Chapter 690: – Trouble in the Whistling Woods (3) |
The moment the fighting started, a group of two Violets and three Blues decided to gang up on Elaine. She had no idea whether they were targeting her due to how close she was known to be to Percy, or because she didn’t have the Clone bloodline – thus making her safe to kill. Maybe they had simply realized how dangerous she would be if left unchecked, due to her two Blue cores boosted by five distinct versions of the Dance.
As flattered as she was by how highly her enemies had regarded her, or glad that she had lifted some pressure off of her relatives, keeping up with the powerful group of hostile mages was proving into quite a daunting challenge.
Pillars of steam wider than small houses, flocks of birds made entirely out of sand, and countless thankfully-smaller bolts of lightning and fire rained upon her, each threatening to burn her to a crisp or grind her into minced meat if she allowed it to connect cleanly.
To make matters worse, one of the Blues had both a mind affinity and an illusion-based bloodline, allowing him to mix countless fake projectiles in with the real ones while giving Elaine a nasty case of déjà vu.
“Am I some sort of magnet for annoying opponents?” she cursed through gritted teeth.
Having pushed most of her Refined spells into the Masterful tier over the past couple of years, she was fortunately just about durable and agile enough to survive the onslaught – for now at least.
A dozen corrosive tentacles made of a pungent purple liquid danced around Elaine. They batted aside or ate through most incoming projectiles, threatened any opponent foolish enough to enter her range, and even served as leverage for her to propel herself around the aerial battlefield.
Her Kraken’s Waltz was the fusion of her old Jet Step and Kraken’s Lair, woven along with her acid affinity into a technique that seamlessly combined offense and defence. Elaine had turned her deadliest weapons into tools for three-dimensional manoeuvrability, basing the spell on the same underlying principles as the elaborate footwork that her cousin had once taught her.
As a bonus, she had even made up for the limited reach of her constructs. The whips hadn’t grown much longer, but that wasn’t much of an issue when they could help her cross the distance separating her from her opponents in mere seconds. Of course, that wasn’t easy to do while outnumbered as heavily as she currently was.
As early as when Elaine and Percy’s clone had figured out the external flow of the water version of the Dance, they had noted how similar the bubbles entering and exiting her body were to her Bubble Coat spell. It had given her the idea of combining the two by adding a passive protective element to her boosting art. It was only after acquiring her mud affinity that she had found the time to work on that, while also incorporating yet another promising element into the technique.
The dense layer of gurgling sludge currently hugging her body bolstered her defences even further, completely negating the Blues’ attacks. Elaine didn’t look forward to removing the mud stains from her clothes after the battle, but she did look forward to being alive enough to worry about that thanks to her Bubbling Swamp Dress.
Despite the prized techniques that she had busted her ass developing, it didn’t look like she was going to make it through this war entirely scot-free.
“Ugh,” she groaned as one of the steam pillars punched through both spells with enough force to slam her into the nearest tree.
The impact turned the trunk of the once-tall pine into fine splinters, while cracking Elaine’s shoulder. If it hadn’t been for her Ruby Bones, it would have done a lot worse.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
More concerning than the mild injury was the loss of her accumulated acid. The attack had knocked her away from her tentacles, and two of her opponents were already working together to gather up the scattered liquid and move it away from Elaine before she had the chance to retrieve it.
‘There goes about a third of my first core’s reserves…’ she thought as she rolled away from an incoming fireball that incinerated what little was left of the tree.
With a mental sigh, Elaine took to the air once again, manifesting a new set of tentacles to resume the battle. Another exchange like this would cause her acid mana to drop below the threshold of the Dance, which would be catastrophic.
She would have to be extra careful until she recovered. Due to her increased mana regeneration, it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds, but the unpleasant feeling of vulnerability caused her features to twist into a grimace. This wouldn’t have happened if she had completed her ongoing project. At the rate that she’d been improving, it wouldn’t take more than a year, yet House Asclepius just had to have attacked before she was done fusing her spells.
Her idea was to combine her composite elements into a type of corrosive mud that she would use to fuel both the tentacles and her dress. That way, the flailing appendages would adhere to her barrier far more strongly, making it almost impossible for her opponents to rip them away.
It would also make the whips denser, allowing them to deal more damage, while giving her coat the ability to dissolve incoming attacks instead of merely blocking them.
Arguably the greatest benefit, however, would be how much more flexibly Elaine would be able to manage her resources. On the off chance that she still lost the tentacles after the upgrade; it would only cost her a sixth of her reserves from both cores rather than a third of just the one in her sternum. It should even give her the option of redirecting her mana, in case she needed to place a greater emphasis on offense, mobility, or defence.
The best part was that she had already confirmed the validity of her idea. Her early experiments had produced a fused affinity with the required properties, so it was just a question of scaling the process up and learning to fuel her spells with the new substance.
Based on her recent correspondence with Percy, she understood that the corrosive sludge that she had created wasn’t a stable element, nor was it the complete fusion of her three common affinities. Something like that was known as a calamity affinity and would require comprehension of the final composite element that Elaine was currently missing: metal. She hadn’t made much progress with it, which was why she was unable to use the sixth and final variant of her boosting art.
Metal was harder to access than acid or mud because Elaine’s cores didn’t produce it directly. If she wanted to use it, she would need to apply affinity fission to both of them before recombining lightning and earth. Leaving aside how troublesome creating metal mana was, it simply wasn’t a very practical affinity for her to study or use when her reserves were as lopsided toward the water element as they were.
Luckily, the incomplete three-element combination that she was working on seemed like an acceptable compromise. It should be much easier for her to figure out, and she estimated that it would offer a rather comprehensive upgrade to her entire arsenal. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be of much help in this battle, nor did she think she would be able to take down all five of her current opponents.
‘It doesn’t matter. Just keeping so many of them occupied is a huge contribution to our family,’ she consoled herself.
House Asclepius had only brought five Violets and forty Blues to the Whistling Woods. Galahad had already injured a Violet, killed a Blue, and was keeping another three busy. Since a Violet was approximately worth as much as five Blues, Elaine and her uncle had basically removed about a third of the enemy family’s top-level combat force from the battle – excluding their patriarch of course.
House Avalon’s remaining nine Blues were doing a surprisingly decent job keeping up with the rest, to the point that many of the mages who had initially tried to harass her family’s Greens had been forced to reconsider. The damage that Archibald’s clones had done to the opposing Greens couldn’t be overstated either. While the flesh constructs were dying rapidly to Machaon’s spells, it wouldn’t be long before some of her relatives on the ground were free to support their superiors, allowing the Blues to assist her grandfather.
Elaine’s analysis did much to improve her foul mood, since she understood that the vast positive impact she had caused on the broader battle was more important than her personal frustration. That said, she wasn’t planning to take a beating without fighting back.
Her gaze swept over her opponents once more, the corners of her lips curling up as she locked onto a certain Blue with a mind affinity.
‘I might not be able to beat everyone, but I’ll make sure you don’t live long enough to bother anyone else.’