Chapter 191: An Odd Domain
“Tricks,” Nara growled, rounding on a plaque poacher through the Mausoleum of the Einvaldi. The poacher, bronze ranked, flung out her hand, explosive pills bursting at the deflection of Nara’s sword.
Surprised, Nara couldn’t block the explosion entirely, powder slipping through her defenses and stinging her eyes, eliciting an equally stinging string of curses. Area effects were unfortunately her weakness, and the wily plaque poacher had sussed it out. Her damage, at least, was low, even if Nara’s pride felt as bedraggled as her combat robes.
Judgement of the astral, Nara tried to silent cast, but she failed. She huffed disappointedly and cast it verbally this time.
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Ability: [Astral Judgement]
Spell (affliction)
Incantation: “Judgement of the astral.”
Cost: Moderate mana
Cooldown: 30 seconds
Effect (Iron): Inflict rending damage for each curse, holy, unholy, or magic affliction the target is suffering from.
Effect (Bronze): Inflicts or refreshes [Sunder].
<ul>
<li>[Sunder] (affliction, magic): Negates immunities to physical, resonating-force, disruptive-force, and rending damage. This includes intrinsic immunities such as not having a corporeal form or possessing an entirely energy form. Cannot be cleansed while any other curse, unholy, or holy affliction is in effect.</li>
</ul>
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Aliyah could non-verbally cast, but then again, most primary spellcasters could. It really wasn’t necessary for her, but it was Sen’s current group homework, and they could only oblige him.
The damage staggered the plaque hunter, who skidded on the stone floor of the mausoleum. The plaque hunters primarily operated by not being noticed in the first place, or outnumbering the team members that remained outside, much like how the Advent had ganged up on her. Nara, with her rapid teleportation, anti-detection abilities, and strong aura, made a perfect hunter of the hunters, so she had taken up one of the various contracts that requested their capture, dead or alive (although with a higher reward for live captures, as the Adventure Society had the good sense not to encourage field executions.)
Mausoleum adventurers were no slouches, as many were here as a reward for heroic feats, but even the best adventurers struggled when outnumbered, and the plaque hunters were more familiar with the mausoleum than visiting heroes sent from various lands to try to gamble their way into a reward. If fate made them heroes, then perhaps fate would deliver treasure (if Nara could equate gods to fate, then the saying may be accurate after all.)
The plaque hunter had been thoroughly locked down by Entropy and Infinity Domain, both of which inflicted Inescapable, a doubling up that Nara didn’t mind; She’d much rather be the only teleporter around than have to fight one. Her duel with her mimic self was enough to let her know how maddening it was.
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Ability: [Entropy]
Spell (curse, affliction)
Incantation: “From order to disorder.”
Cost: Moderate mana
Cooldown: None
Effect (Iron): Periodically applies an additional instance of each stacking curse, holy, unholy, or magic affliction the target is suffering from. This is a curse effect. This effect cannot be cleansed while any other curse, holy, unholy, or magic affliction is in effect.
Effect (Bronze): Inflicts or refreshes [Inescapable].
<ul>
<li>[Inescapable] (affliction, magic): Subject cannot be affected by teleport or non-damaging dimension effects.</li>
</ul>
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The Inescapable effect of Infinity Domain ignored resistances however, so it was the superior option if Nara was willing to get up close and personal, or made approaching her just as risky for her enemies.
If they weren’t willing to take the risk and approach, Nara could always make them.
Still, the plaque poacher wasn’t out of tricks, and Nara was trying to capture her alive. The poacher tripped around a corner (a distraction, Nara noticed, to hide her true action) and triggered another trap. Since the plaque poachers roamed the halls of the Einvaldi, they had littered his mausoleum with traps, always there to catch unsuspecting prey in its jaws or cover their escape. Guides where there to disable them or navigate around them, and they occasionally partnered with adventurers to disable them altogether in similar bounty contracts. Although, Nara wondered if they just let the traps be, if one day the Mausoleum would reach a critical mass of traps, and the plaque hunters would all inadvertently kill each other with professional-acquaintance-friendly-fire.
