When Peter returned to his core space he found a sea of units looking at him like prairie dogs. The small auditorium was literally filled with units who had just watched the entire congregation. Everyone in his staff would clearly be interested in seeing what he had gotten, including putting in their two cents. Peter would not have any of that. “Boris… Delilah… come on,” Peter said before quickly retreating into his personal space.
Peter had learned that including too many people in dungeon direction decisions could lead to some internal conflicts, and it had not been all that helpful in the past. For the most part it actually muddled the waters. Boris should be up on all latest information regarding his dungeon, and at least he could be trusted to only give input when it seemed absolutely necessary or when asked. Delilah… he included for obvious reasons. She was not all that intrusive either, mainly being content as long as she could watch the process.
Soon they were enclosed in his room. Peter and Delilah hurriedly sat in the corner lounge area, while Boris stood by. Only then, did Peter open his interface. He was met by a list that he would have to continually scroll down for a while to see its end. Part of it was because there was only one item in a row, another part was that there were hundreds of rewards. The list had them broken down based on the various category rewards and then just general rewards he had received.
Peter was definitely interested in seeing what fruit was born through his effort in the various 10 categorical areas, but he could look at that later. For now, Peter took the information and had it sorted according to what each line item did. As he generally liked to do, Peter would go through the smaller rewards first and work himself up to his peak prize. The sorting was not exactly perfect, the interface had reorganized them more towards their rarity and what they did other than how beneficial their utilization would be for him. Some items higher on the list would clearly be more beneficial than those lower and vice versa, but it was good enough.
The first several hundred line items were the consumable and items. Peter leaned more to how Wing felt. From his initial glance, before reorganizing, there had certainly been some extremely good standouts that fell in this category, but they generally only helped one unit or were one time use consumables. Still who could say they might help him through some difficult circumstances. Peter briefly looked and relooked through the list before allowing his eyes to fall on what seemed to be the true prizes. The first of which had already been claimed.
Delilah had already impatiently had him summon one of the items, the 8 cardinal rifle. The item was a bulky rifle made of tier 8 gilded mithrel. The ammo was fed by a revolver-like cylinder with 8 chambers, each of which was around half the diameter of his fist. Pretty big for the long and thick bullets they must hold. The rifle was whatever step was above an elephant gun, and was likely far too heavy for him to even lift, but it was not just the rifle. There were also 8 respawnable rounds. The rounds could do a variety of things, but each only regenerated once after battle and only if used. Still Peter could not help but think they were overpowered.
The most basic of the rounds was the god slayer round which was made of the same tier 9 mythic material as the rifle. Delilah had been using tier 7 one shot rifles to take down A tiers. Of course unlike those rifles made of tier 4 material, this rifle would be just fine after each shot.
The god slayer round would most certainly be effective against a unit in the S tier. The other rounds were probably not as lethal but added their own flavors.
One round, the god’s protection round, would cast an energy shield around whatever was hit, so was likely meant for friendlies. Another round called god’s signal seemed to be a flare or perhaps more like a tracer round. Peter was not quite sure what it could be used for, although the opposite seemed to be god’s absence which drained the light from the area around what was hit.
In fact all the rounds seemed to have a corresponding opposite. There was god’s blessing which healed to counter the god slayer round. The god’s protection contrasted against the god’s susceptibility which apparently removed or lessened resistances in addition to making the target more vulnerable to any kind of attack. Then there was god’s judgement and god’s smite which either electrified or force slammed the target as far as Peter could tell.
“Hmmm… I think we should be able to make our own rounds for the rifle eliminating the need for Delilah to have to use one-use rifles at all,” Boris interjected.
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“That would be good, having a bunch of aides following me like baby ducks has been quite burdensome. It will allow me to move around quicker,” Delilah added with a smile.
“Yeah this is end game stuff. Can you imagine how long it would take us to make something like this ourselves? It might take decades or centuries just to get tier 9 materials since I will likely be called to use our resources on other things before I can save enough,” Peter said in wonder.
