Chapter 11 The Way Of Fire

The next day I was in the library researching builds as I still had to level up so I could select two new nodes. It was amazing how fast I got to level 16, but the more I leveled up, the less grey map monsters would provide me with experience. In almost every book and even in some lessons, we were constantly told that the most explosive growth was at the beginning of a new map color.

Sometimes reading was a bit difficult, as some of the originals of these books I was currently reading were hundreds of years old, and the language has changed a bit over that time. Yet I was completely surprised to find something I tried to find but had no luck so far in a seemingly random magic build guides book from nearly 300 years ago.

Ever since that magic class where I figured out that my affinity to fire was a lot bigger than I expected it to be but seemingly less than if I were to select the node, I have been trying to figure out more about elemental affinity, but nothing really explained what I was looking for. There was a good chance that I was simply asking the wrong question, but fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

It seems that selecting a node will give you the maximum amount of affinity in one of the elements. According to this book, there is nothing that would get your affinity bigger than that. The important thing was that it explained, and there were even graphs detailing about natural affinities.

It seems like 30% of the maximum was the average affinity for every element, so after having read a few chapters on affinities and just in case finishing this book, which seemed incredibly helpful, I was back in my room using the method described in the book to ascertain my affinity.

So my cold affinity was about 10% lower than average; all the rest were around 30% which is normal, with fire being the only exception. My fire seemed to be about 80% of the maximum, which was incredibly good. Calculating the damage increase for spells with that affinity, I found that my fire-type spells would only be about 5 to 10% stronger if I had maximum affinity.

That was an acceptable loss in my opinion. I still had access to every element and, more importantly, the non-affinity magic passive tree, which from the information I have gathered is the best for all types of minion builds, even elite ones. Unfortunately, finding a viable elite build was still incredibly difficult, so I was now completely certain that I needed to make my own build, which was incredibly scary.

There were plenty of horror stories about people who get stuck in certain levels simply because they have made the wrong choices, so their power didn't scale properly for the higher levels.

Sometimes I think that my want to also be able to do damage while fight close up and having minions would be something that holds me back, but I can’t simply imagine myself being the weak back-line mage that lets his minions do the work while slinging spells from a safe distance.

Even now I didn’t know exactly what to do. I had two level-ups that I could use, but what should I do? Should I continue filling out the resistance tree or focus on the magic one? While I don’t think I should put much more into the defense tree, at least not right now, there were the attack and enhancement trees; there are some valuable nodes to get that should help boost my current self, but would they help in the long run?

In the end, it all came down to levels. I only had a finite amount of levels I could get, and while there are mentions of some consumables that could give you passive points, I didn’t think I would get any anytime soon.

In the resistance tree, I would need 12 points to get the other major affinity resistance nodes; I would need another 10 to get the side branches and the minor affinity resistance nodes. That was 22 level-ups just to finish this tree up, but that wouldn’t actually give me anything; I would need gems, some that were really expensive to actually buy.

The problem with making a proper build right now was that almost everywhere it says that you should rush some powerful node combination to get a big power boost and then fill out your base, but I think I need to go the other way.

I think I will need to cover the basics. There are a few options to go by, but I think the best solution would be to make my minions have good recovery so they could heal from damage passively and also increase their speed. Other ways are to go more defensive, more strength-oriented, or improve their resistance, which I didn’t need to do.

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. While Greg had incredible physical resistance, my other elite summons might not have them so high. Unfortunately, that wasn’t really something I could fix, but elite summons usually had quite high defenses, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much about that.

There were other ways of fixing those problems as well. While skill gems were quite useful, the best way to boost your skill crystals was with support crystals. For that, you would need linked sockets on one of your items, and those were quite expensive. Support crystals were also incredibly expensive, but they had the power to modify your skill crystals to an extreme degree, so I could see why they were so expensive.

So I went down the magic tree branch that boosted my magic capacity. Two minor nodes of that nearly boosted that by 20%. No matter what plan I went with it will all cost a lot of money. Basically, every minion build required a lot of gems, so while the current map that I purchased was good enough for a bit of training, I would need a lot more profitable maps if I wanted to get stronger in a reasonable amount of time.

As I stepped into the grass fields of the goblin map, I took a few moments to enjoy the pleasant weather and the feel of the grass on my fingertips. For the first time when I summoned Greg, I didn’t just feel our connection but I felt how he was giving me power. The green gem was working as intended, boosting my physical resistances to new heights.

I was still wearing my sword and knife, so I took out my knife, and while before it was already a bit tough to cut myself, when I now tried, just cutting and slicing didn't do the job even if I used more of my strength. Eventually, I saw a bit of blood, which was good as it reminded me that I wasn’t invincible, but this should be plenty to make me safe enough.

