Chapter 1565: She Does Not Make Sense (3)
’Tsk. My Drakkens are far from being as strong as they should be. Even that watered-down Yuyui can dispel them. How do I get over this mana hurdle?’ this Kintar thought while bleeding from the nose and the eyes.
Her Advanced Class, True Myth Mage allowed her to bring myths to life. As it so happened, the only myths she’d witnessed on Aigas (through Skullius’ mind) were the Eternal Drakkens; while it was an incredible feat that she was able to make organisms independent from her take the shape of these creatures instead of being limited to producing such an effect with her own body, she couldn’t make her renditions as strong as the Drakkens of old.
Those creatures were imbued with the greatest powers from the governing Deities of Aigas, born at the pinnacle of power. Kintar couldn’t replicate that kind of might. She could make her Drakkens exactly the same in terms of physical might and racial ability, but she couldn’t give them Divine perks.
This Kintar cursed and made a different hand gesture – clasping her hands tightly together.
There was a significance to this.
In Aigas, hand gestures didn’t necessarily make any abilities casted by the user stronger. Instead, they worked for improving efficiency.
Skills, Blessings, Genuine Incarnations, Territories and mana in general were tied to the body, and through mechanisms very few could control manually, it was possible to increase their activation speed, reaction, range and even cost. With skills, for instance, unless you possessed a guidance field, it was hard to master the sweet spot for how much mana to allocate said skill to make it activate quickly enough. Worse yet, some skills were located in corners of the body difficult for mana channels to distribute mana effectively – perhaps because of the mash of organs.
There were an endless series of reasons why abilities wouldn’t or couldn’t activate fast enough or with their fullest range. For experts without guidance fields to tell them how much mana was needed to cast an ability, and to make the casting process more or less automatic, hand gestures were the answer.
Creating a gesture helped the body memorise prime conditions required for making an ability operate efficiently – when the user discovered said prime conditions. This was especially true where Territories were concerned. Since they were expelled from the body, any mishaps could be fatal, especially when considering that a set of Creeds was used each time to double mana reserves for a successful cast.
Indeed, it wasn’t some magic trick, but for masters of the craft, using hand signs was about half as efficient as owning a guidance field.
Speaking of masters, this Kintar was indeed one too. Even though she’d received a guidance field from Skullius earlier, she couldn’t shirk away the habit of using hand signs, especially in this case. She needed to keep her focus. All her highest-level abilities were active – all of her mana-manipulation skills and all three of her Absolute Magic types – keeping the other her in a fight against a Divine of the masked man’s calibre and someone capable of dispersing magical concepts.
’I only have one option now,’ thought this Kintar and she glanced at the miniature world she had created. ’It comes down to how I did that.’
"Do you really think you can match me in a contest of output just because you are a little juiced-up? Hahaha! I wish Yuyui was here to watch this," the other
Kintar said, grinning. A part of her face fell off, melted by the fire brewing within her.She charged forth just as Rias scoffed and pulled Nana back.
"Get rid of those other creatures," the masked man commanded and he readied himself for the madwoman.
Said madwoman wasn’t going to employ the same strategy as before. This time, before she died, two other Kintars sprouted from her, both of them flaring with some kind of blaze building up from within them. One of them took the skies, brought her hands before her, and condensed time through some Advanced Magic form into a long, ebony chain that swung down to wrap around Rias’ wrist. The other condensed space and created a great silver glaive – nearly twice as long as she was tall – that she spun elegantly in front and behind her in rapid succession. The weapon cast mirage-like illusions – all of them so potent they could have fooled Rias if he wasn’t fully tapped in. It then suddenly snapped towards the masked man’s head, poised to cleave it.
The first Kintar duplicate pulled the chain around the masked man’s wrist with all her might, drawing him to the attack, but he managed to dodge. Rias also managed to avoid the brutish punch that came from behind the glaive user by pulling the chain around his wrist, side stepping, and knocking two of the Kintars in front of him away with one meaningful kick.
