Chapter 240: Unexpected Winged Guests (Patreon)

The thing about alignment abilities, now that I'd learned more about them, was something I never could have imagined applying to myself.

For example, I had two of them. One allowed me to momentarily interrupt someone's motor control. The second was the Court of Quantum Edicts, which let me deploy a zone where I could cast a single rule, and anyone who broke it would be punished by lightning. Lightning that could entangle and bounce at that.

On paper, I had assumed they were just high-class spells. The first one didn't even strike me as particularly regal, but the etchings on my core that appeared when I gained them told me they were important and different. Beyond their instantaneous casting, I had failed to appreciate just how important they would eventually turn out to be.

Well, now I knew exactly what they were.

The thing about my alignment abilities was that they were fundamentally superior forms of spells. A mage could only have a limited number of them, and they were exceptionally hard to obtain. For a human, for example, it usually took reaching gold core to have their first complex spell etched onto their soul and turned into an alignment ability, gaining new benefits and, the thing that made it all worth it, the fact that they were: Superior.

Superior, something I was realizing in terms of spellcasting, could simply be defined as structural permanence. A resistance to interruptions and external manipulations. Every single spell, be it before or after casting, naturally possessed a frail disposition. They could be interrupted, manipulated, turned null, or protected against easily using the right sources.

Superior spells meant they had some form of resistance against such things. And alignment abilities were one thing that naturally possessed such high resistance. It was akin to using divinity— whatever I did with alignment abilities was more "real" and "stable," without needing divinity at all. Maybe even more than that. They were an extension of my very sovereign will, as real as my claws and my scales.

While I hadn't directly faced any interruptions to my spells, stuff like ‘counter-magic’ that doppelganger briefed me on— mostly because I just overpowered anyone I went up against using pure firepower with the assistance of my clones— I knew that had to change. After I got out, I'd usually need subtlety. I had realized that all my firepower was as destructive and flashy as possible, with quantum explosions being my trump card for now. That too, in exchange for turning my clones permanent, had shown more of its limitations. But as a last resort, it was still good enough. Granted, I'd need to find a way to use that amount of destruction anywhere without altering everyone in said country when I got out. But I definitely needed weapons that didn't double as country wide beacons. Ugh. But I was hopeful too. If doppelganger was to be believed, I'd get something to actually start my spellcasting journey, not unlike how humans and every humanoid species already had it. My broken system as "just" a monster was too messy.

For now, though, I had a bigger target to focus on, and you'd be damn certain that thing needed all my focus. But not for long. I had already tested the boundaries and my own power against this thing. It was powerful, really fucking powerful. That crystalline body was a bitch to hurt even with my empowered flamethrowers. The moving carapaces made everything much more difficult on top of that. After my empowered flamethrower shattered its carapace, it seemed to have made the monster actually pay attention to me instead of just playing with me. I was not prey. And it did. Now its carapace was empowered as well, glowing with a rainbow hue in my vision, it all stood out much more. It attacked me with its own dragonbreath, claws, and scythes, all imbued with divine fire. I couldn't afford to get hit even once.

But still, to give it more reason to worry, I had cast the Court of Quantum Edicts, this time empowered with divinity.

The rule was simple: [Using magic is forbidden here.] A rather broad term, all things considered. All the leviathan was doing was magic. So the Court struck it repeatedly, and I hoped it would spend more and more divinity on defense rather than focusing the same on offense. I didn't know how much divinity this thing had, but I had a feeling it was certainly a lot— so in a battle of attrition, I was bound to lose.

The enhanced Court now shot down already-infused thunderbolts from different angles.

A prismatic, flame-wreathed scythe came down at blinding speed, and I phased away to dodge it. Hiding in the shadow dimension was not an option against this thing—its compound, multifaceted crystal eyes tracked me down wherever I was. But it took a moment for it to actually focus those eyes when I changed dimensions, so that split second of blindness was enough of a strategic boon for someone as fast as me.

But… something else was happening. I banked sharply, expecting a second scythe to pin my wing.

Instead, the leviathan aborted the trajectory as it unleashed a deafening shriek and violently swung its scythe at the empty air, as if swatting an invisible enemy. It then thrashed its head like a rabid hound and roared into the sky.

I frowned. It had been going on for a while now. This might be the seventh time the leviathan had done this—tried to target a seemingly unrelated enemy.

What in Thalador's name was it looking at? Because I knew for certain whatever it attacked was not our ally. I knew where all my allies were, after all.

I looked down at the people below me. The vanguard was working like a well-oiled machine. Lily's Veyrath mages were the best support anyone could ask for, casting acceleration and kinetic wards on the ground troops, keeping them mobile. Moving through the shadow dimension, the Kovraths exploited every blind spot created by the creature's erratic thrashing—thrashing usually caused by me—using their innate and powerful stealth to target the joint seams of its lower carapace and other weak spots.

One thing they could do that I could not was improve their stealth using the diluted divinity they had. When I tried to fuel my own dimensional lamina with it, it just purged all the dark mana within—something that was needed to use it. I hadn't figured out how to mix them both and use the empowered stealth.