With my knife back in its holster, I held my staff ready for a fight as I started to walk further into the grasslands. I would need to be careful as the goblins were short enough that they could use the grass to hide. As a distraction, I sent Greg a bit further away from myself but had him walk in the same relative direction as I went, but I soon left him behind.

Fortunately, he didn't need to be close for the gem to continue to work. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the grass move a bit unnaturally. Immediately, I spun towards it, and it seems like the goblin figured out that it had been spotted as it rushed out, brandishing a large club, at least for its size.

I hooked my staff behind the club and diverted its attack while at the same time quickly delivering a heavy attack to the head of the goblin. Immediately, its club dropped and it fell onto its knees. It wasn't dead yet, so I delivered a large overhead strike, crushing its skull and making the monster disappear. It dropped a singular fingernail. At least these were a bit useful for alchemists.

There were supposed to be quite a lot of these things around here, but I had walked quite a bit before I noticed something was wrong. It seems that the goblins were at least a bit bright as they ambushed me after I figured out that there were a few of them around me.

Immediately, I made space by swinging my staff 360 degrees around myself, which made the goblins back off. Immediately, I activated my skill, making two sides of my staff burst out in flame. One of the goblins had a sword, so I rushed it. It was pretty quick on its feet and tried to back off a bit, but I was faster.

A simple feint made him block in one direction, which allowed me to attack from another. I really loved staffs because of that. The hit to its head wasn’t really strong as I couldn’t put too much speed into it, but the fire did its job. The spot that I hit looked like it had been cooked, and because it was its head, it immediately dropped and started to disappear.

I didn’t stop and I jumped over its disappearing body, hearing the noises of missing attacks from behind me. There were four more of them. Once again, I rushed in and managed to surprise one of them. I managed to connect a low strike and hit its leg. While I didn’t break anything, it fell down screaming from the pain as a large portion of its left lower leg was now burnt beyond recognition.

For the next little while, I needed to block attacks until I got the chance to slide my staff’s tip into one of the goblins who was holding a club. The fire immediately messed up its fingers, making it drop its weapon. After two more blocks from the other goblins' attacks, I was able to finish this one off. The rest fell quickly enough.

I gathered the loot and looked into myself to see how much experience I gained. It was low, but I hadn’t expected too much. This map was more so I could practice my staff, and I was kinda liking it, especially with the fire as it seemed more devastating than I expected.

The tips of my staff were currently a bit cracked with flames coming out of it; it seems like whenever I attacked, the fire penetrated a bit deeper than just burning the top layer, which was why it was causing so much damage.

Perhaps looking into how to make my fire penetrate even deeper would be a good idea. At that moment, I felt Greg trying to tell me something. Concentrating on our connection, I saw that he was surrounded by goblins who were trying to unsuccessfully break his feet as he was slowly walking. He had tried to step on some of them, but they just got out of the way.

There seemed to be quite a lot of goblins around him. So going there to kill them would be a bad idea as they could surround me. "Just jump!"

From the distance, I heard a loud noise and then I got happy feelings from our connection and images of dazed goblins being stepped into paste. I should probably go there to gather the loot and kill the rest.

It took me 8 hours to find the boss area. Bosses work differently in every map, but it was more common for them to just be in one area just waiting in one spot. Here, the goblin chieftain was in a small clearing that they obviously wanted to turn into a camp, but it was a long way from that.

What I did was send Greg in at his maximum speed. He didn't hit anything, but none of the goblins also noticed me, so I managed to kill four of them, leaving four more and the chieftain who was now in front of me still looking towards Greg. One of the goblins was going to hit me if I didn't dodge, but I'd rather kill the chieftain and take one hit then simply dodge and miss this good of an opportunity.

Unfortunately, from experience I knew that this was going to hurt a bit, but it was going to be nothing worse than a semi-solid punch. The chieftain's head cracked open from the fire and the strength of the strike, killing it instantly. The attack of the other goblin hit me, but the club basically bounced off me. It looked at its weapon in confusion, and I quickly ended its life.

Killing the rest was easy enough. This map overall was quite easy, although if I pulled too many goblins things could get a bit dicey. Greg slowly slumbered back into the clearing. I gave him a thumbs up.

"Great job, keep it up." It seems like that was amusing to him, but I had other things to worry about. There were still a lot of goblins to clear out. If I didn’t kill them all I would not be making a profit here. It looks like I will need to get a little sleep before I continued as fighting for so long was exhausting.