Saintess Summons Skeletons - Chapter 408: Aerial superiority
Sofia absorbed the imprint and sat on Tarren’s chair before her transformation ended. Her body reverted back to her ‘human’ form, and she now had to deal with her left eye’s issue.
“Did it break? Can’t see anything… It was working fine until my mana hit zero during the fight. I’m still at zero… Richard said it should automatically enter maintenance mode when I’m out of mana, but I should still be able to see in maintenance mode even if it’s just regular vision. Is the lack of ambient mana an issue?”
The cost to fuel the eye was supposed to be 20 mana a second but with [Heat Death]’s reductionit’s just fifteen. It’s not too bad but it’s still not nothing. No cost for maintenance mode, though, so why’s it not working?
There was a way to manually activate maintenance mode… But it requires mana. Is it possible that I hit zero mana too fast and it didn’t have time to automatically activate maintenance? That would explain why it stopped working.
Post transformation weakness is going to stay for half an hour though… It’s not like when I’m still in demon form and can cheat with [Heat death] to kickstart the regen, even if I dispelled the snake I’d be stuck with only what I stole from him. Not that I would be able to steal much from the snake since he only has ten mana… Might as well let him play around with Bookie while he’s out, deserved it.
With only one eye working, Sofia looked through her mana heart’s new stats.
[Nascent mana heart of Aphenoreth]: /C tier/
9 months, 31 days, 13 hours
Imprint progress : 741.51/ 1200
Small Catalyser : 0/1
Effects (Will be doubled) :
- All stats +45% (C rank base)
- Health + 10 561
- Stamina + 10 000
- Mana + 43 590
- [Relocate Core]
Already C tier in just two days. That has to be a new speed record, right? Chances are I could be in and out of the trial in just three days if I wanted. Not that I’d ever do that.
I’ll suck this trial’s nectar to the last drop.
To summarize the new findings, the imprint progress requirement really isn’t linear at all, no point trying to predict it. It does mention the catalyser which is nice even if I already knew.
The all stat bonus went up another 25% as expected. Pretty nice. I wonder if I could push it up to 200%? That’s four ranks above A. Sounds possible. I got plenty of time ahead of me.
Let’s update Pareth’s sheet too while I’m at it.
[Nascent mana heart of Knowledge]:
Rank : C Tier
Imprint power until next rank : 785/ 1200
Small Catalyser : 0/1
Effects (on use) :
All stats +45% (C rank base)
- +8500 Health
- ??? Skill shard (3/10) (Sunless Amalgam Skill)
- [Relocate Core]
- [Arclight]
So far we’ve done a good job spreading the imprints. We need to get Pareth more stats though. Can’t let him with just skills.
Though, Pareth’s most important bonus will end up being the % all stats, right? I wonder… Can he hit 100 million health with good imprints and the [Sanctified grounds] multiplier? Probably not far. That’s pretty exciting to think about.
Health : 85 845 / 85 980
Still doing good on that front too, even if I took another hit. Couldn’t really avoid it. I might want to switch to the impervious title sooner rather than later to avoid losing my health crumb by crumb like this. But the flames from the glorious really helped in the fights, especially against all the drones, so it wasn’t a bad choice to have this one on either.
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Sofia just sat there and let her thoughts wander as her body recovered from the transformation. When her mana finally started going back up, her left eye came back to life as fast as it had died.
Huh. I guess it really just never entered maintenance mode.
Thinking this, Sofia sent some mana into the eye in a specific pattern to manually activate the maintenance mode.
Still works as it should. Really just an issue with the sudden mana loss then. I’ll have to tell Richard. Figuring out these fringe cases is why I got this thing for free after all.
Speaking of richard… I’m going to be stuck here for another six hours?
Leaving the skeletons to do their own thing, with Pareth apparently coaching the snake in wrestling on the other side of the room, Sofia slept through the rest of the dungeon’s lifetime.
It was a crouching Pareth who woke her up with a tap on the shoulder.
“Good morning…” she greeted him while yawning.
Pareth nodded and stood back up.
