บท 47: Chapter 47: Powering Through
Overall happy with my selection, I wasted no time and locked in my perk choices, changing the holographic perk screen to the skill distribution one.
[ Skills ]
Skill Talents Left: 1
Skill Points Left: 972
Ballistic Weapons: 145
Energy Weapons: 131
Explosives: 128
(T)Heavy Weapons: 235
Leadership: 113
Lockpick: 104
Medicine: 107
Melee Weapons: 113
Piloting: 103
(T)Repair: 125
(T)Science: 123
Speech: 103
Stealth: 111
Survival: 112
Trade: 105
Unarmed: 108
…Well that's a shit ton of skill points. How do I want to allocate them because as many of them as there are, they'll quickly disappear when I start spending them. I suppose I'll begin by dumping points into survival since I need to find out whether Wild Man reduces the amount of food and other nutrients I need to consume to recover and grow from my workouts.
Okay, 188 should be enough to see what it does. What skill should receive skill points next... My damage is good enough and I can make half way decent progress training them over the seven remaining years before I depart for the wasteland. Thus, I'll skip my combat skills and focus on my other skills. With the combat skills removed from the potential candidates, I think I'll just dump points into medicine, repair, and science, considering those are the three things I'm going to be doing the most in the coming years.
The three of them have been brought to a solid 300 points now where should the rest of the 239 points be put... Stealth could use some love, so let's put 189 there and bring my presence hiding fields range to 30 meters so I can actually cover all of my robots in its field. The last 50 points I'll dump into speech for the reason that it'll give me a point in charisma when it reaches 200 and maybe on the off chance it could push my charisma up just by being raised.
The skill talent point is the last thing remaining here before I have this mass level up wrapped up. Now what skill should receive the upgrade, I could put it into another combat skill like Melee Weapons. However, I'm already pretty happy with heavy weapons progress, so I'll pass on the combat skills again in favor of something else.
Stealth wouldn't be a bad idea, being that the higher it is, the less likely anyone will be aware of me and my force's presence when they are within the confines of my presence hiding field. That's a possible candidate.
I will also be doing a ton of leading in the future because of my goal of taking over the planet hence it wouldn't be too bad of an idea to place the skill talent there. The only other skill I would consider putting it into would be medicine, since being able to research and develop new and improved drugs and medicines could give myself and my people a real boost and possibly prevent their deaths from injury.
Along with that, there are drugs such as Vital-X which overtime will increase the average lifespan of its user to 120 years so if I want to live a longtime which I do and possibly forever if I take advantage of all the other medical sciences like genetic engineering it would be smart to put the point here.
...
I believe doing everything possible to extend my lifespan would be the best thing to do since I can always improve as long as I have more time.
Decision made, I placed the talent point into medicine, making it my fourth skill talent. As soon as I had done that, I took a second to contemplate whether or not I was 100% sure of what I had chosen. Satisfied with my choices, finalized it and before I knew it, new information, knowledge, and experience started pouring into my head. However, unlike the previous times, the pain I was expecting was significantly lessened and nowhere near as difficult to handle.
The pain is still excruciating, but this amount I can handle and power through.
Gritting my teeth through the pain, I was as happy as can be that what I had to go through every time I leveled up had been alleviated so much. Due to my new relief courtesy of Pain Resistance, time appeared to tick on by faster than the previous bulk level up I had undergone, even though this one was quite a number of levels more.
At some point, the huge amount of new information that was being stuffed into my brain moments ago began to lessen and eventually that became a trickle before that was then rapidly cut off completely.
Fuck, man that was rough, though nowhere near as bad as before, thank god.
Taking a moment to breathe for a few seconds, I brought my system screen back up and took a brief look at it.
...Damn, I've grown strong, but I'm not done yet. I still have a quest to turn in.
Quickly moving on from the stats screen that had underwent a massive increase across the board, I navigated to the quest tab. Locking onto the Master All Trades quest, I turned it in and netted myself a hefty reward of 77,825 exp, a +5 to all of my skills, and a new perk. Just enough for two more level ups.
| Master Of All Trades | Congrats! You've mastered all of your base skills. For accomplishing such a feat, you will have a far easier time from here on out discovering and mastering all skills, no matter if they are newly obtained or those that have been with you since you've come to this world. In addition to that, +200% to skill gain speed, +25% to skill points gained per level up, and +10% to experience gain.
Not a bad perk at all, the effects from Master Of All Trades will boost my skill gain speed by a huge extent and raise the number of skill points I'll get each level up from now on by a substantial amount. Which will compound even further the higher my intelligence becomes.
Alright, let's get these level ups spent.
Wasting no time, I swiftly initiated the process once again, bringing the perk window into view one final time.
[ Perks ]
Perk Points Left: 2
Level 50 Perks
| Back From The Dead | Requirements Level 50: +10 Health per 100 kills, +50% damage, and immunity to critical hits. Also, you can come back from the dead once, though it will not work if you died from old age.
| Double-Edged Sword | Requirements Level 50, [ Warning! ] Must be taken at level 50: Gain 1 more perk point per level at the cost of doubling the amount exp you require from this point forward and reducing your exp as well as your level back down to 0. [ Additional Information ] This perk is required to gain access to mutations and [???]. [ Warning! ] all pending level ups beyond 50 will be eliminated once this perk is taken.
| Strong Body | Requirements Level 50, Endurance 10, Strength 10: The durability of your body is increased by 100% as well as your body's DT. On top of that, your Strength and Endurance improve at a much faster rate and for every 10 points you reach in either Strength or Endurance gain a +2 to that special (Example: 19 strength + 1 strength = 20 + 2 = 22 strength). +250% to both strength and endurance gain.
| Weight Management | Level 50, Strength 10: You've unlocked the unique ability to manage your weight and what effects you wish it to have on your surroundings whether that is lowering your weight and your equipped items so you're as light as a feather when you don't wish for your weight to disturb your surroundings or increasing your weight to the max to crush and destroy. You are limited to making yourself as light as a single feather or as heavy as your max carry weight and the weight you have control over can be applied and focused over your entire body, items, or just a specific body part such as your right leg.
