Chapter 232

Embers and Ashes (III)

Fire warped the air with how hot it burned, transcending into molten lava while cascading downward, at a slope, spearheaded by a rampaging bolt of lightning as thick as an oak tree’s trunk. Mael heaved the shield over his shoulder, the gem akin to its heart alighting with the colors of light, shimmering out into a widened projection. The bolt struck and, like a nail to a glass, dug out an inch that spearheaded tens of thousands of cracks against the surface. A mere second later, the molten lava came crashing down as well, swallowing and burning through the shield with a monstrous growl.

Mael dodged just in time as he watched lava fall through, swallowing the desolate world and alighting the entire area with its incandescence glow. It continued flowing forward, slowly, like a worm, while the man responsible for it hardly took a second to rest before striking again.

‘Sky’ above began to churn as clouds coalesced, space twisting in the wake of surging energy. They rumbled out with thunderous sounds, lighting flashing within repeatedly while a thousand threads of Mana connected the man to the clouds. He began to wonder just who was supposed to be a denizen of the Tower as the man depicted the prowess in controlling the Mana akin to that of someone veteran even to Mael.

While the quantity itself wasn’t anything too world-shattering, well below Mael’s at that, the control and the Mana’s quality were well above this Crucible’s standards; rather, they were well above the initial strata of the Crucibles and likely belonged in the middle-stages of the climb.

The clouds, immediately after, began to spit out bolts of lighting and fire in the strangest sight Mael had ever seen; colors blended in the brightest flashes that illuminated the entire world beneath the world, drowning the darkness out. Mael suspected that every single soul underground was able to see the world around them the clearest they’d ever seen it.

Cain drove Mana and shaped it, casting one of the most Mana-exhausting skills in his arsenal: Elemental Resonance, a Skill he fashioned specifically for bosses that were extremely defense-oriented.

//Elemental Resonance(S+)

Cast: 3s

Mana Cost: 25% of maximum Mana reserved

Cooldown: 6h

Use: Converge all of your raw Elements into a pocketed storm covering twelve miles across. The storm tempers your infused Mana and charges it with elemental particles found in the nature itself, sorting resonance. Every 3 seconds for the next 30 minutes, a randomized elemental charge will burst out, striking the nearest enemy for a certain elemental damage. Each consecutive charge that successfully strikes an enemy increases the damage of the next strike by 3%, stacking infinitely, and decreasing the stricken enemy’s defenses by 2%, stacking until 100%. Damage is dependent on a number of factors: discharged and conjured elements, distance between the strike point and the target, caster’s Intelligence and Wisdom as well as further skill modifiers.

Note: the storm can be dispersed and cannot be extended by any duration modifiers. However, frequency of attacks can be affected by overcharged cast speed. In addition, the Resonance can only conjure raw Elemental power of the Elements you posses, even if it does draw from other Elements in the nature. Though there is no additional Mana cost to sustaining the storm, 25% of your maximum Mana is locked and cannot be recovered for the duration.//

The skill’s strengths, as well as its weaknesses, were fairly obvious: the strong point was that it was consistent, raw, highly-damaging skill that lasted ridiculous half an hour and it struck, at minimum, once every 3 seconds with increasingly more devastating strength. At its peak, Cain suspected, it would be hitting harder than any other skill in his arsenal, even ones specifically designed as single-target nukes that forewent all limitations just to squeeze as much damage as physically possible out of them, such as the ‘Starsurging Nova’ skill that dealt upward of 200,000 direct damage in a single burst at the cost of 90% of his current maximum Mana pool and the whooping cooldown period of 15 days.

Further strength of the skill was also that it would never become obsolete; unlike the ‘Starsurging Nova’, which despite its insane damage burst would eventually simply become a tickle as the health pools began to grow into tens of millions--something that would happen by the 15th floor, actually-- ‘Elemental Resonance’ would maintain its usability even further up. Well, theoretically.

The most glaring weakness of the skill was rather simple-- it was massive, yes, but it was also stationary. The best counter to it was to simply just run out of it, at which point Cain would have wasted its cooldown as well as a good chunk of his Mana for nothing. This was especially true because, during his testing, he realized that was only around the 6th minute mark that the damage the storm does would actually begin to warrant its cost; essentially, nearly sixth of its duration was simply not worth the cost in any way whatsoever.

This was especially dangerous because the skill looked like it did extreme damage, likely prompting its targets to run off. If they got out within the first five minutes, Cain would likely be forced to turn tail and run in most of the battles as his Mana pool likely wouldn’t be able to handle prolonged boss-battles after that.

He actually had no intention of using it against Mael and had instead planned on a much more rudimentary, long-term battle of expending Mana at the rate of recovery. However, noticing how Mael began to fight -- essentially turtling in place and taking all his strikes head on with minimum dodging -- Cain determined that the risk was worth it. Though the skill looked dangerous, especially because Cain knew Mael understood the implications behind it, the former was certain that the latter would take a few hits directly as a test as he was likely confident in his defenses.

