Literature / Saintess Summons Skeletons

What do you mean, the church wanted their summoned heroes to be alive?

[Recovery partially successful]
[Classes have been reduced to one]
[A new class has been created]
[Anomalies may arise]

Sofia is on the cusp of her goal, about to replace her [Orphan] class with the powerful [Necromancer]. But at the exact same time, she's somehow also given the rare [Saint] class, which will doom her to be kidnapped by the church, exploited, used up, and discarded.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the System no longer has any admins supervising it, and has to fall back to junior [Scribes] and automated error handling processes to deal with the unexpected situation of having two classes at once. This will definitely not cause any problems for the newly appointed [Saintomancer]…

Saintess Summons Skeletons is a "Holy Necromancy LitRPG", published on Royal Road and Scribble Hub by Mornn, updating 5 days a week.

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Available Active Tropes:

A

• Ability Mixing:
  • Skill fusion tickets are rare System rewards that allow someone to combine two skills into one, freeing up a skill slot and potentially creating more than the sum of the parts if the skills have good synergy together. There's also a safeguard ensuring that the ticket won't be consumed if no good combination exists. Sofia fuses her [Armor of Bones] and [Holy Wings of undeath] to create [Exalted Exoskeleton], which merges her wings with her armor and results in several benefits. The armor gains the holy light aura of her wings, and now counts as part of her body (like her wings already did) so it can be healed by her [Bone Dominus] constructs or [Heal Undead] if her bone storage is empty. The bone armor's rapid self-repair function now applies to her wings as well, so sustaining damage to her wings during an aerial fight will only briefly affect her maneuverability. The whole winged armor assembly can be manipulated and retracted with much more freedom, which is especially useful since she previously had to cut off her wings when she wanted to keep a low profile, then magically heal them before she could take flight again. On top of all that, it also greatly boosts the bone storage capacity of her armor, going from 100kg per skill level (capped at 10,000kg at level 100) to a flat 1,000,000kg capacity.
    Sofia: It’s nothing but improvements AND it freed a skill slot? This is such a great start!
  • Less safely, evolving a skill can sometimes cause its mana channels to clash with one or more other skills. Resolving the conflict requires either deleting the conflicting skills, or manually reshaping channels to produce a fused skill, which can be very powerful and make mana pathways cleaner going forward — but all the time the conflict exists, the mana channels are degrading and collapsing, so it has to be fixed quickly or suffer massive damage. Sofia fuses four clashing skills, which gave bonuses to movement and thinking speeds, into one that gives large mental bonuses while staying still and large speed bonuses while moving. It takes up three slots, though, so she only frees up one.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The Third Key gets dropped point-first on a kitchen counter, falls through the counter, and ends up halfway through the cupboard underneath.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Sofia didn't even realise how her skill keyword fusions worked when she accepted the first two partial skills offered to her, but the resulting skill, [Blessing of Deep], is actually ridiculously powerful. It puts her under the protection of the Lords of the Deep, who are outside the System and more powerful than gods. They grant her immunity to a variety of exotic attacks, such as [Hypnosis] and [Instant Death], sometimes adding more if she's exposed to a new attack like [Soul Parasites], and she can freely talk about them without suffering the usual consequences, and she can call on them for help in dire need, especially if higher beings like gods are involved, and they sometimes give her special quests with remarkable rewards.
• Acquired Poison Immunity:
  • The [Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void] skill is primarily focused on gaining resistances or immunities through prolonged exposure to things, such as enduring fire or force damage to gain explosion resistance, or exploring pitch-black dungeons to gain Innate Night Vision. Sofia makes extensive use of [False Immortality] runes to speed things up, letting her blow herself up, or get killed in the dark by True Shades, over and over.
  • By the time VPPV has advanced to the third step of the Light Forging Realm, Sofia is so resistant to poisons that all of Alith's alchemical skill can't hurt her enough to progress further, and she actually sets up a public booth offering to pay anyone who can successfully poison her. The students manage a few fractions of a percent of VPPV progress, but the Empress has much more potent brews at her disposal, allowing her to both assist and intimidate Sofia at the same time.
  • The Deep has a tendency to add relevant immunities to the [Blessing of the Deep] skill after Sofia suffers exotic attacks, such as [Soul Parasites].
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • The author is fond of alliteration. The story's title, Saintess Summons Skeletons, is far from the only example.
  • The main protagonist is Sofia, Saintess of Scripture. Technically.
  • Chapter 132 is called Special Self-Service Scribe Shop.
  • Chapter 145 is called Skeleton Soldier Showdown.
  • After Sofia obtains the Avian King-magi Scepter inside a supernaturally dark dungeon and combines it with her legendary Midenicite catalyst, the system promptly renames it Sofia’s Shadow Scepter.
  • Chapter 149 is called Dangerous Demon Dance.
  • Sofia's system scribe takes to giving safety ratings on things she's about to consume, such as "Sufficiently safe" and "Potentially painful product".
    You know, Mr. Scribe, I'm sensing a pretty predictable pattern in the way you write these safety ranks. Did you add them only so you could play around with words?
• Adoptive Name Change:
  • Sofia speculates that she's been adopted when the System gives her a new surname, "Aphenoreth". She has a hard time learning more about it, though, because the name scares the living daylights out of everyone.
  • Apostles of the Recessed receive a new name and are referred to as children, eg Akramaiazerfen, Son of Dread, or Evranarheimlein, Daughter of Curse. After performing of the ritual of the Sabbath of the Hollowed Heart, Sofia becomes Vakariazrehafin, Daughter of Sorrow.
• Alien Blood: Upon advancing the Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void far enough, Sofia's blood changes into light. It still keeps circulating around her body, though; in fact, if she's cut or stabbed, it keeps flowing in the same pattern instead of leaking out. She can even survive having her head cut off with minimal trouble; the light dangles from her neck in the shape of the veins and arteries she no longer has. When she completes the second trial, the System messages for her tier upgrade mention that she has a "Race evolution already ongoing..."
• Alliterative Family: Before Sofia became an orphan, her father was named Silvio Sellar, and Sofia's older sister was named Saria.
• Alliterative Name: Before Sofia became an orphan, she had the surname Sellar. Sofia's older sister Saria and father Silvio would also have been examples, so this was almost certainly deliberate.
• Alpha Strike: Shaily's sprite-calling skills are very advanced, allowing her to swarm a target with motes of destructive light — but that will exhaust her mana in a single attack. Sofia is still impressed by her destructive potential.
• Alternate History: Jennifer is curious to hear about how the filter trial's recreation of Aurelia's imprisonment, as altered by Sofia turned out.
• Alternative Calendar: Each month is 35 days^note In the first draft of the story, chapter 173 indicated one month is 36 days, but chapter 247 indicated one month is 35 days. The author acknowledged the inconsistency and fixed it before putting the first book up for sale., and each year is 10 months. The story begins in the third month of the year 3210. It turns out this calendar era's reference epoch (i.e., the big historic event that happened 3210 years ago) is the creation of the system.
• Always Female: Men are apparently never chosen as Saints, so the terms Saint and Saintess are used pretty much interchangeably. Until Sofia comes to Brighthall Academy and meets Sir Tartaros, Saint of Strength.
• Amplifier Artifact:
  • Midenicite catalysts can increase the speed of magical projectiles launched through them by up to 50%. It's an underwhelming effect, but nice to have when you can.
  • The Avian King-magi Scepter can reduce the casting time of spells and the cost of ongoing spells, but it has to be primed with a billion points of mana to make use of those effects (and for best results, the mana has to come from the owner). Still, it has some other benefits even without being primed, including the ability to hold a midenicite catalyst at one end. Once Sofia finally finishes priming it, it takes on some extra characteristics based on her mana, extending the range of her spells, dealing electrical damage when it strikes a foe, and reducing the backlash from [Angel's Bolt].
• And I Must Scream: Zerei's backstory involved this. Her tribe was faced with a disaster that forced them to flee underground and made long-term survival unrealistic, so they decided their best option to preserve the tribe's knowledge was a ritual that would transform one of their most talented Runecrafters into a demonic Apostle, sacrificing the lives of the rest of the tribe in the process. Unfortunately, the ritual didn't quite go according to plan — the defences around the altar, which were supposed to prevent outside interference, unexpectedly killed all of the participants — and Zerei couldn't escape from her chains afterward. Unable to age, and no longer requiring food or water to survive, Zerei found herself trapped all alone in an empty subterranean city inside a dungeon. The dungeon's entrance is hidden under a pool of magical poison deep inside a sinister forest populated by deadly monsters, and the dungeon itself is filled with a magical darkness that stubbornly refuses to be illuminated, populated by living shadows that can kill without making a noise, and containing a curse barrier that turns flesh into stone. Zerei was trapped for about two thousand years before Sofia happened to come along with the right combination of abilities to reach Zerei and enough empathy to liberate an imprisoned demon rather than kill it.
• And Show It to You: The Sabbath of the Hollowed Heart doesn't quite work out normally in Sofia's case. First, instead of taking the heart from a willing Human Sacrifice as instructed, she cuts out her own heart (hey, she's a willing human) and places that on the altar, using a special magical item to revive herself from death once. Then, once her offered heart has absorbed the essence of hundreds of undead and changed into something unrecognisable, she has to eat it, raw, while falling to her death again. Once completed, she is transformed into an Apostle of Sorrow — except that it took place inside the virtual world of the first filter trial, so once the trial is complete, she's back to normal. Sorrow is intrigued by her, however, and grants her the ability to temporarily transform again, with certain restrictions. Each transformation involves her heart leaping out of her chest and her taking a bite out of it.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Sofia and Alith both received clothes as a reward for clearing their first trial. Sofia received a full outfit (robe, gloves, boots, and underwear) that was fancy, comfortable, self-cleaning, and self-repairing. Alith received a magical talking bandeau capable of eating other clothes or armor and copying their abilities, although it requires that she leave most of her torso exposed.
  • The gachapon boxes occasionally give non-magical clothes, but this is explicitly one of the worst prizes you can get from them. On one occasion Sofia receives a pair of glasses with no lenses, purely for aesthetic purposes.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: There are numerous Gods representing different things, such as Sun, Moon, Knowledge, Sleep, Winds, and Scripture, with each God's power proportional to how much people love the thing the God represents. There are also the Recessed, which represent things that are hated, like Dread, Sorrow, Domination, Curse, Death, or Taxes.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • The System has several safeguards to make it harder — though certainly not impossible — to endlessly grind skills and levels, from the fact that you can only gain XP from defeating monsters at a higher level than yourself, to caps on various skills, to the "filters" that stop you from gaining more levels unless you can pass a great trial of character and strength — and you only get one attempt at each filter.
  • [Way of the Fool] gives substantial XP rewards for defeating enemies through cunning trickery. Repeating the same trick, however, gives rapidly diminishing returns.
• Anvil on Head: Amongst the debris of an assault — arrows, stones, glass, even pools of magma — Sofia is startled to see a number of anvils buried in the ground.
  Anvils? They throw anvils?
• Apocalyptic Log: While exploring the Maze of Zar in the Ranking Spire, Sofia found a very old journal that was mostly unreadable, but she was able to make out pieces here and there mentioning an "uncovered artifact", "pagan rituals", other people being "probably dead, or worse", and how "only nightmares await on the other side" of the doors. She finds this journal after fighting a dozen suits of armor that apparently contained people at one point but had since been filled with hostile tree monsters.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Monsters infested by the Ebb have no regard for strategy or personal safety, and will charge into a meat grinder battle all day and night.
• Attack Backfire: A magic sword releases a wave of energy that attacks Sofia's soul — then a moment later it cuts out and the sword starts screaming as the Deep counterattacks.
  [You were subjected to a Soul-altering attack; but it was dismissed]
  [The 'Mark of Aphenoreth' punishes the attacker]
• Auto-Revive:
  • There are rare single-use magical items that automatically bring the wearer back to life if they die, destroying the item in the process. During the first trial, Sofia relies on such an item to survive using herself as a Human Sacrifice in order to gain enough power to fight an overwhelming opponent.
  • Later on, Sofia learns a skill called [False Immortality] that lets her apply an un-life rune to her body that will restore her to full health and stamina if she dies, but it takes ten minutes and a substantial portion of her maximum mana to apply the rune, and the rune itself prevents her from regaining health, stamina, or mana while on her body.
• Asteroids Monster: The Sunless Warrior is mostly a black humanoid blob, but has three white portions, on its hat and face and one hand. Cutting it in half results in it regrowing into two warriors, but each has only a portion of the white marks; one has the hat and facial marking, while the other has the glove.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Sofia's [Angel's bolt] skill is like this for a while. It fires a divine lightning bolt capable of dealing ~40,000 damage, letting her one-shot enemies well above her level fairly early on. The downsides? First, it costs 10,000 mana per use, which is doable for a saintomancer but more than any other class could afford before passing the first trial. Second, it takes 10 seconds to charge up, and is really obvious, giving enemies time to attack her or start running away. Third, it can only be cast while airborne, forcing Sofia to find a way to stay airborne for ten seconds before she can actually use it, and her first solution is a magic ring that lets her slow her fall after jumping from somewhere high. Fourth, the bolt is dangerous to Sofia, with the heat from the charging process burning her hand, while the force of the explosion is very dangerous if it goes off too close to her. Learning to free-cast it without the system's help allows her to make it more practical by removing the airborne requirement, and she later learns how to adjust its strength as well.