When the one connected to the chain reached her (because of the pull) she expelled another Kintar before Rias decapitated her. That Kintar just so happened to have the best opening for an attack. She was behind the masked man in jiff, grinning. Rias barely managed to turn before the Kintar... placed a palm on his back.
...!!!
The masked man scowled when his Undeath energy shuddered. Something had just tried to divide it.
With a sharp turn, he dismissed the Kintar kindly with a chop to the face, splitting her head. But of course, another spawned, ready to tango.
’Hmph. I see. She has some high form of magic that allows her to divide things until there’s nothing left. She can even work on my Undeath despite me having reached Divinity,’ Rias thought, but it didn’t surprise him all that much that Kintar could do this. In fact, the thing that had surprised him the most was... ’My Undeath didn’t automatically increase in potency just because I reached Divinity, as Fulgardt said. With my mastery over Undeath not improving much, it’s no wonder this woman can even use her peculiar magic against me and my Undeath creations.’
And indeed, it was true. Even Skullius had been wondering the same thing ever since he reached Divinity.
But Rias had made one mistake in his assessment.
Indeed, Kintar possessed an Absolute Magic type called Infinitesimal Division, but it wasn’t limited to reducing the numbers of targets to zero.
The other Kintar, hidden away in the distance by one of her Absolute Magic abilities, Fiction’s Summit, and desperately forging hand signs, beamed.
To create a version of herself capable of holding its own against Rias in combat, she’d made a series of impossibles and concentrated them in one place.
First, she had left her real body and inhabited a new one she created using an Advanced Magic known as Typical Matter. It was like a diluted version of Skullius’ Second Divine Sinew, capable of creating copies of the user. They only possessed 40% of the original’s power, however, yet, Kintar being Kintar, tweaked Typical Matter’s limit.
It had none, except the user’s mana reserves. (It was another of her many Advanced Magics that could turn into an Absolute Magic type if she put her heart into it.)
After this (she did it when her Drakkens were scouring Feinheath), she had used Typical Matter to create seven billion Kintars at the bottom of Aigas’ ocean and then used Infinitesimal Division to divide 6,999,999,920 of them against each other until one was left.
...And indeed, thence lied Infinitesimal Division’s other utilities Rias wasn’t aware of. By dividing common targets until one remained, Kintar could create a superior result. The Kintar that was born after this entire process was the one fighting Rias right now.
But of course, even this wasn’t enough, Kintar knew.
So, on top of this super Kintar, she added something else: her third Absolute Magic type, Elemental Overdose.
This Absolute Magic type allowed Kintar to enhance the explosive power, effectiveness and quantity of any element she could produce until it reached a baseline Divine standard. In other words, Kintar could theoretically create a snowstorm, for instance, potent enough to freeze an entire world solid. Granted, a world weaker than Aigas.
...But it was no theory. Kintar gained the capacity for this as soon as Skullius gave her the skill [Hegemon of Sorcerous Mana].
She didn’t use her absurd powers to try and freeze the world in this case. Instead, she had charged up tongues of Grand Fire with Elemental Overdose and filtered them through her super clone.
The fire, each tongue possessing enough power to destroy a world, was writhing in her clone (and each successive clone it expelled) granting it Divine level physical prowess.
And of course, a magic user had to be resistant to the powers they wielded. Hence why the Divine flame building in the other Kintar had yet to completely destroy her.
Indeed...
Indeed, all this was hard to manage for the hidden Kintar while a volley of her clones kept up a staggering battle against Rias.
The twenty clones that remained from the division process to create the super Kintar were still under the ocean, helping by casting any spell the on-the-field Kintar needed in advance.
But all this wasn’t enough.
As Rias had said, Kintar wasn’t doing him any harm. She wasting her resources to manage a kick and a punch. Soon, she would run out of steam and become easy pickings. But even Kintar knew the masked man wouldn’t be satisfied with that. He wanted her on her knees before she could use exhaustion as an excuse for her loss.
This Kintar grinned.
’I’m going to get this son of a bitch on my own, after all,’ she thought.
She’d got it.
Just like that... she’d got it!
And it only took a little help from a skill called [Manastanding] to tip her over into a new territory of power.