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Chapter 164- Aura Dominance
🕑 Added 2024-07-16 22:59:01 +0000 UTCArthur sent barrage after barrage of water bullets at the massive spider, watching in fascination as it returned fire, hijacking his magic in a grand display of space magic mastery. Whatever stat Control was, Wovan had a shit ton of it, accurately calculating the exact timing and location of dozens of attacks every second.
Arthur wasn't simply wasting energy for no reason, though. Whatever strange space magic Wovan was using to return his attacks didn't make it impervious to his reflective damage as he'd first suspected. Damage was still being returned, only at a lower rate than his skill description suggested. Arthur had a sneaking suspicion he’d figured out what the hivemind was doing. He just needed the perfect timing to confirm his theory.
With his refinement, Arthur's ability to perceive ether had grown by leaps and bounds, so much so that he could now trace the trajectory of magic that didn't have any manifestation in physical reality. That's why he'd been so surprised when he sensed his reflected damage travelling in the direction of the micro portals targeting him instead of the massive target the spider represented. The hivemind was using mini spiders to manage the vast bulk of its defensive magic. Arthur was sure of it.
Unfortunately, Arthur lacked the requisite accuracy required to test his theory as he wished. Instead, he focused on a single micro portal, sending a water bullet careering towards it the second it appeared behind him. He missed the first and second times. On his third try, however, he was successful and grinned when he saw the massive spider's health noticeably drop.
Arthur spent a minute repeating that feat, improving rapidly until he could accurately target two portals simultaneously. He noticed the difference almost immediately. However many sub-brains the hivemind was using to control its magic, the number wasn’t anywhere close to infinite, and soon Arthur’s water bullets were getting through to pepper the massive spider, now in control of far too few sub-brains to maintain its once impenetrable defence.
Arthur's health reserves were once again topped up to full, he was unable to spend energy as fast as he was regenerating it. Wovan hadn't been idle either. The spider had started to drop some kind of dense alien metal from thousands of feet in the air, creating a portal a meter above his head to transfer all that force at the last possible moment. It was almost impossible to dodge, what with how constant the barrage was. The monster timed the attacks such that Arthur was forced to choose which attacks to dodge and which ones he could tank.
If the spider had been using a material native to Earth, Arthur would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, the stones he was being pelted with were positively drenched in ether and twenty times denser than anything he'd ever encountered. If that wasn't a tier-two material, then the moon was made of cheese. As things were, the creature had finally managed to make him bleed. Sure, it was just a drop, and it healed in less than a second, but it was the principle of the thing.
Cursing, Arthur rubbed at a piece of shattered rock that had managed to get into his eye. He checked the spider's health.
Health: 15,490,000 / 15,600,000
110,000 damage in two minutes. If he continued at this pace, he'd be here all day. Thankfully, the vast majority of that damage had been done in the last fifteen seconds once Arthur had targeted enough micro portals to make a difference. Now, half the water bullets he sent at Wovan were actually landing. Considering the monster's abysmal health regeneration, it was only a matter of time before Arthur won, even without considering the True Damage his soul affinity granted him. He didn't want to spend the next few hours standing around, though, and he had come to the lake to let off some steam and get used to his new strength, two goals which were hard to obtain if he carried on with his best impression of a machine gun.
No, it was time to switch things up.
Taking a deep breath, Arthur bounded forward, doing his best to avoid the falling artillery. He wasn't altogether successful, though, and his shoulder was bruised. For the three seconds it took him to reach the creature, that is. Arthur thrust with his spear for all he was worth. In hindsight, attacking a 100-ton creature with what amounted to a pointy stick- albeit a magical one- wasn't his brightest idea. Which was why he was surprised when he managed to strike the monster unimpeded, no portal shenanigans to speak of. His soul spear pierced Wovan's leg; this close, he could see each individual spider that made up the massive hivemind, thousands of bugs no larger than a small dog, limbs locked together and compressed far too tightly, the very picture of an arachnophobe's worst nightmare. His spear penetrated Wovan's leg, skewering through three spiders with relative ease. Arthur wouldn't put the mini monsters' constitution any higher than a hundred.
As much as he might want to, Arthur knew he could never kill the monster by going at it with his spear alone, at least in a reasonable time frame. Still, it wasn't every day he could fight a creature that lasted so long against him, and he'd be a fool to miss out on the training opportunity it presented. One of his greatest failings in battling the Ascended Blood Beast was his inability to properly use his domain. It was the pinnacle skill of his class, bordering on a mythical rarity and brought forth his aura as a weaponised tool he could wield.
