Mage Tank-Chapter 257: Dargons and… (13)

The princess let out a very un-princess-like swear as the world turned ninety degrees from her point of view, accompanied by an arrow in the back. The spell on the arrow activated, creating a spatial distortion that twisted in on itself and tried to compress its contents into a space the size of a small marble. The effect traveled with Ishi as she careened towards the ground.

The princess spun and slowed just in time to make a sloppy superhero landing, cracking stone and kicking up plumes of dust that swirled in the spell’s embrace. It didn’t look like the spell had done her any harm, but it sure made the crash landing more dramatic.

I barely saw the results of our success. I was stretching the absolute limits of my mind to cast Shortcut the moment those portals had been created, juking the spells from Ishi’s wand and staff. They sailed off towards the tunnel’s ever-more-distant boundaries, where one released a plume of green mist and the other repeated the effect that had been on Ishi’s arrow.

When I had a second to think, I registered that I’d received an interesting notification.

Princess Ishi of the Silver Lounge cannot be affected by a hostile portal or teleport effect…

…is what we would have said if that shit weren’t deific!

Did that legally count as very briefly kidnapping a princess?

Hammers rained down on Ishi from the Closet portal, the ones I’d thrown only a couple of seconds beforehand, although it felt like that time had stretched for several minutes. Ishi had learned from my use of Reverse Card and realized the copied hammers counted as spells. She dispelled the first while opening a portal to send the other three a hundred feet away. They turned and zipped back toward her, where she dispelled another and repeated her portal tactic.

Ishi did this until all of the hammers were dealt with over the course of a second, then stood from where she knelt. Even though her face was hidden by her helm, I could feel her glare trying to pickle my skin.

A suite of surgical tools appeared and floated into the air alongside her staff and bow. They shrank and darted into the tiny gaps between her armor, which looked as pristine as when we’d started. It was a nifty healing spell that relied on Intelligence, but it was one I recognized and had decided against taking in the past. It wasn’t terribly useful without sufficient medical knowledge, but if Ishi knew her stuff it would rapidly begin undoing whatever damage I’d managed to deal so far.

“My teleport resistance has no qualifiers,” said Ishi. “There is only one way I know of to bypass it, but I struggle to believe you would have access to– shit!”

I elicited another swear from the princess by throwing another round of hammers, grinning at her ploy. Did Ishi really think I was going to stand around and watch her heal while we had a chat?

Ishi was immediately back on the move, using her portal/Dispel trick to eliminate my copies. I let Somncres prime join the party this time though, and she was forced to take that one on her shield.

I popped open another pair of Closet portals, firing a shaped Elemental Barrier into the one beside me. The second portal intercepted Ishi, blasting her with an 80-foot wave of freezing cold. This was a bit of an indulgence as far as mana went, costing twice as much as a normal round of hammers, but it would be justified if I could hit Ishi with the Slowed debuff. The cone of frost slammed into her, but the Barrier was less effective than I’d hoped.

Ishi of the Silver Lounge is Unstoppable!

I shouldn’t have been surprised, given her title of Unstoppable Dimensionalist. I guess it wasn’t just for posturing. Unstoppable meant I couldn’t apply any movement penalties to Ishi, including Slowed and knockback. That would normally stop forced teleports as well, but that part didn’t matter since my portals overrode the fundamental rules governing life, the universe, and everything. Still, most of my debuffs focused on locking people down, and Ishi couldn’t be locked or dropped.

I could still use Deafen, Ignite, and Shock, but I doubted being deaf would matter for Ishi, my build didn’t focus on Ignite, making it a waste of mana to use Elemental Barrier that way, and Shock built into Stun and Immobilize, both useless since Ishi was Unstoppable.

Honestly, if it weren’t for my deific nonsense, Ishi would be tough to deal with.

A second bow appeared in the air beside Ishi and all three of her floating weapons spread out. The space had expanded so that the walls, while appearing close, were actually thousands of feet away. I swooped low while Ishi fired arrows in a staggered pattern, forcing me to deal with at least one arrow after using Shortcut to avoid the other.

I blocked, but the spell-imbued arrow exploded into a dozen spatial tears that divided local reality into a dozen discs, stacked atop one another. Each layer spun in the direction opposite the one below it, twisting large slices of my body along with them and threatening to pull me into pieces. The moment the spell connected, Ishi fired a beam from her wand that moved faster than I could see, doubling down on the spell’s effect.

