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It was not a joke either when he said Perception was a big reason why he could upgrade the skills the way he did. Rather than do a long time of experimenting and theorizing, he could feel and perceive the skills and how they worked and potentially find snags and room for improvement, along with discovering potential areas to build upon for an upgrade. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed him to faster rule out dead ends and ideas that were too hard to pull off with Jake’s current level of skill and grade.

As for how many skills Jake had managed to upgrade during this month? Three in total. Each upgrade used different methods and approaches but resulted in the same: Jake growing stronger. All were skills parts of Jake’s usual toolbox and perhaps his most essential ones in a fight.

He had been a busy hunter, and the first skill was one he used all the time.

Splitting Arrow, or more accurately, Enhanced Splitting Arrow. Currently sitting at rare rarity since just after Jake evolved to D-grade, where he had upgraded it from uncommon rarity to allow the split to work with his Arcane Hunter’s Arrows. That upgrade had allowed the arrow to split and retain innate magical properties.

It was a simple yet effective skill.

[Enhanced Splitting Arrow (Rare)] – A skill most often used by archers, now usurped and reformed by the Avaricious Arcane Hunter. Allows you to clone your arrows while in flight, allowing them to retain innate magical properties. Each arrow strikes with the power of the original. Adds a small bonus to the effect of Agility and Wisdom when using Enhanced Splitting Arrow.

Paths of improvement? Several. Jake had many ideas. Some of the first that sprung to mind was to allow it to clone even the poison on the arrows and other external magical properties. As an example, then Jake could not split an Arcane Powershot as the Powershot added properties to the arrow that were not innate. Okay, while he could probably still split it, all it would do was make the attack weaker, so it wasn’t worth it.

However, this method of improvement quickly hit a snag in that one of the biggest strengths of Splitting Arrow was speed and how subtle it was to use. If Jake wanted to make it so much more powerful, the skill would require a lot more energy to use as Jake did pay mana and stamina when he split arrows, and dependent on the poison, the cost could get insane. Sleeping Night Toxin would be so darn expensive to clone. Jake was not even sure he had the mana pool for it. So he quickly moved away from doing that.

Which is when Jake remembered his most important motto. Keep things simple. Why would he need to really change the skill? He just needed to improve it. Make it better than what it was. So why not just do that? Focus on improving every aspect there already was – something that would become a theme with these three upgrades. For Splitting Arrow, he felt like he needed to truly understand the process that caused the arrows to split and improve upon that.

Jake did have utterly bonkers Perception, so it was only right to put it to use. He thoroughly analyzed the moment his arrows split and the entire process from start to end. Since gaining it, the skill had gotten a lot stronger already. The resource cost was lower per split than the day he got it, and he had an easier time splitting more arrows than before. This alone was perhaps enough for an upgrade if he pursued it more actively, but Jake went in another direction. One he also believed would shore up even more room for future upgrades and improvement. A path where Jake had taken a lot of inspiration from the Sword Saint and the duel they had. The result had been better than expected.

[Splitting Arrow Rain (Epic)] – A skill most often used by archers, now usurped and reformed by the Avaricious Arcane Hunter. Allows you to clone your arrows while in flight, allowing them to retain innate magical properties. Each arrow has variable strength and can be further split into less potent versions. If the original arrow is shot upwards, it can be split to create a far more potent arrow rain. Adds a small bonus to the effect of Agility and Wisdom when using Splitting Arrow Rain. Increased damage based on Perception and the distance the arrows fall from when creating an arrow rain.

Jake did not have a good area of effect skill before besides just a lot of arcane magic. Now, Jake had what could thoroughly be classified as a disaster-level attack. Pre-upgrade, each Splitting Arrow had the power of the original, but with this version, Jake could vary it. He could make ten arrows with the power of the original or a hundred arrows with about twenty percent of the originals… because, yes, they actually retained more power than math would otherwise suggest.

