Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 438 (Patreon)

Chapter 438 – Preparations

Ding

Catalina Zorita

Godtouched Greater Succubus Female

Level 38 Unholy Breaker of Wills / Divine Courtesan

Titles: Virgin’s Bane, Maneater, Ladykiller, Guildmaster, Devout, Godbred

Catalina sighed as she got enough XP to push her over the limit into Level 38 of Tier 2. She spent her skill points on two skills from her profession. Admittedly, she had not really looked into the skills offered by Courtesan, and then Divine Courtesan, save for ones like [Carnal Arts] and [Improved Carnal Arts] (which made her a more memorable lover in bed), [Sense Motive] (which was useful in her role as a guildmaster, as well as playing into her Dominatrix class), or [Mystic Dancer] and [Entrancing Moves] (which improved her combat abilities while not wearing more than light armor). She knew that there were other skills, there, but when you only got two skill points per level, you had to pick and choose.

Now, though, she finally picked up the [Magic Touch (Healing Hand)] skill, and Divine Courtesan’s upgrade to it, [Divine Touch (Healing Palm)]. The training she’d undergone in the last week, with the healers in House Throk’s employ, had been enlightening. Not only had she earned a steady supply of contribution points by helping the healers, and affirmed that her basic first aid knowledge would help even here in the dungeon, until actual healing could be brought to bear, but she’d come to understand more about how the Magic Touch style of skills actually worked, having seen them in action. The result had been enlightening.

The [Magic Touch (Healing Hand)] skill let her spend MP in chunks equal to her CHA, healing whoever she touched for that amount of HP. She could spend multiple ‘charges’ at once, to heal more, but anything over the individual’s maximum HP was lost, and she could only use it on someone once per hour. That last bit was why she had never picked it up, before. Between the use limit and the requirement that she be touching the person to apply healing, there were simply skills that were more effective at keeping herself and her team alive, by ensuring everyone else was stronger, and harder to harm.

[Divine Touch (Healing Palm)] required [(Healing Hand)] in order to take it. The touch-range requirement was still there, but it allowed her to spend MP to heal HP, without limiting it to blocks equal to her CHA. More importantly, the time between re-use on the same person got dropped to one minute, which dramatically increased the skill’s effectiveness.

However, the reason she picked up the skills was to use as cover for something far more potent. She had worked hard to impress the healers, and, after swearing an oath not to reveal secrets to those who had not earned the knowledge, unless they were bound to her in some way, she had been taught the secrets of the Magic Touch. The true Magic Touch, not the series of nineteen skills that the System recognized, which were just components of the greater whole, set up with System assistance.

In her head, Catalina had cursed herself when she first realized what the healers were teaching her. She already knew that the System was a series of guides, not strict limitations. After all, you could train to use your abilities in areas without the System, as those who fought in broken dungeons did, and she already knew one ‘out of System’ skill, in the Lightning Palm that the Sprite Lord on the third floor of the dungeon taught! If channeling one’s mana into lightning to attack was possible without a System skill to guide you, why wouldn’t healing be possible?

And the Magic Touch was not just healing a creature’s HP. You could replenish stamina and MP. You could lessen pain, remove worries, get rid of fatigue, or make a creature fall asleep. Poisons and disease could be suppressed, or cured, and the same process could replicate poisons or drugs the healer had experienced, and inflict them with a touch. You could calm a person, or send them into a frenzy. Inflicting pure agony with a touch was possible, as well. And you could push your power into another, enhancing their different attributes temporarily.

All of that was just with the Magic Touch. Divine Touch was an enhanced version, using not just the wielder’s own mana, but a connection to the divine, to further empower its effects. While the healers of House Throk did not know how to ‘de-System’ the Divine Touch series of abilities, the fact that it worked with Magic Touch meant that it was possible for Divine Touch. And, if she could master it, then Catalina would be able to become a potent secondary healer for her party, without having to give up all those skill points she otherwise would have needed to spend.

What else had she missed out on, because she had not even thought to ask the questions? The Lightning Palm ability that the Sprite Lord had taught was versatile in so many ways. She’d learned to channel that lightning through her whip, for instance, to enhance her striking power. Dante, her Demonsoul Protector, had learned to channel the Lightning Palm through his shield, painfully shocking any creature who hit the shield with their bodies or weapons made of metal. The rest of her team had made similar discoveries and improvements, through constant trial and error.

Ryan, the Hellfire Sorcerer, had even discovered how to change the Lightning Palm to other elements, and taught the rest of them to use versions with Fire instead of lightning. He tried to teach them the Hellfire version, but Catalina had been the only one to be able to use it without massively overpaying on the MP, thanks to her demonic nature. That suggested that the Tier 1 elements were easier to work with even if you didn’t have an affinity or skill related to them, but the Tier 2 or higher ones required more work, and training, if you weren’t tied to them in some way.

