Chapter 612 - Overthrowing the Tyrants V (Patreon)

The nice thing about working with Arachne again was access to information and knowledge. The world wasn’t quite such an unknown anymore. Vast swathes of the map I’d flown over were no longer labeled ‘here be dragons’ - except for the parts where there were dragons. 

It was good to know who’d survived. It was sobering how many hadn’t. From nearly 100 Sentinels, only a little more than twenty were known to have survived. Arachne thought around four or five more might still be alive, simply continuing to take cover or not make any waves. She wasn’t all-knowing or all-seeing.

Most pertinent, she knew where the active front between the elves and the demons was, and had a few predictions when the next battle would be.

I invisibly slipped through the air, reveling once again in my ability to fly without being seen at last. No more did I have to use Radiant wings to move around, which burst my invisibility. I could simply will myself to move, and I did. I wasn’t planning on being actively engaged in the fighting, and was still having fun with the ‘witch’ vibes. Broomstick and flowing robes, let’s go!

I was a little disturbed at how strongly I’d latched onto the idea, and how much I wanted to lean into it. As I leveled, my companion bond with Auri went up, and the vanity downside became stronger and more pronounced. It wasn’t actively causing a problem, but it felt like I was going to greater extremes. I was more willing to throw myself into a vibe, more willing to completely commit to the bit. There were upsides and downsides to it.

I wasn’t going to do things by half-measures. I wasn’t going to say ‘eh, good enough’ on a disguise or dressing up for a ball, but perfection was the enemy of good enough. It’d help me fully commit and sink into the needed mindset for my spying. I just didn’t want to do anything by half measures.

Fortunately, when it came to time spent, it was barely anything. I was quick enough, and with my new [Manor] skill, it was literally a thought to do a full swap. Just needed to think about it, and I’d instantly change over entirely from ‘witch’ to ‘Sentinel’ to whatever else I needed in the moment.

I saw the battle far before I arrived. Lumbering titans of stone clashed with behemoths of Wood. Fireballs were shot out of the sky by arrows. Domains of Darkness clashed with roiling Mist. Swords blurred as they flashed against swords. Shockwaves were sent out in a never-ending stream, like the worst [Drummer] vibrating a crowd with bass. Radiance spotlights swept the sky, revealing hidden Classers and shattering wide-spread Mirages that were being cast. The battle ranged from the devastated forest floor up to the sky, gravity merely a suggestion to most combatants. There were a few hundred people in total, levels streaming by in blue boxes as I rapidly checked out various notifications. In a bit of a surprise, I wasn’t the lowest level person here, although that might not be true for much longer. I guess… it wasn’t that much of a surprise? I was continuing to level and grow over the years.

The demons were clearly anchored by their [Demon King], clad entirely in leveled gear, people who’d chosen to turn themselves into an item. The elves scattered when he charged them, choosing not to engage the Classer at all. The arrogant Immortals struck back at range, trying to pick off the followers and the rest of the army. Invisible Classers threw out gouts of Lava, while a camouflaged warrior held a blade of pure Ice, snowflakes scattering in its wake. 

I didn’t have a side here, and it was a relief. I didn’t care who won and who lost, I didn’t need to heal one side preferentially, my soul hurting just a bit on the inside. Bonus, I didn’t particularly like anyone here, so I was more than happy to say “fuck you and your fight.”

I wasn’t an idiot, I knew how it would go. The warriors would move from trying to kill each other to trying to capture and bind each other. It was likely a brisk round of executions would happen later, but I knew my limits. I was one person, here and now, and I’d do everything I could to save lives. One side would probably flee before the fight was over, and everyone who lived to run away and survive another day was a win in my book. I wasn’t perfect, and I could accept that.

The fight was spread across miles and miles of land and sky, the speed and reach of the Immortals making it ‘close quarters’ for the majority of them. I leaned down over my broom and zoomed through the battle, my awareness spread all around me. [The World Around Me] let me see a barrage of lethal pebbles heading my way, and I did my best to [Teleport] the ones that would’ve hit me ‘through’ my body, leaving no trace that I was there. I rolled to avoid a spinning tree that some demon had thrown, and got clipped by a disintegration beam. A chunk was removed from my arm and my healing rapidly restitched it, as it rapidly healed everyone on the battlefield. From the smallest rabbits cowering in their burrow, wondering how the world had ended, all the way up to the [Demon King] himself, Black Crow was briefly stymied. 

[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1457->1458 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]

The battle had weight. It wasn’t weight I was directly involved in. I didn’t care too much about the outcome, but it was an important battle for some reason or another that I could barely be bothered to remember between the two forces. One of the first great direct conflicts they’d had.

I was eyeballing a rapidly-moving battle from close to the center. I couldn’t quite tell if my healing range was encompassing everyone or not. It was a little short of 30km on my active healing, so if anyone was out of range, there wasn’t too much I could do about it.

