Chapter 6 Chapter 6: Rare Skill, Violent Thunder
The purple light finished dissolving into his chest.
Alex blinked.
Then the skill data bloomed across his interface, and his eyes went very still.
【 VIOLENT THUNDER, Lv.1 (Rare) 】
Summon a thundercloud covering a 12-meter radius area, lasting 2 seconds. Every second, 10 bolts of purple lightning strike all targets within range. Each lightning bolt deals 130% Magic Attack damage.
Cast Time: 2 seconds | MP Cost: 100 | Cooldown: 35 second
(Skills can be upgraded using Skill Points.)
He read it twice.
Then once more, slowly, making sure he hadn't misread anything.
Ten bolts per second. Two seconds of duration. Twenty total lightning strikes, hitting everything within a twelve-meter radius simultaneously.
"An AoE," he said quietly to himself. "Twenty lightning strikes total."
His eyes lit up with a brightness that probably would have alarmed anyone standing nearby.
He was Level 2. His Gods Chosen talent was currently adding 10% to all his damage scaling with every level he gained. And Violent Thunder's base modifier was already 130% per bolt.
Per. Bolt.
Twenty of them.
For monster farming for clearing dense packs quickly, for grinding EXP and loot at a speed nobody else in the sector could match right now this skill wasn't just good.
This was a god-tier tool.
His 210 MP would only fuel two casts before he ran dry. But at this stage of the game, two casts of something that devastated everything in a twelve-meter bubble was more than enough to reshape how fast he could work.
He thought about the Berserk Wild Boars waiting in the forest. He'd been planning to hunt them one at a time careful, methodical, kite and cast. The smart, safe approach for a Mage facing Level 2 enemies with a charge ability.
But with Violent Thunder?
Why pick them off one by one when I can hit an entire nest at once?
Mages are weak in the early game?
He almost laughed out loud.
What does that have to do with me?
His pace quickened as he headed back through Riverside Haven's gate and into the forest beyond.
Elsewhere in the forest, not far from the tree line, a different scene was playing out with considerably less optimism.
【 EndlessHorizon currently 】sitting at Rank 4 on the sector leaderboard stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set, staring at the enhancement interface hovering in front of him with the expression of a man who had been personally wronged by mathematics.
Beside him, his guildmate 【 StormWatch 】extended a reluctant hand.
"Boss. Please. Stop."
EndlessHorizon snatched the enhancement stones out of his hand before he'd finished the sentence.
"If Ace can get to plus-twenty," he said through his teeth, "I refuse to believe I can't crack plus-thirteen."
StormWatch rubbed his face with both hands.
"Boss. You have a forty percent success rate at plus-thirteen. You've failed *five times. It's dropped back down to plus-eleven. Do you have any idea how long it took everyone to farm those stones?"
The other newly recruited members of the Eternal Guild stood in a loose semicircle behind them, watching in uncomfortable silence. Nobody stepped forward. Nobody wanted to be the one who pushed EndlessHorizon over the edge when he was already this close to it.
"With those stones," StormWatch continued, voice strained with the specific exhaustion of someone who has given good advice and watched it be ignored repeatedly, "you could take your other gear slots to plus-ten across the board. That's actual, reliable stat gains. Instead of"
"I have a feeling," EndlessHorizon interrupted, not looking at him, eyes fixed on the interface, "that this time it's going to work. I can feel it. This is the one."
He hit enhance.
The interface flashed.
【 Enhancement failed. 】
A long silence.
"ARGH!"
The sound that came out of EndlessHorizon was less a word and more a raw expression of suffering. Several nearby Adventurers turned to look. A Wild Rabbit in the undergrowth behind them decided to relocate.
StormWatch stared at the sky and said nothing.
"Keep recruiting in the chat channel!" EndlessHorizon snapped, whirling away from the interface and pacing. "We need more members more people means more stones, more resources, faster development! Numbers are our advantage! And I will surpass Ace on that leaderboard I swear it!"
He stopped pacing. Turned back to the interface.
"One more try."
"Boss"
"One more try."
On the other side of the forest, Alex had already entered the Wild Boar hunting ground.
He'd made two quiet adjustments before leaving the town.
First: he hid his title display. The 【 The Great First Step 】tag pulsed purple and visible from thirty feet away too conspicuous, too much of a target painted on his back.
Second: he suppressed the visual effect on his staff. The +20 gold glow was beautiful and he was genuinely proud of it, but broadcasting I have max-enhanced legendary-adjacent equipment to every Adventurer in the vicinity felt like an invitation he didn't want to accept right now.
