Javier
“Seven!”
The member of the enemy army who’d just entered into the forest battlefield’s flesh and blood transformed into hellwater and exploded, Javier barely able to get out of range by moving back and slightly to the left with his maximum speed. And he probably would have died without Nitya’s immediate assistance, creating a wall of wind in front of him that mostly blocked off the hellwater from reaching his body.
Still, Javier didn’t get away free from harm. This was someone with maximized E rank stats and at least a Heroic grade class using a self destruction skill, the priest of the Lady of Hellwater seemingly sacrificing his own life and all his resources to create the watery explosion while he stepped through the portal.
Several drops landed on Javier’s helmet and flowed through its eye holes and into his eyes, almost instantly blinding him, and, to not die, he had to immediately enter into meditation in order to rid himself of the hellwater’s poison, a process which would certainly take more than thirty seconds.
Made of concentrated qi and mana of the water, death, and life elements, hellwater was an incredibly dangerous substance, and Javier hadn’t taken the necessary precautions.
As their army regularly used plagues and other chemical warfare, his armor had the ability to completely seal him within it, which would have made the explosion of hellwater mostly useless, but seeing through the helmet’s visor wasn’t as clear as with his own eyes directly, and Nitya had already joined him and Isaiah in the forest battlefield, so he’d tried to optimize his attack instead of his defense. And his choice had a large cost to their army.
Even with the need to meditate, Javier couldn’t just sit down and concentrate, so Nitya had to pick him up and keep him safe. Thus she couldn’t help Isaiah fighting against the demigoddess. And Isaiah’s task of keeping the demigoddess busy had just grown harder as the hellwater created from the priest’s self destruction flowed over to Isaiah’s battlefield and joined the hellwater the demigoddess was already controlling.
* * *
Savan
Savan breathed out a sigh of relief upon learning from Amalia’s shared senses that the Hellwater Sacrifice had succeeded.
Losing one of his commanders instantly to a surprise attack had been shocking, but, with Amalia’s experience of almost being ambushed herself, he’d guessed how it had happened, so he was able to come up with a good counter, and this time the exit portal had been within range of Amalia’s senses.
The sacrifice hadn’t been perfect, not taking out Javier Garcia like he’d hoped, but the man had at least been poisoned and required protection while he healed himself, so Nitya Chakrabarti couldn’t join with Isaiah Kent to pressure Amalia.
Still, the forest battlefield was three against one, and about to become four against one, so Amalia was in danger.
Savan’s fiancée was powerful and excellent at defense, especially with all the artifacts she had in her spatial storage ring, but Isaiah Kent was a practically flawless warrior and, in a battle of endurance, he would win.
Savan thought again about sending reinforcements to the desert battlefield instead, but, after seeing the ambush tactics the Earth army had used in the forest battlefield, it was obvious from what he knew of Li Mila that the ambushes there would be even worse, with no ability for self destruction skills to have any effect.
So, Savan turned to one of the other commanders in his army, the head of the delegation from the force under the Earth Mother, and started giving commands. “Teresa, prepare yourself to take over command as I will be entering the forest battlefield as soon as the enemy sends in their next reinforcement.
“The desert battlefield is a trap, with Li Mila almost certainly ready with her doppelgängers to ambush anyone we send. And the flaming battlefield has the Heavenly Spark Soul King. So, try and focus all reinforcements on the forest battlefield unless both Lady Amalia and I fall.”
“Yes, sir.” Teresa placed her hand over her heart and bowed slightly, the traditional salute of the Primordial Humans.
Then, almost exactly thirty seconds after Savan’s priest of hellwater sacrificed himself, Amalia sensed Irena Krol enter into the forest battlefield and Savan stepped through his own portal, summoning out hellwater before he stepped through to successfully block a wind slice attack which had been aimed at his head.
Several hundred meters away from him he could sense Nitya Chakrabarti through the trees, his God’s Eye skill allowing him to see the battlefield’s flow of magic and how the woman’s aura interfered with it, not affected in the least by the fact there were at least five tree trunks between him and her, but he couldn’t sense Javier Garcia or Irena Krol, while neither could Amalia, so it seemed the two of them were out of his range.
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More wind blades attacked him, seemingly trying to push him toward where Amalia was fighting, and Savan considered what the enemy’s plan was.
He and Amalia together were nearly unstoppable at their rank, but it was unlikely the enemy knew that, so it was more probable they were still aiming for zero losses and had a high degree of trust in Isaiah Kent’s combat abilities, believing the man would be able to take Savan out even while fighting two on one with support from their wind mage.
Why though would they not have Irena Krol also join the fight?
As soon as he thought about it, however, the answer became obvious. Javier Garcia had been poisoned by hellwater from the Hellwater Sacrifice skill and, even if it had only been a few drops, that poison was powerful, while, other than Li Mila, Javier Garcia was reportedly the only one among Earth’s army’s upper ranks with a skill of the healing category.
On this battlefield, his importance was second only to Isaiah Kent.
Were Savan their general, and were he to have the goal of a complete victory, he’d probably have Irena Krol, reportedly one of the best among the heathens at energy control, try to help heal him instead of going on the offense as well.