I knew I could use diluted divinity, but how to actually do that remained a mystery—my divinity did not like the idea of being diluted at all. Whenever I tried, it ended in little more than a few loud and humiliating explosions. It had annoyed me to no end, and while I tried to get help from Lotte or doppelganger, all I got were a few patronizing chuckles and their condolences. Something about divinity reflecting your very self.

EXCUSE ME?!

I was the most flexible, accommodating, easygoing soul on this entire miserable continent. There wasn't an ounce of that stubborn pride in my body. The divinity clearly inherited its foul temperament from the doppelganger. Obviously. Without a doubt. Hmph!

Focus, Jade!

Everyone was assisting me, and I knew their general patterns of assistance that Curious was feeding me—mapping strike windows that the Kovraths had opened for me. And vice versa, as she fed information to Serath, who then projected the needed information to the Kovraths. In essence, Curious was the core that kept this machine running. I was just having the time of my life beating up this foul roach.

But the leviathan writhed once again, and I frowned. I knew where everyone was because Curious was constantly feeding me their data. Whatever—or whoever—was the invisible thing this beast was targeting was not one of our own.

That was… bad. I hated variables. And I did not need them. Especially right now. Because only now was I starting to get a few good hits on the damn thing—even managing to draw blood multiple times using divinity-and-quantum-infused claw slashes, and burning it more than a few times.

Something that was not going to heal, thanks to quantum mana blocking whatever innate regeneration this thing had. And it hadn't shown any signs of healing magic beyond that regeneration.

It did manage to land a few more debuffs on me—mainly more diminished fire resistance, more movement debuff, an ice resistance debuff, and another lightning one. The nastiest being a mana debuff itself. Damn thing made moving mana through my body feel like pushing sludge through rusty pipes. Hey, it had more than a couple of wings. So I had no way of stopping it completely. And with the enhanced carapace, I couldn't stop it in time at all.

But I figured out how it did it.

Mainly, it used its wings, colliding them against each other to create a chime that delivered these mass-area debuffs. Whoever or whatever heard it would be afflicted. Be it people, a person, a thing, an animal, a monster, flowers, damn trees, or the ground itself. It didn't matter. It could weaken everything around it like that.

The way I now stopped it from debuffing me anymore came from a forgotten alignment ability of mine: [Thunder Verdict]. It allowed me to momentarily control the motor functions of anything within my vision. Now, if I had my eyes on the leviathan whenever it moved its wings to cast, I didn't need a flamethrower to interrupt it. I'd just clamp my intent on the joint tendons of that single wingtip and throw it off sync, so no chime was produced. The leviathan had been outraged when I did that the first time.

Even I was surprised that it actually landed and worked just as I expected. I was expecting some kind of resistance, like it had with everything else. But it worked so damn smoothly I had trouble believing it. Once again, it went to show just how reliable alignment abilities were.

Between [Thunder Verdict] stopping its cadence, my focused dragonbreath-lances punishing its repositioning, the Kovraths and every other combatant banking on whatever opening I created, and Curious and Terrorist raining synchronized fire from below, we more or less throttled this thing's efficiency by almost eighty percent.

Even so, the margins were razor-thin. It possessed six pairs of wings, multiple redundant carapace joints, and a genuinely nasty combat intellect. It never repeated the same mistake twice. Before I even knew it, it began staggering the chimes, faking strikes with its lower set while priming the upper ones, slipping localized debuffs on me through the crossfire.

And yet, despite the debuffs burning in my body, a manic, toothy grin split my maw.

Just as the roach adjusted to the tempo, so did I. Every strike I landed filled me with violent glee. Every fracture I tore through its crystal scales was another deposit in my personal blood bank. Mana, blood, and molten divinity surged through my marrow like a roaring furnace. I felt entirely awake, elated, feral, and ravenous for more the longer the slaughter dragged on.

I had never locked horns with an adversary like this. Inch by inch, we were claiming the high ground. A few more minutes of sustained pressure, and I would have cracked its shell wide open, planting my talons in its throat and mocking it with the exact same condescension it had shown us at the start.

I wanted to break this thing with my bare claws!

Which made its sudden, midair psychotic break an absolute insult.

Its wild flailing at empty air had escalated into total, unhinged hysteria. Don't tell me this outlander titan was a schizophrenic all along?

A Kovrath materialized behind me and pumped his clawed fist, howling that my sorcery was ripping the beast apart from the inside!

Except I wasn't doing a damn thing. I looked up at the leviathan with an uncertain expression.

The crystal leviathan had completely lost interest in me. It thrashed through the sky like a rabid fish caught in a net. It slashed at empty air with its flaming crystal scythes. It even coated itself in a conflagration of divine flames, but that brought it no relief. It shrieked, flailed, and clawed at everything around it— even itself— but nothing seemed to work.

Something was off here. I drifted down a bit, opting to observe instead of engaging directly for a moment, and Curious dropped down beside me, her eyes darting across the sky.

