Chapter 705: Ballet
Nesha wasn’t very surprised by the notification, as the spell had been close to completion for months, missing only the external pressure for everything to click together.
Unlike Percy’s Carnival or Micky’s Symbel of the Savage Gods, her personalized version of the boosting art was a purely defensive one. It focused exclusively on mobility, leveraging traits of all her affinities to keep her away from harm.
She hadn’t seen any need to include offensive spells into the technique, since her offensive capabilities rested mainly within her traps and strategizing. So long as her boosting art kept her alive for a while, she should be able to find an opening to kill her opponents.
In theory, at least.
This wasn’t the kind of battle where Nesha could find an opening. She wanted to fire back at the enemy nobles: at the bastard who had ruined her life: but she had her hands full just surviving the onslaught of magic coming at her from every direction. Her willpower was spent just loosening the space around her so that she could keep dodging, and every drop of mana that her boosting art produced was used to travel through the air in ways that no other affinity would have allowed.
Every now and then, she tried to unleash a flock of deadly butterflies at her opponents, but the insidious constructs never made it close enough to threaten them before being ground down into harmless motes of mana.
Worse still, Nesha’s defences weren’t perfect.
While she just about managed to avoid any direct hits, some of the spells exploded close enough for the resulting shockwaves to slam into her violently, the enchantments on her chainmail struggling to absorb the impacts. Every blow she received shattered several links, peeling away entire segments of her armour and bruising her body.
Nesha was more than capable of fighting a single grade above her own. Even three or four Blues might not be able to beat her, but a Violet was pushing it: whether or not it was a relative weakling like Jeen. The addition of his subordinates was icing on the cake.
She wasn’t Percy.
The most she could do in a battle like this was to survive. To delay the inevitable. This was why she’d known from the moment she’d decided to lure the patriarch of House Oratio to Twilight City that she’d have to cheat to take him down.
Several minutes and a hundred times as many spells later, Nesha was almost naked, her body beaten black and blue and forcibly stripped of the armour that she had spent years painstakingly crafting. Her chest rose up and down with each strained breath, her lungs causing her to wince in agony every time they pressed against her cracked ribs.
Still, she had to keep the corners of her lips from curling up. ‘This should be about enough.’
Catching a glimpse of her opponents, she couldn’t help but frown in disgust upon noticing that Jeen and his goons were out of breath. The pigs hadn’t even moved a muscle throughout the battle. They’d just stood rooted at the same spots, firing spell after spell at her. Nesha hadn’t known that it was even possible for a Violet to tire that easily.
Occasionally, a fiery explosion illuminated the patriarch’s face, revealing a smirk that would have looked a lot more ominous if it wasn’t fragmented by his constant panting. The bastard was enjoying this, probably elated that he was about to tie a major loose end: in his mind at least.
She poured every drop of mana into her movement spell to stretch herself away to safety.
Jumping backwards, she crossed over a hundred metres in an instant, yet that was just the start. Sacrificing her boosting art, she consumed the rest of her reserves to repeat her action a second and a third time, turning into a swirling blob of flesh and black mana that bounced along the stretchy ground, rolling away from the enemy nobles.
Her opponents were caught by surprise, having clearly not realized how easily she could have escaped. They tried to fly after her, but she wasn’t going to allow that. She’d endured too much pain to piece together her final trap. Clicking her fingers, she willed her enchantments to activate once more.
‘Dad… you weren’t always a good father, but you didn’t deserve what happened. This one’s for you.’
Nesha hadn’t known which direction Jeen and his men would enter the city from, which was why she had prepared fifteen different sets of her enchanted slabs. However, creating and hiding enough constructs to threaten even a Violet, multiplied by over a dozen times, while also maintaining them for several months without anyone noticing would have been impossible.
This was why she had kept the buried constructs relatively simple, weak, and less numerous than what was necessary, treating them as mere distractions. It would have been nice if they could have brought down one of the Blues, to make the subsequent battle easier, but the primary purpose of the fake traps had been to put her opponents at ease: to make them think that her ambush had already failed.
The real trap had to be mobile enough that she could carry it into battle and set it up during a tough fight. Inconspicuous enough that nobody would see it coming. Powerful enough that even a Violet wouldn’t be able to stop it. Something that she would only need one of, wouldn’t be at risk of being discovered or stolen before the battle, and that she could easily maintain wherever and whenever she was.
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It had always been on her very person.
Countless stability runes collapsed at the same time, twisting the space around them. These enchantments hadn’t been carved onto bulky slabs of dimensional alloy. The runes were a hundred times more numerous, and dozens of times more compact, since they were located within each of the links that comprised her broken chainmail.
Unlike Percy’s armour, the primary function of Nesha’s chainmail hadn’t been to protect her.
Every piece was as small as a grain of rice, yet contained about ten cubic metres of compressed space: making it as spacious as ten of Remior’s spatial amulets! And there were thousands of broken links currently scattered around the nobles.
Even with the Vault’s superior runecrafting language and fused mana that was extremely compatible with the enchantments, Nesha had spent hours manually compressing and stabilizing each individual patch of space, dripping with sweat whenever she’d finished one.
