Freya
She carefully set the parchment aside, her curiosity finally outweighing her awe.
The status update had quantified Max's growth, but it had only deepened the riddles. The flickering spatial movement she had caught in his memories still had no explanation she could satisfactorily name. The dragon hoard encounter had raised questions she hadn't even fully articulated yet. And the blank void in his Falna sat in the back of her mind like a splinter, insisting on attention.
Then there was Hogni. Seeing her most isolated child sharing a meal with a newcomer had been surprising enough. She wanted to know exactly how that had come to be.
Determined to get answers, she leaned in, her voice dropping to a quiet, interrogating purr that ghosted over the back of his neck.
"Max, my dear, there are several things we need to dis—"
Squelch.
A cool, damp weight landed on his back, right where her hands had been seconds before.
Freya blinked, startled into silence.
Kairu had launched himself from the bed, flattening out happily across Max's upper back. The little blue slime vibrated with a rapid, high-frequency hum that required no translation whatsoever. It was pure, unadulterated excitement as he was practically vibrating out of his own gelatinous skin.
Max let out a startled bark of laughter, reaching back over his shoulder to give the slime a fond pat. "Whoa there, buddy. Line jumper, are we?"
He glanced back at Freya, eyes dancing. "Sorry, Lady Freya. I think my enthusiasm rubbed off on him. He knows what comes after a big dive."
Freya paused, her carefully constructed interrogation entirely derailed by the quivering puddle of blue ooze. The sheer audacity of the creature — interrupting a Goddess of her stature, without hesitation, without apology — was almost offensive.
Almost. Though looking at Max's fond, unguarded smile, she felt the annoyance dissolve into something warmer.
"Very well," Freya said, reaching out to brush a finger against Kairu's smooth surface. "Let us see what your little companion has managed."
She brought to mind the slim, entirely modest Status she had updated before their dive. Strength I 15. Agility H 105. Magic H 119. Nothing extraordinary. A capable familiar, perhaps above average — nothing more.
She pricked her finger, allowing a single drop of ichor to fall onto the flat surface Kairu eagerly provided.
The glow that erupted was not the blinding celestial gold of Max's Falna. It was a deep, luminescent aquatic blue threaded with veins of brilliant gold, filling the dimly lit room like sunlight filtering through a shallow, living sea.
Freya leaned in, her eyes adjusting to read the incoming data.
She had genuinely believed she was past the point of surprise tonight. She had just read an EX 3956 in Magic on a Level 1 adventurer. Her capacity for shock had surely been exhausted.
Only for Kairu to prove her completely wrong.
—
Status:
Kairu
Freya Familia
Demon Slime - Familiar
Level 1*
*[Notice: Level Up available.]
Stats:
Strength: I15 - SSS2205
Endurance: I23 - EX3176
Dexterity: I47 - SSS2412
Agility: H105 - SSS2987
Magic: H119 - EX3224
Innate Traits:
• Storage
• Size Manipulation
• Assimilation
• Rapid Regeneration
• Amorphous Body
Magic:
Ars Magna (Lesser)
Skills:
Magic Resistance
Familiar Bond
—
Freya stared at the slime.
She looked at the gelatinous blue blob humming happily on Max's back. Then she looked back at the numbers hovering in front of her. Then back at the blob.
Three thousand in Endurance. Three thousand in Magic.
"What are you feeding this thing?" Freya whispered, genuine disbelief breaking her composure for the second time in an hour.
She peered deeper into the data, letting her perception sink into the memories woven within Kairu's Excelia — and unlike Max's Falna, which had returned murky impressions and rigid outlines, Kairu's memories were clear. Simple, unfiltered, honest in the way only an animal's recollection could be. The full dive, laid bare without obstruction.
The first thing she noticed was that Kairu hadn't simply observed. He had participated.
She watched him move through the early floors alongside Max — not trailing behind, not waiting to be directed, but working. The moment a monster fell, Kairu was already moving, collapsing inward like a living vacuum and drawing the corpse into himself with efficient, unhurried thoroughness. Magic stones. Remains. Everything salvageable, consumed and processed in the seconds between one engagement and the next. The Assimilation trait wasn't passive in his hands. It was a systematic harvest, and the Excelia it produced was entirely his own.
