033 - Ashakir X: Shadows
“—unbelievable! [beefus_maximus] of Karravar [kava] is breaking the previous ‘Pit of Lohr’ Veh Survival Record by a hefty mile! He’s fighting alongside his trusty autonomous combat drone [Deborp_Yllana_Mk2]—what kind of name is that, am I right—and seems to be trialing a brand new anti-Veh combat weave cooked up by the nerds at Karravar called a [Sunblade]! Look at them go! Vehspawn density is at... an incredibly lethal 3.8 Veh per square meter, but we’re already twenty-seven minutes past the previous record held by [herc_u_deez] of Olympos [godz] with no signs of [beefus_maximus] even slowing down–”
—The first publicly recorded use of Karravar [kava]’s trademark [Sunblade] spell, later released to the Player base at large, June 6, 2120.
The next time Ai got to talk to [Stormold], she was going to thank him for all the times he ran headfirst into combat encounters as their party tank. She’d treat him to something delicious. Lellen’s potstickers, maybe.
Ai pushed the full, unadulterated might of her Semblance into the world to draw the Veh towards her.
Her [Transcendental Sunblade] was as effective as it always was when dealing with Veh in close-combat range, but she was going to need a new solution to deal with these numbers, especially at range. She was prepared to use the [Eye of the Storm] if it was the only way to keep Sari, Aru, and Aelor’s group alive. But until that eventuality, she would follow in [Stormold]’s footsteps.
She would be the party tank while her spell pushed Aelor’s skiff towards town and towards safety.
But Ai was so used to playing a high-INT glass cannon raid leader that being in the thick of it and trying to navigate the aggro from what now had to be several thousand Veh was beginning to be mentally taxing even for her—
—Veh in touch-range. Swing Sunblade.
Mass of twenty Veh, eight o’clock. No time to turn. Generate second Sunblade off of left arm and alter its parameters to elongate and widen—spear them through.
Veh surrounding Aelor’s skiff. Aru and Aelor dispatching any that make it onboard, Sari casting flame spells to defend, providing fire to the Kannoc men. A handful of Veh approaching, none of the skiff crew noticing. Ai would need to deal with it.
She adjusted her flight weave to flit across the water towards them, her Sunblade burn-cutting through and destroying dozens of Veh as she did. Good. They were safe.
Ai focused on retaking the aggro, asserting her Semblance to draw the Veh towards her, before flying away from Sari and the others so that any passing Veh didn't aggro on them as collateral.
Ve’un reformed, relatively stable. A good sign but the skiff still has about 150 meters to go.
The Veh were one-touch-kill environmental threats. Strictly speaking, nobody could tank them like you could a more straightforward attack. So you’d have to evade them or set up environmental defenses, or develop some sort of anti-Veh defensive weave, as dealing with them over an extended period of time essentially boiled down to a matter of preparation and attrition.
Ai was quite able to play an ‘evasion tank’ archetype, especially when she was running solo lore dives or going out on reconnaissance runs. But she much preferred executing on her plans from positions of power, after getting all of her ducks in a row long before the encounter even happened. She’d have to improvise once the dominos started falling anyway, but knowing more of the variables let her maneuver her way to victory much, much more easily.
But she never really needed to play the role of a tank for long, especially since she’d been playing with [Stormold] since Dirge’s Beta Test, and never truly needed to plan for larger encounters without him throughout the game’s lifespan.
A mass of Veh perhaps twenty strong bearing down on her, three o’clock. Reach out with first Sunblade, maneuver flight weave to accelerate past them, cut through.
During the game, if you were caught outside a stronghold with a pre-existing Ve’un, your options were limited. If you had the Semblance for it, you could try and cast your own temporary Ve’un for the night. But that option was generally limited to players of A-Rank Semblance or higher, as the spell cost in materials was often prohibitive for lower Semblance characters. An anchored Ve'un was thus worth its wardstone’s weight in gold.
The objective of Ai’s vendetta was, then, quite literally world-changing.
If you wanted to try to survive the night through sheer combat prowess and magical ingenuity, you could also try your luck at using whatever magic you had—usually control over fire, as that tended to be more economical in terms of combat sustain—but this was also limited by your hermetic tradition’s particular setup. Some traditions just flat-out couldn’t develop anti-Veh armaments of their own, not until Ai’s Karravar [kava] and the publicly minded Lorehounds [wiki] sat down to compile a list of tradition-agnostic anti-Veh spells like the Sunblade.
Ai had done a few of those as well. It was a shame that the game was real in that respect now, as the Veh scratched that sweet spot that lay between “deadly combat encounter" and “solvable environmental problem" perfectly. Survival runs were always incredibly fun, and provided very good numbers for the guild live streams besides.
More Veh spawning in. Numbers becoming unmanageable. Will be overrun at current pace. She’d have to figure out a new spell to take out the Veh in great numbers.
Such a powerful spell would’ve been prohibitively expensive during the game, and entirely unnecessary to boot. If the Veh were close enough that things had devolved into a combat encounter, then that was already exactly the sort of situation that the [Sunblade] had been developed for.
