Mage Tank

Chapter 266: Fortitude 70

Sometimes, evolutions presented one obvious choice. Other times, they were three different flavors of the same thing. Even when all three options were unique, the power boost wasn’t significant enough alone to feel like I was giving too much up by choosing one over another. Fortitude 70 was none of those things.

Each option was strong enough to become a centerpiece of my build; they represented three distinct progression paths, and I loved each of them like the children I’d never had. I tried to avoid seeing this decision as being forced to give up two, and to view it how it really was, which was that I was picking one ridiculous bonus to receive. Nothing would be lost here, only gained.

It sounded good in principle, but that mantra didn’t end up helping me much.

Body of Asclepius was one of my favorite kinds of evos. It was straightforward, simple, and extremely useful. Doubled healing from all sources. Spells, techniques, potions, passive effects, my natural health regeneration. I glanced at my current regen, seeing that it was sitting at 1,858. If I picked Body of Asclepius, my regen would finally be higher than my health total. Going from the brink of death back to perfect condition in less than an hour sounded good. Really good.

Then the super evolution doubled all Shielding I received. Aura of Persistence was my only Shielding skill, currently giving me 95 Shielding when activated and the same amount every six seconds. Doubling that to 190 was significant, especially since Shielding was a last line of defense, protecting me from damage that had already been massively reduced by my DR and resistances. Ishi had been blasting me for two to three hundred damage with her biggest attacks, meaning that this evo would have cut down on that damage by a pretty massive amount.

It’s not like it would be hard to figure out ways to grab more self-healing and Shielding skills, either. I was always giving Intelligence-based healing skills a pass since they required medical knowledge, but with my Speed and Intelligence scores, I could probably bang out the equivalent of a medical degree in a month. It wasn’t much of a deterrent anymore. There was also a question of how much medical knowledge would matter, given my unique physiology. As for the evo’s second half, the Heavy Armor and Shields intrinsics both had Shielding evolutions I knew would likely be coming up once I got them to 40.

Very tempting.

Extended Care Network was about as on-brand for my aura build as it could possibly be, except that it wasn’t itself an aura. It would let me give my absurd health regen to everyone in the party. My passive aura Who Needs a Cleric? also boosted everyone’s health regen, but had scaled down from ‘overpowered’ at Level 1 to being ‘kind of nice’ at our current Level. It still more than doubled the health regen for Nuralie and Etja, but it wasn’t a huge boost for Varrin or Xim anymore. It hardly mattered at all for me, but it was one among many bonuses that led to my enormous regen score.

Beyond that, it would give them all the benefits of my other Fortitude evos, doubling their base health and stamina regen, allowing them to regenerate any missing body parts, and… I honestly wasn’t sure how that would work with Body of Theseus. Would they temporarily gain generic omni-cells, capable of serving any function? Or would they just have crits and debuffs reduced via some other magical means? It didn’t really matter, so long as it worked.

Then there was Bioweapon. While the other two meshed with my current build, this one would be a pivot. Although maybe not as big of a pivot as it seemed at first glance, so long as I was willing to rely on my party members to get the majority of its benefits.

To summarize Bioweapon, enemies within about a hundred feet of any member of the party would take more poison and bleeding damage and I’d heal for a fuckton. It would also be harder for the enemy to cleanse bleeding or poison.

It was an oddball option. I didn’t apply Bleeding. I didn’t apply Poison. What the fuck, System? Of course, Varrin applied Bleeding. Half his build was centered around it. Nuralie was all about poison as well. When fighting alongside my party, the evo could make me nigh unkillable, as long as I didn’t mind being reliant on others for what would become one of my essential buffs.

Then again, there were ways around this. I’d been offered an aura skill called Cloak of Blighted Frost after finishing Throne’s Delve. That’d let me poison everything around me while also making enemies vulnerable to Cold damage. I could grab a poison buff evo at Physical 40, I could have Nuralie make me some gas bombs to throw around, I could craft items with Toxicity mana weaves. If I wanted to pivot into poison, I could, but it would be an investment.

Bleeding was less attractive to me, and I didn’t have room to build into both moving forward. Poison was also more likely to combo with elemental spells, with some elemental spells including it as a potential effect. I could probably reforge Elemental Barrier to include poison as an option if I really wanted to.

Bioweapon had a lot of potential.

It wasn’t an easy pick, but a bit of thought started to reveal each evolution’s main drawbacks. That made it a lot easier.

Yes, Bioweapon was–potentially–outrageously strong. For me alone. In combat. When fighting alongside Varrin and Nuralie. Against enemies that could be bled and poisoned.

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I wouldn’t say the conditions for Bioweapon to be awesome were niche, but they were the most restricted of the three options and would require the biggest adjustment to my current path. My philosophy centered more around picking abilities that were reliable and diverse. I didn’t mind having a few specialized tools for specific situations, but I didn’t want a major pillar of my build to be something that could break so easily.

