Dante’s Immortality – Chapter 81

Dante narrowly avoided the blue-bellied lizard’s charge, leaping out of the way, then rolling to the side as its blue tongue lashed out.

After avoiding the long tongue, he looked at the patch of grass where it landed and winced. The grass was quickly eroding into a liquid and mixing into the poisonous blue saliva the creature left behind. Dante popped up off the floor, and immediately put space between him and the seven-foot lizard.

On his shoulder, Shade hissed, and he could feel agitation from being jostled coming through the bond. The stupid fox was useless.

Not one to be outdone, the lizard hissed back at Shade, then charged again. Despite its bulk, the creature was stupidly fast. Dante continued to dodge the spikes that sprouted from its black scales as he pumped world essence into his legs, in the periphery of his vision he could see Victoria’s eyes narrow.

He ignored her.

It took him almost half a minute to get enough in his right leg to condense it, slower than his average time, but he was distracted. When he was able to maintain it, Dante shifted his focus to the spear in his hands, condensing the world essence into it. His fight with the blue-bellied lizard had devolved to him running in circles, but thankfully it stayed agitated enough to continue chasing him.

After condensing the world essence, he began to form it, only occasionally slipping up when he used the shaft of the spear to deflect the lizard’s charge. When he formed it into a spiraling vortex, he was ready.

Dante dodged backward as he activated his Rebirth of the Revenant passive to 5%, a debilitating amount. Hopefully.

As soon as the lizard charged, he leaped to the side as far as he could, then planted his right leg, discharging all of the world essence inside of it into the ground as he did so. Dante gritted his teeth as he felt a few of muscles in his leg shred, but the desired effect was achieved. He shot forward, spear outstretched, and impaled the lizard through its side.

Warm blood sprayed out of the lizard’s wound, and he could feel the muscles in his leg itch as they repaired, indicating that he had taken the lizard’s life. Dante slumped to the floor as he let out a relieved breath, waiting for his passive’s side effects to kick in. Hoping that 7% would knock him out in his tired state. He would have done the full 7%, but didn’t want to be out for days.

“You’re a quick study.” Dante flinched as Victoria suddenly appeared. She was standing over him, looking down as the leg that was visibly healing. She didn’t look too happy. “I told you not amplify your speed until you could finish the second level of the spectral attunement.”

Dante cleared his throat, trying to stall for time. A minute and a half left. “I know, but my passive can take care of the damage, and there isn’t any risk of nerve damage.” Six days of almost nonstop training had seen to that. They had stopped periodically so that he could practice the basics of alchemy, and to stop a single caravan, but the rest of the time was spent on the spectral attunement’s second level.

Victoria placed her bag down next to him and began digging through it. Dante watched in horror, she was going to give him another one of those evil pills. He didn’t know how much longer she was planning on depriving him of sleep, but the effects were catching up with him. His thinking was becoming slow, and his actions increasingly erratic. It was even beginning to negatively affect his training.

“Here, eat this.” Victoria handed him a new pill. It was larger than the ones she had usually given him, but the same black color.

Dante took the pill in his hand, but began to stall for time. A minute left. “What is it?”

Victoria continued to move things around in her pack, rearranging all of the items that she had just moved to get to the larger pill. “Something I cooked up while I was away. It should counteract the effects of your passive.” She glanced over. “Unless you overdid it with the heal. I’m not sure how effective it will be though. I had to replace two plants that don’t grow around here with red drelda and eevedil, so the recipe is modified.”

Dante looked at the pill. Those two plants were surprisingly common, and if he could learn how to make the pill, it would make a massive impact on his survivability. Unfortunately, in the past few days, he had deduced that he had no real ability in alchemy. He had nothing to compare himself to, but every step of the process seemed to be an overwhelming hurdle that he had to climb over.

“That kill should have given you enough world essence to specialize your revenant Classification. Now that we got that out of the way, we can finally slow things down a bit.”

Dante froze. “Does that mean…?”

Victoria nodded. “Yes, it means that you can stop pestering me about using that stupid bed.” Despite her words, she looked equally excited to finally get some sleep. She had been taking just as many of those sleep depriving pills as he had.

