Mage Tank-Chapter 283: Focused Fire

There was a subtle shift in the lighting of the battlefield, and I noticed the wall of birds encircling the city beginning to alter their flight paths. This occurred the moment that the Hierophant’s attention shifted to me. An instant later, too many things happened at once for me to spare any brain cells monitoring the birds.

A blue flash, almost gentle, rolled off the Hierophant to fill the air. My skin burned. I tasted copper. Bursts of light sparked in my vision.

You have been Poisoned! Toxicity partially mitigated by resistance.

Toxicity: 88

Mana gathered around the Hierophant for a spell. One spell became dozens, and dozens became hundreds. The Hierophant’s branches burned with brilliant azure light. Swaths of the heads opened their mouths like gaping fish out of water, and three hundred beams of Mystical Force split the air to intersect on my position.

My shield was raised to weather the Mystical onslaught. It was a lot of attacks, and each of them felt strong enough to do serious harm to most Delvers at my Level, but not strong enough to make me sweat. I wasn’t worried about chip damage, and my Shielding was higher than anticipated. I’d failed to account for the interaction between my Leadership evolution Auradin, which improved the potency of my auras for my allies, and its interaction with Auradilato, which let me count myself as an ally for aura and aura bonuses. That boosted the Shielding by 32% before it was then doubled by Body of Asclepius, giving me 250 Shielding rather than 190.

It hadn’t been a huge boost to Shielding in the past, but by this point, an extra 32% was starting to add up.

The beams didn’t strike all at once. They fired off like spray from a minigun, delivering the hundreds of attacks over two seconds. They collided with Gracorvus, which rattled violently on my arm, but I wrestled it to stay in position as the force sent me careening backwards.

I rode the assaulting flood, using my wings to maneuver my body so that I faced the beams lengthwise, shield held over my head. I worked furiously to maneuver the shield into place again and again as the concentrated fire continuously shifted to try and get around my block. My reduced profile and the straight angle of the attacks combined gave me enough of an edge to catch everything on Gracorvus, and by the end of the spam, I was left without having taken a single point of damage.

My spell defenses were pretty fucking good.

Seeing that I cleanly had the Hierophant’s wrath focused entirely on myself, the rest of my party moved in. None of them were fucking around, either. With a Grade 34 on the field, everyone was going full force from out of the gate.

Varrin descended from above, flanked by two soul clones. He’d used Enrage multiple times to build Rage stacks throughout the assault leg of our flight, but had kept the number just below his Berserk threshold until I’d given the Hierophant my blunt greeting. Now, he activated the technique on his ride down towards the Hierophant, and cold, burning eyes burst to life on his helm.

Kazandak was at full extension, all three of him wielding twenty feet of razor steel with Spectral energy dancing along their edges. Against the Hierophant, the length was almost quaint, but a one-inch blade could still kill a fully grown man. I was betting Varrin could apply the same principle on a larger scale.

While Varrin careened down from the sky, three of Nuralie’s mechas darted out from the Closet portal to spread out across the no-man’s land. As usual, the loson herself was nowhere to be seen. Behind them were two of Grotto’s Etja-clone golems, decked out in modified Zng armor and wielding weapons taken from the fallen King’s Guard months prior.

Xim was close on their heels as she came through the portal and then kept coming through the portal. Her entire body was covered in crimson fur that flowed like molten blood. Her face was a bestial visage, her furious eyes and elongated jaws leaking the flames of judgment. A blinding disc blazed at her back, and her six-foot claws left smoldering gouges in the earth as she kicked off into the air. From snout to tail-tip, she was fifty feet long, having burned every lengthy cooldown and combined all three of her major transformations.

Etja herself fired off a long-range death beam, a single exceptional counterpoint to the hundreds of similar spells lobbed by the Hierophant. The spell added to our soul hug combo, the mana cost for channeling Explosion! got cheaper.

The world strobed with light from the exchange of skills between the Littans and the Avian-Elementals behind us.

My awareness of all of this flowed like a tranquil stream. I took a single mental breath, and the forces arrayed on the field collided.

The meat grinder of Mystical attacks poured into my shield while a third of the Hierophant’s heads sent Spiritual mana flooding into the creature’s drooping maw, funneling into a spell that was called, no joke, fucking Doom Cannon. Varrin crashed down on top of the Hierophant, three Soul Strikes carving into its flesh and its anima as the creature cast. Its Physical resistance didn’t stop the torrents of blood that wept from the gashes Varrin left behind.

