Chapter 9: Ireful Shell

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⦓ Equipment ⦔ – ⦓ Auxiliary ⦔ – ⦓ Consumable ⦔

⦓ Skills ⦔ – ⦓ Vendue ⦔

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Rakna went over each word in his vision before throwing an inquisitive look at Kaelith.

She snickered and began, “Firstly, you have three different types of items you can buy. Equipment refers to weapons and armor. Auxiliary Items are what we call Magical Objects. For instance, magic pendants, rings, etcetera. More often than never, they have special effects that can either boost your stats or even give you a new skill. Attribute boosts are a lot rarer than stat boosts by the way. Any Item or Skill that can increase the root attributes is very sought after.”

Rakna immediately thought of his shapeshift trait but he of course didn’t mention it and Kaelith continued her explanation.

“As for Consumables, they’re what you would expect. Food, potions, pills, scrolls… you get the idea. Now, following with the second line on the window you’re seeing right now; there’s ‘Skills’ and ‘Vendue’. The former is self-explanatory. You can buy skills from the shop but I warn you; they’re very expensive most of the time. Well, except Nirvana Skills, of course. There’s none there.”

Rakna reacted to that. “What are Nirvana Skills?” He had seen the Nine-Tailed Wolf’s Tailed Pearl and he himself had one. But he wasn’t aware of what it was actually.

“Well, it’s normal you don’t know. Nirvana Skills are called as such because they’re transcendent in nature and, if I can say so, completely broken. They are exceptionally rare but not to the point where you would only see one every hundred years or something. I’d say that one out of ten thousand hosts have one. But it can vary honestly. Sometimes we get ten in one single batch.”

Rakna scowled and tilted his head. Other than the fact that he had just learned that he had a very special ability, he wasn’t perturbed at all. But there was something that bothered him a little. It could have been his imagination, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Why would I not know about it? I could have asked my AI.”

“Well, silly, the section for them doesn’t appear on your status if you don’t have one yourself. How could you have gotten the idea to ask your AI?” She replied and he nodded absentmindedly. Once again, entirely unbothered by the fact that she had made another assumption about him.

At this point, he had a feeling that if the vixen in front were to learn what he had, half-willing, hidden from her, she might get very angry. Fortunately for him, she just gazed at him with eyes entirely blinded by the fact that he was ‘new’.

‘This woman is amazingly clueless…’ He commented inwardly and Pronos apparently understood his recent friend’s thoughts and nodded in agreement.

“Anyway,” she raised her voice, unaware of the disrespectful thoughts of her guests. “To finish, you have the Vendue. It’s what I told you earlier. It’s the public auction for the Hosts to use at will.”

“I see,” Rakna muttered and tapped on the equipment button. A long list of items was displayed in front of him with a basic description for each such as the name, the rarity, and the type.

“If you want to filter or search for something in particular, as I said, ask your AI. Now, onto recommendations; how much do you have at the moment?”

“10 000 Talys,” Rakna replied mechanically as he scrolled down the list and read each line with almost inhuman speed. Then, he noticed that Kaelith had gone silent. He glanced at her and immediately realized he might have made a mistake going by her dumbfounded expression.

Kaelith had almost choked on her tea, again, when she had heard his current wealth. “How do you have so much?!” She shouted in shock.

“What? Is it a lot?”

“Of course, it’s a lot! When I went through the Initiation like you, I didn’t even get a tenth of what you got! And I was one of the best from by batch as well! What did you do to get a five-figure-reward out of the bat?!”

“Beats me,” he lied with an unperturbable façade. “Maybe it’s because I wandered into the forest after completing the mission and hunted more kobolds. It’s in there that I lost my arm. I lost it to a second wolf that was in there,” he said a half-truth and observed the vixen’s expression as he did so.

“A second wolf? Odd,” she frowned. “You’re not the first to wander outside of the mission zone, but there’s usually nothing but low-level kobolds. I never heard about another wolf other than the Rider Kobold’s.”