B-C

• Badass Bookworm: Before the plot took off, Sofia spent most of her time in her orphanage's library. After receiving the broken [Saintomancer] class, much of her power comes from figuring out the right skill keywords to put together, or realizing loopholes or synergies she can exploit to use her skills in ways they probably weren't intended. Throughout her journey, she continues to seek out knowledge that might prove helpful, like the month she spent in Couvauz reading about mana and ritual theories, item production, known classes and their fighting styles, common monsters, and religions. She also comes up with experiments to test her unique class abilities, like using the skeletons of the thugs she kills in self-defense to test new necromancy ritual circles she customized herself. And as if that wasn't enough, the third hero she summons turns out to be a sentient book.
• Bag of Holding: Items that provide expanded storage spaces are expensive, but widespread.
  • Sofia initially has to compromise and buy a limited cursed storage amulet due to budget constraints, but she later finds much more impressive examples. T.L.D.R. seems to have a particular specialty in them.
  • The [Armor of Bones] skill provides extradimensional storage space for literal tons of extra bones, which it can use to repair itself. Pareth can also store himself there.
  • Ihuarah indicates that spatial items didn't exist thousands of years ago, although there were known ways to attach a spatial expansion to a person — with significant drawbacks that he doesn't want to elaborate on.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: After the final test to determine whether Sofia is worthy of passing the second trial, or will be stuck at level 199 for the rest of her life, Sofia is told, "You failed. <Beat> At being humble!" She just about has a heart attack.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: After learning it's possible to wager divine essence in the third trial, Alith suggests that she could use an essence from the Orator. The Orator finds this idea intriguing and entertaining. However, the essence he shoves into her doesn't interact well with her body, causing her to collapse on the ground screaming, and the Orator then forces Sofia to kill her, after which Sofia spends about 25 hours desperately trying to gather enough mana to resurrect Alith before her soul fades.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Alith gains a [Presentable] skill that makes her immune to all kinds of dishevelment.
  Your hair doesn't get tangled. Your makeup doesn't run. Your nails do not break. You do not grow any body hair. Your face is more symmetrical. Your teeth are white. Your skin is unblemished. Your clothes do not crease. You do not sweat. You smell of flowers… Under a storm or in the deepest pits of filth, a lady must always be presentable. And thus, you will.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: One of the elves trapped on the Orbital Solar Temple apparently chose to messily kill herself rather than wait to starve or be consumed by creatures of the Deep.
  To have the resolve to choose to go like this… She must have been more than terrified.
• Beyond the Impossible: The Deep are outside the System and not subject to its rules. Wagering an essence of Aphenoreth in the third trial results in Sofia gaining access to unique heart ranks beyond the usual maximum.
• BFS:
  • The sword-obsessed saintess Morning Star is 2.3 meters tall, but has a sword that's 7 meters long and half a meter wide. However, she has telekinetic powers that let her control it (and many others), so it's not quite as impractical as it seems.
  • While fighting sandworms up to 50 meters long, Pareth turns his Morph Weapon into a copy of Morning Star's sword made of holy light. Inhabiting a stone ogre skeleton at the time makes it a little more reasonable.
• Bird People: The Avians were an ancient humanoid race who are now widely believed to be extinct. Unlike the beastmen, the Avians looked significantly more animalistic, with beaks, feathery wings under their arms, sharp-clawed hands, and talons for feet.
• Blood Knight: The Crown of Victory keeps track of all its wearer's victories, and gives substantial Strength bonuses according to how epic the fights were. Sofia's duel against her sister, which spanned several chapters, including both of them transforming into giant monsters, and went right down to the wire (Sofia winning with a headshot just before Saria would have finished her), is naturally in the highest category, "Glorious Victory".
  Sen: It's all up to the grinning Orc over there, something about grandiose battles...
• Blood Magic:
  • Sofia's necromantic ritual to raise a skeleton requires her to carve a ritual circle and fill it with blood. Before she gained her class, she used her own blood, but afterward, she can use [Summon Blood] to handle even quite a large ritual circle with no difficulties.
  • Karin Lacour's class is actually Blood Mage, although we haven't seen her fight yet, since she settled into a safe desk job once her level was high enough that she didn't need to worry about old age.
• Bloody Murder: Astelia's version of the vampiric [Blood Curse] racial skill causes her spilled blood to burst into flames that burn more intensely than normal fire. Together with her abnormally large health pool and [Greater regeneration] passive skill, Astelia has the option of cutting herself and using space magic to launch the blazing blood at her enemies, although we've only ever seen her employ this strategy against monsters capable of reforming even after being torn to pieces.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Sofia's [Angel Bolt] skill is based on the lightning bolts used by Acromegon the angel, who turns out to be an enforcer sent by the System to punish those who break rules or go too far. He's polite when he visits Sofia, and even teaches her a different variant of the bolt, but also warns her that if she uses the explosive version at full power in a populated area, he might be sent to hunt her down.
• Boring, but Practical: Faced with a choice between three ritual schematics to learn, Sofia is tempted by the one that generates a defensive wall, and the one that creates a field to turn flesh to stone, but ultimately she chooses the one that sacrifices gold to temporarily boost mana recovery rate.
  Cannot go wrong with more mana.
• Bottomless Pits: The Margin is an apparently endless black void, but gravity works in some fashion, such that you can fall into it. Exactly what happens to you is unclear, except that it is fatal. Sofia and Alith take advantage of this by digging holes under the lurking Phageids throughout Zangdar, dropping them out of the floating city to their deaths.
  All they could see was the black void, and the falling chunk of Midenicite, that shrank more and more until it disappeared from view.
• Breaking the Bonds: Two different levels of the second filter trial start off with Sofia being chained to a wall, but in both cases she easily snaps her shackles.
• Bring It:
  • Nicet thinks it's madness for Sofia to fight the horde of flying monsters at night in Sovuln, but she welcomes the opportunity and is calm even as her foe rushes toward her.
    Sofia: Come. I've been dreaming of doing this for years.
  • Sofia is initially perturbed by the students being set loose to attack the teachers and try to rob them of their competition tokens "by any means necessary". Then she realizes that she wasn't forbidden to fight back, and summons her [Skull Choir].
    Sofia: Come, kids! My singers will make you dance!
• Bring My Brown Pants: Sofia eventually finds Ellen Trinal, who framed Aurelia for theft and attempted murder, curled up, shivering and sobbing in a closet, in a yellow puddle, knowing that Sofia is coming for her.
• Brown Note Being: Demons vary wildly from one another since they're apostles of vastly different Recessed like Sorrow, Domination, or Taxes, but one thing they seem to have in common is that just being near them is very dangerous for lower-level humans. Simply looking at them (even if it's too dark to actually see them) can cause people to faint, go insane, or even die on the spot. This dangerous aura can't be simply turned off like passive skills can, but the more civilized demons can apparently learn how to suppress the aura themselves or rely on magical items for that purpose.
• Bullet Dodges You: Evolving the [Evasion] skill to [Bending Steps] no longer gives any movement bonus. But it doesn't need to.
  Projectiles and attacks move out of your way. Walk forth.
• Call a Human a "Meatbag": Alith's magical talking tube top calls humans "breathers". It's also apparently racist against pants, referring to them as "sub-clothes".
  Dopple: …it's disgusting, really, I mean, you put legs in them! Can you believe this? LEGS!
• Came Back Strong: Danael's class is all about dying in different ways to become stronger, with a passive skill that revives him after a period of time. When Sofia first sees him, he's been cut in half and is waiting to respawn.
• Can't Move While Being Watched: The second trial has a Mobile Maze whose walls approach the participant from behind but are stationary while someone is looking at them. Sofia is able to lock it down by having skeletons do the watching for her, since she can summon dozens of them and they never blink.
• Carry a Big Stick: Sofia's shadow scepter is primarily an Amplifier Artifact, but since it is made of black primus wood and orichalcum, it's quite dense and durable, so with a big enough gap in levels between her and her opponent, it can also be an effective melee weapon. Once primed, it gains the ability to deal electrical damage on melee attacks, although since it also becomes a much better amplifier, she still mostly uses it for spellcasting.
  Sofia gave the closest Soldier a lovetap of her staff on top of his helmet. Resulting in a disturbing symphony of broken bones, bent metal, and splashing blood. The Soldier dropped dead.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • [Angel's Bolt] has several significant drawbacks, and perhaps the hardest to mitigate is that it's so powerful it burns Sofia all through its ten-second charging time, merely by proximity. She eventually learns to cast it without relying on the skill, which lets her scale the power up and down. So she can cast weak bolts that don't hurt her — or even stronger ones that will incinerate her whole arm on the spot.
  • The [Friendly Fire] skill is specifically designed to reduce a percentage of damage caused by one's own magic.
• Casting a Shadow: The "Buried Cathedral" dungeon is filled with magical darkness that resists all attempts to illuminate it. Skills don't work, fire doesn't work, light stones don't work. It's the perfect place to train the second step of the Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void — if you don't mind all the True Shades lurking in the darkness to behead you.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: The Ranking Spire Master chats with Sofia about how his challenge is quite difficult, while performing feats like hopping onto the end of a spear she's attempting to stab him with and poking her in return. Without interrupting his sentence.
• Chainmail Bikini: The "doppletopper" is simply a loop of material to go around your chest, which can consume other clothing, then apply the properties of what it ate to your entire body. Unfortunately, it doesn't like to remain under other clothes, so using it means you stay warm (by feeding it a sweater), and safe (by feeding it armour), but also exposed.
• Challenge Seeker:
  • The Incarnation of Victory has been waiting a very long time for a challenger worthy of his crown, and is elated at the prospect of a decent fight.
  • Zephir tells Sofia that Saria has plateaued in her growth, and needs more challenges to keep becoming stronger, so he would like Sofia to give her a good fight instead of just greeting her and proceeding to the hugging.
• Charged Attack:
  • Sofia's [Angel's bolt] is a powerful attack skill that takes ten seconds to charge before she can fire it. Sofia eventually learns how to adjust the intensity, allowing her to fire weaker bolts faster, or spend dramatically more time and mana charging it to the level of a Fantastic Nuke.
  • The signature skill of the church templars is [Holy Smite], which takes 30 seconds to cast, but then blasts a whole area with holy light. Plus, multiple templars can contribute to make it stronger. They typically enclose the area in a shield first to stop the target from getting away. However, the templars casting it have to be inside the shield. Sofia attacks them before they're finished casting, killing them or forcing them to stop casting and defend themselves.
  • Ranking Spire floor 96 includes a spellcaster with a similar "charge up and then smite the whole area" skill, complete with an enclosing shield, with the aid of a catalyst orb. Sofia uses multiple layers of magical armour to just absorb the hit without damage.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Book of Skeletons normally produces skeleton pages based on the bodies it eats, but Sofia is a little puzzled when it also eats a Primal Midenicite Ingot and gives her a page for summoning a very small horned humanoid creature. Sofia doesn't recognise it, it just looks to her like "some kind of miniature ogre," but it costs 500000 mana to summon, far more than her total pool size, suggesting that it must be something powerful when she eventually levels up enough to try it. Ihuarah sees the page and speculates that the ingot was a portion of the bones of an otherwise extinct fae species — and that it's not actually dead, just preserved its soul inside the ingot, so if Sofia ever summons it then it will have free will and could even try to harm her.
  • The story dual wields when Sofia meets Erredis. She is both the dragon who holds one of the pieces of the Saintess set, whom Valeure told Sofia about, and also the origin of Sofia's [Erredian Rot] skill, which was originally named, in draconic, [Breath of the Outcast] — fitting, as she lives alone on the moon.
• The Chosen One:
  • Each god can appoint just one [Saint], who receives the corresponding class along with a portion of the god's divine essence, and can only be replaced upon the Saint's death. How the gods treat their saints…varies. Sofia is chosen by the minor god of Scripture, but it's not benevolent; she's part of an experiment intended to give Scripture a cheap way to manifest an avatar in the material world, through Loophole Abuse of the System.
  • The Recessed have a different setup, where an individual can undergo a ritual to become a demonic apostle. Instead of granting a class, the apostle's body is drastically altered. Sofia performs Sorrow's ritual, the Sabbath of the Hollowed Heart — but she does it inside the false world of the first filter trial, and it's undone when she leaves. Sorrow is intrigued by her, however, and lets her keep some of it.
• Clingy Macguffin: Once primed and claimed, the Shadow Sceptre will find its way back to its owner. Sofia drops it during her fight against Saria, then finds it bobbing on the waves next to their raft.
• Commonality Connection: Shaily is confused by why Sofia is helping and trusting her so readily, until Sofia lets her know that they're in the same boat.
  Sofia: Just complete after me… 'There is no adult left willing to be your guardian-
  Shaily: "Your class has been changed to 'Orphan'. We are sincerely sorry."
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Challenging teachers to grab contest tokens may be fair game, but Sofia is quite displeased that her students were endangered in the process. So after she has subdued the troublemakers, she cuts a slit in each of their hands, uses [Bone Dominus] to pop all 27 bones out, and keeps them as a Creepy Souvenir, which she later uses to decorate the door of her quarters.
  Saria: Anyone who sees this and who's heard of what you did to these guys will have to think twice about trying anything.
  Sofia: Once for each hand.
• Corrupt Church: Sofia wasn't a fan of the church of Scripture from the beginning, and was aware that the [Saint] class was more of a curse than a blessing, because the church will lock you away and work you to exhaustion and even death. But it's not until the massacre of the orphanage where she grew up that she really decides the church needs to go.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: A vision from the Orator is too much to linger in a mortal mind, and quickly fades. Sofia tries shaping bone to record the message before it's gone, then switches to writing with summoned blood, while Saria scratches the walls with her claws. Between them they remember most of the essentials.
• Creepy Souvenir: Students who attack Sofia in class to snatch her tokens can look forward to her extracting all the bones from their hands, to decorate her door frame and Make an Example of Them. Rumours about "the hand demon" quickly spread among the student populace.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • It's a hard fight to defeat Orvod the level 299 Mountain Shaper, but after that, Vakariazrehafin goes through the rest of her enemies like a scythe through wheat.
  • A level 200 warrior with a mithril rapier, orichalcum armour, and skills for launching magical projectiles, would certainly be a difficult challenge for many level 199 hopefuls. Pareth beheads him in one swing.
  • Four giant skeletons, including a potent magic user, would be quite difficult for most trial takers to bypass. For Sofia, uncovered skeletons can be destroyed with a touch of [Bone Dominus], after which she can complete the floor objective at her leisure.
  • Sofia doesn't lose a single point of health in her duel against the Marquess ProudWall, where she neutralises his magic, ignores his melee attacks with intangibility, and tears out his neck bones.
• Cursed Item: Sofia gets a good discount on her storage amulet because it has an inconvenient side effect. It constantly fills up with a trickle of yellow sand, which will spill over if it gets full, so it has to be regularly emptied. Alith actually finds it intriguing, and wants to keep it even after they come across more powerful and uncursed storage items. Ihuarah eventually takes it, because as an animist who can make sticks and feathers and leaves gain life and fight for him, he finds the sand very useful.
• Cyberspace: Joah has a skill that lets him create a virtual world for other people to enter, similar to the false world of the first filter trial, except that their bodies remain in the real world. One of the participants, Cinthia, even has a special class that lets her operate like a streamer, with her viewers being the Recessed and donating essence tokens to help her in the virtual dungeon.

