PSTH: Chapter Sixty-One

Average rates of progression are a difficult thing to both track and measure. Even in studies where people logged time spent in training, time spent in cultivation, ambient essence levels, the best estimate we can put together is that over the course of a long enough period, training tends to result in comparable essence gains to cultivating in an at-level environment. But where cultivation is a steady gathering of essence from the air, training arrives in bursts of variable size.

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Collection of excerpts from a study on cultivation speeds, 409 Modern-Era

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While the Councillor, River, and Laurel discussed possible times for a rematch, I took down several notes in my augpad. There was some truth to the idea that we needed levels. I’d been advancing at a decent rate thanks to all of the powerful fights I’d been in, but I hadn’t spent as much time training or cultivating as I used to. Levels did slow at each mark of ten, but I wanted to take some time and train seriously after my fight with the councillor. Maybe I’d head home, spend some time with mom, and volunteer on one of the crews that was going over the Obsidian King’s estate. 

That said, just because he was partially right that we did need levels didn’t mean that this was an automatic loss. I already knew a good list of his Primals: Darkwisp, Taurualist, Starab, Insubsturgeon, Fearfeaster, and a Felimalio. That was six, and while it was possible he had more, I didn’t think it was likely. Maybe one more, but certainly not two. With teams limited to three members, like mine, that meant he had… 

I scrunched up my eyebrows, then switched over to the calculator, and plugged in the combination function, trusting that the math it would spit out at me would be the right one. Twenty potential combinations. Except, that wasn’t quite right. Order did matter, since whichever two he sent out first would dictate my initial strategy, while the one he kept in reserve wouldn’t. My calculator spit out a hundred and twenty combinations, but I also knew that wasn’t right either – A and B with C in reserve was the same as B and A with C in reserve. My calculator didn’t have any handy buttons with a function that would let it do that, or if it did, it didn’t make it obvious enough for me to use them. 

All of that meant that there were somewhere between twenty and a hundred and twenty combinations – or was the right term permutations? – that he could use. There was definitely some math that I could do to figure  out an exact number, but I was not an expert on math, and regardless of if the true number was forty or a hundred, there were just too many for me to reasonably create a counter strategy. 

If I couldn’t plan for every possible team combination, then I could at least plan for each individual member, and I started in reverse order. His Felimalio was perhaps the Primal that I was least worried about. With one on my own team, I’d built up a lot of strategy around having gifts suppressed. It wouldn’t play well with many of his team members, however, and it seemed more like the kind of trick that was used to unbalance his opponents than to truly improve his strategy. I trusted either Zale or Scales to handle his Felimalio, if it came to it, and could use Hex to irritate and annoy. 

His Fearfeaster was difficult. Much like Laurel, I would need to take it down early, but aerial support was one of the things I was most lacking at the moment. If I had an aerial Primal of my own, a magic focused Primal that could blast it from afar, or even a buff-focused Primal that could cast a flight spell on my other Primals, then I’d be in a much better spot, but I unfortunately didn’t. I’d have to fall back on Zale as a counter, which I hoped should work well enough, given that Fearfeasters were Gift dependent, meaning Hex could shut down all the power it had gained in the fight, and Zale could crush it. 

The Insubsturgeon was a problem as well. With its water and shade elements, even if I shut off its innate spell to go intangible, it could hide, move, and hit fairly hard. But that was compensated for with a lack of toughness – it put most of its pneuma into making the battle form agile, rather than reinforcing the durability of the pneuma shell. If either Scales or Zale could hit it, then it should go down after only a few blows, but actually hitting the Insubsturgeon would be hard. Maybe if Hex could obscure its vision and weaken it enough, I’d only need one blow? Or if Scales and Zale split off to cover two regions of the ring, it could cut down on how much maneuverability the thing had.

A Starab was a Primal I’d love to join my own group, given that even without its gift, it was a powerful and beautiful creature. Any earth spells it knew weren’t going to be too much of a threat. Not that they could be dismissed, but they weren’t as much of a threat as something like lightning. But if it got a good light attack on Hex, that could create a lot of problems. It wouldn’t be an instant loss, but removing Hex from the field would significantly increase the power of pretty much any of the Councillor’s own team, while only slightly providing a bit of potential for my own. 

And all of that was ignoring the illusions. I wasn’t practiced in seeing through illusions, since when fighting with Gawain, it was rarely a matter of picking out what was an illusion. The illusions were coupled with a mind altering spell to build fear and confusion, not to create complex patterns. On top of that, the ones that I had experience with were the ones created by shade magic, rather than radiant magic, meaning they didn’t tend to operate as well in the bright stadium lights. 

