Chilly stared hesitantly into the lava geyser. Waves of heat radiated off the superheated stone. Chilly could almost feel his cape come to life to protect him from the incredible heat.

With a frown, he stuck his pinky into the roiling liquid. His finger sunk into the thick liquid. He winced in pain as splatters of the sticky substance splashed back on him and ate at his submerged finger like a solution of concentrated acid. He watched his flesh melt and reform simultaneously as his life regeneration battled the corrosive substance. When he stopped getting any twinges of pain from his finger he pulled his hand back. His pinky was entirely gone. The moment that his finger left the lava it began to recover. Bone jutted out of the stub and flesh quickly followed to surround it. In less than two seconds his pinky was back to normal.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Chilly chided the penguins who were looking at him in horror, “This is an experiment. Besides, it barely hurts. ”

Chilly took a deep breath, then stuck his entire hand - halfway up to his forearm - into the lava. The pain was worse, but somehow still manageable. Sort of like washing his hands with scalding water. It brought tears to his eyes, but no more than that. His life behaved identically, slowly degenerated as he felt sensation slowly stop from his hand. When it was all gone he pulled his hand out.

Like before, his hand began regenerating rapidly. The iron bracelet which had vanished from his wrist materialized around his wrist as the bones formed and were subsequently hidden by his iron gauntlet. He glared at the stubborn piece of jewelry then sighed. It would appear that when a mod said an item could not be removed, even burning his wrist off wouldn’t be enough to remove it.

A penguin began tapping its foot at him.

“No need to worry.” Chilly said, “I wasn’t going to back out of the deal, just testing to see if the bracelet really couldn’t be removed.”

With the penguins mollified, Chilly retreated back down the tunnel to the Holy Sanctum. Half way down, he found a spot to rest his head. Several minutes later, he was out cold.

>

>

Chilly awoke to several new status messages. They were mostly redundant as he could tell the poor condition of his body without the explicit messages. The last one though was interesting. A quick look around revealed that there were no more cinders floating in the air. Apparently killing Sooty had removed the source.

He got up and stretched. He felt haggard and dirty. Dust, sweat, and filth covered him. He was seriously considering jumping into some lava to try and clean off some of the gunk despite the pain. He sighed. No he wouldn’t. What he really wanted was to find a zone with water and take a good long soak. With Incinerate there was even a chance that he could heat up the water, and make a proper bath.

Ahh, he could dream.

He walked back to Sooty’s Hell. Sooty was still missing which meant that the reset hadn’t occurred while he was sleeping. He could wait for the next reset and kill Sooty one more time, but it seemed that it would be more efficient to go out and kill some monsters.

Past the lava geysers, Chilly arbitrarily chose the right hand passage.

He left behind the bright light of the lava geysers and replaced it with the bed of glowing cinders that crunched like cereal under his iron boots. The tunnel was dark, but he was far beyond the point of needing a torch. Starfire Aegis combined with Pious Path were more than enough to light up the way.

He continued walking and couldn’t help but begin to lower his guard. The tunnel was long, with no movement other than the handful of penguins waddling amiably at his side.

“Argh,” He choked out as two gleaming red-hot scythes erupted out of his stomach like an alien parasite bursting for freedom.

Spoiler :

A second later the two blades ripped out of him, pulling half his seared guts out of his back. Chilly groaned as his knees buckled beneath him. He summoned Incinerate and blasted behind him, unable to see where his foe or even what it had done to hurt him so badly.

You have slain a level 8 Wall Crawler!

You receive 1 experience!

He heard the sound of hard chitin feet clicking on the stone walls before a heavy thump drew his attention to the side. He blinked blearily at what looked like a burnt praying mantis. Its corpse was smoldering darkly, which meant that he had at least clipped it with Incinerate.

He put it out of his mind as he crawled to the side of the tunnel, gasping for breath through his perforated lungs as he waited for his life to recover to full.

“It must have an extraordinarily small life pool.” Chilly eventually told the penguins, “Either that, or Starfire Aegis burnt it down before it jumped me.”

Chilly leaned against the wall of the tunnel and warily scanned the surroundings. That had been too close.

“Bloody hell, that was lucky.” Chilly muttered. “Without Starfire Aegis’s additional fire resistance I would have died. I guess with my current skill-set hell is really the place to be.”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead as the near death experience settled in. He suppressed the nervous trembling in his extremities as he warily started making his way back to Sooty’s domain. Before he could make much progress, his path was blocked by an inquisitive penguin.

“Thanks for the chapter!” the penguin smiled up at him.