She watched him take his own opponents. A Killer Ant that had circled wide of Max's attention. A Dungeon Lizard that had tracked the wrong target. Small victories, but earnest ones — a familiar fighting his own fights, not simply riding a master's coattails.
And then she reached Floor 12.
The memory brightened sharply — a flash of vivid gold against the steady blue of the rest — and Freya leaned in.
Max had been occupied. Surrounded. A sudden swell of Hard Armours had come from the ground, and before the gap in his defence could be exploited, Kairu had moved. Not slowly. Not cautiously. He had thrown himself directly into the path of the leading shell, absorbing the impact with his Amorphous Body and immediately counterattacking, working through the Hard Armour's plating with the same biological precision she had seen him apply to any monster in his reach. One. Then another. The spawns that followed met the same fate — each magic stone extracted, consumed, integrated.
Freya nodded slowly, a quiet satisfaction moving through her. She only saw the slime as a normal monster getting her falna only because of Max. She was revising that assessment now.
Better than I expected, she thought simply. Considerably better.
The Excelia from Floor 12 alone had been enough — she could see the threshold cross clearly in the accumulated data, the point at which the slime had quietly, without ceremony, accumulated enough to Level Up entirely on his own. He simply hadn't stopped there.
The memory kept moving.
The blank spot in Max's Falna opened up through Kairu's perspective without any gap at all — a quiet cavern, a small tent, Max asleep inside it. Kairu on guard. Not idle. Not simply watching. Working through the stillness with methodical self-direction, extracting the remaining magic stones and other salvageable parts, breaking them to their components, and using the extracted energy to reconstruct a shattered rapier into something stronger. The work was slow and meticulous.
The blank spot wasn't a secret. It was rest — a pocket of quiet so unremarkable that Max's Falna had registered it as stillness, nothing more. No concealment. No anomaly. A boy asleep in a tent on the twelfth floor, and his familiar working in the dark beside him.
Freya sat with that for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
She hadn't realised, until just now, how much she had thought it to be something else.
The memory moved on to Floor 14.
The ambush. Twenty-four adventurers and many monsters in a kill corridor Max had mapped and baited. Kairu had worked through it the same way he had worked through everything else — systematically, efficiently, claiming his own share of the chaos. His contribution wasn't incidental. It was deliberate. The Excelia registered accordingly.
She expected the memory to end at Rivira, or to surface on Floor 22 and turn back much like Max's. Instead it kept going.
The visual shifted — the Large Tree Labyrinth, Floors 19 through 21. Max was entirely absent from the frame. In his place, Kairu was seated squarely on the shoulder of her Dark Elf King.
Freya went still.
She watched in muted astonishment as Hogni moved through the floors in that beautiful, merciless dance she knew so well — precise, efficient, absolute. A Firebird met him and was dismantled. A Gun Libellula lined up a shot from behind and never fired it, because a water-whip snapped through the air from Kairu's direction and annihilated it first.
Hogni didn't react. Didn't pause. He simply relaxed his rear guard and moved on, trusting the creature on his shoulder to hold that angle without being told.
They fought together.
Freya turned the image over carefully, trying to square it with the Hogni she knew. The Hogni who maintained distance from every member of her Familia as a matter of principle. The Hogni who had never, in all the years she had watched him, voluntarily lowered his guard for anything that hadn't bled for him first.
He had let a monster he barely knew ride him into battle. And Kairu had earned his own kills on those floors — his own Excelia, drawn from a Level 5's deep-floor rampage, absorbed and integrated with the same quiet efficiency he had applied to everything else since the first floor.
What did you do to him, little one? she wondered, her gaze settling on the cheerful blue blob. What did you both do to him?
She filed the question alongside everything else she intended to ask Max the moment the updates were done, and kept reading until the memory resolved into the return — the two of them coming back up together, the dive complete.
She withdrew, and nodded once to herself.
The arithmetic was clear now. The Assimilation trait had been the engine — Kairu had generated the overwhelming majority of his Excelia through direct consumption, floor by floor, fight by fight, every corpse and magic stone processed through a body built precisely for that purpose. She had a considerably better picture of the dive now than Max's rigid Falna had given her.
