Chapter 57: Chapter 56: Who Would Disturb a Sleeping Lion? Part II
[You have been affected by ice magic. You are now afflicted by Frostbite.]
[Frostbite prevented by status immunity effect.]
The message alerts came up one after the other. The most annoying thing about ice magic was its additional effect, called Frostbite. Frostbite lowered your movement and attack speed.
There wasn’t much damage to it compared to fire magic’s Burn effect, but it was still the most effective debuff, as the more it stacked, the more movement and attack speed was lowered.
I can finally see the effectiveness of the Unrivaled skill. My high health, VIT, and WIL were enough to deal with the damage from Kim Jihan’s ice magic.
[HP: 958,185/977,500
Fatigue: 1]
According to my health UI, I noticed that I barely lost 20,000 points in health from the two Ice Arrows. That was less than 10,000 points of damage per arrow, barely enough damage to affect me. I continued to get closer to the guy frantically throwing knives at me.
“What the hell? Why isn’t Frostbite working?” Lee Jiwon’s back should have been covered in ice from the Frostbite effect when he got hit by the two Ice Arrows, but his back was clean.
“Gah! His feet! I said, get his feet!” I ignored whatever attacks Kim Jihan threw my way and when I got close enough to that Specialist guy, I swung my greatsword at his waist with the intent to slice him in half.
The Specialist kept backing up to dodge my attack, but the alleyway was too narrow for him to move efficiently. He stopped backing up and tried to block my attack with a knife, but the difference in our strength was too great. My greatsword cut through the knife and cut deeply into the Specialist’s side.
“Gahh!” The Specialist scrunched his face in pain. He could see that he just lost more than 7% of his health. It wasn’t a skill; it was just a normal attack, and it hit that hard!
The Specialist put so many of his stats into AGI and focused his skills into the throwing dagger tree. He learned every skill he could: active skills like Increase Throwing Dagger Capacity, Homing Throwing Daggers, Exploding Throwing Daggers, Angled Throw, and Hidden Wounds, along with passive skills like Throwing Dagger Mastery, Increase Throwing Dagger Accuracy, Increase Throwing Dagger Damage, Increase Throwing Dagger Attack Range, and Increase AGI. However, all of these skills proved to be dead weight now. He had nothing to block the attack.
“He’s so fast!” The Specialist could only remark at the insane speed Lee Jiwon moved wielding that greatsword. He could also feel the difference in STR between them when he tried to block the attack with his dagger. When he realized the difference in power, he could only look at Lee Jiwon in bewilderment. He was nothing like what the information said. He wanted to take that report and throw it back at the guild master right now, but it had to wait. He had to get away from this abomination first!
I used the greatsword’s momentum to swing my body around and attacked the Specialist once more. But instead of meeting flesh, my sword met something hard.
“What?” The Specialist had jumped over my attack and deftly climbed up the building, leaving my sword buried into the wall two meters deep. At least there didn’t seem to be anyone inside…
“This is fun.” I looked up at the Specialist and smiled. I jumped up from the ground and chased after him.
“Eeek! Homing Throwing Daggers!” As the Specialist wall-jumped between the two buildings, he noticed that Lee Jiwon was hot on his heels. He threw out a flurry of throwing daggers. He knew that a head-on attack wouldn’t work, and threw his daggers past Lee Jiwon. As soon as they flew past, the Specialist bent a finger and the daggers turned in mid-air towards Lee Jiwon’s back. The Specialist then clenched his hand into a fist and at that moment, the daggers sped towards Lee Jiwon’s back.
The Specialist heard the four daggers find their mark and smiled. It was his ace in the hole. If he could train this skill more, he could control up to eight daggers, but he could only manage four right now.
But those four daggers had never let him down before!
“Activate Hidden Wounds! Activate Grave Shock! Activate Critical Bleeding!” As soon as he saw the four daggers stab into Lee Jiwon’s back, he activated three critical effects in row. Each dagger carried all three effects, causing the damage to more than triple. This was more effective against mages with low VIT or assassins with high AGI, such as himself. These effects would decrease the opponents’ abilities by 50%.
He doubted that Lee Jiwon’s VIT was as high as his AGI and STR. If his VIT was…then the guild master made a mistake taking this mission. This mission wasn’t worth five times the normal rate; he would have accepted no less than twenty. But that’s impossible. He wasn’t planning on killing Lee Jiwon with this attack. He had to kidnap him. He just had to slow him down enough until the other guys got here.
But the Specialist’s smile disappeared in a matter of seconds.
