After contemplating the revealed abilities on his Fate Wheel Tormacc felt like there were three different ways he could go, with the first and most obvious to save for a tier seven ability. He now had close to the one thousand Essence required to unlock it and nothing else was super urgent on his unlock list, making it his current number one option. Another choice was to invest in more wide area damage abilities with the aim of speeding up his ability to kill the stone rats. They seemed endless, and while he knew he couldn’t actually farm them forever, increasing his rate of Essence acquisition was always a worthwhile goal. There were at least a few thousand of them, and if he could kill them in five days instead of ten that was five extra days he could spend hunting other monsters.

The last option was to go a more defensive route, but so far that didn’t seem quite as valuable as more offensive strength. The situation could change in the future, but so far Stella had been right, and he was relying on his mobility to evade attacks rather than tanking the blows. To that end picking up Dodge might be worthwhile, but unless he was going to go all in on more utility and movement skills hitting harder just seemed more useful, at least for the short term. Enhanced Vitality had revealed Rapid Healing and Regeneration, both important abilities, but if he was never getting injured they would only be sitting unused in his Fate Wheel.

There were other options too, like branching out into true utility or trying to pick up some ranged abilities from the magic side of his Fate Wheel, but until he was one hundred percent confident in his ability to survive in the Shard he needed to choose abilities that were immediately useful. For instance, there was an ability in the bottom section of his Fate Wheel called Compass that would help him maintain his sense of direction. A fine ability, and one he was sure to pick up at some point, but that point just wasn’t now.

He had only glanced over his tier seven options before, as he hadn’t been close to unlocking them, so he decided to start by figuring out what tier seven ability he wanted if that was what he ended up choosing to spend his Essence on. He had a total of four options, two revealed by Rupture and two revealed by Stunning Blow. Out of them, the two revealed by Stunning Blow didn’t seem as useful, at least at the moment.

The first was Bash, a strike that had a strong knockback effect. Useful to be sure, but overall not quite as good as Stunning Blow. The other one was Hamstring, with seemed aimed at incapacitating his foe with a strong cutting force. A very powerful skill, but almost useless against his current enemies. The stone rats were technically living things, but watching how they could melt into the ground almost at will he doubted they were truly flesh and blood. The Stone Giants he knew he would face later were an even worse target for the skill, as they were golems, constructs made entirely of rock and stone.

The two abilities revealed by Rupture were more useful, both of them active skills with a fair amount of value. Shatter was a strike filled with strong vibrations, and from the name it wasn’t too hard to imagine the intended effect. The other skill, Crush, was focused on pure force. If Stella was to be believed he would need something like Crush to face off against the Stone Giants and other more powerful monsters in the Shard, their defense too powerful verse regular blows. Out of the four, Crush seemed his best bet for later enemies, the question was did he need to try and unlock skills now when they wouldn’t be immediately useful?

Tormacc decided to table the question for the moment. He didn’t have to decide right now, as he couldn’t even unlock a tier seven ability yet, needing a few hundred more Essence. Instead, he focused on trying get his Mediation skill to work. The sooner he could start meditating at night the more Essence he would passively earn, offsetting the continued drain of Essence going to his home dimension.

After a few hours of practice he still hadn’t earned any Essence through meditation, but he felt he was closer, the Essence responding to his will in small spurts rather than not at all. He had recovered from his previous battle, so he got up and dusted himself off before heading back to collect his loot.

There was some consideration to engaging with the rat horde again, but sunset was only a few hours away, and he didn’t want to push his limits more than he had to. Earning six hundred plus Essence in one day was enough for him, there was no need to get greedy and overexert himself. Just because he hadn’t been attacked at night so far didn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the future.

The location of the battle was quiet, the corpses all that was left of the crazed melee. Glancing down into the crevices below Tormacc was able to spot quite a few stone rats moving around. It was new behavior for them, and he attributed it to them patrolling their home turf after his continued assaults. Hopefully there wasn’t any loot down there, as he had a feeling he couldn’t descend into the area below the plateaus without being attacked.

Searching the plateaus for loot took more time than he thought it would, partly because he made an effort to cut down on the noise he was making in a bid to avoid angering the rats below. The other part was the hundreds of corpses he had to sift through. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he sincerely hoped he would eventually get an ability in his Fate Wheel that allowed to find crystals and spheres that were buried under things, as manually searching was both physically and mentally taxing. The corpses bled very little, but even that small amount built up over time, and after his search he realized he would have to live with the stench for potentially months, not having access to a body of water to clean himself with, the water in his Storage Bracelet much too valuable to use for anything but drinking.

