Chapter 890: To Scorch, or to Capture, that is the question
=Wait a minute…there should be only one [Abomination] in our lord’s immediate vicinity, yes?=
=Then why am I picking up four…five, five different signals that suggest the presence of minute [Chaos] related entities in the area?=
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“Rianna, what’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure…but keep your focus on finishing the array…”
Sensing that something was off about the situation, Rianna proceeded to draw her saber in preparation for…something to try and take her head. Evidently, this was a good move.
Shortly after she drew her trusty saber, a tingling sensation of danger caused her instincts to go haywire. But it wasn’t a sense of danger being directed at herself.
Instead, it was towards Jin Fang!
“Back off!”
Clang!
“What the hell?!”
“Skree!”
Appearing as if from nowhere, a squat humanoid mantis thing attempted to go for Jin Fang’s neck with both claw and mandible at the ready. Thankfully though, Rianna managed to swing her saber fast enough to repel the creature as opposed to slicing it in half.
She would’ve done the latter, but she was afraid that there was a chance that doing so wouldn’t kill the momentum of the mantis humanoid’s claws, resulting in Jin Fang getting interrupted and possibly killed. In her many years in the jungle, she had seen this phenomenon occur before.
‘What in the nine hells? Damn looks like one of those goblin creatures from those fairytale books in the library.’
Regardless, now that she knew what she was dealing with, Rianna proceeded to take a more defensive stance with her saber in hand. As an added measure, she channeled a tiny of [Chaos] into the blade to ignite it with crimson red flames.
“Skree!”
While this was occurring, the squat mantis humanoid proceeded to bounce back several steps on wobbly legs, as if it wasn’t quite used to walking yet.
The sight of this weak waddle, instilled Rianna with a bit more confidence in the situation.
‘Okay, so I just need to keep off one clumsy little mantis…thing…away from big sis for a couple of minutes. Shouldn’t be…wait a minute.’
“Skree!”
“Skree!”*4.
‘Godsdamnit!’
Evidently, even if Rianna had finished her thought of, “shouldn’t be too hard”, the universe would still find a way to screw her over.
…
‘Damn! This mantis is way tougher than I thought!,’ Zhen Liu commented to the kaijin as Kamakiller managed to parry yet another kick from Razorstella.
[Which is bullshit, how did it suddenly get so much stronger?!]
Despite having been able to launch a coordinated double sneak attack with his father, the two of them slamming palms engulfed in flames directly into Kamakiller’s gut, the mantis abomination proved to be much tougher and more clever than either of them anticipated.
The moment the two of them got within range, Kamakiller stopped her spin in order to throw herself backwards and use the momentum of the father and son’s attack to create even more distance while cushioning the blow to its bare minimum. That said, she did leave a parting blow for Razorstella during this exchange, in the form of a giant blood red crescent shaped blast of energy.
[Bitch!]
While the attack inflicted zero damage against the bladed ballerina kaijin, it did still have the intended effect of slipping her up.
After that moment, things devolved into yet another slugfest, although…it wasn’t as one sided as it was last time.
“Seriously, is this thing getting smarter or am I going crazy?”
“Both.”
The group wasn’t sure what had happened exactly, but the longer this battle dragged on, the more refined and controlled Kamakiller’s move became. Before, she flailed her limbs wildly and fought like how she would back when she was a normal Blood Mantis.
But now, with a significantly smaller body mass to worry about and a strange new form to work with, Kamakiller began to adapt her old instinctual movements into martial art ones that Zhen Liu recognized as being very similar to Mantis style kungfu.
He didn’t know whether to call it irony or a grand coincidence, to be honest.
Regardless, the situation had gone from a fairly easy, one-sided encounter to a growing threat as this battle dragged on.
Zhen Liu wasn’t entirely sure why, but his instincts told him that if he didn’t end this sooner rather than later, then shit was going to get much worst.
…
‘Fuck! I’m gonna have to pull out all of the stops for this, aren’t I?’
