54. Adaptive Regeneration or Enhanced Regeneration

Adaptive Regeneration or Enhanced Regeneration

I flew out of the base, everyone inside moving in my eyes like they were trapped in slow motion.

I was getting used to using super-speed even during downtime. Contrary to what novels often described, it did not make conversation difficult.

The frequency of sound did not actually change, at least not as long as I stayed still. Every sound simply lasted longer from my perspective, and that only took a little adjustment.

The greater bodily control and precision brought by higher attributes meant I could speak slowly enough for normal-speed people to understand. I did not need to slow down to their perspective, and conversation did not feel strange or awkward for me.

Perhaps higher levels of speed would cause problems.

For now, everything was fine.

During the subjective minutes of flight, I considered my abilities.

The first choice was obvious.

How many times had I failed to accomplish something because I was not fast enough?

How many times had enemy numbers overwhelmed me, or multiple coordinated enemies forced me into a corner?

How many times had I made mistakes because there simply was not enough time?

One of my abilities already provided a solution to those problems.

Why not improve it?

Instant Action lv2:
Instantly perform an action equivalent to five minutes of maximum effort, taking only two seconds.

Raising Instant Action to level two let me do twice as much as before for the same cost, while most enemies would have no chance to react.

Combined with the significant stamina increase from higher attributes, the ability would become useful more often.

For only two ability points, it was an absolute bargain.

For a moment, I considered improving it again. If raised high enough, it might change the entire course of battle.

But the same could be said of all my abilities.

More importantly, this was the first time I had eight ability points to spend and no immediate, life-threatening problem to worry about.

It was time to raise one of my level-three abilities to level four.

Improving Force Adjustment might increase the multiplier for all force effects.

That would basically make me stronger and tougher, by a considerable margin, while also significantly enhancing every force effect I could produce—and I could produce a lot of them.

It was a good general option, useful as a point of comparison against everything else.

Forced Acceleration would make me faster.

The increase would not be as dramatic as the way Force Adjustment would make me stronger and sturdier, but even a small difference in speed could be lethal.

It would increase my offense through faster attacks, improve my defense by letting me dodge more, obviously improve mobility, and also raise my thinking speed and regeneration speed.

The downside was that it worked less well against more powerful enemies. Faster attacks were less useful against things that could simply endure every blow, and dodging was not always effective against magic or special attacks.

Proximal Manipulation formed the foundation of most force effects I created. It let me fly, gave me leverage without a physical support, and amplified my strength.

Its direct defensive value was smaller, but when combined with other abilities, it was more useful than any one ability alone.

Progressive Regeneration was the reason I had survived every fight so far.

Against enemies of roughly comparable strength or number, completely avoiding damage was impossible.

Eventually, a mistake would happen, or a sacrifice would have to be made to achieve some goal.

A continuous healing ability that required no attention and no resources had mattered in every single battle so far. None of my other abilities could claim that.

Heroic tendencies or not, staying alive remained my first priority.

Adaptive Regeneration lv4:
You recover rapidly from damage. Each time you recover, you permanently gain a slight cumulative resistance to that specific attack.

Enhanced Regeneration lv4:
You recover rapidly from damage and gain a temporary all-around boost. The strength of the boost is tied to the speed of recovery and slowly fades after battle.

After spending the points to raise the ability to level four, I faced two similar but powerful options.

The first was a long-term investment.

In the short term, for types of damage I had already healed many times, it might actually be weaker than my previous Progressive Regeneration, because I had already optimized those healing processes to a fairly high speed.

But cumulative resistance would eventually make weaker attacks completely useless, and even reduce the effect of stronger ones.

With enough preparation or previous clashes, an army of small fry would become meaningless to me.

The problem was that it worked poorly against powerful enemies.

Every non-summoned monster had its own strange or even rare abilities.

Every time I encountered a new enemy, I would have to adapt to it separately, which undermined the ability’s greatest strength.

The second option offered immediate improvement.

Gaining an all-around boost through regeneration would make every battle of attrition far easier. As long as the enemy could not quickly overwhelm me, or defeat me through non-damaging abilities, victory would draw closer and closer.

Enemies that had once been hard to defeat might become beatable through a defensive strategy and time spent strengthening myself.

The flaw of Enhanced Regeneration was the opposite of Adaptive Regeneration.

Because the boost was temporary, I could not prepare for the long term, and enemies who knew how it worked could exploit its temporary nature.

On the other hand, if its mechanism was not widely known, then in battle I might appear to be holding back, only taking things seriously and releasing my full strength once an enemy had proven to be a real threat.

That idea felt familiar…

And interesting.

Adaptive Regeneration, or Enhanced Regeneration?

The trailer park in the south of the city had existed longer than the city itself, and even longer than most of us had been alive.

At first, back when the whole area had been nothing more than a truck stop with some extra facilities, it had been temporary housing.

During the city’s initial construction boom, it had expanded dramatically.

After more than ten years of gentrification and corporate interference, housing prices had soared. Many of the original residents of the growing town had moved into the rapidly swelling mobile-home district.

The strange fog and other magical weather phenomena in the sky had finally dispersed, revealing the devastation caused by the invading monsters in all its clarity.

Half the city’s buildings were gone.

Monster attacks, magical fires, military bombardment, and the occasional nuclear detonation had reduced them to less than rubble—or else they had been swallowed by the enemy’s grim black iron fortress.

The destruction was especially severe in the trailer park.

A broad strip of wasteland cut across the southernmost edge of the suburbs. What had once been nearly two square kilometers of trailers and dry shrubs was now mostly smoking slag heaps and ash-covered open ground.

The near-total lack of fire prevention had finally come back on the people who lived here, though more than half the destroyed vehicles had been lost during desperate attempts to flee the city.

Still, roughly a quarter of the trailers remained.

Hundreds or thousands of small, human-shaped figures hurried among them like ants harassed by children with magnifying glasses.

Or, in this particular case, by several groups of magical monsters.

The smaller, more mobile imps who could fire fireballs made up the majority of attackers, while a loose ring of skeleton archers had formed around the trailer park, shooting at stragglers trying to escape the ongoing bombardment.

From so high above, even someone like me, with no tactical skill whatsoever, could clearly see the coordination and methodical efficiency with which the invaders exterminated humans.

If ten days of brutal fighting had not numbed my emotional responses, leaving only a constant, darkly burning anger, the terrible sight before me would surely have ignited fresh rage.

After blinking three times through time and space, I flew low over the ground at several times the speed of sound and continued accelerating.

Skeleton archers and sword-wielding ghouls found themselves inside the attack path of a human-shaped cannon shell sweeping through their lines.

In thirty seconds, I circled the trailer park three times. Hundreds of enemies burst apart like bugs hitting a windshield.

Then a narrow, invisible forcefield—one centimeter wide and one kilometer long—swept several times over the trailer park.

Any imp intercepted by that field experienced something like being gently punched by me with an area the size of a fingernail.

Then it was violently torn apart.

By selectively applying force, everything else remained completely undisturbed. There was no collateral damage and no trace left behind for enemies to track or dodge the sweeping beam.

After eliminating most of the attackers, I flew into an area that had been disfigured by the invasion, yet still felt familiar.

Worse was waiting.