Deathwish

*Join your foes in a dance of death.*

## Summary

Deathwish is a peak-quality skill that Zac gained as one of his three level 25 skill quests for his Undying Bulwark class. It is an offensive skill that retaliates by generating specters which look like the attacker and respond with an attack in the same location where Zac or his Immutable Bulwark was hit, although only physical attacks are retaliated. Zac could somewhat adjust the strikes and imbue them with Dao at middle mastery. Zac latter learned he did not have to take the full hit to trigger Deathwish, he could divert most of the force and still trigger it for full retaliatory damage.

The skill was fused with Winds of Decay to create Deathmark using one of his two upgrade skill quest rewards from his Fetters of Desolation Class.

## Skill Quest

Deathwish (Class): The body is but another shield. Receive 5,000 strikes. Reward: Deathwish Skill (0/5,000). **Book 2, Page 702**

* First, he needed to be hit right on his skin. Even if he only wore a T-shirt, it didn’t count as progress. **Book 2, Page 705**
* Secondly, there needed to be a minimum amount of force in the strike for it to count. Just a small love tap wasn’t enough. **Book 2, Page 705**
* Spells did work, though, and Zac’s chest was red and bruised from being blasted with ice balls as large as a fist. **Book 2, Page 706**
* “Perhaps I can be of assistance?” a voice said as the shadows congealed, showing a smiling Ogras. **Book 2, Page 706**
* Every part of Zac’s chest felt sore, but at least the quest was finished. **Book 2, Page 706**

## Skill Window

[Deathwish – Proficiency: Early. Join your foes in a dance of death. Upgradeable.] **Book 2, Page 706**

## Early Proficiency

* Just like the quest. the point of the skill was simply to get hit. Even then he would probably categorize **[Deathwish]** as an offensive skill. The point of it wasn’t to decrease the damage he took, but rather retaliate in kind. **Book 2, Page 707**
* The skill was passive, costing some Miasma every second, and for every strike Zac received while it was active his assailant was hit right back. It looked pretty spooky with a shadowy copy of the attacker that was instantaneously created when Zac was struck, which struck right back. **Book 2, Page 707**
* The only option to avoid getting retaliated was to stop the attack or simultaneously defend as he attacked. **Book 2, Page 707**
* The bad news was that only a part, around 10 to 20 percent, of the original strike was retaliated. But the good news was that calculation was based on the original power of the attack, not the damage Zac’s received after his sturdy constitution had lessened the damage he took. **Book 2, Page 707**
* The skill also took very little energy to keep going and was something he would be able to run for the entire duration of the fight on top of using his normal skills. **Book 2, Page 707**
* He already knew that **[Deathwish]** returned the same type of energy as the original attack, though it was formed by Miasma, so he surmised that if specters could kill themselves, then so could he with the skill. **Book 3, Page 214**
* It meant the skill didn’t work against treasures, allowing their attacker to go on as he pleased without receiving any retribution. **Book 4, Page 57**
* Not every strike against him warranted a retaliation, as the reflected attack would sometimes bring fewer benefits than the cost of Miasma warranted. So he started to control which strikes to counter, and which ones to simply endure. It reduced the number of specters appearing around him by half, but the number of kills was almost the same. **Book 4, Page 118**
* That meant if he made sure to get hit in the areas that were weak spots of the roaches, the lethality of the projections would increase without any increase in Miasma Miasma consumption. **Book 4, Page 118**

## Middle Proficiency

* And his efforts were quickly rewarded as a prompt told him that **[Deathwish]** just reached Middle mastery. **Book 4, Page 119**
* The effect was immediately obvious, as the continuously appearing spectral projections turned slightly more corporeal, and hazy fractals adorned their bodies. **Book 4, Page 119**
* They had also become stronger, noticeably so. Zac had already measured that the power of the specters from **[Deathwish]** was roughly around 10%–15% of the original strike’s power, ... after using the skill for a few minutes, he felt that the power had increased by at least 50%. **Book 4, Page 119**
* After upgrading **[Deathwish]**, he realized that he suddenly had limited control of the specters as they appeared. ... He only managed to slightly alternate the trajectory of their retaliatory strike. **Book 4, Page 119**
* While **[Deathwish]** was still in Early mastery, he’d had no connection to the projections that were created, but now things had changed. Since there was a connection, Zac realized he might be able to infuse the ghosts with his Dao to empower the strikes. **Book 4, Page 144**

