Chapter 125: Opening Skill Books

"Counting what?" Logan said.

Vaerith Solmane sat down on a shelf of black rock like a man with nowhere he needed to be.

"Warlords," he said. "How many are dead? How many are left? Who is killing them, and how fast?" He gestured at the crater. "You just took the one nobody else would touch. That changes my arithmetic, so I came to look at it."

Ilyra Tanthess had still not moved from the rim.

"Thirty-one dead," she said. "Sixty-nine left. You have five of them."

Logan did not ask how she knew that.

"And you have?"

"Nineteen," Vaerith said.

Alice’s hand tightened on the bow.

’Nineteen.’ Logan felt the number land. ’We have fifteen badges, and five of them are ours. He has nineteen; he killed himself.’

"You have been doing this the whole match," he said.

"We have been doing nothing else." Vaerith looked almost pleased to be asked. "Players hunt players. It is faster, and it feels better. But a badge at sixty percent conversion is worth more than any three eliminations, and Warlords do not surrender."

---

"So why not kill us?" Alice said. "We are at nine percent MP and half our units are down. You will not get a better window."

"Because you are useful." Ilyra’s voice carried perfectly across sixty meters without her raising it. "There are sixty-nine Warlords left. We cannot reach all of them. You are killing the ones on your side of the map faster than anyone else alive."

"You want us farming for you."

"We want the board cleared," Vaerith said. "Every Warlord that dies makes the rest worth more, but also stronger. You are raising the value of my nineteen badges every time you kill one, and you are doing it for free."

Logan turned that over and found no hole in it.

’He is right. Every kill we make increases the conversion on everything he is already holding.’

"And at the end?"

Vaerith stood up and brushed the rock dust off.

"At the end there are two of us and two of you, and one pair walks out."

He said it without any weight at all, the way you say a thing that has been settled for a long time.

"I am not in a hurry to get there. You are still getting stronger, and I would rather that fight be worth having."

"That is a very confident thing to say to somebody who just killed the biggest reading on the board."

"It is." Vaerith smiled again. "Ask me in a while whether I was wrong."

They went back up the slope and over the rim, and Nyriel did not register them leaving any more than it had registered them arriving.

---

It took a while to put everyone back together.

Xairon rebuilt the three Mythic-plus units that had stopped moving. Solveig walked off the worst of it and was pretending to be fine almost immediately, which was Solveig’s entire approach to injury.

Logan sat on the rim with his MP crawling back up and went through his storage ring properly for the first time in a long while.

He found them near the bottom, three blank white books that had been in there since the Filburn Queen died.

"Oh," he said.

Alice looked over. "Oh what?"

"I forgot I had these."

He held one up. Alice’s eyebrows went all the way up with it.

```

[ Random Skill Book ]

[ Rank range: Epic to Mythic ]

Open the cover to manifest a random skill. Infuse mana afterward to learn it.

```

"Logan." Alice’s voice was very careful. "How long have those been in your ring?"

"Since we won the last match."

"Three Epic-to-Mythic skill books."

"Yes."

"In your pocket."

"They came out of the ring fine." He turned it over. "Gear is bound to the match. Books are not. They travel."

Alice put her face in one hand.

---

The first one turned gold about halfway through the change, and Logan’s stomach dropped in the good way for exactly two seconds before it settled.

```

[ Bulwark of Sundered Oaths ]

Rank: Epic

> Active. Raises a barrier that absorbs incoming damage for six seconds. Absorption scales with Constitution.

```

"Epic," Alice said. "That is not bad at all."

"It is a worse Blade Veil Counter." Logan set it aside without infusing anything. "Mine deflects any attack regardless of size. This one has a number on it."

The second one came up green and silver.

```

[ Piercing Gale Volley ]

Rank: Epic

> Active. Looses five arrows in a spread. Each gains bonus penetration against armored targets.

```

Alice reached for it and then stopped with her hand halfway there.

"That is an archer skill."

"It is."

"I have Starpiercer Volley and I have Puncture." She pulled her hand back. "Puncture is a Talent. Nothing in a book beats a Talent."

Logan set that one aside too.

Then he opened the third one, and it did not turn gold or green.

It went black shot through with white, and it kept changing for considerably longer than the other two had.

```

[ Kindred Wellspring ]

Rank: Mythic

> Passive. A portion of all damage you deal is converted and distributed to allied units within three kilometers as restored HP and MP.

> Distribution prioritizes the most wounded.

> Conversion rate scales with skill level.

