Liura and Grutus seemed to have finally gathered their thoughts, and come to terms with the fact that they had died, and that now, they were alive. While it didn't take that long to cast themselves from despair, it had been a rather awful experience, urging themselves that what mattered, was the fact that they still drew breath.
Grutus even looked enlightened, somewhat.
He took a deep breath and looked at the struggles going on in two different places near them. Even if he had made up his mind to just leave instead of trying to fight Rias, whom he knew was out of his league, the pretty much unguarded pillar of fire seemed to reel him in.
Maybe... as they had been doing before, he and Liura could try to tear the shield of glass plates around it while the others kept that monstrous boy at bay.
Yes.
If they managed that, then everyone else could chip in and they could finally disrupt whatever evil scheme was being powered there.
Yes!
Grutus gulped.
He turned to Liura who was using her Retriever for support, as she, like him, recovered from her how her body had turned lump, like it was repulsed by the fact that she had tasted death.
"Give me the items you stored..." Grutus told her.
"What?" Liura asked quizzically.
"Just do it. You wanted me to join you in helping, right? I'm helping now. At least whatever else happens I won't be looking at your guilt-inspiring stare in the afterlife!"
Liura didn't know what to make of Grutus' sudden shift in mind-set. She figured he, much like her, was feeling very grateful for being given a second chance, and perhaps trying to make that chance worthwhile, and thus, she emptied her storage.
A series of odd items, most of which she had salvaged from this Cluster, appeared in her cupped hands.
"Save the Revival Star for yourself, and keep it in hand. If we get blasted like last time, we might just get lucky enough to survive again," Grutus told Liura while picking off what he thought was useful from her collection. "Frozen Bean... maybe... uh Draw Bubble, Draw Bubble... What did we decide to call this again... a Faze String. Came in a bundle, right? The Shrinking Jerky... oh, and you still had this?"
Naturally, without having been told the names beforehand, Liura, Grutus and the others could only name the items they found themselves based on what they did, the objective fact that all items placed here by EverSword House couldn't kill them, guiding their experimenting spree.
The reason why the group had been luckier than most when it came to these scattered items was because Hun's choice for a Legendary item within the Royale, was a tool that was attracted to other treasures of its grade and higher. This had been part of the short man's plan for finding other contenders quickly (he assumed the worst, as before a few hours ago, no one knew the setup of the Royale), but given what the Game Master – the original – had said, he had found another use for it. An added bonus to his tool's wondrous effect, was the fact that it could attach trackers – small, sticky pieces of paper – on distant targets and draw the user to them over large stretches.
The results of using this tool, stood in the two's hands. Most of the items placed within the Royale grounds were Legendary and higher!
Liura looked at Grutus, and her face softened.
"Took you dying to make you realise your life can be worth something other than living it in regret?" she said.
"Come off it. Some of us still want to be more than thieves and part-time Knights. Dying... well, it makes you feel fickle, doesn't it? And how the others must felt... Then again, we did choose to risk our lives."
Liura gave Grutus a dry smile.
"Now come on! We have to get closer to that pillar without attracting too much attention. Stay close. I don't want to die alone."
The bulky woman laughed.
"Or live alone," she added.
The two set off.
Grutus set alight his Aura, in case, as he imagined, a stray something flew harshly from the vicious battles.
He assumed Liura would do the same.
However, she didn't.
Thud.
Grutus turned behind him cautiously, where Liura and her Retriever were supposed to be, and his eyes shot out in alarm.
"Liura!" he gasped.
In one miniscule moment, he thought he saw a figure holding her neck from behind her, and in a blink, the two disappeared in a distorted mash of colour!
The Beckoned Retriever left behind, did not react at all. In fact, it kept walking as though completely obvious to the fate of its master. Worse yet, seconds later, as Grutus watched on, it stopped.
Its eyes were suddenly bathed in a murderous, untamed gleam as it gazed at Grutus who found what this meant too hard to swallow.
Somehow, the parted clouds close by (Rias' doing from earlier), mirrored how felt.
*
Vali watched the Cluster General closely. She couldn't tell if it was looking at her or not, but she didn't care.
"...Well, let's test out this Imagining Technique," she said as a wide grin stretched on her pretty face.
She shot her hand to the side, and with such an incredible amount of focus that instantly drenched her body in sweat, she vividly felt the flesh she had absorbed, and assimilated into her own, such that part of a unique Technique branded onto it was carved onto her own body as well, quiver and get dipped in an unnaturally vast quantity of mana.
As Rias had dared to say when he first used his Technique (likely because he was a prideful, overconfident teenager), that his Technique had a lot of requirements, Vali discovered that indeed, it was true. She had been developing this assimilation aspect for a while, and she could tell that she was missing a lot to truly make the EverSword House Technique work for her perfectly.
