Saintess Summons Skeletons

Back to her room in the palace after sharing some drinks with Zerei, Sofia was sitting on a cushion in a circle alongside Saria, Pareth and Pestle, all working on refining their magic, inspired by Sofia’s recent efforts to clean up her skill set.

Despite the night’s silence, all training together like that under soft candle-light was unexpectedly motivating.

I now have three and a half free skill slots. More than I could afford for a long while. Would have been even better had I not lost an arm… But this is still good.

The issue now is I cannot afford to clean up much more. Summon blood is basically the only target if I want more skill slots. Reworking summon self is likely to only make it take more space… And there are very few things I can afford to drop anymore.

Is it time to try my blessing’s latest function of fusing passive effects into my aura?

In effect it’s more or less just enabling fusion of my [Sovereign of Unshackled frames] specialization with passive effects it looks like.

From what I know specializations are supposed to only ever be very lightly alterable and certainly not with an actual direct fusion. And even that is supposed to take literal decades of slowly working on the mana pathways one by one.

Since it’s the blessing allowing this, it should work fine but I’m still worried that there may be a limit to how much I can fuse in there… [Runelord] already hijacks my aura to spread itself around so I’m not sure there is any reason to fuse it. I’m also worried I might lose the active doubling portion of it.I could fuse [Spine of the Black Sun] though, now that it is passive. If the skeletal thralls all have access to an invoked spine weapon that would actually be a great outcome. I might lose out on custom forms, though, if it becomes fully passive. Losing the Atlatl’s bolt casting speed bonus would be quite annoying.

I think… I should get a random classless to try this whole aura fusion first.

Ideal something useful and lightweight… Too bad I can’t just pick [Sanctity] again. 50% physical damage reduction was just so good…

Sofia opened up her available classless, and gave up almost instantly as the list of more than ten thousand skills started to load. Mr.Scribe, please…

Instead of a shortened, curated list of decent skills as Sofia expected, Mr.Scribe was unresponsive for a few minutes, before he deleted all but one single classless skill, [Optimized framework].

Opt… I’m pretty sure I dismissed this one before?

[Optimized framework]: Strengthen bones and tendons by (0.5%*Skill level)

Right! Yes, that was one we considered for Pareth… We dismissed it because tendon strengthening is wasted on him, but for my aura–!!!

Sofia learned the skill right away, her muscles shaking lightly as the new mana circuits dug themselves through her blueprint.

‘[Optimized framework] - Level 100 (0.7S)’

And now, I need to fuse that with my third specialization somehow. I don’t even know where to start.

The process was a bit confusing, but once she initiated the fusion, which shouldn’t have been able to happen, the blessing of the deep completely took over. The mana circuits moved around like snakes in Sofia’s blueprint, slithering around, twisting and turning into place until they reached their destination and became a proper whole again.

It only took a few minutes, and the classless skill was gone.

I got all the blueprint space back, but I can tell there’s only so many of these fusions I can do… Still that’s some extra space to use!!!

Pareth looked at Sofia, having clearly felt a change, so she briefly mentally explained what she just did. Then, they looked over her specialization together, the changes were discreet but present.

In the Aura effects, the ‘bones are 10% sturdier’ line jumped up to 15%. In the field aura effects, it went from 40% sturdier to 60%. Lastly in the Close Aura, it gained the full bonus of [Optimized framework] for the bones, changing from ‘bones 100% sturdier’ to 125%, but only half of the other on an extra line for ‘Tendons are 25% sturdier’.

Since the different aura zone effects are cumulative I’m still getting 50% total for the bones. I’m assuming that because tendons aren’t bones, that effect was weakened? And I hoped for the full 50% bone strength in the Field Aura but I guess half is still not too bad. Besides, my close Aura will eventually be large enough that it won’t matter.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I was almost agreeing with Suhen that I shouldn’t get more bone-related skills because my aura covered that enough but it turns out I should seek them out to strengthen my aura instead.

*ding*

Uh?!

