The Legend of William Oh

Chapter 185: The Beaten Path

Will thought sourly. Will told himself that to ease the sting.

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Will reviewed the Class changes for a moment, head cocked.

The ‘flavor’ portion was longer than it had been originally. Two paragraphs instead of one, and that little nod to ‘going places none before have’ felt like The Tower itself acknowledging his desire to sidestep the sudden end his predecessors had suffered.

The third paragraph, the description of the Class’s effects, was nearly the same as Resourceful Climber’s. A few key words were cut off, though.

‘But most importantly’ had been cut off in front of ‘tenacious, enduring’.

‘Minor’ had been removed in front of ‘focus in Earth and Spacetime’.

Will thought, frowning.

Will’s thoughts stopped in their tracks as his new potential Primaries began marching through his mind. And they were... good.

one

Upgrades:

Phantom Hands:

Note, not a Primary Ability. This is an upgrade to Phantom Hand. Gain a right-hand Phantom Hand and all the benefits thereof. User will not gain another Primary Ability.

Upgrade Secondary:

Holdna’s Gaze:

Active: 1 Charge

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It didn’t matter what Will chose, he was going to be kicking himself in the dick for the rest of his life for passing up on of these.

The others were mouth-watering.

Tunneling was a straight-up teleport ability, which was absolutely phenomenal. Will could vaguely guess from context that ‘contiguous’ meant ‘connected’. Maybe it had been created based on an extrapolation of how he’d moved through Kincaid’s fear.

Will had to look at all these Abilities not just based on what they could do but what he could upgrade them to accomplish in the future.

Will mentally hovered over Tunneling a moment, his mental finger hovering over the selection.

It was obviously a direct upgrade of Serpent’s gaze, but it had an added damage effect, it lasted ten times longer, and didn’t require him to see the targets’ eyes.

Not to mention as a primary, he could take it much farther than Serpent’s gaze as a secondary, and deploy it through Phantom Eye.

Will’s heart hurt.

At the end of that progression, Will could see himself creating a duplicate legendary weapon every couple weeks, by consuming the first and getting two Starters out of it then baking them in Relic dust.

Will paused, frowning.

The agonizing pain over his choice felt…constructed, and it triggered Will’s paranoia. Maybe that stemmed from Will’s inability to accept good things at face value, but he doubted it.

Will had been Climbing with Loth long enough to recognize juicy bait concealing a trap.

Will thought back to his ruminations of changing his mindset when he became a Lord, as well as his musing on the nature of his prophesized death on the 50th Floor.

I

Will turned his attention back to the two Abilities he’d casually tossed aside.

Will could see himself upgrading it to apply to all the myriad descendents of Ouroboros and creating an army of potent scaled monstrosities.

A Lord among the scaled.

Will brought up Map.

Will frowned.

Will’s eyes widened as ideas began to flash through his mind, almost too quickly to keep up. Even though he’d himself to view each Ability for its potential, he’d still been far too dismissive.

Will thought, sitting up stock straight. The prospect of simply seeing everything from a god’s-eye view, and things that others couldn’t possibly know was such a huge advantage.

Will paused.

Will held his right hand up to his gaze.

The range of his eyesight had increased by about an inch overnight, so he could just focus on thepalm of his hand.

Will sat there, staring at his own palm for several minutes. Minutes stretched into hours.

Will heard people come and go, and words were said to and around him, but he ignored them, focusing on his palm.

During a shallow moment of his trance, Anna’s voice cut through.

“Umm…are you okay?” Anna ventured to ask.

“Thinking, don’t worry.” Will breathed, his gaze unbroken as he stared at his palm.

A few hours later…inside his palm came into focus. His brain still gave it the same miasmatic blue as everything else, but it felt like a vaguely different color to his mind, simply in a way that he couldn’t describe.

Will thought, watching tiny squiggles of miasma travel through his palm, coalescing into spots like cities, branching out like rivers and roads, connecting his palm to his fingers, where they ended in little dots.

Will followed the squiggles of miasma back into his palm, back through his wrist, noting the way they suffused his skin, nerves, muscles, blood vessels, each a subtly different color and shape that allowed him to differentiate between them.

Will learned this by spotting where a branching tube of miasmatic squiggles of a subtly different color pressed up tight against those in his skin where the veins in his forearm were most visible.

It hurt his neck, it hurt his arm, it hurt his eyes to stare at his entire arm from two inches away, observing everything tiny piece by piece, unable to physically see all of it at once, like an ant on an apple.

Those squiggles that permeated him that looked like roads and rivers…Those were the effects of his Class, visible through his Uru Drake Eye.

Will thought, his skin going cold.

Will took a deep breath Will thought.

Will’s eyes narrowed even as the hair on his neck stood up. He’d never gotten that question from The System before. It was always phrased ‘do you wish’. Never ‘are you sure’.

Maybe he was making the same mistake every predecessor before him had made.

Or maybe he was going off the beaten path.