D-E

• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Once Alith's hero blessing (Phoenix Lineage) evolves, she can place "Devouring fire" on a target with a successful attack, giving a 10% increase to physical damage received by the target for the next 3 seconds. Which wouldn't be very much, except that Devouring Fire stacks, up to a hundred times, if she can attack rapidly enough before it expires.
• Dead Man Writing: Zhǎng Lú’ leaves a letter to whomever kills him, thanking them for freeing him and making some requests about the disposition of his property. Including delivering letters to his next of kin — but unfortunately, most of them are long dead too. Sofia is eventually able to make contact with the last one, T.L.D.R. the lich, who thanks her for her work and takes the rest of the letters to deliver to the recipients' graves.
• Deader than Dead: The Book of Skeletons consumes intact bodies, producing corresponding pages that allow Sofia to summon temporary skeletal copies of what was eaten. However, when the summons are ambushed and killed by Ormoncleth's enforcers, the corresponding page burns up in blue fire and is gone permanently.
• Deadly Dodging: Sofia struggles to deal any damage to the infested elves on the Orbital Temple, but she does take out some of them by having them chase Pareth into danger (specifically, toward the sun) and then teleporting him back, leaving his pursuers to their fate.
• Deadly Euphemism: Sofia meets a summoned hero who is surprised that she's come back to Skyreach when everyone is searching for her and there's likely a price on her head. Sofia's explanation is, "I came back to... Do some cleaning."^note Which is to say, in the wake of the church-sponsored massacre of the orphanage where she grew up, she's tracking down all the church's leaders and paladins and checking their murder histories, wiping out any who won't reveal it or whose history is blood-soaked.
• Deadly Gas: Sirhellion monsters create normal-looking clouds to hide in ambush, but their System description sternly warns, "Whatever you do, do not inhale the clouds."
• Death Is Cheap:
  • Combining the skill keywords "[Prophecy of ", "[Dispel ", and " death]" results in the System giving Sofia the [False Immortality] skill; she can inscribe runes on herself that will revive her from death with full health and stamina, at the cost of preventing regeneration of health, stamina, and mana while they're active. She makes extensive use of them for all sorts of things, some major, like surviving a pitch black dungeon where True Shades can behead her before she knows what's happening, but others minor, like completing a set of push-ups faster by wearing herself out and then committing suicide to revive with full stamina.
  • Saria has a special [Raid Boss] class giving her a [Respawn] skill that lets her come back from the dead after 24 hours in exchange for a hundred times her level in gold coins. The cost isn't a big deal because of her Dragon Hoard, so it's much more convenient than Sofia's runes that have the downside of crippling mana regeneration while active. On the other hand, Sofia's revival is immediate, and she can stack multiple runes, allowing her to use it tactically in combat.
• Delicious Distraction: The vampire blood curse causes them to be easily distracted by the smell of blood, and actually drinking it has hallucinogenic properties for them. So when Sofia has to duel Astelia with a limited selection of skills, she covers Astelia in a dome of summoned blood. Astelia freezes in place rather than succumb, losing the duel but keeping her dignity.
• Dem Bones:
  • Due to her altered skills, instead of the Night of the Living Mooks, Sofia can summon exactly one Holy Skeleton, whom she names Pareth. If she uses the ritual on a new set of bones, then the old set collapses. Fortunately, Pareth's level and skills transfer over, with stats adjusted to the new body. Even if he's destroyed entirely, she can just find a new set of bones and raise them to get him back. She goes through human, elf, rat, and even chicken bones, before eventually settling on immensely strong Stone Troll bones, giving him a huge power boost.
  • Her third "hero" is a book that lets her summon temporary skeletons made of mist. The selection is based on the corpses that the book has consumed, so she can get access to some very powerful minions this way.
• Demon of Human Origin: Demons (also known as Apostles) were once ordinary people, until they performed obscure, difficult rituals in order to be granted powerful new bodies by the Recessed. Although Apostles are not necessarily evil, people who go through the trouble of becoming Apostles were usually hungry for power already, so Apostles are widely feared.
• Developer's Foresight: Millennia ago when the System was made, the admins planned out the titles that could be given for unusual achievements, although there is also leeway for Scribes to monitor events and create new titles. For example, they anticipated that someone would eventually find a way to kill the Lesser Stone Drake in the second trial, despite the drake being hundreds of levels higher than a trial participant.
• Disability Superpower: When Sofia receives a magical binding making it impossible for her to remember sensitive information while her mind is being read, she immediately recognises that she can use that to test whether someone is reading her thoughts at any given time, by trying to remember.
  Sen: That's really the first thing that comes to your mind? No wonder everything is so broken around you…
• Disadvantageous Disintegration:
  • Using [Erredian Rot] against earth golems is a very mixed bag. It kills them quite efficiently, but also consumes their valuable cores and leaves nothing behind but ash, plus it can get onto the walls and compromise their structural integrity. On the other hand, consuming the bodies means that they don't get in the way and the next wave of golems can't use them as raw material for further attacks. When Sofia proceeds to use the Rot on the dungeon boss, though, it gets inside the final treasure chest and turns the loot to dust.
  • The Rot isn't desirable in the third trial at all, since the value of dead monsters depends on their "imprints" being as intact as possible to harvest. Even the non-explosive version of [Angel's Bolt] is problematic. Sofia still has to use the Rot sometimes, against particularly dangerous opponents. Subverted for Pareth; thanks to wagering an essence of Knowledge, he doesn't need imprints to be intact to get full benefits from them.
• Disc-One Nuke: It's not the start of her journey, but Sofia certainly gets access to a power level she shouldn't have yet when Zerei kills an Alpha Stone Troll for her to use in upgrading Pareth. Pareth is vastly overpowered for the second trial as a result, steamrolling through the army that Zerei failed to defeat in her own trial.
• Dispel Magic: Alith's [Slap of Absolute Shame] ends all mana usage by the target and freezes them in place for one second, which typically collapses all their defences and leaves them helpless.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In response to someone sending a disdainful glance at Cinthia, one of her patrons, Hatred, calls on Sofia to break all the offender's bones, heal them in order to break them again, bathe in his blood, and make a mask out of his skull, or Hatred will kill the guy himself. Sofia doesn't go that far, but she does publicly thrash him in a humiliating Curb-Stomp Battle and then steal his neck bones.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • Once Sofia is wearing a corset with her very generous chest, her sister Saria remarks that no one will notice what jewelry she's wearing, because "Your… charisma is overflowing." ^note The Charisma stat does influence physical appearance, resculpting the body to match the person's ideal, but Sofia was already generously endowed.
  • A teenage boy asks why Sofia is hiding her face, so she dismisses her armour, revealing her six feet of magically toned and very well endowed physique in a casual outfit, crosses her legs, and tells him, "No reason." He doesn't manage to get his follow-up question out.
• Doomed Hometown: Sofia didn't just lose her hometown, the entire Sovuln Kingdom was destroyed when something strange happened in a forgotten underground dungeon that led to widespread disaster, including the land being flooded by monsters. The people who managed to escape became refugees in the neighboring Skyreach Kingdom, with Sofia herself ending up in an orphanage near the border for the rest of her backstory, until she gets Kidnapped by the Call. About a year later, she visits the orphanage and discovers that every man, woman, and child in the entire village have been slaughtered by members of Skyreach's Corrupt Church who have been waiting to ambush Sofia.
• Doppelgänger Attack: The Marquess ProudWall can split his mana into three parts to form a pair of expendable clones of himself, including his equipment. And if defeated, they can use their remaining mana to explode. Sofia can block their attacks with her skeletons and negate the explosion with [Heat Death], though, so all he achieves is getting publicly defeated three times instead of one.
• Dragon Hoard: Sofia's sister Saria has a lair in a Pocket Dimension that nobody can access without her permission, making it a great place to keep her huge pile of gold and jewels. However, the lair does double duty as both a Treasure Room and a Boss Room, as she can forcibly teleport enemies with her to her lair (where the dense mana gives dragons a big advantage), and they can't escape without defeating her.
• Dragons Versus Knights: Sofia's sister Saria is both dragon and knight all in one, which makes for an interesting dynamic against Sofia (Saint and Necromancer in one). On one hand, she's the dragon boss whom Sofia has to overcome, and on the other hand, Sofia comes across looking more like a villain for the knight in shining armour to cut down.
• The Dreaded:
  • Everyone who knows anything about the Lords of the Deep is terrified of drawing their attention — and with good reason, because the usual result of saying their names even inadvertently is death or erasure from the world and from everyone's memory. Everyone, that is, except Sofia, who only knows that attempting to learn more about her surname results in scaring some very powerful people senseless.
  • The Outcast isn't quite as feared as the Deep, but the name isn't a coincidence. Even amongst dragons, her name is feared — which is understandable, considering how many other dragons she has killed. The System doesn't send just one angel to intercept her and ask her business; it sends nine.
• Eaten Alive: Alith is emergency rations, at her own insistence, when she and Sofia are trapped for months in the fallen city of Zangdar. As an undead, Alith doesn't actually need to eat, and Sofia can heal her with mana, so she's a renewable, if disturbing, food source.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Sofia doesn't have many preferences when it comes to her clothing, except that she doesn't like to expose her midriff. The Clothier remarks that if she's lax about exposed skin, she'll be very popular among the male students.
• Eldritch Location:
  • Zangdar was transported into "the margin", a plane of existence far removed from the material plane (on the other side of the Recessed plane, in fact), in a fruitless attempt to escape from the invading phageids. The city now exists within a slowly depleting bubble of mana, surrounded on all sides by an endless mana-less void that kills anyone who enters it, and only accessible using one of the key-rings. Since it's separated from the material and spiritual planes, Alith can't use her ghost transformation there.
  • The Eye of Creation is the centre of everything, and is a place where space grows faster than anyone can travel. As a result, it's possible to enter the Eye, but never to leave it. It's used as an eternal prison for very high level criminals, and once there, the System considers them to be dead for the purpose of determining inheritance of their possessions.
• Elemental Plane: The world has six known planes, or possibly 6.5, for the gods and Recessed (anti-gods), the physical and spiritual planes, the endless void of the "margin", and the deep. Mana exists between the physical and spiritual planes, but isn't precisely a plane itself.
  • Zangdar was transported to the margin to escape from invading phageids, but unfortunately they had already infiltrated.
  • Teleportation involves stretching one's soul through the spiritual plane, to mark out a trail, then following the path in the physical plane. This means it can be traced, but without that trail, the destination would be random.
• Emotion Control: Soul parasites are spiritual monsters that embed themselves in their victim's soul and manipulate their actions by amplifying or dampening certain emotions, usually to make it easier to devour their soul. Sofia believes that Scripture infected her with one of these before she escaped the church, and used it to nudge her towards reckless behavior to try to get her killed after it became clear that Sofia wasn't going to give Him what He wanted. He later unleashes a plague of them that takes over the upper echelons of the church.
• Escort Mission: Floor 96 of the Ranking Spire requires challengers to safeguard 5 critical citizens during a city siege. For each of the "key targets" who dies, the challenger loses 20% of their maximum health for the remainder of the floor, so if they all die, so does the challenger. And Sofia starts off not knowing where they are…
• Exact Words:
  • When Sofia met Valeure Dargent, Saintess of Winds, it became clear that Valeure can detect lies, so Sofia had to be careful during their conversation to avoid revealing that she's a Saintomancer rather than a Saint. For example, when Valeure recommended getting rid of the [Summon Hero] skill (which Sofia never had) if she hadn't already, Sofia told her "Thank you for the advice. I already do not have [Summon Hero]."
  • When Sofia is warned by an enemy commander to "be gone and bring your giant undead with you," she agrees to leave. She leaves his tent — then flies up into the sky and charges a massive [Angel's Bolt] that reduces him to charred bone fragments.
  • The description of [Vakariazrehafin of Sorrow] states that mana will remain at zero for the duration of the transformation plus thirty minutes. But if it's bypassed by another way of restoring mana, thus no longer remaining at zero, then it starts regenerating as usual.
• Experience Booster: The S-ranked "Blessing of the Purifier" increases XP gains by 50% until level 300 is reached. But Sofia instead chooses a blessing for Pareth that will allow him to gain more benefits from each level — which turns out to be a good choice, since level growth is restricted by the filters.
• Extranormal Prison: High-level individuals (eg level 500+) who violate the System's laws can be imprisoned in the Eye of Creation, the centre of the universe. Due to the constant expansion of space, it is relatively easy to enter the Eye, but impossible to leave.
  May you repent for eternity.
• Extreme Omnivore: Phageids will eat anything containing mana, which means basically anything except magic-proof midenicite. The area they live in doesn't even have dust.
• Eye Scream: TLDR pulls the eyeball out of one of his test bodies, still dripping fluid, to show Sofia its properties.

