The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Recourse

I took several slow breaths, calming and centering myself. Given what I knew was ahead of me, I wasn't even pretending to pay attention to the teacher's voice, not that I ever did—as per usual, I had more important things to do.

Truthfully, I'd heavily considered blowing off classes altogether to continue grinding, but several things had stopped me. The first and simplest was the simple fact that I didn't want to draw too much attention from Cinder. While it wasn't uncommon for a student to blow off classes and I could easily come up with an excuse or make them up, that was only in normal cases.

Needless to say, normal I was not—and now Cinder knew it. While I didn't regret 'outing' myself as Keter, seeing as the only real alternative had been a horrific death, the fact remained that it was a choice I was going to have to live with. Even though she didn't know the details, Cinder was now well aware that I was important and was actively keeping an eye on me, which meant that she and her minions were watching me like hawks whenever the opportunity presented itself, often in the form of spending more time with me.

To an outside party, it must have seemed like our team had come together. While it wasn't anything major—at least, as far as the rest of the school knew—team JAME had become well known for its fractured nature. We hadn't really hung out without another when we hadn't needed to, after all, which teams were generally expected to do; Emerald and Mercury spent time with Cinder or doing other minion things, while Adam and I did…whatever I happened to feel like on a given day, before promptly vanishing off to parts unknown.

Now though, Emerald and Mercury had decided to spend more time with us whenever the opportunity presented itself, sitting with us at lunch or following us around after classes. Seeing as we were a team, that type of behavior was all but expected, but it was pretty damn obvious they were doing it because Cinder had told them to.

Sadly, it wasn't something easily resolved, either—or rather, any short term solutions were practically bound to cause long term problems. I could shake Emerald and Mercury easily enough, fool them with an illusion, or even just hospitalize them for a while, but that wouldn't truly solve anything. It would have been easy to do, but if I wanted to go do anything useful, it was bound to be seen through. If I disappeared, they'd know; I couldn't maintain my illusions while in another dimension, so training with Naraka was out, and while I could create the illusions at long range was simple for me, it wasn't something I could do from another continent. Even across the city would be a little tough, simply because I'd need to constantly monitor it. And while beating them up was not without its perks—the entertainment value, for instance, along with the peace and quiet—it would send alarm bells ringing for just about everyone.

Whatever I did, word was bound to get back to Cinder in short order, and I suspected her reaction to the sudden disappearance of her greatest enemy would be…well, something I didn't want to deal with. While she couldn't know I knew who she was, she probably suspected it, and even my nightly disappearances had begun to worry her. I'd been playing it off as if nothing had changed, but that meant sticking to the routine.

It was a pain in the ass, but frankly, I'd rather face Gilgamesh than Cinder and beating the former to come back to the latter wouldn't exactly improve my position. I'd just have to keep pushing ahead as if nothing had changed and hope she didn't have a way of figuring out what I was up to.

The other reason was equally simple—namely, meditation was useful, in its own way. My rate of growth had slowed as quickly as I had anticipated, which meant that there was a definite limit to how much I could improve before we reached Jericho Falls, unless we ventured significantly deeper into the continent of Grimm. While that was, of course, tempting, I had to bear in mind that the dangers would also increase and not necessarily at the same rate as my power. There were risks to going too far into that place and I had to measure them carefully against the rewards.

In my current state, I could essentially measure the improvement to my stats in batches of fifty points—that is, I needed to gain ten levels to reach the next benchmark. While in a certain sense any improvement was important, I had to consider the amount of time required to make proper gains. Although raising a stat from 100 to 105 would indeed make me better in whatever way I chose, it would be a fairly minor improvement on the level I was currently operating at; even fifty points may not be enough to make dividends. I needed the skills tied to my stats if I wanted to make a difference.

I had to keep that in mind. Currently, I only needed seven more levels to reach the next benchmark, but I'd need seventeen to reach the one after that—and if I only got sixteen in the next week, then the time needed to get nine of them would be wasted. Well, maybe not quite; there was a fairly high possibility I'd level up fighting the enemies at Jericho Falls, after all. But the general idea remained. I needed to manage my time wisely and leveling up posed issues, long term.

Not right now, of course. Even if killing an enemy with a level in the high one hundreds wasn't enough to gain me a level on its own any more, I could always just kill several. It was just that with each level, the number I'd need to kill wouldn't itself rise, or else I would need to defeat stronger enemies and venture deeper into the badlands.

That wouldn't be a major issue…if not for the fact that my offensive ability was no long prone to making sudden absurd leaps at each benchmark. Before, I'd focused on INT and WIS, the skills most directly tied to the strength of my MP and the skills that required it. INT especially was the skill that determined the natural power of most of my skills, even before accounting for the skills I'd gotten for raising it. In addition to improving the amount of MP I had and how quickly I regenerated it, my INT and WIS skills had opened up a plethora of options for me at each benchmark, and with every ten levels, my power effectively skyrocketed. I learned to bypass charge times, improved the strength and versatility of my Elementals, and answered a wide variety of problems. Truthfully, my INT and WIS had determined my ability to deal damage far more than my Strength.

