Chapter 453 - Trials and Tributions III

  “Mother.” Builledracht growled as he stared at the disintegrated statue, his eyes following the specks of dust as they faded in the wind. Only after they were gone, dispersed into a billion pieces, did he turn towards the invader, aghast, so horrified that even his disbelief was in disbelief. “You killed my mother!”

  It took only a moment for his distress to turn to rage—pure, unbridled rage. His aura exploded outwards, faster than his draconic flight could scatter. A third of those swallowed were sent plummeting from the sky, their bodies turned rotten from the slightest touch of his aura. The remainder didn’t fare much better. It was only with some difficulty that they dragged themselves out of range, curses under their breaths all the while.

  Cire, however, remained entirely unharmed. She kept his aura at bay with her vectors, splitting it like a stream before she was caught up in its insanity. It corrupted everything it touched. The clouds were turned to ash, and the rain converted to acid. Even the lightning bolts fell victim to his grasping death, their raw energy depleted on contact. Certainly, it was a sort of innate curse magic, an ode to his element much like her aura of ice, but so too was it draconic in its all-destroying nature. And yet, despite having clearly seen its mass destruction with her own two eyes, she had to fight the yankering temptation to stick a finger in the flow. After all, she had four minutes of magic remaining. Her wasteful attacks had depleted much of the raw capacity, but that was hardly a problem. She still felt invincible, high on the sheer strength that her stabilized circuits had brought her.

  As, she was denied the opportunity to ride the wave.

  Having closed the distance in a heartbeat, the bck dragon forced her attention upon him.

  He had a pair of rge goggles over his draconic face and a curious leather vest that spanned the length of his body. From his back, he drew a massive bde, long as his body and nearly twice as thick. Its edge was as bck as the night, and the handle sported a thick, hooked design made specifically for use with talons, a design she stole in a heartbeat.

  The greatsword wasn’t his only weapon. A pair of wooden hand cannons—normal cannons for non-dragon-sized creatures—hung off of the leather belt on his waist. Like the daggers that sat beside them, the guns were engraved with a series of glowing runes. They were clearly dangerous. The sheer workmanship that went into the individual pieces was proof of their outstanding quality. And yet, her eyes were drawn to everything else. All of the little satchels and pockets that dotted his outfit were bursting with magic; the items held within them were even more potent than his regur arms.

  If she had to guess, he was probably a rogue, an alchemist, or something else that functioned in a simir vein. Whatever the case, he was dangerous, dangerous enough that her moose sense refused to acknowledge the possibility of his death.

  His gaze was not nearly as appraising as hers. There was nothing about his behaviour to suggest that he was thinking, or even remotely intelligent for that matter. Rising higher like a fool, he continued haphazardly scattering his magic about, in spite of the damage done to his servants.

  “Kill her!” he shouted.

  Not at all minding their lives, the remaining dragons charged through his curses with their maws wide open and molten fmes brimming within them. But Cire was not the least bit concerned. She opened a portal in front of her lips and breathed a light breath of her own. It wasn’t the potent ser-like attack with which she had finished the humanoid dragoness, but the mistier kind that she had first learned. It was refined, of course. She had taken all of her recent power and efficiency gains and paired them with her less conspicuous projectile.

  One by one, her targets fell from the sky, their lungs filled with ice and their organs frozen over. Only the flock’s weakest members died from just the breath alone. The others were pounded into the ground, bound by a sudden change in gravity. Half had their bodies riddled with Boris-shaped holes. The rest had their spines ripped out and torn to pieces, sometimes returned to their flesh through some orifice or other.

  From that alone, nearly half of her attackers were finished. Of the thirty who fell, only two measured above level 1000. It was obvious at a gnce which ones were and weren’t. The ascended had bulkier bodies, pted with thick, bded scales, coloured by their choice of element. Their equipment, while not quite as eccentric as Builledracht’s, was also far fancier, often adorned with gadgets the likes of which required much smaller hands to assemble.

  Though they were still fodder, free experience to prepare Cire to face their master, the experience that came with their levels was hardly unmerited. One of the particurly quick-witted among them had already started screaming about a potential resistance to fire.

