He really hadn’t been serious when he’d suggested those abilities.

It wasn’t even a good combination, really.

That wasn’t to say he wasn’t enjoying watching Jessica very quickly completely take over from him, digging through the ability lists with honestly fairly impressive speed, seemingly looking for something.

Which made sense– Icy Reply was… technically a damage ability with a strange gimmick, but if she was going to be using it in the way he’d suggested…

All it did was cause any projectiles launched by the user to, upon stopping completely in contact with a surface, trigger a copy of the projectile, this time made of ice, to be fired out of that surface with its momentum exactly inverse to that of the triggering projectile.

Which was all a very complicated way to say that if you shot a wall, the wall would shoot back with icy copies of whatever you used to do it.

It was generally considered fairly good for basically any build that wasn’t the origin point of its own projectiles.

Taking Switch Counter and using it in the way he’d suggested wouldn’t just go against that extremely reasonable notion, it would spit in its face while cackling like mad.

Specifically, the ability was a counter-“attack” move that was best used as a projectile counter. It would teleport the user to the origin of the triggering attack and, if the originator of that attack was within a very short radius of it, teleport that being, whether player, minion, or summon, but excluding non-mobile structures, to where the Switch Counter-er had left from, usually resulting in them being hit by their own projectile.

So, while it wasn’t actually very good, the idea was that the user would use a projectile weapon to hit a target location, wait for the Icy Reply attack to come back, then Switch Counter one’s own attack to end up at that location.

There were, obviously, massive issues with that plan.

Chief among them, the user of the combination would need to deal with Icy Reply all the time, not just when they wanted to use the two-ability combination where one would have worked just fine.

But there were others, too: Icy Reply, even when the user fired from a stationary location, wouldn’t always hit them in return, particularly when longer shots or winds were in the equation. The combination was unusually restrictive, requiring skill or planning to make up for a notable shortfall in versatility; Switch Counter itself had a default cooldown of ten seconds, and while as a counter-effect ability it would allow access to loadbearers that were cheaper and more effective than usual, they also wouldn’t affect most abilities that weren’t counters; even worse, if she didn’t have– or even slightly mis-timed­– the counter, she would hit herself with the damage.

Which was leading to his current worry. Jessica was obviously a good player, but limiting herself so extremely, and off of a joke, or at least something that was mostly one…

“Okay, I’ve got it. Want to take a look before I send it off?”

He did. While he’d given her space to build it out, he now was basically next to her to look at the ability set she’d built.

What he saw basically made his heart stop for a second.

Passive– Icy Reply. He knew that was coming, so not really an issue.

Ability 1– Switch Counter. Same as the passive, at least.

Ability 2– Curse of Flourishing. Which already had him questioning what was going on here. It wasn’t a joke, exactly, like the other two were, but… It was a concentration-reserving, long-cooldown delayed-CC skill that would grow vines around the target’s legs as they took hits, irrespective of the size of those hits. One gigantic slam that took out the target’s shields would be just as effective as a rock thrown by a kid.

Ability 3– Metallic Wall. Not a bad skill for rangers, exactly. It would let her make walls out of both the ground and the bridges, at the expense of a longer cooldown than the earthen variant. But also, it didn’t deal damage.

Ability 4– Shard Strike. The real reason that the set felt like it stopped his brain for a second. Unlike the others, it was a damaging ability.

Technically.

It didn’t actually do any damage to the target hit by it. Instead, it traced a line through anything it hit, spraying psychically-formed shrapnel out the other side of that target in a cone, scaling both with the attack it was used on and Calculation.

And he could see how the set could work.

World forgive him, he saw how it could work.

It wasn’t… great, even then. Shard Strike itself had an energy cost, but didn’t have a cooldown. So while the set wasn’t going to be doing great in an area effect or multi-target scenario, an unexpected Curse-Wall-Strike could, ridiculously easily, completely lock down a target, preventing them from moving at all while she’d be able to just hit them over and over, Icy Reply throwing the shard-copies right back into the target that spawned them. Metallic Wall had a maximum range of sixty meters and would crumble over the course of a minute. Curse of Flourishing had a forty second cooldown with a maximum duration of twenty seconds.

Awe and horror warred for control of his face as he stood there, staring at it. It felt like the kind of genuine bullshit his sister would come up with, with a dash of madness added for flavor.

He loved it instantly, in spite of… maybe because of the horror he felt, looking at it.

He swallowed, hard, looking over at Jessica. She was watching him intently enough that he instantly looked away, back to the screen.

“It’s good. I don’t want to even try to make improvements. It’s just so… that.”

She laughed at him, then sent it off. That was fine, really. He was being ridiculous, a bit. Mostly, it was a kind of fun that he hadn’t had in a while.

He missed it.

His ability sets were non-standard, obviously, but they were, for all their rarity, also fairly cohesive sets, based around a synergy innately built into the system. Void abilities, Psychic Creation abilities, the now-deleted set that was based around Plant abilities… they all just used the tools that were already there to make something good.

Jessica’s sets didn’t feel like that.

Instead, they used their various, disparate elements to turn into something that “made sense” in the way that cloud shapes could.

There was nothing particularly evocative in the medium itself. It was only the combination and interpretation that meant anything.

He was anticipating the results so badly that the two-minute wait felt as bad as the five-minute one from his own set.

Finally, the abilities got returned, making a ding sound to draw their attention back to the screen.

Jade was gonna love this.