Broken Lands

Chapter 377 – Powerful but Damaged

Sophia grinned at Xin’ri, then flashed into her Plume Shift. She reversed it almost immediately on the far side of the atrium in the corner closest to the swordsman and the mage. It wasn’t something she did very often, but it turned out that the combination of Plume Shift and a large aura meant that she could effectively teleport without the use or extreme cost of spatial magic. It was limited only by the size of her aura. 

A flash of reddish light drew Sophia’s attention towards where Dav fought the mage. There were six different Davs now, each made out of a different Affinity. It was clear that he was doing fine; the extra versions of himself were essentially spells he hadn’t discharged yet, less capable individually but useful as a distraction. It required either a lot of setup or an opponent that used multiple Affinities, but Sophia could already guess what Dav was doing. He was baiting out the sorceress’s spells and sending them to the “body” that matched each Affinity. When he had enough mana gathered, he’d expend them all at once to overwhelm his opponent’s defenses.

He probably didn’t have to be that fancy, but it would work if he could make the assorted attacks all connect at the same time, especially with the help of the True Death from Sophia.

It usually worked far more effectively on monsters that didn’t quite understand what Dav was doing than on sapients. Mages in particular usually had better control of their mana; it shouldn’t be working as well as it was. Sophia sparred with Dav fairly frequently and when he tried that technique on her, he was barely able to pull any of her mana into his secondary shapes. She had a significant advantage in both mana control and aura control, not to mention her Domain, but even Xin’ri could prevent Dav from grabbing most of her mana. 

It looked like the mage wasn’t even trying.

Sophia’s first thought was that it was a trap, so she spent a long moment searching for what it could be without any luck. It was just like the shieldbearer, really; there were a lot of ways to tactically improve the effectiveness of a shield that pulled attacks towards it, but the ghost wasn’t even trying. It was like both the shieldbearer and the mage were hollow shells, their Abilities were there but with no real thought behind them.

It was like she was watching a brute force imitation of two Called. Dav and Jax could handle them.

The swordsman, on the other hand, seemed to be smarter. He was also trying to dodge Xin’ri’s projectiles while being messed with by both Ci’an and Taika; Sophia recognized the pattern of momentary pauses and jerks and pulled blows as he realized an illusion wasn’t actually there a moment after he reacted to it. The speed of his movement looked closer to second upgrade than third, but Sophia knew that was Ci’an’s influence and would fade if he put the effort into fighting it. So far, it didn’t look like he’d noticed.

Lightning flashed from the tip of the sword targeting open air. Sophia shook her head; Taika was really managing well. His third upgrade helped, but -

Oh. The swordsman was probably impaired, like the other two, if not as severely. That made sense.

Most importantly, that made it Sophia’s turn. She no longer had fire feathers that were more powerful than her other feathers; with Xin’ri’s help, she had trapped over a dozen different Affinities. The feathers from skyeagles and other magical birds covered fewer base Affinities, but had at least twice as many subvariants, like “cutting wind.” 

In fact, cutting wind looked like a good one to start with. There was a green skyeagle feather with that particular version of a wind Affinity near the swordsman, so she turned it into a Prismatic Plume Strike and shifted it towards True Death. 

It hit the swordsman’s Shield and left nothing more than a slight scratch on his armor. Sophia wasn’t certain he even noticed, which was good for her ability to continue the fight but not at all good evidence that she’d be able to lay him to rest. 

Doubling up on the modifiers from Aural Plumes was right at the edge of Sophia’s capacity during a fight; if she had time, she could manage up to four, but that took nearly a minute to prepare. That was forever in a fight and it was far better to simply consume more feathers. There might be a point if she was seriously resource constrained or had all the setup time she needed, but neither was true here. She had all the feathers she needed and probably thousands more besides.

This time, she picked a “piercing metal” feather. It would work well with the Piercing Aural Plume she needed to try to break the swordsman’s Shield. She mixed Piercing with True Death and sent the Prismatic Plume Strike on its way.

Once again, the swordsman did not see it coming, distracted by an illusion Sophia couldn’t see. That was good, but the effects of the strike were less so, or at least less visible. A loud clang rang out, but there was no physical effect at all. Sophia expected the lack of effect, since that was the way her Piercing Aural Plume worked; it struck directly at the Shield but did very little to anything else. As such, it was one of the very few effects that Sophia couldn’t even remotely imitate with direct spellcasting; she had to use the Guide’s Ability.

The noise was unexpected. Normally, her Piercing Plume was silent, even when she used a metallic feather. Everything was supposed to be channeled into the Shield of her opponent. The noise meant something happened that she didn’t expect, probably some property of her opponent’s armor.

