Descend- Seeing Stars by Sean Oswald (the ebook reader .TXT) 📕

up to stats that would benefit them, he pushed for and got the girls he wanted. Emma was first since Awareness was the next stat. If the training exercise had taught him anything it was that he had the least resistance to psychic attacks. Fortunately, she had a perfect ability for that, Intellect Fortress and passed it on to not only him but everyone else. It was also nice, because Emma had been with them from the very beginning and he felt extremely comfortable with her.

      Next was Trudi, both because of her role as a leader in one of the new clusters that had merged with them and because Kinesis was the next stat up. Her Kinesis swelled from less than a hundred to almost eight thousand just by fusing with him. And her Metalmancy was a unique skill that allowed her to control and manipulate metal in almost any form.

Unlike pyrokinesis, she couldn’t create metal out of nothing, so that was a limitation, but when surrounded by the nearly indestructible A’snkarnt metals, she was a force to be reckoned with. Previously she didn’t have the raw power to manipulate much of it but that all changed with the fusion. It was definitely an ability that he was glad to add to himself and all the other fuses.

      Next under Durability came Kayla. She had started off on such a rocky footing with him, but he felt very protective of her now. She was always one of the first to throw herself into battle and as a result was always in danger.

      For her part, Kayla had come to worship the ground that Jay walked on. He could see in her something like Meikiyo had felt at first. He was a savior to her, risking himself repeatedly to save her and she would do anything for him. Her fusion to him would change that as she gained almost ten thousand Durability and would be much better able to stand up for herself now.

      Just as with most of the other new fuses, he didn’t feel anything even close to being in love with them, but he liked them all and could see things developing in the future. She didn’t really have any abilities that he needed but she passed on Infravision to him and Combat Reflexes to the rest of fuses. Some already had something like that but for the rest it was an important upgrade that would make him sleep better.

      Following Kayla was Formation and Jay had the perfect girl for this. This was again more about the person than the skill. He might not be in love with Martina with his big head or his heart, but his little head surely was in love with her. She had magical hips and still could drive him crazy just by the way that she walked.

      She passed on to all of them her ability to make illusions. This led to an endless set of games over the past couple of days as all of the fuses tried to play tricks on him or on each other. He didn’t mind, much, because it was good practice for a skill and good practice for mental resistance too.

      When Metabolism came back around, he couldn’t think of anyone better than Sora to add to the group. Sure, they already had Huong’s healing ability, but Sora’s was different. Whereas Huong promoted health in the body and caused it to regrow itself, Sora had the ability to manipulate and even grow flesh. There were a few applications to the skill that seemed gruesome but as a healing skill it helped round them all out.

      Each of the fusions had a cumulatively larger impact as his stats kept increasing. By the end all of his fuses had over fifteen thousand in total stats, which would have made them monstrously powerful a few days ago. In fact, compared to the non-fuses they were clearly in a completely different league.

      Yet the changes were even bigger for him. Each of his stats now sat at almost fifteen thousand up to almost twenty thousand. Just as the fuses started to have less and less in common with the rest of Team Jay, so he started to feel less and less in common with the humans around him.

      Jay really tried to fight it, but on the other hand he had to embrace it. He needed to be a veritable god if he were going to win this and so he felt he could be excused for a bit of a god complex. The thing was that it just made him feel isolated and alone. It was a particularly good reason to be thankful for the connection provided through the fusion. Equally, he could always rely upon his wives to burst his bubble if they thought his head was getting too big.

      In all of the practice the one skill that he had not used at all was Scarlett’s Duplication skill. He had asked all the other fuses to refrain from it too, and so far, they had agreed. Jay still had all the same questions about whether a duplicate who split from them would be fused to him. The thing he stressed was that if they could come up with a way to merge the duplicates back together through some type of true and permanent fusion then it would be a boon for them all.

      He was more than a little worried about creating variants of himself. They might develop in a different direction. If they all survived this, he didn’t want to ponder how different they might become over a thousand years. The idea of having to go to war against another version of himself was enough to keep him from exploring this, for now.

      As he thought back over the past few days the other thing that stuck out to him