Bloodlines Online

Training with the demoness was a blessing and a curse, for the new skills they obtained they were happy to have her help.

For the struggle they went through to learn those skills it made things nightmarish, especially when it required pain.

Just like gaining fire and shadow defensive skills they learned that gaining defensive skills against the main weapon damages, piercing, slashing and bludgeoning, took the same treatment.

When one would be practicing their skills they would also take turns to try to gain the damage resistance skills against these three types.

For those that had to actually help their ally obtain the skills it was... upsetting.

They were told that the best way to obtain the skill for each damage resistance required doing small amounts of that damage type constantly.

To increase the level of a skill required increasing the amount of damage done over that constant period.

The first to volunteer was War God.

”I’m the vanguard, I have to be more resistant to the primary damage types of frontline enemies and assassins.”

So Shade and Belial worked together to give her not only the damage resistance to slashing damage but Belial increased her shadow resistance.

This gave him time to gain proficiency in healing magic as he still hadn’t even learned any healing spells.

Meanwhile Hope had used this time to gain more levels on her own with a better chance to practice her own skils.

~

In the dungeon hope was using the combined power of the shield spell she had created as well as other attempts at more spells.

She had figured out that life mana made it incredibly easy to create a spell shape but also acted as a container for other forms of mana.

She could use life mana to create a sword and give it the properties of wind through her wind affinity or the same with her light affinity.

The spell let her hold it without harm but allowed her to send waves of mana at her targets.

When the skeletons were defeated she found that she could take the remaining life mana to do strange things and her primary attempt was the make armor.

She wished to become an immovable beast that protected her friends with her healing magic but to create any armor required a lot of life mana to make anything dense enough to block an attack.

She was currently only able to make a few pieces with the density she desired so she turned them into vambraces and shoulder pads.

By using the mana of the world she was happy to learn that she was actually able to feed her creations but other than that it would require her own mana to repair.

She was able to get quite far before her own death in the dungeon so she returned to her allies.

~

Ezekiel did not enjoy torturing his friends but to give them more damage resistance against their enemy and even his own spells he would go as far as it took.

Between attempts with healing and training her skills Layla had revealed that her slashing resistance had reached the Apprentice rank while her shadow resistance had reached master.

His proficiency with healing magic through life mana was getting better but using it in the same way as his other spells wasn’t working at all for trying to make healing spells or even learning healing skills.

What he did get to learn through this practice was how powerful the combination of his void mana and his new bloodline were.

By using the void conversion skill he could train it while helping Layla out, it offered a great moment to do so since it seemed for every one thousand mana used he would get some experience.

Training the skill would take ages but he hoped that its improved version would have a better conversion rate.

He was practicing his path to create the ultimate void conversion rate but he doubted it was possible to make it ever reach a rate of 1-1.

Since their npc teacher knew nothing about the void she could not even help him.

When he wasn’t helping Layla gain more resistance to damage he was helping others do so, Shade wanted to gain resistance as well and Hope wanted to increase her own healing spell levels by healing herself through their practice.

Increasing the proficiency and level of skills or spells was very important for gwtting through this dungeon but what they truly worried about was the way they would get through the actual door.

On the spell circle were over a hundred runes and although the runes could be divided into four categories he didn’t know what it meant.

The only clue they had so far was that one rune would stop glowing when they touched it which they assumed was the first in the password.

They had tried to find any clues like hidden carvings in the cave or time sensitive mana carvings that they may have missed.

They often tried to press runes in different orders or otherwise.

Ezekiel had taken to trying out each rune in order until he would eventually find the next one in the password but this method was not good either since although it was reliable it also meant they would take a long time to do it.

They needed to figure out what the runes actually meant.

Trial and error would only get them so far in the limited time they had left after all.

What made matters even worse was the fact that they were beginning to catch up in level with the dungeon skeletons and that meant their leveling speed would go down.

200% more experience was a lot but without the extra level disparity they would just be farming for longer.

Shade had a theory after a few runs that killing higher level enemies gave more experience since they noticed that the amount seemed to shrink by the same margin for each of them.

With this knowledge in mind they knew they would have to farm a lot of skeletons just to get through to match the level of the boss which they suspected to be lv200.

~

”What if we show her the runes? Maybe she would recognize them?”

Shade was spitballing ideas for how to solve the puzzle while he and Belial were in the dungeon.

”No, she isn’t really useful for magical knowledge. Apparently demons dont put any effort into learning about it since they doubt they will ever have a use for it.”

Ezekiel was examining the spell circle and about to press another rune after he had already pressed the first one.

There was a pesky thought nibbling at the back of his mind but he couldn’t quite catch it.

”Well she is helpful for other stuff? She gave us some pretty good techniques to handle a two vs one hundred fight.”

”Yeah yeah she’s given us a lot of... wait what did you say?”

”She gave us a lot of techniques? I doubt every npc would do that man.”

”No after that, you said one hundred right?”

”Yeah? The dungeon crawls have been a two vs one hundred battle sometimes. Fighting one hundred skeletons is a pain in the ass so she has been great.”

”One hundred skeletons, you’re certain that there are one hundred skeletons exactly?”

Shade nodded and looked confused.

”You might have just given me the idea to this puzzle, lets redo this dungeon and this time we have to keep track of the order that the skeletons show up in.”

He pressed the next rune in the order he had been going which killed them again.

~

”Ok im going to tear through the skeletons as they appear and I want you to write down the order they show up in.”

”Got it, you think the skeletons are the key to the puzzle?”

”Yeah there are exactly one hundred runes on the spell circle and you said there are one hundred skeletons.”

”There are also four kinds of skeletons which makes things even craziers if this is a coincidence.”

Ezekiel nodded his head at that.

”Yeah, warrior, rogue, archer, tank.”

They cleared out the skeletons even faster than normal, apparently focusing on skill leveling slowed them down.

”Ok so some of them came at weird times but I was able comfirm that there are twenty five of each kind of skeleton.”

Ezekiel laughed and began to cheer.

”Finally! We’re actually getting somewhere!”

Ezekiel pressed the first rune.

”The first skeleton we saw was a warrior meaning this one must mean warrior, what was the next one?”

”The next one was a tank followed by an archer.”

He nodded and pressed the next rune in the order they had been following before, they may have the potential clue but they still had no idea what the other three runes meant.

The rune he pressed was clearly not the right one and they were forced to reset, but this reset was done with newfound determination.