The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 644 – Two-cored Inimit

The Denyte with the time affinity and the pair of two-cored mages were the only participants still tied with Kassorith at first place, since they had yet to lose a battle. Unlike the Thess’kalan, however, they had won their fights without exerting themselves much.

Consequently, Percy hadn’t learned enough about their abilities to be confident in defeating them. Hell, based on what he’d seen, it might not even be possible to do so with an abundance of information, regardless of what clever tactics he devised.

He would have obviously preferred that the three monsters got pitted against one another before facing his host, but he’d known from the first day of the group phase that he had lost that particular dice roll.

The good news was that he had seen a little more of the Inimit’s skillset than the female Denyte’s. While Percy still had no idea how the time mage combined her affinity and bloodline to drain her opponents’ mana, the bird person’s fighting style wasn’t nearly as mysterious.

He appeared to favour dominating his enemies with his steam mana and wide assortment of free-type Decrees, infusing his feathers with various fake enchantments to augment his defence, offense, or mobility depending on the situation – in a manner not too dissimilar from Percy’s approach.

The two-cored mage avoided using his space mana unless forced to, either to preserve his most potent resource as much as possible, or to prevent his future opponents from studying his strongest moves.

It was honestly a good habit. Unleashing his most powerful affinity at the start of each battle would have shortened his matches against the weaker participants, but it might bite him in the ass when he faced a tougher opponent like the female Denyte or the two-cored Maradorian.

Unfortunately for Percy, there was no way he and his companions would win this match unless they came up with an answer for all of the Inimit’s abilities.

Slithering to the middle of the arena with grim conviction, Kassorith stared into the two-cored mage’s eyes, tightening his metaphorical grip on his metal mana so that he would be ready to unleash it the moment the battle started.

‘I still think our beaks are prettier than theirs,’ Micky told Percy privately, probably to relieve some of their shared tension.

‘Yeah, but they’ve got wings,’ Percy joked back.

‘We have extra hands,’ the Huehuan protested.

‘Which you use mostly to play a weird flute,’ Percy answered with a mental shrug. ‘I’d pick wings any day of the week.’

Their brief banter was interrupted by the automated system’s cold declaration: “Let the fight between Kassorith and Remlat commence.”

Several things happened at the same time once the words fell.

Percy used his domain to pull his host away from their opponent, buying time for his companions to prepare their enchantments. Kassorith expelled a quarter of his mana through the gaps in his scales, stamping the liquid metal with unit cells as Micky replicated the runes and forged the material into armour and a flying greatsword.

The trio-in-one flew away and continued to improve their enchanted equipment with every passing second – a process that they had repeated several times throughout the tournament.

The Inimit vanished from their senses almost entirely.

It was no secret that the man possessed some kind of invisibility bloodline – in addition to his many other gifts. The ability wasn’t all-encompassing by itself, but the winged man was able to supplement it with fake enchantments that granted his feathers the properties of concealment runes. He even appeared to have accounted for Soul Vision, having probably encountered many soul affinity users in previous tournaments.

Sadly for the Inimit, Percy never lost track of the ink-coloured silhouette trying to circle around his host. The Sage’s Pond unfolded in every direction, incorporating a wide assortment of magical senses, including the ability to directly detect a person’s willpower. Judging by the winged man’s lack of a countermeasure, that had to be a rather rare sense even among the elites of the alliance.

Still, that didn’t mean that evading the barrage of steam blasts would be easy. The moment their caster realized that he had lost the element of surprise, he switched to speed-boosting augmentations, combining his natural flight with a propelling stream of white mana to chase the fleeing Thess’kalan.

The Inimit even plucked some of his feathers, mixing them with magical projectiles and infusing the product with some kind of sharpness effect that allowed them to dig deeper into Kassorith’s armour whenever they connected.

In theory, the two-cored mage’s lavish expenditure should have caused him to run out of feathers fairly quickly, but his people appeared to regrow them much faster than other body parts.

Percy didn’t know whether that was a biological adaptation that had followed the creation of their ancestral Decree, allowing them to utilize it better, or whether their titan had taken an existing ability into account when designing his spell.

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Either way, the addition of the spiritual blood that was undoubtedly coursing through the bird person’s veins only accelerated his regeneration further, replacing his organic ammunition in real-time.

Kassorith’s core was drying up rapidly as he struggled to protect himself from the Inimit’s onslaught. The Thess’kalan dodged most projectiles, though the few mana-coated feathers that he failed to avoid released sparks and crisp sounds as they cut into his thinning armour.

The barrage contained lots of duds too – steam projectiles that didn’t contain a feather. Those weren’t nearly as dangerous, but served as a distraction since Percy and his host weren’t always able to tell the two types apart until they connected.

The Inimit fired many of the hollow spells intentionally, though about thirty percent were produced by yet another of the alliance’s free-type Decrees. Efenat’s Decree provided its owner with a small chance of passively generating a weaker echo of their attacks – which was sadly perfect for this situation.

