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Of Arms and Arcane: Chaptrer 233
🕑 Added 2025-06-01 12:52:11 +0000 UTCWhen I finally got to my feet and drew my sword to defend myself, the Harpy Queen attacked me while the other harpies were getting airborne.
I parried and blocked her blows. It was only when I counterattacked that I found out that she was a magic beast.
On one of her attacks, I parried her swoop of her talons and used the momentum of her attack to counterattack with a slash, aiming to take off one of her taloned feet, but when the edge of my sword met her skin just above her ankle, it felt like I was hitting steel.
The recoil from striking her leg was familiar, resembling the feeling I experienced when testing weapons on myself; it was the same mana-infusing technique that magic beasts use. This meant that normal sword strikes were not going to cut it.
After dodging and cutting down a couple of harpies, the Harpy Queen came in for another swipe. As she closed in, I waited until the last second before I flared my aura and covered my sword with it. And the moment I did, she clearly felt something change when I saw her eyes widen in alarm.
Despite her alarm, she was too committed to the attack to do anything else but follow through, and when she did, I caught the talons with the flat of my blade and let it slide off before rapidly spinning and lashing out with a slash.
She was fast enough to bring her legs in close to her body to defend, but I still managed to land a hit on one of her leg’s footpads.
Unlike before, this time, my blade cut into flesh, but it felt like I was cutting dense rubber, and my blade stopped when I hit bone.
This injury caused the Harpy Queen to let out a screech of pain as she flew away from me. This particular screech seemed to send the other harpies into a frenzy and made their swooping attacks more vicious. The only upside was that the Harpy Queen appeared to grow weary of me after I wounded her and kept her distance while leaving the other harpies to deal with me.
As the fight became more frenzied, harpies eventually began crashing into each other midair due to their inability to see one another in the dark of night. When they recovered from their falls, they also came at me from the ground. This meant I was being attacked from every direction around me in a 360° dome. My vision was filled with a flurry of feathers, talons, and teeth to the point that I didn't know which way was closest to the cliff. As more harpies approached from the ground, they started to swarm me and attempted to immobilize me by grabbing onto me.
Needing a way to clear away attacks from both land and air, I channeled air mana into my instinctive magic and envisioned a tornado forming around me. A second later, as I was defending myself, I felt a gust of wind beginning to pick up around me.
This was my first time using instinctive magic on such a large and powerful scale. Five seconds later, the wind picked up speed, and the loose, light debris began to swirl around me at the center, forcing the surrounding airborne harpies to adjust their flight paths to reach their desired destinations.
But just as the tornado I had created was just starting to form, I felt the wind begin to die down, or more accurately, a counterwind that was slowly negating the tornado I was building up. This feeling… I recognized it as the same feeling I have been getting all night, as I directed the incense smoke towards the harpies.
I sent mana into my eyes and took a quick peek at the sky, finding the answer to what I was feeling. All around me, I saw my mana battling against a foreign mana. When I traced that mana to its source, I discovered it was the Harpy Queen flying above the fight, moving counter to the direction of the wind from my tornado. Given the buildup of wind mana produced by her, I was about to lose the battle of instinctive wind mana.
Another thing I noticed was that the harpies flying above seemed to be naturally riding along the wind currents the Harpy Queen was generating, using it to pick up speed and slingshot themselves at me at higher speeds.
As much as I wanted to complain about how the Harpy Queen was using hacks, I knew it was just a skill issue on my side. I was a human who was aping what little I knew of air flow, while the Harpy Queen was born to be one of the monarchs of the sky. What I knew of the wind was but a fraction of what she knew instinctively.
To avoid the Harpy Queen’s tornado from fully forming and sweeping me off the mountain, I pumped more mana into my forming tornado to try and overpower the interference the Harpy Queen was putting on me.
After ten seconds of trying to keep myself from being dragged to the ground and savaged, my expenditure of mana was paying off. I had successfully formed a tornado that was throwing both airborne and grounded harpies away from me, but this tornado was a weird one.
What made up my tornado only rose about four to five meters, while the Harpy Queen’s tornado towered much higher and was pressuring mine. This was forcing me to deplete a significant amount of mana to maintain what I had, and if I didn’t think of something quickly, I would eventually exhaust my mana and be consumed by the Harpy Queen’s tornado.
As I was racking my brain for an answer, I could only come up with what amounts to a stopgap measure that was based on a question. What were the chances that the Harpy Queen could manipulate earth mana as well as she could wind? I guess we are about to find out.
I sent mana to my foot and stomped on the ground, opening up a hole a few meters deep, and jumped in while releasing my control on what was left of my tornado. The moment my feet hit the bottom, I placed my hands on the wall of the man-sized hole I was in, and the top of the hole was covered by a meter of rock.
In the tunnel, it was true darkness where even my night vision glasses could not see anything. I slid to the floor, panting. I could hear the sounds of talons scratching against the ground on top of me.
While I was sitting and resting, I put my finger against the wall at an upward angle and started molding a narrow hole leading to the surface, and after a few minutes, I could feel fresh air waft against the tip of my finger. With this airhole, at least I would not suffocate.
Just in case, I made another three air holes in different directions and molded this hole in the ground to be wide enough for me to lie down. Now I just had to think of a way to get out of here.
