Chapter 474: Three Movement Skills
<Chilled Rise>, <Surfing Frost>, <Cryobane Elevation>.
These three movement methods were all extremely expensive FFF+ skills, except for one, and the learning curve was undoubtedly steep. However, they all caught his attention for various reasons.
<Chilled Rise> worked by supercharging the air with frosty energy. The purpose was to force the hotter air to rise as a result, taking advantage to make his body lighter.
As one might expect, though, such a skill was incredibly difficult to control. For one, it was the hot energy that rose, not the frosty energy that was coating your body. That meant one had to take advantage of brief instants of time to piggyback off of the hotter air.
Such a thing sounded difficult even while explaining it so simply. But Sylas could see to a deeper layer.
Not only would this require supreme Aether control, it would also necessitate constantly scanning the environment, looking for regions where the skill would be more effective than not. Only by doing this would it be possible to maximize the skill.
Of course, Sylas also had other ideas as well. He could imagine that at the Legendary Mastery level, or maybe even before then, it wouldn't be necessary to rely on the environment at all.
The technique was designed to take advantage of small changes in temperature to begin with. In pre-Summoning life, the rise of hot air and the fall of cold air wasn't nearly exaggerated enough to lift the body of a person. That meant that the sort of buoyancy this technique was taking advantage of was minute.
Essentially, it was meant to take advantage of even small degrees of separation. In that case, why not create the gradient himself?
He could just make one region around him cold, and another even colder, that way he could create the gradients he needed in real-time rather than relying on scanning the environment. A level beyond even that would probably be controlling the shift in energy itself.
'Cold is just the absence of heat... technically speaking, when I chill a region, I'm stripping heat from it. With a few tweaks to my slow and Freeze Ice-Poison Runes, there's nothing that would stop me from controlling this flow of heat.'
Whether it was Ice or Fire, Sylas believed that both likely took advantage of moving heat and energy. If the science of Earth held up, then there should be no difference at all between the
two when it came to controlling the movement of heat.
It was all the same.
Plus, this skill would allow him to do something that he had wanted to do for a while. Well, something he had wanted to do ever since he saw Nosphaleen's <Glide> skill.
If his mastery of this skill reached a high enough level, there probably wouldn't be anything stopping him from gliding through the air for a moment as well. Of course, that was only if he matched it with his telekinesis.
As far as he could tell by the description of this technique, it wasn't meant to be used to fly, but more so to lighten the steps of the user, and at the extremes, be used as a sort of a "double
jump."
<Surfing Frost> was probably the least technical of the skills. It was as simple as it got. It created platforms, paths, and curving roads of ice for its user to glide on. At this point, it was obvious why it had a name like <Surfing Frost>.
It might be the simplest of them, but it was a skill that truly intrigued Sylas. That was because, in his estimation, the sheer amount of Aether you would need to use this skill was ridiculous.
You had to supercool the air to create ice thick enough to not crack the moment you stepped on it.
If you were on flat land, that was fine enough. But this technique described curving through the air and out of the way of attacks. That would mean literally creating roads of ice out of thin air.
As one might guess, at lower mastery levels, most would only be able to manage a few thin strips on the ground, or maybe even only directly under their feet.
But Sylas was thinking about the highest mastery levels, and how could he not? After all, his Ice-Poison now had Silver-Grade affinity. It would be a shame if he didn't maximize it.
These skills would probably progress a lot slower than his Madness-related abilities would. But they wouldn't be all that slow either.
Finally, there was <Cryobane Elevation>. It was the most technical of the three skills and had the potential to be the absolute most complex. It also seemed to work much more like a Gene Talent than a skill, which was an interesting differentiation.
[Cryobane Elevation (F-) (Gene Skill)]
It was the first of its kind that Sylas had ever seen and it was impossible for him to not be drawn to it.
A Gene Skill... according to the Madness Key, it was a skill that stood above normal skills, but they were likewise even more difficult to use.
And it was the only Ice-Poison movement skill in the Nexus, while the others were all pure Ice. There were also a few pure Poison skills, but he simply wasn't interested in them. They all pretty much did what <Cryobane Elevation> did, but to an inferior level.
<Cryobane Elevation> did two things. First, it used Poison to supercharge the body into an elevated, berserk-like state. Second, it used Ice to keep the body chilled beneath the point of overheating and collapse.
Of course, this "berserk" state didn't refer to one's mind. It was instead an attack against one's Stat Limit. Essentially, for brief instances, Sylas could increase his Speed and Dexterity
Stat Limits.
This put his body at risk of overheating, but that was where his Ice would come into play. The explanation was simple enough, but in practice its intricacies made Sylas' eyes shine.