The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 601 – Fuzzy

Despite his newly reclaimed optimism, Micky was still losing quite badly to Lord Parnassus.

It wasn’t because he was weak. Micky was arguably more powerful than either he or Percy had ever been while fighting separately. Sadly, this was also the first time one of them battled against a Violet without help, and Micky’s style was more straightforward than his friend’s, thus predictable.

The patriarch merely had to take advantage of his superior speed and agility to remain firmly outside Micky’s range, having only to dodge the occasional crescent of soul-freezing mist that managed to cleave through multiple burning tongues without collapsing. Maintaining a fixed distance, he harassed Micky relentlessly, constantly looking for openings to deal serious damage.

The advent of Micky’s Turbulent Lotus had kept the Violet’s spells at bay for a couple of minutes, but it hadn’t taken Lord Parnassus long to figure out how to bait the technique out and target the gaps between the grey arcs or the intervals between Micky’s slashes.

Eventually, Micky made a mistake. No, it couldn’t even be called that. He was simply overwhelmed by his opponent’s assault at some point, allowing one of the blazing tongues to land on his exposed wrist and sever his upper-left hand off, leaving him with one weapon fewer.

Regenerating the limb should be easy enough, but the patriarch didn’t miss the chance to capitalize on Micky’s momentary weakness. A barrage of spells descended on the airborne scythe from every direction, taking advantage of the reduced willpower to shatter the construct to pieces before it even touched the ground.

Micky gritted his beak in frustration.

Ironically, regrowing his icy body was easier than repairing or replicating his weapons. The former only required his own soul-freezing ice, while the latter depended on the relatively pitiful stream of phantom mana that Percy could send through their connection, or the even slower conversion of ambient mana that Micky could achieve thanks to his second-hand connection to his counterpart’s cores.

If that wasn’t bad enough, most of Micky’s limited supply of phantom mana was already being consumed by his remaining equipment to preserve the structural integrity of the weapons and armour as he channelled soul-freezing ice through them, leaving him with very little for anything else.

Even so, Micky didn’t waste a second, snapping a tiny piece off the bottom of one of the remaining shafts. Clutching it tightly with a newly grown hand, he began the arduous process of restoring the oversized weapon, hoping he would succeed before he suffered another setback.

It could easily take over half a minute – practically an eternity during such a high-level battle – but it wasn’t like he had much of a choice.

Sure enough, the Violet had an even easier time harassing Micky through the gap in his defences. Fiery tongues landed on his body one after the other, slashing at the tattered robes that Micky had painstakingly expanded to cover his giant frame.

Thankfully, the Cloak was strong enough to resist a Blue’s attacks by itself, as was Micky’s crystalline flesh. Separately, they wouldn’t quite cut it against a Violet but, together – and further aided by his domain – they prevented the attacks from digging in too deeply.

Several shallow wounds appeared on his shoulders, though the patriarch concentrated the blows on Micky’s neck, clearly trying to decapitate him. The good news was that it was thicker than his wrist, so a single tongue wasn’t enough, and his regeneration was just barely able to keep his head attached to his torso.

Probably realizing that slashing attacks wouldn’t yield immediate results, Lord Parnassus changed his approach again. Instead of lashing at Micky, he gave his whips sharp tips, having them strike like snakes.

In mere seconds, Micky’s head was riddled with narrow but extremely deep holes, several piercing all the way through his thick skull. Thankfully, it didn’t hurt, though the feeling of his icy brain melting into a bubbling liquid and spilling out of the holes was anything but pleasant.

The Violet’s attacks eased for the briefest of instants, giving Micky a chance to mend his injuries and make some progress on the half-formed scythe. He wasn’t sure what exactly was going on in his opponent’s mind, but he guessed that the Violet had thought that he had won the fight by stabbing through Micky’s head.

The rest of Remior didn’t know the full extent of his abilities just yet, so the concept of a creature that could survive and even keep fighting without a functioning brain was likely foreign to Lord Parnassus.

Alas, the seasoned mage appeared to have realized his blunder soon enough, resuming his assault. He aimed at Micky’s torso this time, splitting the burning tongues between his sternum and abdomen, probably having figured out that Micky’s mana cores were his only weak spots.

‘Shit! I can’t let either get hit, or it’s going to be over for real this time!’

While he and Percy had thought the same about his brain before their fight against Deimos – only to be proven wrong – Micky was confident that he wouldn’t be able to regenerate his cores.

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Leaving aside their magical complexity – which he doubted that his mutation would be able to recreate – Micky wouldn’t even have the means to regenerate anything without his cores. His ice mana was the very material that he fashioned his body out of, and his beast mana was what allowed him to breathe life into the otherwise-inanimate substance.

In a moment of desperation, Micky melted a chunk of his pectoral muscle, opening a narrow path to move his first core by a few centimetres to the left, barely dodging one of the patriarch’s piercing blows. A couple of seconds later, he was forced to shift his second core higher to avoid a similar attack.

Realizing that he could capitalize on the flexibility of his internal organs to improve his survivability like this, Micky began deliberately moving the mana cores along his channels to avoid the Violet’s projectiles.