The Hierophant bellowed under the strikes, sending a rumble through my chest. A sigil appeared in the air before the beast, even wider than itself, and a presence invaded the battlefield as a titanic blast erupted from the sigil, a void of lightless black. Chaotic thoughts whispered in my mind as the shot fired.

Etja’s death beam crossed through the attack as she fell back out of the spell’s path, striking the Hierophant’s muzzle and detonating into a massive eruption that stripped flesh from a swath of the creature’s faces. The force of the Hierophant’s released spell scattered the dusty remnants of its many visages with a thumping shockwave that travelled outward for a thousand feet.

I felt less confident about taking this one on the chin, so I used Shortcut to avoid the spell entirely. The column of whispered insanity was so large that my teleport was barely enough to move out of its path, and the ray continued until it struck the western edge of Krimsim’s defenses a half mile north. The structures were left completely untouched, but all of the defensive guns along a massive stretch of the wall suddenly went dead. After clipping the outside of Krimsm’s walls, the beam kept going, until it plowed through the hurricane of birds another half mile away, sending hundreds of them falling from the sky.

There wasn’t even enough time for a chill to run down my spine at the sight, because the massive column of wood along the Hierophant’s back was alight with its own mana. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t another giant tree the thing was carrying around.

It was a seven-hundred-foot-long staff.

Stolen novel; please report.

A spread of arrows appeared in the Hierophant’s hide, snaking tendrils of venomous death spreading out from impact. Xim tangled herself in its branches and breathed a massive gout of Divine fire while she began reducing heads into bloody mist with her claws.

Two hundred of the goliath’s heads spread golden light into its body. Each one had cast Cleanse, and each Cleanse carried a heal alongside it. The flames sputtered out. The rivers of blood from the wounds in the Hierophant’s hide staunched. The creeping necrosis in its flesh receded as all of the poison Nuralie had dumped into it was purged. Any sign of the damage caused by our plane crash was wiped away, and new branches emerged from the trunks of its twisted trees, ferrying fresh heads out to join their decapitated brethren.

All of this happened as the Hierophant’s second Doom Cannon fired from its skyscraper-sized weapon. The spell carried twice the potency of the Hierophant’s native use of the same spell, and I couldn’t Shortcut again so soon. Both Reverse Card and Dispel were sending me some very bad tingles about how much mana it would take to negate or redirect that attack. I barely managed to get Gracorvus up in time.

Gracorvus halted some of the spell’s power, but it wasn’t nearly enough. My spell defenses, while robust, were shredded. My 250 Shielding was peeled away, and the haunting thoughts became a shrieking chorus in my mind.

Fear negated by immunity!

Psychotic negated by Sacrament of Redemption!

Half my Blessed stacks disappeared, and a protective ward shimmered to life across every inch of the Hierophant’s body as its attack ripped away a chunk of my health.

HP: 3,167 -> 2,563

I immediately triggered Rejuvenation to restore 208 HP. The air flashed blue again, my skin grew hot, my vision sparkled, the Toxicity that my Fortitude was working furiously to eliminate swelled to 119.

[Team Pio is pulling their fight away, and Etja and Nuralie are moving out to their maximum range. They cannot handle the amount of Toxicity that creature is generating, and its area of effect is immense.]

My own ability to tank Toxicity was massive, and thinking through how devastating the effect must be for everyone else caused me some concern. Regardless, there wasn’t much I could do about it directly. I had faith that my allies could manage, but we could still do something to adjust for it.

“Ask Nuralie and Tavio to trade out. She’ll be better against the birds, and he should be able to endure the Toxicity. Then get all our constructs to target incoming birds ferrying heads to the Hierophant. Hopefully, it can’t keep replacing the ones it's losing without a fresh supply.”

[Acknowledged.]

The Hierophant was a lumbering, durable, and self-healing battle caster with a fondness for recruiting horrible monsters to fight on its behalf. I was starting to feel like it was stepping on my brand. Still, despite having a significant amount of the damage we’d done wiped away, the Hierophant hadn’t fully healed itself. Branches were scorched, heads were mangled or missing, and the wounds Varrin inflicted were accumulating faster than its healing could outpace. Further, I’d taken the Hierophant’s full salvo and was only down by about 400 health.

This was manageable. I just needed to keep its focus.

While Grotto and I had our exchange at the speed of thought, I flew around the Hierophant at full tilt, doing my best to reorient the creature so that any further mile-long, brain-obliterating doom beams didn’t hit Krimsim as collateral damage. I blocked a barrage of azure rays while throwing another salvo of hammers as I went, pumping them with everything I had, just like the last. I abandoned striking the heads in pairs, thinking that had been overkill, instead choosing to assign each hammer to its own individual target.

