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Yeah, looking at it, the fact he hadn’t upgraded it yet was just downright shameful. Even at rare after the downgrade from the evolution, the skill was still pretty powerful, but it also had some severe drawbacks. First of all, it only worked against the designated target, and while he didn’t think he could or necessarily even wanted to get rid of this level of specialization, it did suck that it was also ineffective against barriers or someone just throwing a big rock at it. He had gotten around the barrier problem by always shooting it with Arcane Powershot and having the destructive arcane energy sticking to the arrow break the barrier before the arrow could physically strike it, but that wasn’t exactly optimal.

This was naturally only the start of the improvements he made.

He meditated as he pondered on the issue and began to form a proper plan in his head. After about a day and a few potions, Jake was back in peak condition and sadly had to delay his arrow-improvement plans a little bit. Before he could focus his attention solely on upgrading the skill, he had to be done with his other obligations, which included looting. That way he could work on the skill without feeling guilty. Thus he began to scour the ruined capital of the Enlightened Republic for anything useful he or his party members could potentially use.

Jake was pretty sure there would be, considering his Pulse of Perception revealed several hidden underground chambers throughout the once-large city. He even found people within some of them, all acting like the entire city above them hadn’t just been razed to the ground a day earlier. Having to begin somewhere, he started out with these occupied chambers first. He quickly discovered all of them were quite nicely sealed and blocked out pretty much everything going on above ground, including sound.

Within half a day, he went through all of them and found only natives within every single one besides one that had served as a bunker for Otherworlders to seek refuge. There were eleven of them in there, and, well, their fates didn’t really have to be described. Neither did the fates of the natives, many of whom had been down there as experimental subjects. Subjects who – based on the journals and recordings he stumbled upon – were often tortured and involved in fucked-up experiments, yet never had any reactions. They didn’t even need to keep them trapped, as they just followed the order of not leaving without permission.

None of these rooms with what was effectively just a bunch of slaves interested him, and the records on how they had experimented on the natives there less so. Turning his attention to the other rooms without people in them, he finally found an interesting one directly below where the Lord Protector’s spire had been. It was pretty obvious in hindsight, and once he broke in, he found a large archive. Looking through it briefly, he quickly noticed a small safe with magical locks placed on it.

After a bit of tinkering, he thanked his beloved Puzzle Box for the practice before he unraveled the locks and opened the safe. Within, he found just a single journal simply named Dark Witch. He took out the journal and began flipping through the pages as he quickly got a good idea of what he was dealing with.

The Dark Witch was apparently the official name they had decided for the former leader of the fourth faction. Probably because she used dark magic based on the descriptions in the book, but also because she aimed to spread “corruption and chaos” throughout Tri-World, and thus had to be purged.

Most of the content of the journal was just boring history about the fourth faction and how a bunch of Otherworlders who also wanted to get rid of the Karmic Plague had gathered there. The truly interesting part came toward the end after a far too self-gratifying section about how awesome the Lord Protector had been during this entire conflict.

“Defeating the Dark Witch proved a strenuous task, but with the unification of those who saw her corrupted ideology, we managed to end her evil reign and burned the capital of her fledgling faction to the ground. However, even if we defeated her, ending her life proved difficult, but we firmly believe that the fight left her crippled as she fled underground. May the monsters down there consume her, so she can at least give something back to the now-renamed Tri-World. Note: Do keep the area under observation, especially the entrance to the cavern system she fled into.

Update: Recent data suggest the witch still lives even a decade after the fall of her faction. Designate area as a no-go zone.

Update two: The influence of the witch has spread more than we hoped. Diving into the cavern system is an option, but too risky. Erecting countermeasures using other means is heavily advised. I will bring it up at the next summit.

Update three: Countermeasures successfully deployed. We decided to enter the cave system and discovered what she was trying to do, but we managed to stop her by sealing away a treasure of corruption she had brought with her when she arrived on Tri-World. Unless the three Living Seals are destroyed, that damn witch shall never be able to ruin Tri-World.”

Jake read the journal and was about to contact his party when suddenly a notification appeared.

Bonus Objective Gained: Find and deactivate the three Living Seals to unseal the “treasure of corruption” brought to Tri-World by the Dark Witch. Warning: doing this will make it impossible to escape Tri-World with the assistance of the three major factions.

Current Progress: Living Seals (1/3)

Well, turns out the system wanted to tell them before he could. Moreover, they had apparently already unlocked one of the Living Seals. Jake was unsure what exactly a Living Seal was, but the journal provided a few more snippets of information. Living Seals were honestly pretty self-explanatory, as they were seals rooted within living beings. The journal even included the fact that the Elf-King of all people had been the Living Seal from the Enlightened Empire, with the two other Living Seals placed within individuals from the two other factions.

