“Now you know there’s more to classes than just the stat growth bonuses they provide. But don’t worry, as long as you guys keep at it you’ll slowly build the foundation you need to—”
As I brought my lesson to a close and moved to pat Radd on the shoulder, Recilia suddenly interrupted me.
“One moment, brother.” She gave me a dubious look and asked, “What happened to the dagger that was in your left hand during the battle?”
“You know how I learned Fast Swap, right? I just put it into my Inventory. See?”
I pulled a new weapon out of my Inventory and dropped it into my left hand.
“That isn’t the Goblin Slaughterer you had earlier,” Recilia said, growing more suspicious. “If you were planning on fighting with just the one sword, you should have kept your left hand free and two-handed your weapon to do more damage. So why did you equip a weapon in your left hand that you never even planned on using?”
Silence fell, before I finally stuttered, “A-As a backup! I didn’t have to use it, but if one of the bats had gotten through, I might have needed it.”
It had taken me a few seconds to come up with that answer, and Recilia narrowed her eyes at me. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wh-Why not?”
Recilia gave me a sharp look. “It’s true that Ultimate Sword Mastery is a powerful skill, but that alone shouldn’t give you enough damage to defeat level 40 monsters so easily.”
I had no rebuttal to that. Indeed, Ultimate Sword Mastery was a powerful skill, but your base values needed to be high enough that doubling them had meaning. It doubled the damage you dealt, but didn’t impact your Attack stat in any way. So if you were already doing little to no damage against an enemy it was basically useless. In other words, if I didn’t already have some means of doing half of a bat’s health in one attack, Ultimate Sword Mastery wouldn’t have let me one-shot them. I’d crafted my speech to hopefully distract people from noticing that point, but as always Recilia was too sharp to deceive.
After a brief silence, I finally gave in. “Fine, you win. Since you figured that much out I’ll tell you the whole story,” I said, averting my gaze.
“Wh-What are you talking about?” Radd asked, confused.
“It wasn’t my own abilities that gave me the power to kill those bats. It was thanks to my weapon.”
“Your weapon?” Radd parroted, giving me a confused look.
While it was true that I’d acquired a bunch of passive skills to power myself up, I’d known from the start my stats were too low to deal with level 40 monsters. However, I’d already once before come up with a fighting style that didn’t rely on having high stats.
“I’ll be frank—my Attack power is too low to deal with monsters at this level. But remember how there was just one skill of mine that had worked even against Nirva the Invincible Blademaster?”
“You... Wait, are you talking about Final Break?!”
Final Break unleashed a powerful AoE attack that destroyed your equipped weapon. Goblin Slaughterers weren’t good enough to do much damage to the bats when thrown, but Final Break had a much bigger multiplier, so even the Goblin Slaughterer’s stats were enough to deal serious damage.
“H-Hold on a second! You couldn’t have used such a wide-reaching attack in a small space like this without hitting all of us! Besides, you...”
“That’s right, until now I wouldn’t have been able to use Final Break in that situation, and if all I’d done is simply use Final Break it would have hurt us more than the bats. But now I have an alternate option available to me.” Radd still didn’t seem to get it, so I added, “Remember how I told you I leveled up the Blademaster class and learned Twin Arts? Do you recall what Twin Arts’s effect is?”
“U-Umm, it lets you copy any skill you use with one weapon to the weapon in your other hand? Wait, hang on...” Radd looked up at me in shock.
“Yep. I used Final Break with the weapon in my left hand, then transferred the effects of that skill onto the sword in my right!”
Honestly, I was surprised the tactic worked as well as it did, since I hadn’t been sure it would do what I’d intended at first. After all, just using Final Break and Twin Arts in conjunction would mean Final Break would still activate from my left hand. So I’d used Fast Swap immediately after activating Final Break to cancel the initial Final Break activation. Normally, you couldn’t unequip a Goblin Slaughterer once you actually equipped it, and you needed a weapon to be equipped to use Final Break. However, the moment you did use Final Break, the weapon was considered broken, which meant Fast Swap let me change it out without having to worry about Goblin Slaughterer’s curse. It was a somewhat unwieldy combo, but it worked better than I’d expected.
The moment I swung my Metallic King Sword with my right hand, I’d used Final Break with my left. I’d then immediately equipped a new Goblin Slaughterer with Fast Swap to cancel the Final Break while still transferring the damaging effects of Final Break to the Metallic King Sword in my right hand. Incidentally, the damage of Final Break didn’t overwrite the base damage of my sword swing, so the two were added together.
That wasn’t all either.
“Since the actual attack is happening with a sword, that means Ultimate Sword Mastery doubles the damage of Final Break plus my sword swing.”
The damage of Final Break plus the damage of my Metallic King Sword doubled was more than enough to one-shot a level 40 bat. The biggest problem had honestly been the Moon Werewolf.
“The Moon Werewolf wasn’t as fast as the bats, but he was a lot tougher, so I needed to combine another Art with Final Break. Oh, also! A good deal of monsters take increased damage when you attack them from behind, so I had that bonus damage going for me too. With all that combined, even the Moon Werewolf died instantly.”
As I finished my explanation, Radd leaned forward excitedly. “Holy crap, that’s so cool! So if you fight like that even level 40 monsters are nothing to you, huh? In that case...”
I sighed. Radd looked really impressed, but frankly, he shouldn’t be. If I could have done this kind of damage without relying on such a risky strategy, I would have. And I would have been more proud of what I’d accomplished too. Sadly, the world wasn’t that nice.