I was engrossed in noticing the differences of using appraisal on humans and on monsters and one of the first differences that i noted being that the monsters didn't have a level like humans do .
The second was something hypothetical for now but, i guessed that there was some prohibitions on the monsters use of the level up system in the world, as it doesn't make any sense on them having their own status window but there's no level up feature in it , all of this was just a hypothesis i made after seeing the goblins status windows , whether there was some truth to this hypothesis of mine or not, there was no point in dwelling about it for now .
The next thing that i was able to notice was the lack of the comprehension attribute in the goblins status window something that gave me a bit of surprise since i believe that the comprehension attribute was related somehow to intelligence but now they didn't even have a comprehension attribute in their hidden attributes column then how they were able to use tactics, could there really be a mastermind behind all of this .
The last thing that i noticed that they were all having the same rank which was E Rank and that most of them had active skills but no passive skills with only two kinds that held passive skills was this something related to their rank or was it the opposite , i don't know .
And as i was so engrossed in my mind , i was finally was able to find out who was the one responsible for the weird angle dagger attack from earlier , to be more specific he found me .
I felt a sudden shift above my head and before i can make any movements i was struck by a dagger in the back of my neck by a hooded goblin who was menacingly smiling as if he already got my head , i was able to dodge alright but why bother i let him struck my neck as he wanted .
~ Clang ~ that was the sound that rang out when he tried to attack me and of course his attack was futile, i then raised my head and used Appraisal on the hooded figure in front of me with quite intrigue to find out what kind of surprises he had for me :
The Sneaky Goblin i didn't know exactly what was that , his name or a title or something like that .
his attributes were as followed :
Sneaky Goblin .
Rank : E .
Attributes :
Strength : 50 .
Stamina : 50 .
Agility : 90 .
Mana : 0 .
Spirit : 0 .
Hidden Attributes :
Constitution : 40 .
Will : 8 .
Luck : 40 .
Fate : 12 .
Spirituality : 0 .
Skills :
( Stealth ) ( Active Skill ) : enabling silent movement and surprise appearances .
Effect : have a 20% chance to grants invisibility for 3 seconds .
( Backstab ) ( Active Skill ) : delivering high damage from stealth .
Effect : Deals 50% more damage when attacking from stealth .
( Trap Lay ) ( Active Skill ) : setting traps for enemies .
Effect : Traps activate when an enemy steps on them dealing damage to every enemy In the traps range .
A killing machine, this was the most accurate description that i had in mind for him and i was finally able to understand how was he able to get behind me quietly and was only able to notice him when he attacked due to the large difference between our two strengths , and also found my next target i activated my unique skill Steal and my hands glowed in purple but other than that nothing else happened .
Did it work, i don't know, i used appraisal on my self and opened my status window and found nothing to have changed , was the skill require other conditions to actually work , and if so what were they ?!! .
Let me try something real quick, i looked at the goblin who was still in the air above my head still smiling menacingly the same as before , as all of that i did just now didn't take even a single second , i again activated the skill but this time i caught the Sneaky Goblin's head and as the purple light in my hands shone again , this time i felt it and it was even confirmed by the familiar sound of the World's Will saying :
notice : you gained new Active Skill Stealth as an effect of your own unique skill Steal , it's currently at Lvl1 .
And that confirmed it i used appraisal on the goblin and again used appraisal on my new skill , first with the goblin let me just say that he want be using it again from now on, second my new skill looked like this :
( Stealth Lvl1 ) ( Active Skill ) : enabling of complete silent movements and surprise appearances .
Effect : have a 100% chance to grants invisibility for 30 minutes , can be turned off if needed and is rendered useless against opponents who have a special optical skills .
Cooldown : 5 minutes .
Cost : 10 stamina points .
So i guess this confirm one of the condition for the skill to work and that is it needs to make a direct contact with the target it was being used on , so does the 500 meters range work only when i try to steal an item .
I really can't react normally to the effectiveness increase of my skills anymore or was this my way of reacting normally all along, anyhow even the skill that were gained by my unique skill got the weird enhancing effect like the skills which were gained normally too , there was a cooldown for using the skill why didn't it appear when i used appraisal and why did it have a level now could my previous guess be true .
Kuaaaaghh kuaaaagh , oh i almost forgot about the creature in my hand and his comrades that were already surrounding me, i guess he is of no use to me anymore,i clenched my hands and his skull got crushed and he fell on the ground and this whole scene happened in front of the other goblins and their reaction was a few more war cries and a few more explosive compounds being brewed and in seconds will be ready to be thrown .