“An unexpected but welcome bonus,”the Fallen King communicated through the Golden Mark after Jake was done explaining the rest of the content in the journal.

“Considering we already planned on purging the entire power structure of these factions, this extra objective is indeed of little consequence and only benefits us,” the Sword Saint agreed.

“So, she was indeed still alive and is called the Dark Witch. Did you find more information on her, and do you think she will prove hostile or amicable when we make contact?” Dina asked. As she and Sylphie were heading toward the Dark Witch, this information was obviously quite a lot more pertinent for the two of them than the two guys.

“Hard to say,”

Jake honestly answered. “It has been more than two hundred years since they defeated her, and chances are the Karmic Plague has quite the hold on her now. I think it is more likely that this treasure was left behind before she was fully infected by the plague, with her maybe being a boss guarding it or something. Either way, proceed with caution. If the Dark Witch was strong enough to require all the factions to work together, then she is likely the most powerful opponent on the floor.”

“We shall keep that in mind,”Dina assured him. “And, to clarify, you remain confident in meeting up with us on short notice if required?”

“As long as Sylphie stays with you, yes,” Jake confirmed.

“Ree!”

“Yep, take good care of Dina for the rest of us,” Jake chuckled a bit to himself. The other four continued talking a bit, primarily out of boredom, as they were all just traveling. Not exactly the most entertaining pastime.

Jake, on the other hand, did a final scan of the ruined capital city before flying back to the forest, where he could finally get back to what was truly important:

Improving Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter. Something it would hopefully not be called much longer.

He had already mentally gone over many of the downsides of the skill, but for now, he didn’t actually bother to try and address any of those directly. No, instead, he wanted to solely focus on adding onto the basic properties of the skill while only ridding it of the negative aspects that there were absolutely necessary to remove for his new arrow idea to work.

Without further delay, he got started, and he began with the most straightforward improvement. Jake was an arcane hunter, through and through, yet his Ambitious Arrow didn’t have a hint of arcane energy to it. That was definitely something he wanted to touch upon and improve. However, he didn’t just want to do it in a basic way but in a way that would assist him in what he wanted to do later.

There were also some other aspects he wanted to improve upon right away for his idea to even work, and one of those was the rule of how the arrow couldn’t hit anything that wasn’t the target. He didn’t need it to be an arrow that would hit everyone equally, but just the option for it still to harm targets it wasn’t specifically made for. Even if it wasn’t more than just a packet of harmful energy that dealt pretty shit damage, it would still be enough, as all he needed was the conceptual change.

In the forest, Jake began to look around for any beasts and quickly found a few D-grades lurking about. They were good enough, and Jake got practicing. He started experimenting by summoning arrow after arrow while he focused on them while moving towards the improvements he wanted. This also quickly revealed another of the “bad” things about the skill now only being rare: it was too cheap. When he first got it, the skill had taken a lot out of him, but that was no longer the case. That he also just needed to up all the specs of the skill was a given.

His practice continued uninterrupted for five more days as he had rapidly moved from choosing different targets to constantly summoning arrows for the same D-grade – a goat of some kind - repeatedly while feeling for slight changes. On the third day, he managed to create an arrow that he then promptly used to kill another D-grade than his initial target, proving that the strict requirement for only working on the targeted foe was gone. The only reason it had only taken so long was that he wanted to ensure the skill wouldn’t lose any efficiency in the process, and luckily it hadn’t. In fact, it had overall gotten slightly more power from other minor improvements he had added.

Towards the eve of day five, Jake was done.

He held out his hand as an arrow appeared. Its design was that of a simple bolt that looked straight off a small ballista, with runic carvings covering the shaft. This was all pretty standard, and one only truly saw the changes when looking at the arrowhead. It was slightly larger than normal and had the hue of Jake’s arcane mana. If one looked really closely, one could see what looked like small lighting bolts bouncing within the arrowhead from the intense infusion of destructive arcane energies. The runes covering the body also now carried slight hints of arcane energy, making the entire arrow slightly more powerful. This was not necessarily due to it getting inherently stronger but now being a better fit for his Path.

Jake nodded, satisfied as he got a notification. For now, he ignored it as he shot the arrow toward his designated target. It flew true as the far lower-leveled monster naturally didn’t stand a chance to dodge. He carefully observed its effect when it hit. The stable arcane energy covering the tip of the arrowhead pierced into the goat like a true physical arrow – something Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter usually didn’t – and a flood of destructive arcane energy came out. However, rather than simply exploding, it rode the curtails of the true Ambitious Arrow beneath that hit right as the stable arcane barrier shattered.

