Mage Tank-Chapter 256: Dargons and… (12)

I ended up taking Devil Drill Beam for my free mana shape. It was the OG, the very first shape I’d ever learned, and couldn’t be replicated through the codified shapes on our list without using at least two of them. So, it was a two-for-one.

DDB turned any ‘touch’ skill into a thirty-foot beam that went straight through all obstacles. Oblivion Orb was my only touch skill, making the shape less versatile than most of the others I knew, but since I could slap it onto my hammers and then copy my hammers for 2 mana each, it resulted in an incredibly efficient combination. I was basically getting a shaped Oblivion Orb that should have cost 15 mana for 2 mana a pop instead.

Turning Oblivion Orb into a line attack also served as a launching point for many other interesting shapes the spell could take. There were a few things I wanted to play around with in this fight, and both Grotto and I thought it was the best pick for experimentation, while also trying to secure the win.

The hour-and-five-minute break hadn’t been for my resources to recover. I’d implied that’s what it was for, but hadn’t ever stated my purpose for the break. My health, mana, and stamina were all back to full practically by the time Ishi and I had finished our chat. The real reason for the break was that I’d needed five minutes to have a speed-of-thought strategy meeting with Grotto, and then another hour because that’s how long it took for me to swap which shape Arcane Geometry applied to.

It was very nice of Ishi to wait.

“Ready?” Ishi asked once I stood and had a brief stretch.

I slapped on my helm, sent Gracorvus into shield mode, and summoned Somncres. “Yep.”

The moment the word ended, Ishi disappeared.

She hadn’t gone far with the teleport, only a couple hundred feet down the narrow tunnel, but a pair of silver wings spread out from her back and she continued to put distance between us. Her flight speed was much faster than I could run, I could already tell that much, and she was facing toward me even as she retreated. Both her staff and bow were hurtling along right beside her, her free hand now occupied by a wand. An arrow was already screaming towards me, leaving a trail of warped space behind it.

It looked like Grotto’s initial evaluation was correct and Ishi wanted to make this a ranged battle. While my effective throwing distance with my hammers was solid, it wouldn’t take Ishi long to move beyond it at her current pace. Homing Weapon would help with that, but it wasn’t like I could throw my hammers at the sun and expect them to make it there one day. If Ishi got far enough away, the skill wouldn’t activate.

The dimensional space had warped prior to my encounter with the Realm Blighters. The tunnel was no longer an endless spiral downward, but another straightaway with no perceptible end. Normally this would have been an excellent environment for me. Having my enemies arrayed in a neat line was great for both my defensive and offensive strategies, but it was an even better setup for a long-range sniper. If Ishi could fire that bow from a mile or more, things could get sticky.

Of course, while my current running speed was too slow to catch up to Ishi, my flying speed was much better. I was already focusing on Therianthropy from the moment Ishi asked if I was ready, and my wings and tentacles burst from my back an instant after the fight officially began. I snagged two wands from inventory with my feelers, then timed my Shortcut to teleport past Ishi’s first arrow.

I went as far as Shortcut could take me with a 1-second cooldown, closing some of the distance Ishi had made, and was immediately moving at my max speed. Despite my boost, I was still slightly slower than the princess, but the difference in our teleport ranges allowed me to keep up. Another arrow came at me before Shortcut was ready, and I held up Gracorvus, tensing for impact.

When the arrow hit, it sucked all light and sound from the world. This would have been a major handicap if I couldn’t still see Ishi’s soul, although I now had no visual on her incoming projectiles. The moment after the arrow robbed me of sight and hearing, the tunnel became a vacuum.

This wasn't like the vacuum of space. It was much worse. An immense force tore at my body, ripping the air from my lungs and threatening to rupture my eardrums. My eyes felt like they were boiling and about to pop out of my head and every inch of my skin felt like it was on fire.

My toughness saved me from any real damage, but the effect continued to build even as I flew forward. I realized that the spells were tracking me somehow and my first instinct was to end the effects with Dispel. I sent a burst of countermagic into the mana sustaining them, but it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.

Absolute Authority: Your Mystical Magic skill level is too low to counter or negate Princess Ishi’s spells!

There went one of my best tricks. I recognized the evolution since it was one that Etja had as well. It meant that Ishi had Mystical Magic at level 40 or higher. If my only ability for disrupting someone’s spells was to counter or negate them, then my own skill level of 30 might as well have been a big fat zero. However, I had other fuckery I could deploy, not that it applied to this exact situation.