There was no good way to identify the equipment someone else was wearing, at least no way Sophia knew of. There were simply too many options; you’d need help from the Guide, and none of Sophia’s team had that sort of Calling, if it even existed. That meant Sophia had no way to learn exactly what happened.

Well, no easy way. The simple fact that her Shieldbreaking Plume ran into whatever it was and her normal strike didn’t gave her some clues. Some items could interact with Shield. They were extremely rare, rare enough that even in Mazehold there weren’t any for sale and no one would admit to knowing how to buy them. Most of the supply was artifacts of Ancient Kestii found in ruins, like the one where they found Othala. 

That was only one of the reasons they were rare; the other was that many of them broke once the user’s Shield was broken. That was one of the benefits of the bracelets Sophia and Dav wore: they wouldn’t fail until their combined Shield was gone. It was entirely possible they wouldn’t break even then; they were the direct gift of the Wanderer, after all.

Whatever this was, it sounded like it was made by someone who knew that and wanted to make it harder to break the Shield at all. Many of the ones she’d heard of would boost the Shield against something specific, but that required activation and usually weakened the Shield against anything else; those items were the most likely to survive, but Sophia didn’t think this was one of them, at least not solely. She’d taken the swordsman by surprise, so the odds that he was specifically protected against her spell was unlikely.

Well, it was metal. That was common enough in one way or another that it wasn’t unreasonable to prioritize it; Dav’s sword was metal, after all, and if Ci’an were using her bow, her arrowheads were also metal. The rest of them used other methods, which just went to show that specializing in only one thing was a fool’s game. You had to know your enemies to do that.

It was worth testing, though, so Sophia picked out a lightning plume. It held some of Xin’ri’s stored mana and was a little stronger than a skyeagle feather, even at the third upgrade, which should make it a good test to use against metal. The downside was that it was lightning, which the man seemed to have an affinity with, but it was in a direction she hadn’t yet struck from. It was worth a try.

Sophia infused the plume with True Death and Piercing as she broke its containment and sent lightning straight for him. The lightning moved rapidly, even for lightning, and struck as though there was no Shield at all. The swordsman jerked in surprise but was obviously unharmed. 

The swordsman raised his free hand towards the now-vanished plume and laughed. “Think you’ll use my own tricks against me? The more foolish you are!” 

Lightning poured from his hand as he continued his laughter. It covered the atrium from where the swordsman stood to almost the far wall, far past the actual location of the feather. Despite its origin at the swordsman’s fist, it reminded Sophia of a tesla coil gone mad more than a Sith lord; it was closer to a series of individual lightning strikes randomly striking the area than a cone of lightning. 

Her strike definitely didn’t work; if anything, it empowered the swordsman. Fortunately, it also distracted him into spending far more power than was in the feather on a useless attack. Sophia was glad she attacked from a direction that didn’t hold any of her allies. While everyone had ways of dealing with it, it was better that they didn’t have to.

That meant she needed to do something else to test what he could take. The one downside of his scattershot attack was that he’d wiped out all of the feathers in the area. While she could grab some of the lightning he was putting out, it wouldn’t be useful. At the same time, it would be best to hit him from near the area he was attacking; if she could bait him into more profligate mana use without anyone being hurt, it could only help. What did she have near the dead zone?

Fire, wind, plain, metal, prismatic, and lightning were the closest options she had for a feather to use. Lightning was clearly out of the question, as was metal since she wanted to test what happened with something that wasn’t metal. Wind was the single most common feather she had and her first attack was with wind without any reaction. If she used it with a piercing prismatic strike, it should tell her something. This one wasn’t cutting wind, unfortunately; it was buoyant wind. It was still close enough.

An explosion from Sophia’s right made her glance at Dav and the sorceress. He’d clearly decided that he had enough of her power stored in his secondary forms and it was time to end the fight. Sophia hoped he was right as she triggered the strike under the cover of his distraction.

The swordsman was making more than enough noise already, so it probably didn’t change anything, but she’d still try.

Sophia really expected nothing to happen when the Plume Strike hit, so she was shocked to see the swordsman’s cloak flare out as a loud crack even louder than the thunder of the swordsman’s lightning rang out.

The swordsman definitely noticed. He turned his lightning attacks to the side and shouted something about “trying to get away.”

Sophia snorted. He acted like he knew someone was there, which might have worked if he was right. He had no idea that Sophia was actually behind him and could attack “from” anywhere in the atrium. Well, almost anywhere; he was successfully destroying her feathers in the areas he struck. It was a good trade, even if it cost aurichalc; feathers were relatively cheap and the amount of power he was putting out wasn’t.