Fates Parallel Chapter 122 - Talent (Patreon)

Jia and the girls sat in her home reviewing the day’s bouts. Rika wasn’t with them—apparently busy with her grandfather—but Haeun had come over to play, and was gleefully running around the yard with Heian. As expected, though she put up a decent fight, Kasai Hanako hadn’t been able to overcome Dae’s superlative magical expertise. It was usually an uphill battle for a martial artist against a mage—the straightforward style of physical combat didn’t fare well against the flexibility of a well prepared mage.

There was something of a balance—a martial artist had enough endurance to outlast a spiritual artist burning through their qi, a spiritual artist would typically overpower a mage of the same level, while a mage had the flexibility to exploit a martial artist’s one-dimensional fighting style. Of course in real fights there was much more nuance to it, but the rule of thumb was well-known enough among immortal practitioners that there was even a children's game based off of it—one that Haeun was now trying to teach Heian, despite the cat spirit's lack of fingers.

Eunae’s match against Kim Yongsun had been...

“He threw it! Ugh, I could just slap that boy. I’m usually patient with him, but this was too far!”

Eunae was fuming. Jia had rarely ever seen her get genuinely upset about anything, but it seemed like her tiger-headed cousin had struck a nerve.

“He is so obsessed with hierarchies and rules and doing everything ‘properly’ but he doesn’t understand the meaning behind any of it! Does he think he was doing me a favor? Misun was watching that fight and I know she could tell that Kim wasn’t trying.”

Based on Eunae’s ranting, Jia got the distinct impression that Kim wasn’t the real source of her ire, just the trigger. She had a bit of a complex about her family—not that Jia could blame her, from what she’d seen and heard of them so far. Eunae’s sister would probably find a way to use the fact that Kim had thrown the match against her.

Eui leaned forward in her seat and rested her chin on her hand.

“Whatever, Kim threw the match. All that means is that now you have to think about how you’re going to beat Dae. You’re both magic specialists and he’s uh...no offense, but way stronger than you.”

Eunae stopped ranting to frown in contemplation.

“True...I expect I’ll have to use my new technique. I’m worried that it will be too painful, though.”

Eui cackled, shaking her head.

“Forget that, you should worry that it won’t be painful enough. You can’t go half-assed against Dae. If your soulfire or whatever isn’t enough you need to be ready to go harder. Do you have a water spell prepared?”

“I—well, I do, but they are far too violent for a friendly competition. I’d rather not resort to such measures.”

Eui scoffed, shaking her head.

“You can’t afford to think that way. The only rule is no killing, so that’s the only line you should be willing to draw. Anything else is handicapping yourself for no reason.”

Yue nodded.

“I agree. This is your last chance to prove yourself before you would end up against Hayakawa, and unless you’ve suddenly changed your mind about using your gaze, I doubt you stand a chance against her. This is effectively your final round.”

Eunae stared down at her lap, and Jia took the opportunity to interject.

“I don’t think it’s so bad to not want to maim your friends just to win a competition. I’d hold off on the deadly stuff unless you think it’s absolutely necessary.”

Eui made an expression of mock hurt and elbowed Jia playfully.

“Traitor! You’re supposed to take my side.”

Jia giggled and nudged her back.

“What about you? That goes both ways, Eui! Actually, shouldn’t you be more worried about your own matches? You have to fight twice tomorrow.”

Eui scowled. Because of the unusual scheduling of the matches, she was scheduled to fight in both the morning and the afternoon—assuming she could defeat Satou Ryuuji.

“That’s annoying, but I’m looking forward to smashing that Bai Lin’s girly face in. Also, doesn’t that mean both our matches are at the same time?”

There was a beat of silence as the girls registered what Eui had just said. Yue sat up straight with an alarmed expression.

“Wait! There’s no way they would allow that, right? The instructors know about Yoshika, and letting you both fight at the same time during single combat would be blatant cheating! I assumed they’d kept your schedules apart for exactly that reason.”

Jia shrugged.

“Maybe they’ll come up with something. What did you guys think about Rika’s new fighting style? She’s my opponent for tomorrow.”

The girls paused as they considered Jia’s question. They’d all experienced Rika’s technique before in practice, but seeing it in a proper duel was different. Yue was the first to offer an opinion.

“It needs work. She’s done well integrating the physical and spiritual arts, but it’s still primarily a martial style. She needs to explore the other aspects of her unified cultivation more and develop a more concrete domain.”

Eunae’s head swayed back and forth a bit as she chewed it over before she nodded.

“I’m not sure about all that, but in practice she’s still a martial arts specialist—perhaps even more now than before she developed her new technique. It’s powerful, but it’s still missing something.”

