Chapter 244

“What’s pretty awesome?” Sofia demanded. “What happened to you? That thing flew into your chest.”

“I don’t even know,” Natalie said honestly. “The shard combined with me? But turned into Lust in the process?” She decided to explain exactly, rather than make guesses. “I got a notification saying that ‘a fragment of Greed has been subsumed by Lust’.”

“O-Oh,” Sofia said. That clearly hadn’t been the response she’d been expecting. How could it have been? “Did that do something?”

“It raised my Carnal Energy. By a lot.”

Her team paused at that announcement.

“Wait,” Jordan said. “As in, your skill resource?”

“Yeah. And by a lot, I mean a lot.” She looked inward at the resource. It had more than doubled. And she’d been saving up for a while, wanting to claim the next upgrade on [Harvest].

“How much?”

“I can afford the next tier of [Harvest], that’s for sure,” Natalie said. “And probably something else. Maybe two something elses.” With [Harvest] having been a persistent focus of hers, most of her other skills were lower-tier and thus cheaper to upgrade—some much cheaper.

“Oh, wow,” Liz said. “Is that a thing now, then? You have another way to earn Carnal Energy?”

“I guess so.” She glanced at the corpse of the goblin. With his golden veins having vanished, he just looked like a bigger, deadlier goblin than normal—but not nearly the same intimidating monster as before. “Though I’m doubting there’s going to be a consistent way to find god-imbued monsters,” she said dryly.

“Yeah, probably not,” Liz said with a single, incredulous laugh. She looked as bewildered as the rest of them.

Well. Besides Ana. “It’s interesting that power spawning from the Passions can be converted like that,” she commented. “Is that going to have any consequences? Or implications? Greed merging with Lust?”

Jordan seemed alarmed by the possibility. To be fair, Natalie was too—if maybe less so. It didn’t feel like anything had happened to her; she was pretty sure Lust had just laid claim to the energy. Not ‘merged’ somehow, affecting her or her class.

Ana hummed. “We’ll need to watch her. Monitor your thought processes,” she told Natalie. “See if you feel,” she paused, “greedier, in the following days.”

“Feel greedier,” Natalie repeated flatly.

Ana shrugged. “We’re operating in unknown territory, here.”

Malice interrupted their conversation by pounding a fist into her palm. She looked excited. “You get extra energy for killing those things? There’s probably more at their base. Since that one definitely wasn’t the boss. Not the main boss, at least.” The wolfgirl grinned, shifting from foot to foot. Her tail swished happily behind her. “And it was a good fight. This is way less boring than I thought it would be.” She looked around the forest. “So, which direction do you think they are? I bet their base is close, if they attacked us with such a large party.”

“Let’s take it a little easy,” Jordan told the wolfgirl. “We’ve got a few things to hash out first.” She looked at Natalie. “What’re you gonna upgrade? No point sitting on that big of a stash, right?”

“[Harvest], obviously,” she said after a second’s deliberation. “And I wonder if I upgrade [Empower] whether the increased effect will carry over to Ana? After seeing how good [Divine Invigoration] is even at its current [Empowerment], I’m pretty tempted.”

If only she could upgrade [Divine Invigoration] itself, but it was an ability that had come pre-maxed-out. Which was fair ... it was way too strong even straight out of the box.

Jordan glanced at Ana. “Speaking of, what the hell kind of buff was that? You were tearing up half the battlefield by yourself.”

Some people might have preened at that praise, but not Ana. She gave one succinct nod. “Yes. I was.”

Natalie snorted at the understated reaction. “I’m pretty sure that’s proof I should bring [Empower] up a rank.” She frowned, a bout of indecisiveness hitting her. “Then again, taking [Juggernaut] and [Bigger Is Better] a tier up would be nice too. So would [Smite].”

She wavered, before nodding to herself. [Juggernaut] would be the selfish upgrade, and while she did want the bonus in strength, having [Empower] to emergency-boost any other ability was probably the smarter idea. Doubly so if it automatically applied to Ana’s current [Divine Invigoration], though whether it would was up in the air.