Chapter 38: Divine Character

"Stop." Kaina said coldly when Marti made a move to stand as though his word was law. "Sit down."

Marti did so quickly once again.

"Tell us everything that happened. How did you die?"

"I..." Marti didn’t even know what to say. He was half stunned and half embarrassed.

They had already heard the reports from Aidylan. So it wasn’t like he could say he was caught off guard by Jaxir’s triple casting. But...

Marti grit his teeth. "I don’t know how to describe it. He defies common sense. He double casted―."

"We know he can double cast." Borus said through gritted teeth. "We know he can triple cast, in fact. Did you not listen during the reports?"

"Can you let me finish you overgrown old man?!" Marti barked back.

"What did you say to me?!"

"Enough." Kaina interjected once more. "Let him finish, Borus."

There was a flicker of coldness in Borus’ eyes, but he sat back, crossing his arms so tightly his bulging biceps writhed with veins.

"He didn’t just triple cast. I mean yes, he can triple cast, but it’s not that simple. He double cast his L1 Abilities."

Kaina’s eyes widened. "... Are you sure?"

It was one thing to triple cast Root Abilities. They were the simplest of the Abilities to begin with.

But double casting L1 Abilities was next to unheard of.

"You’re still not getting it." Marti said with a heavy shake of his head. "He didn’t even do it the normal way. He layered his chants, taking turns saying parts of the chants for each Ability. He wasn’t just double casting one L1 Ability, he was double casting two different forms and completing both of their chants at the same time.

"He bounced from one word to the next back and forth. At first I thought he was using a spell I didn’t recognize. But no. He was literally completing two different chants at the same time. It didn’t make any sense at all."

Kaina’s eyes widened. Even Borus sat up a little bit taller.

The only one in their group that could double cast L1 Abilities was Sejan. But Sejan was their healer, and when he double cast, he used the same healing spell twice.

This was usually what double or more casting meant. Even when Jaxir triple cast, he was using his Root Ability, Cast, alone.

What they hadn’t realized because they weren’t paying attention was that often when Jaxir triple cast, he was layering Charge with Cast at the same time. It could even be said that he was casting six Root Abilities at once, though this wasn’t exactly the case.

"I’ve seen this before." Sejan said slowly. "Marti going alone was as good as sending himself over to die."

The group looked over at him. Sejan rarely spoke, and when he did, it was even rarer for him to be so pointed and jagged with his words.

Yet, Marti didn’t refute. He had experienced it personally. He couldn’t even point to one singular mistake he made that turned the tide of the battle other than maybe not following up the moment he landed his sneak attack.

But even then, Jaxir had reacted so fast Marti wasn’t sure if he would have been able to land a meaningful strike.

"The Champions." Sejan said slowly, answering their questions.

The entire group fell into a deathly still silence. The bustle of the bar might as well have not meant anything to them at this point.

The Champions, the Scions, the Holy Sons and Daughters... depending on the faction, their names were different, and their ranks varied.

But the short of it was that they were the existences closest to Demi-Godhood on the game, and they were all racing to be the first to step into that stage.

Each one of them followed a unique God of their own. Some followed Major Gods, some Minor Gods, and some others only followed Demi-Gods. But each one of them was obscenely powerful.

"Why would a Champion appear here? If a Champion reset their character, everyone would know." Luka said.

"Maybe he isn’t one yet. Or maybe he used a special method. I’ve heard that the Major God of Creation hands out a lot of Divine Abilities that break the game. There is a cloning one I’ve heard of that might have a role here, but it’s impossible to tell."

Kaina closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Getting the Healer Class in this game wasn’t as easy as getting the others. You had to have what the game called a "Divine Character". Unless the game presented it as one of your five options, you were usually stuck between deciding on just Melee, Tank, Magic, and Ranged.

As a healer, Sejan was a lot more valuable to the guild than any one of them were. He also had a lot more patience.

They were all still relatively new to the game despite having already reset their characters, all things considered. It would take them a lot more time to accumulate the same level of knowledge that Sejan had.

So Kaina trusted his word.

"If we want to take someone like that down, we will have to fight together and have a real plan. It will be better if he is weakened first. I can give us a huge advantage," Sejan continued, "but―."

"He used Healing Vestigem Cards, too," Marti said softly.

Sejan’s eyes narrowed. "It seems that I was right, then. Only someone with Divine Character can do that. He must have been given the option of healer and chose the Magic Class on his own.

"If he has a lot of Healer Class Vestigem Cards on him, what advantage I can give us will be a lot more limited."

Sejan’s eyes fell on Kaina and he stopped talking. Now, it was the time for their leader to make a decision.

"What did he say he was going to do?" Kaina asked Marti.

"He didn’t give me details, but he’s on a quest. The quest sent him pretty far away, though, and to an area that’s very dangerous. It’s probably a pretty high level quest."

"Where?"

"The mesh point."

Everyone fell silent. They had purposely gone around the mesh point of the three tutorial villages to get here. Going through it was too dangerous even for them.

"Then in all likelihood," Kaina began, "he is doing a quest related to the history of the three villages. That makes things easier. If we alert the village head who already doesn’t like him, he’ll have to face a force far greater than he’s ready to."

Players were capped at Level 10 and had to remain beneath Level 11 to enter and remain in Tutorial Villages. This was why most of them had Experience Halting Vestigem Cards.

However... the village head and the village guards were not under the same restrictions.

A plan of action began to slowly form in Kaina’s mind.

Sejan might have been their most valuable asset, but she was assigned as leader for a reason.

**

Jaxir didn’t explicitly know a plot was coming his way, though he had his guesses. He just didn’t really mind it. He really only had one goal in this game...

Get stronger.

Now, getting stronger could manifest itself in a lot of different ways, whether that was his character, or his raw ability, or his heart.

While he could say that his character and heart were probably becoming stronger, his raw ability, eh... not so much.

In truth, it didn’t take him long to figure out how to level up Bind. The logic of it all was obvious.

He had to be more intentional with how he applied it. So, if Bind was designed to halt abilities and stop the mana flow of his enemies, then it logically followed the more he understood about the abilities of his enemies, the more effective Bind would be.

Sounds easy...

Except Jaxir alone had six Abilities. Anyone around his level would also have six Abilities. And the magic class alone had three such paths. If one ignored Root Abilities, that meant there were a total of 12 Abilities Jaxir would have to understand intimately.

And that was all before one considered unique mana.

Jaxir couldn’t be the only one who had upgraded his mana. Doing so had likewise changed and tweaked how his abilities worked too.

If one looked at it like that, there were 12 times however many different mana types there were in Divinity to understand.

And that was just the magic class.

There was just no way he could do that. There had to be a better way to level Bind up.

To make matters worse, other than the idea of trying to aim the crimson lightning of Wither in the cracks left behind by Fracture, Jaxir hadn’t really thought of anything that could level the former up.

But that was just relying on Fracture again. It wasn’t making Wither its own unique standout.

Jaxir ended up spending hours thinking and tinkering, slaughtering mobs and marching forward lost in thought.

The only real good news was that his experience continued to inch forward and he could feel his Root Abilities filling out.

However, when he was about half way to his destination, he yawned.

"Time to log out."

Jaxir’s eyes opened in the real world only for the echo of his doorbell to reach him.

Jaxir frowned. ’Who could that be?’