  Said vocal dragon was the first one she attacked. Opening a portal, she escaped Builledracht, who was charging with his giant sword raised, and appeared directly behind her target.

  He spun around in a panic when he sensed her magic and narrowly dodged her first strike, but that was the extent of his evasion. Boris transformed into a hook mid-swing and tched onto his tail before releasing the spell meant for Builledracht’s mother.

  The ice moved like it had a mind of its own. It entered the wound and spread through the dragon’s circuits, seizing control of them in a heartbeat.

  And then, using the dragon's own magic as fuel, the material suddenly expanded, growing in just a scant few seconds from a series of thin lines into a gcial blossom. Made up of giant icy spikes, the resulting object was far rger than the creature that contained it. And as dragons were only so stretchy, the end result went without saying.

  Bits of lizard rained from the sky. It was almost impossible to tell which pieces were what. Even the internal organs had exploded, courtesy of the mana veins that ran within them—a result that left Cire with a bit of a frown. For the most part, the spell had worked as intended, but the implementation was still cking. She would need to adjust the formu and freeze the target more quickly if she wanted the detonation to be any less moist.

  It wasn’t the only observation she made. Casually scanning her surroundings, she’d found that each dragon’s spell was tweaked a little differently. Only the skeletal ones had their formue on open dispy, and for good reason. So long as one had all the necessary draconic components, they weren’t all too hard to copy.

  In that sense, the magic was primitive, perhaps even underdeveloped. And it was with that thought that Cire weaved a spell that took Allegra’s teachings to heart. Its complexity demanded a chant, so she quickly crafted one from the usual pieces. With a verse about the fall winds, a second about winter’s grasp, and a third about the biting cold, she told a story about the dragons’ eradication, their eventual, hungering demise at the barren nd’s hand.

  Her chilling tale was accompanied by an equally chilling smile, every bit as invincible as she felt, even though the stabilizer was on the verge of running its course. It wasn’t because of the time. She had only spent a few seconds in combat with the winged army, but she had nearly burned through the five million points that each of the potions was good for.

  The dragons, however, had no way of knowing. Reflected in their eyes was little beyond the infinite confidence she put on full dispy.

  They confronted it at first. The melee fighters flew into close quarters and tore at her with their cws, the mages worked all manner of draconic magic, and their hunters fired their cannons. But none of them were able to reach her. All of their attacks were caught by strange rifts in the sky and directed towards their companions.

  It was like she was a prophet, someone protected by the gods. Or perhaps, she might have been one herself. Either way, they began to balk, to feel fear in their hearts when their leader demanded a continued assault.

  Said leader was precisely the center of Cire’s attention. She pointed a finger at Builledracht as the final verse escaped her lips and clenched it into a fist with the st word’s departure.

  The bck dragon immediately threw up his guard. Grabbing a stone from the pouch on his waist, he broke it in half to activate its protective effect. A powerful barrier formed around his body, an almighty shield capable of taking a blow from a god.

  A shield that had not even the slightest effect.

  Because he was never her target.

  It was all a ruse to make him show his hand, a ruse for the others to lower their guards. And every single one of her victims had fallen hook, line, and sinker.

  Allowing only a faint smile to appear on her lips, Cire and Builledracht watched in turn as the spell’s effects took hold, one party in satisfaction, and the other in abject horror.

  Though it didn’t use true ice, like the st spell she had decided to unleash, it worked off a set of simir properties. It began as a simple snowstorm, an ordinary, everyday blizzard that flooded the skies with white. And at first, it seemed harmless. After all, none of the targets were immediately subject to obvious harm. But a brief dey saw that changed.

  The snowfkes were like seeds. They would take root upon contact and slowly sap resources from their newfound surroundings before erupting into icy blossoms. Shaped more like castors than roses, their petals were made of jagged spikes, sharpened pilrs that ripped through their victim’s skin. At its core, the magic was draconic; its damage was enhanced by way of the species’ propensity for destruction, leading tiny cuts to transform into messy gashes. Of course, that was hardly where it ended. Cire’s spell was designed with Cadrian warriors in mind, and such a half-hearted attack was unlikely to fell even one.