The arrow’s spell was painful, but the hit that came directly from Ishi made it excruciating. Bones fractured as my organs ruptured, the soft tissue unable to withstand the forces cutting through me. The spell had about as much respect for my armor as the force of gravity, but my spell defenses were still doing work in tearing the magic apart from within. I teleported out after a half-second, but it was a solid hit.

HP: 2,005 -> 1,697

The moment I reappeared, the next arrow was coming my way. I portalled the arrow back into Ishi’s face, but she was ready and teleported herself out of its path. I chucked another series of hammers, then was forced to use Shortcut to duck a spell from her staff. I barely got my shield up to take another spell-imbued arrow, which triggered an instant spell from Ishi’s wand once again, appearing as though the follow-up effect was automatic. Another chunk of health disappeared as I took a run through the space grinder before escaping.

This wasn’t a great trade for me. Ishi built Shielding every second she was moving, she was always moving, and there was nothing I could do to stop her from moving. She had multiple skills that stacked even more Shielding. She had dispels, portals to send attacks away from her, and could shunt damage to her mana pool if all else failed.

On top of that, she was healing every second and I was pretty damn sure she had a massive health pool. For all her defense, hammers still made it through. That first set of hammers I’d tossed had her eat seven attacks and I knew that had to hurt. Even so, she hadn’t for a moment thought herself in danger, and that was what really had me worried.

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She had to be burning through mana like crazy, but wands and staves had mana storage she could draw on. I couldn’t count on winning a race between my health pool and her mana, especially when she could have more wands in hiding. I needed to turn up the heat.

First, I activated Aura of Persistence to grant myself some Shielding of my own. It was expensive to use when I was the only one to benefit, but I was flush with stamina to burn and any amount of mitigation would help. Since it was an aura, it also increased my attack and defense by 5 from Auradilato. Not much, but I was all about stacking bonuses. I was also about to abandon defense to try and do something that might be dumb. If it worked, I’d buy myself some time to set up my next tactic. If it failed, I’d eat a bunch of damage without getting anything in return.

The plan would live or die based on Ishi’s Wisdom score. If it was much higher than my Intelligence, then what I had in mind wouldn’t work. My INT was a 40, which was a common score for Delvers to hang around since it came with a fairly powerful evolution. The next evo wasn’t until the attribute reached a score of 70, leading many Delvers to treat 40 as either an end goal for a stat or at least somewhere to let things lie while they focused on other attributes.

Ishi was a caster, meaning Wisdom was important for her. She also focused on long-range fighting, which Wisdom helped with since it buffed perception. However, the meat of her spells would key off of Intelligence, and those were hitting me hard. She also leaned heavily into external tools to make her mana go farther, like the wand and staff. So, I expected INT to be her primary.

We felt evenly matched for Speed, not just movement but also reaction time and how quickly we processed the battle. She had a slight edge on me, but not enough for a serious advantage. She was also sitting on a pretty stout health pool, as mentioned.

Finally, I knew she was using the Telekinesis spell to control her bows. Telekinesis allowed the caster to control an object as though they were holding it. That meant that to make good use of a bow–the kind she had, anyway–the caster still needed at least some Agility. It was possible she had a weird set of evos and skills that let her use a bow even though she didn’t have the stats for it, but I had another reason to believe she had some points stacked into Agility, and that was how she controlled her staff.

She didn’t control the staff through Telekinesis. Magical Thinker hadn’t triggered when she’d first sent it floating, and I couldn’t detect any significant mana flowing between Ishi and her staff as I could with her bows. There were a couple of evolutions that I knew of that would allow her to control the staff in the way she did, but the best match was an Agility 20 evolution called No Handing.

Ishi’s soul made it tough to determine whether she had attribute inflation going on like I did, but the deep, ancient feeling I got from the core of her soul made me think that the majority of her non-System power was coming from someplace other than attributes.

At Level 21, Ishi would have 186 total stat points. From what I’d seen of the fight, my best guess would be that they were arrayed something like this:

STR:1

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AGI:20

SPD:20

FOR:40

INT:63

WIS:40

CHA:1

LCK:1

If so, her WIS was the same as my INT, and if I tried to force-teleport her, the contest would come down to a coin flip. The cost of losing was the time it took to try, but nothing would be stopping me from trying again. Unless she killed me, of course. Otherwise, I only needed to win that coin flip once.