It was possible for her to copy Techniques, and even breach some of the more shallow boundaries between categories of Classes.
She had advanced her Cellular Supremacy that far.
But the Imagining Technique... it was particularly hard to crack.
Yet, a great flame bellowed from behind her palm, dwarfing her in height, and expressing a scorching girth mightier than hers. It swelled with a vibrant lilac hue, which Vali admitted had sprouted without much of her permission.
But this was good still.
From watching Rias, she had ascertained what he hadn't spilled. There was need for something from which to conjure what she wanted. The conduit, though she couldn't possibly know what the EverSwords called it that.
This flame was her own. Simple in design, and hard to keep active.
The Cluster General Vali faced squinted at this.
Vali had struck it with a sliver of this flame a few seconds ago. It recalled vaguely, as it had still been under Rias' fully control, and truthfully, in a sense it still wasn't completely free.
...!
Before she knew it, Vali was looking at a terribly heavy, large, chopping hand that gushed out storms right down on her! It seemed the Cluster General saw that she was worth acting against, finally!
Vali couldn't dodge, in as much as she briefly saw the coming attack. It would be too late by then.
Her body was splattered in an earthquake's worth of vibration, the ground sinking under the might.
Yet, Vali wasn't done.
Despite the bloody mess under the General's hand, she was striding behind it, once again igniting lilac flames from her hand.
It seemed the Cluster General had already sensed her presence once again, as this time, from the bundled clouds overhead, a thin bolt shrieked as it gathered before diving down right where she was!
Once again, Vali was obliterated, this time with impeccable accuracy and efficiency, but still she persisted, her voluptuous figure appearing elsewhere in a circling sprint!
'I might actually run out of mana if this continues,' she thought. If there was anything that sucked up her mana outrageously, it was one of her abilities, an advanced version of the simple cloning she had done before, which she called Singular Cellular Extract.
Instead of creating clones, Singular Cellular Extract made her real body into a lesser copy, and extracted her 'truest essence', as she called it, into a flesh bud that she would usually stealthily hide somewhere when she felt she was in danger and sprout into her real body!
Right now, Vali was using this ability every time she knew for certain there was danger. The principles behind the ability required complex execution, but she had managed, and the only downside was that she couldn't make such Cellular Extract automatic yet, as she would have wanted. That would be beyond what a Special skill was capable of.
Vali felt a breeze bash into her face and her skin, as well as bone was erased as the Cluster General blew out from its mouth, and to her direction. This was now the fifth time it had destroyed her body despite her Aura coat, in the last six seconds, and she wasn't getting a chance to use her newly acquired ability.
But she wasn't exactly complaining much.
After all...
'Imagine. It's in the name, right? All I have to do is imagine what I want. What would I want to conjure...?' Vali thought with each passing second, her body getting destroyed again.
If one was given the ability to imagine what they wanted, and if they had as much mana as Vali, what would they choose?
When the look of realisation finally swept past Vali's eyes, she grinned both twistedly, and innocently.
For now, she didn't need something complex. She just needed to conjured something that made full use of her ability to manipulate her body freely.
And what was in front of her helped her imagine it firmly.
As the dazzling lilac flame appeared over her hand for the seventh time, Vali imagined this simplistic desire of hers as quickly as possible. She had no doubt that with her body, she could handle it, but she wasn't sure if it would work. With the little she had absorbed of Rias' flesh, she wasn't sure it was plausible to assume that it would work. It could easily go wrong. But not with her body.
Come on. She had seen it countless times. And she was looking at it.
And that said...
Vali locked gazes with the Cluster General, and in the next moment, she felt something unseen brew from the flame, fly out, and etch itself into her, giving her a title.
An identity.
...!
Before long, Vali screamed, but not in pain. She felt an odd burst of power vibrate throughout all her cells, her flesh, her bones and her mana core, edifying them in a rather... specific way.
Her body tumbled about eerily and unevenly, and the sudden loud cracking that came from her drew a lot of attention, and then surprise!
It wasn't just the living beings around her that showed surprise – Rias, Skullius, Gabel, and Grutus.
It was this world as well!
The clouds moved, however hesitantly, over to Vali who wasn't too lost in the ferocious might burning through her body that she couldn't witness it, a look of gleeful amazement on her face. If she wasn't close to bursting open, she would have laughed like a fool.
It was working! It was actually working!
Something from this world, was acknowledging her, and while it hadn't been Vali's explicit intent, it happened anyway.
