[MA] 173. Multilayered Strategy (Patreon)

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[A/N: 1/3 chapters this week. Next one on Thursday.]

Shen reached the gnoll aura user less than two seconds after the explosion finished. That was long enough for him to see his enemy regenerate their entire body. Missing limbs and pelt grew anew at a quick speed while their armor also repaired itself.

Shen had nowhere near such a fast regeneration speed and doubted someone would spend so many Alliance Points to reach that level, too. He guessed magic was involved.

Only a few human Guardians sought to drive deep into the secrets of magic healing. Not because they didn't want to but because they lacked time to train in it. The ones with some mastery over it revealed it required fine control and great focus not to destroy something instead of fixing it. They didn't use their mana to heal as much as to create matter anew in a way that had been told was similar to creating metal out of thin air, except it was much more complex and required a lot more knowledge.

So, Shen's opponent could regenerate limbs in a couple seconds. That only made Shen's ability to purchase healing crystals that instantly healed him a little less of a cheat.

The small and fat gnoll aura user covered their nudity with a thin brown robe they also created magically. Their armor, if it could be called that, was a metallic grated ball covering neck to knees. The bars were thick, dark grey, almost black, and filled with black inscriptions. The gap between bars could be magically widened, allowing the gnoll to put the armor on and push their lower legs and arms out of it.

A smaller replica protected the gnoll's head, while ovoid versions protected their lower legs and arms. The entire thing should make maneuvering next to impossible, yet Shen recalled the gnoll running after him at Mach 15. He wouldn't be fooled.

Shen didn't know what the gnolls' hundred-yard-wide aura could do because he hadn't seen it in action. Fortunately, going through the explosion—and maybe healing themselves—had decreased the invader's willpower; it was currently only around half again as powerful as Shen's own. Their aura folded onto itself as he approached, so he wouldn't need to worry about it for now.

He wondered whether the gnoll would display an elemental—

As soon as Shen reached the gnoll and prepared a swing of his spear, the gnoll deployed their elemental field. Everything four hundred yards around the invader, except the area affected by Shen's aura, instantly became water. Shen's aura's area of influence was enveloped by it, and although it prevented any water from being created inside, it didn't stop it from appearing above it. Gravity was enough to push dozens of yards of water against him.

All gnoll D-ranks used elemental fields and had physical backup means of attack. It was a two-pronged attack that focused on the physical. They outright avoided energy clashes, not to waste willpower or focus that was better spent with the elemental field and physical battles.

Aura users' auras elevated the combat to another level altogether.

Against usual Guardians—without an aura—it gave them an extra edge on the physical battle. An unfair edge that could be used both as defense and attack with no energy and almost no willpower expenditure. Shen was confident no E-rank could win against such a setup.

Against other aura users, it added an extra battlefield to the fight. The enemy would be assaulted by the aura-mind-clash while wasting their focus on both the field and the physical battle. That hadn't mattered against the rapier-user because they had focused on the physical, where Shen had an advantage. But the gnoll in front of Shen perfected the mental part of the strategy, where they had the advantage.

They only had to stay engaged to Shen until they won the aura-mind-clash. Then, he would find himself without an aura to affect his surroundings, fighting underwater against an enemy that he bet specialized in underwater fighting. Victory would eventually be theirs.

Hence their armor. It only had to withstand his attacks for long enough. Its low maneuverability didn't matter because it didn't slow the gnoll down too much; at Mach 15, they could follow Shen if he tried to run, as long as they could use magic to slow him down.

Their strategy started working from the go. Shen used his aura to deflect the water away from him. It took a bit of his focus away from both the physical and mental fights. To make things worse, the gnoll's remarkable ability to heal themselves suggested it cost them very little willpower to materialize water like that.

Shen analyzed all that in the time it took him to complete his spear's swing. Unfortunately, his speed was already at only Mach 18; his divided focus took its toll. At least he had chosen to superimpose a qi spearhead on his weapon for extra damage.