With both hidden, he looked like any other unremarkable Level 2 Mage with a plain staff and starter-adjacent gear. Average. Forgettable. Exactly what he wanted.
The leaderboard death count had done that to him.
89,451 out of 100,000 active Adventurers. In one sector. In one morning.
Over ten thousand people permanent death while he'd been busy feeling invincible.
He wasn't invincible. He had two resurrections and a talent that made him powerful, not unkillable. There was a difference, and forgetting it would get him killed just as dead as anyone else.
Beyond the threat of monsters, there was the threat of people. He was the most famous Adventurer in the sector right now first kill, first +20 enhancement, first safe zone arrival, first on the leaderboard. The regional chat was full of people asking who Ace was. Some of those people were curious. Some were admiring.
And some were quietly calculating how much his gear would drop if they killed him.
Before I've widened the gap enough to make myself untouchable stay invisible. Stay quiet.
Low profile, for now.
He stepped into the Wild Boar Forest.
The canopy thickened overhead, filtering the light into long greenish shafts between the trees. The ground was soft and dark, churned up in places where something large had been moving through it repeatedly.
Then the trees opened up, and Alex's field of view expanded, and he stopped walking for just a moment.
Wild Boars. Everywhere.
Not one or two. Not a small group.
At least a dozen Berserk Wild Boars occupied the clearing ahead massive black shapes moving between the trees, tusks gleaming, making the ground tremble faintly with each step. The closest ones were perhaps twenty meters away, heads down, rooting at the earth.
He pulled up their stats automatically.
【 BERSERK WILD BOAR Lv.2 】
Physical Attack: 25 | Physical Defense: 9 | Magic Defense: 5 | HP: 120
Alex frowned slightly.
120 HP. They were at 100 an hour ago.
The world was scaling. Monsters were getting stronger in real time which meant the window where he had a comfortable power advantage over the local wildlife was not infinite. He needed to move faster, level faster, gear up faster.
He also had 49 Magic Attack and a Rare AoE skill that dealt 130% damage per bolt.
Twenty bolts. Per cast.
He tightened his grip on the staff.
"Let's pull a wave first. Test the numbers."
He stepped forward, deliberately crossing into the nearest boar's aggro radius.
The closest Berserk Wild Boar's head snapped up. Small red eyes locked onto him. It let out a sound that was less a grunt and more a rolling bass rumble and charged.
The second boar heard it. Turned. Charged.
The third. The fourth.
Within four seconds, the entire clearing was moving a dozen black, tusk-heavy, furious shapes all converging on the same target.
On Alex Carter.
Who was standing completely still in the middle of it, staff raised, eyes fixed on the thundercloud already beginning to form at the tip.
Forty feet away, half-hidden behind a tree line, a five-man party had just finished killing a single Berserk Wild Boar.
All five of them were breathing hard. The Warrior had taken a tusk hit that had carved his HP bar down to a third. The Healer was frantically cycling through MP potions. The whole fight had taken the better part of three minutes, and they had one kill to show for it.
"Finally," the Warrior exhaled, putting his hands on his knees. "That hide is unreal."
"Thank God we're partied up," the Archer said, shaking out his drawing hand. "Solo? I'd be dead. Easy."
"Hey" The second Archer suddenly straightened. "Did anyone else feel that? Like a tremor?"
"Look." The Priest pointed, arm extending slowly. "Over there."
They looked.
Through the trees, maybe sixty meters away, a figure stood alone in the middle of the clearing.
Young. Plain gear. Staff that looked like it had been bought at a starter shop. A Mage, by the look of him slight build, no armor worth mentioning, nothing about him that said this person is prepared for what's about to happen to him.
And bearing down on him from every direction: twelve Berserk Wild Boars at full charge.
The five of them stared.
"Is that—"
"A Mage."
"Solo."
"Against all of them."
A beat of silence.
"He's dead," the Warrior said flatly. "There's no world where that ends any other way."
"Ten seconds," the Archer said. "I'm being generous. Ten seconds, he's gone."
"Ten?" The second Archer shook his head. "Five. If he lasts five seconds, I'll call him my godfather and mean it."
They watched, with the specific attentive horror of people watching something about to go very wrong and being unable to look away.
Alex waited until the leading boar was eight meters out.
Then he raised the staff, breathed out once, and cast.
Violent Thunder.
The sky above the clearing cracked open.
A thundercloud deep purple-black, seething with electricity, twelve meters across materialized overhead between one heartbeat and the next. The air pressure in the clearing dropped noticeably. Every boar in the pack faltered mid-stride as the charge built in the atmosphere above them.
Then the first wave hit.