Eui snickered, putting her hand behind her head and leaning back confidently.

“You’re gonna kick the shit out of her, hehehe.”

Haeun picked that precise moment to run inside, carrying Heian above her head and shouting.

“Shit!”

The flying cat happily repeated after her.

“Shit!”

A trio of scornful gazes fell on Eui, who shrunk down in her seat, blushing furiously.

“S-sorry...”

---

Guan Yi stood against one of the most fearsome foes he’d ever encountered. Not the most fearsome—Hayakawa Kaede paled in comparison to the fire elemental he’d faced last year, to say nothing of the demon Jianmo, who had destroyed that elemental like it was nothing. Still, she was definitely in the top five—top three if he was being generous. His odds were poor, as a spiritual artist he was disadvantaged against a martial specialist. However, he hadn’t spent his days training under Master Ienaga for nothing. He would meet her martial prowess with his own, bolstered by the techniques of his ancestors.

The Earth Rending Sword sect took pride in its soldiers, and in the fact that their signature technique was so ubiquitous among the imperial military cultivators. His family had known for centuries that the best way to meet the force of the Yamato was with force to match, and the sect had a much stronger focus on martial training than any other in Qin. This would be Yi’s best chance to show the world the value of his sect’s methods against one of the most powerful body cultivators he’d ever met.

He prepared himself as he awaited the signal to begin, focusing the metal-element qi within his dantian and visualizing the weapon that would best suit this battle. Not his family’s traditional weapon, this time—the guandao would be too unwieldy for an opponent as fast as Hayakawa. No, for this battle Yi envisioned a short, straight, double-edged sword optimized for speed and flexibility.

“Begin!”

As soon as he heard the signal, Guan Yi swiped his hand toward Hayakawa, conjuring the blade as he did. He knew how fast his opponent was, and in the time it had taken him to swing his blade, she had already crossed the distance between them. His opening move paid off as Hayakawa was forced to abort her opening attack and avoid his strike.

A wise choice. She might have been able to parry the blade, but anything less than perfection would come at a cost. Guan Yi practiced the Fang of the Toxic Viper, a weapon-based martial art that infused his strikes with the poisonous miasma of his ki. There might be some who found the practice of using poison to be distasteful, but Guan Yi was a soldier—he would use whatever was at his disposal to win the battle at hand. Besides which, he had no control over his elemental affinity.

Guan Yi didn’t let up, continuing to strike at Hayakawa as she narrowly dodged each swing of his sword. Her movements were fast, but deliberate—each step perfectly flowed into the next no matter how he pressured her. It was beautiful, in a way—the deadly dance of combat. In order to upset the balance, Guan Yi pushed some of his poisonous ki into the blade as he stepped back and swung wide.

The strike was too shallow, and Hayakawa leaned back to avoid the blade—just as Yi had wanted her to. Guan Yi’s metallic qi surged from his dantian into his blade, carrying the deadly intent of the strike as well as the poisonous ki with it as it flew beyond the reach of the sword. A lesser martial artist would have been unable to sense the invisible blade of qi, but Hayakawa’s eyes widened with alarm as she sensed the attack—no doubt a result of her mana sense. She was forced to lean even further backwards, transitioning smoothly into a roll in order to keep herself from being beheaded.

With her trajectory set, Guan Yi followed up the attack with a vertical swipe as he advanced. From her backwards roll, Hayakawa sprang onto her hands and off the ground with an unnatural lightness, twisting almost impossibly to avoid his second qi blade as she flipped back onto her feet. Guan Yi tried to meet her as she landed, but misjudged her airtime and came up short. Hayakawa floated to the ground like a feather, yet landed with the force of one of Grandmaster Murayoshi’s hammers, immediately springing forward to launch her own counter offensive.

Despite the speed of the weapon he had chosen, Guan Yi struggled to defend against Hayakawa’s attacks once she had gained the upper hand. Her attacks were lightning fast, yet deceptively heavy. If he could have afforded to take some of the lighter blows to strike back with his sword, he would have done so, but he knew for a fact that there were no lighter blows—ironic, considering that her style was named Weightless Fist.

There was no helping it—Guan Yi steeled his resolve and prepared to trade blows with Hayakawa. He only needed to withstand one strike in order to inflict her with his poisonous ki. He saw his moment—a punch to the midsection that would be painful, but not immediately decisive. Rather than dodge back away from it, Guan Yi stepped forward and thrust his blade, putting as much of his essence into it as he could muster.