Bioweapon also made me feel icky. I didn’t want to be a blood-poison vampire man, drawing life from other people’s suffering. I’d already passed up on that strategy when I’d declined Body of the Minotaur.

Extended Care Network looked fantastic, but a close reading revealed its flaws. Actually, it didn’t take a close reading at all; the problem was laid out in the first four words: “While at maximum HP…”

When the fuck was I at full health while the rest of the party was injured? Hardly ever, if at all. In fact, if things were going according to plan, I was the only person losing chunks of my health, and this evo didn’t help with that one bit. If anything, this would be best used as a triage ability. Something to break out for when shit went wrong. Again, I didn’t mind having some solid fallback options, but I didn’t want such a big evolution dedicated to it.

There was the option of using an instance of focus to maintain the effect even after I lost some health, but there were two problems with that. First, I wanted that focus for other shit, like keeping an eye on the fight, calling out plays, charging Explosion!, maintaining multiple Elemental Barriers, or figuring out the enemy’s weaknesses. Second, the super evolution that let me apply it to the whole party didn’t say that I could focus to keep it active on the whole party. That felt like a big ‘gotcha,’ and this biscuit wasn’t worth enough for me to risk it.

As for Body of Asclepius, it had no weaknesses that I could see. It was kind of boring, but I liked that about it. Evos didn’t have to be a giant wall of text, so long as what they did mattered, and everything Body of Asclepius did mattered. It wouldn’t be hard to grab some more healing and Shielding without watering down my build, and it meshed with what I already had going on. It wouldn’t buff the party directly, but it would make me way harder to kill. Since I was basically a living party buff, it would make that buff more durable.

I ran the options by the party, but no one had much to say outside of what I’d already gone over. Varrin even told me that his input would likely be more harmful than helpful, since my brand of Fortitude progression was obviously working. He didn’t want me spending too much time second-guessing myself.

I picked Body of Asclepius, and the System sent me a pig emoticon. I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I ignored it and took a moment to bask in my vital stats.

HP:3,185/3,185

HP Regen: 3,717

SP: 700/700

SP Regen: 320

MP: 400/500 (100 reserved)

MP Regen: 200

After getting Intelligence to 70, Wisdom would be up next. My mana pool and regen were looking kind of weak next to everything else. I could always pump up my mana regen by a few hundred points through opening a portal to the right area of the Closet and sucking in Dimensional energies via my Ambient Absorption trait, but that was mildly inconvenient…

Could I make a trinket that just did that? Always had a tiny portal to the Closet, dumping Dimensional mana wherever I went? Fuck, I didn’t have time for all these brilliant ideas. Curse these temporal constraints on my genius!

Ignoring the urge to rush back to my smithy and start experimenting with weaves, I decided to test something else first. I found Varrin and asked him to perform a very important task for me.

“Cut my hand off.”

Varrin glanced at my outstretched arm, then back to me. There was a flash of metal, and Kazandak clicked back into its sheath before my severed limb had even hit the ground.

“Wow, you barely hesitated,” I said. “Should I… be happy about that? It’s because you trust me implicitly, right?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “It has nothing to do with any repressed feelings concerning your personality, actions, or leadership style.”

I smiled through the pain and accepted his words at face value, then looked down at my stump. The inside of my arm didn’t really look like the inside of an arm anymore. The bone was no longer a single piece with marrow in the middle, but diffused throughout the nearby muscle. My veins and arteries were gone, and what blood remained seemed to move around through the tough, spongy tissue on its own.

I thought about how that couldn’t be an efficient way to deliver oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. I did so while taking a deep breath and wondering if my lungs were still in there, or if my body was just creating a flesh pocket to emulate what I was used to. Since 70% of my cells could perform any function my body needed, did I absorb oxygen through my skin? Was lactic acid processed locally, rather than being transported to whatever was left of my liver?

Varrin’s attack had only done a hundred damage, and my hand was back in about ninety seconds. I’d barely had time to study the internal components of my wrist before it was an expanding, fleshy nub. Varrin inquired if I needed anything else sliced off, but I declined his gracious offer of further assistance. I scooped up my severed hand to give to Grotto for study and concluded my half of the experiment.

Later, I had a small medical library delivered from Eschengal and planned on making that one of my downtime hobbies for the next few months. Most medical techniques might not apply to me because of Body of Theseus, but I’d still need to know my stuff if I wanted to use them on others. Plus, it might give me some more insights into what, exactly, was happening with my body. I wasn’t sold on the idea of using my twelfth active slot on a healing skill, but wanted to keep my options open.

I had better equipment, stronger spells, and an ever more alien physiology. To complement this growth, I’d also had the opportunity to ask the Dread Star several new questions.

Up until this point, whenever I’d called upon the eldritch being, there’d always been someone else involved. When I finally spoke to the god in private, it was a very different experience.