It didn’t help that Kassorith’s metallic barrier was somewhat weaker than usual, though that was something the Thess’kalan had done on purpose.

Percy had asked his companions to include a variant of stability runes in their unit cells. Those were some of the earliest enchantments he had ever mastered, having originally studied them mostly to pass to Nesha, since they were useful for crafting spatial devices.

After his recent studies, he was now familiar with a variant that could be fuelled by other affinities to render an object resistant to space magic. Percy hadn’t deemed fit to use them in the durability test, since the extra runes would otherwise weaken the constructs, and the spatial projectiles had only accounted for a small fraction of incoming spells.

In this battle, however, space mana made up half of the Inimit’s reserves, so Kassorith couldn’t afford to leave himself exposed to his opponent’s strongest affinity. Of course, the winged man hadn’t even bothered to use his second core yet. Its mere existence was enough to affect Percy’s plans.

‘We can’t let this go on!’ the Thess’kalan yelled internally. ‘He’s beating us in power, speed, and mana expenditure with just his first core!’

Percy grimaced, knowing that his host was right. Despite holding back, their opponent was slightly stronger than the others that they had faced. It wasn’t surprising, since the Inimit had clearly managed to climb to the top eight in the past with just his steam affinity.

Percy could have potentially found a way to beat the winged person if it had been just that. Unfortunately, no matter what enchantments he and his companions had tried to prepare before the match, there was just no way to account for all of their opponent’s abilities in a fair fight.

The only approach Percy had been able to come up with that held even a slim chance of working had been to prepare the perfect sneak attack and hope they caught the Inimit by surprise while he was still looking down on them.

Over the next couple of minutes, he worked with the others to prepare a formation and attempted to fire the superheated beam repeatedly at his opponent, exploring various possibilities.

After dozens of predictions and aborted shots, Percy was confident that he could threaten the steam mage, though none of his attacks had a high certainty of success. About two thirds of the predictions resulted in the Inimit dodging or resolving the attack solely through his composite affinity and ancestral Decree, while only the remaining fraction forced him to resort to his space mana.

‘Hopefully he chooses the latter,’ Percy thought, knowing that that would be the best-case scenario.

Approaching the two-cored mage, he shattered his host’s armour and shot the sharpened fragments at his opponent as he usually did in preparation to unleash his prized formation.

The Inimit had certainly seen that move many times before, since Percy and his companions had used it multiple times in previous battles, but that was ultimately a good thing. If the winged man thought that he could easily resolve the attack, he was more likely to fall in Percy’s trap.

Blocking the incoming projectiles with a burst of steam and willpower, the Inimit waited patiently for the main event, a confident smirk tugging at the corner of his beak.

Right as the scorching beam was about to hit him, the two-cored mage attempted to avoid the crimson stream by finally tapping into his space mana for the first time since the start of the battle. His body bent and twisted as his surroundings turned blurry, clearly trying to warp him out of the spell’s path through a move similar to Nesha’s Twisted Dance.

Avoiding the blast should have been trivial for the Inimit, but Percy didn’t panic. If anything, his own borrowed lips parted into a savage, toothless grin as he confirmed that his opponent had made the wrong decision.

Reaching into the scattered shards of steel surrounding the Inimit – the same ones that the winged man had just deflected with his domain – Percy tapped into their enchantments, activating the stability runes.

The space surrounding the Inimit that had begun to shift was forcefully clamped in place, blocking the shocked Blue’s escape.

Being the elite Seventh Circle mage that he was, the steam mage remained calm, almost emptying both cores to protect himself with both composite and rare mana. Judging from the jet-black wall of willpower and the ruffling of his feathers, he must have used his domain and ancestral Decree as well.

Two waves of extreme magical power collided into a colossal explosion that distorted the air above the arena and sent a tremor across the entire stadium. Percy scarcely noticed that even the drinks the nearest spectators were slurping got rattled by the shockwave, though most of his attention was focused on his opponent.

The entire building grew quieter as everyone stared into the giant cloud of steam with bated breaths, eagerly waiting for the result.

To Percy’s immense disappointment, a lone silhouette was revealed as the pale fog thinned, the winged mage still hovering almost leisurely in the same spot. His feathers and clothes appeared somewhat dishevelled, and his mana cores were both down to about a quarter of their capacity, but the Blue wasn’t injured, his expression just as confident as it had been a minute ago.

“It was honestly not a bad strategy, but sometimes the gap in power is too great to bridge with a bunch of petty tricks,” the Inimit gleefully said while shaking his head.

Clenching their fists in frustration, Percy and Kassorith resumed their attacks, hoping that their opponent was more exhausted than he looked. The truth was that they weren’t faring much better, however. Their own resources had grown even scarcer, and their most promising attack had already failed.

To no one’s surprise, the Inimit – who no longer had any qualms about using both affinities – swiftly dispatched the Thess’kalan, ending the battle within less than half a minute through a decapitating disk of space mana.

“Fatal damage prevented. Victory goes to Remlat.”