The gnoll raised their armored forearm at Mach 17 and intercepted it. They could move their limbs faster than when moving their entire bodies.

The qi spearhead met the thick metal bar. The armor's inscribed runes shone light blue, increasing the thing's defense.

Shen's qi triumphed.

Regrettably, the qi spearhead didn't just exist forever and cost-free after being created; Shen had to continuously supply it with extra qi when it interacted with the world. Everything he had used to build it, about half percent of his total qi, was gone by the time it had embedded itself one-quarter of the way into the metal bar.

Then, Shen's actual spearhead showcased how its crystal-like material and D- Sharpness enchantment were a perfect combination as it kept cutting.

The swing speed was as fast as his body movements at Mach 18. His spear art and footwork were perfectly harmonized as parts of the Feng Clan's Hurricane Martial Arts. Everything he was and did could always move at his "base" peak speed—which was only overcome if he used special moves.

He wasn't using a special move now but a simple sweep. Mach 18 was still fast enough to significantly aid the spear in penetrating the enemy's armor.

It dug another third into the bar—then stopped.

Shen had expected his opening move to fail. His Path had already told him he would have to work to go through that armor. He pulled the spear back and Backstepped.

He also expected the opponent to see through his move. He had used it in front of them before, and they were fast enough to react anyway. They twisted their body to accompany Shen's move.

Shen didn't mind. His goal was to see how much the added Mach 1 speed he gained from that move could accomplish—especially when he doubled the energy he put on his qi spearhead and used a different spear move.

The gnoll raised their arms to meet Shen's thrust—not a swing this time. Shen corrected his spear's path to not hit the metal bars. They went through.

Or should have, if the bars didn't suddenly change place.

The only way he could describe it was as teleportation. The bars' runes shone bright, and suddenly, every bar occupied a different space. There was no movement he could perceive but an actual instantaneous spatial displacement.

At least that cost the gnoll something; the willpower they used on the mental fight suddenly dropped by half. Even better, Shen had also expected something to prevent his attack from hitting the gnoll, hence the extra qi and speed in his attack. If they wanted a protracted battle, they had to have the means to accomplish that.

The qi spearhead met the bar head-on and pierced over halfway through. His physical spearhead cut through the other half.

His weapon kept going.

The gnoll played smart then; they sacrificed their arm to appeal to Shen's bloodthirstiness. They didn't move the forearm one inch but did move the rest of their body. They approached Shen and punched him with the other arm. At the same time, the water just beyond his aura's range to one side and a few dozen yards behind the gnoll to the other turned into an ice dome.

Theirs was a cunning and multilayered strategy.

Earth's best warriors were still vulnerable; if this gnoll could recover so fast, so might others. Yet, Shen was getting locked down in that fight. If he cared about humankind, he would get desperate to leave or end this fight quickly.

If he tried to escape the dome, he bet the gnoll had multiple ways to slow him down. He would be wasting time and energy without results until he turned to fight them.

And in the fight, his desperation might lead him to misread the result of the current exchange. Soon enough, he would succeed in piercing the enemy armor while their punch would probably deal very little damage. If the gnoll was even brighter, he might even use his own mana against themselves to multiply how much damage Shen's attack would deal. That might have ended up with him fighting while believing victory was only one step away.

Of course, he would have to be an idiot not to see through all that. He had witnessed the gnoll regenerate lost limbs in seconds! Obviously, only instant lethal damage could end this battle.

Unfortunately for the gnoll, not only did Shen see through the ruse, but he was also a master of War and Combat. He instantly concluded the gnolls scheme might be countered in a way to give him the opening he needed for a quick win with minimal qi usage.

So he didn't even finish his attack. He widened his eyes in surprise, sidestepped to dodge the punch, and pretended to run away from the aura user while positioning his body for a sudden attack.

As soon as he started escaping, the ice dome thickened and kept expanding, suggesting all the water would become ice. It was changing at a breakneck pace. The gnoll wanted him to despair so much that they used extra focus and willpower to make the water turn into ice faster.