One of the Radiance spotlights swept over me, briefly revealing my body to everyone watching. One of the nearby demons snarled and launched himself through the air at me, his greatsword literally flaming.

I totally had to tell Auri about that when we met up again. She’d love that someone was finally setting their sword on fire. 

I could fight him, but why bother? People hadn’t quite figured out that nobody was dying, just that their opponents suddenly seemed a bit more durable, their bloody injuries no longer freely bled, and I was a bit of an unknown factor. I could probably core the demon with Radiance then scoot off, but why make enemies?

Why take a life when I didn’t need to?

Instead, I reupped my invisibility - the Classers working on the anti-Mirage front had other problems - and dropped straight down before performing a hard twist, shooting under the charging demon. He sliced wildly through the air, guessing where I might be, then started to sniff, trying to find a trail.

It wasn’t a bad idea if I wasn’t using [Greater Invisibility]. Bless the [Runesmith] who’d crafted it, she’d thought of everything. That I knew of.

I scanned the battlefield to the best of my ability, doing my best to dodge the hail of attacks that just happened to pass through the space I was in. From a flurry of blades to a ghostly image of a ram, from a feral scream that had me briefly flying down before I realized I was disoriented to cursed bandages wrapping themselves around me - and everyone else in a mile radius - simply existing was difficult. I had to semi-reveal my location when a single arrow split into enough shots to let us fight in the shade, and I used my dusk [Mantle] to prevent myself from turning into a pincushion.

Healing the demons and elves who remained more or less ‘natural’ was easy. More troubling were the elementals, the rare fighters who had a [Spirit] affinity plus the necessary transformation skill.

Back in the School we’d laughed and joked about ‘how did you fight the wind?’ as Morning Breeze threatened to cheese the entire Gladiator Gauntlet. I frowned as the titan of stone was knocked down and his ‘chest’ split open.

How did I heal a rock? It wasn’t alive… but at the same time, it very much was a living creature there, being pounded by the behemoth of Wood. The cracks weren’t instantly restoring themselves. The downed colossus was rapidly becoming the focus of the fight, demons rushing to save their friend while the elves pounced on the chance to turn the pivot of the fight. Nervous glances were shot at the [Demon King], who wasn’t quite moving in at the moment. I had my suspicions why, but they didn’t really matter.

I didn’t want to throw my hat in the ring and start firing off [Radiance Beams] in defense of my patient. My goal was levels and lives, and while I didn’t hesitate to kill to defend when needed, I didn’t think it was quite there yet. Plus… why this patient, when I’d just be making more?

No, here and today, everyone was my patient, and I was happy about it.

I didn’t have an image for healing a rock, but my skills were about as potent as could be. It wasn’t called [Elvenoid Panacea], I had [Universal Cure]. 

I focused and thought about it. 

How did I heal rock? 

I had enough of a grasp on geology and rock formation to know I was in way over my head, and my efficiency was going to take a massive penalty as a result. That was before ‘you’re stretching your skill in new and unusual ways that isn’t explicitly in the skill or class’s mandate’ penalized me further.

I laughed in the face of penalties. Between my efficiency and raw stats, I didn’t blink at the cost. No, the trickier part would be having an image that did something. I couldn’t get rocks back together with an image of bones being restored.

The rocks were grey, and non uniform. Grey rocks, grey rocks… why did I have to love looking at the shiny gemstones so much more than the boring rocks!? Argh! Basalt, granite, scoria, chalk, shale, slate… the list of ‘grey rocks’ was nearly endless. I cobbled together what I knew of the various types of rocks into a poor image, resolving to hit the books much harder once they existed again. Metamorphic, igneous, sedimentary… each part should go back with its part. The chest should be made whole again. I threw in various organs and how they should get repaired for good measure, but I was deeply, deeply embarrassed at how gods-awful my image was.

My image was probably worse than most [Apprentice Healers’] from the Remus era. Elegant, refined, and efficient, it was not. But it was an image.

I threw the spell out as its own thing, starting a new book on ‘How to heal elemental transformations’ in my [Astral Archives]. This wasn’t an area the Medical Manuscripts had devoted a lot of time to. Perhaps I could contribute to them more in the current era? I spun the distracting thought off into its own parallel thought, focusing on what my magic was doing.

It cost literally more than a million mana, but the golem’s body slammed back together. Ugly scars crisscrossed the body, a notably different stone filling in the gaps. Whoof. I would’ve had angry thoughts and words about any [Healer] who fixed up a person in such a sloppy way.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1458->1459 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]

Hey, another level!

The battle continued to rage on, the combatants slowly figuring out that nobody was dying. Capture became the name of the game, restraints and shackles. Hunting parties were organized and started to patrol the skies, not fighting others, and I suspected they were looking for me.

