She said it lightly, as though facing three ordinary people. It wasn't blind arrogance — a Witch genuinely had reason to speak that way, especially since the opposition wasn't a well-trained, versatile group of official Extraordinaries. And of the two with abilities, she not only knew exactly what they could do — she now had the means to counter them.
That insufferable woman was contemptible, but at least she hadn't lied about the Witch's power. Compared to the Instigator at Sequence 8, the Witch just one Sequence above it was incomparably more versatile — fully justifying the near-brain-bursting agony of advancing.
Take Aura Vision, for instance — a technique she'd once known, but had never been able to use effectively in combat. The Witch potion had simply saved her the time of learning and practicing it. Two light taps on her own chest was all it took to activate Aura Vision, letting her see the light of spiritual energy directly and easily locate Assassins hidden in shadows.
The activation gesture was hard not to suspect of being deliberate. And remembering the convulsive laughter that woman had shown when handing over the Witch formula — she couldn't help suspecting that specifically recruiting male Assassins wasn't just a personal quirk.
After preparing two more mirror doubles and picking up three iron boxes, she had no remaining reservations. She slipped into the darkness and moved directly toward the three.
She'd have liked to prepare more mirror doubles — but each activation consumed a significant amount of spiritual energy. At her current stage, her total spiritual energy was only enough for four uses at most.
She spotted the one visible figure in the distance and eagerly gave herself two taps on the chest to activate Aura Vision. After confirming the other two were simply on alert and hadn't retreated, she allowed herself a genuine smile and thought viciously:
"No more cheat. Time for a reckoning, you bastard."
Against the dim background glow of plant life, the rich spiritual light radiating from every part of the three living people's bodies was impossible to miss.
She condensed another mirror, passed her hand lightly over its surface while spreading her spiritual energy into the ice, but this time instead of speaking a spell aloud, she traced a symbol in the ice using spiritual energy — a line broken in two, representing interference.
As the ice surface flashed with a brief dark luminescence, the Magic Mirror Interference spell completed. For a set duration, all divination attempts targeting her would be disrupted — the degree depending on the diviner's skill level. In truth, Witches were actually better at disrupting divination than performing it, and they even had a dedicated spell to accomplish this quickly.
The reason for casting Magic Mirror Interference first was that the Witch potion's knowledge had clarified something: Danger Intuition was, at its core, the same thing as the divination an Beyonder performed by consulting their own spiritual energy.
When an Beyonder's spiritual energy detected a threat to their life and fed that information directly to their physical instincts, the result was a premonition. When an Beyonder translated the same process into something visible — using a pendulum, a divining rod, tarot cards — the result was a divination reading.
Magic Mirror Interference could therefore also disrupt an Beyonder's instincts to some degree, delaying their perception of incoming danger. That said, the effect wasn't large — an Beyonder's survival instincts were closely tied to their life, which made them among the most resistant divinations to interfere with. This was the same principle as why divination asking about one's own safety was the hardest to disrupt or corrupt.
She noted the wind direction, quietly circled around the scarred man — whose nose was practically canine — and closed in on one of the Assassins before striking without warning.
The Assassin was jolted by a sudden alarm through Danger Intuition. Already on high alert, he wasn't foolish enough to stand there and take it. With an Assassin's excellent reflexes, he managed to dodge.
He avoided immediate death — but couldn't avoid being cut by the razor-sharp ice dagger.
It had to be acknowledged: the Magic Mirror Interference spell played a supporting role at best in landing that cut. The primary reason was that she now weighed perhaps half what she had before, combined with the Witch potion's further improvement to her physical conditioning — which had given her a genuinely frightening burst of speed.
Bang!
The Assassin, his wound invaded by piercing cold and his movements somewhat sluggish, spun and fired at his previous position — both to deter a follow-up and to signal the others.
But she had already swept past like a phantom, without pausing. Because from the moment that Assassin was wounded, he was already dead.
Burning the residual blood — left behind on the ice dagger — with black flame, she spoke aloud, reciting a spell in Ancient Hermes.
As her clear, beautiful voice reached all three men's ears, black flame erupted from within the wounded Assassin's body. The agony of what felt like a burning soul turned everything he might have said into a howl of pure pain, which echoed through the forest.
The black flame had minimal effect on physical matter — but on matter rich with spiritual energy, the result was something else entirely.
The Ancient Hermes word she'd spoken meant: "Curse."
As a Witch who had just mastered the basics of dark magic — enough, in the early Fifth Era, to be tied to a stake and burned — how could she not know something as classic as a Curse?
Even in the middle of combat, as long as something closely connected to the enemy — blood or hair — came into her possession, the Witch could use it as a conduit to quickly cast a Curse. By attacking the conduit, she could cause the person most closely linked to it to suffer the same harm out of thin air.
This was the most dangerous thing about a Witch — and a key reason she was confident she could kill three Extraordinaries in a single engagement.
Killing you outright might not be easy. But making you bleed was trivially simple.
"What filthy bitch did this? Show yourself!"
The scarred man bellowed it outright.
It was, in isolation, a fairly ordinary insult. But she was already burning with rage, and those words hit her dead center — she lost her composure on the spot, drew her revolver, and opened fire on the scarred man without a thought for anything else.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The reckless shots naturally didn't touch him — he dodged them easily.
Bang!
The other Assassin snapped off a precise shot that hit her square in the head as she stood there shooting.
Crack!
But this would-be perfect counter only shattered a piece of ice mirror, sending fragments scattering across the grass.
The death threat had brought her back to her senses — and she'd slipped into the darkness at the moment the double activated. So as far as the remaining two were concerned, someone who should have died on the spot had simply become a shattered block of ice and vanished.
Something like a taunting ability? She noted it, and was grateful for her caution. Killing only one lackey before getting taken out would have been a terrible trade.
The two survivors converged together, cautiously approaching the still-howling first Assassin while exchanging words:
"Beautiful woman. Looks a lot like him. Still wearing his clothes."
"You sure?"
Tense as the situation was, the scarred man couldn't stop himself from asking.
The response was the sound of something sharp tearing through the air at high velocity.
Both of them had sharp enough hearing to react in time. A crystalline ice lance immediately buried itself in the ground between where they'd just been standing.
This was an ability derived from her Ice Manipulation — one that functioned like a semi-spell: the ability to instantly summon a lance of ice. Normally, condensing ice into a weapon took time — four or five seconds to form the rough shape of a sword or knife. But with this ability, an ice lance could be created as instantly as activating any other power, at the cost of spiritual energy.
The Witch potion had even included knowledge of how to properly throw a javelin — to ensure the Witch's aim never went wide.
Author's Note (this chapter): Take Aura Vision, for instance — a technique she'd once known, but had never been able to use effectively in combat. The Witch potion had simply saved her the time of learning and practicing it. Two light taps on her own chest was all it took to activate Aura Vision, letting her see the light of spiritual energy directly and easily locate Assassins hidden in shadows.
玖兰千夜啊 · Anhui · 03-01 21:15 The two taps really paint a picture.