What could I actually do to counter a Starab? They weren’t exceptionally strong, fast, or tough, but since their gift effectively doubled their anima amount and spellpower, they were able to put more of their essence into their essence pools than most magic-focused Primals. I couldn’t simply rely on Zale to punch through defense. Scales had an elemental advantage against earth, especially with his new spell, Aqua Fin, but that only mattered if he could actually hit it. And since a Starab could also fly…

With a growing sense of dread, I realized that I had no hard counter to the Starab. I’d just have to rely on my team, and hope that I came out better. For all that it flew in the face of my strategy, sometimes all that winning really boiled down to was making sure your spells landed, while your opponent’s didn’t. 

I was in a bit of a sour mood when I moved on to planning for the Taurualist, but I quickly cheered up as I started to draft plans. The Taurualist wasn’t an easy fight by any means, but Scales was exceptionally defensively powerful, especially when using his defensive spell to buff himself. So long as he completed the spell first, he should be able to take a hit from even a full-power Taurualist without losing more than half of his pneuma. Even if Scales went down, simply buying time would be enough for either Zale or Hex to win. 

Hex was faster than ever after her ousia web remapping, and could blind and distract to increase her evasive abilities further. That was admittedly a bit of an assumption that the Taurualist’s gift was a one time process that couldn’t be reversed, like a human’s ability to aspect a core, but I was willing to bet that it was. Even if it was an active process that her own gift could turn off, she should still be able to evade and crack through the pneuma given time. 

Zale wasn’t as defensively powerful as Scales was, but he was still tough enough to take on a sufficiently weakened Taurualist. And if both Zale and Hex were out? It would be a clean sweep. 

That left only the Darkwisp, which was the one I was least concerned about behind the Felimalio. It had moves that wouldn’t normally be effective, if not for the Darkswisp’s gift, so simply shutting that off should render it as little more than a flighty bag of pneuma. It may be a little difficult to catch, but unlike the Insubsturgeon, it shouldn’t be able to hit hard enough to be a problem. A time sink, not a true threat. Even if Hex had already been taken out of the fight, Scales should be able to partially resist the dark fire magic thanks to his water element, while Zale would do the same due to his radiant element. In turn, Scales should be able to hit hard, and Zale could outlast, thanks to his Restore Shell in addition to his natural bulk. 

By the time I had finished developing each of my general strategies – or the lack thereof, in the case of the Starab – it was time for Gawain’s fight with the Councillor. This time, Kingfisher opened with the Starab and the Insubsturgeon, while Gawain opened with Trouble and Gabis. That was an interesting starting gambit, and not what I’d expected from him. To my surprise, it worked quite well – while Gabis took several solid hits from the Insubsturgeon, its ability to go intangible wasn’t able to stop Gabis’ damage reflection. It might have had better luck if it was smaller, but the floating pneuma spikes simply made large targets a guaranteed hit. Meanwhile, when the Starab attempted to pepper it with light spells from afar, Gabis was able to mostly evade, and use its spears of ice spell to fire back. 

Trouble, meanwhile, played support the entire time. The small salamander-like Primal played a game of cat and mouse, rushing around the arena and making it hard to pin down. As soon as the Insubturgeon appeared to attack, Trouble would use its pulse of arcane force to attack. The timing there was tight, as it had to be during the same instant where the Primal disabled its spell to attack, and Gawain wasn’t always perfect with it, but he did it enough to make it clear that it wasn’t a guaranteed win condition. Whenever the Starab started to create any sort of light or illusion, Trouble sent swarms of illusionary black tentacles over the entire area, which sometimes managed to disrupt them, and certainly made it harder for the real one to aim and fire. 

That started to give me an idea on how I might be able to fight the Starab. I had initially dismissed the Cloud of Darkness spell, since it was using shade magic on a radiant Primal. On top of that, I had assumed that the Starab would have a spell that could produce a flash of light large enough to break the shadows, like Gryphon had. But as the Starab was forced to resort to using blasts of concentrated light to burn only small holes in the shadow tentacles, I suspected that had been a false assumption. That opened a few tactics, at least. 

The fight raged on, until Gabis and Trouble managed to take down the Insubsturgeon, after which the Councillor sent out his third Primal, the Darkwisp. He’d brought that to every fight thus far… I filed that away as something good to know for my own fight later. Gawain struggled a bit more against the Darkwisp, until Gabis was taken out by the rain spell, at which point Gryphon appeared. He took out the Starab, who had been weakened by the course of the fight, and then Gryphon and Trouble were able to take out the wisp, even with Trouble’s near-empty reserves. 

As Laurel pouted about Gawain having won where she’d lost, I tapped my nail against my teeth and set about refining my own strategy. It wasn’t great, but I thought I had some hope, at least.