LiseEclaire

Leveling up the World (Chapter 167)

Two on one was definitely an advantage, and now that the tables had turned, Dallion had the upper hand. There was no question that a lot was thanks to Nox. The crackling had developed a lot since it had become his familiar. Now it no longer needed instructions to fight, not to mention that it had caught on quite a few tricks. Either it had picked up a lot during the times Dallion had used it in...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 166)

The third level was completely deprived of creatures. Last time this was the place where Arthurows had freaked out very much, to Bel’s amusement. Now, it was as if someone had meticulously cleaned the cave walls, floor, and ceiling in an attempt to make the place inhabitable. Dallion’s initial reaction was to think that a Shelfey had taken residence. However, the amount of light and lack of...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 165)

“Prison?” Dallion asked.

Was the dagger a prison? The copyette had said something similar as well. So, the sphere items were prisons. Did that mean that fulfilling their destiny meant freeing the inhabitants? The last part felt like a stretch.

“If you don’t know it by now, you’ll never know,” the guardian replied.

Dallion couldn’t tell whether the guardian was be...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 164)

Slashing his way to the guardian chamber turned out to be much easier than Dallion expected. The first wave had tried to rush him, charging as a group. Dallion had dispatched them using Janna and Kallan’s method. As it turned out, one didn’t have to know athletics or acrobatics to perform something, just a lot of practice.

Seeing the failure of their fellow Amphibions, the rest of the...

Quod Olim Erat: The Cassandrian Theory (Chapter 19)

“Extracting fragment seventy-one.” Itea carefully removed any piece of the Cassandrian shell. From that point, the fragment would be catalogued, tagged, and sealed in a container to be taken to the surface for off-site analysis.

The entire process was ridiculously slow, but that’s the way the colonel wanted it. It had taken us three hours just to reach the outer layer of the artifac...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 163)

Don’t sweat it, you’ll do fine, the shield said while Dallion slowly put on his vest. Normally he’d be done in under a minute. However, today was different.

He had never felt so nervous since the day he applied for college. Now, as then, he had spent an hour contemplating what could happen before getting out of bed and spending an hour more slowly getting dressed. It was on...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 162)

Dangerous like a thundercloud… Such a description didn’t match Jiroh in the least. Then again, Dallion had only known her for little more than a month. He knew she was a hunter, and had also seen her fight to get an idea of her strength, but even so, he couldn’t believe that she was that dangerous. Hannah herself had said that she’d taken the fury years ago when she had been young. On t...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 161)

The days counted down to Dallion’s selection test. And during that time four things occupied Dallion’s mind. The guild work became a regular thing to the point that Estezol booked his jobs in advance, so Dallion and the siblings could go right at it first thing in the morning. The sudden influx of sphere items—not only at the Icepicker Guild, but in all guilds in Nerosal—had increased t...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 160)

Cleaning up the main inn hall after Flameforge’s celebration was the easiest job Dallion had done in this world. The guild captain had made everyone mend everything in sight under the pretense that it was part of their training. More likely, she was displeased that a member of her guild had lost a duel and wanted to teach everyone else a lesson. All that was alright with Dallion, especially s...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 159)

“Prep the room, Fire Sky said in an icy tone.

The moment she did, it was as if a switch was flipped. The Flameforge guild members stopped whatever they were doing and in nearly perfect unison broke up the food area into its composing tables. Each table was put against a wall, leaving the center of the room empty.

“There’ll be no fighting here,” Hannah said, although she soun...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 158)

Dallion made a dozen more attempts to construct his first item between lunch and dinner. He’d spend hours reading through instructions, following what passed as best practices, only to find out he couldn’t make heads or tails of the markers. There was one thing on which tomes, scrolls, and Nil could agree upon: it was always recommended that novices started with tin—or iron, if tin wasn�...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 157)

It was astonishing to find that there was something Nil didn’t know about. Dallion never thought he would see the day, but here he was—despite all of the echo’s knowledge and the thousands upon thousands of scrolls and tomes in the ring library, there was nothing that identified the rock plant that had been found at the market.

Initially, Nil thought Dallion to be mistaken or goofin...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 156)

It had been less than a day, in real time, since Dallion had been on a guild mission. Back on Earth that would be considered barely any time at all. After all, how much could change in a day? Barring something going viral or another major unexpected event, everything but the people’s clothes remained the same. Here, he could say no such thing. In the span of a day—or four in true time—Dal...

