[MA] 227. Open Chicken (Patreon)

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[A/N: Sorry for the delay. No good reason today, I just got caught in writing and ended up without time to review the latest chapter.

Chapters last week: 3/3

Delayed chapters: 2

Next release: Tuesday]

The windriders attacked as soon as Shen's group crossed some invisible threshold. They all flew to surround them while sending spells their way.

In Shen's squad, three control zones overlapped with each other. Soundy's vibration zone was twice as large as the defensive ones. Swordy's thousands of swords were now accompanied by Shieldy's countless halberd blades.

The three would likely not manage to defend against the thousands of spells coming their way, but they certainly tried. Shen was admittedly impressed. They had not received his training yet had admirable resolve and did their best.

Lighty and Fiery determined they were more valuable as defenders than scouts this time and assisted the others, but their skills were lacking. Fiery outright got caught in a willpower battle and was instantly overwhelmed. She fell unconscious.

"Lighty, carry Fiery," Shen commanded.

Theoretically, he had no authority to issue that order, but his words were an implicit threat: either Lighty obeyed, or Fiery would fall down and die. He hadn't ordered anyone else to carry her, after all, and he himself wouldn't do it.

He was bluffing; he wouldn't let someone die just because they made a mistake when trying to protect his squad. However, holding the woman would hinder the better fighters. Tactically, Lighty was the one who had to carry the woman, and Shen hoped she saw reason.

She did. She was a mage and quickly grabbed Fiery while keeping her magic defenses up. Carrying the fallen woman with magic would be stupid, an easy weak chain for the enemy to force another willpower battle. Lighty was forced to only wield her staff with one hand.

Thousands of enemy spells approached every instant. On Shen's side, about a hundred spells assisted the control zones in their defenses. Even Soundy didn't attack any enemy but their spells instead.

Meanwhile, the windriders encroached on their position.

The control zones gave Shen's squad a tiny edge, the summoned matter getting in the way of multiple spells, but it was Icy who shone this time. She could've acted in the fight against the fire wisps, but she simply had no need to. Now, she showed why she had the best defense score of them all, after Shen.

The cultivator was used to seeing heat indirectly hurt people when Guardians used fire spells. She did the opposite. Her ice spells took coldness to the extreme and forced the enemy to spend a lot of willpower to have their attacks ignore the laws of physics. She was cunning and mixed summoned ice shards with indirect spells to keep the enemy guessing.

She also kept the temperature changing very fast, which messed with the enemy mages' willpower. The Maiden had told Shen it was an advanced technique he would've learned if he could, and he was surprised to find his ice mage using it.

That was enough. Shen was satisfied with what he saw. Even without him, his squad could've survived—if the enemy didn't have an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Fortunately, they were pretty dumb; instead of overwhelming the entire area with a lot of mana and forcing his people not to use spells, they deployed their own control zones.

A control zone was what its name implied: a zone where a Guardian had better control of the surrounding area using their mana. It gave the Guardian a ground advantage, and they could more easily indirectly affect enemy spells without getting locked in a willpower battle. However, when two opposing zones approached each other, either one gave way to the other, or a willpower battle started.

Dozens of windriders deployed control zones and were quickly approaching.

They hadn't yet wholly surrounded the drow, but Shen wisely decided it was better to attack now than wait for his squad to die.

He swung his spear without stopping. Dozens of blades, each one-third as powerful as he could make them, shot from his weapon toward the enemy. The windriders wore traditional armor and defended themselves with spells, easily resisting most of his blades.

Yet, Shen could literally keep going for all eternity; he kept producing blades, putting the enemy on the defensive. Dozens of attacks turned into hundreds, then into thousands within moments.

They were often stopped by spells and didn't affect the typhoon each windrider had for legs. The windriders were also the richest of the bunch he had fought on this planet; even when his invisible blades struck them, their armor could resist about three strikes in the same place before getting pierced. They were also the strongest; he couldn't kill them with a single strike. Four had to hit the same vital area for him to succeed.

Shen knew the exact numbers because one of the windriders sacrificed themselves to get that data for the others.

It made Shen respect them more. So, he sacrificed a little stealth to treat them as weak fellow warriors instead of training dummies.

He doubled the power of his invisible blades.

It wasn't just a quantitative leap, but also a qualitative one. Shen had only been using it to cut physical matter until now. However, the invisible attack was originally meant to cut the very Concepts of Reality as it traveled forward.

Just like it had happened against the ogres, as the hidden edge traveled forward, plasma, lightning, light, fire, ice, images of weapons, and myriad other elements blinked into existence almost faster than Shen could see. For a split instant, the now-cut Concepts couldn't regulate how any Laws affected everything in the exact place the infinitesimal blade was at. Therefore, some Laws temporarily got more substantial control over that space, creating the phenomena he witnessed.

It effectively turned the attack into a pathetically weak Law attack.

This time, the invisible edge cut down any spell with less than three Concepts or without a mastered Concept—almost all of them. The moving, curved line created a ridiculously tiny region the Guardians couldn't control with pure will inside their spells. It caused a rebound, and most instinctively let go of their spells to protect themselves instead.

Almost none of those instinctive fighters managed to erect defenses in time; Shen's blade was just that fast.

The extra power and the qualitative leap also made most D-rank armor useless. Only those imbued with three Concepts or a mastered Concept resisted. All others did nothing to slow the invisible edge, just as the bodies of the windriders underneath them.

