Blade Over Magic

Growth Under Pressure III

Meanwhile, near the original spot the confrontation began, Aubrey, Curtis, and Ben were facing off against the Tyrian Gazer.

Well, mostly Aubrey and Curtis.

Arrows passed by purple black beams as both sides were engaged in an intense ranged battle where their projectiles moved at obscene speeds.

Aubrey shot her arrows out like a machine gun, each one carrying devastating power due to her applying proper archery forms along with channeling and Mana breathing to her archery. Moreover, she was able to make the arrows curve and move at unpredictable angles, causing them to be a nightmare to evade.

Moreover, she had stopped altering their information to become invisible as the Gazer could clearly still sense them, likely due to some form of conceptual perception. And instead, she began altering their information in other ways.

Some arrows moved at utterly absurd speeds as she altered their information to make it so that rather than slowing down after reaching a certain speed, they actually continued to get faster until they struck something.

Sometimes she’d alter the space between her arrows and the Gazer, making them appear instantly as soon as she let the arrow loose. Some arrows were capable of splitting apart to create arrow rains, and so on.

Curtis was also working overtime as he constantly created ice barriers while directing the golems he’d created to either block hits or try and reach the Gazer. His wide ranged skills also made it so that the battlefield favored them quite a bit, as he would often create large hailstorm of blizzards meant to control the thing.

Ben hadn’t yet made a move, though, and was simply waiting for an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution, even though he was stunned by the sheer scale of the battle.

The Tyrian Gazer wasn’t so simple, either, because the beams it unleashed weren’t simply beams of Void. Instead, they were a corrupted version of the thing’s Core Concept, which was the concept of Overwriting.

Aubrey guessed that the Tyrian Gazer was probably the strongest of the mythical creatures when it was alive, excluding the Behemoth, and that was due to how it worked.

Its Core Concept, Overwriting, did just that. The simplest application was that the Gazer was capable of Overwriting the information of anything that fell under its gaze. As long as it could perceive it, it could Overwrite it. Granted, this wasn’t an omnipotent ability, and beings with superior attainments in their Core Concepts could resist it, which is probably how it died in the first place.

Now that it was dead and corrupted, though, its Core Concept was now twisted. It still carried the Overwriting ability, but the way it did so was twisted and in line with its now corrupted nature. For instance, if an alive Gazer Overwrote fire to become ice or become magma, this dead one would Overwrite that fire to whatever, but corrupted, making it naturally want to encroach and spread its corruption to things around it.

Aubrey could see this clearly due to her Information Magic, and her clones frequently had to create countermeasures and return things like corrupted space near them before it could start spreading.

Fortunately, Curtis’s Concept of Ice seemed durable enough to stave off this Overwriting, though a single barrier couldn’t endure too many hits at a time.

It was annoying, but the bright side was that unlike it’s living self, this version of the Gazer had to unleash this Overwriting in the form of beams that had to strike their target. While likely, while alive, it simply needed to perceive its target to do the same things.

There was, however, another, more irritating ability the thing had.

Like the currently descending Void Demon, Tyrian Gazers were typically higher dimensional creatures, meaning that damaging them in any way was an extremely tall task.

This one was weaker than its alive counterpart, so it couldn’t stay in that higher dimensional state all the time, but it could enter it temporarily to avoid getting harmed. Which is why despite the onslaught it was facing, it hadn’t really taken any damage yet.

As such, both sides were now in a sort of deadlock. The Gazer couldn’t harm the trio, and the trio couldn’t reach the Gazer.

However...

’That’s fine.’ Aubrey wasn’t too concerned. Because she already knew how to damage the thing.

It was a creature that could temporarily enter a higher dimension to avoid taking damage. But what did that actually entail?

Now, there was a difference between a higher dimensional level and a higher conceptual level, which has been mentioned before.

Simply put, obtaining the former automatically meant obtaining the latter, but obtaining the latter didn’t necessarily mean one had obtained the former. Obtaining higher dimensionality meant access to all things at a similar level, too, while getting higher conceptually could be seen as simply ascending the conceptual Hierarchy.

