Cipher descended towards the robot below him. Suddenly, the robot’s head snapped up and it sidestepped, causing Cipher to smash onto the ground with a heavy thud.
"As expected of a B-rank," his voice came from the opposite side of the robot.
The robot’s head came clean off its body.
The Cipher that had just landed began fading before disappearing completely. Although the Phantom Clone was decent, it could still use some improvement, he thought as he stomped his foot onto the robot’s chest. He then sank his hand into the metal frame and ripped out its core, causing sparks to fly everywhere.
He looked at his hand. This was harder than it looked. He wondered how Selene crushed them with her hands so easily.
[You have slain B-Rank Robot (Level 160)]
[+196,000 EXP]
[+160 Cheat Points]
[You have leveled up!]
Cipher looked at the EXP. He wondered if robots were treated like some sort of golem monster. He wondered if what Iris made also gave EXP. If that was the case, wouldn’t she be able to make an infinite EXP farm?
"Mmh, maybe it’s not that simple," he thought.
Looking at the core powering the robot, it was much different compared to an actual magic stone. But Iris could reverse engineer it and get the magic stones. But couldn’t she create robots with the core? He needed to talk to her about this more.
At that moment, the other robots had noticed him and were beginning to charge towards him. He jumped up and activated Fly Mode.
As he flew, he opened up his Cheat Shop. He needed to maximize the profits, so he had to use every free shop reset as well as maybe make a few rerolls himself after the reroll price reset with every level up.
Opening the shop, the cards he found were Refactor, Exploit, and Patch
Since he had leveled up, the packs had also reset. Now it was a Mega Mod Pack and a normal Code Pack. He opened the Code Pack. The cards inside were Debug, Fork, and Optimize .
He looked at the cards. This was quite lucky, getting both Fork and Optimize at once. The only downside was this was a normal Code Pack and not a Mega Pack, so he could only pick one.
After some slight hesitation, he decided to go with Optimize. For now, he needed Optimize more than he did Fork. If it was Merge, he might have just taken it over Optimize.
He then turned to the reroll button. He decided to do just three maximum rerolls every level up.
The new cards were Commit, Export, and Seed . Export and Seed were one of the cards you couldn’t have enough of. He bought both and rerolled the second time.
The new cards were Rework, Soul, and Malware . Cipher sighed. His luck wasn’t looking good this time. He could still use the Rework card though, so he took it and rerolled again for the third and final time.
The new cards were Import, Delete, and Merge . He finally had something he could use. He quickly purchased all three cards.
Although he wanted to merge some of the skills for better management, now that he had also hit the Delete card, he’d have to delay that for now.
He opened the owned cards section and chose Delete, applying it onto his Aura skill. With that, he deleted the Rigged edition.
He then picked the Merge card and merged Seed and Class cards. As usual, the element was the hardest part. He couldn’t pick Dark as it would be useless when using Demonic Qi, and he couldn’t pick Light for the same reason. He wondered whether to go with Fire, but he suspected that would also be useless when used alongside Dagger Throw which had this edition. This meant he also couldn’t go for opposite elements like Water and Ice as they would weaken the compatibility.
After some thought, he decided to go with Lightning. After selecting it, he used the card, applying the Rigged and Elemental editions to Aura.
...
[Skill: Aura (B-Rank)]
[Type: Active]
[Edition: Rigged, Elemental]
[Cost: 160 Mana]
[Duration: 30 seconds]
[Description: Coat your weapon or body with a layer of condensed mana. Attacks deal 200% physical damage and an additional 300% lightning elemental damage while active. Additionally, attacks have a 100% chance to critical hit, dealing an additional 200% damage (total 700% on critical).]
"Now that’s something," Cipher thought.
He turned to look at his next victim, another B-rank robot. Currently, without Demonic Qi, his base damage was 3,000. 570 of which could be used by Assassinate. Multiply that by the now 7x from Aura, and you get 3,990. Then by 6 from Assassinate and you get 23,940 total damage from Assassinate. That was more than his previous maximum damage. And he hadn’t added the overflow damage yet.
That was 2,430 multiplied by seven from Aura, giving a total of 17,010 damage. That plus the initial elemental damage gave 40,950 total damage. This was the most damage he’d had yet.
A peak A-rank’s health was about 32,000. With this damage, he could one-shot an A-rank. Well, there were other factors that would prevent this, but against a B-rank whose maximum HP was 16,000, it wasn’t even close. Now he could relax about his damage for a bit and work on his other stats.
He flew towards the B-rank robot. The robot noticed him and tried to shoot him down with a laser beam from its eyes, but he easily avoided it by doing a flip in the air. He arrived right above the B-rank and split it into two.
[You have slain B-Rank Robot (Level 160)]
[+197,000 EXP]
[+160 Cheat Points]
[You have leveled up!]
The other nearby robots were already charging towards him as he landed. He extended his hand forward to try something.
His expression then shifted.
"They really are alive," he thought as he flew away, taking the B-rank robot corpse with him.
He had tried to take the robots into his inventory but had failed. Since he couldn’t take live objects into his inventory, he assumed those robots were likely alive. He scanned the one he had with his Appraisal and noticed that it had gained the Dead status effect after he had auto-looted its core. He wondered if it would revive after he put the core back in.
He took out the core and tried to put it in, but nothing happened. He wondered if it was maybe because he had destroyed some sensitive parts when taking out the core.
He threw both the core and the robot into his inventory. He would have Iris figure it out.