Paragon of Skills

Jacob leads Champions and Dark Champions through the entrance to the Advanced Grounds.

As Jacob had said during the briefing, the place is rocky and uneven. The path inside is tight, barely able to fit more than two people at once.

They traverse most of it in silence, with Nimirea and Delefagus just one step behind Jacob, his shadows.

The Leader of the Champions leads the Dark Champions into a massive cave and lets the latter group take point.

“I can’t wait to squeeze the Cultists’ necks into paste,” Zorathul says, cracking his gold-scaled fists. “Those vile bastards.”

“You do realize the irony in what you just said, right?” Vyrrak frowns. “You guys are Cultists as well.”

“Apples and oranges,” the other Dragonkin replies.

Soon enough, they encounter a group of seven Mithril Nightmares.

Veyrissa, the Elven swordmaster, shoots forward and shouts, “THESE ARE MINE!”

Jacob crosses his arms and watches on.

There’s a Mithril Nightmare Juggernaut of Apocalypse that looks confused by the lithe Elf charging alone against them.

Two Mithril Nightmare Archers of Apocalypse raise their arms to shoot their projectiles at her, but Veyrissa, not even dodging, slashes her sword frontally.

She’s still so many yards away from them, but the Archers’ heads suddenly roll on the ground.

The Champions, who have not seen her Rainbow Skill, are all slack-jawed.

“Everywhere Blade,” Jacob says. “She can cut at anything as if it were just in front of her.”

In moments, she’s chopped out the entire troop of monsters and is resheathing her sword.

When speaking in terms of pure power, it’s not the most impressive Skill one can wield. It’s easy to say that Jacob’s own Grimoire, for example, is much more powerful and carries much more utility.

But, Veyrissa’s Skill can start a cut at roughly one foot from you. And… she doesn’t need to actually slash in front of her. She could be putting her sword back in her sheath and you might find your heart suddenly pierced.

If you get accustomed to it, you might argue that it’s counterable, unlike the Grimoire.

But most people die long before getting accustomed to it.

Vyrrak walks up to Jacob and grunts under his breath, “You know all their Rainbow Skills, right?”

“Yeah,” Jacob comments as Veyrissa kicks one of the corpses, shouting for the Cultists to show up.

“How does she rank in terms of danger?”

Jacob puts a hand on his chin and looks at all the Dark Champions.

Including the dead Astabazos and Nimirea, there are ten Dark Champions, just as many as the Champions.

Jacob mentally goes through the list.

Nimirea Arendor

Delefagus Blackgale

Astabazos Kerczakh

Augusta Leesing

Korrath Kethys

Asterismos Xiphephoros

Veyrissa Lossandel

Tharvok

Zorathul Wlatherkz

Talia Lagrange

“I’d say, from the bottom, Augusta, Astabazos—who’s dead. Korrath, good warrior but his Rainbow Skill can be too limited… Asterismos, Delefagus, Zorathul, Talia, Veyrissa, Nimirea, Tharvok.”

Vyrrak nods along until he hears the last name.

He looks at the unassuming Human warrior whom anyone could have exchanged for a homeless man without his new Mithril-Imperium armor.

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“Tharvok? Isn’t his Skill something like… helping him figure out Skills? Like yours?”

Jacob raises an eyebrow.

“It helps him level up his Skills, but it’s very different from the Grimoire.”

With that said, Jacob and the others keep walking.

Not only have the Dark Champions grown stronger, but they have been holding back their Rainbow Skills until now. While fighting alongside the other Knights and Champions, they have only used their Rainbow Skills when strictly necessary.

Next, Korrath tanks every single hit that the next group of Mithril Nightmares throw at him, laughing like a madman. Thanks to Absolute Defense, his Rainbow Skill, all the hits he receives are equally distributed in terms of force across every inch of his skin. That makes even the attacks of the scary Mithril Nightmares feel like nothing but a tickle.

“This is great armor!” He roars, and then he starts bashing the monsters with a large sledgehammer.

This continues for a while, with the Dark Champions rotating among themselves.

They don’t need to team up—they’re just too strong for the Mithril Nightmares.

And with the power of their Rainbow Skills, the Mithril Nightmares are overwhelmed. Only Augusta, the Support, does not go face to face with a group of Mithril Nightmares alone.

The Champions, who are watching, are all impressed. They’ve caught up in many ways, but the sheer combat proficiency the Dark Champions are showing speaks of the kind of experience that they’ve gotten.

Nimirea sees Asterismos put down a troop of Mithril Nightmares, swaggering through their blows with Invulnerability, his Rainbow Skill.