‘I knew it,’ Rakna uttered internally; his suspicions were confirmed. ‘She doesn’t know of the Nine-Tailed Wolf. Was it a mistake from the System that I crossed it?’

“You either have very bad luck or the opposite considering that allowed you to get 10 000 Talys,” she added offhandedly.

‘Luck, huh?’ He mused. His luck attribute was at nine and he had already tried and couldn’t increase it with free points. ‘For all I know, nine might be a pretty high number,’ he thought.

“Whatever,” Kaelith sighed. “You’re already weird enough. Nothing should surprise me at this point.”

‘You have no idea, foxy.’

“With 10 000, you’ve got a huge leeway. First things first, Recovery Potions, Healing Potions, and Mana Potions should be something to look into. There are different tiers and each one of them is more expensive than the previous but also more effective obviously. You can balance the cost-efficiency on your own.”

Rakna returned to the menu of the shop and selected Consumables this time. ‘Alexa, show me the second-lowest tiered for each of those three categories,’ he ordered internally.

[Understood,] she spoke for the first time after his wakening.

The AI returned a result in record time and three different prompts were presented to him.

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Designation: Consumable/Recovery Potion

Tier: 9 (Lowest: 10)

Restores physical stamina and light mental stress upon consumption.

Becomes ineffective after level 40.

Price: 100 Talys

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Designation: Consumable/Healing Potion

Tier: 9

Heals physical wounds and minor illnesses.

Becomes ineffective after level 40.

Price: 100 Talys

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Designation: Consumable/Mana Potion

Tier: 9

Restores 50 MP.

Becomes ineffective after level 40.

Price: 100 Talys

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Rakna absorbed the information and Kaelith resumed, “Of course, other than potions, a weapon and an armor of some sort are necessary. Then, although they are expensive, you can buy some basic skills; especially with your budget. Finally, you have your magic to awaken but that’s not for me to do. It will happen on the First Plateau. Any questions?”

“None,” Rakna replied calmly while inputting the number of potions he wanted inside some sort of cart. The fact that it was like any shopping site you could find on the net amused him a bit.

In the end, he chose to buy three of each of those potions. Decreasing his wealth to 9 100 Talys. He glanced at a few other consumables that looked interesting but decided to pass for now.

After that, he had no need for a main weapon since he had Sonata but he thought that having a knife was quite useful. Blood Fang wasn’t with him anymore and his swiss knife had been too damaged already by its use against the Kobolds. So, he bought a nameless one with ten of attack but no perks.

‘It’ll have to do,’ he thought then considered the other recommendation; armor. His uncle had told him about this once in the past. It was when the old man had returned home with a bullet in his waist and asked him to extract it. Then, he had asked why he wouldn’t wear a plated vest.

‘Vests? I don’t use those. Well, my coat is made of the same stuff as your scarf, and it’s plenty capable of protecting me from blades and small-caliber bullets. But, other than that? No. Armor makes you slower. Makes you heavier. What happens when you’re slower? You get sluggish. What happens when you’re sluggish? You get less attentive. What happens when you lose attention? You get closer to death. And worst of all, if you don’t feel the ache, you cannot live.’

‘When you use something that warps the core value of a soldier putting his body and life on the front, you lose the edge that we all need. Go naked for all I care. Feel the wind around you, the blades in your flesh, the blood on your skin, and the bullet burns. And do whatever you can so that those scars never get bigger. The more time you spend like that, the more your body will learn. Learn what, you ask? To not get hurt.’

Rakna snorted inwardly as he remembered the old man’s words. His uncle had always been very cryptic, and sometimes you could learn a lot from his words. But, to him, that particular speech was slightly egotistical. Most people would die on the battlefield without defense and his uncle was just one of the rare individuals with enough skill to be considered a one-man army; you could not compare.