However, that's what Shen had been aiming for: a tired mind with a split focus working on a challenging task—turning water into ice in significant volumes.

Shen deployed his Path Sphere.

While under the effect of the monoliths, he had used his Foundational Sphere for extra defense and attack power. It had aided him immensely while only containing his foundational Concepts. His Path Sphere had his entire Path behind it.

It instantly involved Shen and gnoll both. His qi touched the enemy's mana, and they were frozen in place as an energy-mind battle was established.

Then, Shen pushed with all his will—but not against the gnoll.

The gnoll was distracted enough, and Shen only raised a token mental defense while pushing against Reality itself instead. His Path went against the hold of the Laws in the area as he willed the gnoll's armor to get cut. Sharpness was one of his foundational Concepts, and it was easy to make it the core of his Path Sphere.

He wanted to cut, so his qi became a Sharp edge against existence to make it so.

Shen's Sharpness waged War against the building blocks of Reality, Combated them to the very end, used the Flow of his energy against them, was effective to the last drop of qi because of Zephyr, was quick and destructive because of Arc Flash, and refused to be bound by petty rules of existence because of Boundlessness.

Reality fought back, and the weight of it made Shen clench his jaw; his head hurt so much it felt like it would blow up. He hadn't felt that bad when using his Foundational Sphere. It seemed that not only time made Reality push back harder, but the power involved was also a factor.

Shen could only maintain that for a few seconds, but all he needed was an instant.

The gnoll's armor was shredded into tiny pieces—for five percent of his qi reserves.

If the gnoll had been using their mana on their armor, Shen wouldn't have been able to accomplish that. He would need to win the willpower battle before getting a hold of any place filled with enemy energy. However, the enemy had been focusing their mana elsewhere while Shen was right beside them.

Shen let go of his Path Sphere, regaining control of his frozen body when he no longer had qi touching enemy mana. He then twisted his body faster than usual by spending an extra two percent of his qi. He had already positioned himself for the attack when he pretended to run.

He was too fast for the distracted gnoll to react.

Shen's spear went through the falling pieces of their armor and beheaded them in a single sweep.

In total, around seven percent of his qi was used to kill the aura user with the strongest will he had felt in the entire Rift War. He deemed it worth it. Only around six hundred and fifty gnolls remained; humanity might survive relatively unscratched yet.

Shen finished rotating, following his spear swing, then ran toward humanity's best.

The thin ice barrier shattered easily as he went through it. The other surviving aura user, the one with the weak will, hadn't even finished healing when they were easily beheaded as Shen passed by.

And yet, he was too late.

The nine humans were unconscious on the ground in front of five gnolls. The gnolls stood around thirty yards apart from each other, but the lack of any other gnoll for hundreds of yards suggested Earth's elites had been fighting a group of D-ranks, of which those five were survivors. None of the gnoll survivors were unconscious, and almost all were focusing on healing.

Not all of them, though.

One heavily injured gnoll, a mass of exposed flesh and bones with only half one leg and a missing hand, didn't seem to mind their condition as they dragged themselves toward the closest human. They were too slow, hindered by their grievous injuries, especially the lack of a fifth of their exposed brain. However, the seconds Shen had wasted had been enough for them to be less than one yard away from their target.

The gnoll's mental faculties were lowered enough for them to only manage to cast a spell that close, yet that would be enough.

Time seemed to slow down as Shen saw a fireball forming a few feet above the human.

It almost froze when he suddenly recognized Alicia. Her skin was gone, but her facial bones were still there, and he had been around her long enough to memorize their form.

Alicia...

Alicia would die.

She would die because he had almost killed her with the mana blast, then wasted time killing a gnoll.

The fireball descended...

...and struck a thin sword that appeared on the way just in time.

Shen had been focusing so hard on his failure that he hadn't noticed the very cultivator-looking old man running toward the fallen humans—nor the ten thousand cultivator-looking people running toward the D-ranks who had survived the explosion.

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