Chapter 38: An Ultimate Skill?! Am I Really OP Now?!
The sun was finishing its fall over the plain.
What had been a circle of bare earth prepared to trap me was nothing now but a field of craters and bodies. Dozens of orcs lay where my lances had pinned them. At its center, the king’s pool of blood sank slowly into the churned-up ground.
And in the middle of all that, a dozen orcs were doing push-ups.
In chorus. In cadence.
The survivors, the ones I’d decided to spare now that I’d finally torn out the skill I was after. I watched them sitting on the back of the little orc who’d led me here. That one, I’d kept on purpose. While his hundred kinsmen charged screaming my name, he’d curled up in a hole and played dead. The only one to grasp that fighting me wasn’t a good idea.
He was breathing hard under my weight, flat on his belly, not daring to move.
Every time the others went down, their arms shook and threatened to give. And every time, they came back up anyway, because they’d seen what happened to the weak in this clearing.
"Eating human is not what?" I asked, without looking up from the book open on my knees.
"Eating human is not good~ good~"
They took it up in chorus, a dozen deep voices chanting the same line down and up, while I finished reading the notebook Elsa had left me.
"Eating human is not good~ good~"
I closed the book, and jumped down off the little orc’s back.
The impact flattened him into the ground. He stayed there, splayed out, gasping.
I looked over my little dozen orcs, lined up in front of me.
"You, little orc." I pointed down at him, under my feet. "I name you the new king of the orcs."
The others raised their fists.
"Ooooh. Little orc king."
I leaned down and held out Elsa’s notebook.
"Here. If by some miracle you learn to read, you’ll grow stronger from it. And you’ll make a decent king."
He took it in his two big hands, turned it one way, then the other.
"Thank you, Whitedeath."
"Now get lost."
They didn’t need telling twice. The dozen orcs bolted into the forest, the new king clutching his book to his chest.
I watched them disappear, fairly pleased with myself.
And not only because of them.
I had two more unique skills now. All the others had evolved. And I’d picked up a good pile of levels along the way.
I opened my status.
[ STATUS ]
Name: Kuro Shiragi | Race: Human | Class: Hero of the Infinite | Level: 69
[ Stats ]
Strength 164 | Vitality 49 | Agility 235 | Mana 226 | Intelligence 50 | Perception 130 | Free points: 56
[ Skills ]
[ Divine Blessing — Lv. 2 ] | [ Infinite Evolution — Lv. MAX ] | [ Eye of Infinity — Lv. 5 ] | [ Dance of the Tidal Widow — Lv. 4 ] | [ Dash — Lv. 5 ] | [ Apotheosis ] (Unique) | [ Infinite Arsenal — Lv. 3 ] | [ Mana Control — Lv. 6 ] | [ Goblinia ] (Unique) | [ Orkhan ] (Unique) | [ Trained Body — Lv. 8 ]
(Author’s note: sorry, I don’t know how I completely forgot the Trained Body skill in the earlier Chapters. I’m bringing it back here bumped up to level 8, as if it had been climbing in the background all along. Bear with me!)
Three unique skills.
I lingered a moment on that line. A few weeks earlier, I’d had only one. And I had enough free points left to shore up whatever stat I might need, the day I needed it.
But the best was yet to come. The last step, the one Elsa had written down in the notebook.
Fusion exists among us too, the people of this world, but differently. Far harder. Through training and a total understanding of our movements and our skills, we can join them into a new one.
It was vague. But enough to give me hope.
Because I had three fighting styles now. One built on fluidity and water magic. Another on reflexes, terrain, and cunning. The last on raw force and the acceleration of my mana.
Three. And they refused to layer together. I’d tried, in the heat of the fight against the king — nothing.
But if I could crack the heart of those three, and the right way to link them, I’d grow stronger still.
That was the road I was going to take. Here, now, until I couldn’t stand anymore. And thanks to Apotheosis, that wouldn’t happen.
I drew my blades.
I began with the Dance of the Tidal Widow, the water I conjured rising along the sabers as I moved, my steps sliding from one figure to the next. Then, when I felt the moment was right, I grafted Goblinia onto it.
It was instant.
My body wanted to flow and to feint at the same time, and the two contradicted each other. I tried to push my mana in several directions at once, and it tangled inside me, knotting all at once. The pain folded me in two. I dropped, my body wracked with cramps, and I screamed into the empty forest.
I stayed on the ground a while, breath short, waiting for the mana to unknot itself.
Then I got up. And I started over.
The days that followed all ran together.
I fell. I got up. I held two moves longer than the last attempt, sometimes three, and for an instant I’d think I had it — then the mana would knot, or my footing would contradict itself, and the pain would throw me back down. I slept a few hours wherever I collapsed, right on the churned earth. I woke stiff, muscles on fire, and picked up where I’d left off.
The water wanted me to flow. Goblinia wanted me to lie with my body. Orkhan wanted me to knot my mana and strike to break. Each pulled its own way. Every time I held two, the third let go.
But I kept going.
I was chasing the trance. That state where the body acts without the head stepping in, the one I’d danced hours in my own blood in, back at the castle, no longer anyone at all. I knew it was dangerous. That under Apotheosis, I could push myself far past the point my body should have given out, without knowing when to stop.
