“[Almighty Push]!” I yelled, and not a moment too soon.
Furialis crashed into the force sphere expanding around me. The shell cracked, but it ultimately held as it pushed away both the beast ahead of me and the sands beneath my feet.
The Horror Drake flipped to land on its feet, leaving long claw marks in the sand as it drifted to a halt.
“[Destined Collision]!”
I targeted Furialis and the coliseum stands, yet Furilais growled as it stuck to the ground. The only one to even get close to resisting my class abilities like this was mom herself.
Furialis roared, and the skill’s tug on it shattered.
Mom’s words during our mock fights regarding what makes the rank S evolution special echoed through my mind.
***
“The rank S evolution has a unique effect unlike any other lesser evolutions.” Mom said.
“Upon reaching rank S, the mana core fundamentally changes. The final evolution compresses the mana core into a highly dense, nigh-indestructible mana construct, after which then expands to between two to three times its original size without losing any density. This grants its holder a number of benefits; the first of which is a powerful and inherent resistance to outside mana and magic effects.”
***
Furialis tensed its legs to lunge towards me once more, having shaken off my class skill, only to get slammed by a large, flying chunk of rock from the stands. While compelling Furialis to crash into the stands was difficult, the stands themselves had no such objections.
As expected, the rock was smashed to pieces as Furialis emerged and roared my way. Furialis lunged towards me, and I activated [Force Lord] to raise stone from beneath the sand between us.
Unimpressed, Furialis wasn’t even slowed down as it swiped through the air, cutting through the stone like butter before smashing through it. My goal, however, was to take a page out of the Matadors’ book and misdirect the beast as I dodged its attack.
Instead of slamming into the wall behind me, Furialis created footholds in mid-air out of arcane mana constructs, nimbly changing its direction to continue its rush my way.
“Hahahahahaha! Tear her to shreds, Furialis!” Alanus cackled.
With a flick of my wrist, the sands beneath my feet swallowed me as I sank deep into the earth. Using my mana sight, I looked above to see where Furialis was. Surprisingly, the monster was digging through sand and stone at such a rapid pace that the speed of its descent outmatched mine.
“No matter how strong Furialis became, this shouldn’t be possible.” I thought to myself.
“Unless…”
Mom’s explanation carried on in my mind.
***
“That innate resistance effect occurs because of a subtle change to the nature of the mana processed by the mana core. Instead of releasing mana purely of the element the core belongs to, it instead releases mana modified into a unique variant of the attribute with special properties based on the nature of the evolution.” Mom said.
“For instance, although a normal water-attributed mana core can convert plain mana to water-attributed mana, my mana core converts it into a unique type of frost-like mana. This mana is still water mana, mind you, but it shares an affinity with my very soul, making it more suitable for my purposes – namely, freezing things. Even a water elemental will struggle to wrestle control of it from me, since it isn’t purely water-attributed mana anymore.”
“Wait, is that why [Mana Commandeering] was ineffective against you?” I gaped.
“That’s so unfair! What the abyss is the point of being an elemental or getting mana manipulation skills then?!”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Now, now, they have other uses as well. Just because you can’t always turn the mana in an enemy’s body against an enemy to defeat them doesn’t mean that these abilities are useless or weak.” Mom laughed.
“On a side note, variants of the base attributes emerged once rank S creatures began developing spells with their unique mana types. That said, even if mages could take the time to mimic the effects of rank S variant mana with regular attributed mana, the results were and will continue to be pale shadows of what the real thing can do.”
***
As Furialis kept digging, it slowly made its way closer to me. It was as if anything I put in between us didn’t matter at all.
“…Wait, that’s it!”
I used my mana sight to take a closer look at Furialis’s claws.
While doing that was actually difficult to pull off because of how fast Furialis swiped at the earth, it didn’t take long for me to figure out what the trick was.
At the edges of Furialis’s claws were small, almost imperceptible signatures of mana. Ones that looked eerily similar to those of dimension magic.