F-H

• Fantastic Nuke: Sofia's [Angel's bolt] started off as a system skill that used a fixed amount of mana to create a powerful explosive attack. After learning how to cast the spell without the system's guidance, she eventually also figures out how to pump more mana into it, by which point she isn't so much limited by her mana reserves but by how long she can charge the attack before her hand starts disintegrating. As she continues to level up and improve her stats, skills, and equipment, she gets a sturdier body, ways to passively and actively heal herself, and methods of enhancing her offensive magic, pushing it steadily further. By chapter 238, when she tries going all-out in an unpopulated area, she flies more than a kilometer away from her target and still panics when she fires the bolt and her world turns white. The chapter is even titled "Nuclear".
• Fantasy Metals:
  • Mithril is a metal used to coat high-end weaponry. It's almost indestructible, magic-resistant, holds a sharp edge forever, and is lightweight. However, it's very rare, only ever found in tiny nodes. It also doesn't accept enchantments well.
  • Orichalcum is a pink metal stronger and heavier (and much more expensive) than steel. It's less impressive than mithril, but not quite as rare, and can be enchanted. Where a mithril dagger would actually be mithril-coated titanium, an orichalcum dagger would be solid. Sofia is able to obtain enough orichalcum to construct a complete defensive "EGG" shell, covers the interior in runes for protective spells, and hides inside it to survive a spell meant to kill armies.
  • Mithrium is an alloy of mithril and orichalcum, but can no longer be created, only found in tiny veins. It's even stronger than either one, but is so exceedingly rare that is an Awesome, but Impractical choice for most equipment. Erredis has a staff made of it, which makes sense for an ancient dragon.
    Karlson: Yes, it’s worth a thousand times more than Mithril by the gram. But that's the thing; you weigh it by the gram.
  • Not much is known about Adamian steel, except that it's almost indestructible and extremely rare. Sofia has only encountered it being used in small quantities for very special artefacts like two of the unique rewards in the second trial and Erredis' reinforcement of Sofia's Shadow Sceptre, as well as being mined in a golem factory operated by someone over level 500. Just the slag produced as a mining byproduct is very valuable.
• Feed It with Fire: In Sofia's testing of the Erredian Rot, she tries burning it away with [Angel's bolt], but the Rot just consumes the mana and grows stronger.
• Fingore: During the Brighthall arc, Sofia's classroom is attacked by students trying to steal her tokens as part of a school competition. Although they technically didn't break any rules since they waited until her class had just finished, Sofia was sick of being underestimated and angry enough that she decided to Make an Example of Them by stabbing their hands, using [Bone Dominus] to pull every finger/hand bone out through the stab wounds, then having her skeleton high-priest heal their wounds without restoring their missing bones. She even displays the skeletal hands like trophies outside of her dormitory room. The next day, Sofia overhears students referring to her as the "hand demon".
• Five-Finger Discount: When Sofia finds a vending machine that wants gold and won't accept fake bone coins, she just shatters it with a punch and loots the contents.
• Finger Poke of Doom: Any time you unsuccessfully attack the Ranking Spire Master, he pokes you. It removes just 1% of your health, but cannot be healed until you leave his floor.
• Five Rounds Rapid: Sofia ignores the ineffective first volley of arrows from the church camp she's confronting, but rolls her eyes when they keep shooting.
  How did they not realize that it wouldn’t work after the first two times? That’s enough.
• Flight:
  • Sofia tries shopping for a magic item to let her fly, but they're relatively rare and expensive. On her budget, the only options are one that lets her take twenty brief steps in the air per day, or a slow-falling ring.
  • She's later offered the [Holy wings of undeath] skill and takes it without a second thought, allowing her to fly freely as long as there is mana around.
  • The top tier of the [Runeforged Overlord] skill allows her to fly at high speed in any direction without needing ambient mana. But she can't sustain it for very long.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Zerei won't say exactly what the Avians were facing, but whatever it was, they gave up on surviving and settled on sacrificing themselves to make one of their number immortal.
• Flying Face: The [Skull choir] skill creates a rotating ring of floating skulls that follow the caster around and attack independently (or they can be manually controlled). It can be enhanced further by absorbing new varieties of skulls. Sandworm skulls provide the ability to shoot laser beams, which are much more potent than the default Super-Scream — but Sofia is disappointed that the worm skulls can't sing.
• Friendly Fireproof:
  • The light bursts from the Spine of the Black Sun only trigger when the Spine strikes an enemy, and will only hurt enemies. Sofia has to find a loophole when she wants to have one of her skeletal minions trigger it, ordering the crow to peck her until it deals a single point of damage and counts as an enemy.
  • The Erredian Rot does not touch Sofia, her skeletons, or what they're wearing. Everything else, living or not, is quickly reduced to carbon dust.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: The vampire nation of Vasperia initially raised people's concerns, but is now an accepted and valued part of society, peacefully purchasing blood from its neighbours and providing a variety of magical items. Sofia's [Summon Blood] skill is her first major source of income once she reaches a city with a Vasperian embassy.
• Game-Breaker: In-Universe, the difficulty level in the first filter trial didn't really account for Sofia becoming an Apostle of Sorrow, which allows her to narrowly defeat Orvod and then steamroll through the royal palace to kill her targets. Some time later, when Jennifer hears about it, she laughs so hard she falls off her chair at the thought of messing up the trial so much.
• Gathering Steam: Saria's [Raid Boss] class can make a series of attacks that double in power with each hit. The first only scratches Pareth, but the second leaves him badly injured, and Sofia knows a third will almost finish him.
• Giant Squid: Higher level phageids resemble 3-metre-tall squids, except that they're blue and have only three tentacles. Those tentacles can stretch tens of metres further, though, and are quite resilient. Sofia and Alith are able to kill one in multiple confrontations, with healing in between, but after that they settle for just cutting through the floor and dropping the remainder of them into the void, despite missing out on loot that way.
  Alith: You mean the disgusting transparent red thing with a ton of tentacles and a long tube head? I've seen that once or twice, a friend of mine used to transport fish for the nobles, showed me a lot of horrendous stuff.
  Sofia: Your world's squids have more than three tentacles?
• Give Chase with Angry Natives: When Sofia is being hunted through a Thrombber hive, she sends out a flock of bird skeletons to provoke the Thrombbers and then lure them toward her pursuers. That doesn't take the hunters out, but they're hurt and delayed, which makes it easy for her to set an ambush.
• Glass Cannon: The [Necromancer] class is powerful but fragile, with both health and stamina halved, but multiplying mana by 5. The [Saint] class is even more so, halving them in order to multiply mana by 100. As a [Saintomancer], Sofia gets both effects, multiplicatively, leaving her as almost a One-Hit-Point Wonder at level 1, but with mana equivalent to a level 40 [Saint]. This becomes much less of a problem for her once she passes the first trial and is given 6000 stat points to allocate freely, which she mostly uses to bolster her health.
• Global Currency: Sofia's travels have taken her through several countries in the human continent (including two that are at war with each other) and even the beastman continent, but it seems everyone uses the same gold and silver coins.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Sofia is quite surprised at how sane Zerei seems to be. Turns out that she more or less went through insanity and out the other side.
  Zerei: Oh no, it was bad, awful. In the beginning, at least. I think I got used to it after a few hundred years, yes. I spent most of the time sleeping, mind you, but it was terribly frustrating. And boring!
• Gods Need Prayer Badly:
  • The power of the gods is based on how much divine essence they have, which is in turn based on the worship they receive. This is a major reason that Scripture hasn't been able to fight Sofia more effectively; he has limited essence and as his Saintess she's holding onto some of it (which he wants back), so his ability to act in the material plane is restricted.
  • Furthermore, if a god's concept begins to be hated and feared instead of loved, the god might be changed into a Recessed instead. The Recessed gain essence from those negative emotions, instead of positive ones, and have slightly different powers, such as creating demonic Apostles rather than choosing Saints.
• Going to Give It More Energy: In the right circumstances, even the [Generosity of Sun] ritual for quickly recovering mana can be weaponised. Sofia starts the ritual in her fight against the Incarnation of Victory, then jumps clear, resulting in Victory absorbing the environmental mana so fast he uses it up and his divine form burns out, preventing him from pursuing her.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Recessed gather essence and become more powerful from being feared. However, Death is so widely feared, including by many of the most powerful people in the world, that it is overflowing with essence and has to keep its distance lest it destroy everything by its mere presence. Death's worshippers, by reducing the level of fear, actually aim to reduce its power, "To alleviate the burden."
• Gotta Kill Them All: Sofia has to kill every last attacker before she's acknowledged as having saved Yurnia. That's over 97000 invaders. She gets a counter for them, ensuring that not even one survives.
• Healing Factor: The Incarnation of Victory heals his body faster than Sofia's demonic form can damage it, even though he's not yet fighting back and she's just pummelling him.
• Healing Potion: Dark green Sieva extract potions are the standard for adventurers under level 100, with one flask restoring 5000 health, although drinking more than two flasks in one day can cause a fatal overdose. Alith later designs potions that heal a comparable amount of health but over a longer time, so they can be drunk immediately before doing something harmful (like casting [Angel's Bolt]), as well as very strong potions that can only be used once a week.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Due to her broken class, instead of summoning heroes, Sofia can summon litres of human blood. She's initially underwhelmed, but it turns out that it has lots of uses. Setting the stage for a Wounded Gazelle Gambit. Turning a surface slippery. Splashing people in the face to temporarily blind and disorient them. Selling it in bulk to vampires, who are willing to pay very well. Fuelling necromantic rituals that need large amounts of blood without having to hurt herself or anyone else. Distilling water from it to survive in an emergency situation. She even manages to trap a powerful monster in a sealed room and drown it in blood after it proves too dangerous for her to get into its line of sight. It's actually more useful in her early development than her ability to summon a Holy Skeleton.
• Heavier than It Looks: Sofia looks like a fairly normal human woman, but her body composition has been extensively altered by her Skills. Her ID card in the Exidion Empire records her at 486kg, and that's after one of her items halves her effective weight. She doesn't notice it affecting how she interacts with the world, however — she doesn't break floors or anything like that — so she assumes that System shenanigans are in play.
  While Sofia had an existential crisis over weighing more than the average stone ogre, the receptionist came back with a stack of loose pages of paper.
• Hero Antagonist: Orvod genuinely believes he's doing good and serving the kingdom by trying to kill Aurelia during the first trial, due to Aurelia and Duke Armand being falsely accused of very serious crimes, and Aurelia's transformation into a demonic Apostle makes it even more impossible to settle things peacefully.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Pareth repeatedly chooses to protect Sofia rather than save himself or even follow orders, such as casting a [Greater Heal] on her and then letting a volley of fireballs home in on and destroy him, rather than teleporting back to her. It's actually a prerequisite of his Specialisation, that he's willing to protect her at any cost. Good thing he can be raised again…
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The Maze of Zar has one of the key orbs needed to complete it and exit, within two hundred metres (and in a straight line) from the start. It's inside a rotting barrel amongst hundreds of other such barrels. Sofia has to search for days before she finds it, and can only laugh when she realises the trick.
• Hold the Line:
  • Sofia's first filter trial only requires her to survive through the solstice, which she could achieve merely by distracting her pursuers and running away. However, it offers extra rewards for successfully avenging her character on the girl who framed her. Sofia goes further, using a dark sacrificial ritual to massively boost her power, successfully killing a mage 200 levels higher than herself, comprehensively defeating the kingdom's military, and then going through the villains like a hot knife through butter.
  • Floor 9 of the second trial requires her to survive for three minutes as all manner of magical and mundane projectiles are launched at her. She cheats by using her graveyard skeletons to sink underground and ignore the assault.
• Hope Spot: After two thousand years, Zerei, a.k.a Evranarheimlein, apostle of Curse, is finally freed from her bindings, which will allow Curse to operate in the world again. Except that she then dies due to incompatibility with Sofia's Scribe-only mode. Curse desperately tries to avoid it by resetting time, failing over and over again, until Sofia manages to call on the Deep to break the loop and Curse gets a time-out.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Sofia's first trial pits her, in the body of level 1 pampered princess Aurelia Grandcourt with locked skills unsuitable for combat, against Orvod the mountain shaper, a level 299 hero specialized in manipulating literal tons of stone. However, she does have skills to assist diplomacy and negotiation, and the trial's main goal is merely to survive for one month, which she could probably achieve by running away or surrendering the MacGuffin that the villains care about more than actually killing Aurelia. Instead, she uses a sacrificial ritual to transform into a monstrously powerful demonic apostle, moves the fight to favorable terrain, learns to wildcast her [Angel's Bolt] even with the skill unavailable to her because she's familiar enough with the spell's mana pattern, and takes Orvod down. When Sofia recounts the tale to Jennifer Sellar, who actually knew the real Aurelia and Orvod, Jen roars with laughter.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Ebb is a pink monster with properties of both an ooze and a mushroom, which devours anything organic to make more of itself, turning what it consumes into a hollow shell full of Ebb (though sometimes retaining the abilities of whatever was eaten). And when exposed to water, it sprouts tentacles and attacks everything around in a berserk frenzy. It's dangerous enough that experts have settled for just containing it rather than seriously trying to eradicate it, especially since it has already left no-one alive to rescue and nothing intact to reclaim.
• Horned Humanoid: The Exidian race looks fairly similar to humans, except with horns, blue skin, and white hair.
• Human Sacrifice: The ritual at the end of Sofia's necromantic Spell Book requires both the caster and a willing victim to die horribly in the process. It revives the caster as an Apostle of Sorrow, with immense demonic power.
• Hybrid Monster: TLDR grows a custom hybrid monster, a mixture of Mauler and Hellspawn, then deliberately mutates it with a disease, in order to make the best skeleton he can for Pareth. It ends up with three heads facing in different directions, armor plates and spikes everywhere, goat-style legs capable of jumping to great heights, and still small enough to go most (though not all) places that Sofia can.
• Hybrid Power: Gaining a mixture of traits associated with both the [Saint] and [Necromancer] classes makes Sofia unusually powerful.
  • Pareth has the blessing that summoned heroes get, and can gain strength both from his own levels and from the levels of Sofia's associated skill like a regular hero. But he's also undead, letting her raise him again from a fresh set of bones if he's destroyed, and adjust his base stats to whatever bones he's currently in. Furthermore, his hero blessing gives him more strength based on his weight, so when she hunts down bigger and stronger hosts for him, he gets boosted twice (once due to the base stats of the bones, and a second time due to their significant weight).
  • Both the [Necromancer] and [Saint] class are Glass Cannons, so by combining their stat multipliers, Sofia really doesn't lose much toughness; she was always going to be very fragile. What she gains, though, is a truly immense mana pool. And then Alith's candies boost her maximum health by a fixed amount, which largely negates the drawback anyway.

