“Where is the node? How are you looking at it?” Muse continued to sing without moving her open mouth while Hector lay prone on the roof tiles from a distance as if he was hiding himself.
“I have good eyes.” The Frost Elf didn’t explain further.
To the rest of them, they were looking at an empty street. Ebony didn’t sense any fluctuation or congregation of ambient and foreign mana to indicate something was out of place.
As much as he wanted to buy or leave mana ores while taking some food sitting in front of them, he didn’t dare to take another step closer without the go sign from the two good hunters with hyper-sensitive sixth senses. Invisible tripwires were placed around them.
“Any complaints about this are on you Hecky boy. I was working under Royal orders.” Muse patted the Prince’s shoulders and proudly puffed her chest out for achieving what she did.
None of them cared for his ugly expression.
Ning Xin clicked her tongue out loud. “How do we hunt them…”
“Clearing away eyes, conveni-”
A low-pitched voice echoed and set their bodies into motion. Far above them were silhouettes covered in mist. Reducing their altitudes and exposing their presence set Vent and Ning Xin moving first.
Ebony didn’t manage to save the innocent buildings around them and he let Hector use water magic to put the fires out. He chased after the two hunters.
On his way up, a spinning orb fell past him.
“By the order of the sovereign mandate, full restoration.” Mumbling, the spinning orb covered in mist stopped mid-air and spiralled back to connect to the rest of the mist.
Ebony figured that Vent had lopped off the person’s head before he even reacted, flew up or even saw what happened. But he wasn’t too late to see the next. Without an arrow nocked, Vent had his bowstring drawn. In between his arms, bowstring and frame was likely a neck but visually was just a lump of mist.
Releasing his fingers, the mist split into two.
“By the order of the sovereign mandate, full restoration.” A different voice, softer and more feminine echoed not through the air but in his head. The split mist rejoined and scattered away from Vent and recollected to form their humanoid silhouette again.
“““By the order of the sovereign mandates, grovel.”””
Ebony raised his brows, now that he had access to his mind space. This attack seemed to be travelling through the endless colourless transparency of his mind. It didn’t even get close to the core where his memories and self were. He felt nothing from the mandate. However, he had to catch the falling swordswoman who was susceptible to the weird attack. With one hand around her waist, and her arm around his shoulder, she managed to resist.
The opponent was much stronger than the villagers of the Nebulian’s home they trespassed so her resistance to these sorts of attacks should have strengthened drastically.
“Limp Weaponry.” “Muscle Failure.” “Mana Expulsion.”
Three separate Mandates were cast, Ning Xin’s twin swords didn’t go limp like they used to but the moment the words passed through his mind, he was blasted by Ning Xin’s mana as every bit in her body was forced out.
It didn’t take away her muscular control or her vitality-based enhancements and he tapped her shoulder to prevent her from extracting energy from her mask. Sadly, she was a poor match against the Nebulian or Mandate users.
‘Now I’m sure, Vent is also a partial mana being.’ Ebony landed back on the roof dragged Hector up from his knees and kowtowed head.
“I have to kill all three of them at the same time, this will take some time. Have the young descendant destroy the node.” Vent’s firm voice reached them in another moment. He didn’t talk to his opponents at all, and neither did his opponents have the opportunity for conversation as they healed each other with their mandates.
The mandates were Will-based as he assumed. If Trolls were highly attuned to physical usage, Elves to magical then these Nebulian were highly attuned to the usage of Will. Forcing one’s Will onto another produced pathetic effects. Ebony could only passively affect the unclassed and he was a Grandmaster, it was less obvious on Journeyman while Masters might not even notice he was attempting to infect their thoughts with his own.
A racial trait likely helped but he also realised the mandate users need a large number of specialised skills of a higher tier than their opponent for their mandates to be most effective. Right now, they are using weaker versions of their mandates which have a lower threshold for the effects of their mandates to take place. It felt to him like “Mana Inhibition” moved in his mind space faster, it was thinner and could go further before dissipating. So he deduced that the heavier and stronger the Will they were enforcing, the slower and more defences it had to go through to take effect.
They were perfect at combination skills though, as long as they made the same mandate at the same time, their power stacked. Enough to take an effect on Vent who was getting bogged down by debuff after debuff.
The Nebulian was aiming at all of them and Hector couldn’t snap out of it despite his awareness and red-faced resistance to the Mandate that was forcing his knees down. He lost control of his body and his mana was going haywire, though not exactly being expelled from him.
Until Muse started to sing again.
There were no words, just hymns and weird tonal sounds.
A barrier of music surrounded the building where they stood. They were burnt but remained standing thanks to the quick extinguishing of fire.
While Hector got his bearings, Ebony had his senses watching the fight above them. He did his best to ward off the mandate by wrapping Hector with his mana but it was ineffective.