## Late Proficiency

* There was no earthly reason that his counter-skill could do enough damage for something like this to happen except one. **[Deathwish]** had evolved to the next stage. **Book 6, Page 470**

## Peak Proficiency

* He had spent a herculean effort on his F-grade skills, all of which had now reached Peak mastery. **Book 7, Page 524**
* *No other textual information.*

## Fusion

* The skill was called **[Deathmark]**, and was the fusion of **[Deathwish]** and **[Winds of Decay]**. **Book 8, Page 135**
* It was originally meant to be used in conjunction with **[Immutable Bulwark]**, but Zac now barely fought with a shield. **Book 8, Page 135**
* He didn’t want to keep getting hit to activate the skill, so he needed to change its trigger. Doing so through modifying the fractal was probably possible, but that was still out of his reach. So **[Deathwish]** became his first choice for a fusion, ... **Book 8, Page 135**

## **Synergy**

* There was a synergy between **[Deathwish]** and **[Immutable Bulwark]**. **Book 3, Page 209**
* He already knew that **[Deathwish]** didn’t activate when he used his shield, but that changed the moment he activated his new skill. Any ant that tried to bite their way through the fractal shield was immediately attacked by spectral copies of themselves, proving that an attack on his bulwark was counted as an attack on himself. **Book 3, Page 209**
* Unfortunately **[Deathwish]**, did not work in synergy with **[Indomitable]** as it did with **[Immutable Defense]** [*sic*]. **Book 3, Page 218**
* But any attack against the towers [*of Profane Seal*] would be met with the retaliation of **[Deathwish]**, meaning the cage protected itself from attacks. **Book 4, Page 160**
* The Miasma inside Zac’s body surged as it kept dropping, only to increase again due to the continuous cycle formed between **[Deathwish]** and **[Fields of Despair]**. **Book 4, Page 308**
* Spectral parasites kept appearing one after another as strikes against his new armor [*from Vanguard of Undeath*] would activate **[Deathwish]** just like strikes at his body. **Book 5, Page 5**
* He couldn’t combine **[Blighted Cut**] with skills like **[Deathwish],** ... **Book 6, Page 188**

## Commentary

* That essentially meant that if his Endurance got high enough, he could just stand in a field of enemies and let them kill themselves by hitting him. **Book 2, Page 707**
* He only had one skill at the moment, and Zac believed that the best use for **[Deathwish]** was to handle large groups of weaker enemies. **Book 3, Page 109**
* There was a pretty big drawback to this skill. [Fields of Despair] didn’t have a great synergy with his other skill, **[Deathwish]**. **Book 3, Page 174**
* All around him, particularly behind him, ghastly specters of rats kept popping out from nowhere, maiming and killing their living twins. It was **[Deathwish]** with its damage reflection that was dishing back far more than he got hurt. **Book 3, Page 179**
* However, he was a bit disappointed to notice that **[Deathwish]** wasn’t very effective against these beasts. The defense was clearly higher than the offense of the ants, and even though the specters kept appearing around him to reflect the bites, they mostly harmlessly hit the chitinous shells. **Book 3, Page 207**
* It did not appear that it worked on mental skills, since the queen had no reaction after attacking him multiple times with the mental waves. **Book 3, Page 212**
* In fact, there were multiple means of attack where he suspected the skill wouldn’t work. Illusions and poison were two other examples. It appeared that there needed to be a kinetic component to the attack, such as a punch or a fireball, for there to be anything to reflect. **Book 3, Page 212**
* While the shells of the insects weren’t as sturdy as some other species, they were still quite durable. That was why **[Deathwish]** rarely finished its enemies in one swing, and why he had to utilize **[Verun’s Bite]** to properly cut the critters apart. **Book 4, Page 120**
* with his inability to activate **[Deathwish]** against attacks that relied on technology, **Book 4, Page 202**
* However, he noted that the fit for **[Profane Seal]**, **[Deathwish]**, and **[Immutable]** [*sic*] was just fine while the fit of **[Winds of Decay]** had actually improved [*after taking the divergent Fetters of Desolation Class*]. **Book 5, Page 527**
* It was **[Deathwish]**. He hadn’t truly blocked the hammer’s strike, but he had still absorbed some of the force from the swing while redirecting most of it. He didn’t actually know if that was enough to activate the strike, and he quickly took the opportunity to conjure a spectral blacksmith that slammed down toward the back of the blacksmith’s head. **Book 6, Page 469**
* Rather than blocking 100% of a strike, he could block 20% while diverting the rest of the force. **Book 6, Page 470**