“I guess,” I sighed, setting down the two-headed flail I had been swinging.
“Excellent!” said Natalya, beaming. “Let’s jump right in then! First, your weaknesses. You have a couple minor ones, and one major one, which is your defense.”
I nodded, and waited for her to continue.
“You have good preemptive defense, with your light skills like [Blind] and [Phantom Person], as well as some of your other skills, like [Black Ice] and that pit trap one. However, your active defense is severely lacking. I noticed when you tried to block Yona from stripping off our illusions that your shield was very weak.”
“Well, most of my enemies don’t get far enough that I need to use it, so it’s not that easy to level,” I said, slightly defensively.
“That may be true, but your shield spell is also far weaker than it should be, even if it is a low level,” she said. “Any attacks that you have blocked are almost entirely due to your high [Wil], rather than your skill. You only have the basic [Magic Shield] skill, correct?”
“Yes.”
“My father said that you got many books on magic from him. Did you not get one for basic unattributed magic?” she asked.
“I thought it didn’t sound very useful. I was more interested in elemental magic,” I said sheepishly. Then, I hastily added, “I was wrong though. I’ve realized that. I was actually planning on asking Anatoly for a new book on unattributed magic as soon as I could.”
“Ah, that’s good. Well, there’s no need for a book on it anymore, since you have me to teach you. Not for the combat stuff, anyways,” she said.
I nodded. “So, my shield skill. How do I upgrade it? I just assumed it would upgrade if I leveled it enough.”
“It would have, but it would not upgrade usefully. The [Magic Shield] skill tree is very limited in its uses. It’s by far the least efficient and least effective direct defensive spell. Most elemental shields are better than it.”
That statement took me slightly by surprise. Not because I thought that [Magic Shield] was better than [Earthen Wall] and similar skills, but because the way she said it implied that other unattributed spells were actually stronger. “Oh, are elemental shields not better than unattributed ones? Wouldn’t a wall of earth be stronger than a shield made of pure mana?”
“It may be stronger in some ways, but it is not better,” she said. “Attributed shield spells, especially earth ones, take much longer to cast. Even for a high level earth mage, it would take 10x as long to erect an earthen barrier than it would to erect a mana barrier, and in fights at that level, every millisecond counts. Attributed shields are often useful for efficiently blocking attributed attacks, but none of them can beat the versatility and overall reliability of an unattributed shield spell.”
“So then what makes my [Magic Shield] so bad?” I asked.
“There are many issues with it, but they all stem from its simplicity. [Magic Shield] simply creates a wall of condensed mana. It can be shaped any way you’d like, which is useful, and you can even make it cover your entire body if you want, that can also be done with the more advanced variations while mitigating [Magic Shield]’s weakness. The only thing that [Magic Shield] has going for it over the other shield spells is its casting time. It is literally the fastest spell in existence. However, while I talked about how speed was important in high level battles, it still doesn’t trump usefulness.
“The most dangerous aspect of [Magic Shield] is that it is one single piece, and if any point on it is breached, the whole shield collapses. This makes it especially weak against piercing attacks, and to a lesser extent, slicing attacks, because they focus all their power on a single point or line, and it is easy for them to break shields.”
I thought back to the Halls of Abomination and Baladan’s dying attack, realizing how it had gotten through. He had probably put a little extra power behind his final attack, and I had gotten lazy and was no longer putting my full effort into blocking.
“So are these other shield variations partitioned?” I asked
“Yes, exactly!” she said, smiling. “If you take a basic [Magic Shield] and split it into pieces, even if one piece breaks, the others will not be effected. It will also burn less [MP] when it breaks, because it will be a smaller section of the shield. The last benefit of partitioned shields is that you can focus more mana on individual sections to make them stronger to defend against those focused piercing and slashing attacks.
“To make these partitioned shields-”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting her. “I think I get the idea. Let me try it on my own.”
She raised her eyebrow at me and smirked. “Be my guest.”
From her tone, she clearly didn’t believe that I would be able to do it, which only made me more determined to figure it out. I immediately case [Magic Shield] twice, and started molding the shields into shapes. I decided on a hexagon, because I was pretty sure I had read somewhere that hexagons were the most efficient shape for making walls, and because it would probably look good once they were all put together.
Once the two had been completed, I moved them together and lined up two of their sides, then conjured up a third shield. My head started hurting slightly as I formed the third one into a hexagon as well and stuck it to the other two, but I ignored it, and conjured up a fourth one. As soon as I did, I was hit with a splitting headache that caused me to lose focus, making all of the shields disappear.
