An explosive intro played on screen and Almarine sat beside Winter on her couch excited. She’d just returned from making quick work of an oddly placed army.
The kingdom of the Mana Monarchs had an entire battalion being surrounded by a forest that came alive around them on one side, and a Dump full of even more dangerous opponents on the other side, which had made Almarine’s involvement very slight in her opinion.
“Run!” Many of the troops had scattered, but Almarine used giant hands formed from pure life force to pluck them from the ground and toss them miles in random directions throughout the forest. The wild beast manageable by a group, but flung alone through the air and dropped into the middle of nowhere, left most who experienced it on a one way path toward death.
Almarine shook her head and pulled herself from the memory and back toward the hologram of Arson, the young man running through a jungle while communicating with his host, Lane.
“Give me a second, I have incoming,” spoke Arson. His voice matched on screen with subtitles that flashed at the bottom of the holograms in a multitude of languages. The young man darted toward a group of incoming competitors who’d grouped up and charged in his direction.
Almarine smiled at Arson’s use of hand based constructs, completely unaware of how Arson’s own constructs were all growing consciousness. It wasn’t even until Arson summoned his weapon and threw Sky toward his two available hands above him that Almarine even began to wonder at the progress of Arson’s Cultivation.
“Those hands can’t be too capable,” started Almarine, but Winter shook his head and spoke up.
“Haven’t even seen what Arson is capable of yet because of those sparking hands and that weapon of his,” said Winter, playing a companion video of Arson and his friends and siblings leaving the small RaidCorp building. Almarine glanced over just in time to see Sky being used to sling explosive conductive water slashes through the air.
Are those…
“We can’t tell from the video truly, but I’m sure those attacks have a vampiric nature. Some of the people we interrogated after the fact couldn’t use mana for days afterward,” finished Winter, confirming what Almarine had only just broached mentally.
When she looked back at the broadcast, Arson had already somehow disabled two of his opponents, had an arrow directly through the center of one hand, and was already being charged by another group of three.
“He’s not going to last long if he keeps fighting like this,” said Winter, but Almarine felt… differently. She’d kept a close eye on her, some would say, favorite charge, but the woman couldn’t deny her great grandson had her full attention now.
“Do we know if he can handle teleporters?” Almarine shushed Winter and watched clueless as to what would happen next. A young woman darting toward Arson, vanishing and reappearing closer and closer toward his back yelled right as she appeared a meter away.
To both their amazement Arson jumped and while performing a backflip, his Scythe dove under him. The teleporting young woman was yanked off her feet and dragged bodily through the air below Arson and directly into the path of an incoming arrow. An arrow she took directly to the shoulder.
“That counts toward his total point count, right?” Almarine glanced toward Winter who was already checking Arson’s point total on his flatscreen. She turned back just in time to see Arson unfold aerially, catch his weapon and swing the weapon as hard as he could through the air.
A white gold slash tinged with multi colored sparks cleaved one arrow in half, redirected another, and exploded when it touched the archer at a distance.
“Wow, folks, that looked like it hurt,” said Lane. The announcer came in with a beautiful scene by scene commentary, all the way until Arson had taken out 11 total competitors, another group of four running away after seeing Arson deal with almost three opponents simultaneously.
“So Carter, you were assigned to do your best in the preliminaries. How do you feel you are going to fare after what you have experienced so far?” asked Lane.
“I hope to at least make it to the tower, but, at this point, I don’t know if I’ll even manage that,” said Arson. He handed his weapon back to his constructs and pulled free the half of the arrow that was still in his hand after his earlier combat. One of Rob’s potions was pulled from his inventory and poured over the hole in his hand, the barbed arrow having had taken some of his flesh with its flight through his hand.
“Embers that hurt,” said Arson with a sip from a potion bottle with his company's brand on the side. His hand seen on camera closing rapidly as he sipped. He’d never needed potions until recently, and wasn’t even aware of the branding being done by his team in that moment.
“Gonna have to thank Rob for those. Thought they’d taste like medicine. How’d he make them taste like juice?” asked Arson seriously expecting an answer when he looked at the camera flying above him.
“Company secret, Carter, company secret,” responded Lane with a smile. Also having no idea how Rob made the potions herself.
“Looks like you have more important things to worry about though,” said Lane. The camera tilting slightly to show a group of six running in his direction.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have showed up so late, looks like I missed the teamwork portion of the rules,” mumbled Arson.
“There wasn’t one,” said Lane.
“Didn’t think so…”
…
Legion had struggled to enter the preliminaries as a scion, but in the end, seceded. The assassin was dropped nearby the tower, but after hearing the announcer’s words, he left the area alone, and rushed off instead.
He had one objective and that was to either to abduct Sovereign Arson Omni, or retrieve a pocket sized device where the young man was said to keep an entire building’s worth of people.