With a few Cave Goblins began to carry some big rocks which i believe that i know on whom were they going to be smashing those rocks , the Shaman was only one unmoving but his healing magic was a skill i was quite interested in addition to some of the other skills that some of the goblin had to o like ( Dark vision - Battle Frenzy - Rock Slide - Transmutation - Curse - Cave Resilience - Camouflage ) and those 70 mana points that shaman had could come in hand .
We finished our testing of the unique skill Steal now for the special skill Aura Of The Strong .
But since i have abused my mana for sometime now i believe that i'm a bit short of one or two points of the 20 mana points required to use the skill but luckily with my increased mana pool, i'm able to regenerate mana faster so i will just have to fight them for twenty minutes or so before i'm able to use my special skill .
I held my katana and took a long breath , and right before i blitz slash all of them i was stunned in my place incapable of moving and unable to move a muscle only my eyes, i saw the one responsible for the state that i was in , it was the shaman he was the only one capable of doing such a thing with his skill Curse .
I was taken by surprise but after i understood my current situation clearly, i calmed down and returned to my relaxed mode it won't be that much time before i'm going to be moving again and if i remembered correctly i will be free in a few seconds too , nothing could go wrong in five seconds right .
I was wrong, i was terribly wrong, i believed that nothing bad would happen but i forgot that the distance between me and the swarm of goblins already shortened to the point that we were almost face to face .
I was supposedly to be pierced, burned, or poisoned by the barrage of attacks that was falling on top of me, but all their there attack was being rendered useless by my passive skills,my own body defences and my armor in just a span of seconds, luckily they were focusing all of their attention on me otherwise the people still covered in ice some distance away from me would have been shredded to pieces .
A 4 seconds later i was able to move again and i again tried to activate my skill and this time it was a complete success, the skill was successful activated and for the first time as well i felt my strength increasing even more to the point that i believed that every move of mine could impact the world around me maybe it was just an illusion created by my enhanced strength .
I even increased the skill range by another 100 meters it won't cast much a difference anyway since i would still have a lot of time before the duration of the skill run out i looked around me and the first thing that i noticed was the bustling scene and all the goblins around me suddenly quietened down , they stopped in their tracks and were now quivering in fear with sweat drenching their bodies .
Those who were about to throw the explosive compounds at me again slipped and dropped the vials that was holding the explosive compounds from their hands which set them and those who are close to them ablaze but no one gave it no mind as they were all paralyzed , the whole bustling battlefield turned into deadly silent .
I looked at the stunned enemies in front of me and began to count how much time would i need to get all the 8 skills that i have interest in and the 70 mana points too,80 minutes or so and yes this scene wasn't going to end anytime soon till i get what i want but this doesn't mean i need all of them to be alive just one will do .
I was still under the Centipede's Swiftness skill and with the blessing of the storatge ring i was shuttling more easily between the swarm of goblins unhurriedly too, as i was sometime dashing towards the my next target and other times, i was carefree waking towards target after target, in less than 4 minutes only 5 goblins were left standing the shaman and four other kind of goblins which i kept so i could get the skills i want from them with Steal after its cooldown period ends .
You leveled up × 2 .
I leveled up two times, cool i was about to check my status window when i heard some cracks from behind me .
I looked back to check on the guys that were frozen and found that they were already out but they were staring at me with wide stunned like eyes and completely in awe , i raised one of my hands and waved at them in greating but they were unresponsive , so i began to walk towards them and i can swear that one of the two older guys flinched and was about to take a step backwards, as for the old Adventurer from before he regained his composure after a few breaths of time and nodded at me and said :
Thank you for the timely rescue, i'm in your debt , the other two Adventurers followed his lead after taking sometime to cool off their startled hearts and minds .
Don't mention it, was what i told them with a smile .
One of the two Adventurers after calming down after enough time he pulled out his sword and ran angrily towards what appeared to be the rest of the goblins swarm flashing with red Aura, he was targeting the last 5 goblins that i intentionally left alive .
But just as he was aiming for the head of one of them , i stopped him using my Aura Of Strong skill by stripping him from his status as an ally, he then dropped the sword and was fixed in his place quivering too and in front of the face of the goblin he was targeting which made him dranched with sweat, seeing himself vulnerable in such a way .
the other Adventurer looked at me angrily and yalled : what is your deal, are you so petty that you won't even let us have some gain, aren't we all fellow Adventurers here .
So that was all of this about , and i was the one thinking that he acted that way wanting to take revenge on the goblins, but no he was just trying to take advantage of me restricting the goblin movement so that he could be able to neft himself some gains , i was going to give them some of the carcasses , since i won't be crowding my stortage ring with goblins corpses .
