Risen World

Chapter 149: Rewards and Rebuilding a Territory

It didn't take much longer after putting the poor boss out of its misery for a new door to appear as an exit for the dungeon and a surge of strength to flow through Joshua as he leveled up once again. Just in the short time they had spent clearing the haze from the town and defeating its dungeon Joshua had gone from level thirty-five all the way to thirty-nine and was only one level away from his goal. That was a bit surprising to him, but he was getting double experience from the dungeon so it was basically as if he was going through the dungeon twice in one run. He still had a week and a half before the time he planned to meet up with the rest of his friends to train together and he planned to make the most of it. They could go through this dungeon one more time to reach level forty in all likelihood then they could explore one of the new areas opened up from clearing the town.

Before Joshua could finish planning things out a message from the system appeared in front of him. He was sure Lilly was probably getting the same thing.

[Congratulations on clearing the town dungeon. Your clear rate shall be rated as a perfect clear on your first attempt. Avoiding unnecessary traps while gaining all the treasures from the dungeon at the same time reflects greatly on your clear progress. Thus you shall be given the highest possible reward for this clear. Also due to clearing the dungeon the second portion of clearing the town of the haze infection has been completed, more information on this will be given after exiting the dungeon. Your reward for clearing this dungeon is.the {RESET} skill.]

Joshua was excited after finishing reading through the entire prompt, but he was a bit confused when he saw the way the system had highlighted the new skill. This was the first time he had ever seen a skill get highlighted in this way as if it was of a higher tier or something, but he knew that skills didn't have tiers in that sense. There were tiers in how strong the skill could be depending on which variation of the skill you had gotten just like the difference between his echo strike and the one at the auction house, but there wasn't a difference in tier between Echo Strike itself and something like energy slash. So this new addition to this skill was a bit odd. Joshua decided to check the skill to see if there was something different on it that would explain things.

[Reset A Unique skill that is in limited quantity throughout the system. These skills cannot be sold or traded and can only be learned by those the system deems worthy. This skill in particular is special since it can affect all other skills the user has in a specific way. Reset allows the user to completely reset the cool down of any of his other skills the moment he uses this skill. It has a cool down of ten minutes. As this skill levels it will gain two things. For one the cool down will lower thus allowing you to use longer cool down skills more often and secondly once it levels it will allow you to stack resets. For the moment at level one you can only hold onto one reset, but as this skill levels you get an extra stack. This skill only has three levels, but will take a lot of experience to level.]

Joshua was stunned by what he read. The implications of this skill were incredible and he could see why it was considered a unique skill. It could work with any job since it could work with any other skill and it would be incredibly valuable. Joshua could use some of his longer cool down abilities like aura hardening or even aura shield more often as long as he had reset on the back burner in a critical situation. He could also use it in an offensive situation and make two echo strikes instead of one in a crucial moment. All sorts of ideas were flooding his head when Lilly finally snapped him out of it.

"Oh this is great Joshua! All the partners I used during the battle each gained a skill." Lilly said excitedly as she pulled him over to show him. "See look at all these cool skills they got. Tank, Cinder, Jade, and Flutter all got new skills. Maybe the others will get some new skills if I use them during our next dungeon run.

Joshua smiled at her antics before looking over the skills each of her pets had gotten.

[Buzz Skill (Flutter) - A skill that allows the user to buzz their wings angrily and cause a sound that disorients their opponents. This skill can be used to confuse enemies or even disrupt channeled abilities if used at the correct time.]

That was a rather interesting skill with some unique uses. It could be used at the start of fights to disorient their opponents and get them a clean shot from the beginning without having to worry about them retaliating properly. It could also be used to completely stop a powerful attack that could become a threat to Tank or Joshua if used at the right moment. All in all it was a great support skill that fit Flutter's role perfectly.

[Shadow bind (Jade) A skill that can only be used when inside the shadow of an enemy. This skill allows Jade to bind an enemy for a short amount of time at any moment through its shadow. The effectiveness of this skill depends on how powerful the enemy that it is being used against is and how powerful Jade is in comparison. Enemies that are to strong can immediately break the binding with effort.]

This skill was another support skill that when used at the right time could do wonders for their team. It can hold an enemy in place if they were going to use an extremely devastating attack against it or it could hold off an enemy that was about to do the same to them. Even if an enemy was able to break the bind through their strength there would be a moment where they would have to struggle to do so and that was more than enough time for Joshua to do some real damage in most cases.