He believed it was going to take him quite a long time to find his target, but the young man had quickly put a target on his own back. Not much time had passed, and Legion had already overheard many groups speaking about a young man worth a massive amount of points within the jungle that fit his target's description.
He climbed a tree and waited. Clones being made of his physical body filled the canopy of trees held within the jungle. A literal army being formed by an individual to create what Legion felt to be the perfect trap.
“Sorry, young HonorBorn. It's time for you to pay for your actions against beings above your station,” said Legion, just as Arson ran past the first tree Legion’s clones filled. The young man speaking a single word the moment Legion’s first clone moved.
“Gestalt!”
…
Arson was confused. The trees all around him were filled with enemies, hundreds of seemingly identical enemies from what he learned from each physical blink made while he moved, his closed eye dominion offering massive pulses of information every other moment.
“Gestalt!” Arson yelled in the moment that the first body jumped toward him. He suspected that something was off about his newest opponent, and his assumption was confirmed immediately.
Temper and Bloom emerged from Arson’s back and the young man and woman were sprung upon by an absurd amount of identical twins.
All three were surged by dozens of opponents at once, and for the first time in a long time, Arson was forced to give his current fight everything he had.
A single kick from Temper sent a clone toward Bloom, that smashed an explosive rune into the clone's face. An additional rune was shot out from her palm, and into the chest of another. The rune expelling a fan of lightning that exploded the bodies of a cluster of clones still in the trees above.
“Damage over death, Bloom, these aren’t the trials!” Blood and guts rained down through a portion of the nearby forest. Temper stopped breaking necks and shifted toward single strikes that incapacitated the clones instantly.
Arson defended from a group of opponents, all in front of him, before a wide kick toward their heads and chest forced the trio to give him space. Arson’s living hand Jill, still holding Sky swiped the scythe at the same trio and caused them all to duck during their united backpedal. This allowed Jane to pull the middle clone off its feet.
Jane dragged the clone on the ground in between Arson’s legs as Arson sent a flurry of drill punches from his favorite new dead art, Jeet-kun-do down toward every undefended vital point he could before Jane yanked up, and slammed the clone into more replicas.
“Bloom can go boom,” yelled Bloom as she flew by Arson. The Gestalt form the only reason Arson hadn’t been completely swarmed. He and Temper shared a look and Temper shook his head afraid, but as Arson was forced to go on the defensive again, he made an executive decision.
“Do your thing, Bloom!” Temper rolled his eyes, and dashed away from the now glowing Bloom as she made a u-turn aerially, and began to dive toward the swelling crowds of clones. Her objective obviously as close to the centermost point of all the moving figures as possible.
“I’m a falling star!” Bloom’s cry made many of the clones look toward her lit body, but it was far too late. Arson dove behind a tree, a moment after Temper, both barely able to cover their heads with their hands before a storm of runes exploded out from Bloom’s body.
The symbols of Uni-Vare collided in a reality distorting explosion that caused the illusion of the jungle to be stripped from the area.
Fake trees created a bowl of knocked over vegetation surrounding a now smoldering crater. Bloom nowhere to be seen, her body slowly reforming within the limits of Arson’s soul realm. The only proof of her existence the flaming trees that turned to ash only a few meters away from Arson and Temper.
“Mother of embers, I get how that’s useful, but why do we ever let her do that?” Arson looked around, closing his eyes to check the area more thoroughly before he responded.
“Just be sparking glad she was suppressed, or we’d have more problems on our hands!”
…
Labyrinth waited near a mountain top for a girl said to be completing a climbing challenge well beyond her skill level. His brother had just sent him a message saying he’d barely escaped his first attempt alive and needed time to reevaluate how he would secure his target.
This gave Labyrinth the perfect opportunity to win their bet and capture his target first. A target that only those who’d followed her climb more thoroughly would be capable of noticing had evolved and developed over the last fortnight.
“Woohoo!” Labyrinth heard the girl come to a halt momentarily before she ran around the corner and toward the Plateau he now stood on. He picked it as it was the last true area before the pinnacle of the school's mountain that he himself could reach safely, and that was viable for him to use his abilities to their full range.
The illusionist spread his arms wide, and the path that once opened up to a field sized peak, now was completely blocked off by a high walled maze. The height of the magical glowing stone enough to dissuade any Cultivators from climbing or jumping, even with the assistance from movement abilities or skills, very few would try.
Troy came around the corner moving at almost 500 miles per hour, her figure vanishing inside the maze in a blink. Once within the maze's perimeter, the Illusionist was capable of witnessing all that took place within his constructions boundaries, the blur that was Troy slowed to a crawl as Labyrinth took aim from his closed off position at the maze's center.
A ball of condensed mana pooled in the air above Labyrinth, the frame of a pyramidal weapon slowly taking form. The young man frowned, Troy’s body seemingly broke into multiples of herself, each one moving just as quickly as the original and in many directions.