And the picture confirmed something else.
The accumulated Excelia was substantial enough — more than substantial enough — that the question wasn't whether Kairu could level up. It was how far.
She ran the numbers. Then ran them again.
A slow, genuinely wicked smile touched her lips.
Perhaps, Freya thought, the amusement rising quietly, it is possible for the slime to reach Level 3 after all. Unlike his master.
She withdrew fully from the memory and let the laugh come — soft, melodic, entirely at Max's expense.
"What?" Max asked, twisting his head. "Is there an issue?"
"Oh, no issue at all," Freya purred, resting a hand affectionately on the slime's cool surface. "It is quite the opposite, in fact." She let the pause breathe just long enough. "It appears your familiar was extremely busy while you were sleeping, Max."
She locked her eyes onto his, letting the smile turn slowly, deliberately teasing.
"Perhaps it is possible for Kairu to reach Level 3 after all." She tilted her head. "Unlike his master."
Max stared at her.
Then he turned his head and looked over his shoulder at the blue blob resting contentedly on him, his expression moving through several distinct stages before settling on something that could only be described as deeply, personally betrayed.
Kairu met his gaze.
Ki. Ki.
The pulses were bright, cheerful, and entirely without remorse. If a gelatinous creature without a face could look smug, Kairu was managing it with considerable skill.
Max turned back to face forward without a word and let his forehead drop into his pillow.
"Go ahead, Lady Freya," he said, his voice muffled by the cushion. "Give him the promotion he apparently deserves."
Ki. Ki. Ki.
"Gladly," Freya chuckled.
She channelled the excelia forward, walking Kairu from Level 1 to Level 2. The aquatic blue light flared as the first level up locked into place, and as the Falna integrated the Dungeon's experience into the slime's core, a list of potential Developmental Abilities shimmered into existence before her eyes.
She began reading through them — and paused.
Something about them was different.
The abilities themselves were legible enough, each description clean and precise in the way Falna text always was. But the weight of them was wrong. She had read thousands of Developmental Ability lists across her years on Gekai. They carried a certain familiar texture — a passive quality, like reading a ledger. These didn't feel like that. These felt dense, pressing back against her divine perception with a quiet resistance she hadn't encountered before.
Are they... heavier? she thought, puzzled, tilting her head almost imperceptibly.
She kept the observation from her expression and read through the list.
-◈ -
Developmental Abilities:
Alchemy: Allows the changing of shape of items, as well as bestow effects on them.
Devourer: Allows for efficient consumption and extraction of salvageable materials from monsters.
Blacksmith: Enables the user to make generally better creations and add special abilities to them.
Hunter: Improves abilities against monsters that the user has fought before and gained excelia from.
Mystery: Allows the user to activate a miracle and create magic items.
-◈ -
Curious, and operating on the same instinct that had led her to attempt the dual selection with Max, she pressed two abilities forward simultaneously — testing whether the density she felt was mechanical resistance or something else entirely.
The result was immediate and unexpected.
Where Max's dual attempt had simply closed the second channel, locking the energy into grey excelia, this was different. Both channels opened — but the Excelia didn't split evenly between them. It poured. The overwhelming majority of the available energy surged into the first channel with a voraciousness that left almost nothing for the second, the remainder dissolving into the Falna structure as if the system took it to preserve it.
Freya withdrew both channels cleanly and sat with the result for a moment.
What is going on? she thought, keeping her face composed. Was it the nature of his species — a monster of assimilation and consumption, fundamentally not designed for the Falna's standard architecture? Or was it the quality of the abilities themselves, each one carrying more structural weight than the usual suite of Hunter and Abnormal Resistance that populated most lists at this stage?
She didn't have an answer. She noted it, filed it, and kept it entirely to herself.
"He has options as well, Max," Freya announced, keeping her voice deliberately neutral. "Listen closely."
She read each ability aloud without inflection, letting the list land in full before either of them spoke.
The silence that followed was complete.
-◈ -
Max
He absorbed the list, and for once said nothing. The options had genuinely silenced him — not from confusion, but from the kind of paralysis that came from being handed too many correct answers at once.