And now they'd both reached their effective peak. Now, it was time to focus on my physical stats which, of course, had uses of their own. Strength would improve the damage of any of my physical attacks, which I'd be able to further bolster with my various skills. Dexterity would allow me to both attack and move faster, which was something I'd long relied on. And Vitality, of course, would make me harder to kill. All of those things were useful.

Just not as useful as INT and WIS had been. With each of those, I could attack, defend, heal, move, and more, all based on a single stat—and I could do things that were impossible to accomplish with the body alone. They weren't amazing because they gave me the keys to ultimate power, though one could argue they'd done that as well; rather, they'd given me broad arrays of very useful options. While all my physical stats were also important and, in time, I was sure they'd reach amazing heights…at their current level, my gains were bound to be relatively marginal. I could punch people harder…but I could already blow up cities. I could attack faster…when I could make a legion of Psychokinetic spheres that poured out death at the slightest thought. I could grow tougher…when I'd already made my skin the strongest material in the world.

The improvements were still important and they'd grow with time, but I couldn't rely on sudden extreme increases in power now. If I ventured too far into the lands of Grimm, it was quite possible I'd bite off more than I could chew, because I wasn't making a massive leap forward at regular intervals; instead, I had to rely on relatively slower paths to power, namely my skills. When they ranked up or I combined them, that also gave me strength…but that also took time.

Time. The one thing I was actually running out of.

Which just meant that I needed to be cautious in how I spent it. Leveling up was important, grinding was important, and this was important.

Because I'd made my choice. And of my physical stats, I knew which would be of the most use.

It was simple, really. While none of my choices were quite as desirable as Intelligence and Wisdom had been—which was only natural, or else I would have raised them instead—it was simply a matter of breaking down which would be of the most use to me through process of elimination. I'd considered Luck briefly, but discarded it for the same reasons I usually did; it just wasn't worth it at this point. Because it was so low, improving it by fifty points would only net me a single bonus skill, whereas raising any of my physical abilities would grant me five. Even if I could grind my Luck to over fifty in a week without spending any points, which would be difficult even with my experience boosts simply because I couldn't Accelerate the process but not necessarily impossible, raising it over a hundred would only grant me three skills for a total of four, which was still lower than what I'd get from any of my physicals and its effects were too uncertain to truly rely upon in a life or death situation regardless. Given the choice, I'd prefer something I knew would work over something that could potentially fail.

From the very beginning, it was only a choice between my physical stats. I couldn't go into this halfcocked or waste what few chances I had—I had to give it my all and make sure I knew what I was doing.

For that reason, I discarded Strength almost as quickly as Luck, simply because its use to me was by far the most limited. There was no way to be truly sure of what kind of skills I'd get from raising my stats, but they were at least tied to the stats in question and everything Strength did for me on its own, I had already found elsewhere.

The fact of the matter was that Strength was probably the least versatile of my stats on its own. Its primary function was to improve the damage I could deal with physical attacks—and that was very important, in its own way, just…not so much for me. Being able to put the hurt on an opponent was vital in a fight, but for all that I'd mastered an ancient martial arts style, I was really more of a wizard than a warrior, and when it came to raw damage potential, it went without saying that a three hundred in INT and WIS was probably going to trump a hundred and fifty in Strength.

Even beyond that, physical attacks were, pound for pound, weaker than magical ones—with the tradeoff being that the latter costed significantly more MP than the former, when physical attacks cost anything at all. My various Strike abilities were fairly cheap and easy to use and punching someone in the face was free, except for maybe a minor cost to Stamina. Broadly speaking, someone who focused on magical attacks should run out of power significantly faster than someone who stuck to physical ones, barring rare exceptions.

Needless to say, I was a rare exception. For about a hundred different reasons, both my MP and my MP regeneration were through the roof, allowing me to go from zero to full in a matter of seconds—and I had both skills and items to supplement that. While there was still the risk of exhausting myself in a fight against a truly dangerous foe, simply because I could scale my output to my input, the number of ways that I could restore my power meant that it wasn't a worthwhile enough concern to spend fifty points over.

And honestly, even if that hadn't been true, I still would probably have favored MP attacks over physical ones. Being able to theoretically fight for hours meant nothing if you died in minutes; while physical attacks had the advantage of stability, magical ones could hit outside their weight class, even if it was costly. I didn't mind if my MP vanished in a matter of seconds, so long as everything I happened to be aiming at also vanished.

The other main benefits of Strength didn't hold much to me, either. Things like being able to jump really far were rendered somewhat obsolete by flight and teleportation, while lifting capacity faltered in the face of my Psychokinesis. Besides which, thanks to my Inventory, I was free to travel lightly and with far more weight than I'd ever be able to carry naturally. Supplemented by skills that improved those things anyway…

No. It just wasn't worth it.

