The Culling of Man: A litrpg adventure (Peril's Prodigy Book 1) by Craig Kobayashi (ereader android TXT) 📕

- a lesson he had learned rather painfully in the previous waves. Black Blood didn’t specify whether the ‘powerful shield’ effect would protect him from any particular type of incoming damage. Unsure how he felt about the promising, but all-too-vague Skill description, Garath moved on to the next option on the Blood Skill tree.

(Available from Level: 20)

Repurpose Life Force

Active

Cost: 345 Mana (.5x base Mana)

20 Meter Range

2 Second Cast

30 Minute Cooldown

*Additional Cost: Tainted Soul*

Effect: Devour a summoned creature to instantly restore 50% of your maximum Health.

*Tainted Soul: the form containing your soul is soiled.

Cost to Unlock: 5

Unused Skill Points: 5

Garath fought back a laugh after reading the Skill's name, what a casual and succinct epithet. With his relatively high Health pool, murdering a creature that he summoned from Hell with Repurpose Life Force would restore 430 HP to the Necrologist - a definite game changer. Although it was tempting to purchase the massive self heal, he only had enough Skill Points for either Repurpose Life Force or Black Blood. He kicked himself for having purchased Creeping Death without thinking. He knew that would happen. The single target DoT spell was great and he definitely would have purchased it at some point in any case, but how useful would it be in keeping his dumbass alive for the last wave? The answer to that question was simple: a lot less useful than either of the two options he now had to choose between.

‘God damn I need a probably button…’ he thought for at least the seventeenth time in the past twenty-four hours.

Garath was still struggling to form a solid opinion concerning Black Blood. It didn't specify, well, just about anything except the cost and cooldown. Considering the amount of elemental damage the Dragonlings and Wyverns were capable of pumping out though, Garath had to assume that physical damage wouldn't be his biggest or only worry in the final wave. In fact, each wave seemed to have less physical damage and more elemental damage than the last. As of that moment, his only spell shield (Sanguine Ward) only protected him from physical damage. It was becoming apparent that he needed to have some form of protection against non-physical attacks. Crossing his fingers that purchasing the spell with the too-vague Skill description wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass, Garath purchased the Skill Black Blood.

Unused Skill Points: 0

As soon as he confirmed his decision, a prompt appeared and he read it with a crooked grin.

Congratulations, Garath! By unlocking all prerequisite Skills you have unlocked the hidden Skill Death's Medium.

Prerequisite Skills:

Blight; Haunt; Mastery: Pestilent; Black Blood

It almost felt to Garath like the system was rewarding him for making the right choice! He eagerly dismissed the prompt and located the new Skill circle. It wasn't on any one of the three trees but instead appeared on the far left side of what had been an empty space below them. He willed more information to appear and appear more information did.

(Available if/when all prerequisite Skills are unlocked)

Death's Medium

Passive

Effect: If an enemy dies while afflicted by one or more of your damage over time effects, there is a 10% chance to activate Reanimate Dead. The dead will rise again to fight on your behalf for up to 3 minutes.

Note: Effect can not occur more than once every 5 seconds; only effective against enemies with a Level equal to or less than your own; Reanimated beings possess only 50% of the Attributes they had when alive.

Cost to Unlock: 1

Unused Skill Points: 0

‘Coooool!’Garath thought to himself. Skills like Death’s Medium were exactly why he had chosen the Necrologist Class in the first place. To be fair, he was a little sour that he wasn’t able to purchase the hidden Skill immediately, but at least he had a reason to look forward to Level 22 - apart from living long enough to make it there.

With his Attribute Points allocated and his new Skills purchased, something else occurred to the Necrologist. In every Raid he had ever organized for an online game, and in every player versus player battle, he had always had a thorough knowledge of the Skills and limitations of his teammates. It had always been important to him to have an intimate understanding of those things to effectively lead the team to victory. Without knowing the spells each party member could cast, and their respective cast times, Mana costs, and cooldowns, victory (or in this case survival) would be left largely to chance - even in a game he wouldn't allow that. With over 100 lives at stake, including over ten children and a handful of disabled folks, he knew he had some work to do.

With just under an hour until the final wave of The Culling and the increasing absence of Wyverns daring enough to brave a life or death battle with The Band of the Hawk, Garath spent his time going from one person to the next asking questions about their respective Classes and taking note of anything he found particularly interesting. He didn’t waste time trying to memorize every Skill, cost, and cooldown but he did find that each Class he asked about had three unique Skill Trees, just like Necrologist. And, also just like Necrologist, each Class received a predetermined set of automatically distributed APs each Level. The part he was surprised to find out though, was how few Classes were Mana dependent. TodoroKen, for example, had chosen the Alchemist Class and he didn’t have Mana at all. Instead, the Alchemist depended on a handful of different Elemental Runes - TodoroKen explained that he had unlocked two Oxygen Runes, one Sulfur Rune, one Silicon Rune, and four Carbon Runes. He then went on to explain that using the Runes in different ways, such as initiating a chemical change or combining the elements in a certain order or quantity would give different results. Garath was so interested to learn more that he almost had to physically stop