NOVEL NEXT Chapter 231: Javier Garcia
Daevic
“A female has entered the desert battlefield.” Now that combat had started, Teresa, speaking for the priests of Daevic’s mother under her, spoke over the telepathic channel built into their law armors to save time.
“Good.” Savan’s telepathic voice, as always, was calm and in control. “Given the timing, location, and composition of the enemy army, she should be Nitya Chakrabarti, Irena Krol, or, most likely, Li Mila. Whatever the case, she will be one of the enemy’s strongest members.”
He turned to look at Daevic. “Lord Daevic, you are probably the only one of us who can take her out in 30 seconds.”
Translation, don’t go easy on your opponent and work to draw out the Heavenly Spark Soul King. I want you to be sacrificed early so I can gain more credit.
Daevic, however, didn’t mind. He was not going to miss this chance to finally have a good fight against an E rank. So, he walked up to the portal under the picture of the desert environment and walked right through.
One second he was in the crowded space station and the next he was standing on top of a desert with nothing but sand and sky for as far as he could see. Using his Electrostatic Detection skill, he could sense the area was only about 120 by 120 kilometers, but it had the suppression of a B rank world, so this normally small area was pretty large for a battle between E ranks.
More important, however, he couldn’t sense his opponent and, given what he knew of the enemy force, that meant he was up against Li Mila.
Summoning out the nine storm spirits which lived in his one Colossal and eight Huge mana wells, each shaped like a serpent, Daevic sent them all over the battlefield, but, even with his Perception King uniqueness and his other boosts, he still couldn’t find her, and, three seconds later, twenty-seven seconds before they had to, the enemy army summoned a new combatant to the forest battlefield, this time a male.
Daevic, however, still didn’t care, smiling as he moved to hover over the center of the desert battlefield, preparing for the enemy’s inevitable ambush. He was just having too much fun.
* * *
Savan
Ya Savan was annoyed by the nature of the final battlefield, especially Daevic’s contribution.
In the early part of the stage, the mechanics of having a five element cycle could be pretty much ignored. The winning condition of the stage was to take three out of the five battlefields at the end, so normally the ability of the enemy to destroy one of the other battlefields after gaining control over two or three would be an issue, but the enemy was aiming for not losing a single soldier, which meant they would confine themselves to three battlefields. And this would allow Savan to do the same.
Then, given his stronger average soldiers, if he could win in one of the three battlefields the heathens chose, disrupting their ability to do battlefield effects, he’d be able to easily take over the remaining two battlefields and his army would win.
The bigger issue was that the enemy had more information.
Given the nature of the stage, Savan had originally given it 50% odds that the enemy spearman in the hellscape battlefield was actually the Heavenly Spark Soul King, and, after seeing how the enemy chose the desert and forest battlefields as the other battlefields to compete over, leaving the hellscape battlefield the only one he could attack with the stage’s effects by taking over the remaining two, he was almost 100% sure.
This would normally be good, as it isolated the Heavenly Spark Soul King in a battlefield Savan could just ignore and took away the threat of him arriving at a battlefield where his force was losing and turning everything around, but the nature of being able to only send in one combatant at a time was greatly lowering what Savan could do with this knowledge.
Take the current state of the desert battlefield, for example. From the reports he had received—apparently personally gathered by the Lady of Hellwater—Li Mila was the weakest of the enemy’s three strongest powers, but she excelled at battlefield control. Given the powers of the Heavenly Spark Soul King, he knew everything happening on that battlefield, including all of Daevic’s actions, and this meant Li Mila knew as well, which was why she could evade an idiot like Daevic with ease. More important, it also meant, if Savan sent someone weaker than Daevic to that battlefield, Li Mila would almost certainly kill them without Daevic being able to do a thing.
