Frostbound [LitRPG Apocalypse]-Chapter 218 - Intelligence and Magic

Chris

My fingers flexed fully before I extended them and wiggled them all back and forth. Ashley and Abigail sat across from me in the 'Hospital' and watched me play with the new sensation.

They were still a bit numb, and I could tell that the response time was a tad behind, but they were otherwise good as new. Somehow, the stat additions making us superhuman let us feel things like that.

An odd sensation to get used to.

Finished with my exploration of the newly regrown fingers and hand, I extended one up to make sure the gesture still worked. Can't find out that it doesn't work in the act. That would just be stupid.

I chuckled at their faces.

"Perfect. I appreciate the long nights and for enduring the mana deprivation headaches." I said earnestly to my two saviors.

They were family, but they still deserved my thanks.

"Don't think we're done. You still need a week of physical therapy. Since your arm wasn't attached when you leveled and your strength increased, it will be stronger than you remember it. You need time to adjust before you go doing anything stupid."

While I had adjusted to my new stats with my left arm, my right was a new beast. The fact I hadn't used it in months was another addition I'd have to get used to.

Not only did I have to get comfortable with using it again, but I also had to readjust so I didn't break things. Luckily, most everything inside the Castle was built by either Vincent or me which made the threshold for its durability quite high.

Both of us built commodities that could handle our... rougher tendencies. He and I had the highest Strength of those that lived in the Castle. Jonathan was close, but his Class focused more on Fortitude and Endurance as its primary and secondary stats, with Strength being third.

The Mages didn't even come close, obviously.

"I told you it would be early winter when I got it back." I poked fun at the two healers. Both were adamant at first that it would be mid to late winter before it was finished regrowing, but they were both wrong.

The Cold brought me more Vitality than they accounted for.

They knew how many points I had in Vitality, but those didn't account for the boost my new heart provided. They were still working out how beneficial it was as their predictions were way off.

All told, the process took nearly four months. A little bit longer than it took to regrow both of Gabriel's legs. Making the... insinuation that one of my arms was worth two of his legs caused him to fling Icicles at me.

It would've taken a lot longer if this was their first time doing so. Having practiced and gained experience from Gabriel, it went a lot smoother for me, even if there were some initial hiccups at first due to my stronger body.

Sadly, their work wasn't done. Now that they were done pouring mana into my never-ending body, they were off to help with the rest of the Healers. I wasn't the only one to lose a limb from the fighting and it would be a long time until everyone was back to being whole.

Speaking of wholeness, I could now go have my fun in the dungeons again. With the shipments of crystals steadily coming in, they had both grown another floor. They had already been close to adding one, but the crystals helped push them over the edge. The Ninth held monsters up to level 95 with some even having Tier 2 Laws.

I couldn't wait to face the Bosses of both.

The Eighth floor didn't really cut it anymore for my fighting spirit. It capped with the Boss at level 90 and only had a Tier 1 Law. It had a strong Bloodline it could call on to even it out, but mine was stronger.

I was only a tiny bit jealous that Jonathan got to scout out the floor before me but at least I now knew what I was going into.

The only reason Abigail wasn't strapping me down and forbidding me from doing too much too fast, was because one, fighting was the best way to get used to the new limb, and two, she couldn't afford me not doing it.

While we weren't in danger of bankruptcy, the City was broke.

Well, broke was a strong word but we weren't very fluid right now, to use Jonathan's term. We could sell Crystals and make some easy money that way but there were some downsides to that. No one would buy them for what they were actually worth as we doubted other pylons had the coin to spend. The second reason was we didn't pull enough out of the Mine that we could both use them for what we needed and sell them.

Our need for coin was the only reason we were selling Vincent's products through the pylon to begin with. Both he and I wanted to equip those in our City first, before branching out to selling to others but we simply couldn't afford to.

As the City grew, and we hired more people to work for it, we took a hit to how much coin we had freely available. Abigail had accounted for that and made sure we had enough available before hiring anyone, but what she didn't account for was the numerous bereavement payouts we had to make.

I had assured everyone that their families would be taken care of and with the death toll we had, it was a rather large sum of money every month.