The Hierophant’s wards broke under a triple Soul Strike from Varrin and his clones, making way for my hammers to find their targets, splattering and deleting more craniums.

The moment the first head was pulped, a vicious flare of pain penetrated my skull as the Hierophant activated some sort of retribution skill. A damage notification flew by, showing that I’d taken 140 Psychic damage in return. It ignored all of my DR, but was absorbed by the Shielding I’d regenerated. I had a split second to consider how fucked I was about to be before my next nine hammers landed.

It felt like someone took a pair of Tommy guns, rammed the barrels deep into my eye sockets, and pulled both triggers. The cooldown on Rejuvenation was up, and I desperately activated the skill to offset some of the hurt. My health hadn’t quite dropped to half, but it was getting uncomfortably close.

That level of retaliation completely shut down my multi-attack combo.

Disintegrating blasts continued to bombard the monster while Varrin sliced his way up the creature’s back towards the branches full of heads. Our Bleed plus Toxicity strategy had been halted in its tracks with the enormous number of Cleanses the Hierophant could deploy, and both of those statuses were applied through Physical attacks, making the approach doubly untenable against this foe. Varrin had no reason to linger around the beast’s juicy, blood-filled torso, adjusting his strategy to focus on weak spots, rather than exsanguination.

As Varrin grew close, Xim angled her fire breathing to engulf the big guy alongside a swath of heads, allowing the attack to pull double-duty as a Cleanse of its own. Divine heads glowed, the fire was extinguished, Bleeding was purged, a Toxicity AoE erupted–pretty sure it was radiation–we got poisoned, Xim breathed fire, which renewed the Ignite and Cleansed Varrin’s Toxicity. It was an entire merry-go-round of blood, flames, and cellular decay getting reset every few seconds.

I was too far away for Xim’s fire to eliminate my own Toxicity, but I was still doing all right, though it would get dicey eventually if ignored for too long.

Toxicity: 164

A brief pang of nausea rolled through me as the poison tickled my guts for 94 damage, and my Toxicity dropped to the same. A few seconds later, it ticked up to 213. That would rupture my cellular membranes for 143 damage, then tick up to 260 or so.

My main attack combo was neutered with the Hierophant’s insane return damage, but that didn’t make me useless. The spells cast by the Hierophant itself were significantly cheaper than the supercharged versions coming off of its staff. I caught the beast’s next Doom Cannon with Reverse Card and dumped the enormous AoE into the beast’s lower body, carefully avoiding Xim and Varrin as they savaged its head.

The Hierophant looked annoyed by the turnaround, at best, and my move had still taken nearly a hundred mana to pull off. I decided that was a poor use of my resources, even if I had just gotten a big windfall there.

Then I noticed the battlefield had grown quite dark. A quick survey of my surroundings revealed the cause to be the massive horde of birds that had been swarming to create a dome around Krimsim. They’d abandoned that task and were getting much, much closer to our fight, their bodies blotting out the sky as they converged on top of us.

“Timeout!” I thought to Varrin and Xim.

I Shortcut to the pair, dismissed the Closet portal over Krimsim’s walls, and opened another right next to us. Varrin practically tackled us into the portal, which I immediately closed behind us.

We rushed through an empty cavernous room as Xim activated Sam’lia’s Warmth, then hit me with a Heal. Restoring my HP was more time and mana-efficient than Cleansing my Toxicity. I popped Rejuvenation as well. After being doubled from Body of Asclepius, the rapid healing session restored more than 1400 health in a scant few seconds, regrowing all of my annihilated gray matter and irradiated cells.

My health was back to full, and I got a healthy boost to my Blessed stacks as well.

We entered the main staging ground, our eternal font of dirt pumping out soil in the distance, and ran into fifty-one red Dragons of varying sizes awaiting the signal to enter the fray. The largest was concentrating fiercely on the Closet portal leading back out into the no-man’s land around Krimsim, maintaining a flaming barrier that fully encompassed it.

The Dragon glanced at the three of us as we moved toward the portal at several hundred miles per hour, then dropped the barrier just as we made it within spitting distance. The Toxicity AoE from the Hierophant surged through, but Xim was already breathing gouts of flame to counter it.

We exited just in time to see a radiant star of holy light flying towards the Hierophant. Tavio’s body blazed with Sumrann’s blessings, holding a poleaxe trailing behind him as he streaked through the sky. The Littan warrior brought the weapon around with world-shaking force as he collided with the Hierophant’s head.

The entire battleship-length goliath slid back more than a hundred feet.