And she’d done this over and over, spending most of her free time over the past couple of years. The links weren’t even usable as normal storage devices: the space locked within them was too dense and rough to contain anything without ripping it to shreds.
It had taken all of Nesha’s knowledge and ability to simply keep the runes from exploding in her face before she was ready: she’d had to compartmentalize the pockets of space so that they would remain compressed even when the links shattered into several smaller pieces.
Even Percy’s trick of using controlled self-repair enchantments to copy the magical links hadn’t been an option, since the dimensional alloy contained patches of actual space that she had ripped out of her surroundings: not just mana. Suffice to say, repairing or recycling the equipment was out of the question.
The attack could only be unleashed once.
Afterwards, Nesha would have to spend several more years reforging the armour from scratch if she wanted to use it again. Instead of a chainmail, it might be more appropriate to call this a bomb. She had created the most powerful explosive device that Remior had ever seen, worn it to battle, and tricked her opponents into peeling it away from her to surround themselves with its dormant pieces.
And now the bomb had gone off.
Countless tiny explosions connected in an instant, expanding into an enormous black sphere over a hundred metres across, with no sign of slowing down. It swallowed the three nobles without even giving them the chance to react before continuing to grow toward Nesha.
She tried to slip away once more, only to remember that she didn’t have any mana left.
Out of options, she closed her eyes, at peace with whatever her fate might be. She didn’t care that years of hard work had just gone up in darkness, nor did she care about the pain she was in. She muttered a silent prayer to Phoebe, not for her own survival, but for the demise of her opponents. It wasn’t like she wanted to die, but she’d happily embrace death if it meant dragging that snake down with her.
But she didn’t die. The notification was what alerted her to that fact.
[Congratulations! Your spells have merged: Dimensional Regalia: Refined + Spatial Devastation: Refined -> Husk of Devastation: Masterful!]
‘Two big upgrades in one battle. I bet even Percy hasn’t had that happen to him before,’ she thought, finding this amusing.
It only went to show how much planning she’d put into this. Back in the Alchemists’ Guild, Nesha had never thought that she would obtain justice for her destroyed family with her own two hands. Her plan had originally been to save up enough money and hire somebody else to do the dirty work. Later, she had hoped that Percy would be the one to do this for her. But her boyfriend had done something even better: he’d given her the means and set her on the path to succeed by herself.
Opening her eyes, she realized that the blast had stopped a couple dozen metres away. There was no corpse, nor any other trace of the enemy nobles or the battle they had fought.
Nothing besides a colossal crater shaped like a perfect hemisphere. It was about two hundred metres deep and twice as wide. There was no smoke emanating from it, nor rubble littering its base: just a smooth slope: almost as if a giant had simply scooped out a piece of Remior with a spoon.
She couldn’t hear anything but a loud ringing, the sides of her head and neck slick with warm blood. She guessed that her eardrums had ruptured entirely, meaning that it would probably take a skilled healer to mend them.
‘It’s fine. I’ll look for somebody at my destination,’ she thought.
Glancing at the city, she spotted tiny dots flying towards her: the Syndicate’s Veiled Ladies and Radiant Lords, most likely. The commotion that Nesha had created while speeding through the alternating districts had clearly alerted the pursuing mages to her existence, while the devastation that she had just unleashed had finally pointed them in the right direction.
It didn’t matter.
She didn’t think that there was any Blue on Remior that could catch her, so unless the Syndicate had recently added Violets to their ranks without anybody hearing about it, she felt confident in escaping even in her exhausted state.
Taking one deep breath after the other, she began walking toward the nearest backup stash, about fifty metres away from her current location. Her reserves were half full by the time she reached it.
Unearthing a spatial amulet, she guzzled down four vials of Blue healing potion, and just as many Blue magic potions that Micky had left for her. The former rapidly relieved some of the soreness in her body, lifting her fatigue, while the latter worked alongside her boosting art to accelerate her mana regeneration.
Picking the final object from the stash, she draped it over her battered body, right as four sets of glowing tattoos lit up across her skin. It was a simple linen dress: just so that she wouldn’t run around the continent naked.
The pursuing Blues were already two hundred metres away, the men wearing elegant white suits while the women wore dark veils and long black dresses. Nesha began bouncing away toward the Fungal Spire: where nobody on Remior would dare to touch her.
The Blues kept gaining ground on her for a couple of seconds, until the rest of the Dance: or rather, the Ballet now: activated, after which there was simply no catching her.
Her time in Twilight City was finally over.
Her prolonged stay had allowed her to keep her head low and practice her magic without dragging Percy and Micky down. It had also allowed her to eliminate the bastard who had stabbed her father in the back, uncover the identity of the bigger bastard who had set him up to the task, and even do her part in acquiring information and valuable relationships that would aid her and Percy in the fight against House Asclepius.
Some of those relationships might not survive the revelation of her true identity or her escape from the city, but Nesha was confident that most would. She had been careful to only pick trustworthy people to work with. If any of them chose to cut all ties with her over this, they’d only be doing her a favour.
Thinking that she was going to reunite with her boyfriend at last, she grinned.