```

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"Kindred Wellspring," Alice read out. "That does not sound like anything you own."

"It is not." Logan turned the book over. "Everything in my list starts with Grim or Reaper or Blade. That is the class talking."

"This came out of a dead hive queen on a different Floor. It does not care what my class is called."

"That is a support skill."

"It is a support skill for a man who hits a great many things very quickly." Logan was already reading it a second time. "I put out more damage in one Grimbound Threshold window than my entire production line does in a full shift."

’Nine Mythic-plus units. Billy. Solveig. Sonic.’ He ran it out. ’Every cut I make puts them back on their feet. I have never had a way to help them that was not standing in front of them.’

He infused mana into it and felt it settle in somewhere behind his ribs.

```

[ You have learned a Mythic-rank passive skill. ]

```

---

"Sell the other two," Alice said.

Logan looked at the two books sitting on the rock.

"They are Epic."

"That is exactly why." She counted it off. "Romen offered fifty thousand for a random book sight unseen, and said a guaranteed Epic was worth a hundred. These are guaranteed Epic and already manifested, so the buyer knows what they are getting."

"Two hundred thousand for the pair."

"At least. Skill books never stop being in demand and Epic is where the real buyers start." She nudged one with her boot. "Neither of them improves us by a single point. That makes them money, not skills."

Logan put both back in the ring.

"After the match," he said.

"If we are the ones walking out of it."

"Yes." He looked at the rim where Vaerith Solmane had been sitting. "That."

---

The next Warlord sat a long way north, and it had a gimmick that annoyed Logan on sight.

Morvane Thornshroud did not fight. It commanded from inside a moving wall of six hundred units and never once stepped out of it, and every time the line took losses it pulled the wall tighter.

"It is the swamp one again," Alice said. "Hide in the crowd until the crowd runs out."

"The swamp one had four hundred units and no discipline." Logan watched the formation rotate. "This one is a wall that walks."

Billy could break a wall. Billy could not break a wall and find one specific thing inside it at the same time.

’I need something in there pulling them apart from the middle.’ Logan turned the problem over. ’Something that is not me, because I need to be outside cutting the threads when they open.’

Then he remembered the other thing that had been sitting in his kit unused since the Floor below.

"Oh," he said, for the second time that stretch.

---

```

[ Arcane Construct: Elderwood Phoenix Avatar ]

Rank: Legendary

Cost: 1,000 MP (scalable)

> Manifests an Avatar that inherits the same stats as the user.

> Has six skills. Two recovery, two offensive, two defensive.

> Each 100 MP spent past the base 1,000 increases the Avatar’s stats by 1%.

```

Alice read it over his shoulder and made a strangled noise.

"You have had that since Floor Three."

"I have."

"You have had a Legendary construct that copies your own stats, and you have not used it once in this entire match."

"I did not need it." Logan cracked his knuckles. "I have four thousand two hundred MP sitting in a bar I have no other use for right now, and a wall that walks."

He spent five thousand.

The Avatar came out of the air in a column of ember and greenwood, twenty feet of burning bird with an elderwood frame under the fire, and it carried every stat Logan owned with forty percent stacked on top.

```

[ Elderwood Phoenix Avatar manifested. ]

[ MP spent: 5,000. Avatar stats: +40%. ]

```

"Right," Alice said faintly. "Right, that is fine. That is a completely normal thing to have in your pocket."

---

The Phoenix went into the middle of Morvane Thornshroud’s formation and started pulling it apart from the inside.

It did not need to kill anything. It needed the wall to stop being a wall, and six hundred units cannot hold a shape around a burning construct the size of a house.

The formation broke in four places at once.

Logan went in through the first gap with Sword Intent already open, and Morvane Thornshroud had nowhere left to hide, because the thing it had been hiding inside was currently running in every direction.

The kill took eleven seconds.

```

[ Warlord Morvane Thornshroud has been slain. ]

[ Warlord Badge acquired. ]

```

And the whole time, every cut Logan made fed something back down the line.

```

[ Kindred Wellspring ]

```

Nine Mythic-plus units who had walked into that formation carrying damage from the crater walked back out of it whole.

Billy landed beside him and flexed a hand that had been broken four minutes earlier.

"Boss," he said. "What did you do."

"I found a book in my pocket."

"Find more books."

```

[ Warlord Badges held: 16 ]

[ Warlord kills: 6 ]

```

Logan looked north, where Nyriel’s map still had signatures burning all the way to the edge of the sweep.

’Sixty-eight left. Vaerith has nineteen.’

"Next one," he said.