Hayakawa twisted to keep the blade from striking her heart, which weakened her blow ever so slightly, not that Guan Yi noticed the difference. He was knocked backwards by what felt like a giant swinging a sledgehammer into his gut. He fell to his knees and vomited, ignoring the flecks of blood as he quickly stood to take up his fighting stance once again. Hayakawa had paid blood for blood—Yi’s thrust had struck her between the breast and the collarbone and gone clean through.

Guan Yi kept his expression neutral, but he was grinning internally. His poisonous ki would be spreading through her body now, forcing her to spend her own ki to fight off the invasion. The wound would slow her down, while the poison would stave off the threat of her ultimate technique. The tides had turned once again, and now Yi might actually stand a chance at victory.

He took a step forward, but something felt amiss. His vision blurred, and the world seemed to start spinning around him as he fell to his knees and vomited a second time. What was happening? A spiritual attack? Had Hayakawa learned Lee Jia’s noxious aura? Guan Yi allowed himself a moment of meditation as he calmed his mind and evaluated his own condition. No, it wasn’t a new attack, it was his injury. He had drastically underestimated how much damage Hayakawa could do with a gut punch, especially one that he had forcefully stepped into. His internal organs were soup, and it was only sheer force of will, adrenaline, and the power of his cultivation that was keeping him alive and conscious. He had lost.

“I—cough—yield. I will need—urgh—medical attention.”

Guan Yi didn’t hear the response, as he fell forward and slipped away into the void of unconsciousness.

---

It was a bit surreal standing before a princess of his country. Hyeong Daesung—’Dae’ to his friends—had met a few other Seong’s, but Eunae was the first that he had ever known. Strictly speaking, she was technically a marchioness, rather than a princess, but the Seong clan had a rather unusual structure. Her mother—who would typically hold the title of duchess—held the same title of princess, because all of the Seong clan considered themselves daughters of the Kumiho. The matriarch of the clan—the current queen of Goryeo—symbolically represented their great ancestor. Hence, all other women of the Seong clan were princesses as long as they continued to rule. There were no men—the Seong did not marry, and they bore no sons. Their consorts were relegated to a branch family and typically kept their old family names.

Dae shook his head—he was letting himself get distracted. His mind had an unfortunate tendency to wander if left unchecked. It could be terribly bothersome when he was trying to do research on a topic and ended up getting distracted by a dozen other adjacent topics—and then another dozen adjacent to those. He tried to focus—Seong Eunae! She was a friend and teammate normally, but today she was his opponent.

He was no stranger to sparring. It was a common pastime among students of the colleges, and sometimes duels were even held as part of the classes, in order to grade one’s ability as a combat mage. Dae had always been pretty good at them—he had to be, when every spoiled, snot-nosed noble wanted to prove themselves against the Prime Minister’s protege. Not that Dae’s master was the Prime Minister anymore.

So much for knocking the Seong clan off the throne. The Prime Minister was the appointed head of the high council of Goryeo, and second only to the Queen in authority. Second to none when it came to matters pertaining to the appointment of a new head of state. The elections were held every few decades—not really with any particular regularity—for the high council to choose one of the great families to represent the nation. In the centuries since Seong Heiran’s reign of terror, it had always been the Seong family. With Seong Min at the head of the council, that was not likely to change any time soon.

Dae slapped his own cheeks. He was getting distracted again! By politics, of all things. There was only one way to keep his focus when he got like this. He focused on his mind—his errant thoughts, passing interests, and common distractions. Thoughts of politics, noble family structures, his master’s eccentricities, Lee Jia—everything except for the here and now, him and Eunae, went into a little box in his mind. Dae set that box aside, compartmentalized it away for later.

It wasn’t just a mnemonic visualization—Dae was actually performing a technique using mana. Something his master had helped him to create in order to deal with his trouble focusing. He always used it in battle, as it allowed him to single-mindedly focus on the problems before him. It left him feeling a bit blank—cold and analytical. Those concerns also went into the box.

Seong Eunae—seventh princess according to her clan’s unusual line of succession. Cultivation levels—peak second stage mage, early-to-mid second stage spiritualist, mid-to-late first stage martial artist. Known techniques—standard college-taught array of spells with a focus on water and ice element, soul-based ancestral technique, negligible martial prowess. Primary threats—eye contact, soulfire, water magic, intimidating beauty. Dae frowned, retracting that last bit and filing it away with his other compartmentalized thoughts.

Overall threat level—mid to high, revised to extreme if she actively attempts to use her bewitching gaze. Estimated chance of worst-case scenario—negligible. Estimated chance of success—high. Primary complicating factor—soulfire’s unknown properties.

