The lich rests its holed cheek into one of its hands as it scoffs at the frozen Hero. “Perhaps a bit of attitude correction is in order,” it says just as Hero feels his blood rise up and his muscles move against his will. Amidst the howling celebration from his undead enemies, Hero feels his own body rear in preparation. His right hand curls into a sharp fist as his arm draws back to his side.

In a flash, Hero smashes himself on the side of the face, causing a hideous blow, breaking his jaw and smashing a huge amount of crit damage. Of course, Hero is aware that he’s getting hit, but because he can’t protect against it at all, it counts as a crit.

Even with all his force slamming against him, his STR is nothing in comparison to his 5,000,000 levels of experience and HP.

The lich watches with a pleased smirk as Hero continues to hit himself, dealing damage that would instantly kill most beings in Aydoss, but doing but needles and hair’s worth of damage to his HP gauge.

Hero keeps putting points in INT, but it still isn’t enough to resist the channel.

After watching the Hero smash his face through about five percent of his HP, the Lich looses a lazy yawn. “I have a better idea… faster,” the lich says, right before waving its high left hand about mystically.

Hero suddenly stops, and stops breathing, as well.

Hero can’t speak, as the lich has taken control of even that vital survival process, and in only seconds Hero can feel his body waiting for air.

As the crowd of undead laugh in full derision to his predicament, Hero weighs his options as his quickly-draining air gauge pops up on his H.U.D..

He’s now at 304 INT, but there’s no guarantee it’ll save him even if he can match the lich’s INT score on time. No, there’s nothing he can do with stats, nothing will save him from the 3% total dps from oxygen loss. He needs to look into his skill tree.

With roughly forty seconds before he loses his air and starts to black out, Hero frantically looks over the different class choices in the enormous free-style class screen. More importantly, he scrolls to the top of the screen to see if there’s any high level skills that’ll get him out of this bind. The shitty part of all this is that there’s so many skills he can potentially unlock, and none of the trees show up until level fifteen, so he’s utterly clueless as to what class gives what skill.

His first guess is wizard.

He scrolls up and down from the destruction and arcanist trees until he stumbles upon the alteration tree. He spots spells for increasing his weight-carrying load, his physical speed by impressive multipliers, and all manner of other boon, until he spots one mid-way up. [Endless Breathing] is the name, with a description of “Fills the lungs with empty air, allowing for oxygenation in all terrains.” It’s exactly what he needs.

Without hesitation, Hero begins spending all his points in the wizard tree moving up skill-by-skill to the alteration tree. He clicks away all the stupid text boxes for job advancement quests and dumb non-essential wizard lore, only to have the tree gray out on him in at a fourth of his lung capacity. Why?

He looks through the stupid pop ups as he struggles for air, finally finding a damning lvl 30 note.

As your quest for arcane power continues, you realize you’ve reached your peak. You must talk to Spiritcaller Tha’Le in Lapaya City to progress to the next trees.

Of course, it would be a quest requirement that kills him. Even though he has all the raw power he needs, he was lacking all the important unlocks to actually use those abilities.

Hero turns a ghostly pale, much to the amusement of the lich and its dark brigade of undead soldiers.

He needs to think fast. What else can he do?!

The frozen-stiff lad frantically waves his mental cursor over skill tree after skill tree, looking for any ability or spell in the level 15-30 range that would save him from such a pathetic death. Ultimately, he finds nothing, and his air runs dry. As the “3%” annotations pop over his head by the second, Hero nearly gives up, until he notices there’s not only class skills that have been opened up to him. He swaps his tab to the general abilities tree. Stuff like mount-summoning or blacksmithing; stuff any player would have regardless of class.

He scrolls and searches frantically, his lungs feeling like they’re steadily imploding on him, and then he finds it:

[Worldbait] - lvl 500 required: Provide an instant summoning circle to any player that has you on their kill list. A thrilling challenge for only the most daring of seasoned players! (Cast time:0.00 seconds. Cast state: Any.)

Hero steels himself, and invests the ten skill points required to learn the skill. In a flash he activates it and a summoning circle burns out viciously no more than twenty meters from him.

The lich scoffs. “Look at you with all your INT. What demon could you possibly be summoning that I’d-”

As the boy’s hearing fades out, a blinding flash of light erupts from his mentally-placed summoning circle.

He can’t hear, or see, but he’s definitely aware of a heavy gust of wind, and a great heat near him, lasting only a moment.

“Goddess… Rondi, can you hear me?” Hero asks as he watches his H.U.D.’s HP trickle down 3% at a time.

…Silence. At 20% hp of his millions, Hero thinks to look for another spell, but thinks better of it. There’s nothing he can do in the seven seconds it would take to kill him.

He waits in a silent horror as he watches his HP:

9%…

6%…

3%…

And then, he falls over, not in death’s cold embrace, but because the lich is no longer hailing his mind.