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Chapter 135- Overkill
🕑 Added 2024-02-08 23:59:00 +0000 UTCWater offered little protection against electricity, so when Issania sent a literal bolt of lightning at Arthur’s chest, she expected him to be down for the count. Understandable really. No one could fault her thought process. Unfortunately for her, Arthur had long transcended the limits of rationality, and his body alone was sturdy enough to weather the fiercest of storms, irrespective of whether or not they were backed by the concepts of pain and sharpness.
The added defence this water shell provided him was welcome, but he hadn’t wasted Ether on it to make himself more sturdy. He was plenty durable already. No, he's used it to reflect some damage. Issania knew just how powerful Arthur’s body was, at conservative estimates, at least ten times more robust than her own. And so she’d hit him with magic strong enough to break him despite that absurd constitution. Her predictions had been off by a large margin.
A single percent of Issania’s attack, still lightning attributed and holding onto the concepts she’d enhanced it with came back and hit her, taking out a tenth of her healthpool in an instant and blowing her off her feet. Arthur was already rushing forward to capitalise on her moment of weakness. Even with his Draconic Vitality at 2050, the electricity had hurt like a bitch and done a surprising 700 points of damage to him. Against someone like Issania, that attack translated to around 100,000 damage and a single percent of that being reflected meant that she hurt far more than he did.
She’d be back on her feet in a second or two, and far warier from a lesson learned. He just needed to make sure she paid an appropriate price for her education. Falling back on his most used attack skill Arthur generated a dozen water bullets and shot it at her. Lightning flared around her crumpled form, completely nullifying his mediocre magic. Looks like concepts reinforce your magic a lot more than I expected.
Sure, his magic wasn’t the greatest right now, but she’d gone through it easily like a hot knife through butter. By the time she found her feet, Arthur was upon her. There wasn’t much finesse to his next attack, a sloppy thrust with his spear that had no chance of hitting her even in her groggy state. It disguised his true attack, a devastating low kick to her knee strong enough to pulp flesh and break bone. If it is connected. With his cloak of shadows summoned, he was 20% faster, with an agility stat around 1000 points.
No way were her stats higher.
They weren't but it didn't matter anyway. Issania directed electricity into her calf and her leg moved backwards out of his range, so fast it looked like a muscle twitch. The science of it didn’t quite make sense, but this was magic and a self-buff using electricity was just part of a standard mage's toolkit it seemed. Hopefully, it has more drawbacks than my overcharge. That was Arthur’s last thought before he was fighting for his life. Even without magic enhancing her, Issania’s spear strikes had been nigh impossible for him to dodge. Now that she was using skills and moving almost twice as fast, it was all he could do to stop himself from getting skewered.
He could, of course, try his luck and try to tank the attacks and let reflection damage him with the fight, but something told him things wouldn’t be so easy. Reflective Shield was limited against ‘sufficiently mastered skills and/or concepts’ and whilst his teacher's magic proficiency didn’t quite reach that threshold, her spear-arts certainly did. Her concept's a lot stronger when she applied it to her spear too.
Even without considering all this, Issania was confident enough to strike him even after facing the might of her reflected attack which meant she had a countermeasure prepared. That was okay. He hadn’t expected a single skill to win him the fight. Having learnt from her mistake, the elf no longer used external magic against him, except the precise moment their spears connected, using her own as a medium to channel electricity and shock him.
There was a reason why Issania had reached such a high realm with her original body. In a few seconds of combat, she’d figured out a key weakness of his defensive skill and was now relying on her spear skills as a delivery method to protect herself from the reflective damage her magic would have otherwise inflicted her with. It wasn’t a perfect solution, however, and she was still suffering some blowback from every clash. She was also prevented from using more powerful magic, to keep her attacks as electrically enhanced spear strikes instead of magic lightning bolts with a prod of pointy stick thrown in. The moment the focus of her combat changed, her concept would stop limiting the reflective damage she had to deal with.
Unfortunately for Issania, Arthur was taking a grand total of zero damage from her little electric shocks which took her an entire two minutes to realise. By that time, her hands had already turned a little numb and she was visibly frustrated. Pushing him backwards, she retreated a few metres and tried to shake some feeling back into her hands.
“This isn’t fair, kid,” Issania complained. “I’ve hit epic armours softer than you.”
Arthur grinned, though she couldn’t see it with the locus' obfuscation in place. His body language must have looked smug or something, though, because she smiled at him, a feral expression that looked out of place on her normally calm face. Damn, I think I pissed her off. “As your teacher, though, it’s my duty to teach you that you’re not invulnerable. Even the strongest defences.” she paused for dramatic effect. “Are eventually breached.”
“Eventually doesn’t mean today though, does it miss,” Arthur retorted.
He knew that Issania was stalling for time right now to recover but allowed it anyway. He needed the time just as much as she did, to set the stage for his victory. The skill that would win him this fight, a Legendary skill, Cloaked Blade.
Cloaked Blade (Legendary) level 1- A shadow mage’s blade finds all men unprepared for death and comes with no warning. Your blade is deadlier than most for your enemies shall never see it coming.
Passive effect: (Fixed) Hides 50% of magical presence/signature when casting spells. 1% of the damage done via shadow magic recovers health, stamina and ether.
