[MA] 172. Middle Ground (Patreon)

Previous Chapter — Table of Contents — Next Chapter 

[A/N: Sorry about the delay.

I'm confident I'll release at least one late chapter next week. Look forward to it.

Chapters this week: 3/3 (+1)

Late chapters: 0/4

Next release: Tuesday ]

When Shen landed, the mana blast was still going. Back in the rift, it had lasted for 20 seconds. It should go on for longer this time, with three extra orbs fuelling the explosion.

Some gnolls would survive it, and he wanted to get to them before they could recover. However, he couldn't just let humankind suffer against the other D-ranks while he waited.

So, he decided to try to cull at least the aura users before ending the ones back in the explosion.

Shen ran straight at the nearest of the two, a fat gnoll wearing a simple linen-looking black robe.

A two-hundred-yard-wide elemental field surrounded the D-rank. It seemed related to gravity because it squeezed people to death. It started by slowing everyone in range down, locked them in place, and finally just popped them.

The needless cruelty made Shen furious.

Whoever resisted the field had to contend against the gnoll's forty-yard-wide aura. It potentialized the field's power, forcing humanity to face they were nothing but fragile bags of meat and bones. The gnoll might specialize in more than one Concept, yet the only one they showed related to squashing enemies.

Finally, on top of that, ten floating black metal disks surrounded the gnoll and finished any who dared survive both his field and aura. Each disk was twenty inches wide and sharp at the edges. They easily cut down humans and doubled down as shields, intercepting any of the very few attacks that would reach the gnoll.

Shen covered the ground to the D-rank in an instant. When his aura touched their elemental field, the latter was annulled. As impressive as the field was, it was an unfocused spell that had trouble piercing his aura.

Then his aura touched the gnolls aura, and Shen couldn't believe what he encountered.

The gnoll showed great magic ability, so they had to possess great willpower or be intelligent and knowledgeable—or both. That's how magic worked. They were also talented if they had developed an aura when most D-rank gnolls hadn't.

Shen quickly found the source of the gnoll's magic power: knowledge. There was almost no willpower in that gnoll, not even half Alicia's.

They felt like an empty husk, a golem, living on without any passion or ambition. They just went through the motions because they knew nothing else. Now that Shen noticed it, he realized there was also no joy in the gnolls' body language—if gnolls and humans shared similarities in that area, of course.

They looked like a machine that was just killing gruesomely because that was the most effective way it knew to accomplish the commands it had been given.

Shen's aura crushed the gnoll's. The D-rank turned and looked frightened to death when they saw Shen. All disks moved to intercept him.

The exotic shield-weapon blend didn't even move at Mach 10. Shen avoided them easily, got beside the gnoll, and cut them in half with a single swing of his spear.

He hated himself for feeling disappointed at finding the D-rank too easy to kill when killing them saved many lives.

Shen turned to the next aura user, a tall, large gnoll inside a thick-looking blue and green plate armor filled with magic runes.

Their elemental field produced countless one-arm-long metallic needles. They moved at Mach 12 and went through most targets, turning humans into sieves.

Almost no one survived that. The very few who did and entered the gnoll's aura were faced with Reality itself tearing holes into them. Everyone fell with three one-inch-thick holes in their heads.

None got close enough for Shen to witness the D-rank using their two white and golden rapiers.

Their field was also nullified by Shen's aura, but their will was more robust than the previous gnoll. Shen would say it was about eighty percent as strong as his.

A worthy foe.

The difference in willpower was too small for either to instantly crush the other. Shen kept running at the gnoll, and their auras seemed to fold onto themselves. They were incapable of invading each other's space until the willpower battle was resolved one way or the other.

Shen expected the bending to strengthen the aura, but it was the opposite. His Concepts affected the Reality around him more strongly, but they were still part of Reality. They harmonized with it. They lost said harmony and their hold on the area when they folded as if that broke some of the rules the Concepts depended on to work.

His aura stopped being able to affect anything between him and the gnoll when it was thirty yards wide. Their wills were still linked, still battling for supremacy, and until either won, their auras would be out of the equation. That helped explain why the gnolls who had ambushed him had been adamant about protecting their aura users, keeping them away, trying to lock Shen down until his aura was gone.

At least Shen's aura kept its original range and power sideways and behind him. Only the places where it touched the gnoll's aura were forced to bend as if a barrier had been drawn between them.

Unfortunately, not having his aura in front of him meant the enemy's elemental field was free to get to him. The arm-sized metallic needles kept materializing and shooting at him at Mach 12 speed, dozens per instant. They were too slow to reach him but fast enough to decrease his focus in the upcoming battle.

The gnoll, noticing his approach, stopped killing humans, turned to him, and readied their rapiers.

Shen Backstepped—and failed. The gnoll's needles flew at Mach 12 speed, but the gnoll himself reached Mach 19. They followed his movements and didn't let him get behind them.

While Shen was sidestepping, the gnoll thrust with his weapons.

Shen had never witnessed something so fast.

The tip of the rapiers seemed to weaken the spacetime continuum to make it easier for the blades to move forth. The weapons reached Mach 30, and Shen had to use his Path-filled qi to bring the most out of his footwork and barely dodge. He ended up sideways to the gnoll.

One rapier missed him, but the other scraped his chest. That put him in the path of two of the needles constantly materializing around him. They bit three inches deep into his shoulder and leg despite his D+ resistance and the qi protecting his body.

| HP: 182 / 200 | -18

Shen never stopped—he didn't dare. While dodging, he also stepped back to get away from the enemy and take advantage of his weapon's longer reach.