I-L

• I Have Many Names: Played for Laughs when Alith obtains the Doppletopper, an ancient magical talking ring of smooth and stretchy black cloth. When asked about a name, it says it doesn't care how it's addressed, but offers a few suggestions:
  Dopple: The band; magical strapless bra; the pec ring; tube top; censor bar; annoying fucker; the jiggle canceller; priceless artifact… you name it, I've heard it all.
• I Know Your True Name: Saying or writing the name of a Lord of the Deep (Aphenoreth, Ormoncleth, Edrazaketh, and Yvraveteth) doesn't grant any power over him, but it will get his attention. This usually ends badly for the speaker. However, because of Sofia's [Blessing of the Deep], she can talk about them freely without being harmed. When she's trapped in a time loop created by one of the Recessed, she tries every possible four-syllable letter combination until she gets a reaction from "Edrazaketh."
• Ignore the Fanservice: Sofia knows something odd is going on when she jumps in place a few times and none of the nearby students react to her chest bouncing.
  Sofia: You're preventing them from seeing or hearing this conversation, aren't you?
• Immortal Procreation Clause: As a general rule, everyone ages more slowly as their level increases, and Valeure warns Sofia early on that it becomes harder to have children at higher levels. However, whereas humans are born at level 1 and vampires are generally born at (or slightly above) level 100, dragons hatch in the low four hundreds, making them powerful and immune to old age but exceptionally bad at reproducing.
• Immune to Fire:
  • Alith chooses the "Phoenix lineage" hero blessing, making her entirely immune to heat. It also has the side effect of adjusting her hair and skin tones toward orange and red, but she doesn't mind.
    Alith: Can you imagine? How easy and fun cooking will be when I can stick my hands in the furnace!
  • When Sofia is commissioning armour, her first priority is heat resistance, to handle the backlash from [Angel's Bolt]. The smith makes her a gambeson from salamander hide.
    Karlson: Since you want it to be hyper focused on heat resistance I won't have to treat it all that much, these beasts swim in lava all year ‘round.
  • Astelia's blood curse lets her fly through a cone of fire spell unscathed — but she's very vulnerable to ice.
• Immune to Mind Control: The first skill that Sofia assembles from parts, "Blessing of the Deep", grants immunity to mind control, confusion, hypnosis, and insanity. It's later improved to also block emotion-affecting soul parasites, and domination, after Sofia is hit with them.
• Immunity Disability:
  • Resistance to mind-altering effects means that you can't be anaesthetised by the System when undergoing extensive and painful changes…
    [Allocation complete, closing sub-system]
    [WARNING: due to the 'Pristine essence' passive, you will not receive any pain reduction]
  • Enchanting her own skull as a blessed construct gives Sofia a lot of resilience, but also interferes with her ability to cut off her wings if that's needed or wanted (eg to replenish her bone storage).
• I Need a Freaking Drink: During the Brighthall Academy arc, this is Astelia's reaction to finding out that one of her students was coerced into poisoning one of Sofia's students.
  "One of my own students!" she answered, stomping her feet. Putting her hands on her head, the short vampire crouched and sighed. "I need some blood…"^note Blood has an intoxicating effect on vampires.
• Innate Night Vision:
  • Gachapon boxes can give night-vision pills that last ten minutes. It's considered a poor prize, though (D-rank).
  • The Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void grants Sofia the permanent ability to see in total darkness as easily as bright daylight, once she has trained it. She gets killed a bunch of times by True Shades in the process, though.
• Instant Expert: Sorrow uses a vision lasting just ten seconds to teach Sofia the ritual circle to summon Ihuarah, containing over 50000 runes, yet Sofia can somehow remember it perfectly. She can only conclude that a deity did it.
• Insult to Rocks: Alith is disgusted by Sofia calling the Siren Queen a bird, since that's "insulting their whole race."
• Internal Reveal:
  • T.L.D.R. can immediately recognise Pareth's presence in Sofia's storage. He doesn't reveal all the details himself, but he does announce that necromancy is part of Sofia's class, in front of Orvod and a very curious Valeure who had previously thought Sofia was a regular Saint.
  • He later pays Sofia to tell him everything she can about her interactions with the Deep, learning about how she received their blessing and her surname.
  • In a lecture at Beligenus' Academy, Sofia publicly explains her hybrid class, and how she obtained it from getting two classes at once.
• In Vino Veritas: Getting inadvertently tipsy on moonspring water causes Sofia to sass a dragon about her species' lack of humility.
• Invisibility: Invisibility potions exist, with varying costs and effectiveness. A top-grade potion costing 10000 gold can include suppressing sound, mana emissions, and even heat, making the drinker almost completely undetectable. Unfortunately it works so well that it can affect proprioception and cause a degree of sensory deprivation.
• It Only Works Once: During the second filter trial duels, each participant gets to pick one active and one passive skill per duel, and then can't choose those two again for further duels. (Other types of skills, like racial skills, can be reused, but relying on them can hurt participant scores.)
• Kidnapped by the Call: Sofia wakes up to a System message about her new [Saintomancer] class, and realises that she's in an unfamiliar setting, chained to a bed by her right ankle. The church has teleported her away to their headquarters, to make her level up and start working for them.
  Sofia: How did I get here, exactly?
  Priest: You were summoned here by the Magisterium, Saintess.
  Sofia had a very hard time keeping her face from contorting. So they can just summon me here any time they want? Good. Great. Fantastic! God, I want a refund on my life, please.
• Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand: Sofia knows she can't actually keep hold of the dagger of the third Admin if one of the people in front of her chooses to seize it from her. So she openly reveals that she has it and invites them to make their move and rob her if they intend to do that.
  Sofia: I won't lie, I am a bit nervous about one of you three trying to get it back, but I also thought that if you were to want it badly enough, it would be better if you stole it now, rather than coming for my life in secret later. So, any takers? I cannot guarantee that it will be without repercussions, though. I have my own backers.
• Kill Steal: After Sofia launches the biggest [Angel Bolt] she's ever charged, almost blowing herself up along with the target, the angel Acromegon steps in and finishes the job, denying her the XP. However, Sofia probably came out ahead, because the more precise attack resulted in an intact core with useful applications in alchemy, which she would likely have wrecked if she had kept attacking.
• Kill the God: Sofia is given a quest by the Deep, to defeat the god of Scripture. Not only will this put an end to his corruption of the church, it's also necessary for her safety; she has to remain partially disconnected from the System to prevent Scripture from attacking her. And the Orator promises some very nice quest rewards.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: With as many times as Sofia dies, it was bound to happen. Her internal monologue gets as far as "Wait, is the planet slowing me dow-" when she hits the moon at relativistic speeds and makes a new crater full of lava. Bonus points for dying in it a second time before Pareth pulls her free.
• Killer Rabbit: Sofia finds her new sandworm skull, basically a collection of tubes, rather cute as it floats in the air, until it starts spewing out energy beams.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Sofia and Alith both have a habit of collecting random stuff from dungeons just because they can, which gets worse as they obtain storage items with bigger capacities. While exploring The Forgotten Halls of Mezanthil with a group of less experienced adventurers, Sofia cuts sixteen life-sized marble statues free from their pedestals to steal them because she thinks they'd make good decorations, while everyone else stares in disbelief.
• Kraken and Leviathan: There is a single tremendous sea monster, known as the Leviathan, that even immensely ancient and powerful people like Erredis don't bother trying to fight, and just go around. Global shipping is less than it could be because avoiding the Leviathan isn't always worth the bother.
• Last Chance Hit Point: One of the effects of Sofia's passive skill [Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void] prevents a single hit from taking away more than 99% of her maximum health, so if she's at full health, she can survive any attack even if it would normally be more than enough to kill her outright.
  • She uses it to blow up herself and the Incarnation of Victory at the same time with a pair of Angel bolts; it doesn't kill him, but he's far from unscathed, while she's a walking charred corpse.
  • Later, while investigating Sovuln, this allows Sofia to survive a powerful monster destroying her head (which would normally mean instant death) long enough for her party to regrow it with healing magic.
• Laugh Themselves Sick: When Valeure hears T.L.D.R.'s nickname, "Terrible Limping Drunkard Richard," she laughs so hard that she loses control of her flight aura, falls out of the air and rolls on the ground.
• Leaked Experience:
  • Sofia and Pareth can both boost each other. She can improve his abilities (eg increasing the density of his bones) by levelling up her [Holy Skeleton] skill, and his kills grant XP to both him and her, allowing her to level up her class while remaining in safety.
  • To raise new Saints to level 50, the church sends them into a dungeon accompanied by the Magisterium, who will beat high-level zombies to near death, then let the Saint finish them for a share of the XP. Sofia makes use of this as an opportunity to get the Magisterium killed so she can escape, but only after she's reached level 49.
• Level Grinding: Technically, killing monsters with a level lower than your own still gives experience, it's just a tiny amount. Sofia kills over 440000 monsters in one night, most of them at lower levels than herself, and gains 100 levels.
  For your mental health, remember to take breaks.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition:
  • Mixing [Saint] and [Necromancer] keywords produces some bizarrely contrasting skills, like a skeletal minion shining with a halo of holy power, or a pillar of holy light that heals only undead.
  • Sofia's skill [Erredian Rot] takes this even further, turning the light of her holy spells into a vector which spreads a disturbing black film covered in pulsating veins that sucks the mana out of whatever the corruption touches, then decomposes it into ash.
• Light Is Not Good: The God of Scripture has committed some truly despicable things in his quest for power, although the system still considers him a light-related deity, as shown when Sofia uses his essence to complete the fourth step of VPPV's light forging realm.
• Little Bit Beastly: Most of the beastmen in this world look essentially human aside from animal ears, tails, horns, hooves, or maybe unusual pupils. Supposedly, they're descendants of heroes summoned from other worlds where people looked even more animalistic.
• Living Clothes: One of Alith's rewards for clearing the first trial is Doppletopper, a magical talking tube top that can eat other clothes and armor to copy their abilities.
  Alith: So I feed you armor. Only the chestplate. And you become permanently that resilient, and despite being so small you protect my whole body, that's it?
  Dopple: Exactly!
  Alith: What if I'm cold? You don't exactly cover a lot.
  Dopple: Feed me a coat, I'm a very adaptable piece of clothing, yes.
• Living Lie Detector:
  • Valeure, Saintess of Winds, has a skill that lets her know when people tell an outright lie, although it apparently can't distinguish when Sofia uses Exact Words to mislead her.
  • Xeros Drakron, emperor of the Red Winds Empire, can activate an Area of Effect skill that reveals if someone lied… by killing them. It's a bit extreme, but he does give them fair warning.
• Living Structure Monster: The abandoned city of Zangdar appears at first to be a suspiciously clean Mobile Maze, but in fact, many of the "walls" are powerful phageid monsters, difficult to tell apart from walls when stationary.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: To pass floor 97 of the Ranking Spire, challengers merely have to find the right key orb amongst hundreds of others, and insert it into the keyhole. Too bad that touching the wrong orb causes it to turn into an indestructible unstoppable magical arrow that constantly homes in on Sofia's vitals, or dramatically raises the ambient temperature, or starts a rain of large ice chunks.
• Long-Lost Relative: Sofia was separated from her sister Saria when the two of them fled from the collapse of the Sovuln kingdom, and each believed the other to be dead. Upon completing the second filter trial, however, Sofia learns that Saria completed it just months ago, and she sets out to track her sister down. The oracle of Sun isn't able to scry for Saria, but Erredis is able to track down the dragon associated with her. Both sisters break down in tears and hugs when they're finally reunited.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • The unique combination of [Saint] and [Necromancer] opens up opportunities to exploit the System in ways that the original classes couldn't do. For example, Pareth's Hero blessing, the "Blessing of Bloating", makes him stronger as he gets heavier. It's intended for humans and near-humans. Giving it to a skeleton who can be transferred into any set of bones Sofia can acquire (eg a Stone Troll) allows him to gain benefits dramatically larger than usual.
  • The "Sabbath of the Hollow Heart" necromantic ritual has a bunch of specific requirements, one of which is a willing Human Sacrifice who "must not be of a level beneath that of the necromancer". Thanks to this wording, Sofia is able to use a rare single-use Auto-Revive magical item so she can sacrifice herself to herself, then come back to life and switch roles from Human Sacrifice to necromancer and carry out the rest of the ritual without actually having to convince anyone else to participate in her insane plan.
  • The first task of the Ranking Spire is to identify the poisoned item in a room full of food. Sofia just dunks a piece of bread in a poison she was carrying, and announces "This one."
  • The [One With Suffering] skill increases strength and speed proportionally to the amount of health lost in a fight, with the bonus going away when that damage is healed. However, dying and using a [False Immortality] rune to revive with full health doesn't count as healing, so Sofia can push the bonus past 100%.
• Loot Boxes: Filter trials have a variety of rewards for people who go beyond the bare minimum needed to pass. When people earn a miscellaneous bonus reward, or the specific bonus reward they would have received isn't compatible with their class/skills (for example, Alith earned skill level boosts during her first filter trial, but she's technically an undead summon dependent on Sofia for existence, and Alith's weird support class and skills can only level up when Sofia's class levels up, making the skill level boosts unusable for her), they instead receive wooden "gachapon boxes" containing random prizes, with the boxes themselves disappearing once the contents are removed. So far, we've seen draws ranked from F to SS.
  • 'SS' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included a forgotten relic selector ticker (a ticket that can be redeemed for a compass showing the optimal path to a Forgotten grade relic of the user's chosen type).
  • 'A' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included an analysis scroll (a scroll that provides a single use of the [Identify] skill at maximum level with added system commentary) and a miner's flair scroll (a one-time use scroll that will give the precise location of the nearest unexploited natural vein of whatever mineral the user is already holding in their hand). 'A' rank draws from after the second filter trial have included a scroll of assisted inspiration (a one-time use scroll that lets the user write down an issue they're facing and ask the system for inspiration resolving the problem).
  • 'B' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included an illustrated bestiary book about slimes. 'B' rank draws from after the second filter trial have included an illustrated bestiary book about shades.
  • 'C' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included a minor Health pill (+500) and a minor Strength pill (+500). 'C' rank draws from after the second filter trial have included a Health pill (+5000), an Agility pill (+5000), a Speed pill (+5000), a Processing pill (+5000), and a pile of 5000 gold coins.
  • 'D' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included a night vision pill(10min), an underwater breathing pill (10min), a relaxation pill (10min), and a pain relief pill (10min). 'D' rank draws from after the second filter trial have included a jade skin pill(30min), an odor suppressant pill(30min), and a weightlessness pill(30sec).
  • 'E' rank draws from after the first filter trial have included stylish glasses (actually just empty frames without lenses) and warm socks. 'E' rank draws from after the second filter trial have included a fluffy bath towel, a colorful mug, a royal rug, 50 meters of sturdy string rope, a fertile dirt bag, a strong magnet, a wooden flute, a commander jacket, and a plate of sterile sterile fruits. (The glasses actually prove to be good to have, when a clothier recommends having glasses as part of Sofia's look.)
  • We've only seen a single 'F' rank draw so far, when the Loot Box turned out to be empty and the wooden box itself was revealed as the prize.
• Lord British Postulate: As part of the second filter trial, after finding a way to reliably sneak past Sammy the level 333 Lesser Stone Drake, a fiercely territorial monster which guards an important section of a Mobile Maze and is intended to be be far too powerful for anyone at level 199 to fight directly, Sofia nevertheless then spends four months training [Angel's Bolt] so she can kill it. Once she unlocks the Titles subsystem, she's given a unique title called "Cheater" for it. Amusingly, most titles can be created as needed by scribes, but all unique titles had to be created by the now-missing admins thousands of years ago, so they anticipated that someone might pull this off eventually.
  Admin: Seriously; how?! WHY?!!!
• Losing Your Head: It turns out that if you don't need to breathe or bleed, you can cut your own head off and survive. Sofia still uses a False Immortality rune before testing it, just in case — which actually gets in the way, because without the ability to heal, she can't just stick her head back on.
• Loyal Phlebotinum:
  • Soulbound items can only be used by the owner, and if they're lost or stolen, the owner can trace the connection to find them. If the owner dies, the item self destructs. It's possible to enchant an item to be soulbound, but difficult.
  • System items are actively monitored by the System and automatically returned to their owner if lost. When Sofia loses her head and it's healed back, her crown is gone — until it appears again a short time later.

