Limitless Path Chapter Seven Hundred Fourteen (Patreon)

Beth sidled up to John as the fight got started, saying, “So, a student, huh?”

“Don’t start that shit with me. You know I train people, of all people to ask questions, huh,” he snapped back at her.

“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Beth fired back, which took John a second to process, though the idiom translated into Universal Standard well enough.

“I’m nervous,” John said, uncharacteristically solemn. “She’s good, but their team aren’t fucking pushovers, and this is important. I know you’re more flippant, but I need to focus.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Beth said, waving a hand. “If it’s a problem, I’ll just wipe the floor with all of their ‘students’ at once and win this.”

“Hah!” one of the other students of Baelvyr’s team laughed, but before Beth could respond, the fight had started in earnest.

The opponent opened the match by throwing lightning at John’s student, which was slightly startling to see, but she dodged it quite aptly, stepping through shadows to avoid the strike while flinging a shadow dagger at the man, which was a strong enough attack he had to dodge. He summoned more lightning, though trapped in boxes around himself, populating the field with held lightning strikes while John’s student started sinking into the shadows, clearly doing more than just hiding, but Beth wasn’t good with shadows. She could track as John’s student darted around in the shadows, as shadow teleportation usually involved some kind of twisting of space to actually get it to work, but she didn’t know what other skills were being deployed.

They found out one of them when the opponent sent a wave of lightning blasts out in several directions and then had to immediately defend against dozens of shadow knives and shadow shurikens leaping out of the ground and from pieces of terrain at his vitals. Every one of the ‘thrown’ weapons came from a patch of shadow, whether that was a shadow cast by a rock or a shadowed spot under a small lip in the ground or even the shadow of John’s student, they all flew from various shadows and aimed for vital points. The lightning mage blasted everything out of the air, but Beth was a bit confused by how many spells he was casting. Sure, mana expenditure usually wasn’t a big problem by the time a person got to their level, but his attacks weren’t small or highly precise. He was more a thunderstorm bombardment happening then highly focused beams of electricity, and that would eventually catch up with him.

As the lightning mage nearly caught John’s student and just barely grazed her shoulder with a blast, Beth supposed it might work, if he could really saturate the whole area in lightning. The thing he was competing against, however, was that John’s student was being very conservative with mana and very precise with her attacks, even the attacks involving dozens of shadow weapons. Setting the weapons up and powering their flight took some amount of mana, but it wasn’t a large amount, and so if it really came down to attrition, John’s student was in a good position. The other positive they had going for them was that they were very slippery, despite getting grazed once, and the lightning mage was throwing out large amounts of mana in the form of barrages of lightning bolts or massive waves of lightning without much to show in return. It was almost a classic match of someone that was good at stealth and evasion versus someone with a massive damage output; the match could swing either way on a dime based on just one slip.

Beth crossed her arms as she watched, shaking her head a bit as the two continued peppering each other with attacks. The shadow walker was doing quite well in being conservative while still harassing the lightning mage, but they didn’t have the oomph to really deal any damage or pierce the mages defenses. At the same time, the lightning mage didn’t have any way to counteract the constant shadow jumping and hiding of John’s student, just attempting to pepper them with blasts repeatedly. She was pretty sure the lightning mage would win if they could even get one clean hit in, but John’s student was devilishly hard to pin down, darting around the large area between the two teams without ever slowing.

“Impressive, ain’t it?” John asked her, rubbing his right index finger with the thumb of the same hand as he watched.

“Who, your student or the lightning mage?” Beth teased back.

“My student, you loon,” John scoffed. “She can keep that up all day. I dare say that even you would have trouble against that.”

“John. She’s teleporting,” Beth stated.

“Yeah, so? What’s that supposed to mean?” John shot back, giving her a slight glare before returning his attention to the match.

“John, I’m a spatial mage. A damn good one. I could lock her down, predict her jumps, distort space, and crush her when she tries to evade, regardless of the shadow component. There hasn’t been a single jump or movement she’s made that I haven’t been able to track and predict,” Beth explained, shaking her head.

“Damn it! Damn space mages, you guys are fuckin’ unfair. We sneaky types are supposed to be unmatched, but you can just cheat and see us. I hate that shit,” John said, started to mutter to himself at the end about unfair skills and power sets.

Back in the open area between the teams and Zane, the two were still dueling and still at a stalemate, but that was about to change. John’s student was content to play defensive for a long time, but it looked like she realized the mage, despite his expenditure, wasn’t really tiring. There were a hundred and one ways he could either be replenishing his mana or be using a lot less than he seemed, and if she wasn’t truly exhausting his mana pool, then she was in trouble. One slip and she was in serious trouble, and nobody could really be perfect in such an intense and stressful situation for so long without making even a small mistake. With how wide-range and powerful the lightning mage’s attacks were, he didn’t even need to be lucky or highly skilled at predicting battle movements and tactics to catch her on that one slip, and then it was likely game over.

Having understood this, John’s student started to ramp up the pressure, but she was rather clever about it, which Beth could really appreciate. She didn’t just suddenly go full power and throw everything she had at the opponent, but instead started slowly ramping her shadow attacks and movements. She covered more of the battlefield, becoming even less predictable in where she teleported and how, at least to anyone other than Beth, who could still track her easily. John’s student also started throwing more and more shadow weapons, which was an annoyance to the lightning mage, at the very least, but Beth noticed something right away that it took the mage a while to keen to, which is why he lost the match.

