“Sorry. But I’m pretty sure the moment we take a caravan full of people outside, they’ll strike. We need to figure out some way of killing them as quickly as possible, before they hit. Maybe we can rig some kind of massive explosive trap?” Trig asked, scratching his own head as he puzzled out the idea.
“No…” I said, turning my head upwards, staring into the darkness. “These monsters aren’t here by accident. Something’s directing them. If we want to get these people out safely…we’re going to have to cut straight to the heart of the matter. We’re going to have to kill the Shadow Titan. And quick.”
Chapter 32
The question on just about everyone’s mind was how we could possibly fight a shadow. But I had an ace up my sleeve, so to speak. The Coresight ability from the Giantslayer skill tree would grant me the power to see nearby Titan cores. Combined with my enhanced perception abilities, who knows? Maybe I’d be able to locate the core from here. If not, I’d move out, alone, into the woods until I found the damn core. After all, we didn’t really need to fight the Titan as much as we just needed to destroy its core.
The most recent Orphine kill granted me 6,000 points, bringing me up to a grand total of 15,000 Bloodpoints. Enough to purchase 2 Giantslayer abilities, unlocking the next tier. Good enough for me. My first purchase was Coresight, followed quickly by Unbreakable. Two extremely useful abilities, for the staggering cost of 10,000 points. I just hoped the next tier would have something useful for me.
Rank Up! Appeared in my vision, the golden words sparkling brightly enough to give me a bit of a headache. Rank 3: Titan Hunter. Select Rank Bonus and Hunting Style Bonus.
Choose One Rank Bonus:
- Trophy Hunter: You gain an additional Aspect Point when creating a new charm.
- Essence Harvester: Bloodpoints now rejuvenate health, though they cannot heal critical injuries. 1,000 Bloodpoints equal 10% healing.
- Predator: Gain one permanent enhanced sense: Tracking Scent, Echolocation, Tremorsense, Darkvision.
- Changeling: Extends any transformation effect by 8 hours.
Choose Hunting Style Bonus:
- The Stalker: For each hour you study a monster, you gain 1 free critical strike against it, up to a maximum of your Stealth Skill +2.
- The Huntmaster: Your allies are imbued with your perks and charms affecting your perception. In addition, their perception stat is replaced with yours while within 100 feet of you. This affects a number of allies equal to your Navigation Skill, +1.
- The Planner: Your traps gain an additional use before needing to be reset. All traps now have the piercing quality, as long as you are the one to set them. This affects a number of traps equal to your Trapping skill.
- The Opportunist: Attacking a monster without preparation grants you an automatic insight into one weakness. Attempted ambushes by monsters grant you a speed bonus equal to your Acrobatics skill +1.
My eyes went wide as I studied these new options. I was a bit surprised by the sudden rank up. I had only increased my rank once before, and that felt so long ago that I had kind of forgotten about it. But now, I had two entirely new options to pick, and best of all, they were free!
The first set of options was interesting. Changeling was out, obviously. I wasn’t about to start body transformations any time soon and if I did, I certainly didn’t want them to last for eight extra hours. Predator was interesting but I had charms that could do those jobs for me easily enough. The real toss-up was between Essence Harvester and Trophy Hunter.
Essence Harvester basically gave me the ability to keep going in a nasty fight with multiple creatures. A quick harvest mid-fight would provide a huge boost of health, allowing me to keep going. And it could theoretically help fuel some of my charms that cost health to use, such as my telekinesis charm. On the other hand, harvesting in the middle of a fight was…risky. It could open me up to attack or worse, accusations of me trying to steal when working with other Venators.
Trophy Hunter, on the other hand, gave me a leg up when it came to making new charms. Not only did it grant me a point to use later, but I had actually seen quite a few charms where the ability only cost a single Aspect point. This meant I could theoretically get a permanent ability from a new charm and use another ability, if I wanted to. Or I could cut down the wait for the really good abilities by quite a bit, since I wasn’t really running into the same monsters all the time.
Trophy Hunter it was. Next on the list was the “Hunting Style.” These were interesting enough, but I narrowed down on two almost instantly. Huntmaster or Opportunist. Huntmaster because I was quite literally the Huntmaster of Hunter’s Hope and had plenty of allies hunting with me, and Opportunist because it always seemed like monsters came out of the woodwork with barely a moment’s notice. Especially in a place this dark.
I think, ultimately, Opportunist would match my style the most. My danger senses would prime me well in advance for an ambush attempt, giving the extra speed extreme utility. I could react fast as lightning, move my allies out of the way of danger, or intercept a strike before it landed, all while learning a key weakness of whatever new horror was coming my way. Maybe if I were staying in one place for long, Huntmaster would be more appealing. But once this adventure was over, I’d be heading straight to that new city in the north, to learn about the monster slayers who lived there. No doubt I’d meet a host of new creatures to fight while on the road.
Acting true to the name, I grabbed Opportunist without much forethought. I frankly didn’t have