The mandates were not fully blocked out by Muse and he could feel dozens of them attempting to dig to the core of his mind every second. Evidently, their cast speed wasn’t that fast considering their levels and that there were 3 of them. Some of the weakness debuffs such as pained breath, muscle spasms, joint ache were affecting him. While the version one step higher such as excruciating breath and muscle weakening was affecting Ning Xin and Hector so bad they could barely breathe.
Muse was locked in singing but the sweat rolling down her forehead told him she was not free from the effects of the accelerated exhaustion, substantial energy consumption, dizziness, nausea, migraine mandates and more. Ebony also had visual impairment but there were many that he couldn’t tell if the others were affected by.
The Nebulian changed from debuff mandates to self-buffing mandates because of its ineffectiveness on Vent. The debuffs that had already been cast stayed in effect so they might have run out of effective debuffs and only a small fraction affected Ebony.
Three strands of thick mana twisted and formed arrows above Vent’s fingers. The arrowhead was crafted with ice and wisps of mist started to gather around the arrow.
‘Wow. So mana can become that pure.’ Ebony wasn’t surprised to find the first person who utilised denser mana than himself but Vent’s mana purity did not feel anything like the Kings or Arch Mages that he had come across. As someone who personally witnessed the Elven Matriarch cast spells, he would say that Vent’s mana was far purer.
The effects of mana purity had always been a slight mystery to him because there were too many variables when mana clashed with mana. The easier method that gave him observational statistics was to use mana ores of different rarities but the effects couldn’t be translated to what would happen if a mage of higher mana purity were to collide their spells with someone of a lower mana purity. Mostly due to elemental differences, mana densities and a load of skill effects backing each other spells that made results unreliable.
Vent took aim, pulled his bowstring back and lazily fired all three arrows together. His previous arrows all missed after the ‘projectile misdirection’ mandate.
The latest shots trailed after the misty silhouettes but shot through the mist which brought sniggers but the arrows made a speedy but gentle turn to take a second strike. It passed through their misty bodies again but their disdain was gone as each of them had their mist covers torn out by the second homing touch.
Ebony saw patches of fur before the mist covered them again. Three arrows continued to accelerate mid-flight and make sharper and sharper curves. He heard the sound of raindrops pitter-patter as they tore the Nebulian’s misty figures over and over again.
Then chunks of ice fell from their body and their misty cover began to break apart.
Within the next ten seconds, they were essentially covered in a sphere of a singular rotating arrow. He wasn’t too shocked about the arrow speed to achieve the feat but the fact that the Nebulian couldn’t disengage themselves. It was possibly a compounded trap skill.
Ebony was distracted no longer and probed his perception deeper, looking around like Ning Xin was vehemently doing so. She urged Hector to hurry but they were directionless. The Prince was getting better thanks to Muse but none of them could see or sense a spatial node that Vent claimed to be present.
As much as Xin would like to fight, she didn’t seem interested in joining the current hunt above them. Her anxiousness was spilling through even in her combat mode where only battle and hunting should be flowing through her mind. Despite her mask covering her eyes, he could sense her attention shifting like a blur. Her Intuition couldn’t pinpoint the danger or target to hunt.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Hurry! Just punch down there!” Impatient or urged by her sixth sense, she grabbed and pushed Hector into the skies.
A little slow to react but Hector reorientated himself in the air and quickly tossed aside any hesitation.
“Oh boy, destroying shophouses wasn’t part of the plan. There better not be anyone inside!” Hector’s chaotic elements began pushing outwards.
Ebony’s ability to conjure mana around the Prince was pushed back exponentially by every single pulse of element that coursed through the weird man’s body. After 3 elements, Ebony could only conjure ice a few kilometres away from Hector. By the sixth element, he wasn’t able to conjure any elements outside his own body throughout his entire range unless he utilised Will to fight and place his Domain down.
By the seventh, Hector was anti-mage in Ebony’s definition. Even within his Domain, any elemental conjuration clogged up, slowing and weakening all his spells. Pure mana was undisturbed but that was only for him. It was the reason why Hector’s personal unit was filled with warriors and soldiers who didn’t use magic. They didn’t have many Domain mages and not any that were free to follow one of the many, many princes that weren’t even the next generation but three generations down the line.
“NOW!” Ning Xin ignored that Hector hadn’t gotten to the height of his powers and screamed loud enough to tear eardrums. He didn’t even catch the sudden cut to help transmit her voice but it wasn’t necessary, he never heard her shout as loud.
Hector reacted as fast as he could and threw out his punches. Ebony couldn’t see the punch but if Hector got the chance to enhance himself with another element or two, he might exceed Ning Xin in terms of physical stats but he could usually only maintain that state for a single attack and still be at risk of intense mana poisoning.