"Talk to me," I rumbled through the link. "Did Ceil break her non-interference vow? Do we have an unknown stealth specialist running amok?"

"There is zero anomalous mana signature on the battlefield, main body," Curious replied— and this might be the first time I ever saw genuine bafflement on her face. "The space is clear, both visually and spiritually. The leviathan looks like there's a massive swarm of magical, invisible wasps harassing it for some reason."

"Yeah." That more or less aligned with what I was seeing. But one word made me pause.

Harass?

Wait a damn second.

And a lightbulb immediately went off in my head as I hastily pulled up my system screen—specifically the description of one of my abilities, [Reality Gremlin Paradox].

Reality Gremlin Paradox

• Quantum Loophole (Passive): When enemies resist the user's effects, they are cursed with a stack of Dimensional Paradox. At 3 stacks, a Quantum Fae Gremlin is summoned from the fairy plane. The gremlin autonomously harasses the target for 24 hours, regardless of location.

• Draconic Gremlin's Final Gambit: Consumes an extreme amount of Quantum Mana. Temporarily upgrades the Court of Quantum Edicts into Singularity Court for 1 second (extendable with additional mana).

  • User's consciousness is projected forward in time by 1 second, allowing preemptive reaction and nullification of certain attacks.

  • All Superposition Clones become stable and real for the remaining duration.

I blinked several times at the description of [Quantum Loophole]— another thing that I had genuinely forgotten. While this part had seemed like a big deal when I first got the evolution, there hadn't been a single time where I'd gotten to use it. Because when was the last time someone or something had survived— or had enough magic resistance to— my "effects"?

Never. Not until now. This bloated crystal monstrosity was the first.

I watched the leviathan writhe and roar in anger, but the swarm of gremlins, which must have already been doing their dutiful work of "harassing" it, did not seem to be stopping anytime soon. It let out an ear-piercing screech before shaking its massive bulk around, vomiting wild prismatic flames with no order or direction, trying to push off a threat that neither had mass nor any mana signature. And the harassment was not slowing down. If anything, the leviathan looked more frantic by the second.

I wondered why Curious wasn't aware of it. Maybe… because she couldn't access my status screen by herself at all? She knew how my fighting style mostly worked, and since she had access to all those powers and had all my organs, she had no trouble imitating them. But this was such a situational application that she herself had no idea this feature existed.

I quickly fired a compressed thought packet through the link— with the image of the system screen, yes I could do that now, but only with my clones— and watched her eyes widen as the cogs behind her head whirred almost visibly.

«The criteria,» she fired back instantly. «It all depends on what the ability classifies as 'resistance'! The Court of Quantum Edicts has a passive effect of afflicting an entangling effect on every single strike. Because the beast already has passive magic resistance and had further coated its hide with more divinity, it continually neutralized the spatial entanglement— meaning every third bolt scored a resistance check for the ability!»

I looked up. Since this had been going on for quite a while now, with dozens of lightning bolts hitting it every minute for the better part of almost an hour, it had still stubbornly kept its divine shields up, proudly resisting every single hit in a mocking fashion, resisting every single penalty, not knowing it was the main reason for its own misery now.

In essence, it had rung the dinner bell for an entire swarm of those creatures from the Fae realm.

What an unholy, terrifying ability.

The proud leviathan was no longer in the sky. It was now rolling across the land like a wet dog trying to shake off fire ants, screeching, wheezing, spewing prismatic flame explosions all around it, but nothing was working. At all.

"Main body! Imbue your eyes with quantum mana!"

I didn't argue, channeling a small amount of violet mana into my eyes.

My brain immediately short-circuited as the invisible turned visible. Swarming across the beast's entire body were hundreds of palm-sized creatures with iridescent gossamer wings, a draconic body beneath that, golden scales like mine, translucent tentacles like mine, sharp claws like mine, and a draconic face that looked all too much like me— with oversized violet eyes.

…

Every single one of them looked like a small caricature of me!

They were biting all around it. They were tearing its wings. They were blowing what I could only assume were raspberries in its ears. They were tickling its compound eyes. They had very small, splinter-like things they were wedging between the soft spaces beneath its scales and every other orifice they could find.

The more I looked, the more horrifying it seemed. Not only that, they seemed to be immune to whatever kind of attacks the leviathan was throwing out.

Wait a damn minute.

This oversized roach was supposed to be my punching bag!

I had been cooped up in this rigged trial for months. I had played the roles of a diplomat, babysat thousands of mortals, taken part in administrative drudgery! The moment I went back to the waking world, I would have to sneak around like a rat in the wainscoting to avoid the Elven Queen and every other threat. This was my single window to stretch my wings, roar at the top of my lungs, and beat this abomination into paste!

I was finally getting into the rhythm! I was finally having fun!

And these tiny, winged, smug caricatures of myself were stealing the kill!

"GET OFF IT!" I roared, launching myself forward at blinding speed. "GET THE HELL OFF MY TOY RIGHT NOW!"