Damon's Ascension-Chapter 51: The Value Of Excavated Items

Damon felt exhilarated at this moment.

From the moment he had been able to form his first thought, he had chosen to take the path of steady progress to achieve his goals. This meant that he was the type to control his emotions and actions carefully so that he could accomplish everything he set his mind to.

Even if you slighted Damon, he would bear with it if taking retaliatory action was detrimental to his goals. This kind of mentality was geared towards success and would easily rise up in today’s society, but it was extremely stifling to live.

Indulgence was the poison of attainment.

To let one do as they wished whenever they wanted without any form of self-control was a quick path to decadence, laziness, and arrogance. Damon knew this, which was why he avoided it, but at this moment, he had to admit that he was indulging himself a little.

It couldn’t be helped, anyone who rapidly acquired power would naturally lose control for a bit, much less a young man like him. In fact, he was the same type of creature as the British soldiers he was charging at, just of a slight different flavor.

However, the underlying similarity remained, the thrill of dominating those weaker than oneself. For the soldiers, it was the fleeing Ashanti warriors, for Damon, it was the soldiers.

The first soldier to fall at his hands never even knew what hit him. His brain had no time to register when Damon appeared before him and unsheathed his own standard issue military saber from its scabbard, swiping the blade across his neck and sending his head flying.

His face would remain forever frozen with his look of twisted exhilaration as he had broken into a sweat during his sprint after a fleeing warrior, his gun aimed with lethal precision.

Damon did not bother to use Devour on him because he understood that basic humans possessed very little energy. Once he encountered special beings or magical creatures, he would use it in the hopes of a better yield.

For now, it was just better to use his speed advantage to swiftly approach and kill the foes without alerting the others, so he continued on. If this group were on a normal patrol and had a tight-knit formation, Damon’s actions would be a lot more dangerous.

However, whether it was the previous group of soldiers or this one, the young man made sure that their attention was taken by something else before utilizing his speed to move at the edge of their cones of vision, appearing behind them to deal a swift blow.

By the time the soldiers realized something was amiss, thirteen of them had already fallen. Even worse, their eagerness in pursuing the fleeing warriors had scattered them so thoroughly that they couldn’t regroup to reinforce their defenses, leaving them as vulnerable as sitting ducks.

Despite understanding their unfortunate situation, they all did try to defend themselves by trying to cover each other’s backs, even with the distance between them, their heads turning rapidly as they searched for Damon’s silhouette among the bushes.

Damon himself was currently holding a loaded matchlock and fiddling with it, trying to make out how it worked. He copied the posture of the British soldiers from earlier and took aim at one of the remaining seven soldiers, firing the weapon and striking the fellow in the neck, who clutched his throat, which spurted out great volumes of blood, his eyes as wide as two plates as he fell down, dying slowly in despair.

Damon heaved and tossed the matchlock towards one of the other soldiers while he burst out, rushing in another direction, even as six bullets tore through his previous location.

Damon zipped from bush to bush, trying to lose the sight of his foes who were extremely alert and unwilling to let such a dangerous foe escape. Seeing that they were still, using not only sight but also sound to locate him as he had no chance to mute his movement, Damon realized that without a stealth ability or skill, his couldn’t make use of his Mobility.

This made him wonder if he should increase his Mentality by a few points and use his increased mental faculties to learn stealth operations from either the military or an assassin.

In fact, his use of Mobility to maneuver behind enemies was driven by two motives: not only did it help him avoid being shot, but it also offered the chance to earn a stealth-related skill from the instance settlement, much like how his effective speech in the Fort James instance had earned him the Negotiation skill.

But that was too risky, akin to playing high-stakes gambling.

Damon decided to end things fast, so he took out his Energy Flintlock and sprinted out of a nearby bush, looking at the British soldiers who were almost done reloading their matchlock rifles, then fired at the nearest one.

Immediately, Damon felt like he had been made to run 10 kilometers nonstop as a normal person, his rapid movement faltering greatly as he almost fell over. However, the Energy Flintlock in his hand lit up, the sleek exterior glowing with a lime green color as it released its shot.

There was no recoil since this was an energy bullet and its speed was instant, moving at the speed of light. The targeted soldier was still in the motion of pushing the bullet down the muzzle of the matchlock when a lime green bullet the size of a large marble pierced through his chest.

His armor offered no protection, and he did not even have a chance to scream as his entire body was evaporated by the energy bullet, turning him to ash on the spot. The bullet had no drop, so it kept going forth into the distance until it dissipated.

Forget the remaining British soldiers, even Damon was thoroughly shocked by what he saw. He had known that Excavated items from Essence Instances were powerful, but the young man had severely underestimated just how powerful.

This was the problem of ranking and Grades. As a person with three EX-Grade abilities, Damon had subconsciously looked down on the mere D-Rank Energy Flintlock because not only was it of the rank two steps above the bottom, but it was also based on an ancient weapon that had long been phased out.

How great could a mere flintlock be?

However, he was forgetting that any Excavated item, even at the F-Rank, was intended for use in the Chaos Realm, not in Instances. Even the weakest zone in the Chaos Realm was more dangerous than the famous No Man’s Land of the World Wars, where taking a single wrong step would see you dead.

Against humans from the earlier centuries, it was obviously a divine weapon. Even against tanks and modern military installations, this Energy Flintlock could still cause endless mayhem, much less in the here and now.

The only problem was obviously the issue of consumption. The amount of physical energy it drained to fire one shot was barely tolerable for the current Damon, and if it had been back before he had increased his Fortitude, he might have fainted from exhaustion on the spot.

The weapon had no cooldown or reload time, so as long as the wielder had physical energy, they could fire it like a modern automatic pistol. Of course, if Damon tried that, he would be reduced to a desiccated husk, but this also highlighted the need for more Fortitude.

Damon glanced at the flintlock and had an idea. He pushed out raw energy from his ’first stomach’ into his hand, intending to fuel the Energy Flintlock. As he surmised, the energy was accepted by the flintlock as its color brightened until the lines extended from stock to muzzle, signaling that it was ready to shoot.

He lifted it and fired at another British soldier who was too shocked by the sight of his fellow man being turned into ash from the shot of that funny-looking flintlock. In the very next moment, he got to join his squad buddy in the afterlife as his entire body was vaporized into ash.

Interestingly, Damon noted that the energy bullet was the same size, but far more condensed since it went for a longer distance before dissipating slowly. It seemed that the energy drained from Devouring any entity was of a very high quality, though Damon was not sure what type of energy it was.

He checked the consumption and found that it had consumed about 10% of his ’first stomach’ at full capacity. Since the energy was unidentified, Damon couldn’t measure it in any known units like he could for Worldly Energy, which necessitated the need for percentages.

Well, 10% meant that he could fire ten shots from full to empty before needing to recharge his stored energy by using Devour on anything nearby. So thinking about it like that, one could say Damon had a ’magazine’ of 10 bullets before needing to ’reload’.