A ball of water was punched into a disc, then earth, fire, wind, metal, lightning, mist and then Ning Xin pulled Muse down to lay on the roof tiles.
Ebony was a beat slower and Flickered to catch Hector’s body. The Prince released his black beam of chaotic elements at the very last second but it swerved away from his initial aim at the centre of a street. A spark of explosion lit up in his mana perception but the effects that were the least of his problems.
Having been here for the past few minutes, the Will for his Domain had already been readied and spread out but he hadn’t supplied it with mana due to the ridiculous cost to maintain. That mere fraction of a lag had him on the edge as two pairs of hands attempted to slip a metal bracelet on him.
He spawned a few afterimages and ice arms to duplicate his own to add to his chances of slipping from the accurate hands.
“Young master, that is the level of vigilance that you need to acquire. I didn’t expect the peasants to find the node but it was a good thing I placed it.”
“Was it really necessary for you to go back and fetch the Bellicose Savants? Six of them are a waste of resources, especially these guys. How did you wrestle time into their schedule?”
“That is the importance of this resource. Watch, I called them to ensure the capture and as a lesson for you. The Savants are the only ones with Tier 5 Sovereign Arts. This is the minimal requirement to combat someone at the peak of Grade 4 Path of the Formless in close combat. With the servants at our disposal, they were the only ones that could offer resistance according to my assessment. Any stronger and the Nebula Watch would evict us. Aether conditioned against cold is rare amongst our people, there weren’t many choices and I believe we would recoup the losses with ease.”
Ebony sensed the space magic user’s urge to take action but the ‘Nebula Watch’ was something the man didn’t want to test. He was currently amazed that it took a mere 2 men to push him into a tough spot through sheer martial technique. Since he had his Domain focus on augmenting his physical capabilities before setting up spatial dominance, they didn’t have a stat advantage over him but that was changing as they ramped their augmentations up.
It was completely different from Ning Xin’s complete dominance through power and speed.
Below them, a stage of fire and molten stone was growing in size. Of the 6 large and weirdly armoured men, 1 of them targeted Ning Xin. He was running in lava up to his calves like nobody's business.
The last three were standing by the space user instead of the young master.
One of his opponents used dual daggers or shortswords--equivalent. It was a dark orange blade of energy, he presumed they called aether instead of mana. He could see a metal base within the orange blade and the handle was normal but the weapon was mostly energy.
The other was slightly more unusual with the same orange energy over his arms and legs, making his opponent look like a human with 4 massive double edge blades over his limbs. He was more of a technical monster fighter like the Apex Apes than a warrior. Both of them gave up on the cuffs after two attempts when he landed a couple of sonic-infused punches that froze their guts and impeded their blood flow. They were particularly irritated that clashing blows with him got reflections of vibrations and ice flowing along the reflections.
“It truly is a Grade 4 Path of the Formless monster. We haven’t landed a blow. Ice and sonic are manageable but adding complex gravity control to the mix…no wonder Mr Ezekiel drafted us.”
Ebony had his reverse gravity, the most useful trick against land-bound creatures thwarted with expert use of body and mana, or aether, control to deflect his gravity magic. As fascinating as the technique of using mana to ‘grab’ onto a lump of gravity to reorientate oneself, it was the least of his focus.
He was waiting for an opportunity while the 3 standing by ‘Mr Ezekiel’ were talking and analysing him and Ning Xin. Since they weren’t overpowered in one fell swoop, and the others were just watching, they were going according to plan. Hunt, and they didn’t need to communicate to know each other's intentions.
The vast pulse of vitality that had been building up for way longer than it should put everyone in range, except Vent shake. As they should.
The heartbeat itself was weaponized and not even mana stabilisation could prevent the shockwaves from turning the surroundings into crumbs and dust.
Ebony took the signal and rammed all his processing power into increasing the gravity of Xin’s opponent. Flickering to kick the back of his knees and tearing through the aether, his flames dug all the way down to the bone and removed mobility. His hand was ready to catch the man’s odd looking helmet when he jerked from the impact to the legs after being stunned and terrified by the Immortal’s Pulse.
Trained for battle, he snapped out of the fear but Ebony easily lifted the disconnected head up. With his hand so close to orifices, the prevention of his flames from digging in didn’t matter much. Ebony chucked the mana he was proud of and compressed his entire Domain onto the head, sealing it in ice before denoting it with vibrations.
“Don’t stop.” The monster of fire was barely conscious of her words but she wasn’t attacking Ebony, a win in his book.