The upgrade had come during a fight with a massive water elemental while crossing a small part of one of the oceans of Earth. It had been larger than any creature Jake had faced before and relied solely on its massive resource pools to survive. Jake had bombarded it with thousands of arrows every few seconds and shown it that he, too, had a lot of resources to spend. And mana potions.

Something had to be said about watching a rain of arrows that each exploded upon impact. With a bit of practice, Jake could truly make it look like it rained as he shot the arrows into the air and let them rain down on his foe. His archery skill was also an important aspect of this skill, allowing him to bend the original arrow and make it fall faster and at slightly different angles than just straight down.

The elemental had died simply due to being bombarded for long enough and from far enough up in the air – because, yes, Jake just flying really high up in the air and him then shooting down counted as creating an arrow rain. Granted, Jake would have been screwed against the elemental if it had just run away underwater, but Sandy had done Cosmic Generis Worm stuff and made it so the elemental could not flee underwater by messing with space itself to effectively solidify the liquid. The more Jake spent time with the worm, the more he realized how messed up of a creature Sandy was.

Anyway. Splitting Arrow was the first skill Jake improved, and once that was done, he moved on to another staple.

Arcane Powershot.

If there was one skill Jake would say truly was the core of his fighting style, it had to be this. Jake had gotten Powershot all the way back at level 10, right after he got out of the Challenge Dungeon. Since then, it had been his best archery skill, if Jake said so himself, but more than anything, it was his skill. He had upgraded it twice himself already, and out of all his skills, he didn’t have one he felt more familiar with. Without lying, he would probably want to keep Arcane Powershot over all other archery skills he currently had, even if that would be illogical.

Either way, it was probably his best combat skill. All others had conditions or only worked well when used with others, but where would he be without Powershot? Probably at a far lower level, if not dead. It was only right to give the skill some love, and this time around, Jake took a note out of a Primordial’s book: Valdemar.

The thing about skill upgrades was that there were several ways to do it. The most usual way was to add more to the skill, like how Jake had just improved Splitting Arrow to be able to split more and added the arrow rain function. But there was another way.

Refine and improve. Do not change the core of the skill itself but simply make everything about it better. Concepts did not even need to be added; you just had to better understand those that were already there. Out of all the Primordials, Valdemar was the best at this. He was a simple man, and as a simple man, he had simple skills.

His go-to was a simple chop. Jake had seen this simple chop smash through the barriers of the Malefic Viper and tear his flesh and bones apart as space and reality itself bent and buckled under his power. This was not simply because he was strong but because of the skill the would-be Primordial used. It looked like a common rarity skill, but in reality, it had likely been mythical or beyond during their confrontation at S-grade.

Jake had gone in a similar direction as Valdemar and thoroughly analyzed Arcane Powershot. As mentioned before, Jake was already intimately familiar with the skill and only sought to improve every aspect. Arcane Powershot was inherently a bit chaotic due to the destructive arcane energies, but that was primarily due to Jake’s lacking control. The more stable energy he could actively control and pour in, the more destructive energy he could stabilize and infuse into the attack. The end result would still look chaotic, and the purpose was still to push himself to his utmost limits – something Arcane Powershot had not really allowed him to do for a while.

He wanted to go back to those days when he felt his own muscles burn, his skin peel off from destructive energies, and his bow struggled to not break apart from the sheer level of energy infused. After days of slowly refining the skill and dozens of dead C-grades that became victims to his Path, the system rewarded his efforts.

[Arcane Powershot (Epic)] – Stamina the fuel – Mana the guide – Arcane the power. Evolved from Infused Powershot, it now uses a higher concept of mana to amplify itself. The higher the magnitude of the charge, the greater the stamina and mana expenditure. Arcane Powershot’s power is dependent on the charging duration, but due to your Arcane Mana’s inherent power, the base power without any charging is significantly higher than Infused Powershot. Adds a small bonus to the effectiveness of Agility and Strength as well as a medium bonus to the effectiveness of Intelligence when using Arcane Powershot.

