Alice’s Path Forward: Custom Skills!  

As Alice prepared her plans, her eyes loomed over a prompt that she always kept open, reminding her of her mission

[A new quest is available! Arthur Dragonheart has started preparations to invade North America. He has decided to devote all of his available troops to this cause! The Vanguard Forces are led by one of his Supremes, the Undying Witch, Supreme Tidal! 

Part 1: Supreme Tidal will launch her offensive within 7 days. If you are not back in B30 by the time she sets foot on American land, the mission will be a failure. Return to Miami and receive her with a 'warm welcome' befitting a disciple of the Mad One.

Quest Requirements: Successfully fend off The Attacks of Tidal Witch's forces

Quest Rank: B+

Reward: Mystic Harmony License

Part 2: Supreme Tidal is not the only Supreme coming. 2 more Supremes will accompany her for this war after the first wave. Find them and defeat them in a public battle. You are not allowed to fight with uncontracted beings in this battle.

Quest Requirements: Defeat The Tidal Witch and Her Supreme companions in a battle in front of a large crowd of spectators without killing them.

Quest Difficulty: A+

Reward: Worldwide Evolution Card]

According to Letty, if Earth was conquered by Eridium, it would be subjected to the latter's whims. Earth had quite a few things that Eridium desired, especially its dungeons.

To users, dungeons were essentially mines where they obtained resources for cultivating. New dungeons had a high chance of containing rare resources. The second resource of Earth is population. Slaves were essentially free labour, and Eridium was not above slavery. Letty had seen several worlds where the entire population had been enslaved. For Alice and the others, this was the worst possible scenario.

In her talks with Will, Alice understood that she could greatly contribute to saving Earth if she achieved certain tasks.

First, she had to be capable of defending Tsimikas from all incoming invaders without Woodsy or Merlin interfering. Secondly, she had to learn how to infuse the illusion abilities she gained from the worm in her mind with her class-related skills. Her class was similar to Water Meisters in that it was a class meant for the creation of Custom Skills!

The system had four ways of categorizing skills. The first method was through skill books, which are dropped by demonic beasts once you kill them. This is purely a random process that depends on chance because monsters can drop many things besides skill books, such as items, scrolls, ores etc.

One can try and emulate a skill from a skill book, if you do it successfully, you gain the skill permanently and the system will reward you, depending on the difficulty of the skill, for example, Will's water blade. It was a very common skill, one that the system had, thus it did not count as a custom skill.

The second method was through class changes. When you gain or upgrade a class, it comes with new skills. These skills were often more powerful than ones gained from drops because they were more fundamental to the class itself.

The last method of gaining a skill was when a skill that already existed in your body was awakened through special means. An example of this is Will's Bloodlust, which he gained through enlightenment. Will always had the potential to awaken Bloodlust, but he needed a trigger, which came in the form of Modus' killing intent, and luck, a lot of luck.

Millions of beings have the potential to awaken these skills, yet extremely few, less than a handful even, end up successful from these millions. These are the strongest skills, and are outside the control of the system itself, once the user reaches a certain level.

All three of these methods are dependent on luck to a certain degree, thus it is difficult to determine the calibre of a user through them. This is where the most important category comes in. These are custom skills.

To become a custom skill, a technique must have a certain degree of difficulty to create and requires an incredible amount of aptitude to carry out. For example, even if you create a technique that you made yourself, it will not become a custom skill until it reaches its most perfect state, according to the standards of the system.

This often takes years of practice and modification to occur. It's no different than trying to create an invention, one no one has ever thought of before, and one that has incredible impact. Skills have the same rating that demonic beasts have. This rating is based on the skill's power level and effectiveness.

For example, one skill can have more power than the other, in the sense that it drains more qi or mana from the user. However, the one with less power might have a higher rating because it does more damage or it's more difficult to control.

Skills from skill books start from the lowest rating. Skills that come with a class start from the E- rating, except passive ones which are not rated due to a multitude of reasons. Such as, some are more powerful in one class than in another.

For example, a class like a sword apprentice would use the passive skill of basic swordsmanship far better than a class like a warrior apprentice, because sword apprentices specialize in using swords, thus they benefit more from the skill than the warrior apprentices.

Active skills have a rather uniform power throughout, what makes the difference usually if two users of the same level use the same active skills, and have the same passive skills but have different classes is the passive skills due to the influence of the class, thus they are not rated.

Awakened skills have no rating because their power depends on the strength of the user. Custom skills however are different. They all start with a rating of C- For the system to recognize your technique as a custom skill, 3 criteria have to be met.

First, it must have a rating of at least C- in terms of difficulty. Second, it must not be available in any skill books. Third, no user in your world has used it or any technique that is similar to it.

Once you create a custom skill, you can name it, and it effectively becomes yours. There are plenty of things you can do with custom skills on your menu which give you plenty of benefits.

Usually, the creation of a custom skill is the hallmark of a player with incredible aptitude and talent. Users, who have the ability to create custom skills, are far more likely to level up faster and become powerful. The earlier a user creates their first custom skill, the more impressive their future prospects will be.

Alice had the potential to create a plethora of skills if she mastered programming with runes. All she needed was a bit of time, knowledge which she had gained from Woodsy, and a powerful tool like the Mage Tower to boost her processing abilities. Not to mention the great boons she had received from the Centralized Tripartite Soul Brethren Contract!

All three of her vessels had received a major upgrade. Letty and Duke had each only received upgrades to two of their 3 vessels, whereas Alice had the greatest upgrade of them all from a holistic point of view. Hence she intended to use her abilities to the fullest to define her home and to help Will achieve his dreams. 

Will had already cemented himself as the person she looked up to the most. Aside from the family she had on Earth, Will and the others were the most important people to Alice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that her universe revolved around them. And she would do anything to protect that universe!

Eridium would be invading Earth in 6 six months. Time was not on their side. It was impossible to unify the entirety of Earth at that time, but it was possible to unite North America.

Eridium was a planet that would enslave all of the people on the losing planet and completely burn out that planet's resources and or use it as a garbage disposal.

The threat of everyone becoming enslaved was especially frightening. There is no American who did not know about slavery, as it was a part of their history, still affecting their country till just before the system came.