Quod Olim Erat: The Cassandrian Theory (Chapter 18)

Statistically, one in a million ground troopers suffered a UAD. Up until recently, I thought that I had only witnessed ninety-seven cases during my entire service. The truth was far different. Going through the numbers, a thousandth of a percent had died in unidentified circumstances. In the vast majority of cases, the cause remained a mystery to this very day. Knowing what I knew now, though, ...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 150)

Dawn had long passed when Dallion woke up. The night had turned out much better than anything Dallion had experienced since coming to this world, even if it was unexpected. Even with all the weirdness going on, hooking up with a gorgon was way out there.

The first thing Dallion saw upon opening his eyes was a note of paper on Eury’s pillow, pressed down by a heavy metal key. Curious, Da...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 154)

Interviews, interviews never change. Dallion never was particularly fond of them back on Earth, though he was never terrified of them either. All in all, he found them a waste of time. In nine out of ten cases, a person’s mind was already made up, and it took great effort for the interviewee to change it one way or another.

Given the speed by which candidates entered and left the room, ...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 153)

Five points on a stat were nothing to be laughed at. In absolute terms, that was the same number of points that one got for becoming a full awakened. However, after everything he had been through, Dallion felt the reward to be a total letdown. For one thing, it was in a stat he couldn’t even use yet. To make things worse, it was starting to look like he wouldn’t find out in the near future,...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 152)

The moment Nox jumped towards the echo, it was already too late. Dallion’s copy knew about the order instants before Dallion gave it, however, what he couldn’t know was where the crackling would attack from. When the claws descended, the only thing the echo could do was try to block with his shield. The shield, being only a copy of Dallion’s, quickly broke, as the claws went on, slicing i...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 151)

The further Dallion ran on along the surface of the innermost cube, the more it became obvious that there wouldn’t be any entrance. What windows he had seen before had disappeared, along with edges, cracks, and even seams. It was as if he was running one solid chunk of concrete. There was no place he could turn, nowhere he could hide from the three echoes pursuing him and their ranged attacks...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 150)

Music! Dallion focused

It was hard enough trying to find the path in a complex zero gravity maze. It took Dallion a while before Dallion got the grip of practical perspective shift. It all looked fun and well in the movies, but whenever he tried to walk on a wall, twenty years of experience on Earth rejected the notion, causing him to fall. It didn’t help that the memories of D...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 149)

The entrance to Dallion’s new section turned out to be not where he expected it. To start with, the entrances were two, each located at the corridor ends he had not selected during his last level up. If game principles were followed, each of the sections was supposed to grant him the respective skill when cleared. Then again, this wasn’t a guarantee.

Dallion also noticed that the link...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 148)

There were only two improvement requests during lunch and about half the number of usual mendings. For Dallion, however, the shift couldn’t end fast enough. All the time he kept thinking about his new powers, jumping between his desire to learn forging and going further in his own dungeon.

Falkner stayed a bit longer, barely saying a few words now and then, mostly when Dallion was passi...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 147)

“I’ll escort you back outside,” the curate said after counting to three.

Dallion couldn’t tell whether it was the epitome of efficiency or of extreme mercantilism. Either way, there was no point arguing, especially since he had already gotten what he had paid for… or rather, he had gotten what Falkner had paid for.

“How did it go?” the boy asked, walking alongside Dall...

Quod Olim Erat: The Cassandrian Theory (Chapter 17)

“Sample nine collected,” I transmitted to the station. Eight samples so far and no encouraging results. Officially, all the research was kept confidential, but ‘Rissa had “let it slip” that no progress had been made. If anything, Ondalov had been given more rope with which to hang himself and, apparently, had done a pretty good job of it.

Details remained sketchy, but he had esc...

General Question

Hello, all!

Hope everyone is doing well. As you've probably noticed some real life things happen recently that cuased me to delay last week's Elcy chapter (to be posted today and hopefully another will be posted middle of next week before resuming on schedule).

On that note, would you be interested in another experimental daily story in parallel? It will be shorter (about 1k) with a...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 146)

“That was impressive,” Falkner said, as Dallion returned to the column space. “I recognized some of the advances, but most of them were completely new. Where did you learn them?”

If Nil was present, he would probably have choked to death, laughing at the question. The truth was that a large part of Dallion’s repertoire remained improvisation. As the library echo liked to say, hi...

Leveling up the World (Chapter 145)

Dallion played the strings that resonated with the guardian’s fear. Despite that, no marker appeared. There was no mistake—the bladicorn was completely immune to music. Maybe that was specific to the creature itself, or possibly it required a higher skill proficiency. Even so, Dallion wasn’t worried.

Dripping the harpsisword with both hands, he spun the weapon and threw it in the di...