  Where the gashes were made, so too did the process start anew. Even if the victims were to heal their flesh, new blossoms would sprout beneath it, a cycle that fed off the target’s own mana, repeating until it ran bone dry

  If the dragons were at their true strength, they likely would have emerged alive. But weakened for the trial as they were—somehow, she knew that their hatchlings emerged from their eggs at level 1000—they stood no chance against the grievous wounds. Like flies, they dropped, plummeting from the sky, leaving only their master to face the half-blooded intruder.

  Cire retrieved a fresh Alfredian vial and downed its contents while Builledracht ranted and fumed. She didn’t really care what exactly it was that he had to say. The few bits she caught amounted to little more than self-righteous bullshit, likely something the man got over long before he ascended to godhood. And that was assuming that the copy was true to form. For all she knew, it may as well have been something Aurora had hacked together to poke fun at the god of curses.

  The courtesy of the first move was disregarded. Cire seized it for herself as she allowed her divinity to course through her body. She directed it to expand from her circuits and spread to every st cell, to wrap itself around her, in her entirety, precisely as the phantom had once taught.

  Against anything else, it may as well have been cheating. But all was fair against a god-to-be.

  The world almost seemed to freeze as time slowed to a crawl. Numbers popped up all around her—measurements and detailed descriptors precisely as denoted by the system. She could count every speck of dust within her field of view and trace every particle of snow as it fell from the heavens. She could see every one of Builledracht’s muscles as they twitched unconsciously in response to the change in her presence.

  Though certainly enhanced as well, her body wasn’t quite capable of keeping up with her mind. It felt like she was trudging through a pile of snow, slowly pulling it along as she struggled against the forces of nature. And in fact, she did exactly that. She could feel every particle of air that she pushed out of the way. If she wanted, she likely could have counted the impurities wrought by all the rampant dragonfire and reverse engineered precisely the amount of each chemical produced. But while time was certainly much slower than it was when her circuits were still mangled, she wasn’t quite that free.

  Builledracht was slowly moving his body. A quick look at the exact muscles he’d activated suggested that he was about to charge and deliver a heavy, overhead swing at exactly 63 degrees. If his strength was truly 12,573,364 as the system described, blocking it directly was completely outside the realm of possibility, given that he was enhancing it with his divinity.

  His use of divine force was a little on the sloppier side. And for that, she was thankful. It was the only reason that she could almost catch up to his speed, in spite of the fact that his agility was over ten times higher on paper.

  As far as magic resistance went, he was better than even the best of his peers. His arms barely budged when she tugged on them with her vectors. It was only as she started to push and pull on the individual muscles that his response broke down. He tried to readjust, but his efforts amounted to little beyond a downward spiral. He only became easier to manipute as the strength was sapped from his limb. By pushing in the direction opposite her applied force, he did little but give the opportunity to facilitate his newfound motion.

  As far as Cire was concerned, it didn’t matter exactly which way the arm was mispced, only that she changed its trajectory. After all, the sword was never poised to nd. The victory was strictly moral, elicited for the sole purpose of demonstrating her express superiority.

  She was a fraction of his size. Sure, his bde was heavy, but the towering, dragon-sized greatsword was only sharp for the scale at which it was wielded. It wasn’t going to be making any clean cuts on a creature that stood at her height. Most of the force was channeled into knocking her out of the air.

  And even then, she needed only to transfer her momentum to a snowfke before she hit the ground.

  Cire fought back the urge to giggle.

  For a divine trial, especially one supposedly calibrated to her strength, it almost seemed too easy.

  She wasn’t quite back up to 100%. She couldn’t use any of her more expensive spells without instantly evaporating the stabilizer. Her realm, for example, was expressly off limits, and many of her racial abilities were yet offline. She couldn’t quite say for certain, but she suspected that all that would have long been back in working order if she were really half healed.

  In its current state, the trial would have amounted to next to nothing.

