Macronomicon
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Chapter 121: A Good Strategy is a Predictable one
🕑 Added 2025-03-18 16:18:10 +0000 UTC“How goes it?” Caddock asked as Orev took a deep swig of a healing potion while Maybin kept his ankle straight. A little time-out to catch his breath.
“He’s burning through Charge fast,” Orev gasped as he unsealed his mouth from the bottle. “But sir, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to pin him down in one place long enough to-“ Orev made a hammering motion.
“Don’t worry about that. As long as miss Thuy has parts of his Set, that’s about the second-best bait we could possibly have.”
“That’s the thing!” Orev said, raising a finger. “She’s claiming the set for herself, saying she’s gonna be some kind of Blood Lord, I don’ fuckin’ know. I do know that if she gets the rest of it, she’s gonna stab us in the back.”
“I know.” Caddock said with a shrug.
“Then why did you add her to the Party?” Orev asked. “She’s not even Graneshian.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just make him use up as much Charge as you can before miss Thuy’s Downswing. Which has…” Caddock glanced at the sand pouring through the narrow opening in his five-minute-glass. “About three minutes ‘till.”
“Three minutes? That kid fights like the devil. He stabbed me with my own arrow. With his foot! in midair! He’s level thirty, right? It feels like fighting another Advanced Class. I got him on the arm with some poison but it’s not doing much and Imtithal hasn’t done a damn thing to him…” Orev started muttering bitterly.
“Try not to die. I want you back here in three minutes.”
Orev scoffed.
“That’s one hundred and eighty seconds.”
“I know, I know,” Orev grumbled, testing his weight on his newly healed leg.
“You can do it.” Caddock said, giving his subordinate a stiff smile and a thumbs-up.
Orev rolled his eyes and disappeared in an explosion of feathers.
Once Orev was gone, Caddock straightened, all signs of levity vanishing.
“Once that timer runs out, Miss Thuy has outlived her usefulness. When it runs out, I want you to vaporize everything in the valley.” Caddock commanded. “Start with Miss Thuy and the Set items she’s wearing, then move on to Mr. Oh.”
“Yessir,” Miss Glasswind said, giving him a salute.
“I’m looking forward to seeing if your namesake is accurate.” Caddock said, clasping his hands behind his back as he observed the battle, picturing the valley filled with shards of rapidly cooling glass where once was earth and stone.
“My namesake is an understatement.” Maybin Glasswind said, picking up her mutated Staff of the Warmage in preparation for her task.
**William Oh**
“What now?” Loth asked as Will rose to his feet, watching himself from above for any sneaky behind-the-back attacks.
“Now we kill or scatter them and make our way back to the Fifth Floor. How’s Jason?”
“He’s on his way to the Hole.”
Will nodded, scanning the horizon for the next attack.
This whole battle felt off to Will, like all those times Lord Bakton had deliberately put him off balance in order to thump him on whatever unguarded body part he deemed necessary to teach Will the lesson.
The broad strokes of it were obvious:
The berserker had his gear, and Will wouldn’t leave without it. The ranger was keeping pressure on him in order to drain his Charge and tenderize him for the finishing blow.
Will just had no idea what the finishing blow would look like, but he could feel it looming over them.
Will also didn’t know who was running the show.
Is this a continuation of the battle against the paladin at Basalt, or did the church send someone else after me? Or is it someone else entirely who detected the set and is trying to steal it?
Unfortunately, Will hadn’t seen anyone he recognized yet. For the first time in his life, Will wished that he paid more attention to celebrities.
The people trying to kill him right now were powerful enough that they had to be some level of famous, and if Will knew who they were, he might be able to figure out who they were associated with and by extension, what their goal was.
How can I mess up their finishing blow? Will mused.
He could leave: just pick himself and Loth up and fly faster than they could match. That would infuriate whoever was orchestrating this farce, but it would also give them the opportunity to claim and/or destroy the remaining three pieces of Will’s Set.
And that would infuriate Will.
I could counter the killing blow. That would infuriate the puppetmaster.
The problem with that was that he didn’t know what form it would take, where it was coming from, and the timing of the attack.
A guttural bellow of rage emerged from underground as the berserker burst out of Loth’s stone containment trap, seemingly unharmed and flinging chunks of rock everywhere.
That damned rage is making the blood scales impenetrable. When the Downswing happens, I’ll-
Will considered as he retreated from her maddened swings.