“Thanks for the chapter,” Chilly nodded in return. He looked around uneasily and walked around the penguin. He didn’t want to spend too much time here. There was no telling how many more ninja Wall Crawlers hidden in the area.

The penguin hopped in front of him, once again blocking his way. “Remember,” it said, “close by stars burn the moving trees.”

“Moving...trees?” Chill repeated dumbly.

“Anyways, you can catch weirdos by leaving out shiny rocks, pretty cool right?” The penguin waved a flipper and dropped Realm Walker in a flash of smoke.

Chilly paused. The penguins often did this. Pop in. Give cryptic advice, then pop out. Usually it was complete gibberish, but sometimes he managed to unravel it and it turned out to be helpful. Either for navigation, finding enemies, or helping his mental health. So despite the apparent nonsense, Chilly paused and tried to analyze the penguin’s words.

The first sentence had two aspects to it; Close by stars, and moving trees. As is, it didn’t make sense, but what if it was a metaphor. ‘Close by stars’ could refer to the Wall Crawler. It was hard to tell after it had been damaged by Chilly’s offensive spells, but it did seem to be covered in lava veins. That was relatively starlike. That would mean that he was the moving tree. Which actually made a lot of sense. Trees were pretty cool. He had no compunctions about being the tree in the metaphor. Or maybe he was just wrong and there were some moving trees somewhere in this dungeon. If he’d learned anything from Lord of the Rings it was not to mess with moving trees.

Basically. If his analysis was correct. The penguin was warning him that the Wall Crawlers were dangerous. Insightful. Too bad the warning came after he had eaten a sneak attack to the gut, but he hadn’t sustained lasting damage so no harm no foul.

What about the second sentence though. Catching weirdos with shiny rocks. His mind was immediately drawn to the strange scene in the Prison where rocks had kept clattering and the penguins had behaved oddly. They had asked him to talk to...Claire was it? Kaylee? He couldn’t quite recall. That was a while ago though, so it seemed unlikely the penguin was talking about that. It would make far more sense if this aspect also referred to his current situation.

Was the penguin saying that the Wall Crawlers were attracted to shiny rocks? Shiny rocks, ie. essences? It was possible. The problem with that was that he didn’t have his essence vault, so all his essences were back in Sooty’s Hell.

Well, he had nothing but time.

>

Hmm, not quite.

Chilly shrugged and returned to Sooty’s Hell. He collected a Ruby and Diamond Essence. They were rare essences which would probably mean that they were more effective at attracting the Wall Crawlers. He considered the Jade Essence, but that seemed too valuable to risk. He didn’t know if the Wall Crawler would eat the essence or what.

He returned back to the Tubes.

At the entrance, a realization came to him.

“Hey, penguins?” He turned to the gaggle that was perpetually following him. “Would you be able to scout ahead and point out any wall crawlers for me?”

The penguins nodded exuberantly and rushed forwards. Significantly more at ease, Chilly slowly walked behind them. Once more the tunnel was wide and long, seemingly endless with few sources of light, and many shifting shadows. A couple of minutes later a penguin rushed back all excited and pointed towards a wall up ahead. It put a flipper to its beak and crouched down with a gleam in its eye.

Chilly smiled and crouched down as well. “Here goes nothing,” He said, then tossed the Ruby Essence at where the penguin had pointed and immediately started channeling Incinerate. Fire raced through the tunnel, lighting up the hidden crevasses and immolating a smudge of darkness. It screeched, breaking its camouflage and charged at Chilly with incredible speed. Midway through its jump, it collided with a reaching tendril of plasma that only served to intensify the flames ravaging its fragile body.

Before it could even raise its glowing red scythes, it collapsed in a pile of ash at Chilly’s feet.

“Phew,” Chilly smiled at the cheering penguins, “Good job team!”

The kill hadn’t brought up a notification which meant that the wall Crawler was below level 8. That was ok. He had plenty of time until Sooty respawned.

Chilly collected the Ruby Essence and continued walking down the tunnel. Periodically the penguins would point at a part of the wall that looked the same to Chilly. He would pause, chuck an essence and channel Incinerate at the uniform wall. Every time a hidden Wall Crawler would materialize from the dull stone like a ninja and get summarily executed by dual streams of fire and plasma.

It turned out to be a superb strategy and before long he was looking at the fated message.

You have slain a level 8 Wall Crawler!

You receive 1 experience!

Congratulations! You have leveled up!

You are now Level 9

Will your status screen open to allocate your points.

Chilly grinned. Another level meant more life, more skill points, and potentially more augments. This particular level also meant another skill. Before that however, Chilly pulled up his character sheet.

