by Simon Archer
“Gods, why couldn’t you have found me sooner?” Her fingernails dug into my back like a cat’s claws. “How did I ever… survive… without…?” She couldn’t quite finish her sentence due to a perfectly timed thrust on my part, only letting out whimpers to breathe in and squeals to breathe out.
After each thrust, her grip on me grew tighter and tighter, and I could tell she was nearing her climax. I forced myself to focus and maintain speed, continuing to give it my all until her legs violently rattled the both of us. She threw her head back and let the whole world tomb know we were here with a scream like a banshee.
There wasn’t any semblance of self-control she devoted to keeping herself composed or well-spoken. No lady-like politeness, or even an attempt to seem like she was in control of what was happening between us. All of her attention was on screaming loudly, clawing sharply, biting deeply, and writhing intensely against me as if it was keeping her alive. As if touching me and being connected like this was the only piece of sanity she had left.
“I don’t think I could have found you much sooner than I did,” I joked once her screams had died down. I continued to pump into her, but with less fury than before. I was hungry for a climax of my own, but in no rush to get there. “You can’t tell me that getting from one whole dimension to right here in about a couple of hours isn’t an impressive feat.”
“Jeremiah, in the best and biggest of ways,” she pulled herself up to kiss me with both her lips and her body, “that mighty feat might be the least impressive thing about you that I’ve experienced just today.”
“I assume you meant that as a compliment,” I laughed.
“You better believe I did!” Delilah clamored onto me with her hands while interlocking her feet. “I couldn’t have created someone like you in my wildest dreams.”
“That is high praise.” I was starting to get a little intimidated by this image of me she’d built up in her head. “You’re the first girl to say that to me. Even in my own wildest dreams, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d outperform anyone you’ve been with, let alone a dream man.”
“I can’t go back.” The warrior woman laid back down and closed her eyes. “Not to anyone before this. They all seem so small now. So quick. So boring. I just can’t go back to them… I can’t go… I can’t… I…!”
I felt her tighten around me as yet another unexpected orgasm ripped through her, though she muffled herself this time by biting into my chest like she’d planned to rip away some of it. It had stopped the worst of it, but she’d still managed to let out enough noise to still fail at any sort of subtlety. Once she’d stopped, she used her momentum to flip us back over again, bouncing again on me as she stroked her hands through her hair.
“Holy shit,” I said, losing my breath after taking this half-rest. “You’re relentless. You still want more?”
“Yes.” she’d breathed onto my neck, her thighs squeezing against my sides. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…”
The answer was a solid ‘maybe,’ then.
As I felt myself near my own finish, Delilah must have felt the change in my rhythm. The often left-alone question ‘was an undead revenant capable of conceiving?’ was one that hung around the weirder schools of thought, mostly in online circles that were bordering on the illegal. I was forced to ask myself this question as Delilah pinned me down, keeping me in place before I could have even thought of escaping. Resigned to fate, I let myself go, embedding myself as deep as I could manage. Her legs clenched up against me in one last fit of shaking, biting into my neck like she actually was a vampire. Once the shaking had settled down, so did her grip on my flesh, her whole body relaxing at once.
“Are you okay?” I asked her as she lay on top of me, her face still buried in my neck. “Everything still functional? We didn’t void any warranties or anything?”
“I’m…” she kept me pinned with her legs as she kissed, “just perfect, Jeremiah. I feel perfect. This body you’ve given me is perfect. Your perseverance is perfect. You’re perfect. Everything is so perfect.”
“Good because I’m not done.” I sat up, harnessing her in my arms and pressing her against me as she clung to my waist and shoulders. With a few steps, I’d pinned her to the wall and started up again, and she’d started moaning as loud as before.
13
Lessons learned from this experience: First, using my own health to fuel my spells was called ‘blood magic’ and could easily kill me without any restraints. I shouldn’t have used that unless it was an absolute emergency to do so. The kind of emergency where the only other option was that everyone else died. My powers were far too unreliably strong to have that crutch be useful and not deadly.
Second, when magic was completely tapped out, it didn’t regenerate with magic salvaging like before. I needed to keep a careful eye on how much magic I was burning through at once. Big displays were only for when I had magic to spare. Once I knew exactly what kind of magic that was ‘salvaged’ with that stat, then maybe I could have played a little bit with the rules. All in all, keep it small.
Third, there were a lot of different ways to level up in this system, not all of them involving killing monsters to gain experience. While leveling up individual skills didn’t seem to affect the progression of the total mage level, they do still give perks and bonuses like they were miniature levels, and leveling them up leveled up everything else along with it.
Fourth, after waiting and praying for so long, I finally got a look at the ‘status screen’! Wow, this felt like it was a long time coming. We’d already seen all of my stats, so we were going to skim through the abilities, moving down the list:
Growth Beyond: Every school of magic flows through you. The well of magic from which you pull is nearly bottomless and cannot be fully contained. As abilities overlap and become redundant between the schools of magic, the magical energies serve to further increase your powers.