Hunter was a skip. He'd already dismissed it for himself and the logic applied equally here.
Blacksmith made him pause. Kairu had forged that grey-blue sword from nothing during the dive — a functional weapon, pulled from his own body mid-rest. With Blacksmith formalising that instinct, what could the slime produce under proper conditions? Specialised weapons tailored to specific monsters? Blades that didn't shatter under Power of Destruction?
Alchemy made him pause longer. He had fed Kairu a High Mind Potion early in the dive to analyse. If Alchemy unlocked what he suspected — the ability to replicate, modify, synthesise — then Kairu could theoretically begin producing potions anywhere. High-grade ones, sweated out of a gelatinous body between floors. The logistics of that alone were staggering.
But Mystery.
Max's breath actually hitched. He knew what Mystery meant in this world. It was the ability possessed only by figures like Fels — ancient, enigmatic, unrepeatable. The capacity to create miracles. To manifest magic items that defied the ordinary laws of Gekai. If Kairu combined Mystery with Ars Magna, the implications ran so deep he couldn't see the bottom of them. Grimoires. Magic swords that held their edge. Artefacts worth hundreds of millions of Valis each.
A literal money-printing monopoly, Max thought, metaphorical currency signs lighting up behind his eyes.
Then there was Devourer. Efficient consumption and extraction of salvageable materials. For a slime already absorbing magic stones with the methodical patience of a creature that understood their value instinctively — it made a certain biological sense. But stacked against Mystery? It felt like choosing a pocket knife over a bazooka.
He turned his head to look at the slime in question.
Kairu had somehow contorted his upper half into the distinct shape of a thick, gelatinous question mark — sitting silently, processing the strange new information the Falna was offering him.
Max snorted. "Take your time, buddy."
After a full minute, Kairu returned to his normal blob shape and let out a single, determined Ki.
"You've decided?" Max asked.
Kairu nodded, his whole body bobbing.
"Alright, let's narrow it down," Max said, treating the slime with complete sincerity. "Hunter?"
A firm, wobbling negative.
Fair enough. We agree on that one.
"Blacksmith?"
Another firm negative.
Okay. Chemical route then.
"Alchemy?" Max offered, fully expecting a cheerful bounce.
Kairu shook his head again.
Oh. He's really going for the jackpot.
"Mystery?" he asked, his voice thick with hopeful anticipation. Come on. Tell me we're going into the Grimoire business.
Kairu stared at him. Then gave a slow, deliberate negative.
Max froze. "Wait — what? Are you absolutely sure? Do you understand what that skill does? We could buy half the familias within a year."
Kairu didn't budge. He simply looked at Max with calm, unwavering patience.
Max blinked. He reviewed the remaining option. Let out a long, resigned exhale. "...Devourer?"
Ki! Ki! Ki!
Kairu practically launched off his back, vibrating with absolute, unshakeable certainty — every cell in complete agreement.
Max stared at the ecstatic puddle of blue gel.
He genuinely didn't understand it. Mystery was god-tier. What could his familiar possibly see in Devourer that outweighed miracles?
And then a thought flickered through the back of his mind. Quiet at first. Then louder.
A slime. An absurdly powerful slime, growing faster than anything around him, developing unique magic, absorbing everything that stood in his way. Choosing an ability built entirely around consumption and assimilation.
Rimuru Tempest.
The Predator skill.
A shiver ran down Max's spine — slow and deliberate, starting at the base of his neck and travelling all the way down. He looked at the cheerful blue blob with entirely new eyes.
Maybe his instincts know exactly what they're doing, Max thought. Maybe they always have.
"I trust you, buddy," Max said quietly. He reached back and gave the slime a single, affirming pat — not the fond pat of a man indulging a pet, but something more deliberate. An acknowledgement. "You've earned it."
He looked back at Freya. "Devourer, it is."
-◈ -
Freya
As the decision was made, she felt a flicker of private relief. He hadn't asked her to select two. Given what she had just observed about these developmental abilities, that would have been a conversation she wasn't prepared to have yet.