Judging from the patriarch’s actions, it didn’t take him long to see through the charade, but Micky’s entire frame was densely saturated with mana to begin with, so it was difficult to pinpoint his cores with any accuracy. The Violet had no choice but to attack randomly until he got lucky and struck one.

Of course, Micky’s new trick wasn’t without its drawbacks.

Constantly changing the location of his cores messed with his boosting art, forcing him to slow down the flow of mana in his channels. On top of that, the combined damage from the patriarch’s spells and Micky destabilizing his own muscles and bones to make space for the cores threatened to destroy him from within.

‘Wait… I don’t have to sacrifice my body parts… aren’t they made of soul-freezing ice?’

Realizing his mistake, Micky selectively turned sections of his flesh intangible, creating narrow tunnels for his cores to pass through before materializing them again.

Of course, phasing a piece of a bone out even temporarily could still cause his body to collapse. Thankfully, Micky’s cores hadn’t grown with the rest of his body, so they were now smaller than his fingernails and didn’t require much space to slip through.

Two tiny orbs – one pale as ice, the other glowing in a deep amber colour – swam like fish through a maze of mutilated organs and boiling water, methodically avoiding the patriarch’s attacks.

Falling into a trance, Micky focused all of his efforts into stabilizing his body and protecting his vitals and remaining weapons, knowing that he couldn’t afford to lose anything more than he already had.

‘Symbel of the Savage Gods, Third Toast, Dancing Stars.’

Micky’s new technique bought him time, but it was far from enough. He’d been forced to halt the replacement of his missing scythe entirely, giving him no way to turn the tables against the patriarch. Unless he figured out another way to break the stalemate, his opponent was bound to think of something first.

He would have loved to phase through the patriarch’s attacks in a similar way, but he knew that the Violet had enhanced his spells with his domain, so they would be able to hurt Micky even in his incorporeal state.

Another option would be to phase through the ground to escape the barrage and catch his breath. Sadly, he couldn’t turn his cores incorporeal – only the rest of his body – so it wouldn’t work.

‘Damn it…’ he cursed. ‘I wouldn’t have ended up in this situation if I could just predict his moves like Percy…’

In theory, Micky’s passive Soul Vision did allow him to read a person’s intentions through the fluctuations of their soul – this was essentially the origin of Percy’s Foresight spell that both he and Micky had used extensively throughout the years, even before Percy acquired the Sorcerer’s Eye. However, Soul Vision was far less effective without the mutation.

Besides, it required Micky to keep his eyes on his opponent, and he had lost track of Lord Parnassus a long time ago. Not to mention that much of his body was locked in a constant cycle of destruction and regeneration under the Violet’s barrage, so Micky didn’t even have intact eyeballs all the time.

Just as he lamented his predicament, a strange thought hit him. ‘Huh? Why do I even need eyes to use Soul Vision?’

Weren’t his eyes ultimately just chunks of mana given purpose by his mutation? Micky knew he could replace them fairly quickly if necessary, but that was just scratching the surface of what he was capable of. Technically, he could always shapeshift into a creature with more than two eyes, or even something that had eyes elsewhere on its body.

Perhaps, Micky’s experience as a former being of flesh and blood was needlessly restricting his potential as an elemental. Grasping onto that thought and not letting go, he allowed a part of his consciousness to recede deep into his body, examining himself for what he truly was.

‘Two cores and a piece of the Lone Wanderer’s soul.’

That was it – all that Micky was, beneath the illusion of a body. Everything else was just a tool that he could discard or replace at will. If he wanted, he should be able to cover his skin in eyeballs and give himself omnidirectional Soul Vision. In fact, even that step was unnecessary.

Along with the realization came clarity.

A dark world unfolded around him, illuminated only by faint silver flames – the souls of every living creature in his vicinity. The patriarch’s was the brightest by far, but not the only one.

Tiny wisps burned inside the bodies of insects and critters that had failed to escape the apocalyptic battlefield, scattered amidst still-intact patches of tall grass or buried underground. Even the plants themselves carried a faint silver sheen, though it was even dimmer than the bugs’ souls.

Not stopping there, Micky allowed his Mana Sense and domain to expand as well, supplementing his vision with new colours.

This time, it was the plants that shone brighter than the insects, as even a mundane blade of grass typically contained more Brown mana than the tiny orbs barely visible inside the bugs’ carapaces. Finally, Micky’s willpower gave him a tactile feeling of his surroundings, placing everything else into context.

Sadly, his lack of the mutation held him back once more.

Without Percy’s ability to seamlessly blend the three channels of information together, Micky was immediately disoriented by his own senses, his surroundings growing blurry. The resolution dropped steeply as colours swirled and blended like blobs of paint churning inside a bucket, making it difficult to focus on anything.

‘It’ll have to do,’ Micky thought.

His new vision had severe shortcomings compared to his friend’s, but it had some advantages too. Unlike Percy, Micky didn’t have to keep his eyes locked onto his opponent anymore. All three of his magical senses extended in every direction, drawing a model of the entire battlefield in his mind.

No matter how fast or chaotically the patriarch flew, he couldn’t escape Micky’s vision. The Violet’s soul revealed his intentions, while Micky’s Mana Sense and domain allowed him to detect the burning whips coming at him.

‘Symbel of the Savage Gods, Fourth Toast, Fuzzy World.’