It made him wish his Ring of High Water Attunement was good for something like creating water. He had experiment briefly with using his Elemental Blade to create water, but almost immediately after the attack was used the water disappeared. One second the water was there, the next, gone. But at least his search for loot didn’t come up empty handed. Buried under the rat corpses was a White Crystal. It wasn’t super useful to him, since it was rare to get something more than a weapon or armor from, so he ended up storing it for later. Stella had mentioned briefly that unused crystals were always valuable, and since it wasn’t useful to him at the moment he might as well save it to sell rather than rolling the dice and hoping he got something of incredible rarity.

Throughout his time searching the rats had continued their patrolling below, and he was starting to get a little worried. They were clearly up to something, and while he couldn’t be sure their change in behavior was caused by his slaughter, there was a good chance it was. Ever since he had chased that first rat into the trap the stone rats seemed to have it out for him, attacking him with a reckless abandon the first ones he fought lacked.

When he first came across them they had been aggressive, but it was the aggression of a predator attacking its prey. The last few times he fought it felt like they had it out for him personally. Like he had raided their nest and stolen their young. He hadn’t been thinking about it before, the change percolating in the back of his head, but noticing their strange behavior now brought it into his conscious thought. But he wasn’t going to let their changes affect him. They were still his best way to farm Essence after all. He would be more cautious attacking them tomorrow, but until they showed him something new there was no reason to change his behavior.

The next day Tormacc stood on a plateau above the rats, watching as they scurried back and forth. If he wasn’t mistaken, there were actually more of them, their ranks swelling from yesterday, with no nook or cranny of the crevices between plateaus safe from the patter of their feet. Were he a more cautious person he would be having second thoughts. No, if he was being honest with himself he was having second thoughts. Something had clearly changed, and he didn’t know what it was.

If he didn’t have to worry about time, he would have waited. Stalking prey was a skill, and sometimes that took days, weeks even, waiting for the perfect moment to launch an ambush. But that option wasn’t appealing to him, the drain on his Essence lurking in the background, a constant presence hovering over his shoulder. It made him realize why the slots for guards of the First City were always full, people thirsted for a safe place to grow stronger, and nothing fit that better than staying in a safe city while passively earning Essence.

That life wasn’t for him. You could gain strength while staying safe, but at what cost? Was that true strength? He knew his teachers would say no, and he was inclined to agree. People were like weapons, they needed to be forged, constantly hammered and tempered, forced to endure constant blows and hardships before they could truly shine. Without that tempering it was easy to break, a small strike targeting your weak points all that was needed. No, that wasn’t true strength. True strength required experiencing conflict and failure.

So while Tormacc knew something was different, he was ready to meet the challenge head-on. Slamming his hammer onto the ground beside him, he roared out a challenge to the stone rats below. They quickly responded, their baritone squeaks echoing up around him, rising to meet his challenge full force. As he looked down the edge of the plateau he could see the rats gathering, their ranks building like a storm swell ready to wash away the shore. A few brief moments were all it took for hundreds to gather, and then he could feel the ground shaking beneath him as they started climbing the plateau.

Almost as soon as they crested the edge he knew something had changed. Blows that should have killed were now only maiming, his hammer meeting some sort of resistance that stopped him from crushing the rats as easily as he had before. It didn’t matter at first, as he started the battle the same way as the others, knocking the rats off the edge. If his strikes didn’t kill them immediately the fall took care of any stragglers. But as more and more rats made their way onto the plateau he started to be pushed back, and before he knew it he was surrounded, everywhere he looked a seething tide of rats squeaking for his demise.

His hammer was a whirlwind, each swing slamming into the rats and knocking them away, not giving them a chance to sink their teeth and claws into his flesh. Yesterday his blows were lethal, each strike killing at least one or two rats. But as more and more of the vermin crawled onto the plateau his strikes lost their power. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, but as he continued his relentless barrage of strikes Tormacc realized he could feel the force of his blows dissipating, the power spreading out over dozens of rats and being absorbed by the collective.

He kept his calm at first, trying to add more lethality to his blows. But soon his strikes were completely in vain, each blow merely knocking the rats back, buying him space to avoid their bloodthirsty attacks. He could even see his strikes being absorbed, the power washing ineffectually over the rats, doing nothing more than putting light pressure on their stone bodies.

Not killing the rats was one thing, but as they began to absorb more and more of the force from his attacks he was starting to lose his ability to knock them back. The only reason he was able to fight in the middle of the horde was his ability to buy space by knocking away their bodies, and now that he was losing that, he realized he was trapped, unable to force his way through the horde of rats to reach the edge of the plateau and jump away. As the press of stone bodies closed in around him he felt a tinge of desperation creeping in. He needed to escape, and fast.