The Stargazing Witch & The Dungeon Planet -
Chapter 88: Something Alright
Chapter 88: Something Alright
Initially, the plan was to deal with the small group dashing through the streets. I jumped down like before and struck from behind, going for instant kills.
Speed wasn’t an issue, and neither was power, and with my new weapon, I didn’t even have to pay a price to win it as long as my enemy was weak enough or overconfident and let me stab them.
The pirates in the street were easy targets; none of them had the reaction time to counter me as I stomped them down. I did ease up on my self-imposed condition to keep mana use to an absurd minimum; now all my movement skills were far game as I didn’t want to risk any serious injuries from my greed. And if anything, it would take more mana to heal than I did to not get hit and finish fights faster.
However, instead of going back to judge the larger conflicts, I kept finding small groups and individuals to hunt down first.
After the pirates, I found one sole Dominous Hood member fighting an armoured individual. The armoured person wasn’t doing so hot, and so I decided to lend a hand.
I dove in from above again, but this time they were able to react, unlike everyone else. The Dominous Hood member jumped out of the way, and in the process, the armoured individual recklessly swung his overly large broken rifle towards one of us. Honestly, it was hard to tell who he was aiming at.
The man stopped for a moment, confused, as the sound of multiple footsteps sang in the air. The Dominous Hood goon spread physical afterimages to avoid my attacks. These clones were physical up to the point where any amount of stress was placed on them. The limit to the stress they could take was dependent on the original user of the skill. I hadn’t fought too many monsters with this ability and only seen a few people use it.
At least fifteen afterimages were jumping around; figuring out the exact number was difficult as multiple of them were merging in and out of each other. For a normal person, the merging in and out afterimages could be a trap for the misinformed. A common trap even among the young intelligent but inexperienced monsters. It was easy to make assumptions; the merging ones must be all fake! But the user could hide within the merging ones. It was something I observed when facing such a monster myself and something I saw when I explored the environment of Espoiramissa with [Star Mapping].
My eyes zipped around before looking at the one I chose to attack. For a long time, this type of ability was an absolute pain to fight; don’t even get me started with the ones who have other abilities stacked on top of the afterimage clones. One wrong move could easily be the difference between a healthy body, and one full of holes.
I pretended to strike an afterimage, but before my arrow pierced the image, I spun and stabbed the one who was a little bit behind me, standing with three other images.
Numerous times I faced monsters with abilities like this, and for the most part, it was an okay fight as I would just stay as far as possible and bombard any area with the monster. However, the few extremely intelligent and deadly variants had left some permanent injuries on my body.
But it had an extreme weakness; it wasn’t the only one, but soul pressure was a for sure counter to the skill. By using it, I could detect what the true body was, no matter how many afterimages there were. I was curious if there was a counter to this counter, and there were some for weak soul pressure detection, but any competent user of soul pressure could avoid that.
The Dominous Hood member fell to the ground after the effective stab in the head. I had fired a wave of soul pressure at them beforehand to stun them and ensure the hit.
The man who I rescued started yelling and asking about something, but I ignored him and kept moving.
The next encounter involved more pirates, a full squad who escaped a recently crashed ship. There were ten in total, and they were already being bombarded from all directions. The crash made them an obvious target.
I joined in by taking out a few of the stragglers and allowing the rest of the pest patrol to handle the rest of them.
The extermination of the roaches continued for nearly a minute as I bounced all over the place.
However, once I was finally done jumping from prey to prey, I activated [Star Mapping] to look around the tower again.
What is even happening over there?
Earlier, when I looked at the situation, it just appeared to be one large force from the tower versus an invading force, with a small group of people splitting off from the pack. But looking at it more closely, there were two forces in conflict, and multiple small groups had split from the tower group; appearing to be heading towards the docks or other bunkers.
(“ Something ”)
…Yeah, something alright.
The people who were running seemed to have been from the tower. It was not that surprising that whatever door they had inside allowed people to leave the tower easier than entering it.
I partly understand why people are leaving the tower… but at the same time, the risk, the annoyance, but the fucking risk has to be too much.
Even if they left before the barrier around the first segment went down, there was clearly a lot of action happening just before it went down. The groups appeared to be a number of guards and VIPs, all wearing armour, rushing to whatever location they were aiming to reach.
I used more Starlight to enhance the detail of [Star Mapping] and used soul pressure to get a feel for the individuals in the groups.
What the hell is that?
I felt something strange around one of the groups; it was hard to tell if it was a person or an item they were carrying but it felt like it was a magnet for my soul pressure.
It was for the group east from the tower; initially, they were headed for the docks, but after the ship crashed into the street that they would’ve headed down, they turned towards a sports oval, which would’ve had a bunker underneath.
(“ Are you going to chase after them? ”)
Espr asked, knowing my answer.
Yes.
(“ Okay, but before anything happens, and you do something stupid when I say stop, stop ”)
Okay.
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