Broken Lands

Chapter 378 – Not So Weak After All

Whatever was blocking her shield-breaking Plume Strikes was definitely activated by the fact that she’d focused her feather on damaging the Shield specifically. Sophia could think of two possible reasons it might not activate when she did an ordinary strike: it might only trigger against attacks aimed directly at Shield or it might only activate if you hit hard enough and her piercing attacks were over the limit while the normal attacks weren’t. 

How it worked should change what she did. If the problem was specifically the fact that her attacks were enhanced to break the swordsman’s Shield, she needed to either not use the attack or overwhelm him. If the problem was simply damage, she needed to either, again, stay under the breakpoint but hit him as many times as it took to break through or she needed to simply go ahead and use the Piercing Plume Strike. 

No, that wasn’t quite right. What she needed to know was whether she was doing any damage at all with the small strikes and whether that was more or less damage than the Piercing ones, even with the protection. That was true whether the protection was caused by her shieldbreaking Ability or simply because it did more damage to her opponent’s Shield. 

There was no easy way for her to figure it out. The long way was to hit him a lot of times and see if it worked at all. It was enough to make her wish she had a way to see how damaged her opponent’s Shield was, but she didn’t have that Ability. She didn’t know of anyone who did; it seemed possible but it wasn’t something she’d really looked into. Most monsters were pretty similar, once you accounted for things like durable monsters often having better Shields, so it wasn’t important most of the time. It was important here.

“The sorceress is still up!” Dav shouted over the mindlink. “She doesn’t look like that hurt her at all. She has to have a lot more Shield than I expected.”

“Was there a reaction to each of your hits?” Sophia responded immediately. “Something sort of appropriate to what you used if it was blocked?”

“There could have been,” Dav answered quickly. Sophia felt him move in a smoothly accelerating curve as he bent gravity to dodge around one of the mage’s firebolts, then swung for the neck of her robe. It was clearly telegraphed, but she didn’t move at all.

The moment Dav’s blade hit the robe, a clang as loud as the one from Sophia’s Piercing Plume Strike rang out. 

Well, that answered one question. Dav’s attacks didn’t have any specific shieldbreaking characteristics. From experience, Sophia knew that they were better at breaking through Shield than her normal Plume Strike but not as good as her Piercing Plumes. That meant the defense was based on how hard it was hit. It didn’t answer the bigger question of whether her small hits actually added up to anything, but she did have a way to answer that fairly quickly. It wasn’t cheap, but she had a lot of basic feathers. This would be a good time to dump a bunch of her lower upgrade feathers; their Plume Strikes weren’t as good, but that was fine.

“Do we need to kill him first?” Dav projected. “Or is this coming from the shieldsman?”

That was something Sophia hadn’t considered. Abilities that interacted directly with Shield were rare, but Dav had managed to pick up a shield-healing Ability. That probably made them more common than items that dealt with Shield, even though Sophia’s only way to interact with it was through the bracelet. 

She glanced over towards the where the ghost whose only weapon was a shield clashed with Jax. His shield had a few more minor scratches but that was all; no matter what Jax did, everything was redirected to hit the physical shield. Some of Xin’ri’s spells were pulled off course as well, even though she was well away from him.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” Sophia told Dav. “This may be bright.” She dumped hundreds of feathers out of her Hoard. The vast majority of them were from animals, with most of the remainder originating from first upgrade monsters. Weirdly, she could do almost as much with them as with a plume from a third upgrade monster; her Ability was far more important than the feather she used, which probably meant that the plume was symbolic more than anything else. A higher upgrade feather helped a little and a plume that held trapped mana helped even more, but for this the simple feathers were perfect. She didn’t need that much power per strike.

It took her a moment to spread the feathers out across her aura. That was all she could do with them; no matter how much she wanted to send them all straight for the swordsman, she didn’t have that level of control. Her Spread Plumes was exactly that: she could spread her plumes across her aura. She could shape her aura, but other than that she had to use a different Ability.

The moment they were where they needed to be, Sophia triggered the two dozen new plumes that were the closest to the swordsman as quickly as she could. She’d only ever done it in practice, because it wasn’t something that was often worth it; a few at a time before she retargeted usually made more sense, even if she needed bigger strikes. That wasted fewer feathers and was often faster, since a few feathers on a single target was often enough.

The only Aural Plume she added was True Death. That one came easier than more of the others. Xin’ri thought it was because it was the Aural Plume Sophia had the most practice with. Sophia couldn’t entirely argue, because it was true that she used it more than the others, but she thought the real reason was that she was better with Death. The Guide just didn’t show things the Voice did, back home.