“…” He didn’t want Lee Jiwon to come out of his Groggy state, but he didn’t think there was a problem when Lee Jiwon fell towards the ground when he lost his balance. He knew his attack succeeded. Everyone he attacked like this reacted the same way.
“That was tingly.” Lee Jiwon smiled.
The Specialist knew he was right once more. Today was going to be a bleak day.
I knew that the four daggers were flying at my back, but I ignored them. I didn’t want to jump from wall to wall to try and dodge them. The Specialist guy was right in front of me and I didn’t want to lose him by trying to dodge a few daggers. I felt the daggers dig into my back, but didn’t feel enough pain to make me stumble or anything. When that guy activated his skills, I felt a different kind of pain.
“Activate Hidden Wounds! Activate Grave Shock! Activate Critical Bleeding!” I felt more damage from the skills than from the daggers. I would have almost lost my focus from the Shock if it weren’t for my Unrivaled skill.
[You have been Shocked.]
[Shock prevented by status immunity effect.]
I smiled. “That was tingly.” I jumped back up at the Specialist when he showed an opening in his confusion. I aimed the tip of my sword at his abdomen. The Specialist finally noticed me coming and tried to dodge to the right, but my sword was faster. The blade stabbed in through his left kidney and went through the building behind him.
“Got you now!”
The Specialist knew that he was lacking in STR, but he still burned with indignation. He had put in 3,500 of his 5,500 total stat points. He had put 1,300 in STR, 500 in VIT and 200 in WIL. He even used items and equipment to bring his total AGI up to 3,900. He couldn’t believe that there was someone else that could move as fast as him and have just as high STR and VIT.
The Specialist had used his high AGI and daggers to outpace his opponents and drain their stamina. The only person that this fight style never worked against was the Hitman Guild’s guild master. But he wasn’t furious back then like he was now. The guild master had to be careful and find an opening, and didn’t charge in like this guy.
The Specialist looked down at the blade that had impaled his left side and knew that there was no other way to get out and threw his body to the right.
“Gahhhh!” His abdomen was cleanly sliced a third of the way through. He could even hear his ribs grind against the blade. The Specialist quickly took out a Shining Health Potion from his inventory and quaffed it. His ripped skin stitched itself together, but he couldn’t do anything about his fatigue, which had sharply increased. He didn’t know if he could last the five-minute potion cooldown.
“Why did you take a potion? Such a waste. Your health is going to drop again, anyway. Shouldn’t you save your golden rings?” I asked the Specialist who had nearly ripped his body apart just to get away.
“Exploding Dagger!”
I just about had him. With that much damage, his fatigue should have gone through the roof. That much would be fatal.
The concept of self-contemplation was something of a distant dream to devas. If devas got tired, then they got really tired; so tired to the point that their abilities lost just about all effectiveness. The only way to prevent that from happening was to learn the Berserker skill.
The Specialist threw a dagger at my face and the dagger exploded. I didn’t take any damage from it, but I was blinded by the smoke.
“Multi Dagger Throw!” I saw and heard a storm of daggers fly at me through the smoke. It was going to be hard to predict where the daggers would hit. It didn’t matter. If I couldn’t block them all, I could just take the hits. My VIT and health could take it. My VIT made my body even more resilient, so I wasn’t going to take much physical harm. That was why I just couldn’t give up on VIT.
I tightened my grip on my sword and raised my left hand to cover my face. I walked through the smoke towards the source of all those daggers. My shoulders, thighs, and sides were pierced by one dagger each. The rest flew past me. I felt a slight pain from the three daggers, but it was nothing compared to the attack from before. I grit my teeth, sped up and swung my greatsword in front of me.
I felt the blade hit something.
“Ah…shit!” When I heard the Specialist shout, I jumped off a wall and threw myself at him.
“Gahh!” I had my shoulder against his chest, and he grunted in pain.
I smiled. “Got you. This is the second time, now. How will you get out of this one now?” I asked, watching him gasp in pain.
The Specialist was frustrated. Fuck! He could barely talk with his chest feeling like it was caving in. He had never felt this frustrated since he became a dagger thrower. He was frustrated that he couldn’t hurt his opponent. No, he knew he was doing some damage, but Lee Jiwon kept coming at him like it was nothing. In other words, he just wasn’t doing enough!
He began to think that his attacks never did much damage in the first place. He couldn’t put much into his STR after investing so much in his AGI. He was mad at himself, thinking that even though he put whatever he had left into his STR, it just wasn’t enough.
He knew that he couldn’t survive until the others got here. He had totally underestimated this guy.
The Specialist could only bitterly laugh in pain.