A Radiance spotlight hit me, and a group of six demons charged me with a roar. Two [Warriors], two [Mages], two [Ranger] tags. Not that the tags meant a lot at the levels we were at - warriors could throw weapons harder than most archers of a lower level, mages had enough incidental stats to make a good showing hand to hand, and it was the rare ranger that didn’t have some magical effect to their projectiles. Water bullets sizzled past my ear with a lethal buzz, and I needed to deflect shurikens of all things. I flew away from the demons as quickly as I could, the Radiance spotlight preventing me from ducking back into invisibility. A crack of lightning had the air smelling of ozone.

“Hey! Not nice!” I protested. I was perfectly fine, as were my clothes - thank you armor skill. My broomstick was not fine, the bristles aggressively on fire. I immediately swapped. My flowing witch robes were replaced by skintight running clothes, my broom went back into storage, and I flipped [Essence of Flight] to let me “run” on air. I completed the look with a headband, and tore off across the sky towards the elf side, trailing demons. 

The elves, naturally, took one look at a Classer running towards them, away from demons trying to kill me, and naturally assumed I was on their side. An unknown auxiliary perhaps. 

Smoke and mirrors.

They didn’t fire upon me as I ran by, but engaged the demons with fervor and gusto. Between the healer sprinting away at top speed, and the elegant elven blades going for their neck, the demons chose to fight. With the distraction, I dropped a smoke bomb spell, and vanished once again into invisibility. 

Then from the south, a wave of elvish reinforcements arrived. Arrayed in a rough phalanx formation with equipment that screamed “soldiers” as opposed to the rag-tag [Warriors] that had been fighting, their presence turned the tide. The 512 elves paused in the air, facing off against the [Demon King] while the two sides retreated to their respective sides. I flew up, invisibly off to the side between the two forces, and briskly flew away.

If the two forces were going to start trying to kill each other, I wanted to be outside the line of fire. I didn’t need to be quite so close to the center of the action if it was going to be relatively well-contained to heal everyone.

The demons retreated while the [Demon King] stared down the 512 before leaving himself, and the skirmish was over.

Everyone just… left. The elves had the field, and I bailed before they figured out I wasn’t on their side, and started hunting for me.

Now I needed to find the next skirmish, and see what I could do there.

===========

Several dozen skirmishes later over a couple of months, and I was ready to begin spying - I mean, intelligence gathering.

[*ding!* Congratulations! [The Elaine] has leveled up to level 1459->1502 +200 Strength, +200 Dexterity, +800 Speed, +800 Vitality, +2000 Mana, +10000 Mana Regen, +4000 Magic Power, +4000 Magic Control from your Class per level! +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Speed, +1 Vitality, +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control for being Chimera (Elvenoid)! +1 Mana, +1 Mana Regen from your Element per level!]

Auri had also been busy, and I got to enjoy a number of levels from her over the companion bond. 

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Chimera (Elvenoid)]

[Age: 129]

[Mana: 24,356,320/24,356,320]

[Mana Regeneration: 79,632,641 +(399,065,959)]

Stats

    [Free Stats: 0]

    [Strength: 177,855 (Effectively: 1,422,840)]

    [Dexterity: 202,111 (Effectively: 2,152,078)]

    [Vitality: 791,978 (Effectively: 12,374,656)]

    [Speed: 779,210 (Effectively: 15,337,190)]

    [Mana: 2,435,632]

    [Mana Regeneration: 8,307,384 (+ 39,906,596)]

    [Magic Power: 3,773,444 (+ 283,385,644)]

    [Magic Control: 3,772,301 (+ 283,299,805)]

[Class 1: [The Elaine - Celestial: Lv 1502]]

    [Celestial Spirit: 1502]

    [Domain of the Healer: 1502]

    [A Drop of Eternity in a Sea of Starlight: 608]

    [Luminary Mind: 1502]

    [Universal Cure: 1502]

    [Clad in Twilight: 580]

    [The Mantle of Dusk and Dawn: 945]

    [Elaine Eternal: 1502]

[Class 2: [Dawnbringer - Radiance: Lv 1281]]

    [Radiance Mastery: 1281]

    [A Light Shining in the Darkness: 941]

    [Radiance Beams: 1281]

    [Solar Blades: 500]

    [Celestial Dew: 1281]

    [Sunrise Halo: 1281]

    [Essence of Flight: 1281]

    [Featherstorm: 1281]

[Class 3: [Sage of Eternity - Spatial: Lv 1275]]

    [Spatial Authority: 1275]

    [Scripture Savant: 1275]

    [Teleportation: 1275]

    [Timeless Manor of the Eternally Curious Sage: 1275]

    [Portcullis: 64]

    [Reality, Writ As You Will: 1275]

    [Astral Archives: 1275]

    [Endless Pursuit of Knowledge: 1275]

General Skills

    [Long-Range Identify: 680]

    [Everywoman: 625]

    [Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 1502]

    [The World Around Me: 700]

    [Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 1502]

    [Sentinel's Superiority: 1502]

    [Persistent Casting: 1502]

    [Tender Gardening; Industrial Farming: 901]