Their typhoons were also cut down this time. It was excruciating, seeing as how a few fainted while all others let out roars of absolute agony. They all fell down the skies, and only a little less than half managed to rebuild their typhoons before they hit the ground. The other conscious ones had to use their mana to keep themselves afloat.

Their wings were useless. Or maybe they never cared to learn to use them to fly because they didn't need them. Shen found it a bit of a stupid magic-biological design, but maybe it made sense in whatever planet they had come from.

At D-rank, even the unconscious ones that splattered on the ground should survive this height unless their resistance was still at the E rank. Shen refused to believe anyone would be stupid enough to come to a battlefield between D-ranks with anything less than D- resistance.

Whichever way the windriders communicated, it wasn't with words Shen could hear. Yet, word quickly spread about how to resist his blades after he had killed only three hundred. Another three hundred didn't have the means to protect themselves and immediately hid behind the other four hundred.

Shen was impressed.

That was about the most he could do with his invisible edges. Adding the remaining third of his power to the blades would only make them faster, not more difficult to resist. Granted, they would become twice as fast, which should net him some extra kills, but it would still not be enough to win this fight. It might, however, let an observer extrapolate his true power. He wouldn't do that yet.

The windriders had momentarily halted their approach under his stronger attacks but resumed it.

Soundy hadn't been idle. Her spells kept going, and she fell a couple windriders. It obviously wouldn't be enough, though. The enemy covered for each other, and their control zones were still approaching.

Shen had to go meet the enemy this time.

He had already shown two-thirds of his long-range capabilities. That was a suitable threshold. He would attack using that much of his power and ability.

"Make way for me to leave at direction zero-dot-one hundred-dot-forty-two," he ordered, giving them a three-dimensional direction based on the coordinates he instinctively felt with his mind interface. "Protect yourselves while moving as fast as possible toward the nearby teleportation circle. Once there, defend it while I clear the area."

He filled his body with qi and created a big explosion with his Path Qi below his feet, propelling himself in the direction he had mentioned. It would take him to the closest windrider with a control zone.

Shen was initially slow, not even hitting Mach 10. He kept accelerating with qi explosions and thrusters, taking utmost care not to get caught in a willpower battle. He would eventually enter one such fight—this was too good an opportunity to figure out how his will compared to non-rift dwellers—but now wasn't the time.

He made himself an obvious target, and countless spells came his way. His spear easily cut through them. It vibrated at a general anti-mana frequency.

With only two-thirds of his max speed, flexibility, and skills, his micro-thrusts only disrupted the mana around ten feet ahead. Max power would let him accomplish almost a hundred feet—it was exponential growth.

That was enough. He cut down some spells and dodged most of what remained. He also imbued his body with anti-fake material movements to erase any fake matter a few hundred feet away from him. It went like continuous waves, and he wasn't surprised to see about half the incoming "spells" disintegrate, revealing they weren't actually spells but an attempt to waste his movements.

There was a slight difference between conjured matter and spells, even when both used elements or objects created out of thin air. So, he needed two different frequencies to deal with both.

Aerial maneuvers weren't Shen's forte, but the Maiden had obviously not neglected his training in that direction, even if other drow usually only received such education at C-rank.

So, Shen quickly accelerated to Mach 30—the most he could reach on air using two-thirds of his power—and swiftly dodged almost every spell he couldn't destroy with his spear. Yet, there were too many incoming spells, and many enemies were also peak D-ranks, even if Shen still hadn't detected any peak elite—maybe he should call it a true elite instead? He wasn't fast enough. Dozens of spells struck him.

Or rather, they struck his C- armor with a C- resistance enchantment.

Shen had successfully killed Yinhu Lanfen, a C-rank—but a feeble one that did not have C- resistance. He had almost died anyway. Only extensive preparation and the proper techniques let him cut her right after she used a technique to turn herself into a lightning bolt too fast for him to react against.

But these windriders?

His armor took the hits without slowing him down even a little. He pleasantly noticed that C- resistance meant more than physical defense; he didn't even need to fill his armor with his qi to have it resist the indirect effects of spells. Those things were all physical manifestations of the Laws of Reality at a base level. C-rank meant touching on those very Laws, and while Shen had no idea how to share that characteristic with any equipment, it was evident that his armor took advantage of that.

Shen kept advancing, letting his armor take more and more hits until he found how good its defenses were. He put it at around seven hundred D-rank spells per second; after that, the armor started bending uglily. It wasn't that much, but he guessed that if C- resistance could make one immune to D-rank attacks, things would be a bit too unfair.

Even then, it made it much easier for him to pick which spells to destroy and which to let hit him. He was soon upon the closest windrider zone controller.

Right before getting there, he kept his armor as much out of harm's way as he could. As planned, that let him ignore the elemental field entirely and swing his spear vertically, aiming to cut the enemy in the middle.

A tower shield appeared out of nowhere on top of the windrider's already armored wing, which they used to block Shen's spear. It looked like it was made of metal,  so he kept his attack's frequency set to counter that element; it was already set like that because of the metallic armor.

It worked, and when the blade was through shield and armor, he changed the frequency to go against carbon-based living beings instead.

The windrider became a dead, open chicken, and Shen flew toward the next zone controller nearby.

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