I looked up at Natalya, who was smiling smugly. I scowled and then made a second attempt that was hardly any different than my first. Then I made a third, again with no noticeable improvement.
“Are you ready to give up?” asked Natalya as my fourth attempt failed and I staggered with a dizzying headache.
“Hell no,” I said while slowly lowering myself to the ground.
I started meditating to recover my [MP] while I waited for my headache to clear.
“Here, I’ll give you a hint,” she said as I gathered mana. “If you just-”
I didn’t hear the rest of her sentence, because I cast [Deafen] on myself so that I could ignore her better. A minute later, my head was clear again, and I made another attempt, still seated. Natalya was not speaking anymore, and was simply watching in amusement as my fifth attempt fell apart again.
Suddenly, a small wave of mana tore my [Deafen] off.
“I’m going to-”
I cast [Deafen] again before she could finish, and started on my sixth attempt. The formation of the first two hexagons was much faster by then, and the third formed soon after, but the fourth still gave me a splitting headache. As soon as that attempt failed, [Deafen] was ripped off again.
“I’mnotgonnasayanything!” said Natalya quickly before I could recast the spell.
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I eyed her warily, ready to cast [Deafen] at the first sign of an unsolicited hint.
“It’s obvious that you won’t accept any more help at this point, and you’re too stubborn for me to force you, so I won’t try to give you any.” I nodded. “Instead, I’m going to go wait inside until you give up. I’ll know when you come in, so no need to go looking for me. Just wait in the kitchen.”
“I’m going to figure it out on my own,” I said.
She shrugged. “That’s possible too, but very unlikely. Maybe if it’s you, you’ll figure it out, but even then, it’s going to be at least sunset by then.
“Or, you could let me show you how to do that, and you could have it down in ten minutes.”
I was half-tempted to accept the offer, but her condescending attitude was really getting on my nerves, and I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right.
“No,” I replied. “I can do it on my own. And I’ll be done in an hour.”
She snorted in laughter. “Good luck with that. If you actually succeed in an hour… Well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I will be seriously impressed.”
“If I succeed, you have to remove the tracker you placed on me.”
“Not a chance,” she said instantly, shaking her head. “You’re still wayyy too suspicious. Even more so after your little outburst at the duke’s.”
“I’m not a Demon King,” I said flatly.
“Yeah, you keep saying that, and I keep not believing you,” she said. “Hey, I have an idea,” she said, snapping her fingers. “If you succeed in an hour, I’ll show you the spell that I used to kill the other Demon King.”
She smiled and held out her hand to shake mine to confirm the detail. I thought her smile was suspicious, and that she wasn’t being entirely sincere, but I didn’t really care. I was doing this to prove a point, not for any kind of reward.
“Deal,” I said as I shook her hand. “Now go away, I need to focus.”
“As you wish,” said Natalya with an exaggerated bow before floating back up towards her mansion.
Before she was out of sight, I had already stopped paying attention to her, and began focusing again on the problem at hand. Casting 4 spells simultaneously was still beyond me at the moment. Perhaps if I kept practicing for my entire hour, I would get there, but she would have taken that into account, which meant that casting four hexagons at once wasn’t the answer I needed.
She had said that she could teach me to cast the new variation of the shield spell in 10 minutes, so there had to be some sort of trick to it. Earning the skill wouldn’t involve casting more than 4 spells at once, or else she wouldn’t have made that promise.
I decided to change my approach, and rather than joining multiple shields, I would try to break apart one larger one. That probably wouldn’t work either, but maybe trying it out would give me some hints. I made one larger [Magic Shield], and then started whittling away at it to get it to the shape I wanted. I made a small indentation in one side, and then slowly expanded it through the shield until I had a short line in the edge of the shield.
Then, I made two branching lines from the end of that one at 120 degree angles until they reached the same length as the first one. I repeated the process until the entire shield had become a hexagonal grid of smaller shield partitions. They were not quite separate yet though, as I had left small connectors to keep all of the pieces together. I had initially tried to separate them, but I guess the System regarded them as separate entities at that point, because as soon as I detached a second hexagon, my head started to ache again, and when I detached a third, the whole structure collapsed.
By the time I finished making my second hexagonally divided shield, I had already used up more than half of my hour, and was still no closer to the answer. I could try to dissolve all the bonds between the panels at the same time, but there was a good chance of that going disastrously wrong, so I didn’t want to try it unless it was a last resort.