Icicle nailed the man on the chest where an extremely thin scorched hole had been left. Being used to hunting creatures with ridiculous vitalities, they knew better than to take their chances. High evolutionary staged Trolls could regenerate heads and they saw no reason not to assume these random people couldn’t. Even if they weren’t dead they should be down for the count as long as Icicle continued to violate the man’s organs and not allow a heart to regenerate.
The target’s body wasn’t quite melting or even burning. His deep intrusion of mana wasn’t working out so well until Icicle embedded itself. Even then, Icicle was having trouble damaging the ‘mana’ imbued body. There was a lag, the man reacted and got to casting but got his head crushed before his augmented fully came through.
Their opponents were caught off guard by the sheer decisive and aggressive moves as if Ebony and Ning Xin were prepared and expecting an attack.
There wasn’t any singing in the background. Muse and Hector somehow phased out of his perception and he positively hoped that they weren’t taken away by a space mage. At the back of his mind, he was pretty sure Muse took them away with her mana wrapping both of them but he didn’t have any assurance of that.
The ‘young master’ was wafting off fear that Xin could sense from a mile away but she was intensely zooming in on the fighters, not someone who instinctively hid behind an older man who wielded space magic of supposedly immense proportion that was on constant watch.
The good sign was that one fighter still stood back and remained with the space user. Both now looking higher up, wariness pointed towards Vent. They were mumbling with each other but the words weren’t transmitting to him past the ear-shattering clashes happening around him. The bad sign was that all of them decided that Ning Xin had to go down.
Ebony, the crowd controller was the one who picked their next target and she noticed without any communication between them. He picked the one with 4 energy-bladed limbs. The long-bladed legs made the man stand almost 5 metres tall but the bulk of it were the giant energy blades that dwarfed Icicle. Yet, the man controlled his body expertly using them as the weapon they were.
The element of surprise was long gone and their opponents’ ‘mana’ had shone within his senses like a couple of suns, showing off their overwhelming advantage with augmentation. The fact that his Domain had greatly reduced strengthening effect told Ebony that they were logically out of their leagues.
Although it was clear that his Domain and all elements, gravity, ice, lightning and even non-elementals, sound and sealing were working and focused on one target. The effects barely allowed Ning Xin to trade blows with the four-bladed man. She was losing in terms of technique and battle experience.
Ebony’s attempts to ward off the others and allow her to focus on one opponent where she excelled was not going ideally. With the majority of his computational and spell-casting abilities focused on the four-bladed man to hasten his fall, he was left with a fraction of his mental faculties to augment himself with the minimal amount of his elements to help him keep them in place.
It helped that Xin could override his vitality to cast a weak version of her Core Skill on him using his vitality but he was still a third as fast and strong compared to the 3 people he was keeping attacks on him.
The fighter with the smallest frame was likely a woman under the lithe armour of monster material or alien metal and the most unique abilities they had to deal with. Armed with gauntlets not too dissimilar with Hector’s fighting style but far more polished and little to no weakness compared to Hector's amazingly flawed technique.
Her mana was sticky and landed on contact. It was also violently explosive and she decided when to denote them. It could collate and get stronger depending on how much of it she managed to stick onto him. She was just as annoyed about his vibrational and ice reflections as he was with her explosive mana that he couldn't remove once it stuck onto him.
However, unlike him, she could slowly thaw herself and he wasn’t able to freeze her over time. He ignored her complaints about not being able to land a proper hit on him despite being faster. And that hitting him hurts her more than it hurts him. The yell from the background about not killing Ebony might have helped as she didn’t dare to stack on the explosive mana.
The dual dagger user was the least of his problems, he knew how to counter humanoid dual blade move sets better than hand-to-hand. Other than the power behind the attacks, he didn’t notice any special mana effects or face any magic attacks from this fighter. He was the biggest sponsor to Ebony’s momentum.
His main problem was the amount of active physical skills they had. Regardless of their unknown levels, it was clear to him that their active skills could slice him clean. But they were…predictable. He could tell when they wanted to use a strong active skill and know which to dodge. They were good at timing each of their active skills but, two of them were insufficient to catch him off guard.
Ebony failed to stop the last fighter from charging at Ning Xin. But he didn’t rush and put himself at risk to help her. The last fighter felt like an add-on trying to slip into an exchange he could barely step into. Even the highest proficiency possible with the flail wasn’t going to help slip into a blindingly fast exchange where four human-sized blades were nervously guarding the wielder’s skin from being flayed and his flesh being roasted.
Ebony found himself keeping his Clones packed up and the flail wielder was having fun with a blood halo and three Orcas that popped out at some point in time.
“I must say, kidnapping children in broad daylight is not admirable.”
Dozens of his afterimages and feints with refraction of light came to a standstill and his attention was pulled away towards the voice. The molten roads and buildings had resolidified and his breath frosted over as his lungs burned from the intense chill.
His ice mana wouldn’t move as he wished.