Buffed up and ready to gamble, I activated the next stage of my plan, which involved tackling an Unstoppable woman.

I opened a pair of Closet portals and used Shortcut to get within arm’s reach of Ishi. This was quite close, considering she was moving at about 500 miles per hour in the direction I now occupied. I wrapped her up, bear-hugging for all I was worth while the woman slammed into me like a concrete pillar wearing an irresponsibly powerful jet pack. The sound of our armor smashing together was nearly deafening and my head swam a bit from our helms colliding.

While Ishi couldn’t be stopped, that didn’t mean that every part of her body was filled with god-like strength. I was definitely stronger than she was, and I was able to keep her arms pinned to her sides. I saw her blue eyes narrow from behind her visor right before she started dumping spells on the both of us. Spells that ignored her, of course.

During the one second it took for Shortcut to come back, I ate another 300 damage from Ishi’s space-defiling magicks, dropping my health to 1,097. Once the spell was ready, I opened the Closet again, then used Bubble plus Ziggurat to make Shortcut into a short-range AoE attack and attempted to send Ishi away.

The System had some unusually forthright commentary about what happened under the hood here.

Ishi’s WIS check ties your INT check!

In cases like these, LCK determines the winner.

Get wrecked, Princess!

Ishi disappeared and went through the Closet portal, but I hadn’t sent her to another space within the now-massive tunnel that served as our arena. Nor did I send her into the Closet itself. Instead, I’d opened the portal to Eschengal right in front of the Closet entrance portal, sending Ishi on a little vacation to the middle of Eschendur, several thousand miles away.

I slammed the door behind Ishi as my heart pounded from adrenaline. I couldn’t believe that had worked. I couldn’t believe that the contest had been a tie. I couldn’t believe that fucking Luck had determined the winner!

Maybe it was a better stat than I’d thought.

Regardless, although I’d just sent Ishi halfway across the known world, I didn’t expect that to keep her away for long. I shot toward the nearest wall at max speed, using Shortcut to close the distance faster. Once I was within range of a single teleport, I activated Gravity Anchor and started throwing copies of Somncres into orbit around me.

The hammers whipped out and got caught in my artificial gravity well. Coordinated Thinker worked alongside both instances of focus and my robust mental stats to keep everything perfectly aligned without any of the hammers intercepting one another.

I got twenty hammers out before a crack appeared in the air. Reality peeled back like a curtain to reveal Ishi standing in the middle of a well-worn road leading into the capital city of Eschendur. Several travelers gaped at the spectacle, alongside merchants running stalls and their customers. One Deijinon woman dropped the muffin she was just about to bite into. It landed in some mud, which was a tragedy.

I’d made sure to kill Ishi’s momentum with Shortcut before sending her off to Eschengal, which was something I could do but often forgot about. Technically that was a way to circumvent her Unstoppable buff, but the applications here had no practical advantage for me. I’d done it because I hadn’t wanted her to make a crater right outside of Eschendur’s capital city, but neither had I wanted her loose inside the Closet to unravel all my secrets. Plus, this was way more impressive, and it let both Ishi and Her Silver Majesty know something very important.

“You could have escaped anytime you wanted,” said Ishi, before eyeing my crowded orbital ring of hammers. She floated towards me and the portal snapped shut behind her, leaving a horde of shocked Eschens behind. That’d be a story to take home to the family. I was probably getting a reputation in that part of the world.

“Aye, Princess,” I said. “But escape would not have advanced my cause. I’ve come for an audience, and an audience I shall have.”

“That is rather presumptuous of you,” Ishi replied. “No one is entitled to an audience with the Rulers.”

“I would never presume to be entitled to such a thing. However, I believe your mother told me that I’d earn an audience with her by passing this test.” I gestured between the two of us. “I imagine that winning our duel will suffice.”

“You are half-dead,” said Ishi. “You have played your tricks and, as impressive as they were, I am nowhere near defeat. Do not let your vanity be your undoing. There is wisdom in surrender, and you will still have earned an audience with me.”

“I am deeply moved by your concern, Princess, and honored to have the opportunity to converse with you in a more comfortable setting. However, if being half dead was enough to cow me, I would have been killed many times over.”

“Then our duel continues,” she said.

“Did it ever stop?”

Though I couldn’t see Ishi’s face, I could feel a delightful smile radiating through her soul. She’d felt obligated to give me an out but had never really wanted to stop. She was having fun.

I doubted she’d be smiling when she saw what I was up to.