Chapter 836 – Remior’s golden century – Wintersteel (Patreon)

Gazing up at his friend’s enormous body, Percy was once again relieved that Micky’s first core hadn’t evolved since the end of the war. The Huehuan’s elemental cores had advanced to Blue while his beast core was still at Violet, preventing the gap from widening too much.

Of course, Micky’s recent advancements had only postponed the problem. It would be over eight hundred years before his second and third cores reached Violet, and Percy was pretty sure that the beast core would reach not only White, but also Clear in that time.

‘I suppose we’ll just have to suffer the inconvenience for a few centuries. That’s the end of the Colour realm anyway, so the gap won’t get any wider than that,’ Percy reminded himself with a sigh.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that Micky’s beast affinity was growing so rapidly. It helped him consume his lifespan more slowly, making up for the activation of the Void Decree and the fact that he had likely started off with a shorter lifespan than Percy.

The people in the stands audibly gasped as the colossal bird hovered over the stadium for a couple of seconds, using the frigid gales surrounding its body to arrest its momentum and hold itself in place. The sight of the village-sized crow was objectively terrifying, though Percy couldn’t spot a trace of fear in the spectators’ faces. Only excitement.

After a brief pause, Micky exploded into a cloud of midnight blue particles, the magical cyclone sparkling under the sunlight as it scattered over the stadium and bathed the audience in a cool fog.

“There he goes again,” Elaine chuckled as the crowd erupted into cheers.

Many of Percy’s closest friends and relatives had grown quite influential over the past century, but nobody was as popular as Micky. It probably had something to do with how boisterous the fans of the sport were, or how much the Huehuan’s role had suited him.

When Percy had first floated the idea of copying the format of the Void Hand’s tournaments, he’d worried about his friend’s reaction. Percy had wanted to give the people of Remior a replacement for the constant wars, to identify, cultivate, and reward their most promising fighters. However, he’d been afraid of evoking unpleasant memories of Micky’s captivity in the coliseum, or the callous crowd of traitorous Huehuans that had jeered and sneered at him for decades as he had desperately fought for his life.

Evidently, Percy’s concerns had been misplaced.

While Micky had every intention of ending and avenging the tragedy that had been inflicted upon his people, he’d never allowed the darkness in his past to corrupt what he was at his core: a warrior. As much as he was willing to study alchemy or magiscript by Percy’s side, the thrill of the battle had always been what he truly craved.

Well… that and showing off.

When the storm settled, a much smaller figure was revealed, standing at the centre of the arena and waving at the excited crowd with a grin on his face. Micky had assumed a human shape – two arms, and no tattoos or beak. He was wearing an elegant midnight blue suit over a light grey shirt, his short, curly dark hair draped messily over his forehead. The people of Remior had no issues with Micky’s four-armed appearance, but he had grown fond of his human form as well and had started using the two shapes interchangeably.

Rolling his eyes, Percy focused on his and Micky’s magical accomplishments over the past century to drag his attention away from the latter’s silly antics.

Not long after the war, the Huehuan had reproduced the Thess’kalan ritual bath to improve his body. It hadn’t been perfect, as Micky’s crystalline flesh had been nothing like Percy’s, and they had lacked the reagents to catalyse the transformation, but the Huehuan had still managed to use the artificial ritual to merge and improve upon his existing mutations.

Dead Winter Elemental had absorbed Grey Panoply and Giant Body to become Dead Wintersteel Elemental, forging a body made of harder and colder ice that was simultaneously denser and lighter due to the nature of his gravity mana. While the new material was produced automatically by Micky’s mutation, it was technically a fused mana type containing beast, gravity, and soul-freezing ice mana, which Percy and Micky had named “wintersteel mana”.

They could have forged the Huehuan’s equipment directly out of that, but Percy had wanted to push for something even better. After inventing his own memory amethyst, he’d worked with his fellow aspect to improve their magical silk.

The original version of the silk had technically only consisted of soft and crystallized phantom mana, though Percy had invented six transitional states and carefully combined them into the strands. His idea had been to revisit the project while replacing the crystallized phantom mana with memory amethyst and adding Micky’s wintersteel mana as a third foundational component.