Sofia almost jumped from her seat, she had muted all system notifications to avoid getting disturbed while fusing skills and messing up a delicate manoeuvre, so an alert at this moment could only be something like another Phageid invasion warning.

[You have received a private message]

What?

Is it Nex???

Instead of a message from the admin, what awaited Sofia when she focused on the notification was a simple static image appearing in her vision.

Asty?!

It contained three things, Astelia’s back, wearing a long red mantle embroidered with a golden rune of a triangle in a square in a circle, as well as two item description windows taking up the sides of the image.

★★★★★★★★★U [Tournament Master’s Natural Frequencies Ring]:

Carefully crafted from the rarest materials by a genius craftsman, the master ring enhances one’s attunement to the forces of nature.

The wearer gains 10% Fire, Cold, Lightning, Water, Wind, Light and Dark resistance.

The wearer’s attacks and spells gain 33% extra damage as damage of the natural element they are most resistant to.

Cannot be destroyed.

Must be primed before use.

Price: 1 000 000 000 TP

Huh, it’s like a more attack-oriented version of the Perfect run pin. Nice pick, I never even knew that was one of the choices.

And the other one is…

★★★★★★★★★★U [Tournament Master’s Ultimate Form Divine Mantle]:

Carefully crafted by [Redacted] with their own essence, the divine mantle grants its owner the Archangel sub-class while worn.

Cannot change owner once worn.

Cannot be destroyed.

Must be primed before use.

[Archangel] skills :

Lv.250 unlock: ♢ [Notify] ♢ : Send a private message through the system, up to once a day.

Lv.300 unlock: ♢ [Self reflection] ♢ : All stats including sub-stats are doubled.

Lv.350 unlock: ♢ [Whelming wave] ♢ : Attacks ignore 50% of all defenses excluding immunities.

Lv.400 unlock: ♢ [World edict] ♢ : Up to 50% of your spells’ mana cost is taken from nearby ambient mana instead if available.

Lv.450 unlock: ♢ [Mana attunement] ♢ : Close aura gains Lesser Principality of Mana.

Lords. Now that is a piece of equipment.

I’m no longer the only one with a sub-class.

All stats doubled… Including sub-stats… Including resistances too then?! And then everything else on top?!

Yeah, a crazy piece of equipment. I’m so happy. She looks so cool with it too!

I… I still like the philosopher’s stone full negative status immunity better, I think. But it’s really a close call. And we got the penthouse key with it, which…

“Pareth, can I grab the key for a bit?”

Pareth struggled with his brand new storage ring for a few seconds, before managing to take the key out. He had been really reluctant to get one himself for the longest time, but now that it was either that or having to carry around the master shield all the time he had finally caved.

“Thanks, be right back!”

Entering Jin’s penthouse, Sofia found it a loss less dead than before. She knew Pareth went in and out quite often during their down time, and it seemed he had done so decorating, mostly adding some potted plants and his own paintings.

Wow. He’s getting better.

Unlike Speed’s freeflowing portraits with soft colors, Pareth painted exclusively scenery in a rather detailed style. It was still quite clumsy from up close, but the paintings looked genuinely good from afar, really capturing the essence of the places he painted.

Sofia stopped in front of a work-in-progress painting still on a bone easel she had made for him, it still lacked any detail, only vague shapes and colors.

The mirrored valley. Those hourglass mountains were really something to look at.

I’d really like to explore the forbidden layer some more if I had more time…

But I guess the priority after getting Aphenoreth’s skill is still catching the Dragon bones supposedly buried in Knight’s Death. A real adult dragon skeleton. It’s sure to be something compared to the juvenile Crowie got.

Her gaze moving the nearby bookshelves, Sofia got a glimpse at a few titles. It left her with the same impression as before, these were just random books with no particular theme.

I should still take some time to read them eventually.

It was not what she came here for this time, so she quickly moved on to the system screen room.

The screen turned on and asked for the password like the previous time, bringing Sofia to the image of the green plains under a blue sky again.

There were two things she wanted to check this time.

‘Class Guide V1’

In the search bar, Sofia typed the name of Chino’s class, ‘[Grand Arbiter]’.