But the gesture itself was what bothered me so i told him without even looking directly at him :
first of all, if i left these goblins alive, it can only means that i have some purpose in doing so and second and it is just for you to be aware, i would have left you to get some of the goblin caresses in the first place to achieve as what you called some gains but now, i don't want to .
What did you say ? , he yalled at me i'm not sure he completely understood the situation he was currently in so let me give him some reminder .
I SAID I DON'T WANT TO GIVE YOU GUYS ANYTHING, DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THAT , i stared directly at his eyes and i was completely unaware of the menacing look that golden aura gave me even my blue eyes looked sharp and piercing , i stripped him of his status as an ally too and he too succumbed instantly quivering just like his companion , i then looked towards the old man to see how he would react and saw him coughing while looking in another direction .
He was really quite a smart old man so i asked him about the most thing that was intriguing me i said : old man i'm quite interested to know if you heard any news about the goblins getting more skilled at planning and plotting ? .
He cleared his throat and said : not until recentlyi'm quite sure of that we heard about them building settlement around the safe zones but there was nothing more to it than a few skirmishes and all of those skirmishes were all in favor of the human side .
But now that you asked there were some rumors 20 years ago or so about a goblin lord being born but his birth news were known by the humans and the kingdom issued a task to search for him and to eliminate him, as the humans found out about the tribe he was from that tribe had being stormed by A Rank Adventurers and was completely massacred overnight .
And it was said that the Goblin Lord was found and had been dealt with but the task wasn't removed by the Adventurer's guild which some Adventurers interpreted this move as a confirmation of that the Goblin Lord was able to survive and might even be still hiding somewhere to build his strength , these were all the information i had .
I nodded at his words thinking that i shouldn't be surprised if the one responsible for the breach was the same Goblin Lord from 20 years before and he have every right to hate humans , so everything do weirdly make sense now .
Don't mind me asking, kid but plotting is something that goblins are very much renowned for around here, those kind of attacks happen very frequently too , so why would you ask such a question .
I told him that i'm new here and about the other two swarm that were currently surrounding the whole area in a big circle .
The first part wasn't able to get that much surprise from him but the second part left him unsettling as he asked again to confirm what i saw and i confirmed by saying that i saw it with my own eyes and that he can walk for a 5 minutes or so and he would be able to see them .
The old man began to murmur hystericaly : But this can't be, but the teleportation circle disappearing made it possible, but why now and why did they choose this area to do so .
Hey old man, care to share what you discovered with me .
The goblins swarms that you saw earlier aren't here to stop us from escaping it's the opposite they are marking the area so to not allow anyone to come inside, you see they will be settling in this area and are just waiting for their other comrades to arrive and the reason why i'm unsettling because the only time did something like this happen was in the era of the previous Goblin Lord he too conquered safe zones in this way and he declared the first zone he conquered as his first and most precious territory , what a rotten luck , we need to leave right now .
How strong approximately could a Goblin Lord possibly be ? .
No one know for certain but the previous Goblin Lord was a S Rank monster but the real problem that adventurers have with the Goblin Lord was his strong set of skills, some even spread rumors about him having a unique skill capable of leveling a whole cities , but no one know for sure as i told you before no one has even reported any weird activity of such caliber .
An S Rank monster who have quite weird set of skills and even a unique skill too , well that's more than enough reason for me to stay here .
Appraisal :
Name : Sakurai Ryuu .
Age : 16 .
Level : 4 .
Job : undetermined !!
Free attributes points : 10 .
Attributes :
Strength : 630 . (New) (+)
Stamina : 600 . (+)
Agility : 310 . (+)
Mana : 1 . (+)
Spirit : 5 . (+)
Hidden attributes :
Constitution : 30 . (+)
Will : 50 . (NEW)(+)
Luck : 20 . (+)
Fate : 50 . (+)
Spirituality : 5 . (+)
Comprehension : 13 . (+)
Skills :
( Troll Force ) ( PASSIVE SKILL ) .
( Novice Swordsmanship Lvl1 ) ( PASSIVE SKILL ) .
( Physical Fortitude ) ( PASSIVE SKILL ) .
( Pain Resilience ) ( PASSIVE SKILL ) .
( Appraisal Lvl3 ) ( ACTIVE SKILL ) .
( Stealth Lvl1 ) ( ACTIVE SKILL ) (NEW) .
Special Skills :
Aura of the Strong . (NEW)
Unique Skill :
Steal . (NEW)
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