Chapter 436 - Reign of the Crowned V

A flurry of metal and magic flew through the early morning sky. The sequence of heavy attacks was followed by a divine directive, an order from the goddess of the frozen wilds herself to bring the senseless violence to an end. And yet, there was no pause.

Though closest to the goddess in their physical proximity, so too were the central monsters the least mindful of her explicit instruction. The mountains ran a deep red, painted a dozen times over with rivers of blood even as the usual blizzard took hold.

While her companions were blinded by the veritable wall of snow, Lana could see clearly within her weapon’s range. She cleared away all the winter in her path with a myriad of slashes. The act exposed her to the enemy, the bipedal wooly pig with which she was engaged in combat, but she committed to it regardless. Revealing herself to the monster was far better than remaining blind when her opponent was continuing to throw its fists with pinpoint precision.

They traded blows for twenty seconds. Lana dodged between the porker’s strikes and spells and retaliated with the butt of her weapon, striking it once for every three hits that it threw in her direction. Though she took roughly half its attacks, the exchange was entirely one sided. She allowed herself to be struck—a bid to encourage the growth of her vitality.

For the most part, she was unharmed. A series of class mutations and evolutions had made her fur as tough as diamonds. It absorbed and dispersed most of the impacts that struck her and even allowed her to ignore lower level spells.

That wasn’t to say that the monster was incapable of hurting her. Its 2500 levels allowed it to ignore her newfound armour’s most impressive trait—the ability to mitigate any damage dealt by a lower leveled foe—and its individual strikes were more than heavy enough to punch through the majority of her defenses.

Still, it wasn’t like she was running the risk of death or dismemberment. The pig was a split attacker, and neither its physical or magical strikes proved themselves to be particularly powerful. Anything noteworthy had a big wind-up, and the continued use of her domain ensured that no such strike would land.

She carefully watched her axe as she stalled, waiting until another three pigs closed in before killing them all in a single blow. Their deaths came with a sigh of relief. She was lucky.

Her weapon was still unbroken.

Cracks ran all through its metal, most concentrated around the joints that held its head to its shaft. Bought in a random store they’d found along during their travels, it was never a high quality item to begin with. If anything, it was a miracle that it had survived for as long as it had.

Similar bouts continued to play out throughout the blizzard’s fifteen minute lifespan. Krail and Jules, the only two with whom Lana had reunited, continued firing their spells through the storm. The bright red explosions were far more visible than the tiny arrows, but the elf was putting in no less work. Many of the enemies Lana found were only as exposed as they were because their bodies were riddled with holes.

As the snowstorm faded, so too did the last of their enemies. They collapsed into lumps of flesh, some grasping at the arrows through their throats, some clutching their detonated stomachs, and some searching for their severed skulls.

“Is that everything?” asked the elf.

“Looks like it,” said Jules. “Not gonna lie, we handled that a lot better than I thought we would.”

“We did good,” agreed Lana.

“I mean, you did fine, sure, but I wouldn’t really say good,” said Panda. The raccoon was sitting on top of a pile of corpses, not at all minding the blood soaking its way into his fur.

“Oh, fuck off,” said Jules.

“Hey, I’m just saying it like it is,” said Panda. “You barely killed them in time.”

“Maybe, but I do think that was in part because we paced ourselves,” said Krail. “We could’ve halved the time if we didn’t conserve our resources.”

“Yeah, but if anything, you’re kinda expected to manage your shit,” said Panda. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. You passed either way,” he said. “Your next training ground’ll be the orniferin domain.” Hopping off of his bloody seat, he gestured for the others to follow.

“Fucking finally. I can’t believe you had us sit here for a whole goddamn week.”

“Not my fault you weren’t ready yet. Honestly, I’m still not sure you are,” said the raccoon. “So how about you do me a favour and at least try not to die?”

Leading the group up atop the nearest mountain, he intruded upon the eleventh of the twenty domains and, flaunting a corpse that suddenly appeared in his hand, called upon the wrath of its master.

___

Allegra took a deep breath as she evaded another one of the rat-snake’s attacks. At a glance, they were simple, boring even. The inordinately long rodent was simply rushing her down, blindly charging in a straight line without any regard for the magic she threw its way.