Once he saw that the damage was low and that, even with the uptick with each strike, it was barely worth the shrug, he might even turn offensive as he’d think Cain was using theatrics to scare him. In reality, he was; Cain was in no way, shape or form deluded enough to believe anyone not forced by the Tower to sit in one place and take it would just continue to stand in the storm of its full duration. As such, its theoretical ceiling could only be met by the sandbag bosses that wouldn’t even necessitate that high of a DPS.

The likeliest scenario was that Mael would force his way out by the 10th minute-- but it was enough. Even one third of its duration, Cain calculated, was enough to justify its insane Mana costs.

The battle, however, would hardly be decided within 10 minutes; though it looked like Cain was bludgeoning the poor, armored man, the total amount of damage that Cain dealt amounted to whooping... 2% of Mael’s maximum health. In reality, it was close to around 5~%, but Mael’s natural health recovery was simply that insane. Furthermore, this was with the latter never really using any strong skills, namely relying either on the prowess of his armor, or the most basic defensive projections.

Cain was well aware of this, and though sacrificing 25% of his maximum Mana straight out of the gate of a likely extremely long battle sounded insane, he was confident in the ‘Core of Desolation’s’ natural Mana recovery to keep him afloat while the ‘Elemental Resonance’ was responsible for far more than just dealing some damage: it was more of a psychological attack rather than a direct one.

No one in his party understood just how insanely strong the class ‘Spellweaver’ was, and even when Cain, on occasion, demonstrated some skills, though they understood the scale to some degree, they hardly understood the machinery beneath the pretty colors. Mael, though, did; it was likely that the old man was less impressed by the scale, or even what the skill can do, and more with the underlying machinery that brought it into the living world.

The sky began to shake and churn elemental strikes; fiery sword, starlight-doused spears, bolts of fire and lighting, rain of ruin’s particles invisible to the naked eye... though it looked spectacular and was a sight to behold, as Cain suspected, Mael took it all directly, realizing that the damage was minimal, a smirk emerging on his lips.

“Childish tricks?” Mael said. “And here I thought that accompanying the complex systems was a devastating skill. I guess I was wrong.”

“... do you know why the class is known as the ‘Spellweaver’?” Cain asked with a faint smile. “And not something dumb like ‘One-pump-chump-weaver’?”

“...?” Mael looked at him confusedly.

“Shit, another joke you don’t get,” Cain sighed. “Oh well, whatever.”

Ignoring the sky, Cain shrouded himself in thick warp of Mana, beginning his onslaught. After all, his Mana pool had expanded to the insane 25,000, something he regularly would have hit around 10-15th floor, depending on the items and titles. That, however, wasn’t even the truly remarkable part of it all -- it was his Mana recovery, which was roughly at around five thousand every if he turned off his passive health recovery. He was free to use every skill in his arsenal except those that either permanently locked his Mana off, like ‘Elemental Resonance’, or those that slowed his Mana recovery as a side-effect.

As such, skies, further, came crashing down-- but every skill wasn’t fired off at random; rather, Cain worked to make it as hard as possible for Mael to get out of the ‘Elemental Resonance’ once the old man realized what was happening.

Deafening booms accompanied the array of skills deforming the terrain completely. It was as though a series of natural disasters surged within the same place, tens of earthquakes superimposing on top of one another, fiery ejections that were so hot they melted the dirt itself, winds reaching the speeds in hundreds, and the spectacular, milky-white starlight coating each and every skill with the ability to rend through the stone as though it was butter. The carnage that unfolded was heard for hundreds of miles, as far as the heart of the Kingdom, the Palace itself, where Emma and others, including the boss himself, stopped fighting for a moment, their eyes drawn toward the repeated flashes in the sky that surged in the far distance, akin to two mythical beasts battling for the supremacy.

The sheer, raw output of Mana that reached them through the resonating shockwaves shocked each and every one of them stiff, especially those on the outside of the battle-- Anna and Sera. Though they weren’t fighters themselves, they still had far more experience than Emma and others when it came to the nature of Mana.

And though both knew that Cain’s Mana was uniquely pure and tame in contrast to every other Conqueror, they’d never actually seen him fight all-out. They still weren’t ‘seeing’ him, per se, but the faint remnants were enough for them to understand one, simple truth: if Cain fought their brother... the latter would simply be physically incapable of withstanding the base Mana pressure, let alone actually put up a fight. Even if the Tower blessed them with far greater Vitality over their Conqueror counterparts, some base truths were still universal, and the most important one was the trifecta of Mana -- raw output, purity, and speed. Though she couldn’t comment on the speed at which Cain consumed his Mana, Sera could determine that the raw output and purity were akin to nothing found on this Crucible-- rather, they were far more alike those people who descended before the Crucible’s start and started Awakening them in preparation. The mystery began to mount further, now arrayed with knowledge that the man they ‘accidentally’ met... was far, far more than they anticipated even in their wildest dreams.