+When choosing specializations, can choose three from any school of magic from the same level along with one for the omnimage
+10 to all stats; defenses, health, and magic increase per level with other scores
+all scores increase by the value of the current level per level increase instead of the normal +1
+full benefits of every job skill level
Okay, I was pretty set off at the start of this. Extra stats, extra improvement to each stat, extra perks for my stats, and more defense, I mean, damn, this was almost cheating. I was going to be miles ahead of anyone at the same level as I was. Maybe I didn’t need to worry about going toe-to-toe with high levels as much as I thought I did. I wasn’t going to be stupid about challenging monsters or other mages that were clearly out of my league, but I also wasn’t going to just forfeit any fights on the grounds of seeming too weak to do anything about it.
Delilah assumed right off the bat that I was far more powerful than I looked, and I was wearing pajamas, possibly the least threatening form of attire besides tighty-whiteys. Other mages and magic types could have sensed my powers, even without knowing my exact level. Probably a sign of their sense attribute, even without the special screens to give them details. No slip-ups, no getting ahead of ourselves, and no assumptions.
So, unlike regular fantasy systems, where levels showed the powers of everyone in comparison to the player, Neo Ceissein’s levels were basically only a measurement of the growth of magic for everyone I would meet on my journey, not how strong they actually were in comparison to each other or myself. Might as well have told me the age of their training. The stats were different for everyone, and I was boosted on all fronts. Even a high-level mage could have been training themselves in ways that ruined their optimized strategies. I was no different. Every bit of training counted, and every choice along that path was important.
When did I get to do mage specializations? Even as the omnimage, I was still a novice. How would an omnimage even specialize, anyway? I kind of already specialized in, well, everything. What was there to fine-
tune or trade off with? I guess I’d figure it out when I got to it, and I got to choose other magic specializations.
Omni-Potential: All of your powers are beyond the best, and all of your shackles are released from your magic. One day, you will be akin to a force of nature.
+100 magic reserve
+Unlimited spell augment maximum
+Unlimited spell level maximum
+6 resistance to all damage
Text sprawl was a little dramatic, but I let it slide in light of the sweet perks it granted me. And the improved magic was always helpful. Certainly saved my life just a few hours ago. I was going to make some noise in the magical world. I’d been thinking that a lot, how much I was going to grow and all of that, but now it was especially true. I was going to have some serious boosts to my magic in comparison to the average mage.
Seed of Voloth: You have absorbed a seed of pure magic from a mysterious tree created by a mystical dryad matriarch. While its original purpose was to restore and strengthen a mage’s current magic reserves, this one has been modified to suit other needs.
+School of magic change to Omnimage, but only if the mage has no school of magic previously; 99.999999999997351% chance of instant death upon initial intake
Oh. I could have died.
I COULD HAVE DIED.
That bastard Torlith just shoved a poisonous acorn of magic death right into my stomach! I was not consulted before this procedure! I was not given a second opinion on it! At the very least, I would have at least weighed some of my options before just shoving death into my body so willy-nilly. There was a one-in-thirty-seven-TRILLION chance that I survived that. If they’d drafted every last human being on the planet and all of their ancestors, down to the first homo sapien and Adam and Eve themselves, that wouldn’t have guaranteed a one-hundredth of a single percent chance of survival for one of them.
Yeah, yeah, the dire situation demanded the highest level of sacrifice, no one in their right mind could have expected a split-second decision to be made with much thought to these mathematically insignificant survival rates, the positive end result of the whole ordeal has to justify the risk of one person dying if an entire world was at stake otherwise, and I COULD HAVE DIED.
Anyway…
Final Act: A powerful blessing has been bestowed upon you as part of a dying mage’s spell. Using the last of their magic reserves and living energy, the extraordinary power of the spell they cast has become permanent and will remain with you until your deathbed.
+100% to all healing received and given
+curse immunity
+Ability Immunity: Final Act is immune to magic suppression
Well, now I just felt like an asshole.
This was an amazing ability, without a doubt. Like anyone with a brain they wanted to keep functioning, I liked being healed better at all times and probably would have liked to get the most out of my healing when I got around to using it or having it used on me. Even with all this magic, the more efficient I made it, the better off I was going to be in the long run. Any one-man army still needed an army’s amount of supplies and energy to fight another army. And being immune to curses sounded amazing. I did not like being held hostage by magic spells.
The last little bit there almost sounded like a warning. Did that mean all of my other abilities weren’t safe from that? That scared me a bit. But, at least I could have never been cursed, no matter how nasty things got. I’d never felt cursed, and I never would.
Otherworldly: The world you come from has no magic, affecting the development of your race as a species. Without proper channels of magic within your body, it acts as a natural resistor to magic as a result.
+60 Aegis
-10% magic efficiency and duration.
