Damon's Ascension-Chapter 85: Tribal War - End

Damon sat beneath a ridge, resting among a slew of Ashanti corpses as he checked his character panel. Two hours had passed since the battle began, and his kill count had since surpassed triple digits, truly earning himself the accolade of ’God of War.’

He was just a few dozen bodies short of reaching a kill count of 2,000, the majority of them foot soldiers, with a handful of elites mixed in. The Krontihene and other ’boss’ characters were nowhere to be found at the frontlines, so Damon would have to dig deeper to harvest.

Still, factoring in the remaining Worldly Essence from earlier, he had a total of 24,530 units. Fortunately, that was just enough to cover the 10,240-unit penalty to bypass the cooldown, followed by another 10,240 to actually reach Level 9 and earn a new stat point.

Damon rested for another 9 minutes as the upgrade went underway and then allocated his new stat point right into Fortitude.

[Name: Damon Arnan || Race: Homo Sapien (Pure) || Faction: None]

[POW: 2 || MOB: 3 || FOR: 4 || MEN: 3 || PRO: 1]

[Abilities: Probability Manipulation (EX), Avatar (EX), Devour (EX).]

Why did he decided to upgrade Fortitude? It was the same issue he faced when he was ambushing the reinforcement camp in the nepo-baby version of the Kumasi Fort Instance. There was a great gap between the fictional version of large-scale battles and the actuality on the field.

In fiction, warriors could slay ten thousand men without blinking while spinning and slicing in eternal glory like Kratos from God of War or Artoria in Fate/Stay Night with Excalibur glowing every thirty seconds.

But in real life? Even superpowers didn’t nullify exhaustion.

As impressive as it was that Damon had already slain nearly two thousand enemies, his body was feeling the toll of his long battle. His arms were heavy, his lungs burned, and his eyes stung from the lingering gunpowder smoke and the sharp tang of blood in the air.

Not even Probability Manipulation could bail him out of the simple laws of biology.

Every swing, every dodge, every kill added another invisible weight to his body. It wasn’t mental strain or spiritual exhaustion, just plain, old-fashioned fatigue.

Muscle fatigue and tendon strain were killing him, and he could even feel microtears in flesh that didn’t regenerate. Just because he had three times the Fortitude of the peak human did not mean unlimited stamina, especially since using Silver Eclipse drained physical stamina, which couldn’t be offset with Devour’s initial energy.

The Energy Flintlock was the MVP of this battle, allowing Damon to get his last 500ish while his stamina was bottomed out and slowly recovering.

With that in mind, Fortitude was clearly the only option if he wanted to harvest more Worldly Essence.

Even now, seated beneath the ridge surrounded by corpses, Damon could hear the distant calls of warhorns.

There were Ashanti reinforcements on the way again.

This was another one of the problems with real-world battles, they didn’t end in a 40-minute episode. There was no screen fade or cutscene after a good fight, nor was there a ten-minute cooldown between waves to let you rest.

Damon let out a sigh of relief as his Fortitude stat rose from 3 to 4. Immediately, his heartbeat steadied, the ache in his legs eased, and the weakness in his arms began to fade.

To be honest, it wasn’t really a game-like level-up where everything was healed on the spot, more akin to having his maximum stamina bar elongated while the newly added ’points’ were also granted.

To give an example, if 3 points of Fortitude was 300/300 stamina and 4 points was 400/400, then Damon had been at 20/300 pre-level-up and was now at 120/400 post-level-up.

This was crucial as it gave him time since his stamina regeneration, pain resistance, and physical fatigue were stronger if they were positive and weaker if they were negative.

Done with the little break, Damon rose to his feet again while cracking his neck, staring at the next wave of foot soldiers being organized into formation to siege the resistance forces, who had only lost about a tenth of their troops.

Meanwhile, the Ashanti fielded almost 30,000 troops for this fight and had already lost a fourth of that number, with Damon having killed a fourth of that number on his own.

"Two thousand kills, huh? How did John Wick do it?" He murmured to himself, stretching his shoulders.

He stepped over a decapitated corpse, his now bare feet squelching in the mud made of flesh and brain matter. It did not matter to walk barefoot because along with the quadrupled fortitude, the soles of his feet were tougher than even crocodile hide.

As Damon approached the crest of the ridge, his silvery-brown eyes flickered as he surveyed the battlefield then began to pick and choose his targets to finish up. In his right hand was a spear made of ice and in his left was the Energy Flintlock that was supplied by his Devour, his armor tattered and his body bare.

"I need to find time and visit China after this. I hope their instances have martial arts I can use," Damon muttered lowly before diving into the fray once more like a meteor from above.

...........

Damon exited the Pra River Instance a day later, his body as pristine as he entered, but the look in his eye made his fellow Ghanaians nearby flinch, even though they too committed great slaughters in the instances.

Don’t think that Damon was the strongest human right now. Putting aside some among the first hundred who had insanely offensive abilities like Connor Baines (SS Grade: Shadow World), Kyle Greer (SSS Grade: Vibration Manipulation), Nicholas Spencley (SSS-Grade: Mental Manipulation) or Levi Thane (SSS-Grade: Liquid Manipulation), even some of the weaker S or A rank ability users with offensive powers had surpassed Damon.

It couldn’t be helped, Damon had his duties as Prime Representative first and foremost, and after that he also had three EX abilities that had insane future potential but were not offensive-based.

That was why he considered even abusing his privilege as Prime Representative to go to China and utilize their instances to head to the martial era and learn some wuxia-style martial arts.

As you could tell from his current actions, he had planned to stick to the local instances since he had confidence in African history and mythology to produce items and skills that would be just as good as the other cultures.

While he did get the Golden Stool, its power was extremely suitable for a variety of purposes and not specifically for killing. For that, Damon would have to either go to Europe and learn their various weapon-based fighting forms utilizing the bastard sword, the rapier, or the long spear, go to Japan and learn the katana, ninja arts, or onmyoji magic, or go to China and learn their hyped-up martial arts or so-called immortal magic.

Whatever the case, Damon was content with the magic of his hometown, so he never considered branching out, but it would be quite foolish to limit himself due to ethnic prejudice.

Anyway, this was just as well, because in the level 1 instance, all the enemies were normal humans with not a lick of superpower between them, so even if he went there, it wouldn’t be useful.

Now that he was level nine and was about to hit level ten, it was the perfect time to go over and enter those instances, because the level 2 instances would start to feature superhuman characters and abilities.

Damon first left the Pra River area and took his car home, leveling up on the way back.

After a day of fighting and killing, he had accumulated quite a bit of Worldly Essence, specifically 76,670 units!

It couldn’t be helped, after increasing Fortitude, his long-term longevity had increased significantly. Along with that, after so much killing, he began to become more efficient in his takedowns by killing more while using less.

Putting aside the amazing Energy Flintlock, which was practically over-abused in this instance, Damon even went to the backlines to pick up a cannon and began rapidly bombarding concentrated areas where Ashanti troops fought, blasting his own people as well.

He used anything and everything available to him to take down one more person, and the fragility of human life was something he deeply understood. If not for any other reason than the many he had already, he now gained more motivation to become stronger and not be killed as humiliatingly as he did to those warriors.

With his current stock of Worldly Essence, it was enough to level up once more, so Damon unhesitatingly paid the penalty and then leveled himself up, reaching level 10.

This was the first and one of the biggest milestones in any individual’s journey through the Essence Augmented Reality Instances, which culminated in their exploration of the Chaos Realm, and the Universe Will seemed to think so as well as it sent a message to him.