However, as the minutes ticked by, I still couldn’t think of any other way I could get a multi-paneled shield. It was getting dangerously close to the deadline, and though I wouldn’t lose anything if I failed to solve it by that point, I didn’t want to fail to fulfill the promise I had made. I started slowly thinning all the bonds between the hexagons simultaneously. Despite not needing to breathe, I then took a deep breath to steel myself, and simultaneously erased all the bonds at once. The last thing I heard before blacking out was the familiar ding of a System notification
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As Lucy lay unconscious on a bed on the second floor of Natalya’s mansion, the two elves stood just outside the door, talking in hushed voices.
“Don’t be too hasty, Nat,” said Anatoly.
“I’m 95% sure,” said Natalya. “She has to be Pride. And look at her talent. If we let this get out of hand, we won’t be able to stop her. She’ll surpass even you within a decade.”
“But that means that there’s a 5% chance you’re wrong, in which case you would be snuffing out one of the greatest talents in history, as well as the last of the vampires.”
“Is she even really a vampire?” asked Natalya. “I’ve never heard of a skill that would let someone just completely ignore racial effects like that. I hesitate to call her out on it, because she did say it’s a skill for being the last of her race, but even still…”
“I assure you that she is a vampire,” said Anatoly calmly. I’ve been watching her. She consumes only blood, she has incredibly powerful senses, and she has stats far beyond her level.”
“Then how does she even exist? Didn’t we confirm the death of the vampires 900 years ago?”
“We did. However, the vampires were created by the gods. Who’s to say they didn’t simply create another one?”
“At the same exact time that the Demon Kings appeared again?” asked Natalya incredulously.
“I will admit that she is definitely suspicious,” conceded Anatoly. “However, I do not believe that there is anything to fear from her.”
“Why not? Is she a [Godly Emissary] then? None of the virtuous gods would choose someone like her.”
“I didn’t say that. In fact, I agree with your guess that she may be Pride’s incarnation.”
“Then why are you stopping me? There’s a high chance we have one of the Demon God’s incarnations right here, defenseless! Think of all the lives we could save by finishing her off right now!”
“Think of all the lives she could save if she is left alive,” countered Anatoly. “If she is not, then she will be a great asset in stopping the real ones. And even if she is, not all Demon Kings are necessarily bad.”
“Oh, come on!” said Natalya, exasperated. “Emperor Johann again?! That was once! How many Demon Kings have there been? Hundreds? A thousand? And out of all of them one was beneficial to the world.”
“Do not forget that they were all people before they were Demon Kings. They are not mindless monsters hell bent on causing destruction. They are merely misguided people given great power under dubious circumstances. I have researched the Demon Kings for millennia, and from what I’ve learned, there is no obligation for them to do anything besides kill each other.”
“Yeah, and when they do that, cities get caught in the crossfire.”
“You know as well as I do that is rare. More often than not, they are killed away from populated areas, much like the one you handled not long ago.”
“But that means there’s still a small chance that they do fight in a city, in which case tens or hundreds of thousands could die for no reason,” she said, using his words against him.
Anatoly sighed and put his hand to his head. He rubbed his brow for a few moments. “Let us move to the library. There is something I need to tell you, and you’ll want to be sitting down for it.”
Natalya opened her mouth to protest, but seeing the serious look in her father’s eyes, she decided to hold it in. She took one final, almost longing look at Lucy, and then followed her father downstairs to the library.
Sylvia had recovered somewhat and gone home already, so the room was now quiet and empty, and ready for serious conversation. The two elves sat down in armchairs facing each other with a low table between them. As soon as he sat down, Anatoly summoned two glasses and a bottle of amber liquid to float in the air in front of him. He twirled his finger and an ice cube appeared in each glass as the bottle began to pour its contents into the glasses, seemingly of its own volition. Once they were full, the bottle vanished and the two glasses slowly floated towards each elf. Anatoly took a long sip from his and sat in silence for a moment while Natalya nervously cupped hers in her hand.
“What I am about to tell you is something that I have never told anyone before. Not your aunt, not your brother, not your grandfather. No one.”
“Not even Mom?” asked Natalya.
“She was the one who told it to me,” said Anatoly before taking another long drink from his glass, draining the rest of its contents. The bottle reappeared and poured him another glass, which he drank half of before speaking again.
“Your mother… she passed not long after you were born, so you don’t remember her, but I know you heard the stories. How she was an amazing warrior, archmage, and hero who died ridding the continent of Demon Kings, for the sake of peace. You might have even read the book I wrote about her.”
Natalya nodded, but didn’t say anything, clutching her glass tightly.
“That was not the entire truth. She did do all of those things, but it was not solely for the sake of peace. That was certainly one of her reasons, but there was another, perhaps more important one. She was the incarnation of the Demon God Pride."