Peter soon moved on. There was a set of cybernetic wings that could attach themselves into a unit and be controlled as if they were the unit’s natural appendages.The wings were only made of tier 7 quick silver, so perhaps not quite at the same level of the rifle. Peter would have to decide who they would go to later. He moved on.
The next was a B tier eggsac, which had been counted as a consumable, but fit more into the ongoing benefit category. The egg sac could be linked to one unit and affixed to a floor. The egg sac would then spawn B tier one offs of the linked unit indefinitely. The eggsac would even respawn the linked unit although that would result in fewer one offs hatching. It sounded great if not for the caveats. The eggsac, all the spawn, and the linked unit would forever be tied to the floor. Then it could only be used on beasts that naturally birthed eggs. Still it was a guaranteed defense force that would forever be a part of his dungeon.
The last of the one time consumables were the legendary cards Nemesis had been certain they would all earn based on them getting good ranks and falling well above the bar set by all those before them. Still Peter felt a bit of disappointment, seeing that he had only gotten 12 of them. Still he eagerly looked through what they could do.
Six of them were unit lock in cards. The older concept cores had mentioned that if they got 3 legendary cards at least 1 would be a lock in card, so he had done quite a bit better than that metric. They were the most common type, but Peter was fine with that. They would lock in a unit permanently, which would save on the need for resurrect cards. However, the locked-in unit would only revive after the dungeon battle was completed so it was worse in a sense, since the resurrect cards would allow a resurrected unit to rejoin the battle after 24 hours. Still the lock in cards made a unit a permanent fixture, one that did not rely on him getting a high number of support cards.
Then Peter also got a pair of the same, unit craft cards. The legendary unit craft card took his design type option function and supercharged it. Peter would have to burn the corresponding card types and combination cards, but he would then get a say in its attributes and 10 options for its special ability. What made Peter excited was that there was no order of operations. He could optimize the unit based on what it did, and the result would be a guaranteed S rank. Then Peter would be free to use other support cards like tier up increase as desired. A perfectly optimized tier S was not necessarily a game changer in and of itself, but the unit craft card promised a good chance at getting new capabilities. Not only would he get 10 options, but they would be named. That was certainly more than what he normally had to go off of, the unit’s picture and name.
The next card Peter studied was the bloodline addition card which could be used on a new unit or one that had already been summoned. The only limitation was that it had to be a living being, so no undead, constructs, elementals and so on. The card would give the 3 choice option to add a bloodline which would also translate to all future one offs including those from maelstroms. If Peter understood it right it would not add the bloodline to one offs that had already been summoned if he used it on a unit he already had, but it would change the maelstroms he had for that unit.
Next was the symbiote card which also had to be used on a living being. The legendary symbiote card would summon an S tier unit that complemented the unit it was used on. Peter could only guess what it would be like, but he pictured something in line with the pup familiars which augmented their linked mage’s mana.
Then he had received two add domain cards. Peter had a couple of units with a domain aspect. The two strongest were the chilled glacier turtle and the gravitron with their sub zero and gravity domains. However this card made no mention of affecting future one offs, so perhaps it would be better to use on new summon.
The last legendary card might as well have been a part of the other consumable rewards. It was an artifact item card. Peter immediately used it since the card would just give some random artifact level item. The result was the three fate scepter. It was an ornate wooden staff, maybe four feet in length. At the top were three gems: one white, one black, and one gray. They were equidistant from each other around the circumference of a transparent crystal. Peter could not help but think of the story, the Christmas carol, when he saw that they represented the past, present, and future. It was not quite clear, but the present seemed to be a reality warper, while past and future affected time. It was likely as over powered as the rifle.
Peter found himself sifting his hand through his hair. Everytime he felt he had a good grasp on things and the limits of power, something came along to shake his understanding although he had to be getting closer to the end. After there was only the SSS tier above the SS tiers he already had. He already even had units with an SSS tier attribute, and he knew that artifact was the top item rarity. Peter felt he was doing pretty good as only a 10 year old core. Still he had a ways to go. He might be closing on the limits, but it seemed there was a lot that could still be fleshed out.