That, combined with the veritable flood of refugees, and we were rather strapped for coin. Even the additional people didn't help that much. In terms of tax revenue, the extra population accounted for a few percentage points and that was about it.

We gained most of our coin from taxing the Dungeon and we had already been delving it at the most it could sustain. More people didn't mean we could delve it faster.

All it would take to fix would be selling some crystals, but I would rather go delving for it so we didn't have to.

And Abigail agreed, even if she didn't want to.

Even if she didn't, nothing she could've done would have stopped me. I was itching to test out my new strength. Not only from the massive influx of levels from the Demons but from my Profession as well.

I now had two stats at over 1000, and I wanted to have some fun experiencing what it was to fight with them. Runesmith didn't give points in Fortitude, but it did give points in Strength, and with [Frozen Fortitude], meant I gained Strength anyway. The extra levels finally pushed me the stat over the four-digit mark.

The little chunks of experience from carving Runes onto Vincent's work added up and once I finally finished the Ward embedded into the Outer Wall, it was a massive windfall.

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The levels for my Class and Profession were closer now than they had been since my evolution when they were even at 50. Runesmith sat at 78 and Hammer of the Jotnar sat at 84.

The months spent crafting while I healed were well spent. Nearly 20 levels were gained during my recovery. Without Vincent, it would've been much less, but still, it was a lot.

I had gotten used to my Class leveling rapidly. Well, not used to it, but I was at least experienced in gaining physical stats in large chunks. It'd happened enough times that I had a process to go through to acclimate to them.

My Magical stats, on the other hand, I was completely inexperienced with the massive gain. My Profession had never increased in large chunks before, which made the stat increases gradual and hard to quantify.

Increasing a few stats at a time, spaced out over days and weeks, made it feel like no increase was made at all. If looked at from the start and finish, sure, there was a large jump, but experiencing the gradual rise made it feel like normal.

The essence that rushed into me from completing the Ward raised me 9 levels alone. Which when quantified into stat points, was nearly 100 points in Wisdom and Intelligence.

Totaled up, the increase in Wisdom, Intelligence, and Acumen from the near 20 levels in Runesmith awarded me 190 Wisdom, 152 Intelligence, and 114 Acumen.

When listed out like that, it didn't sound like that much. Hell, my Strength alone had jumped by over 300 from the fight with the Demons.

It was when put into context that the increase became apparent.

Going from having just over 400 points in Wisdom and adding a half-again increase was large. Each stat point meant more than the last, making the effect on my mana pool greater than a 50% increase and what the points represented.

While that alone wouldn't have been that much, it happened to all three of my magical stats at the same time.

Intelligence and Acumen nearly doubled.

If it'd happened to only one, fine, two would be a challenge, but all three was extremely disorienting. Not disorienting physically, I could still walk around fine, but magically.

Skills failed when I tried to use them, mana leaked out of my body sporadically from the increase of Acumen, randomly chilling the air around me as Arctic mana accumulated. Enchanting anything was impossible, as I couldn't keep the flow of mana steady to save my life, let alone precise.

Worse, I was unused to the thickness of said mana. Intelligence, as a stat, was one of the most subtle to measure by feel. It was innocuous because it was static 99% of the time. It only increased when you leveled and that increase was usually small.

As it represented the concentration and thickness of your mana, it was something I had grown intimately familiar with. The concentration increased and thickened as the stat went up, but it wasn't like the obvious feeling of lifting something heavier.

It was small.

Tiny even.

And most of all, gradual.

A point of Intelligence would raise the concentration by minuscule amounts. Nearly imperceptible to anyone but the best mana senses. Even Rachel wouldn't be able to feel an increase of only one point.

A lot of my family who chose the Mage route complained in the early days because of that fact. They saw the Warriors lift giant stones and haul entire trees as we leveled up and our strength increased. Rogues would move faster than humanly possible while they didn't have a lot to show for their increases.

It wasn't until later that their specialty showed its worth. Take Gabriel and I for example. We both had the [Ice Arrow] skill but they were nearly two different skills by this point.

He was pushing well over a thousand points in Intelligence while I just reached a third of that only recently. Both skills would create an arrow nearly a foot in length and an inch or two in diameter. The size of what would otherwise be a normal arrow.

