And again there was another let down with this ritual. The thing in the ground shone, he felt a prick and then some weakness, though none of his resources or even his XP were so much as touched. His best guess was that the ritual influenced his significance since making the contract, and since his significance was invested in traits….
Holy shit he almost fucked himself over so bad! Ha! The traits wouldn’t even destroy themselves or anything, they were used up significance that had yet to generate more of itself due to a lack of time and achievements from his part, rather, if he didn’t have his significance ‘invested’ beforehand he’d just become a collapsing soul that could barely interact with mana due to so much of it being entangled with the changing contract. Which made a sad statement about how little his life before all of this actually mattered in the great work of things, but he’d fix that eventually by simply living for a longer time while doing badass stuff, a non-issue if he ever saw one.
He’d say he had to thank the system for this one, but in actuality he wouldn’t have much significance or worth without it to begin with, so the ritual would never have happened nor would it have been crippling if for some reason it did happen.
A more important line of conjecture however, was if the thing had even worked.
"The greatest failure of those in the human fortress is their lack of passive mental resistance and an incapability of detecting it's influence when it is cast inside of said fortification." He spoke without even stuttering, a far cry from his complete inability of voicing his opinion despite none present being capable of understanding it.
"I take it you are well." Asked the only pale skinned person he'd seen around here, her face even whiter than before. He nodded. "Then we will be…” *Boom*
With her words interrupted by an explosion, Aki smiled.
“Kill all humans?” He asked in mirth. If he could just get a chance at proving how good he was as a battlefield support…
“We will do better without having to worry about you.” So he released a pulse of bright light and shrill sound that disoriented the entire room.
“Kill all humans?” He repeated after his new handler looked more like she wanted to throttle him instead of wanting to keel over and cry. Before she answered, he did something he wasn’t too sure he had the capabilities of doing, after he raised a couple of levels on the screen, and conjured a ball of flashbang with a conditional trigger by changing the Intent and mana invested into the spell slightly.
[You have unlocked a tal…]
He could do it, so he offered the glowing ball to the demoness. She gave him a look, then took it, ordering all present to follow. Aki followed, though he wondered how and why he had not also been stunned by his spell. Something to test later.
……………
Walking up to the crenellations was rather exhilarating. Maybe a bit stupid of his part to want to participate despite not being in desperate need of XP, but still he didn't regret importunating his new captors.
In the first place, it was mostly because he also wanted to fuck up the people making his family suffer. Rather than any possible sociopolitical reason he might come up with, this was the actual reason he would risk incurring more restraints or whatever the demon kin thought to throw at him.
The fact that they might respect and fear him more due to how much of a dangerous unknown he could be did help with the decision, but still.
Whether they'd think him an idiot or a madman for so readily running to the firing range to participate in his first fire back was anybody's guess, but he quite liked the sound of the system saying he earned dozens of partial contributions from timing his sound bomb to the hit the soldiers down below right before the actual attacks.
Much like in a video game, finding a character that could defend while stunned, or that could avoid stuns to begin with, was comparatively hard so long as you didn't attack some kind of boss, meaning his intervention had allowed for a lot more damage than expected.
That didn't apply so well to the parts of the army behind magical shielding, of course, but he had gotten out and about only after their charge, meaning there were now at least a couple hundred soldiers that had been wounded or straight out killed.
Even that much was enough to change his overall effect on the entire battle, as the number of casualties was higher than the amount of people he had saved beforehand as a paramedic of sorts, nevermind the strategic decisions that even allowed for all of this to happen and the blow to morale that losing so many people had.
Obviously it wasn't enough though. He had to break them further for a retreat to even be considered.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
So he sat down near a defender that had come with him and felt for the mana. The surroundings were utter chaos over that part of reality too, but the newest addition to the picture of the battlefield was the most prevalent, with the death mana practically blasting the ground open.
If not dealt with, it'd probably raise a lot of undead in the surroundings. Unfortunately not his intention, but still, there was a much simpler, much cruder way to utilize all of it.
With righteousness and unity, he made his spell attract the mana. Through revenge, fear and hatred, he aimed it. Using XP to max out his class and shoving all his points into intelligence, he gave it fuel.
Then he released the mass of emotion, meaning and congregating mana. It flew away and made the air scream, not only with the speed of it's passage, but also with the impression of the last moments of the recently dead, each one noting the flying spell crossing the killing field towards the stationed army and releasing their confusion, denial and anger towards the thing that promised then release.
