Chapter 396: Math Resistance (1/2)
Ilea wasn’t about to test the magic bypassing bonus of her newfound third tier against a Wyvern. The fuckers melted her skin even with a Heat Resistance at the end of the second tier.
Wait… does that count?
She summoned one of the glass vials holding the poison from the eight layer. “Are you magic damage?”
The vial of course did not reply, as vials should.
‘ding’ ‘You have been poisoned by Concentrated Rupture Liquid -100 Health per second for three minutes’
Alright, now can I deactivate the resistance? Ilea tried to feel for the skill and something instantly clicked in her mind.
The notification changed.
‘ding’ ‘You have been poisoned by Concentrated Rupture Liquid -208 Health per second for two minutes and fifty eight seconds’
“What?” she exclaimed and checked her Poison Resistance.
“That’s fucking twice the damage!” she murmured to herself. Something felt off.
I should have asked how damaging the poison was to the others.
“Ah, they wouldn’t even want to drink it,” she sighed.
Ilea searched through her necklace and found something else that could perhaps serve as a test.
The corrosive arrows the elf near Riverwatch had used right before she went to the Shadow’s Hand. She looked at them and found little of the green sheen remaining.
Eh, why the fuck not.
She jammed one of them into her unprotected arm and let the sizzling begin. Ilea counted five seconds and checked her health throughout the whole affair.
A frown on her face, she looked at the useless arrows. No change in her health was noticeable. Her natural recovery outdid the corrosion.
So how about I disable the resistance.
This time, something did happen. Her brows lifted high as she looked at the numbers change.
“Twenty five… no, twenty eight health per second,” Ilea had no clue what that meant. With all her defenses, her natural health recovery and nothing else but a bunch of arrows and poison to test it, she simply sighed and put the rest of the arrows into her arm, finding the damage rise to a little over one hundred and ten health per second.
Ilea summoned her notebook and flipped the pages to the last notes on her health recovery. 0.1% base, plus 1% from my class… now with Sentinel Core at 3rd lvl 10, that’s… 1.1 times 11.25.
It took her a while to figure out the math, finding her health recovery at an insane 12% per minute. A little more than that but Ilea really struggled without a calculator.
With 7410 current Health, that meant nearly nine hundred health per minute or around fifteen health per second. Last time it had apparently been at around thirteen.
Every level counts, she noted.
One alone dealt around twenty eight damage per second. Plus fifteen health per second meaning around forty three?
Adding two more arrows dealt an additional eighty six damage per second, quickly decreasing.
The exact numbers were hard to grasp. Ilea had the capacity to see and recognize the changes exactly but depending on where she stuck in the arrows and if she moved them, the damage changed of course.
Likely less than with a normal human, where an arrow to the throat would deal much more damage regardless.
Ilea’s body wasn’t one single sludge either though, some parts more difficult to regenerate, meaning damage dealt would certainly not be static all over her body.
“This is getting ridiculously technical…,” she moaned to herself but wanted to reach at least some form of conclusion.
“So, this means that with my resistance, I can reduce forty three corrosion damage to less than fifteen. What about three?” she asked herself and deactivated the newfound ability once more.
She ripped the arrows out, healed her arm completely and jabbed them back in.
Oh? Five seconds passed before she removed them once more.
“You deal… about twenty one damage per second,” Ilea exclaimed proudly, holding the arrows up above her head.
“So,” she looked at the notebook again. “112 or so damage plus 15 health per second equals around 127 damage. 21 damage with the resistance skill active means it’s around 36 damage in total without my recovery.”
She scribbled some more. “Second tier level nine corrosion resistance equals… a 71% damage reduction. What the fuck?” Ilea closed the book and stood up. Poison vial in hand, she squinted at the little thing.
The arrows had lost their green glint, discarded in the cave.
I’ll have to ask someone about this. Armor of Ash likely fucks this whole thing up anyway, affecting my resistances as well. Or it’s different because I applied the corrosion to my flesh and poison works differently?
At least I know that deactivating my resistance actually does something. Might just be that the poison is fucking powerful and thus only allows for a smaller reduction.
The new skill would help immensely with her resistance training, even turning these useless arrows into quite a chunk of damage.
I don’t think I want to know what the Wyverns would do to me without Heat Resistance though. If it seventy percent on my corrosion, it could be in the same vein.
She was getting melted as it was. Plus, there was likely no way for her to level her Heat Resistance any further. For now at least.
Ilea cracked her neck and teleported out once more. There were beasts waiting for her still.
Ilea managed to kill two more Wyverns in the span of the next six hours. The newfound bonus to her ash let her tank more hits without major damage and noticeable reduced the time she needed to penetrate its defenses.
In the grand scheme of things however, the creatures still got through her armor just as much as she overwhelmed them in the end. Without her shredder tactic, she still failed to penetrate the hard scales.
‘ding’ ‘The Azarinth Sentinel has reached lvl 322 – Five stat points awarded’
‘ding’ ‘Kin of Ash has reached lvl 321 – Five stat points awarded’
All points were once more invested into Intelligence.
‘ding’ ‘Sentinel Sphere reaches 3rd lvl 2’
‘ding’ ‘Azarinth Reversal reaches 3rd lvl 10’
‘ding’ ‘True Ash Creation reaches 3rd lvl 13’
‘ding’ ‘Avatar of Ash reaches 3rd lvl 2’
Finding them within the mists proved to be quite difficult, their lack of corruption the main reason for that. Both of the creatures had been below level six hundred. Enough still, for a single level in each class.
It didn’t exactly help that the layer expanded downward for several kilometers. Ilea had yet to find the actual ground level.
Only the tiniest percentile of rock formations actually expanded up to the top and above the mists, most of them ending within the sea of white.
Ilea could only follow the roars she heard from time to time but all she found were Tusk Bears and Wisp Ravens, the former ranging in the lower three hundreds and the latter even lower, below two hundred.
Neither was worth killing for the experience and neither did they show any corruption among them.
Not amongst the living ones that was.
Ilea did find dozens of once corrupted corpses, most of them burnt to a crisp. Only one of them had been a Wyvern. She even found a couple tentacles from corrupted tangled reapers that must have made their way down after being frenzied.
There was a chance that the corruption had sprung up in a higher up layer and the group had simply missed it. However unlikely that may have been, considering the lack of trail left behind by the expedition.
She returned from the hunt and landed once more on the plateau where the red church priest had resided.
Ilea hadn’t met any of her group during her hunt but she assumed they had left quite some time ago.
One of them had remained.
Lucas had collected samples from all the plants in the area and was currently studying a fern like plant he had potted into a wooden container.
He turned her way when she entered the cavern. “Oh… mhm. What a smell! How often did your hair burn up?” he smiled and shook his head, turning away from the plant as he grabbed his pipe from the gnarled wooden table.
“I don’t count. Probably lost about a hundred sets of bowels though. If that counts for anything,” Ilea said, looking around.
“They left. About two hours after you did,” Lucas replied. “And yes, I believe your survival counts for something. As well as your level. You have caught up to me. Congratulations.”
Ilea smiled. Her Sentinel class was now one level higher than Lucas and his wood creator one.
She assumed the light magic one was his weaker class.
“They’re tough. It’s fair to say that mana intrusion and my insane recovery allows for some wonders,” Ilea commented and formed and ashen chair, sitting down as she stored her bone armor, cleaning herself with ash before she switched to more comfortable clothes.