[You mean the Harmonize thing?,] Spring Brawler replied, knowing that the ringmaster needed a soundboard at the moment. [Because if you wanted to use the Godoku cannon, you only have Razorstella and Blazejudicator to work with. I’m pretty sure that combo would be crazy powerful, but that would also deny your father some much needed Chaos protection.]
‘I’m aware, that’s why I’m thinking of just using [Harmonize:Max] to just slice this crazy insect into a million tiny pieces.’
[But I thought you wanted to keep that particular move a secret from your family unless things got really bad. I don’t think it has devolved to that point yet.]
‘No, but it does feel like it’s getting worst. What do you suggest then?’
[Well…we don’t necessarily have to outright defeat Kamakiller right now, we just got to inhibit her long enough for Jin Fang to do her thing…or we can try to remove her from the battlefield altogether.]
‘Meaning…’
[Remember why we have a crazy purple flamed Ignarii sitting in the library’s holding cells.]
‘…huh. Logos, Pathos. Do you mind…’
<=Setting up a holding cell for yet another unexpected prisoner to the library? Already done.=>
‘Excellent.’
‘Awe-wait a minute, what?’
…
“Skree!”
“Skree!”
“Skree!”
“How!”
Clang!
“Much!”
Clang!
“Longer!”
“Just one more minute!”
“Great!”
When it came to one-on-one fights and hunts, Rianna had a lot of faith in herself.
With a bow and arrow in hand, she could snipe giant wasps like they were nothing more than floating targets.
While her saber play wasn’t the strongest, she had been growing increasingly more and more competent with it, thanks to the assistance of both the Zhen Clan and the [Library of Nowhere].
However, when it came to dealing with multiple enemies at once, especially short little mantis goblin babies that were trying to rip her head off, Rianna wasn’t exactly the best pick.
Aside from having average reaction times at best, Rianna also had the mild (mis)fortune of being too damn muscular.
Evidently, a diet consisting of mostly fresh fruits and giant insect meat has the detrimental(?) effect of making one built bigger than the average bodybuilder and then some.
In other words, while Rianna was able to repel and defend herself and Jin Fang from the onslaught of attack originating from Kamakiller’s mutant nymph spawn, she wasn’t able to counterattack or proactively act without opening herself up to a lot of attacks.
She didn’t even have to lunge forward to know that the moment she attempted to take out one of these little shits, the other four would be on her like flies on a corpse.
She couldn’t even really release the full firepower of her saber, lest hae accidentally hits Jin Fang in the process or burn the whole jungle down.
That latter notion wasn’t likely, but the thought of it had occurred in her mind once or twice during this battle.
‘Dammit!’-Clang-‘Dammit!’-Clang-‘Dammit!’
As her frustrations mounted inside her with every necessary but annoying block of the saber, Rianna began to ran her mind through what options she had in order to turn this entire thing around.
Eventually, she began to remember a little gift she received from Pathos from the [Library of Nowhere], a little brooch that was shaped like butterfly/spider that had ruby red eyes and wings patterned with flames.
A part of her didn’t want to use this little gift of hers quite yet for two reasons.
One, she thought it would be a little disrespectful to show off this particular little trinket when Jin Fang hadn’t done so yet either. Rianna had come to regard Jin Fang as her older sister as of late and treated as such.
Second, and maybe it was a silly little thing to worry about given everything that was happening in this exact moment, she couldn’t help but feel a little self-conscious about the mini-skirt that came with the outfit.
Either way, desperate times called for desperate measures.
‘Okay…what were the words again?’
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*Bing-Bong*
…
|What?|
You’re actually going through with that addition to the story? Really?
|I’ll have you know I had this planned for a while.|
Really? How long ago?
|Well… probably around the second time out hapless protagonist was being watched by his love interests?|
I wanna say bullshit…but also, you can use the term “harem”.
|I think this is technically a polycule?|
That…that means something else entirely…unless you’re implying-
|Spoilers.|
I am your narrator!
*Bing-Bong!*
