Blade Over Magic

Deadly Assault VI

Though the group moved, Xander and Falael were the only ones who actually went forward. Aubrey was the one to attack first as her arrows were sent out rapidly, striking the void beings and causing their strange shapes to part as they were blasted apart with remarkable ease.

Xander had been wondering how they’d actually deal with the creatures of nonexistence, and his solution was that they’d just overwhelm them with their own concepts which were primarily rooted in existence. However, it was then that Ben’s usefulness revealed itself once again.

As soon as he and Falael exited the area protected by Permanence, rather than being fully exposed, a thin layer of the concept was wrapped tightly around their bodies, protecting them from the encroaching Void outside the zone’s scope of influence. And on closer look, Aubrey’s arrows were also wrapped by this concept, empowering them and allowing them to blast through the formless creatures that unmade everything they touched.

But even with this, an issue was their large numbers.

At a glance, there were thousands of the things surging towards them, so Xander and Falael were getting ready to charge in when Mira made her move.

Plucking a feather from her wings, she let go and blew at it lightly, yet despite this, the speed at which it flew was absurd, and in a moment, it was already in front of a large group of void creatures where it then dissipated, unleashing a tide of compressed charm that washed over several of the creatures, making them halt in place.

This scene was shocking as, at first glance, it seemed like Mira had charmed them into staying still, which was absurd since they lacked cognition and sentience, only the instinctive desire to unmake this. But Xander with Myriad Paths saw what she did, and it was even more surprising.

While the area controlled by the Void Tower —as he dubbed it—was still getting destabilized, this process hadn’t completed, so there were still some concepts remaining in the area. And he saw Mira’s charm and the concepts behind it actually lock down on the local concepts and space, keeping everything within frozen.

In other words, she charmed the area rather than the void beings to keep them stationary.

Falael did not waste the opportunity.

The halo behind her head, which hadn’t faded yet, suddenly flared as she shot forward, arriving among the group of frozen creatures as she punched forward. However, she didn’t cast a spell this time, but like Xander, used a skill based on her mana and its nature.

And it was a devastating one.

’Gravity Knuckle.’ As her fists surged forward, space warped as they exhibited a terrifying pulling force that drew in the void beings by the dozen. Unable to resist, they could only observe as her fists struck the drawn in masses and unleashed devastating explosions of starlight that washed over everything, leaving nothing in their wake.

Xander wasn’t idle either.

Using manifestation, dozens of sword projections holding swords from his garden materialized around him, each one in a stance as, with Xander in the center, they charged into the fray swinging.

The issues with the void beings was that due to them being formless, ordinary sword play and kinetic mechanics didn’t really apply to them. However, that hardly mattered as while they were made of Void. Void was still a concept that Xander, with Myriad Paths, could perceive and interact with.

And so, just like with the bone scorpions, Xander’s projections moved in seamless unison. Every strike they performed complementing each other perfectly, making them all move like a well-oiled machine that left no gaps, causing them to shred their way through as they progressed deeper into the mass of void creatures.

Mira seemed to have taken on the role of support as, whenever she could, she’d charm areas where the void beings were to stall them so that either Xander of Falael could make the kill.

Aubrey also continued to rain down arrows, her arm a blur as she shot them out like a machine gun, each arrow going through dozens of void beings each time as she, too, pulled her weight.

However, the person who seemed to have been doing a whole lot, was Curtis.

Up till now, Curtis hadn’t had much chance to show off. Not because he had nothing to show, but because his teammates had just been that competent. They always dealt with whatever the problem was before he really needed to get involved, and he seemed content enough to watch as they handled whatever came their way. Keeping to his task as a guardian.

Well, now, that role was being put to the test.

Since Falael, Xander, and Mira left the zone of permanence, the Void Tower no longer faced any suppression as its beams could be unleashed at full power. And said full power was terrifying.

Saying how destructive these beams were was a bit misleading simply due to how the Void worked. It didn’t destroy, it unmade things. Reducing them to nothingness. Hence, rather than say they were destructive, it was more accurate to say that they carried a terrifying amount of erasure.

Their speed was also hard to predict as speed was measured by distance divided by time.

It was a bit hard to measure when the aforementioned attack seemed to unmake the very distance between itself and its opponent. Making them appear pretty much instantly to strike their targets.

And it’s not like the beams were shot one at a time or took a long time to charge up. The demon the tower presumably was a part of was firing these things en-masse. Making them curve and arrive at unpredictable angles. Some were large enough carved out massive chunks of mountains, others were thinner than a razor, and they’d arrive at different times, making predicting them a steep endeavor.

And yet, with all of that said...

Curtis managed to block every single one of them.

Expression unreadable, Curtis stood tall, an icy blue magic circle at his feet, while his wand hand was aimed at the sky with a smaller magic circle at its tip that gave off intermittent pulses.

Over where Xander, Falael, and Mira were fighting, shields of absolute zero ice bloomed and vanished moments later at insane speeds, blocking the rain of beams unleashed by the Void Tower before any could strike the three. It didn’t matter how fast they moved or how unpredictable they were. Curtis blocked them. Every. Single. One.

Because where Xander represented the peak of sword mastery, Falael was a destructive powerhouse with insane output, and Aubrey’s perception and information manipulation made her a walking supercomputer. Curtis had somethings of his own that made him terrifying.

As he uncovered more uses of the Ice Diamond in his mana pool, one thing he learned was in regards to his mana control.

Falael may have the greatest output out of anyone in the group, Curtis’s sheer mana control beat all of them decisively. The mana moved like it was an extension of his body, and he felt hardly any mental strain even when mobilizing and manipulating large amounts of the stuff in complex manners.

That alone was shocking. However, it was another aspect of the construct he’d learned to weaponize that was truly terrifying.

If one forgets, then similar to how Falael’s Star passively pulls in ambient mana into itself as fuel due to its gravitational pull, Curtis’s Ice Diamond passively turns the ambient mana in his surroundings into ice mana. And Mary noted that, in theory, if he was to stay in a singular spot for long enough, the ice mana around him would become dense enough to birth ice elemental spirits.

But that’s not what was important.

Instead, he took that trait, and he elevated it to work on concepts.

So now, he didn’t just turn the ambient mana around him into ice mana. He figured out how to transform the natural concepts around him into his own Core Concept.

The concept of Ice.

And this wasn’t simply passive. No, he could actively direct it or make it selective, choosing what concept to transform and what concept to leave alone. He could also concentrate it, forcing particularly stubborn concepts to transform, too.

When he did this, he figured out how to do something else.

Previously, his defenses were terrifying due to them being rooted in Absolute Zero. Any attack that struck his barriers would lose all thermal energy and become a part of the barrier, turning into a unified structure.

This concept had now been elevated to affect other concepts.

And it is for this reason that despite the terrifying onslaught of Void based attacks unleashed by the tower, not a trace of the stuff managed to get through Curtis’s barriers. Because the moment they made contact, the concept was Void was transformed into the concept of Frost, and thus falling under Curtis’s control.

Curtis wasn’t just a tank. He was a conceptual nightmare.