Wasting no further time, Dante popped the pill in his mouth and ate it. If he was finally going to get some sleep, he was going to enjoy it. He no longer needed to be knocked out by the effects of his passive.

The pill got into his system just as the passive’s side effect kicked in. It felt like a someone had dropped a mountain on him, far worse than usual. Thankfully, the weight on his muscles slowly began to recede as the pill’s effect permeated through his body.

Dante struggled to sit up. Even without the feeling of an enormous weight resting on him, the soreness was also equally unbearable. “Why did we go so many days without sleeping?” He was eager to specialize his revenant Classification, but not to the extent that he would go days without getting any rest.

Victoria moved to the dead lizard. She flipped it over on it’s back. In contrast to the black colored scales on its back, it’s stomach was a bright and vivid blue. “I don’t know much about your Revenant Classification. In fact, I’ve never heard of it. It’s properties sound more like a variant Classification than a regular one. So, it would have been pointless to begin teaching you how to fight when a new skill could flip everything on its head. Since we are limited on time, I wanted to get specializing it out of the way as early as possible.”

Begrudgingly, he had to admit that Victoria’s reasoning was valid. He didn’t like it though. “Why didn’t we just turn in those invoices then?”

“Even by raptor, it’s a day’s ride to Warlord Vidal’s main stronghold. Two days wasted counting the travel time to come back, so it wasn’t worth it by the time we had enough invoices.”

Dante nodded, then opened the Classifications tab in his Status.

World Essence waiting to be assigned: 10,433

Chronomancer lvl 11/20 (0/11,000 world essence)

Blademancer lvl 11/20 (0/11,000 world essence)

Blade Dancer lvl 11/20 (0/11,000 world essence)

Revenant lvl 10/10 (0/10,000 world essence)

Recent world essence gain:

943 World Essence for killing: Blue-Bellied Lizard

The blue-bellied lizard was definitely deserving of its two-star rating, 943 world essence was a staggering amount. Dante fed the requisite amount of world essence into his Revenant Classification.

Choose Specialization Skill or Upgrade for Revenant:

Upgrade Rebirth of the Revenant (passive) to Regeneration of the Revenant (passive):

Regeneration of the Revenant: Regenerate 1% of max HP and 1% of max mana every time you kill.

Insurmountable (passive):

+5% Constitution

50% resistance to mental attacks

Revenant’s Perseverance (passive): Require half as much sleep, and recover from exhaustion twice as fast.

Juggernaut (passive):

10% reduced damage taken from kinetic attacks

50% resistance to movement impairing skills

Looking at the skills, he couldn’t help but think that he had been scammed when he chose the Rebirth of the Revenant skill. The ‘upgrade’, if you could even call it that, made it far worse. It’s saving grace was the mana regeneration. That was useful. Even at 1%. The only other notable change was the wording. Instead of heal, it said regenerate. Hopefully that was significant.

Scanning down the rest of the list, his emotions began to heavily conflict. Revenant’s Perseverance. In his half exhausted, half energized state, the effects sounded divine. Not only would the exhaustion recovery help with his Rebirth of the Revenant passive, but he would only need half the usual amount of sleep.

… but that might not necessarily be a good thing. He wanted more sleep if anything.

The other skills were overwhelmingly powerful to his untrained eye, but he decided that Victoria needed to interpret them for him.

By the time he finished reading the list to Victoria, her expression had shifted through almost a dozen emotions. “You said you got this Classification on the day of holy bestowal?”

Dante nodded, technically he got it the day after, but he decided not to divulge that little detail.

“It should be a variant Classification, at least based on my experience. But that’s obviously not the case since you can choose your skills. It’s interesting.” Victoria seemed to lose herself in thought as she pulled out a dagger and began carefully slicing into the blue stomach of the lizard.

Dante cleared his throat. “That is interesting, but doesn’t really impact the choice of skills, right? Which one should I choose?” He didn’t understand how she could take her time in such a situation. They were one decision away from blissful sleep.

Victoria didn’t even look up. “Upgrade your current skill.”

Victoria didn’t seem to care about the choice at all. “That’s it? Shouldn’t you, uh, let me choose after you explain the skills in detail?”

