Chapter 564 - Training Freedom Skills (1/2)

After cycling through his skills, Backbreaker came off cooldown. Nie Yan found his rhythm and started steadily rotated through his skills.

The Barbarian Warrior repeatedly hacked at Nie Yan. Each swing of its axe carried significant weight and power behind it. However, none of the attacks landed. Nie Yan kept utilizing the illusory footwork of a Shadow Dancer to evade while simultaneously executing one skill after another. The Barbarian Warrior couldn’t keep up with his pace and was completely helpless against him. The difference in speed between the two was too great.

The Barbarian Warrior’s axe came cleaving down. Nie Yan dodged to the side and executed Phantom Assassination, stabbing the warrior in the throat with Zennarde’s Sword.

The Barbarian Warrior let out a deep grunt and collapsed to the ground with a loud thud.

Killing the Barbarian Warrior took about two minutes. It was quite exhausting.

Phantom Assassination has advanced to Rank 3.

While fighting the Barbarian Warrior, his skill proficiency for all his skills skyrocketed up. Nie Yan felt ecstatic.

After reaching Rank 3, Phantom Assassination dealt 100% more damage and had a 5% chance of instantly killing a target. For every rank increase, the damage would go up by another 50%, and the execution chance would by 1%.

If Phantom Assassination could be raised to Rank 7, it would deal 300% more damage and have a 9% chance of executing a target. Combined with Nie Yan’s ludicrous attack power, this skill would become incredibly overpowered!

At this moment, Reverse Grip Backstab had reached Rank 4, Phantom Assassination and Backbreaker Rank 3, and Flicker Strike Rank 2. Since Nie Yan never had much time to train these skills in the past, he wasn’t too familiar with them, causing his execution of them to be a bit sloppy. But now, he had more or less grasped them and could consistently achieve a completion rate of 60% or higher.

As for how to get the completion rate even higher and grasping some of the deeper intricacies of the skills, Nie Yan still had a long way to go.

The Barbarian Warrior appeared to drop something. Nie Yan bent down and picked it up. It was a Warrior skill book for ‘Enhance Tendon Break’. It couldincrease the effects of Tendon Break by 30%. This was a fairly rare skill book which couldn’t be found in the marketplace.

“Nice! I wonder if Bladelight or Smoke Stub could use this. I’ll ask them when I get back.” Nie Yan tossed the skill book into his bag.

His harvest was quite bountiful. The only downside to this map was that the Barbarian Warriors didn’t give experience. Such high health and defense and yet not a single point experience, talk about being stingy. This also meant that if Nie Yan wanted to keep training here, he couldn’t level up.

Nie Yan glanced at his status bar—Level 97. Looking at the leaderboards, there were only two people over Level 80. Once you reached Level 80, levelling up would become more than several times harder. Catching up to him would take at least a month or two. If they were slow, even three months wouldn’t be enough time for them to break through Level 90.

So, even if Nie Yan were to stay here for a month, he wouldn’t have to worry about others catching up to him.

“Let’s train up my skills first!” Nie Yan moved on to his next target.

He spotted another Barbarian Warrior roaming around off in the distance.

Nie Yan entered stealth. He circled around to the back of the Barbarian Warrior and gradually drew closer until he was only five meters away.

The enemy was right in front of him. Nie Yan could clearly see the design and grooves on the Barbarian Warrior’s armour. He could determine all its weak spots, scapula, heart, abdomen, and central spinal column.

Nie Yan was suddenly struck with an odd thought. Freedom Skills likely had their own hidden meaning. For example, Backbreaker was similar to Backstab, targeting the enemy’s back and inflicting the cripple debuff.

In the past, Nie Yan believed just landing the attack in the right spot—in this case the target’s back—was good enough. However, his completion rate always hovered around 60%, sometimes even going as low as 50%.

“Is there something I’m missing?” Nie Yan muttered.

Staring at the Barbarian Warrior’s back, Nie Yan couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if he incorporated some fighting techniques into the execution of these skills.

Many of the skills in Conviction were pulled from reality. Take the Kick skill for example. If you struck the leg or thigh, the effect would be weak. But if you struck a joint, you could paralyze or temporarily incapacitate the foe.

A few memories surfaced in Nie Yan’s mind. In the previous timeline, back when he was Level 160, he had once fought against a Shadow Dancer. That player didn’t use any fancy or flashy moves, only simple skills like Kick, Backstab, and Assassinate. Yet he suffered a one-sided beating. A single Kick had left his leg numb for five seconds. How was he supposed to fight back?

That Shadow Dancer’s expert kick was quite marvelous. That fellow was wearing boots with blades He didn’t aim for the leg or knees, but rather the hollow spot right below the kneecap. That one kick had disabled Nie Yan.

Recalling this now, that Shadow Dancer had probably employed a fighting technique.