There’s a reason why it’s him usually sparring Veyrissa and pushing her to her limits.

Asterismos and Veyrissa’s Rainbow Skills, Everywhere Blade and Invulnerability, are one opposite of another. Where Veyrissa’s Everywhere Blade is meant to attack you from any angle, any moment, and kill you before you even realize it, Asterismos’s Skill is possibly even more insane.

He can turn invulnerable. Now, that doesn’t mean immortal. Invulnerability is a state where nothing can touch Asterismos. That’s why he’s often gone forward scouting now. That would have usually fallen upon Astabazos, but since Jacob killed him, the Highblood is now the one who covers it.

Of course, if the Skill were all about invulnerability while you can hit people, it would be… impossible to counter. It would be the most coveted Skill in the entire world. So, Asterismos cannot hit anyone while in its invulnerable state. Blades and projectiles go through him as if he does not exist, but so do his own attacks.

Nimirea, in order to fully understand what Jacob’s planning, has been watching carefully over everybody. She thinks that his plan might, ultimately, rely upon the unification of Champions and Dark Champions.

In fact, despite the two groups taunting each other during combat, it’s clear now that the Dark Champions are taking a lot of pride in their fighting and are more than grateful to Jacob — to be able to show off? It’s incredible what Jacob has pulled off. It’s something Nimirea can’t fully understand — how it was done.

He brought together two groups that are supposed to be essentially fate-tied nemeses.

And yet, here they are, taking pointers from each other after battle, discussing their own Rainbow Skills, something that should have been impossible since each one’s Rainbow Skill would have to be used, in the future, to kill the other.

But still, as she looks at the sickly Jacob, so sick that nobody apart from her probably fully understands his condition, she wonders: ‘what’s his plan?’

Lyra watches through the Dungeon the group of parasites getting through her walls.

Three corpses, stripped of flesh, only bones and soul, orbit around her core. Finally, someone removed their weak control over them, so that she, alone, can direct the Dungeon. By fusing the souls of the three that were previously trying to control her, she can now accomplish her Goddess’s Mission.

She has consciousness again.

Not even the Cultists understood just how much power she would have had if left alone, if capable of putting together her own plans.

The parasites are organizing around the Heir.

That’s what Lyra calls Jacob.

She knows who Jacob is. She has all the memories of everybody who died in the Dungeon. She can feel Jacob’s consciousness for herself through the memories of the people killed by her children.

It’s as if he had been her own commander, in fact.

But that’s not where her powers stop.

Unlike Evil Gods, or what she’d refer to as Fake Gods, Primordial Gods do not have Apostles and a Prophet.

They have Dungeons.

To be clear, an Apostle is someone who has gotten a tremendous part of power from their God. Usually, it takes an extremely powerful individual to surrender their souls and fate to the Divine. Then, they are able to wield power beyond comprehension.

In the case of Primordial Gods, an Apostle is just what the parasites like Jacob Cloud and that Sir Maximilian call an ‘Original Primordial Dungeon.’

An Original Primordial Dungeon’s birth is nothing but the expression of divine power of a Primordial God manifesting on mortal grounds.

It’s the way Primordial Gods communicate with mortals.

Lyra is, unbeknownst to possibly everybody there, an Apostle.

And she knows very well that even a weak Apostle, one from one of the Fake Gods, would be able to pulverize the current opposition in her territory with their ridiculously weak powers.

So, she barely pays any attention to the presents. Well, any attention to anybody save for…

A naked woman manifests inside the giant core of the Dungeon, still too weak to take corporeal form. She’s like a voluptuous sculpture of glass.

“Jacob Cloud,” she mutters. “What are you doing?”

Apocalypse is the Goddess of Primordial Magic, the one who created Skills.

Lyra’s powers are such that she can easily read everybody’s intention. She has a very good idea of what anybody inside her is planning to do. It’s so simple to read their weak Mana, their signatures, and, most importantly, their Karma.

But Jacob Cloud…

Jacob Cloud’s future, intentions, and even broad thoughts are…

“Muddy…” She whispers in a tantalizing voice.

Lyra wishes she could open up Jacob Cloud from hip to shoulder, to eat his soul through his flesh and blood, to absorb whatever is that he’s hiding.

But she can’t.

Shortly after he summoned a Primordial Spell that he should have never possessed and destroyed the Cultists’ control over her—for which she’s very grateful and will deliver him a passionate, long death—he became unreadable.

He absorbed some kind of power that made him impossible to read.

Lyra turns toward the far wall as she hears something move.

There, in a womb-like sac of Mithril, one of her children manages to push out.

She smiles seeing it.

“Finally, I can start making decent children,” she laughs.

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