A hidden stone slab groaned from the wall, and then slammed forwards towards Nara fast and hard. She slipped by it, easily enough, not even needing to phase. The light bending effect of her Moonlight Robes often caused their enemies to misjudge her distance and fail precise maneuvers against her, and the treasure hunter hadn’t stopped to look behind her, failing the precision the trap needed to hit. It shattered against the wall in a shower of dust and stone projectiles, the diamond rank mausoleum once again proving the toughest opponent around. Nara danced through the shower of stone bullets, building Waking Moment and Boundary’s Scorn as each rock pinged off a glowing golden sword, directed by her abilities to just skate their surface.
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Ability: [Dream’s Wake]
Special Ability (boon)
Cost: None
Cooldown: None
Effect (Iron): Negate all damage and non-damage effects from actively intercepted or parried attacks. Not all damage and non-damage effects from very powerful attacks will be negated. Intercepted or parried attacks will not trigger retributive effects.
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Effect (Bronze): Gain an instance of [Waking Moment] upon intercepting or parrying an attack, even if not all damage or non-damage effects are negated. Instances of [Waking Moment] have a threshold determined by current rank. After reaching the threshold, gain instances of [Endless Dream] instead.
<ul>
<li>[Waking Moment] (boon, holy, stacking): The [Speed] and [Power] attributes are temporarily increased by a small amount. Additional instances have a cumulative effect, up to a maximum threshold.</li>
<li>[Endless Dream] (boon, mana-over-time, holy, stacking): Periodically recover a small amount of mana. Slight reduction in mana cost for abilities. Additional instances have a cumulative effect.</li>
</ul>
Ability: [Avatar of the Boundary]
Special Ability (boon, affliction, holy, magic)
Cost: none
Cooldown: none
Effect (Iron): When inflicting damage on an enemy with a normal or special attack or active damaging ability, gain an instance of [Boundary’s Grace]. Upon reducing, avoiding, or negating damage with your abilities, the attacker will be afflicted with an instance of [Boundary’s Scorn]. [Boundary’s Scorn] inflicted in this way cannot be resisted. Instance limit of [Boundary’s Grace] is determined by the [Spirit] attribute.
<ul>
<li>[Boundary’s Grace] (boon, holy, stacking): Increases rending and transcendent damage dealt. Additional instances have a cumulative effect.</li>
<li>[Boundary’s Scorn] (affliction, unholy, stacking): Reduces resistance to afflictions dealt by anyone with the [Boundary’s Grace] boon. Cleansing abilities have reduced effect when cleansing afflictions inflicted by anyone with the [Boundary’s Grace] boon. Additional instances have a cumulative effect.</li>
</ul>
Effect (Bronze): Gain increased reflexes, proprioception, and spatial awareness.
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She could even deflect the same attack multiple times if she could spare the mental capacity to do so, and angled her swords just right, but it was mostly best to deflect each once. Far more efficient, although less impressive. A hazy mind state of dual cognition was gradually forming, a shape within the fog, and the swords did as she bid, without much active thought direction. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Chrome huffed a sound of approval (but that could’ve been her own imagination).
Area attacks may be her weakness, but multi-objects attacks boosted her more than they harmed her. Unfortunately, the indiscriminate nature of the explosive-rock-vomit bypassed the anti-homing of her robes, which excelled against targeted attacks, although her Infinity Domain kindly redirected most other rocky projectiles. She partial-phased her leg to pass a particularly large shard of rock to prevent the interruption of her movement. Ahh, a classic. Amara had trained that particular reaction into her.
Obscured by the shower of stone dust, a man barreled through, massive in both stature and momentum. A split-second transformation of Nirvana into a shield intercepted and nullified the bulk of the damage, but she let herself be flung, the charge attack launching her backwards back towards the wall like an action movie sequence. With a well-timed node teleport, she appeared to the side of her first target, smashing into her with the momentum her comrade had so generously donated to her. Try as she might, Nara had no such methods of generating such massive instantaneous momentum.
However, she specialized in using the strengths of the enemy against them.
A simultaneous flare of her aura and the momentous impact concussed the female leonid poacher in aura and body, banging her against the wall with a crack that an iron ranker would not have survived. In that brief moment of vulnerability, Nara snapped a suppression collar (provided by the Adventure Society for the contract, not one of Encio’s illicit goods) around the poacher’s neck, and Thanatos darted from her shadow quick as a viper, snapping the poacher up in his jaws in a sweep of shadow and dark flame.
