PoA The Concept of Death Chapter 5

PoA The Concept of Death Chapter 5

PoA The Concept of Death 5

Melinda and her team walked back to their suite of rooms lethargically. Their brutal beatdown hadn't ended with the first duel with Matt. No, they tried for a second bout and had been handled just as easily.

Melinda forced her hands to unclench and wiggled them, letting blood flow freely. Losing to Matt wasn't the worst thing. Their friend had always been tanky for his Tier. Now that he had rounded out his skills a little, it wasn't too surprising that he could beat them. He had always been an unrelenting force.

Even their loss to Liz was acceptable. The woman was an elemental manipulator with the ability to carry her element around in a spatial growth item. Her use of skills and the way she helped train Vinnie proved that the woman had invested a lot of time into working on her craft.

No, it was the loss to Aster that ate at Melinda. Aster, in her mind, was still the cute and adorable baby fox who wanted pets and cuddling. She was pretty sure that they would have beaten Aster if they had a second fight, but having most of her team turned into ice sculptures was something she wanted to avoid.

Baxter hadn't said anything else to her, but he hadn't needed to. His message was taken and understood. If they thought they were slipping before, they now had hard proof that they were weaker than they should be.

Her musing was interrupted as they entered their suite, and the weight of their recent humiliation became apparent.

No one said anything until Kyle lightly shoved the coffee table with his foot.

"That was horse shit."

Vinnie sneered at him. "At least you got to fight."

"Shut up. That's not what I meant. I..."

Mathew stood and towered over everyone. "No. Stop."

Her husband was unusually serious, and it caused the bickering to immediately die.

Once he saw that he had everyone's attention, he spoke with a flat expression on his face.

"What happened, happened. We can't change the results of that fight. But we can review and learn from it. Let's start with Matt."

Tara interrupted, "We got..."

Her husband held up a hand. "No. Stop. One at a time. Why did we lose against Matt?"

They were silent for a minute as each of them pondered the question.

Sam tossed out, "He knows our talents and skills. He was able to counter us." As if that would absolve them of their failure. Melinda had noticed how mad the woman had been when none of her skills or attacks were able to penetrate their friends armor. It had been a blow to her confidence.

Her husband nodded. "Matt knew our Talents. He was able to counter me by getting me off the ground. I know my Talent works less on people, but he was able to negate it by taking me out quickly. But we knew his Talent too, so it should have balanced out. Same with our skills. So what else?"

Kyle threw out, "He's strong. Stronger than I am. I checked his skills, and I saw that he was using a strength-enhancing skill." Her teammate grimaced. "It makes him stronger than me. By a lot. It doesn't help that he's a better sword fighter either."

Melinda could see that his admission hurt, but she was proud of Kyle for showing humility. He took pride in his strength and sword skills, so she knew it wasnt easy for him. She learned over and rubbed his shoulder in a show of support.

Sam had her arms crossed, but Melinda didn't miss the subtle rubbing of her chest where Matt had stabbed her and Kyle. She made a note to check up on her after this.

"My poisons are great in a rift, but I'm limited against intelligent combatants. Even more so now, with Matt's armor being impervious to gases. I would have done better against..."

Mathew interrupted Sam as she tried to move on to the other fights. "No, let's get everyone else before we move on."

Vinnie repeated himself, "He knew our Talents and realized that Tara and I were the two people who could either trap or hurt him, and he took us both out at the very beginning." Vinnie clenched his fist, and with white knuckles said, "We got slapped around like kids, but that second shot was bullshit. Tara, how does a crossbow bolt bounce like that?"

Tara looked confused as she responded, "I don't know what you mean. I was too busy getting drowned by ice to pay attention. Is the arrow special?"

Melinda sent everyone her perspective of the second fight, where a crossbow bolt had bounced off the ground like a rubber ball, slipping around Vinnies flat wall of defensive earth.

Tara whistled and said, "That's a special bow for sure. Maybe it's the bolt, but I doubt it. Shit, I want one." She cracked a wry smile before asking no one in particular, "Think he'd sell me one?"

Mathew redirected the conversation. "What else could you have done better, Vin?"

"I made a flat wall because it was cheaper, and well, yeah. You watched how that went. I should have gone underground or encircled myself fully. It's not like the stone blocks my vision."

Everyone looked at Tara, and with a sigh she said, "I was screwed from the outset. I can't shoot an arrow through that much ice. It's too dense and too heavy to punch through."

Kyle shrugged. "Was it that bad? I didn't really see it."

Tara withdrew an arrow from her new quiver and smacked Kyle. The sharp tip cut a thin line on his leg through his armor, and she said, "I have armor penetration. I could feel my Talent trying to punch through the ice. There was so much ice, it was counting as armor." She spoke slowly as she glared at all of them.

"Look at my view of the ice."

They got another video, and Melinda winced as she saw Tara's view replaced with blue hail as soon as the fight started. The rain of ice was so dense, she couldn't even see out of the skills area of effect.

