EmEs_etherious
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Chapter 134- Battle Prep
🕑 Added 2024-02-06 23:59:01 +0000 UTCDon't worry, guys. Arthur will be exiting the locus very soon. This fight will be finished in the next chapter.
Chapter begin->
“In all my years of teaching across dozens of worlds, single lessons and long apprenticeships, I can say, Mr Ward, that you rank amongst the highest of that number,” Issania declared, bowing to him. “It was a pleasure to teach you. Truly.”
Despite the fact that he’d been thrashed and the numerous wounds covering his body, Arthur couldn’t help but grin. “For what it’s worth, I can say with certainty that you are definitely the greatest teacher I’ve ever had,” he answered, returning her bow. “I learned more in the past four hours than I probably would have four months alone, so thank you.”
Issania was an easy woman to fluster and he’d chosen his words carefully to throw her off her A-game, even if it only lasted a minute. This time, however, besides a smug grin, she didn’t react at all.
“System, please return our bodies to their original status,” Issania politely requested.
Arthur almost groaned in relief when the cuts in his body suddenly disappeared. His high Draconic Vitality meant he hadn’t received any significant injury from Issania’s piercing strikes; what should have been debilitating wounds only cut his skin. With his absurd regeneration, death by a thousand cuts wasn’t a thing that applied to him any more, but the pain of Arthur certainly felt like it would kill him. The elf’s spear cuts left a caustic ‘something’ behind when they pierced his flesh- nothing skill-related, because they’d banned them for the first five minutes of the spar- but whatever it was, it slowed down his healing from instantaneous to around thirty seconds. His wounds also stung far more than they should have.
Thirty seconds of injuries didn’t sound like a lot, but it was an eternity of pain when you were fighting someone like Issania at the speed of sound. She’d hit him over 500 times in the past minute alone. She had held back initially, but when she realised she literally couldn’t harm his body with spear-arts alone, she’d stopped pulling her punches and poured everything into killing him. With every single attack.
Damn evil woman. The moment she knew I was invulnerable she just couldn’t hold herself back. He’d learned a lot about his body in those five minutes and refined his spear skills a lot so couldn’t get angry at her, but damn had it hurt to high-heaven and back. “I need to get a pain-numbing skill,” he mumbled under his breath.
“What was that?” Have you rested enough already?”
“It’s nothing,” Arthur replied quickly. “I was just wondering what was so special about your spear. You weren't using poison or anything, were you?”
Issania looked at him incredulously to see if he was joking or not. With the locus' cloak of disguise on him, she realised she couldn’t tell either way and so answered him. “It’s called a concept, at least where I am from. They may call it differently here, but they’re basically truths that you connect yourself to. Well… that’s not quite the right word but I’m not sure how else to explain it. This clone of mine here, uses the concept of sharpness and pain, things that the real me has turned away from. As you can probably tell, this body’s mastery over them isn’t great enough to control how much they’re applied in any given attack.” Issania explained.
Arthur took a moment to digest it, annoyed at how little he knew of how things operated at higher levels. His ignorance was grating out at the best of times and downright pissed him off at the worst. He could’ve gotten all the way to level 200 without ever finding out a whole other branch of power existed to be exploited. Or am I jumping to conclusions here?
“So, let me get this straight,” he began. “A concept reinforces what you do, makes it truer… or something along those lines. Like, a fire mage could use a concept of heat or destruction to make their spells more damaging. Have I got this right?”
Issania nodded her head. “You’ve got the gist of it. And confirmed that you’re below level 200 by the way. A concept is one of the conditions required to get past the first-class barrier. I don’t know why your education is so flawed and I’d teach you everything you needed to know if I had the time but we have 23 minutes left for our spar. I can give you an introductory class on concepts that barely cover the basics and you sacrifice this layer's rewards but I advise against that. It’s not knowledge that’s hard to come by, but a locus reward is, so what do you say? Finish the spar, or start another lesson?”
“We’ll finish our fight,” Arthur immediately decided. Issania was right. Now that he knew about concepts, he could look into them, but he wouldn’t get the chance to challenge a locus that had interacted with a tier-3 chaos one ever again. The elf smiled at him. “Good choice. I’ll give you two minutes to use any skills you need to prepare, any self-buffs or things along those lines. In a real fight, you’d need to be able to use them whilst in combat but that’ll take you weeks of practice, if not months if I'm not wrong about where you are in your current development.”
Arthur had read through his newest skills quite a few times already and he knew what he’d be using. Any soul-skills were off the table because of the permanent harming problems they came with. That left him with shadow, water/poison and healing. Hydra's poisonous fang [Epic] was out of the picture straight away. He highly doubted Issania would give him enough time to charge up the attack.
Molecular Water Shot [Epic] would be useful as a deterrent and to keep her at a distance. Reflective Shield [Epic], however, looked like it would be very useful. Besides Overcharge [Elite], his healing skills were something he’d be much happier not using. It would mean he’d taken significant damage that his natural recovery couldn't deal with, it’s also a waste of ether considering my body is going to revert back to normal after the spar.
The MVP for this fight would definitely be his shadow skills. If only he had a few months of practice under his belt so he could use them in a high-speed battle. Using Shadow step [Epic] to teleport looked good on paper, but it didn’t mean jack if it took him ten seconds to activate every time. He needed the skills to be second nature, instantaneous in usage.