  Her confidence remained even as Builledracht threw his sword into the air in favour of gripping his cannons. She leisurely watched him throughout the process, not bothering to intervene with his efforts. She had long confirmed that, once mastered, her divinity had no effect on the state of her circuits. The apparent eternity that had epsed was about a fiftieth of a second in reality. With the world at a standstill, she could waste as much time as she wanted.

  It wasn’t like the cannons posed much of a threat. She had already examined their formue and confirmed that they may as well have been toys, simple arcane bsters that converted his power into heat and light.

  She wasn’t even sure why exactly he had them until she realised the sheer amount of magic poured within each gun. Each contained a hundred million points, more magic than her body could even contain.

  The resulting bsts were quick, their movements difficult to track even with time dited, but while they had certainly caught Cire off guard, she found them entirely irrelevant.

  Doing the math in her head, without the system’s assistance, she simply opened two portals in front of her. And so Builledracht’s wings were torn.

  They began to heal right away, mending before he lost any more than a modicum of height. Only then did he seem to understand the crisis he was in and resort to his most powerful abilities. But there was a bit of a problem.

  Cire knew the st dragon’s future.

  She knew that he was never truly a rogue, but a mage in disguise, most notably a mage specialized in the casting of curses.

  A small part of her wanted to sit around and wait, to allow him to show his hand, just to examine the end result. Most of his curses were fairly harmless, comical in the sense that they demanded only the most mundane suffering. Case in point, the famed curse that would cripple its target with severe constipation, only to immediately vacate their bowels in the case that they were the subject of ten people’s observation. There was the curse that would greatly enhance one’s sense of smell, but only for the foulest and most putrid of scents. And then there was the curse that would prevent one’s nether regions from functioning in the presence of true love. Certainly, they were terrible ailments, fates meant solely for the vermin that scurried through the gutters of society, but it wasn’t as if they were of much use in battle.

  She wanted to see the methods he employed in times of crisis, if not to steal them, then at least to sate her curiosity. As, she knew that the advantage was illusory. She couldn’t give even a single step without gambling her control over the battlefield—the one thing that kept her ship from sinking.

  Cire summoned twenty Borises at once. Turning them into needles, she teleported them into the gaps between Builledracht’s scales. Sprouting legs again, upon reaching their destinations, they buried themselves into his skin and attacked the sensitive nerve endings therein.

  Of course, the pinpoint assault was far more than just a means of harassment. The Borises soon resorted to thievery. They sucked the dragon’s health and mana, stealing it haphazardly between their zy yawns.

  Builledracht tried and failed several times to construct whatever spell it was he happened to have in mind, his face paling with every subsequent attempt.

  But even so, he wasn’t quite done just yet.

  The Builledracht of time long past was still something of a rowdy teenager. He was just a cocky young hotshot, a non-thinker who had taken over the cn with only his brute strength. But he was still one of the few who would one day rise to godhood. There was no world where he would fall to a few petty cantrips cooked up by a mage who measured half his level, let alone one with such scant use of her circuits.

  Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, he pressed through the disruption of his magic and forced his ultimate to cast. Laced with divinity, the spell had no projectile. Making full use of the system’s ability to decre a fixed target, it ensured that she was fated to be struck by the time of its completion.

  Log Entry 919103You have been afflicted with the curse of the bloodied mirror.

  You suffer 120% of all damage you inflict upon others.

  Log Entry 919104You have been afflicted with the curse of the courtsman’s bane.

  You will always give a perfectly honest impression of the individual you are speaking to if asked.

  Log Entry 919105You have been afflicted with the curse of lesser bdder function.

  You are no longer able to control your urination.

  Log Entry 919106Error 0x5c67adf6a404: Bdder not found.

  The curse of lesser bdder function could not be applied.

  Log Entry 919107You have been afflicted with the curse of distant dawn.

  You will be put into stasis for a minimum of 200 hours, breaking with the dawn that follows the timer’s completion. You will experience a number of minor mental abnormalities during this time. Sweet dreams!

  Cire blinked.

  She barely had any time to process the too-cheery message before the world was swallowed by darkness.