There’s the timing. I’m on the defensive until her Rage expires. When it does, I’ll immediately go on the offensive and aim to retrieve my set, my focus on that goal blinding me to what might be happening around me.
That’s when I’ll be vulnerable to being blindsided. They’ll swoop in and switch out the berserker with something much more dangerous.
Now I still need to answer where and how.
“Hold STILL!” the berserker shouted.
Will turned his attention over to the berserker and two of his snakes wrapped themselves around her legs and flung her straight up into the air, letting go before she had the opportunity to reach down and remove them.
The snakes weren’t stronger than she was, but she only weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, at most. Even if she was stronger than them all he had to do was grab her in a place she couldn’t easily reach and give her a little toss.
Oh. Will hadn’t been able to throw her like that earlier mostly because he only had the one hand: He needed it to keep pressure on the ranger, and its grip wasn’t wide enough to circle a fully armored leg.
Now that he had five…
Phantom Eye spotted the ranger poof silently into existence overlooking him on the hillside above, drawing an arrow to his cheek.
Without any prompting, two of the snakes –
Let’s call them Thumb and Pointer, Will thought.
Thumb and Pointer sprang across the distance and tried to break the man’s ankle the same way they had earlier. The ranger managed to dodge it this time, teleporting out moment before the snakes wrapped around his neck.
Will leaned out of the way as the arrow whistled past him.
Will blinked, scanning the battlefield as the ranger retreated, teleporting back to whatever distant hole he liked to hide. When he wasn’t trying to trick Will, his retreat area was off the map entirely.
Did reaching the four-piece set bonus completely swing the fight the opposite direction? Will considered. Will’s ability to multitask was outrageously improved, and it was making dealing with two opponents at once a simple endeavor.
Off the map…
If I want to counter the killing blow I need to change the flow of the battle and go on the offensive right NOW. The 4-piece set bonus was granting him enough breathing room to choose his tactics, rather than play endless keepaway.
Phantom Eye
36 -> 16 Charge remaining.
Above Will, twenty Phantom Eyes emerged, causing Will to stagger in place as the vast amount of visual information flooded his mind.
He’d never practiced with more than a single one at a time, and now the spot he’d mentally partitioned for his ‘third eye’ was cluttered with twenty disparate viewpoints.
In a moment of inspiration, Will directed all of them to cluster close together and look straight down. After a bit of adjustment, his mind was able to stitch together the different viewpoints into a single image, which made him a lot less queasy.
Will directed the cluster of Phantom Eyes to shoot straight up a quarter mile before they began to gradually expand away from each other, creating a mental map that stretched dozens of miles in every direction.
Now where are the rest of you? Will mused, mentally scanning the map by dedicating his attention to one section of the map at a time, ‘expanding’ that part of the map by moving closer with the eye responsible for that piece, making the detail go up, while the overall map was preserved with the overlap between the Phantom Eye’s view.
This is very strange.
BOOM!
The berserker landed feet first, sending up a cloud of dust and stone.
The ground gave way underneath her as she fell into Loth’s trap.
He distantly heard a feral curse, muffled under a wall of stone.
“Are we just too good at this?” Will mused as his Phantom Snakes harried the ranger, chasing him from hiding spot to hiding spot.
All the while, Will was expanding his mental ‘map’, looking for any sign of their backup.
They wouldn’t be pressing this hard if they didn’t have backup.
The ranger certainly didn’t look like he wanted to be there, and there was no love lost between him and the berserker. Yet they were on the same team.
Will felt a Charge flow underneath his feet, and he pulled himself and Loth back moments before the berserker erupted from the ground again.
“You little shit,” She muttered, climbing to her feet.
Tried to climb to her feet. Two of the snakes he’d dedicated to harassing her – Let’s call them Ring and Pinky – kept harrying her feet, preventing her from doing anything other than writhe face-down in the dirt where she belonged, never staying long enough to allow her to hit them with the tomahawk she was wildly swinging.
Meanwhile, Will kept searching the map in his mind, carefully keeping his stomach under control as the borders of the stitched-together images shifted, momentarily revealing that it was not one image, but twenty.
Finally he spotted two ant-size figures standing on the opposite side of the mountain southwest of them, some fifteen miles distant. One of whom was instantly recognizable as the paladin, while the other had a staff eerily similar to Mason’s Staff of the Warmage.
There you are.