That night, when they gathered at their dormitory room, Catalina and her pets compared notes. They had all undergone training of some sort, working with the instructors of House Throk to better their skills, and better their chances of scoring well in the Game. No one in the House expected them to score high on their first Game. They were, after all, fresh recruits. But doing their best would increase their reputation with the House, so they’d all thrown themselves into training.

Each of them had discovered new abilities while training with the members of House Throk. Ryan had learned to shape and wield Hellfire almost as well as some of the demons were able to, to the point where it was practically second nature for him. And he was doing it without any System spells or skills!

Jonathan had learned a trick to siphon a portion of the magic that hit his shield through his armor and into his blade. Whether it was spells, or magic weapons, the shield would siphon a portion of the magical damage he blocked with the shield, and then store it in his blade for a few seconds, until he either hit something with the blade, before unleashing it like a [Wind Cutter] spell, but with untyped magical power. The result was something that could really change the game for Jonathan, who was loathe to give up protection for having more options at range. The skill gave the sword-and-board paladin extra options, even if those options were basically ‘magic slash from across the room’.

Dante had figured out a similar trick with his hammer, actually. He called it Resonance. Every time his hammer struck a target, it stored a portion of the impact’s vibration in the head, adding to the damage. But the real trick came when he was able to match the vibration to the natural frequency of whatever he was hitting. Under those conditions, each hit rapidly wore down the durability of the object he was hitting. It only took four or five hits while Resonance was in effect for a target’s armor and shields to literally shatter under his blows. The fact that he needed to do five times as much maintenance and repair work on his gear showed how powerful the effect was.

Jose, her Magitech Knight and Master Artificer, had discovered something interesting while tinkering with his creations. He had unlocked the [Overcharge] skill early on, back when he was a Tier 1 Artificer, but never taken it. He preferred reliable and durable equipment, rather than gambling on enhanced effects at the expense of reliability and durability. It didn’t matter how powerful the blast from an overcharged spell cannon was, if it had a 20% chance of blowing up in your face every time you pulled the trigger. And [Overcharge] wasn’t even to that level of predictability. It was, in essence, a panic button. And Jose did not like panic buttons, because it suggested that the situation was already too far out of control to be saved without gambling everyone’s lives on an uncertainty, and that was not something he would allow in his creations.

That said, he was capable of admitting that overclocking or overtuning machines temporarily could lead to improved performance, but that needed to be a choice made in advance, with proper structures put in to address the increased maintenance needs, and so forth. Overclocking a PC, for instance, without arranging for extra cooling was just setting your machine up to fail, perhaps catastrophically so. However, if you took the time to do it properly, then the cooling systems would work, and the machine would run better than it had before. That was an oversimplification, of course, but it formed the basis of his Managed Overdrive.

Managed Overdrive, as the name suggested, was only usable on gear he had designed, precisely because he had designed them with the ability in mind. Each of his items had extra mana pathways, which were originally there for redundancy and rerouting systems while doing damage control. However, with the right commands, he could activate them, allowing the system to increase performance in his armor and weapons by up to thirty percent. The waste heat this process created was shed through heat exchangers on the items, but, even then, the Managed Overdrive could only be used for roughly fifteen minutes before operations needed to be stepped back to normal levels, to maintain safe operating thresholds. Though he had admitted, privately, to Catalina that, in emergencies, that time limit could be extended, if he was willing to suffer increasing direct damage from the systems, using his HP to substitute for the devices’ durability, and keep them stable, longer. Obviously, even that had a limited duration, as damage from Managed Overdrive couldn’t be healed while Managed Overdrive was active, but it was possible, and preferable to having the entire party wiped out without doing everything to try and prevent it.

Then, there was Chastity. The Shadowblade Assassin was not the most adept when it came to magic. She’d been the one who had struggled longest when it came to learning Lightning Palm, and converting it to something that she could run through her blades. However, that experience had taught her something, and she had applied those lessons to the skills her class gave her, learning to shape the shadow magic infusing her blades.

The Shadowshape ability was as simple as its name suggested, but just as versatile as you would expect a simple ability to be. It did nothing more or less than allow Chastity to project and shape shadows from her blades. The length wasn’t very long, just two meters, and the shapes she could make were fairly simple, with most of them being solid objects, other than her whip projections, which she’d managed by mimicking my whip work. But that did not mean the projections were useless. They extended the reach of her blades, giving her more cutting surface, or turning a clean edge into a serrated one for ripping and tearing. But the nastiest use she’d made was to wait until the blade was buried in a target’s flesh, and then create barbs on her dagger, before ripping it out, leaving large, ragged, asymmetrical wounds that bled plenty and resisted normal healing magic. It was an understated, but extremely powerful ability, when used correctly.

Catalina nodded as she looked at them. “Well done, all of you. With these new abilities, we just became a lot more capable. Rest up tonight. Tomorrow, we start hunting, so we can have contribution points banked before the Game begins.”