[SS 2.79] Wet and Wild (Part 1/3) (Patreon)

[You have spent 6,381 Essence to reach Puck Lv.26 | GP available: 6]

Angelica’s Puck form was reaching its end. Probably one more good push of Essence gathering would be all it took, though the levels were getting egregiously expensive. By her best guess, with the remaining thousand leftover, she’d need roughly another sixty-five hundred. Sadly, with the latest hunt, there likely wouldn’t be a big batch of Malignants around Vulgrest for quite a few weeks at least. 

If she really wanted to hunt them, she could travel the world a bit, head to major hubs and cities, then ping the area with Malignant Tracker to see if anything was worth her time. Then either clear the place out or move along. But there were a few problems with that. Primarily, if Summoners in the other cities were doing their due diligence as well, it would be slim pickings. Maybe she’d have more luck in a place like the Middle-West where they were likely more focused on fighting each other than the evil forces of nature. 

Of course, travelling was an issue. She had the money to fly wherever she wanted, but that’d feel like a waste when she was currently saving up to buy her apartment complex. Not to mention the issue of time spent in airports and uncomfortable plane seats. She’d rather bounce her way across the world, but that was still an effort and a half. Though at some point, now that she had Flash-Freeze, she’d be interested to see if she could make her way across the ocean while making frozen platforms upon impact. Probably best to test that on a large lake first. 

Using the Hell portals would be the most efficient way, to at least get her to specific spots and then travel from there, but Angie was the issue. She would be destroyed as soon as one of the Circles was used, losing any growth she’d earned, and the entire reason Angelica would be willing to dedicate such time to travel would be having her Duplicate back home taking care of business. She’d be more likely to do the inverse, send Angie out to travel around and find the Malignants, then catch up with her when they had a good hunt on their hands. 

Finding them in other worlds was also off the table for the same reason. Damn, the plane of existence limitation for Duplicate was so annoying. She could definitely travel to one, spawn Angie, and then they divide and conquer, but again, she’d need the time to dedicate to such a venture. Angelica definitely wanted to explore the other worlds available to her at some point. Maybe after achieving Hellion, and she had a better idea of what the future held. 

But she wasn’t really in a rush to reach the next stage for a variety of reasons. So since she didn’t have Malignants for convenient gains, she’d need to rely on Summoners still, but at least there was variety in that regard. Now that she could lean on the Zenmoon Sect for regular work, jumping to the beck and call of strangers was far less appealing. Of course, there was still a limit to what she could do for them, so that path was likely slower than sourcing jobs herself. 

To that end, she had asked Divining Ear to mute most Summoner requests except for those that would be of genuine interest to her. It’d be foolish to deny potential opportunity entirely, but hopefully the strong filter would keep her out of more annoying situations like she’d experienced with the military. Of course, if the Summoner was strong enough, they could simply hijack her as Hijir had done. Apparently, there always needed to be a healthy dose of dread in her life. Though as she improved as a Summoner, she should be able to counteract that with her own power, based on the experiments she’d run under his binding.

Angie was still the primary reason for the holdup. Angelica wanted to conclude her training before moving on to anything else, and finally have the fully competent side-kick that the Skill description had promised. Not that she was doing bad, though. 

After the latest outing, she had reached adulthood, which honestly could be a good stopping point if Angelica wanted to move onto other things. However, she knew that the girl's most depressive years were ahead of her, and wanted to push past that hurdle to her current self, so she knew that her clone could be counted on for anything. Even now, though, their mentalities were getting steadily more similar, and it was almost like the girl could read her mind at times. 

Another reason not to rush was Angelica was not quite ready for the Evolution to occur yet. It was funny. She had initially hated her Puck form and wanted to move past it as quickly as possible, but now she was somewhat dragging out its end. A design hadn’t been finalized, and since Hellion was supposed to be a more aggressive stage, she honestly wasn’t looking forward to the shift in mentality. Part of her had considered stockpiling Essence until she could power-level through most or all of it, but purposefully crippling herself by being intentionally weaker also didn’t sound like the greatest idea. If situations she couldn’t predict were going to keep happening, it was smart to be at her best build.

Also, because art Demon was her goal, she wanted to get Fabrication Attunement to at least Intertwined before triggering the Evolution. That would bring it in line with all the rest at the top, well, except for Pestilence. Attunements very clearly had a big impact on Evolution, so if Fabrication was lagging behind the rest, it’d be harder for her to make a case why it should be front and center. Even if it wasn’t going to be incorporated heavily into her design, she’d still like the Racial Skill freebies to be as artsy as possible.

To that end, besides training Angie, she was mostly focused on art still. Because she speculated that focusing on a specific Attunement made it grow faster, she was trying to limit how much she levelled anything except for Fabrication Skills. In the two days since the Malignant hunt, she’d banged out a few Merlina chapters but had been primarily working on commissions. 

[Auto-Color Lv.20, Evoke Lv.29, Duplicate Lv23]

Angelica had gone ahead and asked for the Might and Attunement notifications to be turned off when not a rank-up, unless they were unexpected or unusual so that they were less intrusive, especially since she was spending so much time lost in her own mind these days, and the pings pulled her out of it. Now that the ones for Duplicate had started to stabilize, they were less interesting or worrying. But she had to be getting close to the next Fabrication rank at this point, right? All combined, Fabrication had some of her highest total levels. It was starting to get frustrating. 

And there had been some concessions in her training, most notably with Ambidextral Mastery. Since hitting Lv.20 there would unlock a new Fabrication Skill on the Weave, she definitely wanted to see what that would be before committing to her next few purchases. But with how slow it had been improving, maybe it would be best to go ahead and decide the remaining Puck GP spend and deal with it in Hellion.