It was just much simpler and much more cost-effective to cast a Ve’un, if you were looking for a wider-range option. But the interference of the Dark Entity meant that she couldn’t just cast a new Ve’un, and casting one would cause the same problems that using [Eye of the Storm] would have, anyway.
That was all right. Her Semblance had grown. She wasn’t [Ayle] anymore, with an SS-Rank Semblance of 31,000 and change. She was now also Ai Kanbara with an SSS-Rank Semblance so, so far in excess of 99,999 that the [Status] screen couldn’t even display its true score.
[Sun-Divinity]-[Dark-Banisher]-[Bladed-Weapon]-[Fishing-Line-Whip].
There. That should do it. It would’ve been even more effective if the Varrans had a concept for what a laser was, but this would serve her interests just fine.
“[Transcendental Sunblade: Razorwhip]!”
She applied the modification to the Sunblade on her right arm, closing her open hand so that she was pointing with two fingers as if she were miming a gun. The blazing corona of sharpened True Sunlight around her arm focused down into a single thin line of molten gold, a razor-thin whip of light many times longer than the original blade.
With a flex of her Semblance and a flick of her arm, she snapped her new Razorwhip across the horizon. The millimeter-thin ray of light extended across hundreds of meters in a split second, slicing through every Veh that it passed through—hundreds of them.
She felt like a Hollywood tomb raider as she snapped the Razorwhip back on its backswing, cutting through the entire right flank of Veh.
Combat against the Veh wasn’t supposed to be this easy. Oh, she would die in one hit still, there was no doubt about that. But she’d been limiting herself to what she knew from the game out of habit—her newfound Semblance trivialized the limitations she’d once accepted as fact, and it was high time she adjusted to her new reality. It was looking like she was here to stay, after all.
Ai cast her gaze back towards Aelor’s skiff to check its progression. It was approaching the Ve’un barrier, perhaps a hundred meters to go. Good. They were nearly safe.
But something changed as she was observing them. Whether it was because they got too close to the active ward, or whether there was an unknown interaction between her freakish Semblance and the malfunctioning Ve'un she couldn't tell right now, but a significant mass of Veh were headed towards them from all directions.
No more shackles. How could she remain true both to those under her care, and to herself? Ai weighed her options.
She could activate [Eye of the Storm] and fly down to their level, taking its Ve’un and providing an immediate safe zone to them. But that would mean that the situation had become untenable and that she would have to resort to its [Divinity]. This was still preferable, vastly preferable, to the alternative of Aru, Sari, Aelor, and the Kannoc Merra being taken by the Veh.
But the situation hadn't become untenable.
She could also try to press her Semblance into reality even further, asserting her metaphysical gravity to such a degree that no Veh within 100 miles could resist her. But doing that would have the same effect as using [Eye of the Storm], just through a different avenue of discovery. She had confidence this tactic would work. But there was also the risk that the reason those Veh had veered off to pursue the skiff was something more than a simple interaction of Semblance.
Could she go down and fight the Veh in close combat? No, that option was ridiculous. At this juncture, her approaching them without using [Eye of the Storm]'s portable Ve'un would mean that she would be kiting the horde of shades right to them.
No, then the best option would be to support them from afar and make sure that the skiff got inside the boundary of the Ve'un as fast as possible. Thirty seconds at most. Quicker if she stopped caring about the skiff's structural integrity as much.
She now had a ranged option in the Razorwhip, and she knew she could push the weave even further. It was just a matter of experimentation.
Ai made her decision. Ranged support and a redoubling of her kinetic weave to push the skiff past the finish line.
As she glanced over, she saw Aelor wield his soulsteel blade to cut down the Veh that had made it through despite Aru’s best efforts and Sari’s fire wall.
She still had his other dirk tucked into her waist belt. He seemed to prefer using two blades instead of one, judging by his stance. Every little bit would help, she supposed.
With a quick nudge of her Semblance and a clever bit of targeting, Ai sent it hurtling towards its twin, nudging it at the last moment so that the blade sunk into the wooden deck of the skiff, next to where Aelor was standing.
She readied the Razorwhip, supercharging it with True Sunlight before letting it fly towards the shades that had massed into a veritable wall of darkness surrounding the skiff.
The modified Sunblade slipped through them all like a hot knife through butter, leaving only ephemeral clouds of shadowstuff in their wake.
She reached down to modify the kinetic spell pushing the skiff forward, ignoring any modicum of structural engineering that her more practically-minded guild mates had tried to hammer into her, back in the day.
There. That would do it.
Ai turned her attention away from the skiff to scan her immediate surroundings for any surprise Veh that might have been sneaking up on her when—
—[Self]-[Soul]-[Ignition]!
The unmistakable stench of the Burned Brand emanated from the skiff. Ai whirled around in shock.
Aelor had retrieved his second blade, and was burning his Semblance in a show of what seemed to be righteous defiance against an oncoming wave of Veh.
How in the absolute hell had she missed that!?