M-O

• Magic Enhancement: Ihuarah is an animist, meaning that his magic allows him to imbue a degree of life into mundane objects, greatly expanding on some natural characteristic that they have. He can take a feather and give himself wings, or throw a grass blade that will strike like a sword.
• Magic Harms Technology: The Orbital Solar Temple cannot function properly in the presence of mana, which puts a time limit on Sofia's visit. Anyone stronger than her would have an even harder time; Sun's oracle would cause the whole station to destabilise and fall into the sun within twenty minutes. Sofia uses her [False Immortality] runes to keep her mana from leaking, and finds a schematic for a magic isolation field to keep her spellcasting from wrecking the place, so that she can keep going long enough to finish clearing out her targets.
• Magic Kiss: At level 80, Alith learns [Maiden’s kiss], an Intimate Healing skill that restores someone else's health proportional to Alith's attraction and affection towards the target. The kiss just needs direct skin contact at first, although at level 200 she unlocks a more effective version that requires a kiss on the lips. She mostly uses it on Sofia. The embarrassment factor, however, prompts her to alter the skill when she has the opportunity.
• Magic Knight:
  • Sofia is primarily a spellcaster, but her unusual access to skills and resources has allowed her to become far more resilient than would normally be expected, with several types of potent damage reduction, magical armour, and [False Immortality]. She also has the skills and stats to be reasonably dangerous in melee, much less than a dedicated warrior but quite effective against moderately weak foes.
  • Pareth takes the opposite approach, with great physical strength and absurd toughness, augmented by a selection of magical skills for shielding, healing, and restraining.
• Magic Skirt: Clothiers past level 300 can create miniskirts with an obscuring enchantment that magically censors the woman's underwear if anyone tries peeking.
• Magic Staff: Sofia's shadow scepter is primarily an Amplifier Artifact, but since it is made of black primus wood and orichalcum, it's quite dense and durable, so with a big enough gap in levels between her and her opponent, it can also be an effective melee weapon. Once primed, it gains the ability to deal electrical damage on melee attacks, although since it also becomes a much better amplifier, she still mostly uses it for spellcasting.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Sofia dies in so many painful ways — crushing, burning, poison, dismemberment, high-speed impact, the works — and revives so many times, that she becomes rather inured to mere injury.
  Sofia: Ripping out an eye certainly wouldn't be the worst thing I've done to my body, not by a long shot, but it does make me a bit uncomfortable, somehow…
• Make an Example of Them: Sofia really doesn't want ambitious students attacking and disrupting her classes, so she wants a strong deterrent. She starts out by stealing all the hand bones of the first three students who tried it, then at Saria's suggestion, she mounts the six hands in a bone archway at her front door — with hundreds of empty slots waiting for more, to send a clear message to future challengers.
• Make Them Rot: Sofia's skill [Erredian Rot] spreads a disturbing black film covered in pulsating veins that sucks the mana out of whatever the corruption touches, then decomposes it into ash. It works on plants, flesh, bones, and even rocks. By using the holy light of [Heal Undead] as a vector, she can inflict it upon anything (or everything) within 200 meters.
• Mana Drain: The [Ringed arms of Zar] can recharge when empty by using [Collapse] to instantly drain all environmental mana from an area. It won't directly suck mana out of living bodies, but losing all the ambient mana will hinder their recovery for a while.
• Martial Pacifist: [The dark orb] is a powerful flying golem with an assortment of skills, but it will not protect a powerful owner, nor one who started or provoked the fight, even indirectly. It's meant to be gifted to someone weaker, such as a family member, to keep them safe and out of the way. Its System description states, 'May those who cannot protect themselves be protected'.
• Mercy Kill:
  • The master of Zangdar, trapped inside his own magical security system, begs for death — but warns that he is dangerous, and indeed, he doesn't go down easily. His last will and testament thank whoever did the deed.
  • Sofia isn't sure what reaction she'll get for killing the Apostle of Dread, but it ends up being thanks for ending his suffering.
• Metronomic Man Mashing: Pareth seizes a shielded mage and repeatedly hammers him into the ground "like a monkey trying to open a hard fruit," until the shield finally cracks and the last two slams are lethal.
• Mind Virus: Scripture has been using soul parasites (which can invisibly spread from person to person via physical contact) to manipulate members of his Corrupt Church. Soul parasites are usually subtle, altering a person's behavior by amplifying or dampening certain emotions so they don't realize anything's wrong. However, if a person disobeys the Oracle's orders, these soul parasites also have a way of destroying an infected person's mind in their sleep, leaving an Empty Shell that retains the original person's skills and can apparently be controlled by Scripture directly. The high-priest Gerold who was originally commanded to massacre Sofia's orphanage refused to do it, so his subordinates were taken over and used to carry out the mission instead, leading Gerold to try to figure out what was really going on, share his findings with Perenia and Jeb, then slit his own throat before Scripture could destroy his mind and take over his body.
• Mobile Maze: The Ranking Spire contains a maze controlled by a giant lizard with stone magic. The walls are able to shift around so quickly and silently that Sofia doesn't notice it happening, boxing her in.
• Morph Weapon: Pareth's [Shapeless weapon of light] can change size and shape depending on what would be best for the situation. He's turned it into a dagger, sword, spear, mace, lance, war hammer, and even a giant pair of shears. As a chicken skeleton, he was able to get around the lack of hands by turning it into chicken claws of holy light.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • During Sofia's visit to Hooasow, when she's level 119, four thugs with levels ranging from 53 to 99 try to rob her. Presumably they figured that a [Saint] without any heroes accompanying her will be an easy mark. However, a [Saintomancer] has far more combat potential, and her summoned hero skeleton was simply kept out of sight when not in use. She later uses their skeletons to experiment with modified versions of her necromancy ritual circle.
  • Cinthia destroys a bone bird in the virtual dungeon she's exploring, and is puzzled both by the presence of an undead, and by the lack of a kill notification from the System. Then Sofia turns up to investigate the loss of her scout…
  • The students of Beligenus' Academy are allowed to attack teachers to steal their bags of competition tokens, and being at a relatively low level, Sofia looks like a soft target. However, not only does she punch well above her weight class, her skills are very well suited to dealing with crowds of weaker opponents, since she can summon hundreds of skeletal minions. She can fly, absorb incoming spells, see through invisibility by sensing mana... and Pareth is always by her side, a One-Man Army in his own right. She doesn't even use her strongest abilities, like angelic lightning.
• Mundane Utility: Sofia's [Angel Bolt] is a ten second Charged Attack so powerful that she can't use it in an enclosed space, for fear of killing herself and/or bringing the whole building down. Every shot burns her armour and then her body with its mere presence, requiring magical healing to recover from the backlash. She can also use it to boil drinking water and grill meat.
• Natural End of Time: The aim of the "Heat Death" Specialization is to allow someone to potentially survive every natural end, with no need for heat, food, air, or anything else outside oneself.
  Where fate ends.
  All will fade, such is destiny. All but you.
• Neck Lift: The Ranking Spire Master picks Sofia up by her neck just to demonstrate how weak she is in comparison to what is possible. She doesn't need to breathe, so she isn't choking, but she dangles helplessly in his grip, unable to get out or even summon Pareth.
• Necromancer:
  • Sofia is fascinated by the idea of commanding armies of skeletons, and wanted to gain the [Necromancer] class as a result. As a [Saintomancer], all of her summoned heroes are undead, which is good, because summoning living heroes has a lot of ethical problems.
  • Most of the world's best spatial storage items were made by the lich known as T.L.D.R., formerly human and now just a skeleton. His friends don't seem to have any problem with his activities. He's able to procure an excellent set of host bones for Pareth, humanoid but large and very heavy, from a Boneplate Mauler.
• The Needless:
  • Despite having a human form, Alith is actually a ghost, so she doesn't need to eat, drink, sleep, or even breathe. She'll still indulge herself when it's convenient, although her innate poison immunity prevents her from getting drunk.
  • Demonic Apostles don't need to eat or drink, and are also The Ageless. Which is how Zerei remained trapped alive underground for over 2000 years. Once freed, though, she's excited to be able to eat again.
  • Sofia gets access to several items and skills that reduce her needs, such as the Saintess items that reduce the need for sleep and halve the speed of ageing. [Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void], once the first realm is fully trained, allows her to see in the dark, breathe light instead of air, and ignore the cold. After her second trial, her [Heat Death] specialization allows her body to entirely self-sustain on its own mana. All of this, in combination with her System-enhanced resilience, allows her to live for months in the void of space. The second realm of VPPV continues the trend, such as stopping her ageing and turning her blood into light, so she no longer bleeds when injured; even after cutting off her hand, the light continues to circulate in the places her veins used to be, and even responds like a hand, going so far as allowing her to channel [Angel's Bolt].
• Negate Your Own Sacrifice: Sofia finds a loophole to make a Human Sacrifice ritual more palatable, by sacrificing herself while wearing an Auto-Revive item. She then has to kill herself a second time — but that was actually a standard part of the ritual, which revives her as an Apostle of Sorrow.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: Saints can summon people from other worlds to become heroes. Upon arrival, three hero's blessings are picked at random; the hero is given the descriptions and gets to choose the one they'll keep. When Sofia summons Pareth and "Bookie", she gets to make the choice of which blessing to take, since they are not fully sapient at the time, while Ihuarah defers the choice to her. Alith, though, makes her own choice, at Sofia's insistence.
• Next Tier Power-Up: The filter trials can give very substantial rewards, escalating with each filter, so there is a dramatic difference in strength between eg level 299 vs level 300, and an even greater difference between level 349 vs level 350. As a result, individual power is usually compared, not using exact levels, but by the filter they're in. From her level 200 trial, Sofia gains enough bonus points to more than triple her total stats; she had approximately 109000 combined health/stamina/mana, and is granted an extra 240000 points to allocate.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: All dragon scales are very tough, but Thrayk's in particular is practically indestructible. Erredis predicts that even the System can't break it. Shaping one requires months of work with special techniques designed specifically for such an obdurate material. How did she kill him and obtain it? "We have no scales on the inside, sweetie."
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Sofia is part Saint, part Necromancer, partly converted into a demonic apostle after she performed the ritual inside her trial, can absorb light like a plant, and has been moved to the draconic area of the System. She's also a baroness with a black belt, armed with the signature weapon of an angel.
• Noodle Incident: When Sofia asks why Zerei knows a ritual for Disposing of a Body, Zerei blithely answers, "Don’t ask, no. Long gone anyway."
• No Party Like a Donner Party:
  • After Sofia and Alith find themselves trapped in the lost city of Zangdar for months with dwindling supplies, Sofia resorts to eating Alith's flesh to stay alive. In a subversion, Sofia's healing magic lets her safely regrow Alith's leg every time it's cut off, so it's much less of a moral dilemma than usual, and Sofia finds it more disturbing than Alith does.
  • Sofia is disturbed by the remains of the elves on the Orbital Solar Temple, one of whose bodies shows clear signs of being eaten after they were trapped together. (Not that it helped; they all died anyway. But at least it resulted in an intact skeleton for Sofia to use.)
• "No Peeking!" Request: Sofia doesn't actually think to ask for privacy before getting incinerated by a dragon's breath, which she revives from but her clothes do not. However, when she comes to, Pareth is standing in front of her with a large opaque shield. Also, Erredis isn't far away and would be put out if Sofia were mistreated.
  Sofia: Thanks for not looking.
  Phil: You think I had a choice? Look in that direction.
• Not So Invincible After All: When Sofia suggests killing the Unstoppable Dimmerion, Ihuarah gently chides her that the name was chosen for a reason. Her response? "Have you ever heard of the Erredian Rot?" The Rot actually isn't enough all by itself, but it does weaken the Dimmerion, after which she brings the plant near death with an Angel Bolt so large that the original angel turns up and warns her to be careful where she aims that thing, before finishing the Dimmerion off.
• Not the Intended Use: The [Graveyard of the Righteous] sprouts skeletal arms that can seize Sofia's enemies and drag them underground. She eventually realises that the arms are not just pulling the target down, they're actually using a form of intangibility — meaning that she can have them drag her through any solid surface, up to the limit of the spell's range (a single cast lets her travel 150 meters per 100 skill levels). She still occasionally uses it in combat, but she primarily keeps it for the ability to travel long distances through the ground.
• Now You Tell Me: The system description of the key ring to reach Zangdar is updated to show that it has limited uses, after they have run out.
• Of Corsets Sexy: Sofia wears a fancy dress with a corset, intended for occasions like tea parties, for a formal duel, to deliberately disrespect her opponent. She finds it suffocating but does like how it makes her look.
• Older Than They Look:
  • People in this setting age slower as they level up. Most human villagers never reach a high enough level for it to make a difference, but it happens with too many recurring characters to list. A notable example is Kuli, master of Drakron's adventurer's guild, who looks like she might be in her early teens but has actually been stuck like that for centuries.
  • Alith is a non-magical example at first. Although she's 22 when she's summoned from Earth, her growth was apparently stunted from malnutrition, so she's only two-thirds Sofia's height and is easily mistaken as a child when they're together despite being the older of the two.
• One-Hit Kill: The [Holy Smite] skill draws on the light of the gods. When used by Sofia's skeletal templars, it opens a portal to Death's domain, inflicting Instant Death on anyone in the affected area, and rapidly causing heavy damage to anyone immune to that status.
• One-Man Army: Pareth actually takes on an army, of over 90000 people, during the Ranking Spire. He goes through them like a scythe through grain.
• One Size Fits All: Sofia is a little surprised that the Clothier needs to measure her feet to supply shoes. He tells her that it's possible for shoes to magically resize themselves, but it would cost extra.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Sofia performs a Human Sacrifice ritual with herself as the victim, inside a filter trial, and turns into an Apostle of Sorrow, granting her a demonic form with immense strength and toughness, and potent magical abilities. Outside the trial, Sorrow decides that she has shown promise, despite not performing the ritual for real, and grants her ongoing access to the form, but only when she has no mana, plus she incurs an XP debt when she uses it, so it's a backup form for serious fights.
  • The Incarnation of Victory can turn from an orc into an impossibly thin humanoid figure covered in eyes, which can infest opponents with a touch. However, it must constantly draw in mana to sustain itself.
  • Saria can turn into a dragon, strengthening her and allowing her to manipulate mana around her without spending her own.
• Only the Worthy May Pass: Upon reaching certain level thresholds (99, 199, 249, 299), no more experience is granted, and progression stops, until the person goes through a "trial." They are usually not fatal, but are designed to push you to your limit — and you only get one attempt at each trial, ever, so if you fail, you can never level up again. However, they offer special rewards for exceptional performance, so the gap in strength between level 99 and 100, or between 249 and 250, can be quite large. Sofia later discovers that with sufficient time and expertise, it is possible to manually and painstakingly alter and improve one's body in the same way that the System would have; Orvod is locked at level 299, but that was enough to become The Ageless, and in the centuries since, he has managed to give himself strength that the System ranks at equivalent to level 412.
  [Congratulations, you have reached the second filter. The great path lies ahead.]
• "Open!" Says Me: Sofia finds a vending machine that wants gold coins, and is too sophisticated to accept bone substitutes. So she punches it, shattering the glass front, and takes whatever she wants.
• Orchestral Bombing: As part of Sofia's big entrance to Saria's boss battle, she has a skeletal choir sing for her, and times her steps with them.
• Organ Dodge:
  • As Sofia advances the [Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void] skill, it progressively changes her body — especially in the Light Forging Realm. Eventually her blood, nerves, and brain are all turned into light, so stabbing her in the head just leaves a glowing hole without substantially harming her.
    Saria: Not dead?
    Sofia: No. I'd appreciate it if you could pull the blade out, though.
  • During the third trial, Sofia finds traces of the [Relocate Core] skill, which allows a mana heart to move around its host body to avoid being hit.
• Our Banshees Are Louder: Sofia's mixed-up skills grant her access to a Maiden Banshee as her second "hero", combining aspects of a wailing ghost and a lady-in-waiting. In this case, the ghost of a young woman who was burnt at the stake on Earth (France, specifically) for witchcraft, as a result of knowing too much about herbal medicine. Her [Human form] skill lets her change between an incorporeal ghost and a flesh-and-blood human who looks and feels alive despite technically being undead. She can indeed use a Super-Scream, although it hurts her too if she uses it in human form, but she also has skills like [Accounting] and [Menial chores].
• Our Sirens Are Different: Sirens are sea monsters that hunt in packs, and when they find a ship, they work together to use strong hypnotizing chants to take control of the crew one by one, forcing them to jump overboard so the sirens can tear them apart in a feeding frenzy. Although the protagonists never got to see regular sirens, they did fight a siren queen, a huge four-winged flying half-fish half-bird monster with strong elemental attack magic.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires in this setting are a distinct living race like elves or dwarves, rather than a type of undead, and although they need to drink blood regularly, they mostly eat normal food. Vampires are born as babies, and vampirism is passed down from the mother, so a vampire mother and non-vampire father would produce a vampire baby, whereas a vampire father and non-vampire mother would produce a non-vampire baby. Unlike humans that are born at level 1, most vampires are born at (or slightly above) level 100, letting them skip the first trial, although races with naturally high levels also have low fertility and difficult childbirth as a drawback. All vampires have a racial skill called [Blood Curse] that makes them crave non-vampire blood, which acts like a drug that strengthens them but can intoxicate or even kill them if they drink too much, although not drinking any will eventually turn them into mindless monsters. There are different versions of the [Blood Curse], as well. Agran has the ice variation, which makes his skin pale and cold to the touch, as well as granting him resistance to ice and cold but increased vulnerability to fire and heat. Astelia seems to be the opposite, as her skin is tanned and unusually warm to the touch, and her shed blood bursts into flames.

