[MA] 162. Mana Infusion (Patreon)

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[A/N: 2/3 chapters this week. I owe you 1 late chapter. Next chapter in a few minutes.]

One of the Guardians who had raised his hand previously, an elder with gray hair, plate armor, and a massive shield and mace, raised it again.

"Yes?" Shen prompted.

"You said generals will still be able to stop us, right?" the man asked.

"Yes. So?"

"What if a general goes rogue?"

"Report it to me," Shen replied. "I'll deal with traitor generals myself."

"What if you go rogue?" a young woman in what looked like a white bathtub robe asked next and added an "Again" under her breath.

Shen looked at her blue eyes. "Then run because there's nothing any of you can do to stop me. I'll prove it to you when we fight after my introductory speech. If you think something is wrong with me, run in every direction and hope I don't choose yours to follow."

Sepulchral silence followed his declaration.

Shen shook his head. "I don't mean it as a threat, but as fact. Let's skip some of the speech so I can let you feel the gap between us. Marzia, get two hundred yards behind me. She cannot be touched under any circumstances. This is not a hidden test, joke, or anything of the sort. I will kill whoever attacks her.

"You all have five minutes to decide on a strategy to use. You can start anywhere you want, be it outside my aura range or right next to me with your weapons touching my skin. Don't overthink things; I'll give you ten chances. You can fail that many times before being thoroughly convinced of your inferiority. Sai, join them."

Shen suppressed a smile when he heard Sai give out a grunt. His guard had learned the futility of what would come already. It had only taken a single exchange, too. He was a wise man.

By the looks of determination and arrogance on his trainees' faces, they would be feeling even more frustrated than Sai soon enough.

= - = - =

Forty-two trainees remained.

Two had said they didn't want the job, and four had been dismissed for being too weak for Shen's standards. They had been offered and accepted the chance to become ordinary high-ranking officers.

The last two had conspired to kill a Guardian and make it look like it was Shen. The cultivator had foiled the plan with his aura alone, and the dismembered imbeciles had been dragged by a soldier for interrogation.

"Enough," a guy with a missing hand groaned on the ground. "Please, guys, let's end this."

A chorus of groans and expletives of agreement accompanied the pledge.

This was only the seventh round, and Shen was glad to see they were smart enough to give up already. This wasn't a spar but a beating; they had nothing to gain by continuing with it.

The Guardians were lying on the ground with different injuries, all caused by Shen's aura or fists. He avoided damaging their weapons and equipment but not their egos or bodies. Getting used to injuries in combat was good for them, and there would be no lasting harm because of their stats. Even dismembered limbs grew under the system.

As for Shen, dealing with so few peak E-ranks with little to no coordination among themselves was a piece of cake after the gnolls.

"Anyone wants to try again?" he asked. The rules were clear. Everyone had to do their best if even a single person wanted a new attempt.

"I swear..." Sai said, breathing heavily, "that if anyone asks for more... I'll kill them even if it's the last thing... I'll ever do."

Maybe it was his charisma that convinced them to stay silent.

Shen nodded. "Now you see the gap between us," he concluded.

"Now I see the gap between your aura and us," the young woman who had asked about Shen going rogue countered.

Shen raised an eyebrow at her but did not look below her chin. The brunette mage wore nothing below her bathtub robe and didn't care about what became visible when she moved. Unfortunately, there were no dressing rules in the camp, so she had defiantly refused his request to dress more appropriately, and he had agreed she was within her right.

He kind of hated her for that though. He had enough trouble already with shutting up the part of his aura that let him feel people's bodies without the constant visual reminder.

"I've beaten you two times without using my aura," he told her. "Maybe you do want to try again, after all."

"No!" Her beautiful blue eyes widened in terror as she looked not at him but at her companions, who were staring daggers at her. "I was joking, I swear!"

Shen smiled and conceded, "But you do have a point. Auras are an unfair advantage, and at least ten gnolls have it. Tomorrow, we'll start with the mass drills, and everyone will be briefed on how to fight aura users. Specialized groups are already training to negate auras. They and the strongest Guardians will have a chance to fight me using the technique we'll reveal. I won't spoil everything for you, but I'll give you something."

He started walking away from them. Once they were all outside his aura range, he used the Lion's Roar technique to talk to them from afar without screaming. He avoided doing that in crowded or public places because it was intrusive, but it was his usual manner of communication in training sessions.

"Not all of you are mages," he said, "but you all use mana and know how to make your spells touch each other without entering a context of willpower." It was a simple trick, he had been told, a matter of perspective, but it didn't work with qi. "No one ever found a way of pooling their strength together to cast spells, but as you've noticed, the more Concepts a spell has, the deeper it can go into my aura."

Guardians were asked how many Concepts they knew and how many they had mastered when they entered the camp. The one who said she had the most had shown six. She could make her spell go halfway into Shen's aura.