John’s student hadn’t just been throwing shadow daggers, shurikens, claws, needles, and little blades that whistled through the air and spun as they flew. Well, she had been pretty much doing that and teleporting, it was just that when she started to ramp up the attacks, the weapons that the lightning mage blasted out of the air didn’t just dissipate or disappear. The mage did mostly blast them away, but he was only really concerned with stopping the weapons hitting him and wasn’t paying enough attention to what happened afterwards. The daggers and shurikens mainly, the pieces with more overall mass, which would really just be more mana since they were generated wholly by mana, didn’t just fade away, but instead left pools of shadow and darkness on the ground.

At first, the shadow pools didn’t do much, and it was pretty insidious, as they were rather small and hard to spot, especially in the bright light of the system’s sun shining down on the plain, but they started to build up. After a couple minutes, about the time the lightning mage noticed what was happening, it was far too late, as there were massive pools of shadow on the ground, including a few smaller but much more concentrated pools right around where the lightning mage had been standing since the very start. Noticing the problem too late, he tried to correct, but a massive onslaught of shadow weapons and shadow beasts, crows and wolves and lynxes and even small bears, all poured out of the shadows at the same time John’s student teleported a bunch in quick succession and threw real, powerful weapons, not just shadow copies, at the mage. The weapons were all heavily enchanted and flew both fast and true, striking at the mages vitals as he was being overwhelmed by the shadow tide.

Oh, he put up a fight, and a good one, lightning and wind exploding around him and dispelling most of the shadow attacks and even pushing the weapons off course. Or, it appeared it had mostly gotten him free, as the most clever and secretive attack of the set was a series of tiny, poisoned needles that John’s student had thrown after a short delay, allowing the mage to flail and blow tons of mana and effort on defeating what, it turned out, was all a big decoy. The poison needles were the real win condition, and the lightning mage didn’t even realize he was dead before the match was declared, the pillars preventing him from truly dying while the needles and poison were removed from his flesh.

Zane declared the winner and the two combatants returned to their teams before several people did a small bit of cleanup on the field. Letting the place get blasted didn’t really matter, but they didn’t want the terrain to be too broken up and shattered. The teams wanted most of the fights to be as even as possible, and that would mean having roughly the same type of ground and arena for each fight, including getting rid of traces of mana that were still lingering, which was easy for those there to handle, especially with Zane there. He simply formed, or summoned, or made visible a group of black holes, all of which selectively ate the remnant mana and nothing else before disappearing. He didn’t help in any other cleanup and still appeared rather bored, but what he had done was quite helpful and also a naked display of immense power coupled with incredible precision.

The next match was between Elana’s student, a tall and gangly man with pale skin wearing cloth and leather armor pieces, and a short, thickset man from the opposing team. The match was interesting, but maybe because Elana was still fairly young herself compared to the rest of Baelvyr’s crew, or maybe just because of the student, it wasn’t all that hard to figure out the outcome after a minute. Elana’s student used a heavy sword while staying light on his feet and moving fast, a fascinating style of fighting, considering it was genuinely different than how Beth handled her greatsword and moved, but it didn’t save him. The man from the other team used two long-handled, heavy-headed maces that he swung with the force and speed of a falling star. Their exchanges were rapid, and Elana’s student got a few good licks in in the first minute of the fight, but he was just overwhelmed by the other fighters strength and power. It didn’t help the opponent was quite durable and hearty and Elana’s student was…not.

They both used a few ancilliary powers as they fought, and Beth could get the feel of boosting skills coming from both of them, though the short man from the other team had better skills. If Beth was reading the mana flows correctly, she was guessing the man using the maces was using a tier four skill that was focused on speed that he had at the top end of platinum, while Elana’s student had a strength-focused boosting skill that wasn’t quite as good, or as high level. The mace-wielder also used earth magic or stone magic, either breaking or reinforcing the terrain at will, the second part of that skill set being rather interesting. He would reinforce the ground under his feet when he was about to strike a heavy blow while doing the opposite for his opponent, both when Elana’s student was about to swung and when he had to directly block a strike. The footing difference might not sound like all that big of a deal, but footing was critical in a fight; a lot of the power of a swung, or the surety of a block, came from foot position and the ability to push against the ground. By messing with that, the man with the maces was creating a rather sizable difference in the two combatant’s attacks and defenses.

Elana’s student held out for a while, but his own magic, which was mostly based around a wind skill that gave his blade and extended cutting edge, and another skill that let him dash using the wind to move at hyper-speed for a few moments, weren’t enough to make up for the opponent’s skill and strength. When Elana’s student took a nasty crack on the elbow from a poorly managed block that was thrown off by the earth shifting under him, that was the end of it right there. The opponent didn’t give him any time to recover, sending out a flurry of strikes, each of which with enough force to crush a mountain, and the conclusion was pretty obvious. The pillars put Elana’s student back together from the mush he had been smashed into in just a split second, but it still hadn’t looked like a particularly pleasant experience.

Beth shook her head as the man returned and they got ready to send out the next opponent. If it were her team here, maybe Andrea or Neph would have struggled with those first two opponents, but she thought even they could have given a very good showing of themselves. Someone like Bjorn against the man using maces? It wouldn’t have even been a challenge, though that was maybe be a bit unfair, as Bjorn seemed to have access to much of the legacy of the titans and was a monster in his own right. Still, whenever Beth was off on an adventure like this, she couldn’t help comparing the people she ran into, whoever they were and whoever they worked for, to her team, and she almost always found the people she met fell well short. Too bad that it was a student fighting students kind of thing happening here, or Beth’s team could have absolutely wiped the floor with those clowns. Even assuming they had an ace up their sleeve, Beth’s team had a…well, Beth up their sleeve, and it would take a lot to even slow her down at this point.

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