“You’re really too tall with this skeleton… I like it better when you’re my size…”
Pareth crouched again. Even like this he was taller than her, the hellspawn skeleton was just massive.
“Pfft. You’re sweet, don’t take it to heart alright? I like you no matter what skeleton you take. Dungeon’s about to run out?” she asked as she stood from the chair. Pareth nodded in response.
“Alright! Let’s get to work with that bonus task. Direction, the moons!”
Without warning, the scenery shifted around Sofia, and she found herself with Pareth in a completely empty square room, with the same big doors she had entered the dungeon through.
“Oh. I can actually sense through these now. This is where we entered from, the other side is the room with the ladder to the surface,” she told Pareth. Walking up to the door, she lightly touched them, and they slid open by themselves slowly.
Seeing how everything was safe, Pareth returned to the bone storage, and Sofia went on to climb the rusty ladder. She emerged from the same spot she had entered the ladder shaft before, in the middle of the swamp. The first rays of morning sunlight caressed her face as the nightly ice quickly melted all around the wild scenery.
I should put the armor back on.
This is probably the safest time of the day, though. When the Sunless disappear and the regular monsters have yet to really wake up.
Let’s not linger. Bookie! All the birds!
The book of skeletons appeared in front of Sofia, presenting four glowing pages to her.
The first page was Crowie, which obviously had to be summoned first if Sofia was going to summon birds, next was the page with fifty other crows, then the page with the fifty-four small birds she had had forever, and last was a new page with a hundred birds she had prepared for this trial with Astelia. These skeletons were straight from the spirit forest, caught by a Vampire mercenary at Sofia’s request.
These new birds were named the ‘Three eyed spinews’, they were slender birds with long wings and tails for their size, as the name pointed out, they had three eyes offering them a superior vision compared to most birds. They liked to spin around as they flew, were quite fast despite their small size, and had the ability to temporarily turn invisible if needed. They made for a perfect aerial scouting squadron. The only downsides were the mana cost being ten times higher than crows per bird, and their relative lack of intelligence in comparison.
Surrounded by 205 undead birds, Sofia didn’t bother to distribute tokens, she just gave them instructions and let them fly as soon as the ambient mana had reached a good enough level again with the disappearance of the Sunless.
Considering the IPS tower she had entered the trial through has disappeared when she was about a hundred meters from it, Sofia assumed that the camouflage of all the towers should be about the same, so she ordered the birds to get in a line with two hundred meters separating each of them, and to fly as close to the turbulent mana ceiling as they could.
It’s not exactly optimal as the turvins and the spinews will have to slow down to the crows’ speed, but I can cleanly cover a line of forty kilometers of terrain like this so it’ll have to do. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long to find one of those IPS
Sofia flew with the birds for the entire day, taking breaks when the birds were unsummoned and Bookie had to bring them back out, and they failed to find anything of notice, not even a single Sirhellion cloud. At the very least, she had finally left the swamps, and was flying over a cute flowery meadow when the sun fell down, which was when she realized she had made a critical mistake.
I flew in the direction opposite to the sun all day… I’m stupid. Made the day shorter for no reason.
Ah, whatever, let’s find a safe place to land. I’ll turn left and travel as far as I can through the night, then tomorrow I move in the opposite direction. I’m sure I can gain at least a few minutes of sunlight by flying toward it, right? How fast does the sun go exactly?
Wait, no… That’s not how it works.
How fast does the planet spin?
The days seem to be about as long here as on our planet, which is a curious coincidence. Can the system control the speed of the planet?
As the night fell and the mana in the air started to disappear, Sofia was about to land when she saw a flash of light in the distance. It was weak, and short lived, but she had definitely seen something, and on that planet where the night was the territory of the all-black Sunless, this was very out of the ordinary.
You saw that too, Crowie? Sofia asked her only skeleton out at this time. The small crow perched on her shoulder seemed to agree, intently looking in the direction where Sofia had seen the light.
She used the zoom of her left eye to try to spot something, but she was rapidly losing altitude as the mana was being absorbed by the forming Sunless drones all around the meadow, and she couldn’t find the source of the light.
Well, well, well. This day might not entirely be a waste after all. Let’s investigate!