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[Arcane Powershot (Ancient)] – Stamina the fuel – Mana the guide – Arcane the power. Using your arcane energy, charge a devastating attack using a bow that pushes your body, will, and control to their limits. The higher the magnitude of the charge, the greater the stamina and mana expenditure. Arcane Powershot’s power is dependent on the charging duration but has a powerful baseline due to your arcane affinity. Adds a medium bonus to the effectiveness of Agility and Strength as well as a substantial bonus to the effectiveness of Intelligence when using Arcane Powershot.

There was no interesting fight that spawned this upgrade. Jake had not made it to battle a certain foe like the massive water elemental. The upgrade had come during one of his many times using it to first engage a foe, and everything had just clicked and fallen into place.

The change in the description was intriguing. Primarily how nothing had really changed functionality-wise, yet it was quite different word-wise. All references to Infused Powershot were gone and now replaced with their own text, indicating that the skill was now more divorced from Infused Powershot than before. The changes were so few that not even the skill name had changed; the rarity had just upgraded.

Did Jake complain about this? No. No, he did not. His only possible area of criticism was in that there was still no inherent Perception-scaling in the skill, but it was acceptable for now. The skill did still kind of scale with Perception simply because it empowered attacks that did scale with the stat.

In that fight where it had clicked, the energy had moved more smoothly than ever before. First, a stream of pure stability had entered his muscles, bones, skin, and bow. A fraction of a second later, the destructive energies had come, but Jake had protected himself already. The two energies interacted and rapidly reached equilibrium as Jake mixed stamina and mana far more efficiently than before he began practicing the upgrade. His efforts were rewarded as the skill upgraded and system assistance kicked in.

The Arcane Powershot Jake had released had been by far the strongest he had ever used outside of one using Hunting Momentum, and Jake was already beginning to see a path to a goal he had formed for himself. Something he had done in E-grade and wanted to repeat in D-grade if possible:

Kill prey a grade above himself with a single shot.

The final skill to be upgraded was a bit of a surprise. Arcane Hunter’s Arrows.

This one honestly wasn’t one Jake had been actively going for; it had just kind of happened as he worked on his other skills. This skill was one of those semi-passive ones that he didn’t think actively about, but seeing as it was his source of projectiles ninety-nine percent of the time, he probably should consider it more.

The skill was honestly a bit… meh? Like there wasn’t much to it, and it barely fit him as an Avaricious Arcane Hunter. It fit the Arcane Hunter part, but there was nothing avaricious about it. The avaricious tag usually just meant he dealt more damage to foes above his own level and sometimes less against those at a lower level. Most often than not, the tradeoff was just that the upgrade only worked on those at a higher level, making it a demerit by omission.

What Jake had gone for this time around was to better introduce his class into the skill along with his increased level of control. Once more, he dove into the vast treasure trove of Perception and better analyzed the arrows. Jake had already applied many concepts to them before and was rather used to them. He had found ways to infuse the Stealth Attack Concept better and now worked with Hunting Momentum. and began to practice a bit by first making a bunch of Arrows of the Ambitious Hunter since the skills were a bit similar. The difference was that the Arrow of the Ambitious Hunter was a singular, far more powerful arrow and one that also contained the concept that allowed him to deal more damage to enemies of a higher level. Jake wanted to take that element and apply it to Arcane Hunter’s Arrows.

Jake did have to be careful not to change the skill too much, though, as one of the best things about the Arcane Hunter’s Arrows skill was the instantaneous summon. If the skill lost that functionality, he would probably have to switch back to just using a quiver that conjured arrows, which would suck.

As he was trying to work this concept into the arrows, he also began to ask himself why he only ever shot arrows that were either stable or destructive. Like, he knew it was best to go all-in with one element, but why have it be all static? Jake could make stable balls of arcane energy and then make those explode. His arcane bolts were stable at one moment and then destructive the next. That shouldn’t be too hard to also do with arrows, right?