Annoyingly, because of the Sinful aspect, Ambidextral Mastery had been ever increasingly picky about what it constituted as training for its growth. A lot of the old methods didn’t work well anymore, so she was finding that she had to be a bit more hands on. Quite literally. Angelica was pulled out of her thinking when her body suddenly behaved erratically. Parry had activated, blocking the incoming blow, followed by a Riposte in the form of a roundhouse kick that hit Angie square in the stomach, sending her flying into the wall.

[Parry and Riposte Lv.7, Bash Lv.12, Pummel Lv.8, Ambidextral Mastery Lv.17]

“Are you alright,” she asked as she walked over to her Duplicate and helped her up. Since Angie had a much smaller Health pool, too heavy of a hit could kill her, and Angelica hadn’t been paying much, or really any attention, she’d probably used far more force than needed. And she also slyly checked the wall behind her, to make sure it wasn’t damaged. That would be a problem for a variety of reasons.

Her landlord would, of course, be furious about the damage, and possibly even just throw her out as a result. That would probably only be escalated by the fact that the Angelica twins were currently not in their apartment. After their first spar, it became exceedingly obvious that doing so in her actual room was a terrible idea. So through the power of Transfiguring into a bug, breaking into one of the vacant units was easy peasy. 

Really, they should probably just go to one of the Hell Training Rooms for this, but that was a mild inconvenience when there was a space so much closer. Plus, the Training Rooms were public. Any other Demons could watch their roughhousing. And honestly, the hand-to-hand combat they were currently engaged in would be a lot less efficient for training Ambidextral Mastery, deadlier, and simply sillier looking if she did so in either of her Demon forms, kind of like watching kids slap fighting. So she was saving both of them that embarrassment.

“I’m okay,” Angie mentioned. “I’ve got a few more hits before I need to heal or be remade. I’m more likely to give up out of frustration before that happens, though. This is totally not fair! I have to fight my ass off while an Order does it all for you! And you’re not even paying attention, playing around with those commissions in your head while I can’t lose my focus for a second!”

It was true. That was exactly what Angelica was doing most of the time while they trained together. She had went and plowed through dozens of commission rough drafts so that she could then fiddle around with the finer details in her mind using Editable Reprint. Then when the work was done, she could draw out the final version lickity split thanks to not needing to completely redo it all from scratch anymore. And she’d also started leaving a few blank canvases open on both her computer and laptop, so she could transfer them from her mind straight to digital canvas, even from this other apartment since it was in her range. But once she ran out of those, she couldn’t do more, unable to control the devices mentally otherwise.

“Well, you have an advantage too,” Angelica countered. “You’ve got all those moves that I don’t know about yet.” In between their spars, Angie had mostly been studying, a lot of which was spent researching different fighting techniques—reading guides and watching tutorials, also hopefully leading up to unlocking Speed Studying eventually. While relying on the combat Destruction Skills had been great, she felt like they were reaching their limit on how effective they were if she didn’t understand the fundamentals of fighting. That’s where her ability to perform the twisty roundhouse kick had come from.

“And I wasn’t actually working on commissions this time. I was thinking about our future. What do you think we should spend the rest of the Puck Growth Points on?”

“You know what I think because it’s the same as what you think,” Angie argued. “It’s between Rune Absorber and Borrowed Time, assuming you can still get Conceal for free. If we’re going to keep focusing on gathering a lot of knowledge, then I would lean Rune Absorber.”

Yes, that was right where her thoughts lined up too. She really wanted that Skill, because it was the gateway to so much more. Borrowed Time was a nice safety net, but since as far as she was aware, no one or nothing was actively trying to kill her, it could be waited on until she was more regularly throwing herself in the line of fire, if that day ever actually came. So Rune Absorber it was then, especially because the avenue toward Runes had been opened up to her.

She still didn’t know much about them, where they came from, but she had a good lead. Now that she had joined a Cult, she could likely leverage that to access the Rune shop she’d seen in Hell and start there. That, of course, meant getting Muse as well. The two sort of went hand-in-hand, unless she could discreetly draw the Runes while browsing the shop. That could definitely be a dangerous proposition depending on the demeanor of the store owner.

And besides that, she wanted to increase her knowledge a lot. Since Angie had been doing so much studying, it had really been agitating her scholarly side. Gnostic wanted to be let off the leash. Maybe Hell had a library somewhere that she could just spend all day reading and uncovering secrets. Yes, that sounded nice, and would hopefully keep her out of trouble as a Hellion.

She could probably get a good amount of info about such things from Gawk, and maybe the Demon services office. But again, the best intel would probably come from Ba Skin, since he would be the most incentivized to get her what she wanted. It’d mean doing some work for him at the start, but at least then she’d know what she was getting into, as long as she didn’t agree to any stupid Pacts. Maybe he could help guide her to the interesting places in other worlds too. 

Alright, her mind was made up. Hellion would be the Evolution of Runes, knowledge, and exploration. It would be time to fully understand her situation and the many worlds of the universe. That’d be her goal. Well, on top of her main dreams of course. Art and stability wasn’t going anywhere either, but the call to adventure was certainly calling her at present. So she needed to root back down and focus on the current matters.

“Yes, I agree that Conceal needs to come first,” she admitted to herself. Angelica had already taken a few steps toward that endeavor, actually. Or rather, Angie had, and she just needed to claim that knowledge. “Maybe after I finish this batch of commissions. It’d be nice if we had it before this upcoming event with Zenmoon. Then if it gets to be too much, I could turn invisible and slip out.”

[A Demon has been deterred]

The pair of gals rushed out of the apartment, but there was nothing there even after just the few seconds it took. How vexing. So yes, the matter was being forced ahead after all. Angelica turned to herself, “Alright, let’s take care of it now.”