The gnoll tried to follow, but his movement speed was still at Mach 18, a far cry from his attack's. Shen's speed advantage, though small, was wide enough for him to put some distance between them. Seeing the enemy coming at him as fast as they could, he used the opportunity to thrust his spear at them.

The gnoll crossed their rapiers, caught Shen's spear shaft between them, and pushed them up. That left Shen's front side open, and they tried to capitalize on it, using a Skill or special move to suddenly reach Mach 25 and get closer to Shen.

The Skill had a glaring flaw: it required a more robust body than the gnoll's. Shen couldn't see past the blue and green plate armor, and any sound moved slower than they were moving, but moments later, he heard the consequences of using that move. The gnoll grunted in pain as their pelt was torn open and multiple bones snapped.

Yet, the Skill served its purpose. Shen stepped back to keep his distance, but the gnoll was faster, and their short weapon came to their advantage because Shen's spear was out of position. The enemy lowered the rapiers and aimed to skewer Shen's chest and head.

Unfortunately for the gnoll, any spearman knew that such a situation could arise and was prepared for it. Shen had started pulling his spear back and rotating the shaft sideways as soon as his previous attack failed. The shaft deflected both rapiers sideways in the nick of time.

Shen had counted on that and let one hand go of the spear as soon as it struck the enemy rapiers. At the same time, he stopped his retreat and moved toward the gnoll while thrusting his hand at the enemy.

His Path-filled qi painfully turned the edge of his open palm into a spearhead. His body protested and hurt from it.

| HP: 181 / 200 | -1

Shen ignored the pain and aimed at the enemy's chest—if they tried to dodge, he would have a better chance to hit something at last.

The gnoll had too much momentum and too weak a body to slow down in time. As Shen's spear had been, the rapiers were now out of position. The enemy let go of their weapons but had bet too hard on their fast attack working—they hadn't planned for failure.

Shen let Path-filled qi out of his body to create a phantom spearhead around his hand. His and the enemy's speed were just enough to give him the extra edge he needed to pierce through the thick magic armor. Its runes shone brightly, and a thin magic barrier coated it, but it didn't resist.

His qi blade touched the gnoll and faced their soul resistance. It was dispelled but managed to get about one inch into their pelt before his hand arrived.

Shen's hand did the rest.

His arm went into the gnoll's chest, and he curved it up, aiming for their head from the inside. While it traveled through the enemy's innards, Shen used Arc Flash to create multiple arc faults inside the gnoll's body. Explosions shredded everything around Shen's arm.

They turned into light.

Shen ignored his bloodied arm, now missing a sleeve, and looked around. Killing the gnolls had taken a few seconds. The explosion was still going.

With his aura in full swing, he doubted the remaining six hundred gnolls would fare better than the aura user he had just dispatched.

He rushed at them.

= - = - =

Forty seconds later, Shen had killed only forty extra D-ranks. They didn't present a challenge but mowed fast through Earth's army. He was always playing catch-up.

His spear beheaded another enemy at the exact moment the mana explosion finally died down.

He immediately rushed back toward its epicenter while checking the results of his stratagem.

Around one hundred gnolls had survived in total. Half was naked and had turned into exposed flesh and bones of different sizes, lacking one to three limbs. The other half was also mangled but still had at least pieces of magic armor on their bodies. The parts were quickly growing anew as Shen watched, likely from a self-repair function. Only twenty still had weapons, which indicated they had chosen to buy a better armor first or that their weapons were simply more fragile despite being of the same rank—or a mix of both.

Of the seven hundred and fifty Shen had fought, only six remained, two of which were aura users, including the strongest one—who still had their armor but no weapon.

No armored vehicle, wyvern, monoliths, or the white cubes that had been inside remained.

Neither did corpses.

The mana blast had corroded everything but the survivors into nothing, including the ground, which had turned into an enormous crater. The rift portal was now floating midair.

Shen felt a pang of guilt when he confirmed that Earth's elites had indeed been inside the explosion's blast range. Nine still living human remains were fallen in front of five gnolls. They had fared as bad as the enemy, their skin gone, what should be hidden, in sight.

Shen identified each race primarily by their jaws and teeth. Gnolls' face anatomy was positively canine.

Those nine humans were close enough to suggest they had banded together to fight the mana blast. That was probably the only reason the peak E-ranks had survived where so many D-ranks fell. Each gnoll survivor was alone, suggesting they hadn't tried anything similar.

That was strange after seeing the E-rank gnolls work so well together. He guessed the D-ranks had either been more confident of their personal power or less trusting of their peers.

Whatever the case, he had an important choice to make:

Should he head toward the survivors first and heal them, or should he kill as many weakened gnolls as possible before they got too far?

Shen chose the middle ground.

The two aura users from the ambush were on the way to the survivors. He would engage them for a few instants, then, regardless of whether he had killed them or not, move to help his people.

As much as he felt terrible for the nine, simple logic moved him, not empathy. There were too many D-ranks for him to kill before they got through Earth's army and moved on. He would need help hunting them down, and those nine seemed like the best the world had to offer. It was better to save them in the long run, even if a few extra gnolls escaped him for now, which would cause additional people to die in the short and middle run.

Shen turned to his previous arch-enemy, the strongest aura user, and rushed at them as fast as possible.

Previous Chapter — Table of Contents — Next Chapter