That was a nice perk. It literally saved my life not a few moments ago. However, that second bit there was that I naturally resisted all magic, including my own. My full magical potential would always have been hampered as a result. As long as I was human, I was always going to be just a little bit less strong as I could be. Later on, when that amount of aegis boost was negligible, perhaps I could have looked into somehow changing up my race or improving my magic channeling flow to be on par with the rest of the magical races on this planet.
Until then, the absolute magnitude of magical power I had at my disposal was more than enough to counteract all of that. And perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t use all of my potential before I had the control over it necessary to survive.
Harrowing Experience: You’ve seen and experienced much pain. People have died before your very eyes, and your body has been pushed to its absolute limit. While you can still feel the sting, you’ve hardened yourself to the worst of it.
+10 Armor
Thank you for acknowledging that, Mysterious System. Shit’s been hard, man. Real hard. Fuck, the worst thing I had to worry about before all of this was bitchy coworkers, nasty bills, and getting sick every once in a while. In less than an hour after leaving Earth, I saw friends and innocent people die and was helpless to stop them, and then an entire organic network of magic was forcibly grown into my body in a pain I wouldn’t want my worst enemies to go through. Well, maybe I wouldn’t have gone that far, but it still sucked a lot of ass. Maybe the worst of my worst enemies. Maybe Grune. Fuck that guy.
And I didn’t mean to toot my own horn, but I was taking it all like a champ. If someone had told the version of me from just a month before this moment that I was going to be a hero in another world of magic and mystery, I’d have laughed it off like it was a bad joke. I had proof. When someone told me that in my own apartment, I did, indeed, laugh it off like it was a bad joke. But here I was, a growing hero, and I’d saved a life already.
It was nice to know that getting my ass kicked was rewarding. All my pain came back to me all in gains. Every punch I took and every shitty thing I had to go through from here on out was going to mean something for me. If things were going to go the way I thought they were for the rest of this adventure, then I was going to get my ass handed to me a whole lot, and I was going to need the boosts that came along with them for the next handful of my own ass afterward.
Status Screen: You may now view the status screen
And here we were looking at it. Hell to the yeah. Funny, no little bullet points at the end of this one. Odd. Must have been because it was obvious. However, it did have me wondering who was writing these things out for me. Was it just a display of my own subconscious? Was it that Galdrin guy? I’d have to ask blue-boy once I met him.
Determination: A hero shows no fear and moves undaunted by the growing dangers that will come upon him. You are on your way to becoming a legend, and that will require facing all the horrors that the world of Neo Ceissein has to offer.
+fear condition immunity and can freely remove all other conditions afflicted with enough resolve.
Was that why it was so easy to figure out how to end Delilah’s possession of me? I felt a little cheated out of my own victory of personal fortitude. Here I was thinking that getting the light magic inside of myself was clever, and I’d just found the willpower enough to make it stick. Or maybe that was how I could come up with that idea so quickly and not succumb to possession so fast. I bet most people would have just been enslaved from the very start, but I still had a semblance of control while she possessed me the whole way through. And was that part of how my resolve score worked? Did it affect my immunity to certain things, like effect durations? So many things about this system I just had to make assumptions about.
At any rate, gotta love fear immunity. Thankfully, it was just the condition I was immune to and not the feeling itself. Being unable to feel fear was a terrible idea for my sanity and my survival as a whole. Fear used wisely kept people alive, and bravery used poorly was death just waiting to come on them. Paranoia was called prudence and shrewd when it was proven right, and heroism was called rash childishness when the heroes died from their lack of preparation. If it paralyzed me or
kept me from doing what I needed to do, fear was a problem, but until then, it was a great way to make sure I retained my ability to breathe and have blood. Never underestimate the power of restraint at just the right moment.
After all of that were the real goodies. These next few were new abilities I’d just gotten from the level, and I was excited to see what they did:
Fury: You are the tempest on the battlefield, the orchestrator of slaughter in the sea of clanging metal. When your enemies hear you roar, the smarter ones among them will have already sprinted for safety, and the rest will already be too late to live beyond the next few breaths.
+Activate: When you shout a battle cry, it increases damage resistances and damage dealt by 200% for twenty seconds. Recharges after daily resting
Ha! Awesome. Berserker battle mode, the bread-and-butter of gladiators and Vikings everywhere. I could have already felt the catharsis of beating the shit out of some punk ass bitches right after I gave them a war shout to scare the shit out of them. I bet that this was an ability for blood berserkers, as Torlith had mentioned before, and I just now got it. I wondered how many actual schools of magic there were. Hundreds, from Delilah’s reckoning. It seemed like a whole damn lot even before then, given the number of seeds that represented them back in the void. I was going to need a comprehensive list at some point in my magic career to expand the possibilities of magic I had at my disposal and a possible map of abilities I could have expected in the future to anticipate.
Speaking of other abilities, the very next one was of particular note, as it may have been one of the most classic powers there were, magical or no:
