Editing Skill Tree Goddess:Volume1 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 2===

It was a pleasant morning.

Gilbezos was in his usual room in the usual inn.

“A little closer now, Gilbezos. There, caught you. And now your goddess will be cleaning out your ears★ Just lie on your side and rest your head here, okay? There, now that’s the perfect lap pillow★★★”

…Why?

After all that ultra serious stuff about stopping Brave Liar and keeping his promise with the king, how had his life reverted to the very brink of being a baby!? Was he cursed!?

“You don’t need to think about a thing. Just let your goddess handle it all while you enjoy your life. Hee hee. Look, look, I got so much from deep in there. Can you believe this? But don’t worry. I’ll clean it all out for you.”

“No! This kind of treatment first thing in the morning ruins people! B-besides, if I stay here in the peaceful city forever, I’ll never earn much LAW. If I want to earn enough for any real growth, I need to go fight in a dungeon where deadly danger is a constant companion!!”

“Really? And here I thought I was giving you a heart-stopping experience for a late bloomer like you.”

…He would prefer not to comment on that. What was with this sketchy lap pillow event?

“You’ve gotten so cold. It used to be I just had to pat my lap and you would rest your head there.”

“That was forever ago! When I was four or five!”

He needed to escape this strange LAW acquisition plan by switching to a more serious topic. Gilbezos Overridge did his best to slip out of the inescapable quagmire that was this goddess.

“Lady Seliphenia, open the Skill Tree real quick. I want to take another look at it. At the whole thing.”

In the past, he had mostly been choosing a combination of the skills Goddess Seliphenia suggested for him, but that wasn’t enough anymore. To better brainstorm ideas together, he wanted to know the Skill Tree better himself. He needed to be able to carefully choose his own skills.

“Hmm? Well, I can’t fault you for wanting to learn more. Okay, Skill Tree time.”

The goddess gestured as if stirring a large pot with a ladle in her hands and golden light flooded out of empty space. It formed the complex geometric patterns of the Skill Tree.

“Do you have to place it right in front of your navel?”

“Hey, you’re the one who kept complaining about how distracting it was at chest level.”

There were a few oddities among the complex gold lines. The blue flashing lights indicated the skill Gilbezos currently possessed.

“Ignoring the small buffs like HP+1 or AGI+3, the payback for all your current skills would get you about 4000 LAW. Starting from the bottom of the tree and moving up, that would not be enough to reach Rank 9.”

Learning a single Rank 9 skill required 512 LAW, but you couldn’t select one of those skills from the start. It cost a lot more LAW to climb the skill ladder starting at Rank 1.

As tracing the lines of the Skill Tree with a finger would show, climbing each rank required learning around 10 skills, even if they were only small buffs to HP or INT or whatever. So leaving even the Rank 1 zone required 20 LAW, but leaving Rank 7 required 1280 and leaving Rank 8 required 2560. The upper half of the tree was pricey.

In that case…

“Can I receive all my LAW back from those small buffs to HP and stuff too? That has to add up to something, right?”

If you really did receive payback for ''all of it'', your Max HP would drop to 0 and you would drop dead on the spot. But if that’s what you want.”

Gh.

…Yes, all his basic stats like HP, MP, STR, and VIT came from those small buffs. That wasn’t something to take lightly.

“Come to think of it, there’s an HP buff up at Rank 9, isn’t there? …Wait, HP+1Billion!?”

Rank 9 really was overpowered. That was beyond excessive. With a billion HP, the enemy wouldn’t be able to tear through it all even if they had a type advantage, so you could brainlessly attack even the most powerful enemy and win in the end.

“I doubt that would work here,” said the goddess.

“?”

“We could see a couple of Brave Liar’s skills. And one of them was the bright and shining Rank 9 Certain Death.”

A top rank skill. And that name did not give him any warm and fuzzy feelings…

“What kind of skill is that?”

“If the skill user gets a critical hit, it will kill the enemy no matter how much HP they have left.”

So it was like a never-ending free-to-play death lottery? And even without getting a crit, the standard damage was still stupidly strong?

…Hold on. Just how overpowered could things get!?

“Now, now. No crying, Gilbezos. Smile for me. We’re still analyzing the enemy. We’re not fighting him yet.”

The tall goddess rubbed his head. From her position a head higher than him. …''I wasn’t actually crying, but did I look like I was?

“Crits are rare, but they aren’t exactly unheard of, right?”

“Right. And since the skill is based on the critical hit determination of a standard attack, it can slip past the usual assumption that death magic doesn’t work during special boss battles. The legends say he’s slain at least 5 SSS-rank dragons, but I bet he used this skill. That means any plan based on boosting your HP or VIT won’t work.”

The short boy hung his head and trembled.

Why couldn’t that dark and pretentious man have at least one silly skill like “Brave Liar is still sleepily rubbing his eyes”?

“If you are going to battle Brave Liar, you need to first figure out what you’re going to do about Certain Death.”

That made sense.

First. That meant this was only the beginning and that monster still had ''much more'' beyond it.

Fire, water, wind, earth, other, light, shadow. Gilbezos doubted this would be a simple matter of figuring out which element to master.

“There are two ways of going about that. The first is to learn the Rank 9 skill Zombie HP. That one means you will survive even the most deadly attack with one HP remaining. That will give you a chance to just barely survive even if Certain Death hits you. Assuming you aren’t hit again before Zombie HP’s ten minute cooldown ends, that is.”

“Fine, but what am I supposed to do after getting my HP dropped to 1? That isn’t just a number – my actual body will be beaten down and on the verge of death. Who knows if I can even stay on my feet at that point.”

“It seems better than having it suddenly reduced to 0 to me.” Seliphenia laughed before continuing. “The second way is to learn all the AGI+ skills scattered across the tree’s lower levels, generally Ranks 1 through 3. Certain Death’s effect only kicks in if he gets a critical hit, so you will have more of a chance if you boost your odds of evading his attacks as much as possible.”

“So there’s nothing to fear if he can’t hit me?”

“Exactly. And your little body means your hitbox is, well, you know★”

…He was tempted to go with the passive safety of the latter option since he could escape unscathed that way, but it really came down to Brave Liar. If his speed and accuracy were absurdly high, that plan was meaningless.

Was there nothing else?

It seemed to Gilbezos like he would have more options if he could use Brave Liar’s abilities against him.

“Whether I’m going for a Rank 9 skill at the very top or a bunch of Rank 1 through 3 skills at the bottom, I need to decide on a goal.”

“If you want room to go either way, I would recommend having around 6000 LAW.”