“But dimension magic isn’t capable of destroying matter – only moving it around. Yet there’s no way Furialis can move so much earth beyond my sight, especially with such tiny bursts of mana. What kind of effect did the evolution give its mana…?”
Whatever conclusion I was to reach, it had to happen soon; Furialis was already too close for comfort.
“The mana platforms definitely weren’t it. That was something you could do even with regular arcane mana. No matter what kind of force it had beneath its strikes, it couldn’t have nearly broken through [Almighty Push]. It isn’t even a force-attributed creature, and I am an elemental anyway even if it was.”
Furialis was getting closer and closer, and only mere seconds separated the two of us.
“It can’t be related to arcane mana’s advantage against mana constructs either; it tore through mana constructs and physical matter with the same ease, even using nothing but mana to lash out from a distance.”
The stone in front of me was sliced apart, and Furialis’s claws rushed my way.
The world slowed down and faded away as nothing but me and the claw heading to slice my head apart existed anymore.
With such a close vantage point, the truth emerged both figuratively and literally before me.
***
Alanus Alypius
“What the abyss is taking so long…?” I grumbled, tapping my foot impatiently on the ground.
Using [Mana Perception], I stared beneath the ground to see what the two imbeciles were doing.
I quickly noticed both mana signatures, but something felt odd. The signatures were quickly getting bigger.
My eyes widened, and I jumped to the side as fast as I could. The monster seal on my left shoulder glowed, and my rank B [Obsidian Troll] stood between me and the rapidly emerging pair.
It was barely enough.
The sands of the coliseum grounds erupted with rock shrapnel flying everywhere at ludicrous speeds. My obsidian troll was battered so hard with the rocks that they crumbled to dust against its chest, denting the beast so badly that my seal was forced to reabsorb it.
Deafening booms thundered above, where Furialis and that girl were exchanging blows – mostly her blocking and dodging Furialis’s onslaught.
“…What the abyss?!” My jaw dropped.
A mere rank A girl was fighting a rank S creature toe-to-toe, and actually blocking its void-laced swipes and bites. That impudent girl was actually resisting Furialis’s devouring attacks head-on!
How is this possible?!
On closer inspection, her whole body was covered in a thin layer of arcane mana, with each movement of her body slamming obscene amounts of that same mana to neutralize what small bits of Furialis’s mana she could. The strikes still got through regardless and tore through both armor and skin; but instead of bleeding, the girl’s wounds immediately recovered to pristine condition.
I felt my teeth grinding so hard that they could turn diamonds to dust.
“FURIALIS!” I screamed.
“END THIS CHARADE, NOW!”
The crimson seal on the beast’s forehead glowed, and it roared loudly. The girl in tattered armor retreated quickly, bracing herself for a coming attack. Furialis’s roaring mouth never closed, as a tiny, black sun emerged in its mouth and slowly expanded.
A flood of mana emerged from the girl’s body, but I paid her no heed.
There was no dodging or blocking this attack, and her critical mistake was daring to stand against me in the first place.
“Go, Furialis! [Annihlate] her!”
My class skill activated, greatly boosting Furialis’s offensive power at a significant cost to its HP. Blood magic is the most effective way to squeeze out power from a tamed beast, making the synergy between the two capable of punching far above its weight.
And this enemy was no match for Furialis’s power even on the best of days.
“ROOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRR!” Furialis growled as [Eradication] shot out of its mouth.
My head turned just in time to see the girl summon a dark orb of her own in her right hand and slam it right into [Eradication]!
An unbelievable flood of mana was pouring into the girl’s orb as it desperately fought against the death of its master, just barely keeping it in the fight as [Eradication] slowly advanced and ate into it.
Seeing the way things were going, the girl flooded even more mana into her attack, pushing back frenziedly.
“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” she screamed, as the clouds were torn asunder, the wind roared and tore down the edges of the coliseum, and the stone beneath the now-blown away sands shattered to pieces.
And then, at the heart of the fight between the two dark spheres, space itself cracked.