"I can't shoot through that. My arrows get hit on the shaft and knocked down. It's absurd how much ice he can shit out. Any normal mage would have had to drain their mana pool to sustain that much ice generation. The only reason I could escape the ice field at all was its small size."

She looked at Kyle and apologized. "Sorry. Hurting you was wrong."

Kyle just patted her hand. "I'm sorry I doubted you. You were the only one who was able to hurt Matt after all. I should have known you weren't sitting on your ass."

Melinda healed Kyle and said, "I was unprepared for how quickly we went down, and failed as both a shot caller and a healer."

She swallowed and continued after a minute of reflection. "We should have changed our entire strategy after the first loss. Whether it worked or not, we should have tried."

Mathew took charge and redirected them. What about Liz? Id say it was pretty fucking terrifying when she just washed over me and slit my throat. I can't stop a wave, whether its blood or water.

Melinda saw her husband and Vinnie both shudder at that.

Vinnie shook his head. I don't think there was anything we could have done.

Sam interrupted, I could have poisoned her. And Tara could have shot her.

Vinnie shook his head. No, while those are both possible, I don't think theyre practical. We talked. We both have manipulation skills. I'd rather fight Matt than her. At Tier 5, she was killing Tier 7 monsters with defensive fighting styles. If she wanted, she could have cut us to shreds with one of her multiple ranged blood spells. You saw the one she used, but she has more.

Mathew nodded and asked, Anyone else?

Kyle shrugged slightly and said, Shes strong. We only sparred once, but it was enough to see that she's stronger than any normal Tier 6 mage should be. Either she's heavy in physical cultivation, or doing something else. It could be a skill maybe [Mana Strength].

Sam tossed out, The golem thing didn't seem like a skill. And she kept her head out of the blood, so she needs to breathe. That's a weakness that Tara and I can exploit. Its just a hard one to hit.

They talked for another ten minutes about how to handle Liz, and the conversation eventually shifted to water mages. Technically, you could put Liz in that sort of category as well. It would be a challenge, but taking them out early would be their best chance. The biggest issue is how [Water Manipulation] could increase a water mage's versatility to insane levels. Lizs own version with blood made her a terror in a group fight. The more people bled, the stronger she got.

"The good news is that your Concept is strong as hell. The bad news is that anyone you use it on is a dead man. I don't even know if you could heal this at your Tier."

It was a confirmation of every nightmare she had ever had, and she wanted to vomit once again.

"Your Concept is literally tearing apart the spirit of the victim, which destroys the bonds of reality. It won't be easy to heal., Without the spirit, it's hard to recreate the physical structure of a being. Its possible, but incredibly difficult. Overhealth works miracles, but it still needs the spirit to build off of for its automatic healing."

The monster vanished in a flash of pale light, and Baxter continued. "It's not unheard of for spiritual attacking Concepts, but theyre rare. They may be strong but they still have weaknesses."

That caught her attention. She didn't want to be a killing machine.

"Spiritual attacks attack the spirit, obviously, so their use is truly a battle of Concepts. You need to overpower the other person and their Concept, or else they can halt the attack. Otherwise if they remove the limb before it fully takes hold they may survive. But like I said it will be difficult to heal, if not impossible."

Melinda knew Baxter well enough to know that this wasn't the end of their testing, but she swallowed and nodded.

An hour later, they learned a few things.

She could only use her Concept on one thing at a time, and had to kill the infected individual or have her Concept broken to move onto another one.

The second was that her Talent had enough power to heal her own damage. It was just insanely expensive and slow. It was good to know that she could heal anyone hit with a spiritual attack, but her Talent wasn't healing the spirit, which Baxter said was normal.

A person, or in this case, a monster's spirit would take longer to heal, but as long as the flesh was mended, it would regrow to match their body slowly. While the flesh was functional, it felt like it didnt belong. Immortals could speed the process up a little, but it was still incredibly slow, and could take years.

She hated the look in Baxter's eyes, but she knew that for her next Tier up, she would be aiming to get her overhealth Tier 3 Talent to affect the spirit. It would be amazing if it worked, but she knew that it would be a slow process to grow her Talent enough to make it work that way. She would need a lot of time at her Tier, and to practice with spiritually crippled monsters.

It meant she would be using her Concept often.

She hated watching the monsters from her childhood ripping even other monsters apart. Killing them was one thing, but watching their flesh slump and melt was a cruelty she didnt wish on anyone or anything.

He deposited her later that night in front of her suite, and Mathew was waiting up for her while tapping on a pad. She brushed past him with the excuse she needed to shower again.

Her husband wasn't dumb, for all of his good-natured attention and ability to see the fun side. So he opened the shower door as she scrubbed herself with some soap and a luffa.

"Are you ok?"

She repressed a hiccup, and with more control of her voice than she expected she said, "No. Not really."

He crawled into the shower with her and held her, and she let out the pent-up tension from the afternoon.