Nope, it wasn’t. Considering Jake had spent an entire month focusing on upgrading skills, his mindset was already well-adjusted mentally to focus. And after he began to be able to change the equilibrium of the arrows, he tried to also apply the avaricious element. He thought it would be hard, but that very day, he had gotten the upgrade.

[Arcane Hunter’s Arrows (Epic)] - A mage and a hunter both, you combine your talents as you conjure your tools of destruction. Allows the Avaricious Arcane Hunter to conjure arrows made of highly-condensed arcane mana, focusing on either destruction or stability. A stable arrow will be sharp and durable, while a destructive arrow will explode upon impact. Conjuring arrows consume mana, and the conjuration is instant. Adds a bonus to the effectiveness of Intelligence and Wisdom when using destructive Arcane Hunter’s Arrows. Adds a bonus to the effectiveness of Wisdom and Perception when using stable Arcane Hunter’s Arrows.

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[Avaricious Arcane Hunter’s Arrows (Ancient)] - A hunter embracing control over all energy, you combine your talents as you conjure your tools of destruction. Allows the Avaricious Arcane Hunter to conjure arrows made of highly-condensed arcane mana, focusing on either destruction or stability during the creation process. A stable arrow will be sharp and durable, while a destructive arrow will explode upon impact. Conjuring arrows consume mana, and the conjuration is instant. The user can change the balance of the energy within the arrow remotely. Deals slightly increased damage against foes at a higher level. Adds a bonus to the effectiveness of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Perception when using Avaricious Arcane Hunter’s Arrows.

Jake had to admit that this one was the cheapest upgrade out of all of them. The amount of system assistance that came in was insane. This was one of those instances where the upgrade path had been pre-determined already, almost just waiting for Jake to discover this way to improve it.

The result was slightly more powerful arrows that were better against foes at a higher level, which naturally meant more damage to everything. The ability to change the balance of destruction and stability on the fly was also a great addition for quite a few reasons. Where Jake applied this upgrade the most was, of course, by shooting a stable arrow, and once it was close to its target, he made it explode. No, Jake could not blow up an arrow already embedded in his foe. He tried, and it failed every time.

This one was still a new addition, and Jake had more science to do before he had figured out everything.

Every single skill upgrade also improved all existing properties, even if new ones were added. This month of hunting had been perhaps the most fruitful period Jake had ever had in D-grade when it came to improving his fighting power. Jake still wanted to improve some things, but time was limited. Soon enough, he would have to resolve everything going on with Earth.

”I am done eating!” Sandy said to Jake as the giant worm flew over, having consumed the entire field of fruit trees. Jake stared out over the ocean and smiled at the worm as he shook his head, telling himself to focus on what lay ahead. They were about to head across the ocean for the first time.

The geography of the Earth had truly changed a lot, and one of the changes was the placement of land and ocean. You could walk nearly anywhere without crossing an ocean as paths connected almost everywhere, but there were still parts without a reliable way across. These narrow points were all they had crossed so far, but to go further, they had to head straight through the open ocean. That, or potentially take a long way around. Jake would lie if he said he wasn’t looking forward to their sea trip, at least a little.

On a side note, the ”ocean” Jake had crossed with Carmen was not truly an ocean. Jake realized that now. It was more just a massive lake still connected to the ocean, though, by old-world standards, that lake was indeed ocean-sized.

”Did you know that even before the system, we knew so little about what hid in the depths of the ocean? Had so much of it still unexplored? Some even said we knew more of space than the depths of our own seas,” he asked his wormy companion.

”No?” Sandy asked as Jake felt the mental version of an eye roll. ”How would I know? I am a Sand Worm. It would be very weird if I knew what you humans were up to before the system.”

”My point is,” Jake said, waving off the worm, ”I am looking forward to seeing what monsters may roam over the vast oceans.”

”I am more wondering what kind of tasty things these monsters are hiding away,” Sandy said with glee. ”But no going into the water. No way we are doing that.”

”That we agree on,” Jake said.

There was no fucking way he would willingly face a C-grade in underwater combat.