With more experience under their belt, more time on their hands, less pressure on their shoulders, and far more mental resources available inside their heads, Percy and Micky had experimented extensively with the three components to develop new variants of silk that were far stronger than what they had used before.

In addition to using better raw materials and developing more transitional states, Percy and Micky had worked on making the threads even thinner and adding an extra layer of enchantments within the strands themselves. Between the layer contained within the grains of memory amethyst, the layer contained within the silk, and the four layers that Percy had already been using with his equipment, all of his and Micky’s human-sized tools started off with a minimum of six layers of runes. When they scaled them up to the mountain-sized bodies of the Huehuan and their fused constructs, the number of layers could increase up to twelve.

Percy and Micky had developed three different versions of silk that were about equally strong but composed of different ratios of their mana types.

The Lone Wanderer’s aspects had been capable of generating each other’s elements to a small extent ever since their first fusion – excluding beast mana, which Percy couldn’t produce at all by himself. Their outputs had also increased after raising all their Elemental Control spells to Masterful and using the Merciful Spring domain to improve their conversion rates.

However, there seemed to be an upper limit to how much of an element they could produce without the corresponding core or attaining divinity, and that limit appeared to be around fifty percent of what the original wielder could produce.

Being able to locally generate so much foreign mana was still quite good, as it gave Percy enough ice and acid mana to potentially experiment with the storm affinity on his own – a project that he could start working seriously on, since he had already elevated all six of the underlying Control spells to a sufficient level. Not to mention that Percy and his fellow aspects could further supplement their output by directly borrowing each other’s mana through the cords or the spatial seal.

Still, Percy and Micky had agreed that it would be prudent to develop personalized variants of silk that leaned more heavily into the proportions of mana they could individually sustain, as well as a more balanced third version that they could use with the Symphony. That way, they would always be able to fight at full strength while maintaining their equipment in optimal condition.

Percy would have loved to include Nephthys’ mana types in the silk as well, but those elements weren’t suitable for solid materials, and the wasp couldn’t easily use equipment. At most, Percy and Micky could channel Nephthys’ affinities through their weapons to enhance their attacks.

In addition to their upgraded equipment, Percy and Micky had spent countless hours sparring against one another to perfect their fighting style. Their moves had grown so flawless that they could keep fighting for weeks without ever making a mistake and were unable to decide a victor if they ensured that they balanced their willpower out at the start of the battle.

By the end of the war, Percy and Micky had each been about as strong as someone between the Seventh and Eighth Circles – or around the halfway point between the White and Clear grades. While combining their strength, they’d been able to fight against someone between the Eighth and Ninth Circles.

After advancing all six of their cores once, they’d raised those thresholds by another grade, while the rest of their improvements over the past century had given them another half a grade of power in both their fused and unfused states.

Half a grade might sound like a small boost given the numerous insights and breakthroughs that had contributed to it, but Percy was quite thankful that they’d been able to squeeze so much extra power out of their spells and techniques while already fighting so many grades above their own.

Individually, they could be considered Ninth Circle mages.

Ignoring the fact that they hadn’t reached the Clear grade yet, Micky was essentially as good as a paragon even on his own, while Percy could punch four grades up without anyone’s help – an unprecedented feat as far as he could tell.

Together, they estimated that they could match the strength of a Tenth Circle mage, placing them just a single grade below the weakest deities. They hadn’t quite reached the level of power that Percy and Nephthys had wielded during the war, and the March had grown even stronger after the changes to both hives. Still, the gap between the two Extreme spells had shrunk greatly, reinforcing Percy’s fears that his second Ultimate Art would eventually fall behind.

Outside of Percy and Micky, Remior hadn’t produced any other paragon-level figures. Even Nephthys fell a little short without her swarm, while many other people like Elaine, Archibald, Nesha, and Galahad could only fight two grades higher.

Percy wasn’t too deterred, as he knew that their world had already reached the standard of a peak faction, even if that was currently limited to a relatively small number of mortals. Paragons were supposed to be rare, but it wouldn’t be long before more of them emerged on Remior after all the advantages that Percy had given his people.

‘Who knows? Our next paragon might even come from one of these tournaments,’ Percy thought as Micky sat next to him in the VIP section and the two contestants finally walked into the arena.