Last Minute Benefits Pt3

By the end of their third cycles, everybody had spent well over ten minutes in the pit- er, pond with their third cycle lasting an average five minutes all the way around.

To sustain this, all of my boded familiars were synced up to not only control the condensed mana but also fuel the Soulfire variations in their intensified states. The second cycles had gone up by ten percent in output, followed by a further increase all the way to thirty percent of the original output. The pain involved was sure to test their tolerances.

I went ahead and warned them after thirty sessions of ten groups of twenty players. I told them the numbers I used to control the Soulfire and then informed them that their fourth cycles would be at an estimated fifty percent stronger than the initial sessions they went through.

No less than one hundred people opted out in the next few seconds, shortening the cycle times by a by a great deal by cutting the number of batches in half. What I did not tell them, though, was that the cap was fifty-percent more than the first cycle so the following cycles would all be what they built their resistances to. This ensured only the naturally committed players got to enjoy these benefits.

Once the teams were reorganized and tied into new human chains after filling in the spaces left behind by the others, the original test team who all stayed together this entire time were the first people back in the pond. They only took the same four minutes they had spent last time to escape the new Soulfire pit, actually looking as if they were taking their time and moving in line with one another as a single unit.

Even though the anchor in the middle had never changed people or positions, they were now moving up front and center in line with the tankers even under the new one-point-five-x output. Four minutes after the flames turned on when they reached the bottom, the most veteran physique trainers were sitting on the broken edge of the pond letting their feet hang in the white fire.

Following up less than half a minute later, my party lead Mistress' team that was actually haggardly hanging in from being dragged around by Stonewall. Stonewall had traded places with Mistress in the central position and now the ends were taken up by Go and Papi. Stonewall was not the only halfling giant character, but he was one of the only ones with a main stat focus on Agility.

In the three other teams that had containing a giant halfling, they eventually became a burden due to averaging at only one-twenty-percent movement speed at their levels. Stonewall packed a decent punch with similar Agility perks to my own with some fringe benefits due to his Luck stat along the way, but his movement speed was still only around one-and-a-half times the average person.

Under these circumstances, though, his naturally high Strength and Endurance stats made him one of the fastest moving people in the pit. However, he was only just barely in the lead as the other fought to keep from being dragged by the bullish mobile fortress

The differences between not only my teammates but also them and other elite players were very clear under these circumstances. All of the female characters across the board were, sadly, being carried by the guys at this point. This was more due to actual exhaustion than their strengths of weaknesses, but this itself was a weakness of sorts.

As for the others, Merch who spent most of his points and focus on being a magic assassin and paid little attention to actual Endurance or Willpower was the weakest link in the chain. Even Conansson who was the youngest player around had more stamina in him than Merch.

However, they still maintained the bar at just under three minutes under the increased pressure. Ms. Donna and Mr. Thirteen took a little over three minutes to escape this new hell. The only reason any of them could still move at those speeds while literally under fire was because of the resistances they had already built up in the last three cycles.

Knowing that this output would be the measure of the rest of their exercises seemed to help motivate them, putting in more than their previous maximum effort to get out. If they kept this up, their ability to function while sustaining damage would only grow more and more. Sadly, controlling all of this was becoming meticulous and boring.

I managed to sit through two more hours of these cycles before finally forcing the others to stop this exercise. This was not only because of personal reasons but because of how much divine mana we had used up in this process. There was only about half as much divine mana as when we started and I had more work to do.

Cutting off all processes and ties to everybody but Zekrom so the other demon elites could rest, I give them a few minutes to prepare themselves before making Traytar enter first. Once the biggest demon was taking up the middle of the pond bed, the others went in and gathered all around.

Just being in the divine mana was damaging to the demons, shaving away tens or even more Health Points per seconds. However, the main person in the middle grew from this form of exposure and was steadily taking a few percent less damage every few moments.

After thirty seconds just sitting in the divine energy, Traytar was already taking half of the damage he had been at the start. The others were only just now starting to show signs of taking less damage per second. In ten more seconds, I turned on Zekrom's healing Soulfire to counteract the damage of the divine mana.

A few minutes later, I turned on my own damaging Soulfire.

Because they had been watching the players go through such an experience for the past few hours, the demons circled around Traytar were immediately on their feet when the flames appeared. However, it was within a single step apiece that they realized their goal was not to escape the Soulfire. They had to sit there and bathe in it.

Even though their damage had essentially tripled, Traytar did not even budge from his seat and the closed-lipped smile and squinted eyes on their face seemed to suggest that they were actually… enjoying the experience. I suddenly felt bad for all of the other demons forced to share the pond with him. I was definitely never going back in it.

After calming themselves and acclimating to the combined powers at work around them, the bar was suddenly raised high over the heads of the other players as the demons all sat down around the edge of the pond bed on or near the wall. They did not have any plans to go anywhere any time soon. I could tell they wanted to take advantage of this as much as the elite players had.

This continued for half of an hour before the other demons all finally gave up in unison and scurried out from the pond. Their once dark bodies had paled into light grays or brighter red in Reptor's case, as if baptized by the combined divine energies and spiritual fire. In the middle, even Traytar had begun paling considerably into more noticeable ashen gray tones.

Left alone, Traytar leisurely stretched out along the bed of the pond and lied down in the burning divine mana. Seeing this, I decided to use some shock therapy to test the demon's limits. I stopped condensing the divine mana so that the entire pond filled with Soulfire and torrential swirls of energy.

