Merging Skills

I will have to meet Jack after seven days, which gives me some time to work on my skills after changing my Grade in the 'Status' to Combat Power.

Shona informed me that I can merge my skills just like how my elements merged to create skills that are effective in battle with less low energy consumption. Even though I won't be able to merge any of my skills with the Armor skills, I will be able to merge my attack skills or that is what she tells me.

I want to see if I can convert the low damaging AOE skill 'Ice Wave' to a high damaging AOE skill by merging with my first skill I ever purchased 'Air Strike'. At first it will be difficult as I can't use the Air elemental skills as it is merged with Water element forming the Ice element.

I can't go to the secret base in the ore factory to train as I am no longer 'officially' a member of the Obsidian Shadow. So, I will have to use our garden for the first time to be proactive and merge an AOE attack. I am sure my mother will kill me if I do any irreversible damage to it or the plants and trees in it, so I will also have to be careful while I merge those two skills and practice it.

I have to do a lot of tweaks to the skill 'Air Strike' as it was initially 'Fury Slash' which I modified to be a powerful one-shot kill attack in my arsenal. I will have to re-tweak it back to its original stage and then merge it with the tweaked 'Ice Wave' skill to bring out the skill which I have in mind.

It would have taken me at least a few weeks to do all these, but thanks to Shona I am able to do the tweaks and figure out how it works in just two days and start practicing it without any difficulties and to my surprise the skill has become much better than I expected.

Using this skill is going to be a good boost to my power as this will be both an AOE skill that causes damage and restricts their movements to a radius of two meters from the center of impact.

I wish I could get more skill and merge them like this creating one hardcore skill that will one-shot the monsters that are more than thrice stronger than me, like the bi-pedals in my nightmare. But it will take a lot of time and hard work as merging the skills has a separate set of rules and laws to complete a successful merging.

But merging two skills is itself difficult and if it wasn't the help I got from Shona, I am not sure if I could have successfully merged the skills with all these rules and laws to see a good result even if I keep trying for years to come.

Now I understand that how incredible the AI they have created is, to help an average talented person like me to merge skills within a week that takes almost a year for talented people to do. I can call it a 'Boon' which I am grateful for the Obsidian Shadow to give me such a high level AI which I am doubtful not provided to others.

After merging my skills, I work on my defense skill, 'Ice Armor' to check if it has been changed in anyway or I can continue using it in the same way as before to increase my speed and defense.

When I activated it in the afternoon, I frightened me to see my dark skin turning pale and starting to become as hard as an Ice that is at the bottom of the ocean instead of the usual thin Ice layer forming above it. I almost had a heart attack seeing this as I don't have the composure of the talent to grab things quicker.

I as thinking, after these many things that has happened in the past few months, from the time I awakened, nothing will surprise, but I am still getting surprises which I couldn't fathom why or how it is done.

This is going to be hard for me to understand how and why as even Shona doesn't know about it as this has never been documented in any official or unofficial documents or even redacted documents which she can access with a few tweaks in the system.

I practiced the 'Ice Slash' skill which I have gained by merging the 'Air Strike' and 'Ice Wave' to use it in a battle without any issues for the two remaining days in the week so I can be prepared to face anything that is thrown at me when I meet Jack. I have a gut feeling that I will be sent on a 'mission' soon which mostly could be a covert one and maybe that is why they didn't select me to be a member on the Obsidian Shadow officially.

On the final day of the week, I get an email from the branch office in Havet to meet Jack at the Sector-2 region near the west defense gate which is nowhere close to where I expected to meet him. I was hoping we would be meeting at the eastern defense gate where the permanent dungeon is or even better at the Death Valley, but it is arranged in a place that doesn't have any challenging animals around.

This is a forest area that is home for mostly gale rabbits which can be easily hunted by any newly awakened if they have the required speed and endurance which confuses me even more why we are to meet there instead of a place where the people are too scared to enter.

It also makes me think 'Is there are any suspicious activity going in that place that is being overlooked by the town's people or is it just my imagination that is causing all these ruckus in my head?' For which I will have to wait for another day to find the answers for.