By the time the spell reached the rapidly erected secondary shields of the enemy, it had become a maroon colored spike of suffering and revenge.
"Fuck them!" He spoke to his handler in english, but his expression and tone conveyed his message through. Still, she just looked at him, arm raised until his spell connected.
Only when it pierced clean through did she give the order in their language, a situation in which he was happy to introduce her to Anya Forger’s smugness as he emulated, if not the caricature like expression, at least the feeling of superiority over simpler mortals.
To be fair though, he didn’t stay for long, reaching for the supply cache at the mage’s area, which was filled with several blue potions in easy to remove apertures in the boxes despite the sheer number of empty bottles on the ground and the running support units cleaning them up as they bought more potions over.
Truly, it was great to work with understanding and rich teammates.
And then he started blasting.
It was not like his previous spell was a one time thing, especially since he wasn’t powerful or significant enough to simply move the entire battlefield’s mana with one spell. No, so long as nobody puri…
‘FUCK! I hadn’t even finished the thought for hell’s sake!’
Even as he complained, he started throwing flashbangs towards the place he thought the source of light was coming from, because much like every other wizard currently at the parapet, he could see jack shit but knew this was an absolutely horrible thing
Then he had an idea. Even as he started forming a fire between his hands however, it was easy to see that he did not have nearly enough mana to even start making his idea work despite the potions topping his new mana pool. Turning the light into infrared and then directly onto heat would need a far more ‘hospitable’ environment for the spell for the current him to cast.
That same realization gave him a better idea, but still, the first one would have been cooler.
Condensing water from air turned out to be much easier to do with thirty intelligence, and soon enough he and a few other mages had a water screen from which to see somewhat better.
And damn were they screwed.
For whatever reason, a woman with angel wings was currently floating in a ball of radiance, and although discerning her figure was hard because he had no way to polarize the water to refract light however he wanted, it was really fucking simple to see the few dozen warriors glowing golden and charging out of their camp, a floating wizard in white robes leading them from the front as his eyes shined with what was either a protagonist superpower or the telltale signs of possession.
Either way he had to be killed or the fort was falling, he had no doubt.
As such, the first thing he did was to shoot the support caster on the enemy side with the same spell as before, if with less mana.
Even before it got anywhere close, the spell was intercepted by rays of light from the woman, who was now looking directly at him. Or so it would seen since she sprayed his water screen with beans of light, though at their current distance it simply wasn't damaging to him at all after passing through.
The floating pane of water was more than paying for it's continued stay at this point, even if he had to increase it's espessure in case the winged woman decided he was worth the mana cost of using a powered up version of those basic beams to kill.
Rather than betting on surviving that with his meager physicality however, he would rather just kill his opponent.
So he took a few moments to think about what would pass through her defenses and then shot a bean of not so visible purple light at her.
This time his attack got to her and was stopped at a shield of what seemed to be hard light. Not that a random barrier of light would be able to completely stop UV, but he had absolutely no way of knowing if his idea was working or not. Using light to transmit information was somewhat simple, though rather draining, and the pseudo mind bridge was established. Suddenly, his eyes burned, forcing him to close them, his skin growing prickly as his ‘fake epiphany’ idea DID work out.
Before he could keel over due to getting burned by his own idea, he instead started to even more subtly infuse the idea of electrical charge into their mind bridge. How well that would work in turn was anybody’s guess, but the sheer volume of the woman’s pseudo elemental body (or whatever this was) would guarantee that she’d feel a shock. So he separated the beam he kept shooting from his hand, if only by a few centimeters, before giving himself a moment to be thankful that the woman’s new shield (even if only due to her lack of familiarity with it) would not protect her from contact with his beam near as much as the one from before. Every moment was pain and panic, but as he slowly reduced the ohms of resistance in his beam bridge, eventually something really did happen.
There was a flash that completely blinded him despite his closed eyes and then he got a notification.
[You have defeated Mage Lv 50 (The white saintess candidate). Due to killing an enemy two life levels above you, four times bonus XP multiplier. Due to killing an enemy three class advancements above you, eight times bonus XP multiplier. Due to killing an elite archetype, two times bonus XP multiplier. 15.805.440 XP awarded. Due to previously stated multipliers, 6.400 quest points awarded.]
"Well, that should do it." Said his blind, grinning ass.