P-S

• Pain & Gain: The [One With Suffering] skill increases strength and speed as health is lost, but healing reduces the bonus again. By using [False Immortality] runes, Sofia is able to push it much further than usual, up to a 399% buff, because reviving with a rune doesn't count as healing.
• Papa Wolf: The Recessed take a somewhat parental interest in Cinthia, and the Recessed of anger in particular chooses "Daddy Hatred" as his handle. When Cinthia is disrespected by an arrogant student, "Daddy Hatred" hires Sofia to humiliate the offender, by giving her a System quest with a very angry description and a valuable reward. Sofia is rather fond of Cinthia too, and gladly accepts the quest, then proceeds to flatten the offender, making it look effortless, and steal his neck bones.
• Paralysis by Analysis: When Sofia gets an assortment of excellent skill keywords like "[Divine ", "[Runic ", and " dominion]", she's so excited yet overwhelmed that she just stands and argues with herself about the best combinations, until the sun goes down and she has to sleep on it.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The church provides a setup where new [Saint]s can pull a lever to dispense a [Composter Slime] into a contained area, then stab it to death with a wooden pole, over and over. Sofia reaches level 20 in a single day this way, although since the slimes are all at random low levels, she wouldn't be able to go much further.
  Sofia: I understand how all the noble kids are at such a high level now.
• Perception Filter: Empress Delivia is skilled at causing an audience to see something quite different from what she's actually doing. Sofia has multiple intimidating conversations with her that no-one else is aware of.
• Perfect Poison: In the course of training VPPV, Sofia tries some ridiculously potent substances, though only a few of them actually manage to kill her through all her resistances. Kleptra Saliva causes her body to slowly and painfully eat itself from the inside out, and an unnamed alchemical solution simply dissolves her entire upper body.
• Person of Mass Destruction: At high levels, individuals become capable of wiping out cities. One of the functions of the angels and archangels who serve the System is to keep such people in line.
  Acromegon: I came to issue a warning. Refrain from using such power in an inhabited area, or the System might send me to put you down. Rarely does someone receive this warning so early, consider it an honor.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Aphenoreth has always been helpful to Sofia, but he's also an Eldritch Abomination who not only doesn't speak, but silences everything in his presence, distorts the System, first appeared standing over her bed, and is best known for erasing those who speak his name without permission. He and his sort-of-daughter Sofia have a nice moment watching the sun together, though, and he leaves her a picture of the two of them afterward.
  • Aphenoreth also saves Evranarheimlein, a.k.a Zerei's life, resolving Curse's millennia-long disappointment, when he turns up to fix causality in Chapter 152.
  • Ormoncleth filled the Solar Orbital Temple with horrifying monsters that consume and infest anything they touch, forcing even a goddess to abandon the temple. Also, one of them kills Sofia's pet skeleton dog. Once she has completed her quest to clear the temple, however, Ormoncleth gives her a bonus reward in the form of a small indestructible bell containing the dog's memories.
• Plot-Triggering Book: Sofia's life would have gone in a very different direction if she had never found a necromancy grimoire under the floorboards of her orphanage's library.
• Poke in the Third Eye: After Sofia learns that her long-lost sister miraculously survived the monster tide, she finds a high-level diviner capable of locating people using residual traces of their mana signature left behind in hairs pulled from an old brush. The diviner is able to locate the target's general vicinity, but while attempting to pinpoint their location more precisely, the diviner's spell goes out of control, backlashing violently, because the target (or someone close to them) does not like being spied upon.
• Porn Stash: Sofia investigates the house of a centuries-old enemy and is perturbed to find a room full of nude paintings he's made, mostly of various elves, but also some of the Sun goddess and even an incomplete painting of Sofia herself. She proceeds to shred most of them, but keeps her own and one of Sun's, because she's not confident that shredding is enough, and spares a family painting that actually includes clothes.
  That'll teach you to paint people without permission, you freak.
• Power Fist: The arm covering made from Thrayk's scales doesn't make its wearer any stronger, but it is about as close to indestructible as armour can be. Erredis' assessment is "Fit to punch a god."
• Power Glows:
  • The majority of Sofia's skills emit some degree of holy light. For most of them, this is largely cosmetic — until she acquires the [Breath of the Outcast] skill, which allows any source of holy light to spread the Erredian Rot.
  • After unlocking the Light Forging Realm of the Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void, Sofia is startled to see thousands of veins of light under her skin.
    My hair is probably the only part of my body I wouldn't mind seeing glow and it's one of the only unaffected parts!
• Power Parasite: If Zerei can trap an enemy in a ritual circle, she can activate her ultimate skill, the [Curse of the unborn soul], which erases the target's soul and grants her one of their skills, including any skill levels.
• Poverty Food: Shortly after her arrival at the church, with assurances that her treatment will get better or worse depending on how cooperative she is, Sofia is presented with a small loaf of hard bread, water, and a plain white robe. Even as an orphan, she isn't impressed.
  We ate better in the streets…
• Power is Sexy: After Sofia kills over 440000 Ebb-infested monsters in one night, Nicet hesitantly informs her that he has a cousin who is looking for a bride.
  Nicet: Oh, you don’t have to pay it any mind, but he would be interested I’m sure, and he would probably kill me if he knew of today’s event and that I didn’t… So, yeah.
• Precision F-Strike: Zerei is generally cheerful, friendly, and very polite, but she bursts into astounded profanity when she sees Pareth's stats as an Alpha Stone Troll with the [Sacred Ground] Status Buff.
• Price on Their Head: After Sofia visits her old orphanage in Verenha and gets ambushed by paladins and templars, she learns that the Skyreach church put a bounty on her head that started at 500 gold and then jumped to 50,000 gold, presumably after Sofia started murdering other paladins and templars. Soon after, Sofia finds herself being targeted by a team of bounty hunters whose highest-level member is a seer capable of using divination to track Sofia.
• Pulling Themselves Together: Astelia's [Greater regeneration] lets her do this as long as she still has health left. Whether she's been cut in half at the waist or even decapitated, she can make her parts snap back together like a magnet, rapidly heal most of the damage, and counterattack before many enemies would realize the fight isn't over yet.
• Quality vs. Quantity: At level 67 with just one skeleton, Sofia internally laments that a proper necromancer would have dozens by now. Until she discovers that her one skeleton can receive a hero blessing that lets him grow far stronger than a skeleton ought to be. In fact, his skeletal nature lets him grow beyond even a normal hero, eg he can be transferred into stronger bones from other species. Instead of an army, Pareth proves to be a One-Man Army.
• The Quest: The goddess of the sun is (in)famous for offering quests that are so difficult you really ought to turn them down, but with rewards so good you have to take them up anyway. Sofia accepts a quest to cleanse a temple in deep space, full of creatures from another plane of existence that infest whatever they touch and are almost unkillable by any magic at her command, and capable of permanently killing her mist skeletons. But Sun was offering five divine essences...
• Randomized Damage Attack: [Saintess' Madness] lets Sofia infuse mana into a skeleton and then throw it, exploding on impact with a random damage element. Her initial reaction is that it's not entirely useless, but being unpredictable is a significant limitation. Once it advances to level 2, she gains the ability to channel a specific element in advance, greatly improving its usefulness so long as she has prep time.
• Random Loot Exchanger: When given a Specialisation, Sofia can either accept it, or pay one level to roll a new random Specialisation. She ends up ten levels in debt before finding something she's happy with for Pareth, and over a hundred when replacing Sanctity.
• Rare Candy: One of the more valuable system rewards available from a gachapon box (see Loot Boxes above) is a stat pill. Consuming a stat pill permanently increases one of a person's stats (starting with +500 for minor stat pills), although the pills are soulbound, meaning they can't be used by anyone except the person who drew them from a gachapon box, which requires considerable effort and luck, given how few opportunities there are just to obtain a gachapon box.
  • Alith's unique [Lady-in-waiting] class gives her a weird skill called [Refined palate] that lets her identify all of the individual ingredients of whatever she's eaten, including stat pills. Entering into a collaboration with a wealthy alchemist, they try different ways of combining together the ingredients of the stat pills Alith has obtained until they figure out recipes that will allow them to reproduce the effects of the stat pills. This new form is known as stat candy, and although they stop working for someone after they've eaten ten of the same kind, they aren't soulbound like stat pills are, making it possible to manufacture and sell them on a large scale. It's not clear what kind of effect these mass-produced stat candies could have on society, considering Sofia nearly doubled the health she had at level 199 with just ten of the Minor Health Candy, but as a trial run, the alchemist Alith collaborated with agreed to start out by just auctioning a few of them to the nobles each year. The first year's auction alone yielded a profit of 80,000 gold, and by the time Alith got her cut, she had already passed the second filter trial and gotten her hands on several stat pills that had ten times the potency of the minor pills.
  • Alith later develops an even more potent variant, adding 5000 stats per pill, but with a combined limit of approximately ten pills total, instead of ten per stat. Going beyond that limit could actually reduce your stats, or even poison you. Saria manages twenty six of them before she starts to bleed from her eyes and ears, which astounds Alith.
    Alith: When you start vomiting blood is usually a good sign it's time to stop.
• Reclaimed by Nature: This tends to happen with ruins left abandoned for decades or centuries (like the old capital city where Sofia started and finished her first trial), but special mention goes to "the green", an area north of Couvauz between the mountain range and the desert, where plants have been magically growing out of control for the last twenty years, to such an extent that people living in its path found it easier to relocate than try to stop the spread. Ihuarah reveals that it's the work of an Unstoppable Dimmerion plant, which grows and heals so fast that hardly anyone in the world is strong enough to kill it, but Sofia proceeds to attack the core with an [Angel's Bolt] so overcharged and destructive that the original angel turns up with a warning never to use such a spell in an inhabited area.
• Reincarnate in Another World: This is basically what has happened to Alith, although she's not 100% incarnated, as she's still considered undead (specifically, a ghost), she just has a [Human form] skill that lets her manifest a physical body. She otherwise plays it straight, having been burnt as a witch in France, then awakening to a new life in Sofia's world.
• Remembered I Could Fly: Sofia has so many ridiculous skills and items that it takes hours for her to remember the Ringed Arms of Zar, which can instantly absorb all nearby mana outside a living being, wrecking the spatial barrier she was trapped in.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: Sofia's demonic apostle form is nerfed once she's out of the trial, only being usable once she's at zero mana, and preventing her from recovering more until it's expired — so she's still strong, tough, and fast, but loses access to her powerful apostle skills. However, the [Heat Death] specialisation allows her to bypass this limitation and recover mana from the deaths of creatures around her. Furthermore, as soon as her mana isn't zero, it starts regenerating normally.
• Required Secondary Powers: The [Ringed Arms of Zar] enhances the wearer's offensive and destructive magic, with the System description "May you bring all things to their destined end." To fuel that, it can absorb all the mana from its surroundings, except mana inside living things, in a single [Collapse]. Sofia ultimately finds [Collapse] to be the most useful feature, since it can wreck active and ongoing spells with minimal side effects.
• Ret-Gone:
  • Speaking or writing the name of Aphenoreth the Inquisitor, one of the Lords of the Deep, can result in this. An adventurer who had been exploring ruins mentioned this name to Astelia, just as part of reading an item's description, and he disappeared, along with anyone's recollection of who the guy had been.
    Astelia: He vanished. I blinked and he wasn't there anymore. Our anti-teleportation barrier didn't pick up anything. What's worse is I can't even remember his face or who he was anymore. It disappeared from my memory and everybody else's. All I can remember is his voice.
  • Sofia's own memory is censored after Chapter 152 when she rescues Evranarheimlein, a.k.a Zerei, [Daughter of Curse], with Aphenoreth's intervention. Any time Sofia tries to think of Zerei's class, her mind goes blank after "Daughter of", and the class line in Zerei's status has been garbled to "Daughter of ̶̜̬̼̲̠͑̍̔̅ ̵̭̦̈́̋̔͒͠ ̷̘̠̲́͑ ̷̯͌̄͒ ̷̘̠̲́͑ ̶̨̓̓̈͊ ". As seen in Chapter 153, Sofia can still think of the word "curses", but thinking of the Recessed known as Curse is impossible. She suspects that he/it was erased by Aphenoreth.
• Right Behind Me: Upon seeing how far [Angel's Bolt] can scale up, Sofia remarks on how scary angels are — and then hears a voice from behind her.
  "I will reluctantly accept these words of praise."
• Rousing Speech: Sofia rallies the citizens of Yurnia to go on the offensive and drive the invaders out, while she targets any leaders or elites. She feels horribly embarrassed afterward by her attempt at public speaking, though.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Pareth received some essence from Knowledge as part of his creation, resulting in him being an Instant Expert with any weapon. However, it apparently has the side effect that he cannot speak beyond nodding or shaking his head and pointing.
• Save Scumming: Erredis can cause short term memory loss, erasing the last few seconds of someone's memory and allowing her to retry a conversation until she gets an outcome that satisfies her.
• Searching for the Lost Relative: When Sofia learns that her sister Saria is alive, she faints, then puts all her efforts into tracking Saria down. It turns out that Saria had been looking for her, too, but something was blocking divinations from finding Sofia.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes:
  • Pareth's specialization into an Eclipse Skeleton linked his and Sofia's souls together. Among other things, this allows Sofia to see and hear using Pareth’s senses whenever she wants to.
  • At Brighthall Academy, Sofia meets a more traditional necromancer, who teaches her a transmission spell she can use to see, hear, and talk through other skeletons or even just disembodied skulls after carving a particular rune into them. The necromancer had used this spell to create the fantasy equivalent of a smart doorbell.
• Semantic Superpower: Instead of gaining access to the normal skill list, Sofia gets pieces of skills, half from the Saint class and half from Necromancer, such as "[Blessing of ", "[Dispel ", and " bolt]". She can then fit the pieces together however she wants, and the System will do its best to fill in the gaps and provide a skill matching the name, sometimes delegating to a [Scribe] to invent something. This can produce unreasonably powerful results, such as [Angel's Bolt], which is copied from an actual archangel's primary attack, or [Divine Shadow body], which is converted to [Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void] and grants her access to a whole new enhancement system for her body and mind, full of potent immunities and resistances.
• Set Bonus: There are seven items of jewelry that only a [Saint] can use, each with their own benefits, but giving extra effects when multiples are combined. Sofia is given the [Saint's pride] headband as soon as she reaches level 20, which slows ageing, and later obtains the [Saint's indolence] bracelet, which reduces her need for sleep; together, they grant a Healing Factor while sitting down. Adding the [Saint's touch] sash, which defends against physical projectiles, causes the set to grant additional mana regeneration (although it doesn't do much more than cover the mana costs of wearing the pieces). Sadly, as Valeure informs Sofia, although the entire set is purported to be quite powerful, it's not possible to assemble it all, because two pieces are missing and another of the pieces belongs to a dragon. The dragon in question turns out to be Erredis, who takes a liking to Sofia after learning that the System has given her a skill that mimics Erredis' own Breath Weapon, and she willingly hands the anklet over in exchange for learning the details of how Sofia came to be in her home.
• Shout-Out:
  • While traveling through Sovuln, Nicet senses the presence of an Ebb-infested windmill, and insists that Sofia should kill it before continuing their journey.
    Nicet: Their level can be anywhere between 100 and 249, they are a pain to get rid of without the right skills, but with someone who can throw lightning, we might as well get the free experience as well as making this area safer.
  • Sofia kills some time by sculpting statues out of bone under the moonlight, speculating on what they might sell for, and even wonders whether Sculptor is a class.
    I wonder how they'd fight. It's not like you can sculpt your enemies mid battle, that's just called being a swordsman…
• Sinister Scythe: Once Alith has the chance to shop for some proper weapons, she settles on a pair of mithril-coated sickles. After her first trial sees her trained as a ninja, the System starts referring to them as kamas. Since she's a herbalist and alchemist, they're useful for her work as well as combat.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: The Exidian Emperor visits Beligenus' academy and throws the teachers in the deep end, announcing a year long contest for the students to win tokens for a grand prize, and the teachers each have a pouch full of tokens that they have to carry around and protect at all times, from students trying to take them "by any means necessary". The experienced teachers immediately teleport away. The others have to deal with a mob of students firing spells at them. And that's only the start.
• Spell Book: Sofia's original ambition was sparked by a tome about necromancy that she found under the floorboards in her orphanage, with descriptions of spells and rituals and how to obtain the class. Turns out it was planted by the god of Scripture as an experiment, but the contents were genuine.
• Spirited Competitor: Mornn emerges from an intense duel, where she lost both arms and then her head, shouting her excitement about what a great fight it was.
  Mornn: Woooooooooh! Yeaaaah shorty! That's what I've been waiting for! That's what it's all about!
• Spit Take: Sofia nearly chokes on her water when she hears that a storage item large enough for a few books would normally cost over a thousand gold.
• Splash Damage: Sofia is nearly killed by the shockwave, and both her eardrums are blown out, just for being in the same room as Leverle punching one of Hugo's golems.
• Stat Overflow: Sieva extract potions will heal 5000HP, which is more than Sofia's maximum health the first time she tries one. For a few seconds, her health is 5018/335, but then it quickly settles back down to her maximum.
• Statuesque Stunner: At 6'5" (196 cm), Sofia isn't just tall for a woman, she's in the 90th percentile for humans in general, and it's well-established that she's considered quite attractive In-Universe.
• Status Effect:
  • Sofia combines the keywords "[Greater holy ", " miasma]", and " with suffering]" to create a skill she can't read, as it's labelled in draconic, but the description says that it allows any holy light she produces to spread The Erredian Rot. The description doesn't explain exactly what that condition will do, though.
  • The direct damage from [Saintess' Madness] is nothing special, but it also inflicts a status condition on the target. By prepping the right element ahead of time, Sofia can produce some nasty effects, such as inflicting Mana Burn right before a monster casts a powerful spell, which results in it suffering massive backlash.
• Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: The System gives people skills related to their class as they level up, allowing them to cast magic in a very defined way by fulfilling the activation conditions, which is much easier than learning the magic from scratch. However, after using the skills over and over, people can learn how to use the magic without relying on the skill, and through trial and error, can figure out how the magic works well enough that they can alter what it does. Sofia discovers this ability in her first filter trial, where her skills are locked and unavailable, but she is so familiar with [Identify] that she still manages to use it.
• Summon Bigger Fish: What can you do when you're in the power of a hostile deity? Summon a Lord of the Deep, of course! It works for Sofia, who doesn't suffer the usual penalties for calling on the Deep; they not only break the time loop that Curse trapped her in, they erase him.
• Summon Everyman Hero: Saints can summon random people from other worlds to receive hero blessings and fight for the kingdom. This is heavily deconstructed, however; the summoning process is agonisingly painful for the hero, it can strike at an unbelievably bad time (such as a woman being snatched away just before she could prepare dinner for her young son, or a man getting summoned while he was driving a now out-of-control truck), it gives the hero a [Slave] class so they have no choice but to obey, there's no way of returning to their original world, and heroes often end up fighting other heroes summoned by other kingdoms rather than an army of Always Chaotic Evil demons. All in all, it's a pretty awful deal for the heroes. Their blessings are so potent, however, and make them so important to the international balance of power, that some kingdoms, like Skyreach, will immediately kidnap a newly chosen [Saint] to be used for constant summoning and healing until they die.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: When choosing a Specialization, you can either take the path offered, or take on a level debt to unlock another path — as many times as you want. Even when Sofia starts to get Sanctity specializations that she actually likes, she has such a big debt already that she feels it's necessary to keep going until she gets something really great. And then when she finds something great, she feels like she can afford to continue because it's unlocked and she's can always go back to it… she eventually takes one because she realizes that she could keep going forever otherwise, and she's over a hundred levels in debt. It's a powerful path, at least.
  So what if she lost a few more levels, she thought. The next one could be much better yet!
• Super-Persistent Predator: The first Sunless Amalgam that Sofia meets turns out to be capable of sensing her location, phasing through the ground faster than her skeletons can carry her, leaping high into the air (and without ambient mana she can't fly), chasing almost as fast as her enhanced running speed, launching parts of itself as highly damaging magical projectiles, and it's extremely hard to hurt. Note that that includes her 2000% running speed bonus from the [DODGE ME] skill, and she's still only slightly faster than the blob. She's kilometres away from her starting point by the time the Rot finally erodes it too far to continue.
• Super-Scream:
  • Alith can use [Maiden's Shriek] to debilitate or even instantly kill those who hear it, depending on how resistant they are. It's meant to be used in ghost form, although she can use it in human form as well, with the caveat that it ruins her own throat, causing her to vomit blood afterward.
  • Upon coming close to losing a fight, the Incarnation of Victory shouts his defiance with enough force to physically hurl people away.
  • The [Skull Choir]'s default attack type is sonic, which is to say, a skull shouts and the target is hit with intense vibrations, enough to explode trees in a cloud of shrapnel.
• Survival Mantra: Sofia's traumatic childhood resulted in her developing one of these to keep herself going forward, no matter what: "Do what needs to be done." She relies on it less as a young adult, but during the first trial, she finds herself repeating it right before dying for the first time.
• Swap Teleportation: Sofia's first Specialization lets her swap places with Pareth. She later gains a similar ability with Ihuarah. Technically it requires consent, but with her heroes that's pretty much automatic.
• Sword Beam: Sofia is taken by surprise when the Sunless Warrior's sword swings start launching arcs of light that can punch through shields and armour. Fortunately, after passing through multiple layers like that, the attack doesn't actually inflict very much damage. Once she wins the fight and clears the dungeon, the spoils include a mana heart imprint that grants the [Arclight] skill.