My Dispel having proved useless, I went for an analog solution and swept Somncres over the front of my shield, feeling the slightest resistance as I dislodged the arrow buried between two of its plates. I left the arrow behind along with the zone bereft of light and sound, then quickly exited the vacuum.

My ears popped hard enough to ring, and the sudden spike in air pressure made me feel like I was a water balloon squeezed until it was on the edge of bursting. I was pretty sure I was immune to decompression sickness–or would it be compression sickness in this scenario? Probably both. Regardless, it looked like I’d have it confirmed one way or another by the end of this duel.

The vacuum would only be dangerous if I was forced to linger in it, but I was betting it would have been much worse if my blood was willing to evacuate my body. Otherwise, the biggest threat the spell posed was that it tried to suck everything out of my everywhere, and only my blood was really immune to it. I’d have to clench for all I was worth if I wanted to keep my dignity in front of the princess.

I cast another Shortcut to avoid the next arrow and threw a set of Void Hammers at Ishi, duplicating it four times with Somncres. I immediately resummoned the real hammer to my hand, allowing the fleeting copies to test Ishi’s defenses, which would inform my next move.

Ishi’s body glowed with Shielding, which was building up as she continued to move. Her kite shield was already in position to catch my attack, but another layer of Shielding wrapped around the one that was already there. It was a pretty impressive defense, especially since Shielding didn’t normally stack.

All four hammers came in at slightly different trajectories, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room to get fancy in the narrow tunnel. Ishi deftly moved her kite shield to catch all four, which pounded into the wood in rapid succession. A helm had appeared to hide her face, preventing me from getting a good read on her reaction, but each hit shook her around and forced her to stabilize her flight, lest she collide with a wall.

The Oblivion Orbs, of course, couldn’t be blocked, and the woman’s Shielding was exhausted after the third hammer. Her kite shield, armor, and the distance between us prevented me from seeing any bodily signs of damage, but the woman’s soul told me enough. She was surprised by how much that shit had sucked for her, but she was nowhere close to being in danger.

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Also during this time, something very odd happened.

All four of the hammers I’d sent at Ishi were fleeting copies. That meant they would disappear the moment they struck something substantial. But they didn’t disappear. Each hammer appeared to bounce off of the shield and immediately come blasting back down the corridor at me.

It was betrayal! Mutiny! My own hammers were in revolt!

Now here’s the thing. My hammers were no joke. With my spec, a single Oblivion Orb wasn’t a big deal. A single Homing Weapon wasn’t a huge issue either. But each Void Hammer combo was two separate attacks, meaning the four hammers heading my way represented eight attacks in total. The hammers couldn’t be dodged and had a decent amount of armor penetration, whereas the orbs couldn’t be blocked and dealt Planar damage, which was generally a weaker defense.

My personal defense against Dimensional attacks was solid, especially when matched up against spells. The Oblivion Orbs would still hurt since they’d slip right past Gracorvus. The hammers themselves were an even bigger threat because of their armor penetration and the stacking bonus damage they got from my Flurry of Blows evolution. Would these count as a repeat of hammer attacks one through four, or would these be attacks five through eight instead?

The answer to that question was worth about four hundred damage.

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I wasn’t about to stand around and get hit with my own attacks, though. That would wound my pride, especially since writing “return to sender” on someone’s spell and mailing it back to them was one of my favorite moves. As such, I decided to insist that the princess re-accept the gift I’d so lovingly thrown at her face.

Whatever Ishi had used to send the hammers back my way wasn’t a spell, so there wasn’t much I could do about it. The hammers themselves were a different matter. Somncres copies took mana to create, which meant that the copied hammers were spells in the most technical sense. Since they were spells, they could be targeted with counters or, more importantly, redirects.

Each hammer was an individual effect, and I wasn’t quite fast enough to get all four, but I seized three of them with Reverse Card. This was laughably cheap to do since it cost the same amount of mana as was spent on the spell by its original caster, which was two whole points. I then arced them right back around to head towards Ishi, hot-potato style.

Doing this prevented me from guarding against the sole remaining hammer with Gracorvus, and getting hit with any part of my own attack stung in both ego and body.

HP: 2,291 -> 1,998

But the satisfaction of seeing Ishi’s head jerk back in surprise when the other hammers revealed themselves as triple agents was worth more than a couple of crushed ribs and a few thousand sand-sized pieces of my liver and intestines being removed from space and time.

Her Shielding was gone, but the woman summoned a Force Shield instead, dumping a chunk of the damage into her mana pool. The princess was outing herself as a true enthusiast for all things shield-related. There was the briefest pause as both of us looked at one another and acknowledged the silliness of that entire exchange.