Dae held out his most precious possession—his dimensional scroll. It held a cubic meter of compatible material—paper, wood, and ink. It didn’t sound like much, but in practice that was a lot of talismans, and Dae always kept it full. He began to formulate his strategy as he patiently waited for the signal to begin. There was no pre-casting allowed in the tournament, but Dae could still shape his mana as he prepared.

As soon as he heard the signal, Dae released his mana and began to load talismans into his spell trigger technique. His dimensional scroll glowed brightly as the talismans flew out of it and began to orbit around him, each one primed to fire with the barest thought from Dae. Eunae’s opening was typical of a college-trained mage—she erected a wall of ice and began to cast defenses. Dae saw no need, his defensive spells were loaded, but he would only trigger them when needed.

His first spell took advantage of her own wall, causing spears of ice to sprout from it and forcing her out from behind cover. Once she was in his line of effect, Dae cast another spell to form a quagmire under her feet to slow her down, while simultaneously triggering a stone arrow spell. This was an opening he’d used successfully in twenty three duels. It took advantage of the common combination of a physical wall and metaphysical mana shield. Very few college mages avoided the trap, and fewer still escaped it.

Seong Eunae was not a common college mage. Rather than try to dodge out of the way with her unsteady footing, or block with her mismatched mana shield, she backhanded the stone arrow out of the air with sheer martial skill. Dae was forced to mentally upgrade her martial prowess from negligible to basic—she had been practicing.

Eunae made her way out of the muddy quagmire, launching shards of ice to keep Dae occupied. Dae reflexively cast a basic wall of air, which he manipulated and concentrated to efficiently deflect each shard away from him. Given Eunae’s proclivity for ice and water magic, Dae adapted his own attacks to counter it, casting a spell that he had worked with Harada Jun to create. The pyroclastic surge would double as an attack and a defense against her water-based magic—though Dae had to be careful with it as, unlike Harada, he was not immune to the intense heat left behind by the spell.

As she fled the cloud of ash, Dae saw fiery green wisps floating above each of her three fox-like tails. Her ancestral technique—possible worst-case scenario. Dae carefully avoided looking at her face as he adjusted his tactics. Wide-area effects that he didn’t need to aim as precisely would be necessary as long as there was even a tiny threat of her gaze being used. Unfortunately, spells like fireball, toxic cloud, and pyroclastic surge were all fairly poor against the sort of elemental mana shield favored by college mages.

A few minutes of stalemate and Eunae’s primary weakness began to rear its head. Her professed lack of talent was not just an attempt at humility. Seong Eunae’s cultivation speed was excruciatingly slow, and came with another, secondary weakness—extremely low mana. Eunae had almost no staying power as a mage, and as Dae had observed in her duel against Ishihara, she quickly ran out of stamina.

Dae was about to press the offensive and finish the fight when an enormous wall of green flame took up his entire field of view. Eunae had gathered all three of the soulfire orbs she’d been building up and launched them together as a single wide-area attack.

Problem—soulfire. Soul-based attack with a pseudo-physical attack vector. Resistance impossible, deflection impossible, mana shield ineffective. Dodging was the only option, but Dae wasn’t fast enough. Solution—contingency spell.

Dae triggered a spell that he’d been keeping prepared since the very beginning of the fight. It was one of his two most precious and irreplaceable talismans. He had been hoping to keep both of them in reserve for his potential match against Hayakawa, but he wasn’t confident in his ability to withstand Eunae’s soulfire, so now was the time. The talisman was not a simple paper charm. In fact, it hadn’t even been in his scroll due to being made of incompatible materials. The material was a strange tenebrous crystal—an artificial material created from the high-grade core of a rare creature of the void. The complex spell was written into it with nothingness—a magically infused space where even air was rejected. It had taken Dae months of work and considerable resources to create even one copy of the spell.

The void-element mana of the spell enveloped Dae and the space around him, and with a brief flash of absolute, impenetrable darkness, he vanished. The glowing green orb of flame splashed harmlessly across the stone floor of the arena, finding none of the fuel it needed to sustain itself. Dae reappeared with a loud pop right next to Eunae, his arm outstretched and his eyes cold as ice. He unleashed another spell, this one also higher grade, though not as high as the one he had used to teleport. Eunae didn’t even have time to gasp in shock before she was blasted away by a wave of force so powerful that the wards at the edge of the area glowed as they absorbed its excess power.

As she tumbled off the edge of the arena, Dae heard his master’s voice call out.

“Hyeong Daesung wins! Seong Eunae is eliminated.”

Dae blinked a few times, and his expression softened as all the compartmentalized thoughts and feelings came rushing back to him. His ears dropped and he scratched the back of his head, waving at the cheering crowd and chuckling awkwardly. He hoped he hadn’t hurt Eunae too badly.