That narrowed it down to Dexterity and Vitality, which was a tougher choice. In the case of Dexterity, I had a lot of skills that allowed me to move faster…but most of them were calculated using my base speed, so even minor improvements on that front would have major results. Further, where physical attacks were rendered somewhat obsolete by my MP, having more speed was always useful. If you could moving too fast to hit or hit an opponent significantly more than he hit you, that was a huge advantage. Granted, the improvements to physical attack speed didn't matter as much when I could conjure up a hundred spears of burning power, but still. I'd won a lot of fights because of my speed.

On the other hand, I had Vitality, which was much the same case. Yes, I had layers and layers of personal defenses and healing abilities…but I could always use more. It had also provided the most useful batch of skills last time I'd reached a benchmark for my physical abilities, with Second Chance along being more than worth the price of admission. Further, it added to my HP—and, thus, my MP—directly, which was another thing I could always use more of. It played directly to my strengths.

It was a tough choice, but in the end, that was what decided it for me. Having more MP and MP regen meant having more options—it meant I could hit harder, move faster, protect myself and my friends better, and more. Having that breadth was better than having speed alone, even if it was tempting to go faster and faster.

And besides, I had to look at the big picture. While I was confident that Malkuth wouldn't kill me before I got whatever it was he wanted, what about afterwards? It wasn't just the attack on Jericho Falls I needed to worry about, but also the potential aftermath. If we were attacked seriously, it was quite possible we wouldn't have a chance at victory—that we'd be faced with something we had no chance of defeating. At that time, running would be the natural choice, but there were two problems. The first was, of course, the possibility that we might be faced with something that I couldn't outrun, in which case I was fucked. The second, however, was more important.

I couldn't escape alone. If it was just me, raising my Dexterity as high as it could go and speeding away would be a good choice, but that wouldn't save Raven or Adam or Gou or Autumn. I could try to bring them along, of course, to pick them up and carry them away at high speeds, but even assuming I could do it without harming them—which was far from guaranteed when I could already casually ignite my surroundings from the sheer friction of my passage—it would slow me down. Carrying several times my mass…it went without saying that my speed would drop. If we were pursued by something that could threaten me to that extent, it was quite possible that the only way to do so would be to leave someone, perhaps even everyone, behind.

And that wasn't happening. There was no point in even planning for it—I would never be able to do it.

The only acceptable way out in such a situation would be through Raven's portals. We could all escape through them and if we managed it, it could take us halfway around the world in a single step. It would second to open one, too.

Sadly, I knew better than anyone that a lot could happen in a second. Assuming the worst—which seemed fair, given everything—if someone with a speed even close to matching my own appeared, to say nothing of surpassing it, then that second would get really dangerous, really fast.

And Raven would be the target. It only made sense, after all—if your enemy has only one escape route, the obvious choice would be to cut it off. Even assuming we had her waiting at a distance and observing from afar to teleport us out, there was still the issue of something following us through a portal, as well. That was going to be a major issue if things got hairy enough, and one I had only a few ways of potentially dealing with. And all of them required me to be alive.

As such, taking the skill that directly improved my odds of survival and supplemented my strengths was the obvious choice. The best choice, or so I sincerely hoped. But if nothing else, it was the only acceptable choice, because I'd actually die before I left my friends behind to run away alone.

In the end, it was my choice to make and I did.

By raising VIT above 150, you have gained two random abilities related to your exalted physical condition.

The skill 'Determination' was created.

The skill 'Sufferance' was created.

By raising VIT above 150, you have gained the passive skill 'Qigong.'

By raising VIT above 150, you have gained the passive skill 'Solipsism.'

By raising VIT above 150, you have gained the passive skill 'Inerrant.'

The moment I'd made my choice, I'd felt energy—life—flow through me; the result of such a sudden increase in Vitality, rather than the gradual improvements I was more accustomed to. It ran a circuit through my body, shimmering through my blood and bones. I felt my body grow stronger, healthier, and better, all at once.

And that was even before taking into account the skills I had learned. One in particular, I was quick to put to good use.

Qigong (Active & Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%

Within all living things flows the power of life—the Aura of one's Soul. A spiritual existence that protects and reinforces the user, it has been the guarding light of Mankind since time immemorial. Throughout the millennia, Man has cultivated countless ways to draw closer to this light and strengthen themselves. One such method is to draw in that light and gather it within the body, connecting one's spirit more closely to their physical body. This skill represents a natural talent for that technique, born from the natural meridians within the user's body that carve out a complex pathway of channels and vessels that ease the flow of energy between body and soul, allowing for an unusual form of physical and spiritual.

Health (HP) can be improved through meditation.

Stamina can be improved through meditation.

Strength can be improved through meditation.

Dexterity can be improved through meditation.

Vitality can be improved through meditation.

Stamina may be consumed to temporarily increase the power of one's physical abilities.

And so, I passed the school day in contemplative silence, true form hidden beneath an illusion as I trained.