Summoning out three short needles from his spatial storage ring, which together made up his main offensive artifact, Savan used Artifact Enhancement to empower them and Telekinesis to send them toward Nitya Chakrabarti, continuing to use Hellwater Control for defense. Then he summoned out a hoverboard, hopped on it, and flew not toward Amalia and not toward the enemy wind mage, but toward where he guessed Javier Garcia and Irena Krol had hidden.
The enemy would send new reinforcements soon, but they had no one left who would be able to make much of a difference on the battlefield. Anton Smith, Earth’s remaining A rank talent combatant, was a sniper specialized in the elements of fire, light, and death, but, while his single target attack was powerful, his speed was not and the forest terrain would make his extremely long range useless as his attacks couldn’t flow through the trees like Nitya Chakrabarti’s wind or Savan’s needles. Were the enemy to send him, given they wanted a complete victory, he would be more of a liability than a help.
Reginald Vin, the elf who’d betrayed his race, was then the most likely candidate, but he was a level weaker than the combatants already on the battlefield and Savan had reinforcements of his own coming, so what truly mattered was stopping the enemy’s ability to ambush his reinforcements at the exit. And, as Nitya Chakrabarti’s single target attacks were not her specialty, that meant locking down Javier Garcia and Irena Krol.
As he moved, Amalia summoned out a hoverboard of her own, which up to that point she hadn’t been using, and almost instantly drained all of its power as she sacrificed all the extra hellwater she’d gained from the Hellwater Sacrifice in a single attack toward Isaiah Kent.
The hoverboard moved at an extreme speed, and she soon started moving in the same direction as Savan.
* * *
Isaiah
Amalia Stormborn’s style of artifact creation was different from Aalam’s.
Aalam preferred permanent passive effects for most of his artifacts, like how the only effects of Isaiah’s spear and shield were to boost the power of the skills Isaiah generally used with them, and, if the artifact came with a skill, it was generally one which made use of the user’s own resources, such as the berserking skill built into Isaiah’s law armor. And, if Aalam had access to materials which could externally store qi, mana, or psyforce—and he didn’t want to make some kind of golem—he would generally use them to create single use artifacts.
This, in Aalam’s words, provided more bang for his buck. Single use artifacts made with the same materials as multi-use artifacts could almost always exhibit more power. And Aalam’s crafting speed was fast enough that he could generally reforge single use artifacts in just a matter of seconds, so he didn’t mind the extra work.
His half sister, on the other hand, seemed to prefer to have every one of her artifacts have multi-use skills which relied on qi, mana, and psyforce stored within themselves, able to use all their stored energy to release overpowered versions of their skills as well, and this was causing Isaiah a headache.
With golems and single use artifacts banned, the Earth army had thought both sides would be affected equally, but this was now proving to be very much not the case.
Amalia Stormborn was powerful, with an effective Magic around what Diana’s would have been, and she controlled the large amount of hellwater which flowed around her to produce both a strong defense and a strong offense, but she wasn’t as good at fighting as most members of the Earth army and her physical stats were not boosted by much beyond her bloodline. Meanwhile, Isaiah’s every strike was filled with the power of utter destruction and he exceeded her in speed.
In the minute and a half they’d been fighting, he’d already almost killed her four times. But, each time, she took out a new shield artifact from her spatial storage ring and activated what was effectively a one time use skill, a spherical defense which wrapped her in glowing divine power and made all of Isaiah’s attacks fail. Then she would just abandon the shield, which technically still had the power of a Rare grade artifact, on the ground.
And now the woman had summoned out a hoverboard and was using it as a single use fleeing skill, forcing Isaiah to follow with his own power—well technically his and Aalam’s power as he was using Aalam’s resources to power all of his equipment instead of his own, but still with him controlling the energy rather than the artifact.
Thankfully, with Aalam watching over everything, Irena knew she was being targeted by both the demigoddess and who Isaiah was pretty sure was the enemy general, so she was able to move Javier away for long enough so Isaiah could intercept the two enemies before Irena and Javier were within their attack range.
But then something went very wrong.
The demigoddess took out another new artifact, this time a sword, and Isaiah’s head suddenly hurt like he’d been hit by a combined psyforce attack of several dozen of the enemy’s combatants, and, were it not for the defenses built into his armor’s helmet, his brain probably would have turned to mush.
In the roughly one second he was stunned, however, Amalia Stormborn abandoned the sword and took out another weapon, a spear, which she threw at him, the weapon using a ridiculous amount of stored qi to go through his armor and his own defenses to penetrate about three centimeters into his chest. More dangerous, however, the enemy general’s three flying needles, which he had been using to force Nitya to waste a lot of her resources to evade, activated a one time use skill to teleport right next to Isaiah and used the time when his energy was spent blocking the spear to penetrate through the weaker sections of his armor at both of his elbows and under his right armpit, injecting him with hellwater in three important places.
After what had happened to Javier, Isaiah was ready, instantly using his Law Pupa of Destruction to completely destroy the areas affected and force out the hellwater, but he had no way to stop himself from dropping his spear and, for several seconds at least, he wouldn’t be able to lift his shield.