Nightmare Realm Summoner

Chapter 42: Testing skills

It was a difficult decision. Alex wasn't sure how long he sat and examined his options, but eventually, it had to end. Both Funhouse and Plane Slip were good choices. One of them just had something that the other didn't.

Plane Slip was powerful — but the extent of its power was exactly what it appeared to be. It was a guaranteed way to avoid an attack or reposition. That was it. Nothing more and nothing less.

Alex had no issue with that, but Funhouse was different. The ability could be used both offensively and defensively. And, if there was any way to figure out exactly how it worked and if he could get any degree of control of how the things passing through the space it affected, the ability had an immense skill ceiling.

I did go into this wanting to make sure I took an ability that had a good chance of giving me an advantage in the upcoming fight. Even if I can't immediately control the direction something gets sent after passing through Funhouse, it's still a fantastic disorientation skill. If someone steps into it and gets shot out in a different direction, they're going to be confused no matter where that direction is.

And if I can get a better control of the skill, it'll scale far harder than Plane Slip as well.

Eh. I've always been one to roll the dice. I might have a problem, but oh well. Can't do anything about it now. Might as well embrace it.

His decision was made.

[Riftwalk] (Novice 4) has gained an additional effect.

Funhouse: Draw latent energy from the Mirrorlands into a small area, causing anything passing through it to warp and change direction. The extent of the warping effect increases with the amount of energy drawn.

The surface of the white marble mantle changed once again. Three more black boxes formed beneath the skill he'd chosen and the words faded away.

Alex's head tilted to the side. Riftwalk had gone straight to Novice 4, skipping clean over Novice 3. That answered a few more questions that he'd had. His ability's ranks were based on the number of points that he'd spent on them, and the cost to get a new ability was the same as its current rank.

So I'll need 4 Units if I want to upgrade Riftwalk again, or 4 levels. Interesting. So if I really want to hyperfocus into a single skill, I'll go through huge swathes of time where I can't get upgrades — but if you distribute your skills evenly and never push one higher, you're going to have to wait even longer to get the really strong abilities farther down the path. That might end up just getting you killed when you run into something an evenly distributed path can't handle.

There was going to have to be a lot of thought put into all the abilities he chose. Wasting points could get him killed, but so could holding on to too many of them. Alex bit back the urge to chuckle. It looked like even selecting his powers was going to be a challenge. At least the System was incredibly consistent with what it liked.

He took one last look around his Mind Palace. The plain white stairs beneath his feet led down to a lake of black water that stretched out in every direction around him. He could just make out the beginning details of a pillar waiting for enough power to manifest itself in the distance. Alex had no idea what it would do, but he was excited to find out.

Somewhere far beneath that, Berith waited. The fragment of the demon's soul was bound somewhere under the lake, held in check by thick white chains — for now.

Alex headed down the stairs and stepped down onto the water. A faint ripple passed out from where his foot landed, rolling past his basin and disappearing into the distance in every direction.

Only one thing left to do. I still have to figure out how to distribute the soul flames that I've gathered so far. There are two monsters to feed now.

Alex pulled both of his Spatial Mirrors out and studied their reflective surfaces. He'd gotten a new ability, but it had come at a cost. Any upgrades he gave to his monsters now had the potential to be worse than they could have been if he'd chosen Monster Medley as the upgrade skill and it had given him a way to improve their advancement.

Granted, that was a whole lot of 'ifs'. It was practically making problems up where none existed — but Alex couldn't quite bring himself to waste any energy.

And, after a few moments of debate, he realized that he didn't have to. Unlike his own abilities, upgrading Glint and Spark was nearly instantaneous. He didn't have to cash in all the soul flames he'd gathered if nobody in the town actually managed to challenge him for the top of the leaderboard.

If someone does, I can power up Glint or Spark then. It'll be a card I'm forced to play, but I'd rather hold it close to chest until then. No point wasting energy when there's a chance I can save it.

Alex grinned and nodded to himself, more than aware he looked like a madman and relieved that there was nobody there to see it other than his hazy reflection.

There was nothing left to do in his Mind Palace.

He let himself slip out of the deep meditation and returned to Room 221, where Claire was waiting for him.

***

There was a Russian grandmother crossed with a showboating boxer in the room when Alex awoke. Claire had gotten her new clothes, but it looked like they might have been selected by a child that had run free through a costume store with their mother's credit card.

She wore a thick, fluffy coat complete with a furry hood and cuffs. It might have fit right in place on a woman striding from a divorce court after a victorious result had she not been wearing a pair of intentionally ripped jeans and what seemed to be a dirty white tank top.

"Yeah, yeah," Claire muttered. She pulled at her new clothes and let out a heavy sigh. "I can't complain. They're clothes, and this tiny shirt isn't really going to cover much of anything without the coat."

"The coat is nice," Alex agreed once he got a hold of himself again. "If a bit… long. It's on the edge of a cloak."

Claire glanced down at her hands. They were almost completely consumed by her sleeves. Her eye twitched and she rolled them up to reveal her hands once more. She turned away from Alex, which made her robes flutter dramatically behind her and drew another round of snickers form him.

"At least this'll be great when it gets cold," Claire said with a shake of her head. She double-checked the door to make sure it was locked before turning back to Alex and crossing her arms in front of her chest. "Is it my turn to meditate, or did you just come out of there to get jealous of my fashion sense?"

"Hey, it could be worse. At least you aren't wearing a wrestling mask," Alex said as he rose from bed. He nodded to the spot where he'd been sitting. "Go ahead. I'm all done. Ready for the horde — or about as ready as I'm going to let myself get right now."