But in reality, the attack was far more complex. The hairs that lined the giant creature’s body disturbed the mana in their surroundings, creating invisible blades of wind powerful enough to cleave through the stone pillars scattered all over the cave. The silent, invisible attack was incredibly difficult to counter. She had to observe the angle of every hair and math out its velocity and tangent before creating a mirror image to cancel the phenomenon outright.

Destroying literally every projectile at the time of its inception might have seemed rather unnecessary at first—she had thought that she only needed to block the blades at risk of landing on target—but the first few seconds of battle had proven the assumption false. Dust was one of its main weapons. Every time it crashed into a pillar and shattered it, the broken rocks were compressed into tiny, dense blades and launched like a barrage of missiles.

At its core, the attack was incredibly simple. If not for the hairs integrated within the bits of rock, she would have been able to throw up a barrier and block the incoming projectiles with ease. But with them in the mix, her efforts were easily ignored.

Every barrage presented a near-death experience.

She could only counter by mirroring its stone creations with her own and blowing the hairs away with gusts of non-magical wind. It was a difficult process, and she needed to exercise the utmost care. Though most assumed otherwise, Allegra was bad at healing, awful even.

Her restorative abilities stemmed from her solar spells, which returned the damage they dealt as health. And with the rodent completely immune to the sun—she had already tried to torch it twice over—any damage she took was sure to stick.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Allegra had sustained a fair bit of it already. Over the ten-odd minutes that the battle had lasted, she had suffered a dozen deep gashes, broken her dominant arm, and lost a few of her toes. Most of it was because of the initial attack, the moment where she had allowed the rat-snake’s wind blades to completely shred through the cave. The barrage that had followed was nasty to say the least.

All of the exchanges that followed had thoroughly exhausted the rabbit. She was ready to crawl under a warm blanket, call it a day, and go right to bed. None of her ars magnae worked. The scripture of the sun, which provided the ability to light anything aflame, was neutered when the rat stopped, dropped, and rolled away the magical fire. The concepts of suffocation, charge separation, and compressive deformation, were negated directly by the rat’s resistance to magic.

Her alchemy-based abilities, particularly those based on polymorphing her targets, failed for all the same reasons. It wasn’t looking good. She almost thought to fall back on Constantius and ask for his help, but she knew that he had picked the challenge precisely because it would fuel her growth.

Glancing in his direction, she found that he had even brought Claire’s fox so they could watch together as she floundered.

He was shaming her into improving.

It was a petty strategy. And yet, it was strikingly successful.

Something about seeing the vulpine bard provided just the hint of inspiration she needed. In theory, sixfold skullbreaker—the ars magna that enacted the concept of compressive deformation—was the solution she needed. If it wouldn’t work on account of its magical nature, then she simply needed to reproduce it through a set of non-magical means.

The first thing she needed was an incredibly hard substance, something that the rat-snake could never break past. And for that, she picked a sheet of diamond. They were easy to forge. All she had to do was compress a massive lump of coal whilst heating it with her flames. She had accidentally discovered the process some nine hundred years prior and refined it to a science ever since; a snap of the fingers was all she needed to bring the flat, five meter sheets into existence.

Next, she needed a source of movement, something to deliver even force upon both the plates above and below. For that, magic was still allowed. It was only the part that touched the rat-snake that would have to be based in physics, so she summoned her plants and ordered them to take point.

Finally, she needed the rat to fall into position. And that was the easiest part of all.

All it took was for her to stop moving. The monster had spent the whole battle in pursuit with its jaws wide open and its eyes as ravenous as its rumbling stomach. It was practically driven mad by the need to feast—a madness that led straight to death.

Allegra ordered the trees with a wave of the wand and closed the cage around the monster's skull. If that alone was enough, the battle would have long been over. Its skull was hardly soft enough to be crushed by her vines. But that particular weakness, she easily covered with fire. She created a jet of flame behind each panel. The intricate spells sucked in the surrounding air, and after mixing it with fistfuls of raw magic, ejected it as ignited propellant.

Suddenly, there was enough force for the rat to feel the pressure. It immediately tried to back away, but it was too late. Allegra had already built a diamond cage around the rest of its frame. More thrusters were added with each wave of the wand. The rat screamed as its flesh was pushed together. It tried to push back, but with no developed arm or leg muscles, the most it could do was ram the walls.