The arrow sank into the body of the monster as Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter usually did, releasing a flood of pure damage into the goat. Some of the destructive arcane energy snuck its way in, too, directly impacting the soul of the goat along with the inherent energy of the Ambitious Arrow for a substantial increase in overall damage. The goat’s soul was instantly extinguished just as he saw the destructive arcane energy that couldn’t enter through the “hole” created by the Ambitious Arrow continue onward like normal, blasting a hole in the goat’s physical body.

It was complete overkill, but good data. Jake also finally checked his notifications and saw the upgraded skill.

*Skill Upgraded*: [Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter (Rare)] --> [Double-Layered Arrow of the Ambitious Arcane Hunter (Epic)]

The name had gotten super long to the level of it being kind of dumb, but nevertheless, he read the full description to see what he had changed.

[Double-Layered Arrow of the Ambitious Arcane Hunter (Epic)] – An upgraded version of the signature skill of the Ambitious Hunter. Grants the ability to summon a powerful double-layered arrow to strike down a specific foe. The Hunter must envision his foe and, with great focus, channel his Willpower to slay it into the creation process. The arrowhead will possess two layers, allowing the Hunter to inject destructive arcane energy into a stable arcane layer surrounding the true arrowhead. The arrow summoned deals significantly greater damage to the envisioned target. Damage increased further based on level disparity. Adds a small bonus to the effects of Agility, Strength, Intelligence, and Perception when using Double-Layered Arrow of the Ambitious Arcane Hunter.

So, it now also had arcane energy infused into it, resulting in it scaling with Intelligence. It had changed the wording when creating the arrow to include Willpower, indicating some scaling with that too. Additionally, the strict target requirement was indeed gone, and it included the description of the layers with destructive arcane energy within.

Jake nodded, satisfied as he sat down and took a breather. It was a good upgrade, and the only downsides from the upgrade were the increased energy cost and slightly longer time to summon. The upsides were pretty much all the changes to the skill, along with significantly increased damage to all aspects of the skill, even the pure Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter part. Yet Perhaps most importantly, the skill was now far more aligned with his Path.

However… Jake wasn’t done with this upgrade session yet.

One of the things he had never liked much about the former nor current skill was his lack of input on how the arrow would end up looking and its overall design. Sure, the skill tried to design the arrow to be better against a specific target, but in all honestly, as long as the end was pointy enough, the actual effect of this system-assisted customization tended to be negligible. What customization the system did assist with was also dependent on his own insights into the target, so who’s to say he couldn’t just do that customization himself? No, he definitely didn’t need that part of the skill… so if he could replace it with him designing the arrow himself, that would be swell.

If he could do this, that meant he could make use of the larger form factor of the arrow compared to his normal arrows. Considering he often conjured an arrow and kept it hidden in his quiver until he needed it, he could even have the entire creation process be a bit more involved. When he first got the skill, Jake needed to spend well over a minute focusing all he could to make one arrow without being able to do anything else, while now he could create it pretty fast within his quiver without affecting him. He was fine with it taking longer for a better effect, and with his C-grade mind and soul, he could easily split his attention between a pretty involved summoning process and fighting.

There was also the downside of him even needing a high level of insight related to his target for the skill to even activate. He could always summon arrows for humans or other beings that he was already familiar with, but he often faced unique opponents he had never seen before. So unless he wanted to spend a good week stalking his target to analyze it, he was shit out of luck. This was particularly a problem when one factored in how it was pretty much anti-synergy with Stealth Attack that Jake couldn’t make his strongest arrow from the get-go.

To summarize, the primary thing he truly wanted out of the skill was more control. Back when he got it, the level of automatization in the skill was great. He only had to focus on a specific target the system ruled he knew enough about, and bam, the arrow would be summoned.

Now he wanted to truly be the master of his own skill. Double-Layered Arrow of the Ambitious Arcane Hunter was a fine upgrade… but it was just the first part of his plan. Because if he had to upgrade it, he wanted to upgrade it properly.

In all honesty, Jake had long wanted to do a lot of things with Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter. However, he always hesitated. One of the reasons he hadn’t upgraded it before was definitely because he didn’t know what direction he wanted to take it. He knew that opening one door would close another, and while just infusing the arrow with arcane energy was an easy solution to instantly upgrade it, Jake wasn’t certain if that was what he wanted. He was pretty confident it would be part of the upgrade, but he feared making his arcane affinity too prominent and creating a skill that no longer made use of the quite frankly awesome innate concepts within the original Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter. Now he felt more confident, and he believed he had found a good solution.

Because if he couldn’t decide which direction to take the skill… why not all of them at once?