“To bad for you, my brother is unmatched in this, or maybe you’d actually have—“ The young man was cut off, when each of the young woman’s forms split again, all at a distance from one another. A dozen became dozens in an instant.
Forced to begin to shift the walls in an attempt to keep the copies close to one another, Labyrinth focused further on the task at hand. The weapon above his target almost charged to a level that would handle any his level, let alone the unregistered attendant he’d been sent after.
Labyrinth began to wonder if he should focus primarily on charging his skill, the young woman moving through his maze beginning to confuse him. The multi colored bodies were easy to analyze when clumped together, but in the few breaths that had passed since Troy had entered, she’d already moved through a fourth of the maze.
Yes, he had fought his brother with the same style ability all his life, but his brother wasn’t additionally capable of moving at speeds beyond the average Cultivator their level.
Finally his weapon was charged, and immediately started to spin. In a blink, an explosive shot of mana equivalent to a shotgun blast was expelled from the pyramid of mana above Labyrinth.
Normally at such expansive ranges this style of attack lost power through range, unknown trajectory of bullet or ammunition based weaponry, and the spread of the explosive projectiles which further caused inaccuracy.
Labyrinth’s attack on the other hand, was the equivalent to a turret, with the volatility of a shotgun, and the accuracy of a sniper rifle. A mere breath after he began shooting almost half of the moving bodies had exploded into bursts of light.
His target may have been moving fast, but with the amount of targets, it was harder for him to miss than not, and he smiled at how many he’d been able to strike even as they sprinted at astonishing speeds while navigating through a maze.
Then he began to wonder if he too may fail his assignment, the young woman doing something he’d never expected could or would ever occur.
One of the figures stopped moving, and instead sat down, beginning to meditate. This isn’t what surprised Labyrinth though, as many had given up on making their way through his mazes and had been easily detained during previous jobs, many times. No, what had surprised Labyrinth was the sheer number of copies that began to ripple into life around his target.
Labyrinth: I think we may have an issue here, brother.
Labyrinth had hacked the school’s security system to be able to disrupt the footage of his actions while there, yet instead used it to share the experience of what he was being faced with. An image of his target from above attached to his Overlay’s message.
A horde of bodies was captured as it grew even above the walls constructed to capture the Cultivator within. Clones of Troy could be seen in frame spilling over into nearby sections of the maze, many on their feet and moving even more recklessly through the maze. Some wall kicked to return to the top of the walls, more clones being made from the apex of the maze.
The number of clones being made eclipsed the fire rate of Labyrinth’s weapon, which would soon run out of the energy he’d stored within his skill to fire. By the time his brother responded, the advice given was redundant. He was already backpedaling by the time the first copy of his target reached the interior walls, climbing up to stand dozens of meters above him. She looked around before she saw him, their eyes locking.
Legion: Run brother, I think we may have been tricked by those royal brats!
Labyrinth had frozen. The want and urge to run the only thing his mind offered as the young woman yelled in his direction.
“Do you know how to get out of here, or are you trapped in here!”
Labyrinth turned tail and ran for it. Troy’s clone whistled, and by the time he turned back to see the young woman pointing in his direction. An entire corner of the square that had once been his barrier, had been consumed by a flood of bodies.
The entire area filled with sprinting forms that Labyrinth knew he wouldn’t be able to escape, even as his turret continued to fire above.
Labyrinth: Safe and Dangerous protocols. Don’t tell Lumen anything unless I’ve been gone for more than three days!
He’d never been close to being approached by a target, his brother and he were normally together in these situations, but as the targets had been both unregistered and without true fame or notoriety, they’d decided to obtain them separately. They’d done this numerous times before for low threat targets, but now,… Labyrinth knew mistakes had been made, and if he survived, far more research would be done on any target high, or low if within the Cultivation community’s hierarchy.
‘Oye. Stop running or this is going to get bad for you, quick!!”
Labyrinth only had one hope left in escape, and he knew if the young woman behind him figured him out, he may pay for entrapping someone for the first time in his life. His maze had up to that point had a 100% infallibility, tested against many, but his target’s brute forcing of the maze through such a familiar skill felt even worse.
Labyrinth once more put his entire focus into the walls of the maze, and separated himself from view in an instant. Walls moved all at once. A massive number of copies smashed between walls forced to collide into one another. A stream of curses heard at his back as he continued to run.
“And I’m not going to stop kicking until you let me out of here or there is nothing left to step on”
…
Jade struggled to hold on. Draphen had lost control after the third random guard attack through the MegaPlex, his draconic form barreling through the halls.
“Really!” Jade held on to a single scale on the dragon’s back as Draphen’s natural breathing flowed free of his closed maw, flames rippling down his body as he grew further.
His wings wide, pillars crumbling as the pair raced by unhindered by construction nor Cultivator. Women and men either rushing aside, or crushed in any meager attempts of bravery to stop the beast.
“Really!”