CHAPTER 49: FAST TRAVEL

Cipher easily cut down another undead.

Before, C-ranks were a little harder for him to handle without using aura, but now he could easily deal with them. With his now 50 strength, he was dealing 3000 damage with just pure mana manipulation. With this amount of damage, a C-rank merely needed two solid hits to kill, or one if he hit a critical area.

Speaking of, Cipher had discovered something interesting about the crit system.

Apart from the usual RNG crit that skills like aura had, there was another kind of crit known as the crit area. When hitting a crit area, one would always deal critical damage, which multiplied his damage by two.

For an undead like the one he was facing, the crit area was the neck up. He could figure this out through his aimbot, which showed critical areas to him in red. That’s how he had found out about this.

He had also tried exploiting this earlier to see if he could deal five times the damage by hitting a crit area with aura, which gave an additional three times crit damage, but he had failed.

The crit damage did not stack.

The base crit damage for hitting a crit area was 2x. Adding another multiplier did not stack but rather replaced, so instead of 5x, he just dealt the 3x from aura. So in conclusion, when using skills with guaranteed crit, there was no benefit to targeting crit areas as the damage was the same wherever he hit.

Still, it was a good habit to target these places.

Even if the damage didn’t stack, there was the possibility of his attacks leading to complications in the target’s body that could compromise them.

Cipher finally managed to clear a path through the monsters and reunite with the team. "I’ve inspected the area. There are multiple paths, but most of them are dead ends filled with undead," he said. "They probably noticed me and will be flooding this place soon"

"Did you find out which way the captives are?" Selene asked.

"Yeah. The main path doesn’t seem to have any undead, so they’re probably being kept there," he said.

"Wait, if they’re being kept there, wouldn’t it make more sense that it’d be the most guarded?" Maya asked.

"Not necessarily. Since all people here have turned to undead, they might attack captives. Since that guy wants to use them for his strange rituals, he won’t want them to be devoured by undead," Ryker explained.

Dante nodded, though he didn’t really get it.

"I see," Maya responded. "So, should we go to the main path?" she asked.

"No," Cipher responded. "I’ll go. You guys stay here."

"Huh? Isn’t it better if we all go in?" Dante asked.

"No. It’s better we stay here," Selene said. "If we all go in, the undead in the other caves will follow us in, blocking our exit. Although they’re much weaker than the C-ranks we faced just now, there are enough of them to cause problems, especially when escorting thousands of civilians." She added, "You want us to keep the undead out, right?"

"Yeah," Cipher nodded.

"Then you can leave it to us," she said.

"Alright, I’ll leave it to you. But if they become too strong, feel free to retreat inside to where I am, I’ll find a way to handle it" Cipher said and left into the main path.

...

As Cipher walked through the main path, he summoned his system once again.

[Name: Cipher]

[Level: 110 (8,000/110,000)]

[Species: Human]

[Class: Cheater]

[Health: 5300/6000]

[Mana: 200/600]

[Strength: 60]

[Stamina: 60]

[Agility: 60]

[Intelligence: 60]

[Stat Points: 11]

[Cheat Points: 4800]

[Skills (8/16): Pain Tolerance (S), Mana Manipulation (A), Regeneration (C), Aura (C), Dagger Throw (D), Mana Recovery (D), Voice Transmission (D), Assassinate (E)]

[Unique Skill/s (1/2): Heavenly Demonic Sword Art (Unique)]

[Cheats: Cheat Shop (Max Level), Absolute Appraisal (Max Level), Aimbot (Max Level), Fly Mode (Max Level), ESP (Level 2), Infinite Inventory (Level 1)]

[Owned Cards: ]

His stats had increased even more.

He had killed 30 C-rank undead, gaining 60 stat points and 2400 cheat points.

For the stat points, he had mostly distributed them during battle when he felt they were approaching the point of changing his true rank. As for the remaining 11 points, he put them all into mana.

As he closed the system, he couldn’t help but feel that he was improving quite fast.

It had just been about a week since he had returned and awakened, and he was already approaching B-rank. Could others improve like this?

Well, it was mostly attributed to his cheater class and multiple skills that allowed him to fight equally ranked opponents solo, where others would have to be in a party and just gain a percentage of the experience.

Still, as he grew stronger, leveling up would keep getting harder and harder as he would need to kill more and more monsters to advance. Like in B-rank, he would probably need to kill over two hundred B-rank monsters to advance to A-rank, and that number would keep doubling every rank he advanced.

He sighed. The path ahead was still rough, but he needed to persevere and find a way to save the world. And to do that, he needed more and more cheats.

Speaking of, he had leveled up five major levels, so he could spin for five cheats. He opened the cheat shop and spun for a cheat.

[Congratulations! ESP (Level 2) has advanced to ESP (Level 3)]

"Another ESP duplicate? Is this thing actually rigged?" he wondered. Now his ESP worked on a hundred-meter range. "Well, it’s useful, I suppose," he thought as he spun once again.

[Congratulations! Infinite Inventory (Level 1) has advanced to Infinite Inventory (Level 2)]

[Cheat: Infinite Inventory (Level 2)]

[Type: Passive]

[Description: Store non-living objects in an infinite alternate dimension. No weight or size limit. Living creatures cannot be stored.]

[Note: You can set whether or not to allow the flow of time for specific items in the inventory]

Cipher observed the description. The only change was that now he could select whether or not time flowed inside the inventory. He had yet to begin using his inventory much, so he didn’t think this was a huge difference. Still, it could come in handy later on. He spun once again, and this time, he hit:

[Congratulations! You have awakened a cheat]

[Cheat: Fast Travel (Level 1)]