[Whirl Pool (Tank) A skill that allows the user to flood the surroundings and create a massive surge of water that pools all enemies towards Tank. This skill can be used as a trap that will keep enemies disoriented and in place. The constant water pressure also deals damage as long as the enemy is within the whirl pool. The damage changes depending on how close to the center of the whirlpool the enemy is. When used in an area without a lot of water this skill cost a lot of aura or mana for Tank, but when used in an area with abundant water or moisture in the air this ability cost far less to use.]

Now this was probably the first offensive skill he had seen thus far. It was a skill that basically made Tank a trap for enemies and gave him a bunch of water in the surroundings to work with at the same time which said a lot. The constant damage was good for enemies that would try to heal right through it and the skill could be used in combination with Cinder to do some interesting things. Water alone did some serious damage to their enemies, but what if the water was boiling the entire time? That really gave Joshua some future ideas to use.

[Flame Pyre (Cinder) An ability that sets a trap on the ground that can either be triggered directly by Cinder to send a pillar of flames into the air or set off from an enemy stepping on it. The power behind the flames changes depending on how much mana or aura Cinder puts into the seal for the trap at the start. ]

This skill was a lot more straight forward than the others and was there purely for damage. It would be extremely useful with the way Cinder was able to change a battlefield with all of her other skills. She could easily blind an opponent or web other routes off to force them into those sort of traps. Plus used in conjunction with Tanks whirlpool it could probably do just what Joshua had been envisioning beforehand.

"Well they are definitely interesting. I've already got all sorts of ideas going through my head over how we can use them. Oh, here's my new skill by the way." Joshua said as he sent the information over to Lilly.

"You truly are unusually lucky, but that's good for us." Lilly said with a teasing smirk.

"Yeah, I get the whole lucky thing already. Let's head out so we can see what the rest of the system said was all about." Joshua said with a small smile before heading towards the door with everyone following right behind him. When they exited the dungeon and came back out into the small town the place still looked horrible, but the moment they appeared another system message popped up in front of them.

[Congratulations on completely clearing and claiming a territory of your own. Now that you own this territory you can give it a name and start to build its defenses. You can also have the system clear the area and build new structures for the right price. The time to build structures will be shown in the territory building panel of the system window. You will have six months to fix up the area before anyone else can try to challenge you to your claim of the territory. In that time you can either allow others to enter the territory, allow specific people to enter your territory, or block your territory off entirely. Those not allowed to enter your territory won't be able to pass through or cause trouble in your territory until challenges are allowed.]

Joshua made sure to read through all the information and instantly blocked off the territory outside of people that he specified. For the moment it was just him and Lilly, but that would change soon. The only reason he did this was because he was making sure they'd have the territories that were beyond the town in the mountain range area all to themselves. Of course people could try to go over mountains to get inside, but with the enormous birds and whatever else could be up their looking for an easy meal Joshua was certain nobody would be stupid enough to cause trouble.

This tactic might annoy some people and even get some smaller guilds to try to challenge them in the future, but in six months he was certain he'd be able to handle any challengers that came their way. He planned to treat this town as a major point for his future guild for two main reasons. One of them being the simple fact that it was his first cleared town and that meant something to him. Sure he could go clear another one that was even larger in the future, but that would take some time and until his personal guild was big enough he didn't plan on spreading it to thin. Guarding multiple territories cost three things, a lot of money, a lot people, and a lot of time. At the moment the only thing he had was a lot of money and that was enough for him to take care of one territory not multiple. Constantly having to repair the defenses of multiple territories would get taxing extremely quickly.

The other reason was the far more important one. It was the simple fact that this territory basically gave his future guild multiple different training grounds for his future guild members. There was the dungeon in the town itself, the several territories with different level beast that they had yet to explore inside the mountain range, and of course any dungeons they found inside those areas. This territory was basically an experience gold mind for a freshly started guild and even more importantly it was a material gold mind as well that would allow his guild to catch up in the expenses department going forward without having to rely on the rest of the alliance completely.

In the end it was a great starting point for his guild and Joshua was going to make sure to keep it in tip top shape going forward. Now it was time to figure out how the territory rebuilding actually worked with the system. He figured he could spend his little break getting started on that.