A feral scream pulled his attention back to the berserker as she gave up on standing, instead putting a hand over her stolen mask.
“That’s how you wanna play it!?”
Will leapt backwards at the feel of a Charge being spent. The berserker exploded outward, the mask’s jaws opening to reveal a real, hissing mouth.
In a fraction of a second, what was human was replaced by serpent as the snake mask seemed to extend backwards, engulfing the berserker’s neck, shoulders, arms, legs, and gear, leaving nothing but a massive snake with a mane of multicolored feathers.
Between her scales, blood oozed outwards, forming another layer of protection until the entire snake turned crimson. She really could have been the Crimson Snake Lord.
“I don’t mind the aesthetic; scales are better, obviously. But is not having hands…a good thing?” Loth asked.
The berserker seemed to recover from her transformation, fixing the two of them with a golden-eyed stare.
“…Nope.” Will lifted himself straight up into the air with Middle while Loth sank into the earth. No sense letting that thing engage them on equal terms.
I guess we’re back to our rousing game of keepaway until I know exactly how dangerous that thing is.
The forty-foot crimson serpent leapt off the ground and began swimming through the air after him, eyes blazing with hunger.
Of course it can fly. Why wouldn’t it be able to fly? Silly me.
Ring and Pinky snakes tried to shove her nose around a bit, but the sheer mass of the creature made that a pointless endeavor.
Changing tactics, Will withdrew Ring and Pinky and set them on the task of keeping him aloft and dextrous while sending the two figures hiding fifteen miles distant…the middle finger.
Comments
JACOB HEBERT
Give em the Middle
Hell 5pawn
Excellent pun
Neuos.t
Tyftc
Jeff Wells
Loth has generally been portrayed as the Kobold equivalent of Will, with her own Kobold prophecies and all, so I don't think you're overestimating her competence.
Jeff Wells
This tracks. The rods and cones in your eyes are just a highly specialized type of nerve ending, and one of Acuity's most obvious functions is making nerves more sensitive. It follows that processing speed would improve as well, because more sensitive nerves are sending more data that must be parsed by the brain.
Jonty
Definitely this is a great idea. That way he can save bird for special occasions and finishing blows
ioajfidsnmfomds77
I think it’s Acuity. A previous chapter said that night vision is perfect after hitting a certain Acuity threshold. There are only 3 potential explanations for how that’s possible. 1. Acuity affects the external world and causes more light to enter the eye. That’s unlikely as we haven’t seen any stats change the world around them without an Ability. 2. Acuity improves the eye physically so it can see better at the same light level. Possible but unlikely. No one has commented on how Lords or high level climbers have weird looking eyes. 3. Acuity improves the nervous system and the brain. The same amount of light enters the eye. The brain is just so much better at processing it that vision improves. I think it’s 3 and that processing improvement explains this chapter
Quazzy
Acuity or Kinesthetics also multiply thought speed, yeah! Will’s exceptional at it, ofc, just as he’s exceptionally scrawny, but *everyone* thinks fast at high levels.
Ethan Barrow
TFTC!! I wanna see that nuker dead before they realize it but with a Paladin literally next to them I doubt it. Also, can't wait to see berserk bitch go down permanently.
Andrew Gonzalez
I'm under the impression the spell that's gonna be cast is some large scale AOE attack, so it probably can't be deflected, honestly just think middle finger is just gonna yoink the mage away to break her concentration
Cyrus McEnnis
Deflect could work. They're far enough away that even a minor deflection would make a big difference.
Andrew Gonzalez
Don't think we've seen the hand of Oh detonate a spell prematurely, pretty sure it just either deflects them or outright dispels whatever skill/spell is being cast
im Panda
The middle finger should be named Bird, 1 to subvert the naming sense and 2 for the obvious
Andrew Gonzalez
Maybe an earring too, have we seen any examples of an earring relic?
Andrew Gonzalez
He still has slots for rings, gloves/gauntlets, a new amulet, and a shirt
Ruan Labuschagne
He said 3 more chapters of fights in the previous chapter, so the conclusion of the fight will happen friday
Quazzy
That’s all. Phantom Hand boosts relic’s effects though, remember?
JhanicManifold
part of the set being destroyed is likely necessary from a narrative point-of-view, just to have a few open inventory slots for future relics, otherwise Will's build gets frozen until he's able to find relics that can outcompete a legendary Set
Emily Gurnavage
Do any of the stats affect multi tasking or thinking ability in a big way? Im wondering about Will being able to parse all those eyes (yes he had trouble, but still) and the snakes each doin their own things and him still fighting at a high level himself all at the same time. He's not fully human is my current reasoning but idk if any of his stats explain it away either.