Shadow step [Epic] level 1- Use ether to instantly travel to a shadow within your vicinity. The nature of this magic makes it nearly untraceable to both magical and mundane senses. You remain cloaked in darkness that makes you nigh invisible to magical and mundane senses for 3 seconds after you reach your destination.
Cost: 50 ether/metre of travel (Cost decreases as you level up)
It was an incredible skill, perfect for assassins and battle in general but doubly so when he was facing a humanoid opponent. The cost was incredibly steep, but with epic skills capping at level 40, if he was lucky, the cost might go down to as little as ten ether per metre of travel. Probably even less. The skill would practically be free at that point, and he’d be able to spam it to create multiple locations of ‘darkness’ concurrently to confuse his enemies. No one would be able to see where he’d be attacking from.
It was a waste of energy, but Arthur wanted to check if he’d improved any since the last time he’d used it. Focusing on the shadow a metre in front of him, he poured the required ether into the skill matrix. He concentrated as he followed the energy’s passage through the skill applying the little directive required to keep things on track. Five seconds, six. On the seventh, he felt a slight tug in his gut, not unlike the teleportation the locus employed between floors and he knew he’d done it, he'd travelled a single meter with shadow magic. Seven seconds! That was three seconds faster than his previous best and for the amount of practice he’d put into shadow steps, it was massive progress.
Sadly, it wasn’t enough to make it usable for this fight. Unless Issania stayed completely still for an extended period of time, he wouldn't be able to use it. Next on the list of shadow skills was Cloaked Darkness an epic skill that would definitely see some use here.
Cloaked Darkness (Epic) level 1- The darkness is your Ally. Shadow cloaks your presence, making you difficult to perceive, even in the brightest of spaces, for you herald the end of light.
Effect: Summons a cloak of shadow around the user. 30% increased defence against magical damage. (reduced effect against opposing elements) 20% increased movement speed.
Allows the user to float in space for 60 seconds. Short-range flight is possible for 5 seconds at a cost of 30 ether/second. Speed of flight is 50% of the agility stat.
Skill cost: 1000 ether summon cost +100 ether/minute of use.
Arthur quickly poured 1000 ether into the skill matrix to summon the shadow cloak. At his current level, it took him an entire minute to do so and he was lucky Issania had given ample time to prepare. It was a powerful skill, and from his single prior test against the seventh monster wave, he knew just how well it served as a means to hide his actions. Whilst it wasn’t anything approaching true invisibility, enemies without high perception stats found it difficult to keep an eye on him and they couldn’t see which limb he decided to attack with. Arthur hoped it translated well to spear usage.
“So, I guess you’re a shadow mage then,” Issania declared, brandishing her spear. “I must say, it’s not an affinity I suspected you’d have. I was thinking of fire or earth. I guess shadows are plenty powerful if you learn how to use them properly, though. So, are you ready?”
“One last thing,” Arthur replied before casting Reflective Shield (Epic). He held back on using overcharge for now. It was an elite skill that boasted his physical capabilities but it came with a period of weakness afterwards that he didn’t want to deal with. Being a little stronger wouldn’t help him much here either way and if he couldn’t win quickly, he’d be fucked.
Reflective shield (epic) level 1- create a shield of water around yourself that protects you from both physical and magical damage.
Orb form- Create an orb of water around yourself. This orb nullifies all attacks below a certain threshold (Damage that can’t get past 400 constitution) Any damage beyond this point is absorbed up to a threshold of 100,000 points. Absorbed energy can be reflected outwards in an explosion or used to enhance your own attacks. Absorbed damage maintains the affinities of any attackers.
Orb Cost: 10,000 ether
Time: 10 minutes
Shell form- create a layer of water around yourself, Increase your defence by 10%. Reflects 1% of all attacks. Sufficiently mastered skills and /or concepts may reduce this effect. The water shield generated is poisonous and inflicts debuff Hazy Sight onto opponents.
Hazy sight: Reduces perception by 20% makes ether more difficult to control.
Shell Cost:3,000 ethers.
Time: 5 minutes
Cooldown: 15 minutes
Arthur, of course, used the shell version of the skill. This took even longer than the cloak to cast, an entire three minutes, which left them with only nineteen more before their time was up. The water shell scaled off his own defence, which was already sky-high because of Draconic Vitality. It truly was a shame that all the titles he had boosting the effectiveness of the stat only affected how much health it gave him and not the defensive side of it. Perhaps it was because they had previously only worked on his healthpool and carrying that over didn’t change things?
Nonetheless, he was happy enough with how lucky he was already and he couldn’t go wrong with enhancing that. The main selling point of the skill, however, was that it reflected damage. Sure, 1% didn’t sound a lot, but 1% of something that could hurt him, would probably cripple if not outright kill normal people.
“I’m ready,” Arthur called out. “We can’t die right now, but I apologise in advance for what I’m about to do.”
Issania tilted her head back and laughed. “Took you long enough,” she replied to his taunt. “I was about to get worried, kid, but sorry. This is a bad matchup for you.”
“I’m a woman that works with electricity. I eat water-mages for breakfast,” Issania declared.
Then she launched a lightning bolt at him
Comments
Haden Snodgrass
TFTC
Haden Snodgrass
Pure water is 1 micromho/cm while tap water is 100-1000 micromho/cm. Strictly speaking everything is a conductor, it will just have some amount of resistance to conductivity. Air for instance, is an insulator, but given enough charge it will jump. Take lightning for example. The only thing that doesn't conduct electricity is void, or a perfect vacuum if you prefer.
Gavriel
Truly pure water isn't a conductor, it requires impurities to conduct.