T-Z

• Taken for Granite: There are curses capable of turning flesh to stone. One of the three ritual schematics Valeure offered to teach Sofia had this effect, although Sofia instead chose one that created a zone of faster mana regeneration. Later, while exploring the Buried Cathedral, Sofia got too close to a curse trap and her foot started turning to stone. She had to amputate her leg to keep it from spreading, although regrowing a lost limb was easy enough for her by then.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Before giving any help to a [Saint], Kuli insists on having them experience severe pain, since that is what happens to a summoned hero. She doesn't realise that Sofia's undead summoning has no such effects, or that Sofia's mental resistance means that she won't have the mercy of blacking out from the pain.
• Teleport Interdiction: As soon as she learns that the Magisterium can summon her back to the church, Sofia starts looking for countermeasures. Her initial approach is to just kill the Magisterium, but she eventually purchases a bracelet that hijacks the soul pathway used by the teleport, to immediately transfer her back to where she was. It costs her the amount of mana used in the teleport, but it costs the other party the same, and Sofia has extremely large mana reserves, so it's an effective defence against most hostile teleportation. As a bonus, she can quickly deploy Pareth before she's pulled back, leaving him to give whoever summoned her a bad day.
• Tempting Fate: Sofia isn't overly worried about Sun's quest, because after fighting the Incarnation of Victory, "How much worse can it be?"^note Sun's quests are infamous for being so hard that you should turn them down, but dangling rewards so lucrative that you can't resist.
  Bad things never happened when Sofia was very optimistic about her situation.
• Terraform: Cerberus Beta was a frozen lifeless world until the admins altered it to become suitable for the third filter trial. Its ecology is still unusual, with mana being scrambled around the planet and ambient mana disappearing at night to form "sunless" blobs while other species are locked in cocoons until the morning, but it has plants and animals and atmosphere.
• Theme Naming: In Chapter 152, Sofia tries brute force guessing a Lord of the Deep's name:
  Names of the deep.
  Ormoncleth and Aphenoreth. There were two more.
  As far as she could tell, they were both ten characters and ended in ‘eth’.
  There couldn’t be too many different combinations of syllables one could make under these constraints. Either way, she had nothing else to do.
  “Boravereth”
  “Boraveseth”
  “Boraveteth”
  “Boraveueth”
• There Was a Door: It really wasn't necessary to punch her way out of Joah's dream world, but Saria was in a hurry to see her long lost sister whom she had thought was dead. She causes quite a lot of equipment damage, breaking out of her own tank, and into Sofia's, leaving glass and stasis fluid everywhere.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: The Lords of the Deep prefer that information about them is not spread around too widely. Powerful individuals are aware of them, and usually scared of them, but speaking their names will usually result in them eliminating the offender, sometimes including all traces that the speaker ever existed. Zhǎng Lú’ has a collection of midenicite tablets that explains the different planes of existence, including the Deep, albeit rather cryptically; when Sofia views them, she is unharmed because she has the Deep's blessing, but Aphenoreth still takes the relevant tablet away.
• These Hands Have Killed: Lampshaded and subverted after Sofia's first murder; she is aware that people often angst about it, but she's mostly just relieved that the job is done and she's free.
  She held her bloody hands above her face. The hands of a killer.
  "I should feel bad, I think, maybe."
• Thicker Than Water: Erredis is quite put out to hear that a dragon might have rescued one family member but ignored another. Dragons have great difficulty reproducing, so they place great value on family.
• This Page Will Self-Destruct: Sofia's scribe sends her a message about how she should act during the next trial to complete the Light Forging Realm of VPPV, ending with "These instructions will disappear in twenty seconds, commit them to memory now." After the twenty seconds are up, the instructions turn into nonsense.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: After reflecting on the best course of action, Sofia makes a dramatic formal challenge to her sister Saria. Not out of any enmity, but because she knows Saria will want a good fight.
  Sofia: I am Vakariazrehafin, Apostle of Sorrow. Ranked first in the spire. Dragon mask, I have come to challenge you. I shall be your demise!
• Too Awesome to Use: Discussed but ultimately subverted when one of Alith's rewards for clearing the first trial is a single-use scroll that lets her use the [Identify] skill at maximum level with added system commentary, and Alith wonders if she'll keep putting off using it forever in case they later encounter a better target to use it on. She eventually decides that it's worth using on the mark of Aphenoreth, which has been added to her status.
• Torso with a View: Sofia retaliates against a student's ambush on her classroom by sending a piercing bolt that leaves a fist sized hole through his abdomen. (And then one of her skeletal crows flies into the hole and the student collapses.) She heals him once he's pinned down.
• Tournament Arc: The second filter trial includes a round robin set of duels to determine placement for the final stage — but they're only ten seconds each, or less if there's a clear winner.
• Training from Hell: The Venerable Physique of the Primeval Void has some extraordinarily painful and dangerous training requirements. If it weren't for the fact that Sofia can afford to die repeatedly, it would also be remarkably tedious into the bargain.
  Successful attempts should feel like being stabbed in the heart and will convert around one drop of blood to light.
  Repeat until no blood is left.^note There are over 126 thousand drops to convert.
• Trapped in Another World: Summoned heroes have no way of ever returning to their original world.
• Treasure Chest Cavity: The nine gems of the second filter trial are stored inside the Incarnation of Victory's chest. He literally punches a hole in himself, then digs around inside, to retrieve them upon Sofia's victory. Being the avatar of a god, he heals quickly afterward.
• Treasure Room: Played with in Zangdar. After mercy-killing the master of Zangdar and inheriting his castle, Sofia goes exploring and is disappointed that the castle lacks a Treasure Room… unless you count the jeweled ring she pulled from the late master's dead hand, which turned out to be a password-protected storage item leading to a Pocket Dimension about five meters tall and fifteen meters long and wide, containing priceless magical artifacts, a fortune in precious metals, and some treasures of mostly sentimental value. Sofia realizes it makes sense to keep all of your valuables with you in a portable password-protected Treasure Room if you're rich enough to afford one and powerful enough to protect it.
• Troll: Having beaten the dungeon boss and with just a few seconds left on her Apostle transformation, Sofia takes the opportunity to dig through the bone bunker where she stashed her students, and even has Pareth, who's guarding them, act as if there's a genuine threat. Moments after breaking through, covered in eyes and teeth, she transforms back and laughs as the students swear at her.
• Turns Red: The [Enrage Timer] skill can be activated after being reduced to 10% health, greatly increasing stats and making the user glow red. Justified since Saria has a class literally based on video games.
• Underground City: Thousands of years ago, the Avians were struck by a mysterious disaster that forced them to flee underground. While exploring the subterranean dungeon known as Buried Cathedral, Sofia stumbles upon the ruins of the underground Avian city, but by then it was populated only by hostile Avian ghosts and a single chained-up demon.
• Unnaturally Looping Location:
  • The maze in the first phase of the Ranking Spire is like this. Not only does it have walls that move when nobody's looking and an absurdly dangerous monster that you need to sneak past to reach the hidden exit, it also has a subtle teleportation effect if you reach the circular boundary, causing you to appear on the opposite side of the circle. Sofia manages to figure this out fairly quickly because she can control her undead minions remotely and monitor their location relative to her, but most people don't have that option.
    Truly a sick way to design a maze. You could walk forever in the same direction and never find an end.
  • It takes some time for Sofia to realize that the mansion her students are exploring is actually a trap, with teleportation blocked and all directions looping back to leave no escape. Even allowing an item to fall endlessly doesn't seem to drain the effect. She eventually breaks out by using the Ringed Arms of Zar to absorb all mana from the nearby environment.
• Unstable Equilibrium: The biggest factor in gaining power is how well you perform in the trials, but you only get one chance at each one. Thus, an exceptional performance in the first trial will set you up to advance further and gain greater rewards in the second, and the converse is also true. When entering the third trial, Sofia is warned that she won't get much of a chance to relax for the next year, but that isn't borne out; between Pareth's Hellspawn Abomination form, her ability to free-cast angelic lightning, her flight, she's become so powerful that it's relatively easy for her to brush off the hordes of Sunless drones and focus on optimising her imprint collection, in a way that someone constantly struggling to survive couldn't afford. Kuli, on the other hand, was traumatised by the trial; she passed, but held off from going to the next one for a long time.
• Uriah Gambit: By the time Sofia reaches level 49, the Magisterium escorting her is getting tired, but Sofia wheedles him into continuing, claiming that she wants to reach level 50 and never have to come face all the Sinner Zombies again. She then arranges for him to be distracted, surrounded, and overpowered by the zombies.
• Verbal Backspace: Eternam's bored and uninterested, "Oh. Have a nice stay," makes it clear he doesn't want to talk to Sofia and would like her to go away and stop bothering him. She goes on to explain that she was hoping to discuss necromancy — and suddenly he's inviting her in, apologising for his impoliteness, and offering her tea.
• Victory by First Blood: Sofia's duel against Marquess ProudWall is meant to end when one party either surrenders or is reduced to 5% health. However, thanks to her quest from Hatred, she intends to win without taking a single injury.
• Water Source Tampering: It's mentioned that a remorseless summoned hero capable of using plant magic once decided to test the potency of his poisonous flowers by throwing some into a village's water well, wiping the village out in the process. He was executed by the Red Winds Emperor, and Sofia is later given his skeleton to feed to her book hero, in exchange for information.
• Weapon of X-Slaying:
  • Sofia acquires a secondhand mithril-coated knife called [Garrett's Bog Slicer], which is designed for slaying goblins. In a subversion, the weapon doesn't have any enchantments to make it easier to slay goblins specifically (although the mithril-coated blade is sharp and durable enough to carve through rock without scratching or dulling the blade, so it's still quite effective), but the handle is enchanted to display the number of goblins slain with the blade. It was up to 11,322 when Sofia got it.
  • The S-ranked [Blessing of the Purifier] offers Pareth a hundredfold damage bonus against demons. Sofia decides on a different blessing, though.
  • As the [Holy Skeleton] skill levels up, Pareth gains a double damage bonus against undead (later doubled again when the skill is specialised).
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Parodied when Sofia is making grand plans for her necromancy career.
  Who could stop her if she wanted to be a helpful necromancer? Besides the church, and the king, and the guards, and anyone physically stronger than her.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: After a night, day, and second night of drowning her sorrows in dwarven ale with Kuli and some friends, Sofia can vaguely recall the singing and the mock fights, but she has no idea of how they all ended up passed out in the Imperial palace, or why Drian fell asleep hanging upside-down, with his belt caught on a chandelier. Incidentally, this is how Sofia discovered her [Pristine essence] passive skill only protects her from magical memory alterations.
• What Have I Done: After helping Sofia to raise Pareth with Alpha Stone Troll bones and then seeing the results, Zerei blurts out a stream of profanity followed by "What have we created?"
• Whip Sword: Sofia's [Spine of the Black Sun] (created by combining "[Solar ", " spine]", and " soul]") is a blunt segmented longsword that can also be used as an extendable whip. Upon impact, it deals very little physical damage, but creates Area of Effect solar bursts that only damage enemies, and which also heal Sofia.
• White Mage: The [Saint] class comes with a very large mana pool, but not much combat ability. It can summon powerful heroes, but with no control over what those heroes do, and indeed many heroes will resent being abruptly and painfully yanked out of their own worlds. There's a class skill that inflicts random status effects, and one to help draw ritual circles, but primarily the class is focused on healing and buffing the heroes. (Which may be why a group of people, upon seeing Sofia without an attendant hero, surrounded her in an alley and tried Mugging the Monster, only to discover that a [Saintomancer] is rather different.)
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • The skeleton summoning ritual Sofia learns involves carving a magic circle and filling it with blood. The first time she does it, Sofia uses her own blood, and fakes a fall at the orphanage in order to explain the cut on her arm.
  • She later uses her [Summon Blood] skill to set the scene and fake being injured, in order to set her captor off guard. And make the ground under his feet slippery.
  • The storyline of Sofia's first filter trial is that her character, Aurelia, has been accused of stealing another girl's magical seal and trying to kill her. When Sofia is faced with the accusation, she can see the supposed victim smirking at her.
• Worthy Opponent: The Incarnation of Victory has been waiting thousands of years for a challenger worthy of his crown. Earning his approval during a fight with him is actually a hidden precondition of winning the floor.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Time can be compressed inside filter trials; participants might spend six months there, even a year, but no more than a month has passed when they leave. Sofia takes advantage of it to spend four months training herself to cast [Angel's Bolt] without the assistance of the System, knowing that it won't cost her four months in the real world.
• You Are Who You Eat: Sofia's third "hero" is a book that can absorb dead bodies and then summon temporary skeletal minions based on what it has consumed. Sofia often does her best to preserve at least one reasonably intact specimen of each monster she fights, so that she can feed it to "Bookie" and increase the variety of available summons. It has to be a naturally produced skeleton, though, not one she reshaped with [Bone Dominus].
• Zero-Approval Gambit: Sofia has been asked to give her sister Saria a good fight, so instead of immediately revealing herself, she plays up the Necromancer angle and presents herself as a dangerous villain, even having her skeletons speak for her.
• Zonk: Sofia is puzzled by a gachapon box that opens to reveal nothing inside. However, the box doesn't disappear, and a moment later, a notification appears that she received an F-ranked draw — the empty wooden box itself.

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Who needs a Hero? I only want tropes!