Gregory “Chilly” Morhuil

Level

Exp

Skill Points

Spec

9

0/9

1

Fire

Life

Life Regeneration

666/666

147.85

Armor

Fire

Cold

Lightning

Chaos

78

43.82%

108

51.92%

5

4.76%

5

4.76%

0

0.00%

Incinerate

Helmet:

Iron Barbute

Vitality

Body Armor:

Iron Plate Vest

Pious Path

Pants:

Iron Pants

Starfire Aegis

Boots:

Iron Greaves

???

Gloves:

Hide Gauntlets

???

Jewelry:

Iron Ring

???

Mainhand:

Iron Kite Shield

???

Offhand:

Iron Kite Shield

Ha! 666 life. How fitting. Couldn’t have been more perfect for a hell themed biome. Other than the minor boost to life; life regeneration, and fire resistance also increased. The fact that he needed nine experience points for the next level was starting to become a lot. Before just a battle or two against equal leveled enemies was enough to level him up. Now, he would need a dozen battles or more considering that most of the enemies he encountered were below him in level. Good thing he found Sooty, or it would have taken much longer.

Incinerate

Unleash a beam of fire that burns enemies that it touches. The beam dissipates after 5.8m

Deals 177.8 Fire damage per second

Ignites enemies for 62.2 Fire damage per second

Channeling

Incinerate was getting powerful. Obscenely so. At nearly 250 combined fire damage per second it was more than enough to overwhelm his life regeneration. That was, if he didn’t have any fire resistance. Even with the resistance, he had no desire to be subjected to his own blistering fire.

Vitality

Your body thrums with a powerful vitality increasing both your life and life regeneration.

Regenerate 9.4% of maximum life as life per second

31.2% more life

Most of that life regeneration came from Vitality. And an absolutely massive amount of life. Honestly, he wasn’t sure how it was possible to face monsters in this dungeon without an ability like this.

Pious Path

Walk along the path of the holy. If the path does not exist, create it yourself. While moving or stationary, consecrate the ground beneath your feet granting life regeneration to you and allies.

3.4m radius

30s duration

Pious Path provided the other half of his life regeneration, by producing rejuvenating consecrated ground at his feet. The other benefits included a pleasant glow and the ability to remove the desecrated ground that Putrid Ghouls produced upon their death. A shame that there weren’t any of those buggers in the fire biome.

Starfire Aegis

Cloak your form in starfire, granting you an intrinsic protection from the spark, and burning foes that strike you.

108 fire resistance

Deal 34.0 fire damage to melee attackers

Deal 125.7 fire damage per second to enemies within 4m

And lastly Starfire Aegis. It seemed like only yesterday that he had gotten this ability and upgraded it twice. It provided all of his fire resistance, and was the entire reason why he had survived the nasty blow from the first level 8 Wall Crawler. Abilities that granted raw stats were no joke.

The meager reflect damage per hit was ok. Nothing amazing, but it would probably save his bacon one day against an enemy that hit frequently. The far juicier aspect was actually the second augment. Star Fuel. It created an aura of fire around him that didn’t quite double his damage, but almost did. It also made it so that his excess life regeneration wasn’t wasted when he was sitting at full life. Truly one of his favorite abilities.

But he was level 9. An odd number. That meant new abilities. It was time to see what was offered.

You have an open skill slot!

Choose from one of the following skills:

Patience of the Hearth

The hearth is but another aspect of the flame. Patient. Protective. Always prepared to provide.

Gain 2 banked embers per second while stationary up to a maximum of 10

Lose all banked embers while moving

2% increased fire damage per banked ember

1% less damage taken per banked ember

Chains of Vala'Kuur

Summon a portal to the lower realms, out of which burst the chains of Vala’Kuur, the Arch Vampire.

Portal summons 2 chains per second.

Enemies are slowed by 10% per attached chain

12% fire spell vamp against enemies with at least 1 chain

Chains break when the target moves more than 2 meters from anchor point

1s cast time

4s cooldown

4s duration

1m radius

Flame Dash

Dissolve your very essence into flames, allowing you to blink to a location within line of sight while leaving behind a trail of fire that burns enemies who walk over it

4m maximum travel distance

3s cooldown

1s cast time

Burning ground does 8 fire damage per second

Another hard choice. Chilly sat down and gathered the penguins around him.