Concepts had hierarchies. But a single person could raise their Core Concept above its placement in that hierarchy to achieve greater heights. But this only applied to the individual and not the concept as a whole to everyone who utilized it.

For instance, on that hierarchy, concepts like space and time typically existed above concepts like heat and motion, but someone who utilized the latter concepts could theoretically elevate them above the former despite their base states being in the established hierarchy.

Keir would be an example of this. He is a being that exists on a higher conceptual plane from birth, and his Core Concept, Invalidation, is also a concept that is naturally higher above a lot of other concepts on that hierarchy. It’s for this reason that Keir was more or less immune to most attacks as they couldn’t reach his conceptual level.

However, that did not mean he was a higher dimensional existence. Though he was close.

Rather, what Aubrey had come to learn was a higher dimensional existence was actually a being that had a lot of... information.

As stated by Mia earlier, Information is constantly being generated. Both from the past and present. Yet despite how much of it is there, it never seems to have any effect on physical reality, yet information does exist, so where does the information go?

That would be the Information River.

But beings and items still carry information by themselves. It’s how Aubrey can manipulate said information and alter it. And she learned that higher dimensional beings were creatures who simply had an overwhelming amount of information on them, so much so that they couldn’t exist within the base layer of reality without destroying it with their mere presence alone, forcing them to Ascend dimensionally.

Which is also why it takes so much effort for higher dimensional creatures to descend to this base layer. And why the Void Demon, which is one such entity, can’t just pop in. Because reality actively resists their descent much like how laws resists the Hell Gates. Think or a ball trying to pass through a needle hole.

So, what did any of this mean? And how did it allow Aubrey to harm the Tyrian Gazer that kept temporarily ascending to avoid being harmed?

Well, Aubrey used Information Magic, and she was capable of tapping into the Information River directly.

However, if one can recall, doing so was very dangerous for her because she ran the risk of grasping information she in no way was capable of handling on her own. Information was the heaviest thing in existence, after all, and certain things were too dangerous to even learn, let alone grasp.

... Which is where the third page in her book, I Came, I Saw, I Record, came in.

It was called the Ledger of Tracing. And simply put, it allowed her to use the Information River directly without getting overwhelmed.

If one recalled, in her library, there was an access point that she could use to reach the Information River directly, but it was sealed off as she both lacked the ability to access it directly without getting swept up in infinite information and because if it wasn’t sealed, the sheer amount of information would collapse her soul. Hence, she could only passively take in information that she let leak in and sort it with her Information clones.

Until now.

Now, with the Ledger of Tracing, as long as she had a specific piece of key info, it would allow her to precisely find more information linked to the initial piece directly from the river without getting overwhelmed. It’s how she knew about the crisis plaguing Viscount Freecs and his territory. She traced it.

So how did this let her harm something that existed on a higher dimension? Well, it was pretty simple.

Coming out from behind Curtis who had blocked a barrage of beams from the Gazer, Aubrey let loose an arrow that multiplied when it neared the Gazer, leaving it no room to dodge.

Seeing this, it’s body seemed to turn both intangible and somewhat incomprehensible. If a weaker mind witnessed its current form, it would collapse just from trying to comprehend it.

However, Aubrey, Curtis, and Ben weren’t really perturbed. Instead, something shocking happened.

The arrows reached it... and struck it hard.

Its ring-like body was thrown away like a rag doll, some of the bones and wings getting cracked dangerously as they drilled into it with a vengeance.

Aubrey had damaged it. But how? Well...

She could use the Ledger of Tracing to trace information directly from the river as long as she had a piece pertaining to it already.

And the Ledger of Manifestation allowed her to create information projections of information she had recorded in her library.

And Aubrey knew about the Tyrian Gazer and how it worked. So...

What if she simply took some of that higher dimensional info related to it, manifested it in the form of an arrow and shot it in the face?

That’s what she did.