At first, it almost mustered enough force to concern the rabbit, but it lost the ability to build up its momentum as the walls continued to close in.

And then, with one last squeal, the mouse fell still and bestowed her thousandth racial level.

The dungeon around her vanished, and with it went her falsified form. She was not reduced to an elderly, deformed freak of a rabbit as Claire had suspected, but a shape that few would describe as being a rabbit at all.

Sure, she had a pair of large floppy ears, and sure she still had the spring-boosted legs that allowed her to cast on the move. She even sported the usual puffy tail that had earned her race its name. But that was it.

The rest of her body’s shape had been changed over time, warped with every ascension to improve the flow of her magic. With her third, she took the idea to its logical extreme and minimized the distance that her magic circuits had to extend. She optimized the use of her volume as well, eliminating unnecessary organs in favour of additional mana veins.

She demonstrated with her form the shape of an ideal caster.

She demonstrated with her form a circle in three dimensions.

Without any illusions applied, Allegra was a ball of fur with two arms, two legs, two ears, and a tail.

And that was all she was.

The Grand Magus had no face. The extra organs were too inefficient when she could use magic to see and taste and smell. The visage that she showed the rest of the world was a reconstruction of the form she had in her youth. It was a mask constructed by way of light magic, specifically the sort that allowed her to bend the sun's rays to do precisely her bidding.

It was not just the front end of her digestive track that had vanished. The entire system had been done away with. The organs took too much energy to run, and the requisite holes in her body would only allow her mana to leak into the world beyond. It was simply a matter of surface area. The less she had, the less she had to worry.

Of course, the shape wasn't without its weaknesses. Its compact nature and overall lack of heat-generating parts made it incredibly easy for her to get cold. Being incapable of eating, she could no longer experience many of the simple joys in life or even comfortably sit down. But more importantly, there remained the fact that most of her body was brain.

She covered up the vulnerability with the same ars magna that distorted her image. Any attacks that struck her were recalibrated based on the assailant’s perception. Even if a knife dug straight through her brain, it would remain unharmed if they thought they stabbed her through the stomach. Her skin would certainly break from the impact, and the flesh around the lower part of her midsection would be readily torn open, but with no stomach to lose, she would emerge with no organ damage at all.

It was a bit of a double-edged sword. Most of the time, it paid off in her favour, but there was the odd occasion where an attacker would think that a hit had landed despite a lack of contact. And if they were truly convinced, then it would effectively ring true—not that it mattered at present.

Her true form was as exposed as the surrounding hellscape. Dark blackened rocks, plumes of blighted magma, and the wails of those condemned to eternal damnation stood opposite a boundless sky that overlooked a great blue planet from atop a floating cabin. Two completely different realms existed in the same physical space, not at odds, but peace.

The goddess who served as her guide was hardly displeased by the god taken by her furious lament, and so too did he respect her as the one who birthed the light he blighted. Seemingly ignoring their differences, they stood side by side, the Rikael in the burning hells, and Builledracht within the pleasant cabin. The wrong domains. And yet, the ones that were aesthetically most fitting.

Both had served as her teachers. Both had bolstered her magic, And both had lit her path.

Together, they smiled, and together, they extended their hands.

Allegra was finally ready.

Ready to face not only the life she led as Grand Magus, but the consequences of her long standing deception.

Ready to accept that she was the source of Virillius’ grief, the one who stole his joy and eroded his authority by framing him as a bloodthirsty monster.

Ready to admit that she had arranged for her own master’s death.

Constantius had certainly tamed her, but he had never issued any orders. It was just an excuse, something she could use to squirrel away her guilt and pretend that she was never responsible. That was why she had asked him to take control in the first place.

She had only wanted to run away from what she needed to do, to shut out her feelings and claim that the fault was his, and to see him as evil to pretend that she was not.

There were no two ways about it.

Allegra was responsible for the war with Kryddar.

Allegra was responsible for Ferdinand’s fall.

Allegra was responsible for the curse laid on Violet, the cruel, twisted spell crafted carefully to resemble her chronic illness.

She finally stared down the facts.

And became the aspect of false fiction.