Emily Gurnavage
No way Will leaves without at least getting back his tomahawk. I can totes see Mac letting Caddock get his hands on a piece or two though. But Caddocks plan is to destroy it, so Will would need to take care of the war mage first and for some reason change his mind on destroying any of it as I don't see Mac destroying any pieces of the set so soon. Will can retain the full bonus without it all, but I just don't see any getting fully destroyed so soon.
Sam
If he can disrupt the nuker while their still forming the spell or ability but before they launch it then it should work
Emily Gurnavage
At least a lot can happen in that time with fighters like this, lol. And 2 POVs. I thoroughly enjoyed it, althogh I do hope for a conclusion in a chapter or two.
Emily Gurnavage
Im not so sure it'll work the same for what sounds like a big AOE rather than a carefully targeted shot. But perhaps that will be the method, yea.
Cyrus McEnnis
Two things come to mind - first up, the Graneshian tendency to forget about Loth. I'm possibly over estimating her competence, but if she's on form she's trapped areas likely to be used for an artillery strike. Of course if she has then she should have told Will their rough location, so that's probably not what's going to happen buuuuut... Secondly, while yeah good old Middlish could disrupt the nuke, have we seen the Hand of Oh _detonate_ a spell prematurely before now? Because being Ground Zero of a vitrification strike will sting a little >.>
SunderGoldmane
“William oh once stuck his hand through four walls and gave his middle finger to a guys eye”
Andrew Gonzalez
Yeah just went back and read up on the set; 7 pieces, pants, amulet, hatchet, secondary weapon, mask, cloak, and boots. Jason still has his pants. So even if Will shifts his phantom hand to another relic he will still have the full effect of family gathering active.
Andrew Gonzalez
Jason still has some of his set though right? Like the pants and shirt I think.
Ryan Berends
That does not sound like a nice comment. Thanks for the chapter!
Andrew Gonzalez
Thanks
Andrew
Thank you!
Baines
the delivery lmao
SunderGoldmane
…. I forgot about that.
Ano Ano
Good thing the phantom hand can disrupt skills. Otherwise that nuker would be really scary.
Ano Ano
Amulet counts as at least 2 pieces due to being enhanced by phantom hand.
Tommy Littlefield
I believe him making it a part of his phantom hand multiplied its effect by 2.8 and it therefore count as two pieces of the set to have the amulet absorbed into the hand
SunderGoldmane
I thought he was actually flicking them off. Then I realized it was about the snake.
Metool
Next time on William Oh Z
Andrew Gonzalez
what other piece of his set does Will have, I only count three; the stompers, the amulet, and the cloak.
Uroš
I hope he gets the full set, though I fear that at least some pieces of it will be destroyed. Then Will will still get the full bonus via his phantom hand boosting it.
Uroš
Fun fact, it will take the middle finger about 76 seconds to reach the other two :)
austin kutz
60 second chapter right there Edit: this isn't really a criticism, I've read xianxia chapters that that place "within the time it takes for a spark to fly" which is both strangely specific and oddly common
Tom C
An excellent chapter! *smashes glass Thor style* ANOTHER! (Please)
Sam
Will, Will actually get his full set or are we being teased about what could have been?😅
Nate Oppy
William Oh has danced with many partners. Some willing, some regretting their life choices. With each new opponent, his moves evolve, twisting and turning into something so absurdly advanced that keeping up is less about skill and more about sheer survival. To challenge him is to embrace the inevitable fate of flailing limbs and existential crises. He doesn’t just dance, he ascends, leaving behind a trail of exhausted foes, shattered egos, and at least one person questioning if the information gathered about his level was ever relevant.
Gerald Monroe
It's really solid Macronomicon, you have grown as an author. A character who doesn't have overwhelming power but does have enough experience to know what his enemies next move is is really entertaining.
Macronomicon
its crazy how much more powerful Will is when the hand splits into five. He can fly AND dedicate 2 snakes each to making 2 people's lives hell. that's an insane power bump that completely changes how much effort he has to dedicate to staying alive. Sorry it's a couple paragraphs short, I just wanted to end on that middle finger joke.
Nate Oppy
Yay