After a good cry and talk, she actually felt quite a bit better. Not perfect, but better than she had after the experiments.

She now had a goal. Be able to heal the damage she could cause. And she now knew that she couldn't really hurt more than one person at a time. Her Concept seemed a lot less scary.

She was still going to send her therapist a long message tonight, but things were looking less dim.

***

They were called up later the next afternoon for a mission. They had been running drills while absorbing the skills Matt had given them, or looking to trade them for more useful skills. She felt bad for taking his items, and if they had been offered now, she would have refused to take them. Their team needed to work on their fundamentals before they relied on skills, but they had them now, and needed to put them to good use.

During their downtime, she had been working on her shot caller module that she had bought. She wanted to say that she was getting better through hard work, but she was more driven now, plain and simple.

It was helping. Her random teams were doing better each time she ran with them, and she hadn't had a death in three runs. Good progress only meant that she needed to turn up the difficulty, but it was something.

Their mission brief was interesting, but wasnt anything too crazy. They were guarding a fort in the middle of a forest. They weren't the primary defenders, but backup. There had been Kingdom activity spotted in the area within the last day. Scouts were seen sniffing around the lower level forts, and the Queendoms higher-ups thought there was going to be an attack. They wanted to have a team ready to respond to a fort being attacked, or a strike team to take out any hidden camps.

Melinda was nervous, but they stepped onto their extra-large flying sword that they recently purchased, and flew to the indicated fort. Sam flew with Tara as they made their way through the sky. Riding piggyback wasn't ideal, but the sword was just uncomfortable for all of them.

There were a few cheap Tier 6 flying devices on the war market, but they didn't have that kind of money lying around.

When they arrived, they were shown a small room full of bunk beds where they were able to set themselves up. After that, they just hung out on the walls, scanning the nearby forest.

It was slightly eerie. The thick, dense forest blocked out most of the light, and the clearing that was being cut around the fort only increased the contrast.

Vinnie was out there with them, and was using his Talent to see through the ground as a makeshift scout. His ability let him poke his head under the ground and see quite a distance. He would be a lot more dangerous if it didn't cost so much mana to move earth while traveling quickly.

In the end, it still worked out for them, but he was being careful not to be seen above all else. If there were scouts out there, he was at risk. Melinda hated it, but it was the right call. After three hours, they got their payday.

"I'm hiding in a hill right now and I found them. Theres a team of five people moving to the smaller fort to your fort's east."

Melinda checked their location in reference to Vinnie. That wasn't fair at all.

She sent a message to the forts leader that they were going to complete their mission and forwarded it to their headquarters.

In five minutes, they were jogging out of the camp, moving to Vinnie's location. They didn't expect to sneak up on the scouts, but they didn't want to give their location away like a bunch of brutes either. She winced every time they stomped on leaves or twigs, and just hoped the scouts were occupied with their sabotage.

When they reached Vinnie, he crawled out of the ground and joined them as they slowed down and carefully moved to a slight highrise near the smaller fort.

Vinnie laid down, and after shoving his head into the ground, said, "Found them. Or four of the five. Theyre in a dry creek bed around the hill to the west of us."

The missing scout was a problem, but they could deal with that when they took out the other four. The most obvious answer was that they were hiding somewhere, not touching the ground and thus preventing Vinnie from sensing them. While his Tier 3 Talent said see-through earth, it was more like a new sense that functioned like vision for anything touching or in the ground. Someone not touching the ground negated it.

"Watch the trees, and let's push forward."

They crept along and used Vinnie to get an AI recording of where the four were hiding. At her countdown, they raced over the edge and dispatched the four prone scouts. It wasn't even a fight with Tara standing on the hill and putting arrows into the backs of three of the Kingdom scouts. Mathew raced down the hill and skewered the remaining one.

It was surprisingly easy.

At least it was, until Sam noticed the hideout camouflaged in a nearby tree. When they saw the small, suspended hut, a short, lithe figure burst out and bounded through the tree branches as if they were walking on solid ground. They quickly lost the final scout, but Melinda wasn't worried. They had done their job after all.

She was about to call the mission when Kyle asked, "Why did they run directly towards another of our forts?"

It made her think as well, so she brought up a map of the area. They had come from a medium fort that had a sprinkling of smaller forts around it. And their unkilled scout had run deeper into Kingdom territory in almost a straight line.

It was dumb, unless she was trying to lead them away from their actual base.

She said as much, and her team agreed with her reasoning, so they moved in the opposite direction of where the woman had fled, and let Vinnie search around.

Two very careful hours later, they found a base being built into a neighboring cliff face across from their own. A wooden wall was being created as they watched. With careful observation, there seemed to be five non-combatants that were quickly building the base with some kind of building skill. It locked the freshly cut trees into a solid wall, and the others were assisting. Fourteen people among them seemed to be combatants, but with how they were constantly moving, it was hard to get a firm number.

Melinda was reporting the information up to the headquarters when Vinnie cursed and said, "They have an earth mage, and he felt me."