CRACK, CRACK, CRACK, CRACK
Ten bolts of purple lightning detonated simultaneously across the pack, each one striking with the sound of a small explosion, each one carrying the full weight of 130% of his Magic Attack.
Damage numbers erupted above the boars like a fireworks display.
-65!
-130! ⚡ CRITICAL HIT! (×2 Damage)
-65!
-65!
-97! 🎯 WEAK POINT STRIKE! (×1.5 Damage)
-65!
The boar that took the critical hit stopped moving entirely.
A flash of white light and it was gone.
【 DING! Berserk Wild Boar eliminated. EXP +2 | Copper Coins +20 | Boar Skeleton +1 | Common Enhancement Stone +2 】
One down. Nine lightning bolts still falling.
The second wave crashed before the first had finished echoing.
CRACK CRACK CRACK
-65!
-97! 🎯 WEAK POINT STRIKE!
-65!
The boars that had taken two bolts collapsed in rapid succession. At 120 HP and Magic Defense of only 5, two clean lightning strikes was all it took. Three bolts made it instant.
Miserable squealing erupted across the clearing.
【 DING! Berserk Wild Boar eliminated. EXP +2 | Copper Coins +20 | Boar Skeleton +1 | Basic MP Potion ×2 】
【 DING! Berserk Wild Boar eliminated. EXP +2 | Copper Coins +20 | Boar Skeleton +1 | Common Enhancement Stone ×2 】
【 DING! Berserk Wild Boar eliminated... 】
【 DING! Berserk Wild Boar eliminated... 】
Notification chimes stacked on top of each other so fast they blurred together into a continuous sound, like a slot machine paying out in every direction at once.
Alex was grinning. He couldn't help it. The grin had arrived at some point during the first wave of lightning and had shown absolutely no interest in leaving.
"Ten." He counted the white flashes of dissolving boars as they blinked out across the clearing. "One skill. Ten boars."
One-fifth of the quest. In two seconds.
He did the math quickly on EXP. Each boar gave 2 points. He needed 250 kills to hit Level 3. That was a lot of boars but with Violent Thunder resetting every 35 seconds and an entire forest of them spawning around him?
It's workable. Grind harder.
He'd also noticed something interesting during the fight. One of the bolts had hit a boar squarely in the skull dead center and triggered the Weak Point bonus. 1.5× damage, separate from the critical hit multiplier. If a Weak Point strike also critted 1.5× first, then 2× on top of that the result was 3× total damage from a single bolt.
3× at 130% Magic Attack, with 49 base Magic Attack, plus talent bonus
The number he got when he finished the calculation made him exhale slowly.
That will one-shot almost anything at this tier.
He needed to learn the weak points on every monster type in this forest. Head and heart for most animals he already knew that from the system database. But the specifics for boars, the exact pixel of skull that triggered the bonus, he'd figure that out through practice.
He was already thinking about the next pull when the commotion behind him registered.
Back at the tree line, all five members of the party were standing in complete silence.
The Warrior had forgotten he was still crouching in a combat stance. The Healer was holding an MP potion she'd been about to drink, hand frozen halfway to her mouth. Both Archers had lowered their weapons without noticing.
Ten boars.
Ten Berserk Wild Boars.
Two seconds.
The same monsters that had just taken the five of them three full minutes and nearly wiped their entire HP pool to kill one of them, not ten had evaporated in a two-second thunderstorm cast by a lone Mage in starter gear.
The Warrior opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"The five of us," he said slowly, like he was recounting a trauma, "spent ages grinding down one. And he just"
"One-thirty damage," the second Archer said. His voice had a slightly hollow quality. "One bolt hit for one-thirty. I saw it. That's not Mages aren't supposed to in the early game"
"Is he even human?" the first Archer said. Not as a joke. As a genuine question.
"His talent." The Priest said it with the quiet certainty of someone arriving at an answer they didn't entirely want. "Has to be S-rank at minimum. Maybe higher. Nobody hits those numbers at Level 2 otherwise. That's not possible."
Another moment of collective stunned silence.
Then, as if a switch had been thrown simultaneously in all five of them:
"That's a big shot."
"That is absolutely a big shot."
"We need to go talk to him. Right now."
"I'm going first."
They were already moving, pushing through the undergrowth toward the clearing, tripping over roots in their haste, all five of them talking over each other in the scramble to
be closest.
"Big shot!" The Warrior reached the edge of the clearing first and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Take me on as your lackey I'm seriously capable, I'll carry your bags, I'll tank anything"
"Big shot!" The first Archer skidded up behind him. "If you don't mind I'd genuinely be honored to call you my godfather!"