This then left Savan with a conundrum. Should he send one of his average commanders to help Daevic, likely losing them to the heathen general? Should he send Amalia instead and hope the enemy general wouldn’t just stall the two demigods while her force consolidated their power in the forest battlefield? Or should he start sending his elites to the forest battlefield and not interfere with Daevic’s battle at all, instead using all the rest of his forces to battle against Isaiah Kent and the heathens’ other commanders?
Responsibility was hard.
* * *
Javier
Standing to the side of the enemy’s portal, just outside the magical view of the image in the enemy’s camp which Lord Aalam had confirmed showed the portal’s exit, Javier Garcia’s muscles tensed as he poured all the qi and mana he could into the longsword Lord Aalam had made for him, the black and white wings behind his back ready for the five meter charge he’d use to attack whoever exited into the forest battlefield.
A member of the Garcia Clan, Javier had awakened to his clan’s most common uniqueness line as soon as the integration had started, the law wings line, specifically the Fabled grade Law Wings Prince, and this uniqueness had three main effects. First, it increased his Agility stat by 100%. Second, and much more defining for the Garcia Clan’s most common builds, it increased the power of any one wing category skill by an entire grade, a full sixfold boost. And, third, it turned the wings that resulted from that skill into a special type of Law focus for the elements the wings were associated with.
In short, in a way completely separate from Law affinities or the Attunement stat, when Javier had his wings out, his ability to understand the Laws of fire, water, light, darkness, life, and death, the elements associated with his Yin Yang Wings of Alacrity skill, it was like he was on a planet of one rank higher.
And this, along with the high affinities of his own race and his Ascended Demon Pure One bloodline, one of the more common bloodlines on Earth which boosted his affinities with all six elements even further, allowed him to have trained up six Law Pupae, four of which were already middle grade.
Given he had a separate movement skill, Yin Yang Steps, which his Yin Yang Wings of Alacrity enhanced, along with his maxed out Agility stat, he was the fastest member of Earth’s army after Lord Aalam, so he’d been entrusted as the first combatant to enter one of the battlefields. And his job was to work with Lord Aalam to ambush any enemy as soon as they entered, something only possible due to Lord Aalam’s ability to track the enemy’s portal into the battlefield, even though it would move after every new combatant entered.
“Three!”
Javier heard the telepathic message from Lord Aalam at the same time he saw a white robed woman exit the portal, and he didn’t question the command, completely ignoring the woman and immediately activating his full speed to move toward his three o’clock.
At the same time, he also received a map from Lord Aalam, showing the new enemy exit portal in the direction he was moving, and, with his Heightened Senses skill, he could feel the sudden advent of draconic presence as Isaiah entered the battlefield.
The woman, Amalia Stormborn, was surprised for a second, and the counter ambush she’d prepared failed, the gray energy-filled water which exited from her spatial storage ring flooding out through the air as a sphere and killing everything within five meters, but missing him completely.
She wasn’t able to react in time, allowing Javier to escape, and a second later she had an armored beast of a man thrusting a spear toward her face, hopefully completely blocking her ability to track Javier’s movements.
“J!”
Five seconds later, Javier had already prepared for another ambush, and this time Lord Aalam gave the go ahead, telling Javier exactly where to aim through his single letter command.
Flashing forward with his sword still at full power, he used his Balance of Dualism skill to control his qi and mana, enhanced by the power of yin and yang, to flow through his body and into his weapon, empowering the sword with his Yin Yang Blade skill to launch a black and white crescent of energy out from the sword and into the side of the neck of the armored man who suddenly appeared in front of him, the crescent only having to travel about 5 cm before slicing off the man’s head.
“Getsuga Tenshō!”
Having a little fun, Javier shouted out the name of his attack, copied from one of his favorite anime characters, and then he proceeded to thrust his sword through his opponent’s eye, destroying his ability to think, before taking his blade back from the flying head and thrusting it down through the man’s neck and into his body, activating Yin Yang Blade a couple more times until Lord Aalam confirmed the warrior was well and truly dead.