"Going to let yourself get?"

"I don't want to do a few final upgrades. I figured out that leveling skills up needs exponentially more the higher level they are, and I didn't have enough Units to upgrade everything. Also — the weaker I am, the better reward I'm going to get for anything I do."

Claire squinted at Alex. "Why do I feel like it's more of the latter reason than the former?"

It actually wasn't, but Alex was pretty sure he'd made a bit too much of a reputation for himself at this point to deny it any further. He just grinned and shrugged.

Claire rolled her eyes as she sat down on the bed, crossing her legs beneath her and bracing her arms against her knees. She settled, glanced down at the robes bunched up beneath her, then let out a sigh and slipped out of the furry robe.

"What happened to your fashion?" Alex asked.

"No questions from the bleedin' bystanders." Claire nabbed the pillow and stuck it behind her back. "Wake me up if anything happens?"

"Will do," Alex said. "Good luck. And don't forget—"

"The stuff we talked about?" Claire's face grew serious and she nodded. "Oh, trust me. I won't."

She closed her eyes and slipped into meditation, leaving Alex in silence.

Minutes ticked by. The moon pushed its rays through the murky window and traced designs across the floor, using the dirt on the glass like hands in a shadow puppet show. Shapes and figures scrawled past on the ground.

Alex's gaze eventually started to drift. He briefly deactivated his bracelet for just long enough to pull a crumpled dollar from his pocket. It was one of the ones he'd taken from Jackson, crumpled and smeared with dry blood.

He rolled the paper into a ball between his fingers and tossed it from hand to hand. It had been a long time since there had been a proper moment of quiet since the apocalypse had started where he hadn't been about an inch away from collapsing in exhaustion.

I'm not so sure I like the silence. I'd go to sleep if I could, but I'd rather wait until Claire finishes up her own meditation — and I'm not really all that tired.

His senses extended to the magical energy within him. Power prickled against his insides and coiled within his veins. At the very least, he could spend some time familiarizing himself with Funhouse.

Alex lifted a hand and drew on his energy. Just as it flowed when he used Glint's powers, magic rushed to respond to Alex's call. The air before him rippled like a haze rising from desert sand.

Then, with the distant tinkling sound of falling glass, it cracked. Lines of distortion lurched out until their growing spiderweb was roughly the size of a large beachball. Fragments jutted out of the air like someone had dropped a heavy rock on a mirror and locked it in time before any of the pieces could fall back to the ground.

Alex peered through the warped air. He could still see the bed behind it, but it was like looking through a poorly made kaleidoscope. Half of Claire's body was up above her head, and portions of the bed had filled in her midsection.

He moved to the side to get another look at how she actually looked before peering through the distortion once more. Alex extended a hand, then paused just inches away from it. He pulled his hand back, then flicked the crumpled dollar into the magic.

The paper ball struck one of the fragments in the distortion and abruptly changed directions, flying to the side and colliding with another fragment. It changed direction once more, struck yet another fragment, and was redirected twice more before it was spat out to fall at Alex's feet.

"Huh," Alex said, kneeling to pick his dollar up again. A faint prickle at the back of his mind reminded him that he was losing energy as long as the warped space remained present in the air, but he ignored it.

He tossed the dollar into the distortion again. It flicked out to the right. Alex continued to repeat the process. He did his best to replicate his throws as closely as he could. It didn't matter. The paper came out in a different direction each time.

But, while it seemed almost random, Alex was nearly certain it was anything but. The fragments acted the same way every time something passed through them. What changed was the angle at which his dollar struck them. Even the slightest shift in speed or direction completely changed where something would enter and emerge.

Alex lost count of the number of times he flicked his test dollar into Funhouse. He didn't have anything better to do. His boredom spurred the intensity of his studies more than any teacher ever could have.

Time dragged by. His results continued to be seemingly random, even though his conviction that they weren't only continued to grow. The only way to prove his theory was to actually replicate a throw multiple times and have the dollar land in the spot each time.

It was fortunate he had nothing better to do.

As most things worthwhile, improvement was an insidious beast. Several throws landed his dollar in the same area, but they weren't consecutive and it was difficult to tell if the results had been intentional or not.

It took nearly an hour before he got the dollar to land in the exact same place twice in a row, and but it was only another thirty minutes before he managed to replicate the process twice. A grin pulled across Alex's lips.

Funhouse looks like it basically acts like a bunch of really tiny portals. Every single fragment is like a different passage through space. If I can figure out exactly which ones connect where, I can basically determine exactly where objects passing through it end up… but what happens when something bigger than a single fragment passes through it? Is it determined by the first fragment they touch? Or does each one change the trajectory on its own?

There was only one way to find out. Alex deactivated his bracelet for the second time and pulled his torn and bloodied shirt off, balling it up and tossing the whole thing into the area he'd cast Funhouse over.

The shirt stretched from fragment to fragment. It jerked and twisted like a jellyfish in a blender. Every time any part of it touched a fragment, it was pulled in an entirely new direction. The scrap of cloth eventually fluttered out the bottom of the warped space and splatted to the ground.

Alex stared down at it. It hadn't acted anywhere close to how the dollar had.

I see it was the latter option, then. Every touch with a fragment changes the trajectory. If I'm lucky, each fragment is tied to a specific direction.

He had a lot of research ahead of him. Distilling exactly how the ability worked to the point where he could completely master it would take a very long time. There were so many different variables and potential outcomes.

A small grin pulled at the corners of Alex's lips.

I'm pretty sure someone a whole lot smarter than me would say this is basically just some branch of physics, but this is more fun than school ever was.

Let's see just how far I can push this ability.