“ALBA!!” her comrade yelled out, furious but unable to follow, Inescapable shackling any teleport that tried to break free. He yelled at his inability to follow and redoubled his efforts onto Nara instead. There was no escape: only the battle, and the duel.
A third poacher joined, just shy of in time to save his teammate, bladed whip darting forward, blades sliding over blades like the rattle of a snake.
“You’ll pay for that!” the barrel-chested man bellowed, as if his voice alone could incapacitate Nara. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t his specialty; Nara would’ve had no defense against such a thing except range, and thanked her lucky stars. Leonids were unfortunately known for sound attacks. This man (not a leonid man) was more likely a Juggernaut Confluence user. His iron skin gleamed with his next charge, man turned into speeding car, his eyes the headlights of his rage.
Nara had the mind to be thankful she had spent the majority of her training and life-and-death combat situations fighting enemies more massive than she, and she vaguely wondered if the provided suppression collar would be able to accommodate the width of his girthy neck.
The juggernaut poacher had enough experience in his hunting grounds not to ram himself fatally into the diamond ranked walls, and Nara taunted them both from there repeatedly. Should the whip strike it, it would break, a shower of metal shards against unrelenting stone. Rarely were such absolute obstacles Nara’s friends, but here, the walls watched her back and supported her steps.
A third joined the poachers, for a group of three, previously four, with their comrade taken. With a small enough group of essence users, with one or two within the challenge rooms, they would be able to overpower those left outside.
Nara would not be able to say she found the tactic of ganging up on someone cowardly, as Sen would gleefully employ such a strategy. Nara however, would take great joy in proving that numbers were not enough to defeat her. She may be a duelist, but she felt like a chess master, blitzing through a line of twenty challengers alone.
“Well come on,” she taunted, her black blade gleaming with the sunset edge of the invocation of Horizon’s Edge, “Surely the three of you can defeat me and take my token? Or do you need me to wait so you can call another buddy to help?”
Nara didn’t actually have her token, she had just traded it to Tyranel.
The poachers, of course, didn’t need to know that.
*****
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-You have used [Forge of the Divine Chariot].
-The effects of [Forge of the Divine Chariot] have been adapted to [Astral Domain].
- [Effect: Converts the interior of the vehicle or constructed into an extension of the connected entity’s spirit domain] has been changed to [Effect: Converts the interior of the vehicle or constructed into an extension of the connected entity’s spirit domain or astral domain].
-You have gained the ability to create a [Spirit Domain] when conditions are met. You posses no [Spirit Domains].
-The effects of [Soul Legion] will apply to applicable [Spirit Domains].
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Her state of meditative introspection faded away, her new awareness of the space around her replacing it. Her inherent bond to the Nebula House with Soul Legion had granted an increased awareness of everything within her house, but not that awareness was complete, absolute.
She had an inkling that this was what the gods felt in their domains, and why Spirit Domains were associated with divinity, although Premiesta-Knowledge had told her that it was not only gods that could posses Spirit Domains. It was an awareness that surpassed distance, although Nara did not know if it could surpass dimensional boundaries. With her astral presence, the jury was still out on that conclusion.
Had this been worth her token? Chrome had scoffed and said it did more than she understood and should thank Tyranel for allowing the exchange in the first place.
It was an odd thing, a domain—be it spirit or astral. In her Astral Domain, she possessed all the administrative properties. From light to even life and death, she could simply switch off their existences like switches in her Astral Domain. She possessed some level of control in a Spirit Domain—not to the extent of life and death, but she could manipulate gravity, as that was a function the Nebula Flask was able to replicate already. The most important aspect of the Spirit Domain was the aura and soul part of it—she could deny aura and divine sight within her walls.
Physical perception still passed through, but a wall would simply do. Not to mention, the complex magic of nebula and cloud flasks had protections against observation, control, and analysis.
Her flask had always been a potent defensive encampment in combat. Nara appreciated the peace of mind it provided during the hours of rest and meditation, unlike some parties which used watch shifts at night despite their perimeter arrays.
Regardless of how strong the flask was defensively, it would not progress her abilities. In that, all essence users were equal. Equipment could fill the gaps, increase their strengths, and tilt the scales towards victory, but only by using and mastering abilities could they cultivate true strength.
The point of equipment was that they’d be alive to see it.