Unfortunately, he was like a caveman given access to a fighter jet, and all he had used it for so far was intimidation. Even now, against the hivemind, he could sense that his aura was a qualitative step beyond the monster's domain, and yet, in the battle of domains, he was hardly its equal, only surpassing it because his aura was that much stronger. Acknowledging the problem didn't magically grant him a way to solve it, though, and he was left at an impasse. His schooling on the subject came entirely from Alyssia Sil' Vorken, the alien Alverin he'd parted with on less than stellar terms after the Locus of Power.
Whilst she was a master on the subject- a bonafide aura mage- decades of learning couldn't be taught in the few days he had spent on the skill, doubly so when considering how scrambled his soul had been at the time. All he'd learned from her was a method to scramble his aura signature, an endeavour that had led to the creation of his one and only unique personally created skill, WhatAmIDoing, that had settled at the rare grade. At the time, he'd been perfectly happy with it, but looking at it now, he couldn't help but feel like he'd wasted one of his precious general skill slots.
If there was one thing the skill had taught him, however, it was how to compress and condense his aura to an almost extreme degree. Focusing on the same principle in his present fight against Wovan, Arthur tried to apply the concept. Usually, his domain covered a kilometre of space, but as he'd learned today, especially whilst combating a single foe, much of that aura coverage was downright excessive. Arthur reeled his domain in, trying to compress it down to half its usual size and match Wovan's domain in size.
It was impossible, not in a way that was simply difficult. It just couldn't be done; there was no wall of effort he could push against, no understanding that time and experience would make his goal achievable. His domain just wouldn't get smaller. That demoted his general skill from marginally useful to completely useless. He wanted to blame Alyssia for leading him down this route, but he had a feeling the problem lay in his pinnacle skill and not the techniques he'd developed.
Wovan wasn't content to let him continue his experiments unimpeded, and this close to the beast, he was forced to contend with a veritable flood of offensive spatial magic. Arthur ignored it all and let the attacks crash against the impenetrable defence his body represented. If I can't condense my aura down, how exactly do I make it more potent? Arthur knew it was possible; he'd seen it done by both Alyssia and Iris. If anything, his brand of aura strengthening went against the grain of what was standard.
Knowing that something was possible sadly didn't make achieving it any easier, and so Arthur was left with no choice but trial and error. If he threw enough energy at the problem, something would eventually stick. What was it Iris said? My domain gives the impression of an aura belonging to someone far stronger than I currently am, but how and why? No answers were forthcoming, and so he focused on individual aspects of his pinnacle skill. It did a whole lot of stuff, from making his skills cheaper to allowing him to mark his enemies with debuffing brands.
Arthur selected Wovan for the debuff, A Homunculus Draining, and hyper-focused on how exactly his domain interacted with the massive spider. Arthur's perception wasn't his highest stat, but his unique eyes, evolved from the standard Identify skill into a rare physical mutation, made him far more in tune with the workings of ether than his stats suggested. His domain 'twisted' around the creature- that was the only way Arthur could describe it- and a link was created between the monster's resource pools and the function of his domain that would drain the creature's energy to fuel his shadow bombs.
Zoning in on that connection, Arthur tried to impose his domain, his very will, on Wovan's ether. He was immediately hit with a backlash that tore through his body, rupturing blood vessels, ravaging his insides, and making a complete mess of his eyes. That backlash was the single greatest piece of damage he'd suffered since gaining his class, instantly decreasing his health pool by a third, a whopping 100,000 points. Whatever had just tried to make his domain do, it was far beyond his current strength, and the only reason he was still alive was because of how sturdy and durable his body was.
Arthur couldn't help but grin, a bloody smile that revealed a single incisor that had shattered under the deadly backlash. He had failed spectacularly like Icarus, flown too close to the sun but survived the burns to learn a lesson most were never taught. But Whilst Arthur's attempt had been unsuccessful, he knew one thing. For the briefest of moments, a time period so small it could hardly be called a fraction of a second, Arthur had seized control of Wovan's ether.
For the briefest of moments, Arthur had held the spider's very life in the palm of his hands.
Comments
bcd051
I love that he's able to try to figure this out while fighting the giant spider conglomeration.