I know I've used quite a bit of profanity already today, but holy fuck, those are some strong ass perks. Back From The Dead from the dead can literally resurrect me, grant me immunity to critical hits that particular effect is great for if I ever get headshotted or hit in my vitals. Besides that, I'll gain 10 health for every 100 lives I take. Wish I had this when I was butchering the molemen, but that's alright. I'm sure I'll have plenty of lives to harvest when I begin my long awaited journey.
That said, I may not even take it since I have three other candidates that are just as great in their own rights. Strong Body, for instance, will double both my body's durability and damage threshold. Having twice the amount of DT will allow me to tank 7.62 rounds with my body alone.
Just the thought of it alone is crazy to think about. On top of that, it will more than double my endurance and strength gains and will provide me with an immediate increase to both of those two attributes. That +2 to strength or endurance when they reach another 10 higher sounds pretty sweet too.
Weight Management looks useful and could become extraordinarily strong as well. I could see myself using it to jump off of buildings and land on ground unharmed or lighten myself when I get a suit of power armor down the road so I don't collapse and bring down structures that can't support my weight normally.
On the other hand, I could use the perk to max my weight while jumping from a building to come crashing down to deal a shit load of damage on whatever I'm targeting. The only obvious issue with doing that would be if my body could take the forces and pressure being applied to it on impact. Hmm, I suppose I could negate that by focusing the weight on an item instead of using my body as the instrument of destruction. However, since I don't know how the perk actually works, all of this is just baseless speculation in the end.
Excitingly looking their various effects over, I returned to the singular problematic perk amongst the four of them that I had skipped over initially.
Lastly, we have Double-Edged Sword. This perk provides some nice benefits, that being the additional perk point per level up at the cost of a +100% to my exp requirement. The increased exp requirements aside, it has another glaring issue that is it'll reduce my exp along with my level all the way down to zero, thereby reducing the amount of exp I gain from all sources because of Quick Learner. That's not even the end of it, my health will also be lowered by a whopping 1,000 points, so there's that as well.
Despite those issues, mutations and whatever [???] is are locked behind this perk and if I don't take it now, I won't be getting access to either of them, not that I really know what either of them are since this wasn't a perk from the game. But I got a pretty good guess what the former could be and that would be the ability to become a marked one or a transcendent and, if not those, maybe access to a whole assortment of new abilities.
There is [???] too, however, I have literally no idea what it could be. But it might be something powerful, so it would probably be wise just to take the setback just to see what it is. It's not like I'll be losing out on all that much since I'll be able to level up again significantly faster than I had done in the past thanks to my much higher experience rate. I'll also be receiving an extra perk point to spend every level so I can pick up a lot of the lower level perks I didn't take previously... Fuck it, I'll pull the trigger and return to level zero, it's not like it'll be that hard to get back to level 50.
Now that that's decided, I have one perk point to spend before I select Double-Edged Sword and from the perks available, including the ones I had passed over in previous level ups, I'm going to have to go with Strong Body. Someone else in my same position might say that's a dumb choice over Back From The Dead, which literally grants you the opportunity to come back from death.
The issue I have with it is how does it work, is it instantaneous, fast, or slow and if I got put in the dirt once, why can't the one who killed me once not do it again. Since I don't know the answer to these questions, it's a risk, at least in my book. So why not just simply take the perk that will literally double my body's own defenses and will make said defenses far easier to improve in the safety of the undercity over the next 7 years.
Combine that with the performance-enhancing drug maxigen, I plan on modifying to rid it of its negative side effect. The gains I'll be able to make over the coming years will be insane. I wouldn't be surprised if I could lift a couple of tons and tank .50 BMG with my body alone by the time I set out for the wasteland.
For those reasons, it makes more sense to invest in the perk that will let me rapidly increase my strength and capabilities than to invest in a perk that will allow me to come back from the dead one time.
My mind made up, I selected the perk Strong Body first, and then Double-Edged Sword. Finalizing my choices, the holographic screen swapped to display the skill distribution window.
[ Skills ]
Skill Points Left: 70
Ballistic Weapons: 152
Energy Weapons: 138
Explosives: 135
(T)Heavy Weapons: 248
Leadership: 120
Lockpick: 109
(T)Medicine: 307
Melee Weapons: 126
Piloting: 108
(T)Repair: 307
(T)Science: 307
Speech: 158
Stealth: 305
Survival: 311
Trade: 112
Unarmed: 121
I'm pretty happy where most of my skills are at but I need to increase my charisma so I'll dump the points into speech and bring it to 200 so I can raise my charisma by 1 point... There, that should do it. Now I can turn that Molemen Removal quest once I'm done here. All that's left to do is to figure out where I want to put the remaining 28 points. I can always use more gold and silver so I'll pump my trade skill up a bit.
Good, time to take care of that quest next and the following level up.
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Want to keep me motivated to write throw the work some power stones.
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