It was the density of the Ice and the speed at which it flew that the changes showed.

Mine was like getting shot out of a normal longbow. It flew fast, but not overly so, while packing a decent punch behind it. It would shatter against anything too tough but it would otherwise penetrate like a normal arrow would.

Gabriel's was like getting launched out of a compound bow set to the maximum draw strength. It flew at speeds mine couldn't hope to reach and would go through things mine would shatter against.

There were ways I made up the difference but nothing would beat sheer stat superiority when doing flat comparisons. My Law, Spirit, and Affinity would all go into boosting the skill, along with the skill rarity, but if all was the same, he would always overpower me in those kinds of spells.

It was the main reason I didn't use it very often, as it only worked against monsters with weak bodies or if my aim was good enough to hit soft spots. And even with hitting soft spots, my typical foe was strong enough that even its weak points wouldn't get penetrated by an [Ice Arrow].

Gabriel liked to call Skills that scaled with Intelligence Spells to differentiate them, but that was personal preference. Luckily, I only had two 'Spells'.

Technically, I had more than two but only two were limited by my Intelligence stat.

[Ice Arrow] and [Icy Bastion].

[Sweeping Snow], [Desolate Blizzard], [Permafrost], and a few others were technically 'Spells' and increased in effect as Intelligence grew, but they weren't limited in the same sense. To match what a higher Intelligence stat would do, I could just use more mana.

Those three skills specifically were mana hogs for that reason alone.

[Permafrost] would have a greater effect the same way [Ice Arrow] did if my mana concentration was higher, but I could also just throw more mana into the skill for the same result.

I couldn't do that with [Ice Arrow].

There was only a limited amount you could 'overcharge' a skill before it would break. It had something to do with the underlying skill matrix, or at least that was what Gabriel claimed.

Channeling 'Spells' got around that and was why my two domain skills, specifically, were so 'potent' even though my Intelligence was nowhere near an actual Mage.

Incidentally, that was the same reason hybrid classes with mage being one-half didn't fare so well. They just didn't have the amount of stat points necessary to both keep up physically, with either speed or strength, and magically.

A Spellblade was usually an Agility-based physical fighter. It didn't have to be, and could choose Strength or Fortitude, but more often than not, their physical stat of choice was Agility.

To keep up with the speeds of other people and beasts of their level, they needed their Agility to increase by an equal amount. This also meant they needed their Perception to at least keep up by half that, or else the ratio between the two would cause problems.

In addition to that, to keep up with the mana pool and spell strength of people at their level, they would need even more points dedicated to Wisdom and Intelligence.

And, to cap it all off, if they wanted to recover their mana in any decent amount of time, they needed some Acumen thrown in at the end.

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Not only did they need multiple different stats to scale like they were primary stats of a Class, but they also needed three others to scale like they were secondary. Which was impossible unless you had Epic, Legendary, or Mythic as your class rarity and even then, it would make you average at multiple things and great at none of them.

It would undoubtedly make you versatile in a fight, but sometimes not being great at one thing was its own weakness.

The only hope to get back the edge stat-wise and be an elite, or someone that could be a 'champion' in a fight, would be to have an equally rare Profession that filled in the stats you needed. Doing double duty on Agility and Intelligence would push the stat to rival what Rogues and Mages had but that was easier said than done.

Even using the Free points of your Class and Profession wouldn't work, as those would be needed to balance out the physical side to account for ratios. Strength would be needed to make sure you could move at the speeds Agility demanded. Perception to see where you were going at those speeds. Fortitude so your body could handle it, Endurance so you could do it for more than a few seconds, and Vitality for the same reason that you needed Acumen.

It was just too much, at least in my opinion.

I prided myself on having three stats above all others and that was what made me so strong. My Strength, Fortitude, and Endurance being so high was the reason I could do what I did.

If I'd split that up among four or five different stats instead, I would probably be dead.

Admittedly, my Endurance wasn't where I wanted it to be and fell behind slightly, but my Anchor made up for that.

But that wasn't the point. I didn't need to think about the knockoff Warriors right now.

It was time to have some fun. Enough thoughts on boring stuff.

My hammer was back, my body was back, and I was ready for some action.