The first option was Patience of the Hearth. If he understood the description correctly, then it would give him 20% increased fire damage and 10% less damage taken after 5 seconds of standing still. He only did fire damage up until now, so the 20% increased fire damage applied to all his damage. Some quick math with his current Incinerate damage meant that with 10 banked embers he would gain about 36 additional fire damage, from 180 dps to about 216. The damage would cascade downwards and increase the ignite portion of the skill from 62 to about 75. Which was another 13 points of fire damage. So in total at 10 stacks of banked embers he would gain 50 fire dps.

That wasn’t even counting the additional fire damage he would get from Starfire Aegis. The reflected damage was a little hard to calculate, but the area of effect burn was fire damage, so it was likely that it would get scaled by Patience of the Hearth.

In addition to all that, it would grant him 10% less damage taken. That meant that if he would take a blow for 1000 physical damage, it would deal 900. Then multiplying by his resistance would result in a hit of roughly 500 damage.

Chilly grinned. He would survive that.

He could survive a direct hit that deals more than 1000 raw damage. A massive increase from the meager 100 that he had started with in the beginning.

Chilly refocused.

Patience of the Hearth seemed like a very well rounded skill. granted damage reduction, which could mean that he would be able to face tank enraged enemies. Mighty appealing. It's only downside was that he had to be standing still for it to work. That was both a blessing and a curse. His playstyle was already focusing on standing still, and leaning into that style might be beneficial. Sure the style wasn’t all that intense, but boring was good. It was dependable.

The downside was that standing still was dangerous. The Priest of Purity already showed that he would encounter enemies that couldn’t be face tanked. At least not directly. The optimal playstyle against those enemies would be to run and kite. In addition, the skill would be completely useless against assassination attempts like the Wall Crawlers since he wouldn’t have any banked embers at the moment of the attack.

Then there were the augments to consider. An augment for increasing the maximum number of banked embers was likely, or one that increased the damage reduction or increased fire damage. So far all his skills granted some form of flat resistance to one of the ailments, that was likely. That still left two or three augments that were unknown. Regardless, it was likely that the effect would only get stronger.

Well, what about the other skills?

The second skill, Chains of Vala’Kuur, was a whole different can of worms. On the surface it was an area lockdown skill. He would summon a portal that would slow down any enemies within, and make it so that his fire damage against those enemies would heal him. This skill theoretically would trump the tankiness of Patience of the Hearth, but it would require a special situation and setup. In theory since all his damage was area of effect he could apply chains to a large group of enemies and heal off of all the damage that he dealt. That would vastly trump the 10% less damage taken that Patience of the Hearth granted. Assuming he’d recover 20-ish life per second for each enemy chained and Incinerated, which was 10 to 15% of his current life regeneration per monster. That was significant. Unfortunately this was probably difficult to achieve due to the small area of the summoned portal. At best he could only expect to catch one or two mobs with the chains.

The augments would probably make it better, but that still meant that he could only expect a fraction of his enemies to be chained down. Regardless, even against a single enemy the life leach would be a solid increase to his regeneration. In fact, the extra regeneration would probably increase the damage of Starfire Aegis, since the wording of Star Fire was that extra life regeneration would be converted into damage.

Actually now that he thought about it, this skill would technically allow him to lock down a single enemy permanently. A super tough slow enemy would be simple to get 10 chains on it. That would give it a 100% slow, which was basically a stun. As long as it didn’t move all that much the chains wouldn’t break and he could keep burning with Incinerate forever.

So among the two skills Patience of the Hearth was the better all rounder, while Chains of Vala’Kuur was better in niche situations where he could apply chains to a lot of enemies or against a single tough enemy that he could permanently lock down.

Actually there was one open question which was what would happen when the portal ended. Would all active chains break? Or would they stay until the mob moved. If they did, that would ruin the infinite lockdown.

Hmm, an enigma.

The last skill was simpler. Flame Dash was a bog-standard movement skill. If he understood it correctly it would allow him to teleport up to four meters away every three seconds. The skill was antithetical to his current stand still and blast playstyle, but that didn’t necessarily mean that it was bad. There were plenty of situations where a quick repositioning would be completely invaluable, allowing him to continue channeling Incinerate immediately after. The Mrawll Warden’s came to mind.

The augments for this skill likely also made the skill more convenient to use. The burning ground was probably negligible damage, but there was possibly some kind of augment increasing that damage. Other augments could include reducing the cooldown, or increasing the range.

Compared to the other two skills it was a more utility focused skill. There was nothing that said he couldn’t teleport directly up, so the skill could theoretically allow him to scale sheer cliffs. If he could get a running jump he was confident that he could clear a 6 meter wall or even higher.

Before he made his decision however, he turned to the penguins to get their opinion.