"A fascinating choice," she murmured, her eyes refocusing on his face with undisguised interest. She had seen the exact moment the calculation shifted behind his eyes — from confused resistance to quiet, unsettled understanding about the ability. She filed it alongside everything else she intended to ask him about tonight.
She channelled her will, pushing the accumulated Excelia into the chosen pathway. The deep blue light pulsed, locking Devourer into place and completing the jump from Level 1 to Level 2.
The light faded.
Freya drew a breath to offer the playfully consoling remark she had been composing — something warm and teasing about lost mercantile dreams — and stopped.
She stared at the newly settled hieroglyphs on the slime's back.
The Level Up prompt was still active.
She had expected that. What she had not expected was the source.
She leaned in, reading the Excelia attribution carefully. The growth that had carried Kairu through his first level up had been predominantly his own — Assimilation doing its work, consumption by consumption, floor by floor. But this remaining reserve was different in character entirely. It was warm rather than sharp, passive rather than earned, and when she traced it back to its origin the answer was unambiguous.
The Familiar Bond.
Every instance of Kairu placing himself between Max and something that intended to kill him — the Hard Armours on Floor 12, the chaos of the ambush on Floor 14, the flanking threats he always sniped — each one had registered not merely as combat contribution but as something the system had catalogued separately. Protection. The Bond had been quietly converting every act of it into Excelia of its own category, accumulating in a reservoir that had nothing to do with kills or magic stones.
Freya's eyes narrowed.
That alone was unusual. The Familiar Bond skill generating independent Excelia from protective behaviour was not a documented mechanic. It was theoretically possible — the system rewarded growth in any direction it recognised as meaningful — but she had never seen it produce numbers of this magnitude.
Unless the Bond hadn't generated it.
Unless it had received it.
She thought of Max's Lux Tenebris — that hungry, relentless skill that had consumed his overflow rather than allowing a Level up, hammering the excess inward to reinforce his vessel's structural capacity. A skill that aggressive in its consumption didn't simply absorb and stop. Or so she thought. But in the light of these new revelations, what if it had purged the most volatile dregs of Max's chaotic growth — the excess it couldn't safely integrate — and funnelled them outward through the only available channel?
The Familiar Bond.
Directly into the slime.
It treated Kairu as an overflow valve, Freya realised, a chill brushing against her spine that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. Forcibly mutating the familiar to keep the master from rupturing under his own power.
It violated every known sacred law of the Falna. Under any other circumstance, it would be flatly impossible.
But this boy is built on impossibilities, she thought, her eyes tracking the faint dark energy still swirling beneath the Falna ink.
She glanced at Max — lying face-down on her bed, still sulking quietly over his familiar's choice, entirely unaware of what his own skill had been doing in the margins. Then she looked at Kairu, cheerfully vibrating, equally unaware and equally delighted.
This symbiosis, she thought. I am going to have to watch it very, very carefully.
She decided, as she had decided with most improbable things tonight, to keep the theory to herself for now. There would be time. Till then, she would simply observe.
"Lady Freya?" Max asked, finally registering her silence. "Did he break something?"
"Not exactly," Freya said, lifting her gaze to meet his. "He can level up again. Right now. To Level 3."
Max blinked. He pinched himself to break this illusion — which did nothing — and looked back at her. "...Seriously."
"Seriously," Freya confirmed.
A beat passed.
"Well," Max said, with the breathless, somewhat helpless chuckle of a man who had stopped being surprised and started simply accepting, "I suppose that makes him the senior adventurer in this party." He nodded toward her. "Please proceed."
Ki! Kairu bounced twice on Max in enthusiastic agreement.
Freya smiled. She pricked her finger and pressed a fresh drop of ichor to the centre of the slime's Falna.
The aquatic blue light flared again — blindingly, room-fillingly bright — a wave of compressed magical pressure washing outward like a held breath finally released. The Level 2 symbol distorted, burned away, and reformed with sharp, immutable finality.
Level 3.
As the light settled, a new list of Developmental Abilities bloomed beneath Devourer.
"New choices at Level 3," Freya announced, her voice soft in the quiet room. "Here they are."
-◈ -
Developmental Abilities:
Alchemy: Allows the changing of shape of items, as well as bestow effects on them.
