Chapter 52
Every item they had was sorted out very well but it was already midmorning when Anton and his family together with the help of their guards and their family completed the work. Anders checked their carriage to make sure they had not forgotten anything and made sure that all the bills were settled.
Lucas and his family were ready for quite some time. Nermina would be driving their cart while Lunelle was inside it looking after their possession and the cart would follow Ander’s carriage. Lucas and Devon would ride their horses guarding everyone. Anton and Anna climbed the carriage while their father started driving it out of the village.
Anton was surprised that a lot of people from the village were waiting by the side of the road waving their goodbyes to their family.
“They were truly grateful for the coins they received from us. It would help them a lot if an emergency arrived and to them, the coins were almost a gift since they exchanged it for something a lot of them considered as garbage,” Anna said.
“I’m glad we’re able to help them a bit.”
Anton left unspoken that they were sure that the villagers would flee once they heard that the Undead Coalition had conquered Mendi and that the coins would be useful to them then. Anders did tell some of them last night but the villagers just told them the city was very far away from them and that it would all blow out somehow and that they couldn’t leave since they had stayed in this place for generations.
After a while, Anton told his father through the front window that he would meditate. Anna pouted and said that she should have joined Nermina and Lunelle on their cart.
Anton just shrugged when he heard his sister and then he maximized the game and entered virtually. He was about to challenge Diablo himself and would like to see the iconic monster in the flesh although he was sure that it would be fearsome. He was halfway to reaching level twenty-nine and since he felt that he was weak compared to a normal character since his skill points were spread out to different spells he decided to go to farming experience to level up his character to level thirty before defeating Diablo and completing Act IV.
He decided that the best place to level up was in the Chaos Sanctuary challenging the unique monsters there and their minions. He did that for a couple of hours managing to find a lot of good items and finally leveling up to level thirty.
Doing the run in person was extremely different from doing it in front of a screen. The experience was unimaginable but exhilarating. Anton needed to be aware of his location and his enemies every second to make sure that he would not be hit. He was thankful that although he was there in person, the hits didn’t actually hurt because if they did, he would probably hesitate to challenge the game in person.
Another advantage of playing the game in person was he was learning how to manipulate the mana of his spells effectively since constantly using them in person allowed Anton to focus on the details of how the mana felt when he was casting the spells.
When he reached level thirty, Anton immediately summoned a town portal and went to the Pandemonium Fortress. There he sold off all the items that he didn’t need and he traveled by waypoint to the Rogue Encampment since he was going to practice his spells outside that location.
The first thing Anton did when he arrived at the Rogue Encampment was use Akara’s free reset since he had not used it yet. After he talked to Akara to reset his stat and skill, he put all of his stat points the same way that he had them before, evenly between strength, vitality, and energy and a bit in dexterity since all stats were useful to him in real life. Then he put a single skill point in all of the spells except for Thunder Storm because he was still wary of the effect of the spell and he did not want to use it accidentally and Shiver Armor and Chilling Armor since Frozen Armor was basically the same as them and was enough for a defensive cold spell.
Anton still had the remaining four skill points but he decided not to spend them since once he leveled up to thirty-one, he would need to put one to Frozen Orb and one to Cold Mastery.
For items, he was still using his old Stealth armor which he would need to upgrade soon to probably the same runeword armor but a higher-level armor item since he had high strength he could wear better armor like a Field Plate converted to Stealth runeword and for his weapon, he was using a staff that added one to all cold skills. Once he was done with Normal Difficulty he would begin searching for better weapons and other armor pieces like Spirit Sword runeword weapon, Lore runeword for his head, and Ancient Pledge for shield.
The other set pieces would be based on luck on him finding good pieces and upgrading them using the Horadric Cube.
Outside the Rogue Encampment, he began practicing the spell Frozen Orb. At first, there was no difference between the spell with the original Diablo II. Ice Bolts would spread out from the Orb and would hit everything in sight but after an hour of practicing, Anton was gratified to learn that he could consciously affect when the Ice Bolts would spread out and the general direction of where the Ice Bolts would unleash.
That meant that in the real world, once he hurled the Frozen Orb at a group of enemies, he could consciously influence the orb to only unleash the Ice Bolts once it was amid enemies and concentrate the barrage of the bolts to where the enemies were clumped together.
Anton would still need to cast the spell carefully to make sure that allies would not be affected. The next practice that he did was to manipulate the mana of the Frozen Orb spell to the point where he could use it to summon water in large volume or otherwise. It was easier if the volume was large but it was undeniable that the mana concentration on the Frozen Orb water was higher compared to the water from the Blizzard Spell. It took him a couple of hours of practice before he was confident enough to cast it in real life to summon mana water but to be safe he would still use the Blizzard spell since he was used to casting that spell already. He would need a few more hours before he could be really confident in using Frozen Orb the same way.
When Anton minimized the game, he realized that the carriage had already stopped and when he exited, he saw that everyone was taking care of the horses and preparing food.
“Father, I’m sorry for not being present. I was meditating and I learned a lot of new spells but I will need to meditate more before I can show them to you. Do you need the food in my magical space?”
“Son, it’s good that you’ve become more powerful but we don’t need the food yet. We decided to use the food that was stored outside your space before it went bad. This is also the campsite where we would stay for the night because this is where you will repair the items from the village.”
“Okay Father, I’ll follow your instructions,” Anton then joined everyone for lunch.