Ascending Endlessly: I Copy Skills

My eyes were weighed down by deep bags, glazed over as I sat on my couch gripping a blank card tightly in my hand. It was four days since I'd hunted down those goblins, and I'd quickly obtained a new obsession. I could feel my days of experimenting furiously into the night with mana returning.

"Ha… Ha ha… this is fucking awesome…"

I muttered to myself as I looked at the card in my hand with a grin and wide eyes.

It started the day after the hunt. When I woke up, I immediately decided I wanted to understand the application of the cards and how they worked. Of course, in order to truly test things out, I would have to enter the dungeon once again.

I didn't enter the second floor that time- my experience before made me want to collect more information regarding my abilities before trying to gain any new ones. 

I learned three things that day.

First, I learned that the cards seemed to have abilities beyond simply holding and casting magic. It sounds strange, I know, but they're more unique than I'd imagined. If I willed one of the Jokers to cast a skill, it would float out of the deck itself and fire off the skill on my command. After casting, it would dissipate into the air, teleporting back into the deck.

Pairing this with the fact that each card seems to have its own small gate, only a bit larger than my own, it made me wonder about their true origin. Regardless, this wasn't a bad thing. It would make casting in battle and retrieval much more efficient.

Second, I experimented with successive casting. Drawing the same card several times to cast a skill could apparently destroy the spell signature. At least, I remember the old man saying something along those lines, so I decided to test it. Surprisingly, the results were pretty good.

After one cast, the card would still look normal. However, casting it immediately a second time would cause the characters on the card to fade slightly. Oh, right. The characters. They were really bizarre- Strange glyphs that completely covered the card. I couldn't really understand them, but they certainly piqued my curiosity.

Regardless, a third cast would cause them to erode slightly around the edges. A fourth would lead to greater erosion. At this point, I realized the skill had been gradually weakening with each cast, becoming less and less stable. Finally, the fifth cast would destroy the characters completely, returning the card to a blank state.

Destroying one spell signature wasn't too great of a loss for me. I could obtain more relatively easily, so I tried one more thing with the second flame skill. It turned out that after the third cast, the characters would not return, but with the second, where the characters would only fade a bit, they would regain their luster after a couple of hours. Self-correction seemed possible, at least to a certain degree.

After a single cast, if I waited about an hour, the skill wouldn't fade at all after a second one, so I figured that one hour was roughly the cooldown time for the card to stabilize. I wasn't sure if this was unique to this skill, or to its rank, but I could wait until I found more powerful skills to figure that out.

Regardless, it wasn't too bad. It meant that my weak skills could be replaced with stronger ones in the future, so I didn't have to have any reservations about collecting as many as possible.

Finally, I learned a third thing. This was, by far, the most important. Really, it was the solution to all of my greatest problems. In fact, even if the cards only possessed this function, they would already be the most broken weapon possible for me. I had the idea after killing some goblins and thinking more about the potential mechanisms behind the cards.

If they were able to store a spell signature, as well as conduct mana, what would happen if I input my own mana into one? The result was incredible. It would store it. If I put my mana into a blank card, it would simply stay put inside. Even more importantly, I could remove and use it whenever I liked. This meant that, as long as I was willing to put the time into charging them up, I could have a massive mana battery at my disposal whenever I pleased.

This led to my brain firing on all cylinders. I tried putting my mana into a card which already possessed a skill signature, which had no result. It only passed through it. However, if I did so while the skill was casting, the card would start drawing from my gate as a supplementary power source.

In addition, this gave me greater control over the skill. I could actually, strangely, feel the skill, and to a degree, manipulate it. I couldn't change its trajectory, but I could decrease the output. This was certainly valuable knowledge.

Finally, we reach the present, where I'm several days sleepless, pouring my little bit of mana into a card. I was testing the limits to its storage capacity. So far, it seemed almost endless. However, within the last several hours, the card started glowing lightly. I sensed that I was reaching the end. Finally, after three days of almost non-stop mana circulation, the card started to reject being filled any more. This was it.

I held the card in my hands, watching it glow and laughing loudly. My one problem. I had always struggled with the amount of mana I had access to. But now? I could control as much mana as I needed with just a single card. On top of that, I still had one hundred and sixteen remaining. What would happen if I filled all of them and drew all of the mana out of them at once?

I felt like that kind of power could completely wipe out the gloam if I wanted it to. My mind was in total disarray from the lack of sleep. I felt like a madman, but the satisfaction of finally gaining the immense power I'd always dreamed of had taken complete control of me. I didn't bother taking a nap. I wanted to test this right away.

And so, once again, I headed to the dungeon.

On the way there, it really sunk in what an incredible power this was. In fact, there was only one material capable of storing mana on earth, and that was Polarium. However, this had to be done under extremely specific circumstances, with entire facilities just to store a relatively small amount of mana.

Otherwise, I could've been using my Polarium knife as a battery this whole time. Unfortunately, as reactive as it was, this was a far cry from reality. But now? I laughed to myself again on the train. With how disheveled I looked, I got some pitiful glances from a couple of hunters around me, but I couldn't care less.

Fuck you guys. I'm fucking better than you. Suck my dick, you bastards. I flipped off the guy across from me who was looking nervously at me and his face turned sour. Ha ha, who fucking cares what these motherfuckers think.

I'm the goddamned chosen one. I was born with more mana sensitivity than anyone on earth. I used to train the fucking S-Rank hunters. I was born for this. You're just a bunch of weak-asses.

I was reveling in myself. A small part of me cried out not to think that way, but I couldn't help myself. So, I kept indulging in it. As the minutes passed, I just kept getting more and more overconfident.

Finally, we arrived at the dungeon. I didn't hesitate for even a moment to head directly for the second floor, pushing my way through the basic goblins with my remaining two fire pillars. I didn't stop and think for even a moment as I walked down the stairs. I felt no fear. I felt no panic.

It didn't even feel strange to realize that I'd abandoned all of my hesitation and care. It just felt fucking great.

I didn't bother to go into a less populous area. I headed straight down the middle, looking for as many goblins as possible. There was a group of five. I swaggered closer to them with a devious grin on my face as I pulled out my mana battery.

I stuck my middle finger up at the goblins as I started siphoning a huge amount of mana from it- more than I'd ever felt in my life. The power was incredible. I started circulating it through my entire body, feeling invincible. One goblin fired off a skill at me, some kind of mana arrow. I deflected it with ease with just my bare hand, disassembling the skill as it came into contact with the thick layer of mana covering my entire body. However,

I kept drawing more and more out from the card. Through the rush of adrenaline, I failed to feel the pain until the last moment. The moment when my heart stopped. The moment my muscles started ripping apart. The moment my bones started to splinter and fracture, and my tendons started to tear. Within just a few seconds of pulling mana from the card, my body was being destroyed from the inside.

As I felt the immense pain that was now surging through my body, I couldn't stop myself from passing out. The last thing I heard was an explosion.