Blacksmith: Enables the user to make generally better creations and add special abilities to them.
Hunter: Improves abilities against monsters that the user has fought before and gained excelia from.
Mystery: Allows the user to activate a miracle and create magic items.
Strong Defence: Boosts the user's endurance proportionally depending on the damage taken, mitigating kinetic impact.
-◈ -
Max reviewed the list. His mind moved through it quickly.
Hunter — immediate skip, same reasoning as before.
Strong Defence made him pause briefly. He remembered what it could do from Sword Oratoria — Gareth has it, and it turned the dwarf into something close to an immovable fortress. But Kairu already possessed Amorphous Body, which absorbed physical strikes by nature, and Magic Resistance to blunt elemental attacks. Layering a damage-scaling endurance buff onto a creature made of non-Newtonian fluid felt like putting a seatbelt on water.
The redundancy was too significant.
That left Alchemy, Blacksmith, and Mystery.
The same three he'd wanted to sit with at Level 2.
Max looked over his shoulder at Kairu, intending to open the guessing game again — and stopped.
Kairu wasn't doing the question mark shape. He wasn't bouncing or anticipating. He was still. And from that stillness, a single thin pseudopod extended slowly over Max's shoulder and gave his cheek one small, deliberate poke.
Max blinked.
The pulse through the Familiar Bond was incredibly clear, carrying no ambiguity whatsoever.
You choose, Master.
Max held the slime's featureless gaze for a moment. He had assumed Kairu would keep exercising his own instincts — had been prepared to trust whatever the slime landed on, the same way he'd trusted the Devourer choice. But Kairu wasn't choosing. He was passing the baton with complete intentionality, yielding his own evolution to whatever Max had in mind.
It was a gesture of absolute trust. And it landed harder than Max expected.
You earned Devourer on your own instincts, Max thought, looking at the small blue blob with quiet, genuine affection. And now you're handing the rest to me. The slow, wide, predatory grin came before he could stop it. Alright. Then let's make you into the most broken crafting engine the world has ever seen.
"You trust me with this?" Max whispered.
Kairu jiggled an affirmative.
Max looked up at Freya, who was watching the exchange with undisguised delight.
"I've made up my mind, Lady Freya," Max said, his voice carrying the specific calm of someone who had just seen exactly how far a decision could reach. He thought of Fels. He thought of how thin real magic was in this world — how long it would take someone to attain one. He thought of his small blue slime — Devourer already etched into his soul, Ars Magna already running, Assimilation and Storage already giving him a body that could hold and process anything he consumed — and what happened when you gave a creature built to devour and assimilate the ability to perform miracles with what it had already swallowed?
"We choose Mystery."
Freya said nothing for a moment. She looked at Kairu. Then at Max.
A creature built to consume everything it touched, and a Devil whose skill devoured his own growth to feed it.
Now holding the ability to make miracles out of what it had swallowed.
"Of course," she murmured, more to herself than either of them. "Of course that's what you chose."
She channelled the final wave of power into the chosen pathway. The blue light pulsed, deep and rhythmic, etching the arcane words for Mystery alongside Devourer like something being carved into stone.
With a graceful motion she swept her hand across the Falna, sealing the update into place. She pressed a fresh parchment to the slime's back, lifted the ink, and set it beside Max's own copy on the table, locking his falna.
"It is done," Freya murmured.
She shifted back from his waist, settling cross-legged on the mattress beside him with the unhurried composure of someone who had been waiting patiently for this moment through an entire evening of extraordinary interruptions.
The Level ups were concluded. The falnas were sealed. The room was quiet for the first time in over an hour.
Max had already pushed himself upright, his own updated status in hand. He sat with his elbows on his knees, eyes moving across the parchment with the quiet, methodical focus of someone taking inventory after a long campaign. His shoulders had lost the residual tension of the Falna process. What replaced it was something more settled — the particular stillness of a person beginning to understand the full weight of what they were carrying.