‘But… he has a point. An armor is a liability. It doesn’t ‘listen’ to you like a weapon does and you have no way to assure it does its job. It can’t protect everything as well,’ Rakna thought and closed the equipment tab after merely adding new clothes to the cart since the ones he had at the moment were bloodstained and damaged, especially his left sleeve.

After that, he spent around ten minutes looking through the Auxiliary Items and Skills. The former had very interesting aspects while the latter were all useful but expensive. He needed something to fill his lack of defense and he had to manage something with his remaining money.

Although his newly acquired trait allowed him to get more tanky, he couldn’t activate it at will. In that mindset, he chose a certain skill that cost him 7 500 Talys. The skill was called Ireful Shell. It basically increased his defense proportionately to the damage he took. It was a very good skill on paper but there was a reason why 7 500 was enough to buy it, otherwise, this skill would have been too strong.

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Designation: Cursed Skill/Cognitive Skill

Name: Ireful Shell

Blight Tier: 4

Learning Requirements: Level 5 <✓> 30 Atr Cap <✓> Feral Race <✓>

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Description:

A responsive defensive skill. When the Host is injured, the AI will evaluate their state and choose between five different options.

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Lightly Injured, Mildly Injured, Heavily Injured, Critically Injured, Death’s Door.

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Respectively, the defense boosts given are 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and 50%. The boost disappears after twenty minutes following the last injury suffered by the Host.

On the other hand, when this skill is learned, the Host will gradually lose their rationality as their injuries aggravate until they become berserk.

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Note: This skill is cursed. It cannot be deleted or unlearned. The curse is also susceptible to an increase in intensity if conditions are met.

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There were a few interesting things about this skill. One of them being the fact that if he hadn’t changed race, he would have been unable to learn it. Then, the pros were obvious but the cons were massive.

For probably everyone except Rakna, it would have been an inexcusable flaw. But for him, it was perfect. For one, he knew for a fact that he was unable to produce powerful raw emotions. It was due to a certain incident he had experienced younger. His uncle had told him that it had caused his brain to make a countermeasure.

This measure was what the old man called ‘Obsidian Blood’. A split behavior that would resurface whenever his emotions reached a certain threshold. The cigarettes of Obsidian’s Smoke had precisely been made in order to suppress it and stabilize it.

But Rakna didn’t want to suppress it now as much as before. The strength it gave him wasn’t something he could ignore. In that way, he was hoping that Ireful Shell would trigger Obsidian Blood and not rob him of his sanity. It was a gamble but one worth taking.

As he was thinking about that, Alexa spoke up in his mind, [Acknowledged. Unnamed Trait has been updated to Obsidian Blood.] He was a bit surprised but certainly satisfied that it wasn’t listed as ‘???’ anymore.

“Hey, you’re finished?” Kaelith asked with a sullen look. “I already told you I’m working overtime here. I wanna go home, you know?”

Rakna sent her a deadpan look. “Then why did you indulge yourself in explaining all of that? I don’t want to sound ungrateful but it’s hard to believe you gave the same explanation to everyone. Now that I think about it, how many Hosts did you have to welcome?”

Kaelith pouted at his words. “If you’re grateful, then act like it. The only reason I humored you for so long was that you were slightly interesting. I usually just say hello, give them a printout with the things they have to know and answer their questions. And to answer yours, it’s only ten. There are many temporary shopkeepers for the Initiation. It’s a sort of part-time job.”

Rakna nodded. “As you said, this really feels like a strange society. Based on what you said, it has even evolved until it could work along with the System itself,” he muttered to himself.

The vixen sighed deeply. “And I will probably contract an aversion after today. Overly calm and smart people are a pain. I regret taking an interest in you.”

“I see. So, you’re into shy and impressionable kids only, huh?”

Her expression twisted and Rakna swore he thought he heard the sound of glass breaking before she shouted, “Fuck off, wolfy! I’m not a predator!”