I chased it anyway.
And one morning, after how many days I couldn’t have said, I found it.
I stopped thinking, stopped deciding. My blades moved on their own, the water followed them, my feet found the ground without my guiding them. And for the first time, the three stopped fighting one another. They reached for each other, called to each other, answered.
The notifications burst across my eyes.
[ Skill Fusion ]
[ Dance of the Tidal Widow ] + [ Goblinia ] + [ Orkhan ] -> [ Worldflow — Ultimate Skill ]
[ Worldflow — Ultimate Skill ] - The user synchronizes with the world’s flow. Terrain, mana, momentum and killing intent become one continuous current. Every movement reaches optimal efficiency, every strike naturally seeks the highest probability of victory.
An... ultimate skill?!
I had no time to dwell on the word. The world had already tipped over.
Not just my body. The very way I perceived it.
Everything slowed and sharpened at once. The ground under my feet, the water clinging to my blades, the air, my own momentum — all of it flowing in a single direction, one alone, and I could see it. At every instant, I already knew which footing to take, where to set my weight, how to parcel out my mana to the tenth. Not by thinking about it. By knowing it, the way you know how to breathe.
My water, too, had changed.
It could carry me. Worldflow read the current of the world and followed it, and me with it — from one puddle to the next, from one point of water to another, sliding in the flow like a leaf in a river. And under Orkhan’s charged state, the water I drew up onto my sabers compressed to the extreme, the mana churning and furious inside it, up to a pressure I’d never have reached before.
I had to try it.
I struck the empty air in front of me. A thread of water sprang from my blade, so fine and so taut it split the earth for ten meters, a clean gash opened in the ground.
Then I threw myself into it for real.
And I danced.
The field torn apart by the fight was no longer an obstacle — every crevice, every mound, every corpse became a foothold, a step, a springboard that entered the flow. A saber cut and three mana impacts left in the same motion, the feint and the force knotted into one, a blow that lied and a blow that broke, impossible to tell apart.
I threw Naia into the air. With my free hand I flung a mist of earth laced with a veil of pressurized water, cutting, toward the enemy I imagined there — then caught Naia on its way down, without a single step of mine breaking.
And that was only the start.
Because the ground now was covered in water. My threads, my mists, my cuts had sown it with puddles.
So I vanished.
I sank into one and came out of another, ten meters away, before the first had even finished rippling. A blade came out of the water a fraction before I did. A pressurized thread swept the space I’d just left. I reappeared at the back of an enemy who didn’t exist yet, just for the pleasure of feeling the current take me again and fling me elsewhere.
Terrain, water, mana, momentum. One single current. And me flowing inside it, until I no longer knew where I ended and the world began.
I stopped at last, out of breath, after hours.
"So that’s it, then?" I breathed, feeling a familiar presence at my back.
"You’ve outrun every one of my expectations again, Kuro."
A hand settled on my shoulder. Elsa.
I let out a small laugh.
"It’s still nothing next to the monsters like you."
"Don’t get ahead of yourself." She came to stand beside me, her good eye on the wrecked field. "You’ve been here barely three months. One day, I won’t be able to land a single blow on you."
"The day that happens, the fear you drilled into me will do its work."
She laughed. Openly, this time — which threw me enough to make me forget my exhaustion for a second.
Then she went serious again.
"An ultimate skill." She shook her head slowly. "Do you even understand what that means?"
"Not really, no."
"Those who hold one number among the strongest in this world. I have only one myself."
I said nothing.
Just one. Her. Rank S. The one who’d put me on the ground dozens of times without my ever seeing her move.
And I had one now.
Three months here, and I’d just crossed a threshold. Step by step, I was closing in on the greatest this world had to offer. Elsa. Sylwen. The high demons. A few months ago, the thought alone would have kept me up at night. Tonight, it kept me warm.
"We need to go," Elsa said, already turning away. "Our next destination is waiting. Alice, too."
That name landed in my chest like a dull blow.
Alice. It had been so long since I’d seen her. I felt an eagerness I didn’t quite dare look at head-on — and, underneath it, a quiet dread of how she’d react, after all this time apart.
But curiosity won out in the end.
"Where are we going?"
"The Tower of the Fallen Heroes."
I turned to her.
"It opened only a few days ago," she went on, her gaze lost toward the west. "A relic left behind by the ancient heroes — a trial they built for those who’d come after them. Something to harden you before what’s coming, and to give you the means to survive it."
It took me a moment to answer.
"...Hold on. Something like that existed all this time, and I’m only hearing about it now?"
She gave a half-shrug, one corner of her mouth lifting.
"It doesn’t open when you want it to. Only when it decides to."
"And the others, then?" A thought had just crossed my mind. "The other heroes. They’ll be there too?"
"Exactly." The smile widened a fraction. "That’s where all of you are finally going to meet."
I tightened my grip on my sabers, the exhaustion of the last hours already far behind me.
Alice. The other heroes. A tower built by the ancient heroes, long dead. I’d written enough stories to recognize a turning point when I saw one — and something told me this one would be the greatest trial I’d faced in this world yet.