Active effect: Pay 2 times the skill cost for any affinity to reduce your magical presence by an additional 20%. Damage done via this inflicts the debuff Trapped in Darkness.
Trapped in Darkness: Reduces speed, mental processing and skill usage by 25% (may be resisted)
Pay 10 times the skill cost to make your magic untraceable to all senses up to 1,500 perception or its equivalent. Increases damage of selected skill by 50% and inflicts the debuff Fear of the Dark.
Fear the Dark: Reduces all stats by 30% for 30 minutes. You enter an immaterial state for 5 seconds after using this skill and become nigh invulnerable against physical and magical damage.
Create a dark crest for yourself or place it upon a weapon of your choice. Used upon yourself, strength and agility increase by 30% for 5 minutes. Used upon a weapon, For one minute, every successful hit landed via the enhanced weapon upon the opponent's flesh reduces an opponent's speed by 5% (up to a maximum of 75%). Damage done with an enhanced weapon does not naturally regenerate for six hours and is partially resistant to healing magic.
Dark crest cost: 3,000 ether.
Crest cooldown: 5 hours.
From amongst his new skills, it was the one with the longest description, and as a legendary skill, it didn’t disappoint. Using any one of its many effects would almost guarantee him a win in this fight. Almost wasn’t good enough, though. He wanted a decisive victory without any possibility of failure. At first glance, most people might think that a ten times cost for skill use just to make his magic untraceable wasn’t worth it, especially when a two times increase reduced his spell's visibility by 75% already. What was the point of paying 8 times more ether just for an extra 25%?
Those people, In Arthur’s opinion, were very stupid. The difference between a 75% reduction in visibility and making your magic truly invisible was like night and day. Like humans, many races were ‘magically blind’ and didn't have the perception stat and those that did didn’t tend to raise it all the way to 1,500. This is just unfair at this point, Arthur thought with grim satisfaction. To create a sufficiently powerful water bullet, he usually invested around 100 ether. Using a cloaked blade to enhance it to the maximum shot that cost up to 1,000 ether per bullet, a truly absurd cost.
It was worth it.
Arthur and Issania stood apart with around 5 metres between them. His teacher was using the lull in battle to recover all the damage she’d taken thus far and he was content to let her do so. Things would be ending in the next twenty seconds anyway. Using Cloaked Blade, Arthur generated exactly five enhanced water bullets. The skill, at least this part of it, was very easy to use. It simply attached an extra tunnel in front of the selected skills entry point for one to push ether through and everything else remained the same. Arthur generated the five bullets in such a way that they surrounded Issania completely, each of them ten centimetres away from her body. One aiming at her chest, one at her stomach, two at her back and one at her knee, all in locations where her armour was thinnest. He could have just generated them all around her head and instantly ‘killed’ her, but he didn’t want to go so far for a simple spar. True to the skills description, Issania remained completely unaware of the impending doom hovering around her. He could have generated a bullet a millimetre away from her eye and she wouldn’t have been able to see it.
“I’m sorry,” Arthur said as he released the bullets. Issania remained confused up until the moment the water bullets shot into her body, breaking bone and pulping flesh as they made a mess of her insides. The moment she couldn’t see his spell work spelt the end of this battle and it simply took a little time for things to come to their natural conclusion. Arthur ignored the notification letting him know that he’d successfully applied the fear debuff and walked over to his downed teacher. He wasn’t worried about facing any counterattack right now or anything of the sort.
Reminiscent of his shadow bombs, the water bullets he’d enhanced had all exploded the moment they entered Issania’s body. Right now, she was missing a leg, her right lung was destroyed beyond repair and the organs in her stomach had become a soup of gore. At higher levels, you weren't as reliant on your bodily functions but Issania’s clone hadn’t quite reached that rank.
“I guess this is my win, teach,” Arthur said, grimacing at her broken body. Even if this spar was without any real consequences, he didn’t enjoy seeing Issania like this.
“Fuck you,” she groaned, her voice coming out as a wheezing gasp. “What the hell even was that? I didn’t even see what hit me.” she coughed up a mouthful of blood before rolling onto her back.
“End the simulation. It’s my loss.”
Arthur breathed out in relief when he heard those words and watched as the blue mimicry magic exited their bodies. He’d known the blood and gore were fake but felt a weight lift off his chest when Issania reverted to her normal state. She sat up and looked at him with a complicated expression on her face, a mixture of incredulity, excitement and caution.
“I think the locus got things mixed up,” she finally said. “You should’ve been teaching me instead,” stretching her arms out like a cat, she huffed. “I’m guessing that last trick isn’t something I can learn though, is it?”
“Afraid so,” Arthur replied.
“So a class skill, then,” she deduced. “Definitely Epic. maybe even Legendary. It got past my epic-ranked threat detection like it was nothing.”
“No comment,” he said, noting the additional information down for later review. Turned out shadowed blades worked on those types of skills too. Arthur was about to say something when the blue of the system text jumped into his vision.
Congratulations! You have completed this layer with the highest qualifications possible. Prepare to receive your reward.
Comments
Gavriel
When your facing the final boss, but your the hidden boss. (The one the devs really wanted to use, but would have made the game too difficult if it was required).