Another Guardian had two mastered Concepts and knew two others. His spell had gotten as far as a hundred yards away from Shen.

It might not look like much, but both tests had been the basis for the best technique they had found to deal with aura users.

"Even when you let us get to you, we can't deal more than a couple points of damage to your bare skin," another Guardian complained.

"There are forty-two of you," Shen countered, "forty-three if we count Sai. You can deal a couple points of damage. What if you were hundreds? Thousands? What if you were an army?" He gestured with his head at the people around them who were still learning or training. "What if we knew how to make everyone's attacks reach me?"

That gave them pause.

"As I was saying," he continued, "the more Concepts a spell has, the deeper it can go into my aura. What you haven't noticed is that your Concept-powered mana creates a power vacuum wherever it touches. My aura can't affect any place with Concept-powered mana at all. You don't need to cast a structured spell either—in fact, it makes no difference. You only need to spend mana and send one actual attack hidden within it for it to get to me. Or dozens of actual attacks. Or tens of thousands, if you have the people for that. You can also send Guardians shrouded by Concept-powered mana to fight inside my aura."

They thought about that for a moment, then the bathtub robe girl—really, her eyes were mesmerizing—asked, "But you can use your qi to destroy any spell even if they are deep... Oh. Ohhhh."

Shen let out a small smile. Beautiful and smart. If only she were a cultivator and weren't so bold.

"If we force you to use your qi, it'll touch our mana, and you'll enter a willpower context against all of us," a tall black man in a sumo suit—despite being very thin—said.

"And you can't be stronger than all of us together," a muscular youngster finished.

Shen nodded. "You can force an aura user to retreat or fight you using only their bodies and internal energy. Even if you don't kill the aura user, their auras won't be killing your allies anymore."

He was simplifying things significantly.

The aura user could flee, yes, but if they were fast enough, they wouldn't get caught by the mana infusion in the first place. They weren't stationary targets.

Shen had planned for that, of course. The mana infusers were training hard to improve their coordination, movement, range of attack, and angles of approach. Yet, even if the aura users were caught, they had to be killed quickly. If not, they could just move around.

Their soul-protected body would touch mana, forcing the mana's owner to spend willpower for it, while the aura user wouldn't. Touching the soul was one of the things that spent willpower the fastest. It would then be a matter of time before the attackers fainted, and the aura user was free to do as they wished.

The tactic was actually a double-edged sword, a bet against time.

Yet, it was still the best method they had found; auras were that powerful.

That strategy wouldn't be used to let people fight the gnoll aura users. Instead, it would be employed to make the aura users kill fewer humans while Shen was occupied with other gnoll aura users. The mana infusers only had to stay awake until Shen arrived to, hopefully, deal with the extra aura users himself.

The sad truth was that Shen could still kill everyone on Earth even if they used that method against him. His body was just too strong for their weak attacks. If any gnoll had D+ resistance or armor that gave them similar defense, no Guardian or mortal weapon would be able to do anything to them.

No legal weapon, at least.

Thinking about that, Shen had developed a way to kill someone stronger than him. And that, in turn, meant he had told people how to kill him. He didn't like that one bit, yet, the method required the correct preparation, and they were already cutting close.

It was, literally, the nuclear option.

No intact nuclear weapon remained on Earth. Every single one had been found and dismantled after Marzia's Decree. Yet, when the Decree arrived, some atomic warheads had been yet to be fully assembled, and the system's radar didn't point toward them. Putting them together required people with the proper knowledge, but it was possible and was being done even as Shen taught people the first step to kill him—nullifying his aura.

If all else failed, the plan was to fill as much invader-occupied space possible with Concept-powered mana and detonate the bombs inside it—hopefully, inside the rift. Exactly twenty thousand people were training precisely for that.

They called themselves the Mana Swarm.

Even in the best-case scenario, many more than those twenty thousand would die when the explosion and radiation spread outside the portal. The entire camp might perish. However, that was better than losing Earth without trying to protect it with all they had. The underground, at least, would be safe. It had become a nuclear bunker, though few had noticed it with all the magic going around.

But that was a thought for the future.

Right now, Shen had a group of very sad Intervention Colonels to uplift. He didn't like coddling people with soft words, but without hope, they were more likely to flee than do their jobs.

"Stand up and attempt this new tactic whenever you're ready," he commanded. "If you can deal ten points of damage to me, I'll give you bragging rights. You can tell everyone you won in a fight against me."

They would fail, of course, but he liked the fire in their eyes.

[A/N: I decided not to show the fight because it would be just a curb stomp. Also, fewer battle scenes now will leave your minds fresh for the big battle later.

Speaking of which...

There was a lot to deal with and show before the fight, but it's finally mostly done.

Only one more chapter (maybe two, but probably one) in the camp, and maybe an extra POV (if I feel it's required) before we time-skip to the big battle!

Hype!]

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