The newly enlarged conflagration of Soulfire quickly overrode the healing Soulfire from Zekrom, forcing me to tap into the other demons to meet Traytar's demands. He did not actually make any demands, but the strangely distorted shrieking roar amplifying up out of the pond was encouragement enough.

These demons had just left the pond moments before so their remaining reserves ran quickly. However, between the lot of them, there was enough mana to sustain a concentrated healing Soulfire that countered the contained storm I created. Thanks to the masochist's natural abilities, it was not long before its resistance began climbing proportional to the damage it took.

By the time the exhausted elite demons we had captured thus far simply collapsed form running out of mana thirty seconds later, Traytar had already reached the point of resistance where he took the same damage as when the pond was first ignited.

Such an amount might have been more than one would expect with its compiled resistances, but it was an almost infinitesimal number compared to the actual damage output of the current pond. By now, Zekrom had been run down to about a third of his hundredfold mana pool helping to control the circumstances taking place. Since his mana was a pretty much a hundred times my own, that was more than a million MP spent in the past few hours.

There was no way I could have sustained any of this without access to such a giant battery.

Using their own small amounts of replenishing mana from their sleeping, I rely on Telekinesis to move the fainted demons out into the graveyard. Once they were safely out of the way, I relinquish my control over the Soulfire in the pond so that it completely burns from the divine energy. Suddenly, the once white flames turn a dark gold in color that dyed the entire pond with a new brilliant lighting.

I immediately took control of Zekrom's healing Soulfire and coupled it with my own to drastically boot its strength while isolating these flames around Traytar's body within the pond. By the time my twenty thousand MP was close to running out, Traytar had begun taking less damage once again while the pond was running out of mana.

The once densely swirling maelstroms had thinned down to a single massive swirling current that dominated the center like a giant whirlpool. This might not have looked like much of a change considering the circumstances, but even the initial damage output from when I set it free had lessened. Traytar's plainly visible health bar at one end of the pond, though, continued to be maintained by Zekrom's power.

Within the next few minutes the pond's energies had thinned down into a deep pool of golden flames and surrounding hazy reflective light. The damage was now so low that even Zekrom was resting while I randomly threw concentrated balls of Soulfire down at Traytar's vaguely shining body. These fireballs were capable of restoring roughly two thousand HP apiece and cost several hundred MP apiece.

Coupled with the masochist's resistances and enormous HP, these fireballs were enough to refill his HP every few seconds of damage. They only took one second to make and I had already stockpiled over a dozen in the first few seconds. This only took a few thousand MP and every second after the stockpile I began regenerating mana.

Ten minutes of measured healing later, carefully monitoring my output so that I did not fall below ten thousand MP, the pond itself finally burned out to reveal the most recent demonic addition at the bottom of the pond.

Lying sprawling out leisurely at the bottom of the pond was a drastically changed demon. Their once varying gray body was now a creamy off-white color and covered in a combination of black jagged tribal and intricate golden Celtic-like lines and designs all about their giant body. The combination of styles was both conflicting and confusing, but the contrast of colors almost managed to tie it all together.

Almost.

Reminding myself that this would not be my demon, I finally decide on who to hand this crazy bastard off to while surveying the rest of the pond. As expected, to some extent, the large rocks and boulders making up the lower levels of the pond walls and bed had turned into a shiny rosy gold sand filled with thousands of small golden crystals.

All of the other players were currently resting in the cathedral so I took the liberty of sweeping out my mana and awareness to sift through the golden sand and sweep up thousands of small divine mana crystals. These crystals, like the sand, carried a golden hue and even a faint glow.

Despite this, there was no change in their names or information but I was almost certain that they had changed their levels of potency or effect in some way. I simply gathered them up into large bags of one thousand apiece for every clan here while adding a few thousand to my own clan's stock before continuing the divide out crystals for the rest of my alliance.

The two clans we were using for show would only receive a thousand crystals apiece for this on top of everything else we planned to give them, but everybody in the alliance received no less than five thousand. My own clan only got a little more than ten thousand of them, so I had nothing to complain about. Hopefully, nobody else would either.

For a little while I was stumped by what to do with all of that sand. When inspected it was simply pumice dust but this shit was gold. There was no way that I was going to leave it behind.

In the end, I could only rely on Zekrom to gather it up with magic before storing in a carefully woven and threaded cordycep silk bag. The bag was big enough that, when full, several people could comfortably lounge on without getting in each others' way. If this could be considered a queen-size bag or mattress, then each of the other clans got a pair of twin-sized bags that could have been used as love seats.

The rest was then immediately processed into an experimental production. The process was a simple alchemy replication of modern synthesis, heating and smelting tens of pounds of golden pumice sand and compressing it together. After having rendered it into a molten slag, the heat was simply turned off so that the compression would quench the material through sheer pressure.

Once the golden pumice was cooled, what remained was a crude two-by-four board of an incredibly dark golden obsidian. The board was a little more than four feet long overall and had fused to an overall weight of little more than thirty pounds. There had been more weight while it was a sand, proving it had properly integrated during smelting and compressing.

There was nothing that I intended to do with it at the moment, but it was still an interesting material that had come out with the name 'Anointed Obsidian' and a grade of S in its description. Besides some of the upper level demon parts and the supposed soul materials that Zekrom and I could produce, this was one of the only S grade materials we had access to.

The access to this, though, was much more restricted than our access to soul material. So, without further ado, I quickly ate the two-by-four to hide the evidence.

[Assimilating: Anointed Obsidian]

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