Vali's body ballooned for a second, and in that moment, blood shot for her eyes, but she immediately healed whatever damage she was taking from the inside – from her flesh contracting horribly against itself, from her mana core growing so bright it threatened to burn her hole through her!
'Let's use it while it lasts!' she urged herself, and with all her might, she shot from the ground, which crackled before splitting, broken bits flying over tens of meters from where she had stood. The raging mana within Vali was swiftly converted to Aura.
A deep magenta coat that would have blanketed the tall Cluster General just as well, and with space to spare, enveloped her snuggly. It augmented her to such a degree that she had to mobilise half of her mana strictly for regenerating her flesh!
Then, before several halves of a blink of an eye could pass, Vali had smashed her fist into the Cluster General's face with a mad roar!
An ear-piercing crack was heard as a wave of expelled wind gushed in all directions horrendously, disrupting – above Vali's ground-breaking lunge just now – all the activity around her.
The Cluster General she hit barrelled back and smashed into the group after an unnatural spin, half its torso getting buried into the ground!
This was nothing to scoff at even for Rias who looked on with a deep frown. It wasn't only him either. Skullius also looked bizarrely at Vali, as did Gabel.
There was a distinct presence gushing from her.
The same presence they all knew from facing... Cluster Generals!
How in the world.... how could she have such a vast pool of mana belching from her mana core like this?!
Vali, after her strike to the General, landed on the ground and blew out her cheeks as she struggled to keep control of her own body.
Indeed. What she had wished from her fiery conduit was to become as physically powerful as a Cluster General!
Her original intention was to gain enough strength to wrestle against this particular General, but as it seemed, that wasn't the only result.
Vali grunted as the mana just kept piling on and on.
'All right then!' she thought, and from the opening on her outfit – over her smooth abdomen – a large blob was spat out, then another and another and another. In no time, a series of Valis all decked in outrageously thick magenta Auras were crafted from the blobs, and most of them rushed towards the pillar of flame while the rest divided themselves between the Cluster General, and the effort against Rias!
The young Game Master was not quite pleased to see eight Valis streaking through the air with loud booms towards him.
He clicked his tongue, and dashed back quickly, but immediately after, he saw the figure with a fuming Aura of blackish-red swipe through the air with a green blade, a nasty cry screeching from it, and to no one's surprise, Rias was carved at the chest, blood spilling from him messily!
Creating distance was dangerous because of that one man, and fighting at close quarters led him to getting swarmed. The situation was perfect for making any combatant miserable.
Rias bled from the mouth, but his expression was a far cry from showing signs of utter defeat. He reversed time to heal himself with his sword, but in the next, Gabel reversed it again, so that he was once again sliced through gruesomely!
The young Game Master had expected this, however.
His Incarnation was holding a star-shaped object in its hand which it broke, and sprinkled over his head. In the next moment, Rias was whole again. He had even erected a bubble of stalled time around him in order to ensure to Gabel didn't stop time just when he was about to heal himself.
'This is getting a bit too dangerous. Time seems to move slower than I had imagined,' Rias thought. As he summoned another swarm of crows to block his enemies' view and dashed off to create more distance, he looked at the Valis running towards the sheltered pillar of flame and those ganging up on the Cluster General.
Towards the former, he frowned.
Towards the latter, he felt pity.
'That thing isn't the same as when I first fought it. If it had been as vicious as it had been before I 'broke' it, me setting it loose would have ruined all our plans,' he thought as his deer head drew close. 'That said...' he continued, remembering something odd which he saw, with Vali. 'Doesn't matter anyway...'
The deer head opened its maw extra wide.
"Oh no, you don't!" a Vali dashed from out of nowhere and was so close to sinking Rias' face in when he trapped her in a bubble of stalled time. He drew back, but then a second Vali skirted around him, and dangerously cocked back her arm. Rias summoned his Incarnation to guard, and when a heavy bash smote it, dispelling it like mere smoke, he was flung high into the air.
But the torrent of enemies wasn't done with him.
They leapt through the air to get him, every one of their attacks tagged fatal.
Rias once again called his crows to obscure the view as he readied his deer. He extended his hand and with a hard face, he turned resolute.
He might as well bring out his trump card, if things were going so terribly.
The shield around the pillar was halfway destroyed by the Valis, and he would legitimately die if this continued. He had his own stack of tools prepared but they wouldn't last for long, and honestly, it ate away at his pride to use Revival Stars.
Something had begun to poke out of the deer's mouth, the third Conjured Daydream, when...
One of Rias' crows brought something to his attention.
The bright rectangular light in the distance, situated over the vast mountain, flickered before disappearing.
The GOAL. It had vanished.
The two minutes had finally ended.
...And the game, was over.
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