MTLNOVEL Chapter 1710 Timely Options
--- Lily ---
The fighting had slowed down in some ways. Pebbles wasn't participating quite so actively. Sure he occasionally still threw out spells and whatnot but he'd mostly sat himself down in the corner to think about something. If Trvis got too close he'd throw something out but otherwise he was puzzling over things. Lily was pretty much in the same boat. Her 'shadow saturation' trick that let her attack all over the room was costly on mana and things had been going for twenty minutes or so at this point… maybe.
Time was a little funky here and Lily could tell her link with Kat was running a bit oddly. The same thing that happened when Kat sped her mind up a bunch from how it seemed. So… 'twenty minutes' from her personal perspective might be closer to accurate and spending most of that time with mana pumping through a gymnasium sized room? It was a lot so she was resting as well.
Strdl had tried to throw out a few crystals but she wasn't all that successful and quickly stopped after she nearly hit Meg in the back of the head. It was definitely not worth antagonising her in Strdl's mind.
On the other side of things. Meg had decided to get serious. Her form glowing with a pulsing blue energy and as she moved she left behind blue outlines of her body with the details smudged a bit as if she was moving fast enough to leave behind afterimages and these ones decided to linger. Helped by the fact that she did have afterimages when she moved already.
Lily looked over at Hunter for an explanation. "It seems Meg is getting more serious though…" Hunter trailed off quickly.
"You do now with to reveal to me the specifics," stated Trvis as he appeared nearby for a moment. Just long enough for Hunter to fire another bullet towards him and vanished just as quickly. "Sadly for you, I have seen the explanation. Both your own and what Meg was willing to share.
"Meg is capable of leaving behind this images of herself. Each image she creates cost more demonic energy then the last and they can respond in one of two ways. She can either trigger them to copy what she's already done. Paying a continual upkeep for the movement of the images, or she can force them to mimic her current motions exactly. Though the second option causes all of the images to disappear afterwards,"
"That's kind of annoying," grumbled Meg. "I didn't think you'd be able to see so much of our future…"
"I am getting better at it. Perhaps at the beginning of this conflict I wouldn't have been able to, but now that my power has sufficiently saturated the area and yourselves I can model you better," explained Trvis.
Meg clicked her tongue. "I'm surprised you haven't used that to actually attack us. You've been very defensive." Meg wasn't actually mad, she was trying to fish for information…
And apparently Trvis had no issue just handing it out. "I have determined that should any of you be sufficiently injured you'd try to attack me with demonic energy to speed up my mental degradation significantly. It would still be dangerous to you… but if I was already causing significant injury you would deem it worthwhile,"
Meg scowled for real this time. "Damn prophets. I really wish I'd bothered to take proper classes on dealing with this sort of bullshit but they're expensive,"
"Indeed," agreed Hunter, not pausing in her attacks. "I took the basics of dealing with time manipulators and had been holding off on the more advanced protocols. From what I was taught Trvis here breaks so many of the rules already. I suspect it is due to the demonic energy and mana mix, as well as his soul breaking down but that's just a guess,"
Meg growled, and started jumping around, leaving additional copies of herself in as many places as possible and then waited. Lily noticed the teleport going through and Meg moved, even before Trvis had reappeared. The copies of Meg all moved in line with her as she stabbed at the air. One clone though, was just in the right spot to stab into Trvis as he appeared.
Cracks formed in his body as everything around the struck area started to flake away into grey dust that made your eyes water if you looked at it. Lily felt her heart soar… only for Trvis to teleport once more and pull the grey dust back into himself, returning to full health, or at least it seemed that way.
Meg frowned, letting out a puff of air. She glanced around the room but notably didn't move to immediately chase after Trvis. Hunter didn't pause in her attacks just yet, firing a bullet at Trvis and glancing over at Meg who shook her head. Hunter frowned and shifted her face through a few different distinct modes. Meg nodded. Hunter nodded back and nothing seemed to change.
*I have no idea what any of that meant…* Normally she'd ask… but the issue was simply asking might cause Trvis to find out. If she raised the question and either of them even thought about answering despite not wanting to? That might be enough for Trvis to get the whole answer.
*Which is sort of terrifying to think about. I mean… for now he's chill and just dodging what's being thrown at him… but… but what are we meant to do?! Meg's big attack only worked to show that the darts that I've sent at him did nothing important. Probably why they hit at all. So… so where does that leave us?
I'm just not sure what the key to winning is here. Meg's move looked fancy and it did damage… but based on the fact she's not using it anymore there has to be some problem. It's either that it costs too much demonic energy or it didn't do enough damage… but it really did look like it worked. Those grey particles… I don't know what that was but I think Trvis body was collapsing in that moment.
Am I missing some sort of 4D chess moves going on here? Is Meg holding back to ensure she doesn't risk a more… vigorous response? Why hasn't Trvis attacked? For all his talk about not burning energy… I feel like he could set something up or make a scary attack and be all 'don't keep fighting or I'll use it'… but he's NOT doing that. So am I missing something?*
Lily felt her stomach rebel as she dived into her spatial senses and immediately opened her eyes back up. Knowing she'd need to do that again… but also not wanting to place herself in too much danger just in case she sprinted over to where Hunter was standing and curled up on top of Hunter's tail. Hunter didn't seem to react to this, and Lily took that as tacit permission to remain in place.
Taking a deep breath to steady herself Lily closed her eyes slowly and started to once again dive into her extra senses. Ignoring her ears and nose focusing only one the space in the room. It was hard, and disgusting. Like deliberately sticking your nose into road kill or squeezing down on a bucket of maggots. It was WRONG on a fundamental level to be doing this but it felt necessary.
Despite her feelings of uneasy Lily felt like she had to do something. That she could find something that the others could barely touch on but it was difficult. To her spatial senses it was beyond obvious this was the source of the distortion. The room looked somewhat broken at the edges but fairly normal otherwise to normal sight. To Lily's senses though? It was like someone had taken the room, stretched it out, shaken it around and then crushed it into little pieces before taking those pieces and photocopying them to fix things and just leaving a huge mess behind.
This was not helped by Trvis regular movements around. Every time he teleported it screwed the space up just a little bit more. Like someone was tightening a lug bolt on a tire while it was attached to their shirt. Each teleport was a major twist in one specific area that then dragged everything else along with it.
Continue your saga on empire
It made searching for anything out of place or noteworthy really hard. As if someone had smeared grease over her glasses or something. It was difficult but… Lily might have found something? No, she'd definitely found something. It was off to the side and 'buried' underneath the floor. The issue Lily had… was telling if it was relevant. It was definitely a bit of unique space… but was it important? And did she risk even thinking about speaking that knowledge out loud?