While we had our moment, the tunnel around us started to get weird. The distance between myself and the walls began to grow, though the walls themselves kept the same texture and appearance. I’d seen something similar during my earlier romp through this Dungeon, but it was still hard to wrap my head around. Coordinated Thinker sent me conflicting information about the phenomenon, telling me that the distance between the walls and myself was growing, but that each of us was still the same size relative to everything else around. I wasn’t shrinking, the walls weren't getting any bigger, and yet the space between us expanded.

I was also unsure whether Ishi was the one doing this. If she was, it wasn't burning any of her mana–meaning it wasn’t a spell–and it didn’t look like any technique I was familiar with. This may have been due to something the princess had ‘access’ to from within this space or her inventory, like some kind of control mechanism allowing her to manipulate the Dungeon’s environment. The first sign of rules-based chicanery was afoot.

And then our fight resumed, and the portal battle began.

Three palm-sized portals formed around Ishi, and she fired off shots from her bow, her wand, and her staff at the same time. It was the first attack I’d seen from either of the latter two, and all three projectiles disappeared into one of the small holes in reality. While Ishi did this, I sent four more hammers her way.

I sensed the three exit portals appear around me the moment each of Ishi’s attacks reached their entrances. However, before I discuss what happened next, it’s important that I mention a couple of things about portals.

Most portals were planar magic, connecting one space to another through an intermediary plane where a variety of conditions could allow for instantaneous travel back on our plane. Maybe the distance was much shorter there, or time flowed differently, or an eldritch being ejected the interloper via the path of least resistance, which just so happened to be the exit created by the caster.

Some portals, however, could also be spatial. These were generally very short-range and briefly lived portals, which compressed a thin line of space between their entrance and their exit while shrinking their targets to stuff them through the very small resulting tunnel. They were what Grotto referred to as “the quick-and-dirty method, classified as portals only because imbeciles lack the capacity for appreciating the nuance and complexity of true portal magicks.”

Regardless of the Core’s personal opinions, spatial portals resulted in something cheap, fast, and versatile, with the added benefit of not chucking their subjects through mysterious secondary realms. These were the types of portals Ishi had just summoned, and also the type I suspected she used for movement as well.

My brand of portal magic was dedicated to the planar school. Dreadful Shortcut involved the Dread Star facilitating my movement through whatever void realm it so chose. The portal to the Pocket Closet created a gateway between my present location and a demiplane adjacent to the material world. One might note that there is a significant difference between those examples.

Shortcut created two portals in the material world–an entrance and an exit–for such a brief time as to be nearly unquantifiable. Accessing the Closet created one portal in the material world that lasted for so long as I maintained it. However, Grotto and I had discovered that this didn’t necessarily have to be the case. Was I limited to a single Pocket Closet portal? We’d discovered that the answer was no.

Each one required some degree of focus, and the mental demand increased substantially when multiple were deployed. Fortunately, I’d purchased a trinket from Avarice that let me split my mind in two. I could dedicate one instance to keeping two portals going, while the rest of me figured out what to do with them.

Going back to the example of planar portals that passed through an intermediary realm, the Closet itself could serve as an intermediary realm. Specifically, the kind in which the distance between two points was much shorter relative to the portal locations in the material plane. How much shorter? As short as I damn well pleased.

Okay, back to where we left off.

An arrow and two spells appeared from Ishi’s portals, moving toward me on three different vectors. I created a portal leading into the Closet a thousand feet ahead and just behind Ishi, then created another portal leading into the Closet below me, angled toward the woman’s incoming arrow.

Initially, each portal was created via an individual instance of focus, which acted with only the slightest delay between them. Once the first portal was established, my second instance of focus coordinated with Grotto to place the second portal so that it directly faced the first portal within the Closet, with virtually no distance in between them. After that, the task of maintaining both portals was handed off to a single mental partition.

Thus, the portal I created behind Ishi led to a location within the Closet where another portal leading out of the Closet was approximately 1 micrometer away. That exit portal currently had one of Ishi’s spell-imbued arrows hurtling towards it.

Ishi had never stopped moving, and even as the space within the tunnel continued to expand, she was still flying backward at several hundred miles per hour while facing me.

She did not see the Closet portal appear behind her in time to stop from flying right through it. This immediately sent her out of the second portal and into her own arrow, which detonated its imbued spell. All of this was shortly followed by the volley of hammers I’d thrown, whipping through the portal on their way to find the princess.

It was fucking beautiful.