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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 122
🕑 Added 2024-07-24 14:12:01 +0000 UTCThe second lizardman turned back from the wall I raised and drew two sickles that looked identical to the first lizardman’s.
“Confident one isn't he, brother,” the second lizardman said, “What can I say, I hate to admit it, but despite his lack of experience, he can back up that confidence. Let's finish this fast.” the first lizardman replied and they burst into motion.
In response to their move, I closed my eyes and emitted a full-body flash as I jumped backward. A heartbeat later, I hear the sounds of the lizardmen’s sickles woosh through the empty air in front of me.
I opened my eyes to see floating spots in my vision and the blurry figures of the two lizardmen in front of me, I may be immune to my own spells, but I am hardly immune to the secondary effect of the light bouncing off the walls and flashing myself.
Note to self, never use full body flash in enclosed areas. At the moment, all three of us were stationary and stock still, it took a couple of seconds for my vision to get back into focus, and I looked at the two lizardmen.
Their heads were pointed in my general direction, but their eyes were closed, and their tongues were constantly flicking out of their mouth, so I could safely assume that I successfully blinded them.
In order to end this quickly, I spun up two earth bullets to shoot them, but somehow the two lizardmen reacted as their heads snapped to my exact position, this means they have some way of detecting magic, but I can think about all that at a later time.
I shot my earth bullets, but the lizardmen scattered and my earth bullets hit the dirt behind them, scattering dirt high in the air.
They blindly charged at me and slashed with synchronized perfection as the first lizardman went low, as the second went high.
As much as I wanted to jump back once more to avoid their slashes, I was quickly running out of space before I hit the alley’s dead end, and I wanted some space to maneuver, so I chose to block instead of dodge.
But as I saw a glowing sickle coming toward me, I remembered that the first lizardman still had a sickle with my lightning spell stored inside, ready to be released upon contact with me or my sword.
So I hopped over the bottom slash and caught the top attack with my sword, this made me spin in the air, and in the spur of the moment after spinning a whole rotation, as i was midair, an amusing idea struck me as i decided to perform some ‘wrestling’ moves and performed a drop kick with wind instinctive magic mixed in.
This sent both me and the second lizardman flying in opposite directions. While the lizardman ate dirt upon landing, I smashed into the wall of the alley’s dead end, making a loud enough sound for the first lizardman to hone in on my position and charge me again.
I quickly recovered and saw an opportunity, the two lizardmen were currently blind and separated from each other, and even better, the lizardman I sent flying with a drop kick landed smacking the alley wall, so with the remaining time I had left before the first lizard man reached me, I stomped the ground again, sending two walls of earth up against the alley wall to form a tetrahedron with the second lizardman trapped inside.
As the first lizardman closed in, I could see he had his eyes partially opened and was once again focused on me, which meant his sight was recovering from the flash.
His aura-powered body zigged and zagged as he approached me, most likely in an attempt to throw me off from where he was approaching from.
But to me, this mattered little, as I was not in the mood for such petty tricks, the time for that was over, now was the time to cut loose.
I punched the air in front of me and used instinctive magic to release a gout of fire, that covered a good portion of the alleyway, hoping that the sickles were unable to absorb from a wider area.
As the fire left my fist, I saw the lizardman raise both his sickles, prepared to absorb my flames, what happened instead, was my flames washing over him and he released a shriek of pain as he jumped out of my blast of flame.
When my flames dispersed shortly after, the lizardman did not look so hot, metaphorically speaking, in reality, he was on fire. The left side of his face and torso was covered in red and black splotches where his scales were peeled back due to the heat flash cooking his skin and his shirt was on fire. It was also safe to assume that his left eye was also damaged by how tightly he closed it.
But besides the crispy lizardman, the other thing I noticed was the sickles he used to absorb my spell were the same, one of them was still glowing while the other was not, and he used both to block.
Could this mean instinctive magic is immune to absorption enchantments? I mean, come to think of it, the lightning spell he absorbed earlier was a constructed lightning spell, a concept of lightning, mana imitating lightning.
Whereas the fire I shot him with was instinctive magic, and from what Professor Sageira described it during our discussions, it is my mana and will imposed upon the world to manifest phenomena like the fire I just shot out, no concept, no runes, just mana turned into real fire. Which means nothing for his sickles to absorb.
The lizardman ripped away his still burning shirt and threw it aside as he snarled at me with hate in his remaining eye, it was around this time that a boom came from behind the first lizardman, revealing the second lizardman had just managed to punch his way out of the foot thick hardened earth I trapped him in and was widening the hole by the second.
But despite my soon to be two on one fight, I find this to be a great opportunity to confirm the theory of instinctive magic being immune to absorption enchantment, and also, now was no better time to let loose with no holds barred on live targets that mean to do me harm.
Let's start off small. I stabbed my sword into the ground and performed a light one-two combo punch with wind instinctive magic and sent two compressed packets of air that were visible from the warped air as they traveled toward the first lizardman.
They hit the lizardman’s sickles with dull thuds, but it was nothing his aura-powered body could not shrug off. Looks like I will have to take it up a notch, I threw a three-punch combo with a lot more strength and intent, followed by a roundhouse kick and a spinning hook kick.
This sent three of what I could only describe as air bullets, followed by two horizontal air blades. This time, the air bullets hit the lizardman, the first air bullet was caught on the flat of his sickles and pushed him back, the second bullet caught him on the shoulder, sending him spinning, and by then he knew he could be hurt by the air bullet and dodged the last one, and when he saw the two air blades, it looked like he did not want to have anything to do with those and dropped to the ground as the air blades went over him. And he was lucky he got down because the two air blades dug long gashes into the alley wall.
“Ok, that was cool.” I mumbled to myself as this brought up memories of watching cartoons of a bald kid who had the elements at his command, and I was starting to wonder if I could do the same.