Fire, wind, sound, ice, earth, metal, and even pure arcane force rained down on the swordsman. 

Without the Piercing Aural Plume, there was no over-the-top response that pushed the attacks away, but when the barrage finished and Sophia could see the swordsman again, he was unmarked. He might be moving just a little slower, but that was the only effect Sophia could see from sending all of those feathers at him. 

His Shield was definitely still intact. Sophia still couldn’t tell if she’d damaged it or not.

“There you are, you little rat!” The swordsman whipped around and seemed to turn into lightning that streaked towards Sophia. 

She reflexively triggered Plume Shift and poofed into feathers spread throughout her Domain as the swordsman reappeared directly in front of her and sent his blazing sword sailing through the space where she’d been only a moment ago.

“Tricky, tricky!” The swordsman shouted. “But I’ll catch you, don’t think I won’t! What about this one?” He turned and sprang towards Xin’ri.

The movement looked like lightning, but it wasn’t quite as fast. That was the only thing that let Sophia act. She reached out through her Domain and grabbed the foreign plume of mana he rode and wrestled with it, suppressing the mana that tried to overcome the control of Sophia’s Domain.She couldn’t stop it entirely, or even slow it down much, but she could make it end early. The lightning strike spat the swordsman out about two-thirds of the way to Xin’ri.

Very close to Dav.

The swordsman swung at nothing, then stabbed as if he thought he’d made it the full distance.

“I’ve got him, but act quickly!” Ci’an shouted along the mindlink. “He fell for the Vision of False Success and it never lasts long.”

“Just has to be long enough,” Dav answered as he flickered in place, then appeared beside the swordsman. It was an Ability he didn’t use often, both because he’d only gained it at the third upgrade and because of how vulnerable he was during the transit. He was in both places at the same time, but his Shield wasn’t. His version of teleportation was a great way to get hurt if their opponents weren’t distracted.

It had one advantage that running or gliding over the short distance didn’t: it brought an eruption of eldritch energy with it. According to the Ability description, it “strengthened his hold on the area around him.” In practical terms, it meant that any magical effects he used immediately after teleporting were enhanced significantly, close to double their normal strength.

Those effects included the True Death bestowed on all of his attacks by Sophia’s Arcane Signifier. 

Dav shone with black flame as he did something else they’d only experimented with: he Called on the True Death Sophia was granting him. Sophia felt her own mana drain as she supplied more True Death through her Arcane Signifier. Most of the power was coming from Dav, but if she kept replacing what he took, they could amplify it even farther.

Dav’s strike looked almost lazy, not because he wasn’t trying to move quickly but because of the way the eldritch power around him warped the perceptions of everyone else. The speed was there to the outside world, but Dav and Sophia both knew the truth: the sheer amount of power Dav was channeling was difficult to move. 

The shadows along the floor seemed to writhe and rise around the swordsman’s feet. Sophia had just enough time to realize that Arak Shade was doing the best he could to help; he hadn’t solidified the shadows yet, but he was ready for the moment it would make the most difference. 

Dac’s sword of black flame hit the swordsman without whatever active defense he and Sophia had triggered earlier. It sheared through the swordsman’s right wrist and into his chest, slowing only when it was halfway through the chest. Dav twisted his sword and yanked it back out as the swordsman’s once again broken blade fell to the floor.

No blood fell from the now-swordless leader’s side. Instead, everything below the injury faded from sight, present only as a misty insubstantial glow. Even the sword that lay on the floor was duplicated in the Ability-generated hand. “You want your revenge? You are not the first and you shall fall here, just like all the others.”

The swordsman shifted in place as if he still had full movement and pulled his arm back but was halted in place when his feet were frozen in place by their shadows. He continued the motion and slashed towards Dav, but the move was robbed of most of its power because only his arm powered the strike instead of his whole body.

Dav was still recovering from the rapid teleportation and True Death strike and couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way. The sword stuck cleanly … and bounced. Whatever force wasn’t dissipated by Dav’s Shield wasn’t enough to even damage Dav’s armor.

Sophia grinned fiercely when the sword emerged from the dissipating aura of black fire around Dav. The length of the blade that struck Dav looked like it had a bite taken out of it. Sophia could see that it was trying to fill itself back in; she could also see that it was having trouble. “We can kill him for good if we can keep the pressure up.”

“I can’t do that again immediately,” Dav warned. 

“Can you keep the True Death Call -” Sophia felt a clot of mana hurtling towards her at high speed from the direction of the sorceress.