He looked at Ryker first. "For you, it’s mostly about the sword. Your stats are good, but you need to work on your skills - you don’t seem too used to them yet."
"I suppose it’s because you advanced too fast. Either way, you should take the time to visit the training area. I know it looks useless since you can’t gain any EXP there, but it’s useful for training your abilities and learning to use them together."
He paused, then added, "Other than that, everything’s fine. You have some bad habits in your swordsmanship, but those can get fixed with more practice."
Ryker nodded in acknowledgment, taking in every word.
Cipher then turned to Dante. "As for you, good work out there. You know your role well."
Dante straightened slightly at the praise.
"There’s just one thing you need to work on," Cipher continued. "You need to remember your role as a Tank. When a monster gets past Ryker and you push it away with your Shield Bash, you shouldn’t chase it for the kill. That means you’d leave Maya exposed."
He turned back to Ryker. "And to make sure Dante doesn’t have to make those kills, when a monster gets past you, you need to turn back and face it. Strategically, of course - not just leading all the monsters back to the healer."
Both nodded in understanding.
"As for you," Cipher said, turning toward Maya and letting out a sigh. "Where do I even start with you?"
"Is it that bad?" she asked nervously.
"Well, I suppose it’s not as bad as it could be," he said, "but still bad nonetheless."
He looked at her seriously. "Do you know who the most important person in a party is?"
She hesitated for a moment.
"A healer," he answered his own question. "And do you know what the healer’s most important stat is?"
"Mana," she said.
"That’s right. So when the healer has no more mana, we basically have no healer." He let that sink in. "Do you get where I’m going with this?"
She nodded. "I’ll be more careful next time."
"Good. Here’s what you need to do," Cipher said. "Keep track of conditions instead. Observe your teammates and note when their condition reaches a certain threshold - then you can heal them. Don’t waste mana on every little scratch."
He continued, "As for buffs, you need to wait until they completely run out before casting another one. Unless it’s an emergency, of course."
Maya nodded, listening intently.
"As for the shields," he added, "you shouldn’t bother. Just save the mana. Anything that could harm Selene won’t care about your shield - at least not at your current level. You should spare that extra mana for your own shield instead, in case of emergencies."
"I understand," Maya said, her expression determined.
"There are other things, but that’s mostly it," Cipher said, looking at the group. "Now let’s discuss how we’re going to accomplish our mission here."
...
"How’s the situation?" Selene asked.
"It’s strange. The corpses here don’t seem to have died to the robots. Do you have any information on the monsters in this gate?" Cipher asked.
Selene shook her head. "I’ve never been into this gate before. But I’ve read the files of most gates in the US, and the only hostiles mentioned to be in this gate are robots."
Cipher nodded. This checked out. After all, his 400-meter ESP wasn’t picking up anything but robots.
"There’s something going on here, and it’s not something good. Since our purpose today isn’t exploration, we’ll just go the scenario route," he said.
This place didn’t give him a good feeling. They needed to get what they came here for and leave instantly.
"I’ve already scouted the surrounding area. It’s mostly robots, just like here. But you need to be more careful - most of them are C-rank, with some B-ranks among them too," he explained.
"You don’t have to worry about the B-ranks, I’ll take care of them. Just focus on the others," Cipher said.
The four nodded in understanding before they all moved out.
The moment they opened the door, it was then that they realized what Cipher meant by "mostly robots."
What should have been a city before was now just pure robots moving around everywhere.
They swarmed through the streets, crawled along the walls of buildings, perched on rooftops, and filled every available space. Even the ground was barely visible beneath the sea of metal limbs and glowing sensors.
The moment they opened the door, all the hundreds of robots turned toward them. Their blue glowing eyes suddenly turned red and they began rushing toward them.
"You guys take care," Cipher said as he activated Flight Mode and floated into the air.
He then increased his speed and flew up about a mile. He looked around him. He’d climbed up here mostly because he wanted to know if his ESP wasn’t picking up on the enemy because they were high up. Seeing as he didn’t detect anything here as well, he guessed this wasn’t the case. Of course, there was always the chance that they were even higher up, but he didn’t have the time to check.
He needed to first deal with the B-rank robots before they got to his teammates, he thought as he dropped down.
After he was within range of the robots, he took out his sword from the inventory.
Currently, the maximum damage he did with Assassinate without Demonic Qi was 13,680. He really needed to upgrade these skills soon. Thankfully, Aura was B-rank, so it scaled with all his stats. If he took the overflowed 810 damage after Assassinate, multiplied that by three from the Heavenly Demonic Sword Art, then by four from Aura, he would get 9,720. That plus the initial Assassinate damage brought the total damage to 23,400.
This was barely 5,000 above his previous max damage with Assassinate when he’d just entered C-rank. Meaning improving his stats was actually the slowest method to raise damage - the best way was having better skills.
He could also use Dagger Throw, which had better scalability, but since he wasn’t using Demonic Qi at the moment and was up against a B-rank in the open, they might just dodge his throw, which would be just a waste of mana.
Cipher lined himself up properly with one of the B-rank robots and deactivated Flight Mode.