Kairu had relocated from his back to his lap, and was going through what could only be described as his own version of the same process. The slime held himself unusually still, his surface flickering with faint internal light in slow, rhythmic pulses — each one slightly different in colour and intensity, as though something inside him was cycling through the new data, turning it over, finding its edges. Every few seconds he would extend a small pseudopod, touch the parchment in Max's hand as if cross-referencing it against his own internal record, and retract again.
Max glanced down at him once. Something passed between them through the Bond — too quiet and particular to read from the outside — and Max gave a small nod, as if confirming something they had both arrived at simultaneously. Kairu pulsed once in acknowledgement and went back to his cycling.
Freya observed all of it without speaking.
She had spent centuries learning when to let silence work. This was one of those moments. The two of them were integrating — not just stats and abilities, but the full reality of what the last forty-eight hours had produced. She had questions, and she intended to have answers, but she wanted him present for the conversation. Fully present. Not still half-inside a dungeon.
She waited until the quality of his stillness changed — until the parchment lowered slightly and his eyes drifted from the ink to the distant city lights, the outward sign of a mind that had finished processing and was beginning to simply exist in the new reality.
Then she spoke.
"I have been very patient about my questions," Freya said, her voice becoming smooth and unhurried. "I believe it is time for you to answer them."
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Here we have it, folks. The 2nd part of the Status updates. With this we are officially done with Status updates and I added the full and final statuses of Max and Kairu below after AN for reference.
It has definitely been an hour of revelations for the trio involved with Freya gaining the most. Obviously everything is not as it appears. ;)
Oh, I forgot to mention, we have officially entered in Arc 4 from Ch 31. It's name El Dorado. It doesn't have to do anything with Max's developmental ability, I swear!
From next chapter, we will see Freya's questions and Max finally exchanging his real loot. Any guesses on the numbers?
As always, don't forget to share your thoughts on the story in a review/comment.
If you'd like to read 8 chapters ahead(around 40k words), support my work, or commission a story idea, visit p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/b3smash.
Please note that the chapters are early access only, they will be eventually released here as well.
Next update will be on Friday.
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
-◈ -
-◈ -
Status:
Maximus Stilbon
Freya Familia
Devil [Pure-Blood] (Low Class)
Level 2
Stats:
Strength: I0
Endurance: I0
Dexterity: I0
Agility: I0
Magic: I0
Lineage Powers:
• Devil: Superhuman physiology with enhanced physical parameters, accelerated healing, adaptive resilience, flight via natural wings, and the ability to shape and manipulate demonic power for various supernatural applications.
• Destruction: Manifests a catastrophic power that erases matter. Shape and intensity are dependent on the user's will. Scales with Mind
?
Magic:
Ars Magna
The user's personal grimoire made manifest. A system of magic that allows the user to shape their demonic power into various magical phenomena based purely on their will and imagination. This magic is not bound by the conventional slot system. No chant.
Independent Action
Magic activates automatically when predetermined conditions are met. Complexity and quantity scale with Level. Available Actions: 1 Simple, 1 Complex.
Skills:
Lux Tenebris
Established resonance with the Dungeon enables accelerated growth through combat and exploration. Facing superior opponents further enhances growth, pushing natural limits.
Developmental Abilities:
Fortune - I
-◈ -
Status:
Kairu
Freya Familia
Demon Slime - Familiar
Level 3
Stats:
Strength: I0
Endurance: I0
Dexterity: I0
Agility: I0
Magic: I0
Innate Traits:
Storage — Can store and retrieve ingested substances without affecting size or weight.
Size Manipulation — Can alter size from small to gigantic form.
Assimilation — Can absorb the power of magic stones and integrate their magical energy to enhance own attributes. Does not grant full monster abilities.
Rapid Regeneration— Can rapidly regenerate lost mass using magical energy.
Amorphous Body —Immune to lesser physical damage due to gelatinous form.
Magic:
Ars Magna (Lesser)
A lesser version of his Master's Magic. No chant.
Skills:
Magic Resistance — Greatly reduces damage and effects from magical attacks.
Familiar Bond — Shares a portion of the Master's growth and experience. Power increases when fighting alongside or protecting the Master.
Developmental Abilities:
Devourer - I
Mystery - I
___
Since the Clan Trait is called Destruction not Power of Destruction, I have made that change in the status to reflect that.