Masteria Online: Shattering the Dark God's Grand Scheme-Chapter 170 - Something

With her battle won, Lena slowly pushed herself to her feet. Her legs trembled beneath her weight, but she forced herself upright. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. She needed to get back to Lumi’s side. That was where she was supposed to be, guarding him like a good girl.

She took a step forward, then another. Each movement sent dull aches through her body, reminders of the injuries she’d just sustained. When she had a moment between steps, she raised her wand.

"Heal."

[HP +128]

The spell washed over her again. The pain dulled further, yet exhaustion still hit. After all, healing one’s physical health didn’t mean energy was being restored.

Heal didn’t take very long to cast at all. The incantation was simple, the mana expenditure was moderate, and the casting time was only about three times the length of Holy Arrows. Given the effect Heal provided, that was nothing. Practically instant.

The real issue limiting her from instantly healing herself to full wasn’t the casting time at all.

It was the issue of diminishing returns.

The more you healed a body in quick succession, the less effective each subsequent healing became. The body developed a temporary resistance to restorative magic when it was applied too frequently. That was why a Second Rank magician, even if they could cast Heal repeatedly, couldn’t just sustain the life of a demigod indefinitely through sheer spam.

They might heal for around two hundred health points on the first cast. Then one hundred fifty on the second. Then one hundred on the third. The numbers would keep dropping with each application until the healing became nearly worthless.

To retain effectiveness, healers needed to wait between casts and let the body’s resistance fade before applying more restoration.

That, in effect, created an effective healing rate cap. Even if a healer could maintain their effectiveness for hours, even if they healed for a cumulative total of ten thousand health over the course of a prolonged engagement, did that really matter when facing someone who possessed over a million health?

Not particularly. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Not that the concept of health actually existed in Masteria as a tangible thing. That numerical value was just a representation created by the system, a way to quantify the physical condition of a body in terms players could understand and track.

Anyways, Lena didn’t even have a thousand maximum health yet. She could recover to full in about a dozen seconds if she cast Heal repeatedly without diminishing returns. Though if it weren’t for that limitation on successive casting, it would take about six seconds instead.

Six seconds versus twelve seconds.

You could do the math on what you’d prefer to have in the middle of a battlefield.

She cast Heal again as she walked.

[HP +96]

Several more pixies were suddenly attracted to the area. They’d been drawn by the commotion, namely the constant barrage of spells Lumi was casting across the battlefield. His Lance of Light spam created a visual spectacle that was impossible to ignore.

The pixies came flying in from various directions, converging on Lumi’s position.

Lena sighed deeply.

Was this what they called exhaustion? The battle had only just begun, the larger engagement was still ongoing all around them, and she was already tired. Wasn’t that weird?

She was supposed to be a battle maniac, wasn’t she? She loved fighting. She loved the thrill of combat, the rush of adrenaline, the satisfaction of victory.

She was, right?

Damn. Now she was doubting herself.

Maybe she wasn’t actually as into this as she thought. Maybe the whole bloodthirsty psycho persona was just a coping mechanism she’d adopted to deal with the stress of knowing the world was ending.

She shook her head, clearing the thoughts away. This wasn’t the time for an existential crisis.

She scanned the mass of approaching pixies quickly, scanning and evaluating their ranks. There were about a dozen of them, yet none of them were even at Second Rank. Mostly fodder, but with numbers they could be a threat.

She threw herself into battle without hesitation. Her wand came up. "Holy Arrows!" The spell launched forward, striking one of the pixies and forcing it to teleport away.

Another pixie came at her from the side. She sidestepped, letting its claws pass by harmlessly, then struck it with the tip of her wand like a club. The pixie recoiled, and she followed up immediately.

"Holy Arrows!"

The arrows pierced through it at point blank range. It fell unceremoniously.

[EXP +267]

She moved to the next target without pausing.

Meanwhile, across the battlefield...

Ding!

[Level Up! 37 -> 38]

Lumi gained yet another level. He didn’t stop casting as he opened his skill panel and immediately allocated his four stat points into Torment, bringing it to level 13.

He glanced briefly at Lena’s fight. She was holding her own against the weaker pixies without issue. He turned his attention back to his own activities.

Experience kept being racked up at an absurd pace. How could it not? He was practically stealing from the system through sheer mechanical exploitation.

The way experience distribution worked in Masteria wasn’t based purely on contribution percentage. Rather, the more contributors there were to a kill, the more total experience was generated and distributed among them.

For example, suppose there was a monster that, when killed by one person acting alone, gave 100 experience points total.

Then, if six people worked together to kill that same monster, they might each receive 50 experience points. That was 300 experience points total generated from a single kill, three times what a solo kill would have produced.

That meant that a situation like this current battle, where it was incredibly easy to get even the smallest contribution against masses of enemies, then someone else would deliver the finishing blow, was by far the most efficient method of getting the system to give him EXP.

Lumi’s Lances kept hitting random pixies caught off guard. Even those that dodged still were affected by him by forcing a movement in the middle of their own battles. Every pixie he struck, even if he didn’t kill it, counted as a contribution when someone else finished it off.