Victoria pulled a strange intestinal sack out of the lizard, then she reached back and grabbed a jar from her bag, then sliced into the sack. Bright blue liquid oozed from the sack and was collected carefully into the jar. “Of course. You should upgrade the skill because it gives you mana, and the amount of mana will grow along with your Intelligence. I would trade any of my skills for just that alone. But it also regenerates instead of heals, so you won’t have any feeling of exhaustion that world essence healing brings.”

The fact that Victoria specified that his healing was world essence healing made him speechless. She had never mentioned it, and it was likely she had some information he could have used.

“The sleep resistant skill isn’t necessary, and you won’t have exhaustion problems after you upgrade your first skill.” Seeing his glare at the mention of sleeping not being an issue, she continued. “Those pills may be unpleasant, but they are effective. And they are mellow, so there aren’t any residual effects.”

Victoria finished filling the fourth jar and grabbed another. “The other two skills are good. Really good. But they don’t compare to the benefits you will receive from the extra mana in a fight. You are already proficient in blocking mental attacks, and mobility impairing skills are too uncommon to waste a skill on. Aside from that, the defensive bonuses are negligible on both accounts.”

He did agree with Victoria’s assessment, but still wished that she could show a bit more interest. “Why did we spend all day hunting that stupid lizard anyways?”

Are you sure you want to upgrade Rebirth of the Revenant (passive) to Regeneration of the Revenant (passive)?

Yes/No

*Warning: any skills chosen are final*

He chose yes.

Attribute change for Revenant Classification, new attribute gain per level:

+1 Strength

+2 Constitution

Victoria held up one of the jars as though it was a precious treasure. “The poison of the blue-bellied lizard doesn’t corrode metal, at all, so it’s perfect for your created weapons. And the poison from its gland is far more concentrated than what you dealt with earlier, since it hasn’t mixed with the creature’s saliva.”

Dante glanced at the patch of grass that was liquefied by the lizard’s saliva and winced. If the concentrated version would likely be worse, he almost felt bad for the people he would be using it on. “Will the poison stay on my blades if I store them?”

Victoria nodded. “It should. When created by relics, spatial storage can affect the objects stored in strange ways. I doubt that’s the case with your skill though. Give me one of your daggers.”

Dante created a dagger, then placed it into Victoria’s waiting hand. She pulled out a strange looking tool, what seemed to be a fluffy white ball connected to a handle by a metal wire, then dipped it into the blue poison. Victoria then applied the poison to the blade by carefully wiping it down with the white ball. When done, Victoria held the tool over the jar and fed world essence into the white ball, forcing all the leftover poison to drip into jar.

Victoria handed the dagger to him by the handle. The blade now had a faint blue tint to it. “Be careful not to touch the poison, it doesn’t need to pierce your skin to corrode it.”

He couldn’t help but think that the poison was a bit much if that was the case. Dante stored the weapon, then waited about half a minute for good measure, and retrieved it. It was the same, still maintaining the light blue tint that indicated the poison was still on it.

“We’ll need to reapply it after every use, or its effects will diminish, but you shouldn’t have much of a problem with the caravans now.”

Dante nodded along with her words, but wasn’t really listening any longer. He pulled out his bed frame from his storage, then did the same with the mattress, blankets, and pillows. That done, he ordered Shade to alert him if there were any intruders before lying down with a content sigh.

“You’re going to sleep here?”

Dante slowly opened one eye, and saw Victoria standing only a few feet away by the lizard’s corpse with her arms crossed. There were bags under her red eyes from the lack of sleep, and he vaguely sensed that she was a bit jealous that he had a bed. “Our camp is three hours away, even if we run. Yes, I’m going to sleep here.” Victoria could travel for hours to sleep on the floor if she wanted, he had come prepared.

Victoria looked longingly at the bed for several seconds. “Scoot over.” Without even waiting, Victoria shoved him to the far side of the bed, only an inch away from falling off the edge before lying down next to him.

Now facing away from Victoria, Dante glared into the open forest in front of him. He bit back a few choice words that were on the tip of his tongue. First Victoria kept him up for six full days, and now, she took his bed. Well, half of his bed. It was the principle of the matter though.

This matter was not concluded, she could be sure of that. A line had been crossed, and he was definitely going to speak his mind… after a quick nap.