[NR] Chapter 378 - Lightning Swing (Patreon)

Satisfied with the results of the skill alteration, Jason takes a slightly hasty step to test it. A quick slice of his nail with a bit of Energy opens a wound on his right palm. Then he pours whatever is left of the poison and venom mixture onto the cut.

“Boy, does that sting”, escapes his mouth before he can get his reaction under control. Quite the mild reaction all things considered, because while the mixture doesn’t necessarily hurt as much as some other things Jason had experienced, it was quite a sudden sensation. This was a good sign.

The sting not only meant his body was reacting to the mess, but that neither of the components had been able to numb the wound. Sure, Jason could still feel a stiffness creeping up his arm and his hand had gone a little limp, but even without taking a look he could tell things were different.

That, of course, didn’t stop him from looking. Not much to see, though. Unlike the more finesse based version of the skill from before, his body is now flailing around to eliminate the stuff. A less than useful response for most people, as that would represent an immune system going out of whack. Jason didn’t have to worry about those kinds of things though, so the brute force method was a lot more effective for him.

Satisfied, Jason gives the poison and venom a few moments to clear and then continues forward towards the next monster nest. Though this time it wasn’t just a matter of training. The event space had been a windfall, but not one planned or hoped for so of course he had made sure there was some valuable target along the way.

A day later, Jason has entered the territory of the monster he plans to hunt. Though this time it wouldn’t be quite as straightforward. The last few dangerous areas had been picked out for training and so circumstances had pushed a bunch of monsters into a small space. That wasn’t the case here.

His target was best described as a giant salamander crossed with an electric eel. Upon becoming an adult, the ever creatively named, giant electric salamanders, would come up to about mid-thigh and could kill a man with their electricity alone. Though seeing as most of them use Qi it is more likely to die under a static claw attack of some sort.

Where the difficulty in hunting them came into play though, was how spread out they were. As a child, they’re only about the size of a normal young salamander, it only being at the last moment that their size balloons up. Combined with a special requirement to become an adult has created a situation where all the bodies of freshwater for quite a distance around will have a multitude of their young while adult specimens are quite rare.

Though Jason admits it probably doesn’t help that their electricity producing cheek organs only develop after becoming an adult and so they tend to be hunted pretty persistently. While a rare element to train in, equipment making use of the stuff is quite popular among the players. The locals aren’t quite as hot on the stuff as lightning damage tends to be very swingy when it comes to damage.

The players ignore this downside with their ability to ignore death and the fact that feast or famine, the effect will create a great scene. A short video of godly lightning being called down will pull just as many views if the bolt only does five damage or five thousand damage. This eagerness to use the stuff honestly caused a bit of a problem for the locals.

Until the players arrived, lightning was only ever used in large quantities so as to average out the damage or against certain monsters that were particularly weak to the stuff. For that, the giant electric salamanders were not exactly useful as there were too few of them. No, the locals would use things like static infused grass, which could be grown by the acre. Suffice it to say, none of the locals were ready for how crazy the players were for the stuff and the swingyer, the better.

Jason wasn’t one to chase after that kind of thing, but he wasn’t against selling some monster parts for a hundred times their original value. His biggest problem at this point was that Rosha wasn’t here to track them down. While this area had a higher frequency of encountering the monsters, technically, you could see them anywhere. There just happened to be a bunch of ponds in this part of the forest so that chance went from nearly non-existent to only moderately non-existent.

That was fine with Jason because he had planned to hang out in the area for a couple of weeks. Back in the city this had been a period of time set aside to provide padding in case something held him up. Now, though, he felt it would be better used to take a deeper look at most of his skills. Besides war stomp, the rest of them weren’t exactly developed by someone just a step away from exceeding NeoRealm as a whole.

Even his poison and venom resistance skill wasn’t going to be excluded. After all, if something like the divide between poison and venom was built on an assumed need, who knows what his other skills might be hiding? That included his self-made skills. In fact, if anything, they needed an even more critical eye on them. The System might appear to have god-like powers in NeoRealm, but it most assuredly had limits.

So as Jason wanders around, going from pond to pond, he turns his eyes towards desolate traversal. Because sure, he had somewhat passively been using the skill, but it had a lot of untapped potential and part of that might just be in figuring out how to change it to fit his abilities better.