While they waited at the rendezvous location Mira sat down on a chair beside a wall and stared into space as she thought ‘Damn I’m strong. It’s hard to believe that I was the same person who was just a sex slave about a year ago’.
Mira sighed and thought ‘Now, I wonder, if I was to face myself what would be the best way to win?’ Mira pondered over the question for a while and came up with one probable solution ‘Although the Novas are powerful I don’t use much energy to make them. Since they are my ambition but also just a construct of my energy they can become immaterial but I can’t detonate them when they are immaterial. So if I’m fast enough to remove the Nova and throw it away before it explodes I’ll be safe if I fight against myself’.
Mira thought for a while before shaking her head and thinking ‘It’s just not feasible, I’ll probably target vital spots like the head or the heart so injuring those organs to remove the Nova is just taking a step backward. And besides I don’t think I’ll be able to remove it faster than I can detonate it if I fight myself, even after ignoring the damage I’ll do to myself’.
Mira closed her eyes for a moment and opened them as she came to a realization ‘I use little energy for my Novas but that would be a disadvantage. If I was fighting Jade he would just compress his energy and his energy would repel the Nova since in the end of the day they are just energy. The Novas won’t be able to get close to him. I’d have to make a bigger Nova which would be easier for him to dodge while being harder for me to accelerate because of the greater size’.
Mira squealed and jumped in place upon realizing the weakness of her technique but she soon got deflated as she thought ‘Then how do I fix that weakness?’She thought dejectedly ‘I can only increase my energy stat as a stop gap. I’ll find a way to overcome it as I improve. It’s a weakness of energy in and of itself I don’t think it will be solved easily’.
Eventually the other platoons came back to the rendezvous point many were surprised at the report of platoon G. Mira was expecting that she would have performed the best but she learnt that her achievements were pretty much on the same levels as the other peak Rank 6s.
The most amazing performance was credited to a Vampire called Anastasia whose platoon members didn’t have a single injury and killed the highest number of monsters. She was not an aura user but she had a broken skill called Blade Tree. Her energy acted as an extension of her sword and formed a longer blade that could split and converge. The blades split until they were as thin as spider webs and could converge to be as thick as a car. They were also extremely sharp and could be freely controlled by Anastasia.
The greatness of the skill came from the fact that it could absorb the life force (as abstract as it might seem) of those they pierce and conduct that life force through the Blade Tree and redirect it to heal anyone else pierced by one of the Blades as Anastasia chose.
This caused Anastasia’s platoon, platoon C, to have no injuries even though they were the weakest platoon. Anastasia would just stab any monster she could reach with Blade Tree’s roots and cause the blade to make branches inside to monster’s body to prevent them from ever being able to remove it. When the monster then fought any person she would transfer the life force of the monster to the person it was fighting whenever the person was injured. She did this until the monster died.
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Although her platoon was quite traumatized since they had to keep fighting no matter how hurt they got, her performance was still considered the best since her platoon killed the most monsters. The monsters that joined the fight could never run away or leave like in Mira’s fights since the blades in their bodies prevented that and the most of the monsters didn’t notice what the blade was doing to them at all and only paid the blades attention when they realized they couldn’t run away with it stuck in their bodies.
Mira took the performance of Anastasia as a challenge and thought of ways to ensure her platoon never got hurt and the monsters couldn’t resist but she soon realized ‘This Anastasia’s skill is too perfect for support. I can’t beat the performance. The best I can do is to keep Novas in the bodies of monsters instead of detonating it right away; this way I can just create more Novas to put into any other monster that arrives and detonate them only when the monster they’re in is about to kill one of my platoon members. It can’t beat the fact that Anastasia can heal her platoon but it will remove the chance of a monster leaving the battle alive’.
Days passed as Night City kept hitting the territories of the King and running away. The higher Ranked monsters knew what was happening and they tried to help the Rank 6 monsters but Samuel, Kenny, Jake and Charlotte kept killing them.
Two weeks passed and Night City conducted flash raids twice every day, one at morning and one at night, before a change happened on Mira’s battle field. At the start of a morning raid Mira did her usual and made her Nova armor and she wanted to put Novas into the bodies of all the monsters. The monsters though had a formation.
The close range monsters protected the long range monsters behind them; the monsters were now copying the formation of Night City. All the long ranger monsters were focusing on Mira which caused her to focus on defending herself with a large hollow Nova sphere made of many small Nova beads that she deformed and meshed together into a sphere.
The sphere held up well against the combined assault of the monsters and since the monsters had a larger population they didn’t lose so much even if their long range monsters weren’t covering them.
The platoon performed various strategies to maneuver the situation. The defenders of a part of their circle would purposely draw back and the monsters before the defenders would foolishly press forward only to find themselves surrounded behind enemy lines when the circle of the platoon reformed behind them.
In the air the flying monsters kept chasing the long rangers to prevent them from helping Mira by counter firing. The long rangers would fly away from them and lure the monsters into positions in the air where they were surrounded by other Night City members that were also being chased and the members would ambush the chasing monsters one at a time while running away until they were no more.
The tactics that Night City had became more effective as more people became Rank 6s so Mira didn’t have to baby the platoon all the time. Mira focused on the attacks that came hit her sphere.
She focused on the energy in those attacks as there were all sort of attacks coming from different races of monsters. She didn’t counter attack; she was now trying to replicate the capabilities of the Soak Bubble that could absorb the energy in attacks. Mira thought ‘If Nova is my energy then it should naturally turn into whatever energy it touches like normal energy does but it is also a part of me, it will not just change so easily. And besides Soak bubbles didn’t just replicate a type of energy it absorbed energy’.
Mira thought for a while but the task of creating Soak Bubbles was too contradictory to her original skill. Soak Bubbles absorbed but Novas detonated she couldn’t make her ambition turn into a black hole. But then she thought ‘If Jade made the Bubble armor for me to learn from then there must be a way to achieve it’.