Ebony's Fable

"Heheh..hahahaha!" Luna'Myrr sweatbead dripped across his cheek. His shock from the intense heat that went through his mana skin didn't stop his laugh. The woman stopped her charge.

Either way, he managed to get his Bark Shield in front of her attack right in time.

"You might be immune to my toxins, but he's not!"

Xin felt the curiosity from her husband and shook her head in exasperation when he wanted Luna'Myrr to activate the unknown poison.

This emotional balancing was a hindrance after all. She cut it off completely and returned to her normal state so that she was no longer distracted by her husband. Ebony was more curious about how he wasn't aware of the poison more so than the effects of the poison.

They both knew it took highly specialised poisons to work on either of them so she couldn't help but be curious if this Elf had poison and poison delivery methods that could escape her husband's senses.

Unwilling to damage her swords further, her flaming lance broke apart and dispersed on impact against the bark shield. Urging Luna'Myrr to activate his poison because her husband wanted it.

'Why's the tree bark so fire resistant compared to the arrows?' Xin got close and personal and used hand-to-hand combat instead.

While she wasn't inside another person's Domain, it was harder to cast magic so close to the Elf's magic body.

She hasn't reached the proficiency of a Tier 5 Mastery, only about the lower end of Tier 4 according to her husband.

Surprisingly, this Elf could move his body to counter her!

She only had Unwavering Immortal's Pulse passive static going, without even dipping into its active output. Foregoing her elemental augmentations of blood, fire, lightning and wind to further strengthen her physicals, but the Elf was keeping up.

'How is the plant not burning…' Luna'Myrr blocked her kick with his bow but swapped out for multiple close-range weapons.

He quickly guarded with a wooden dagger, which he swapped for a bone one after noticing that her body temperature was immensely high even without fire mana running through her.

Xin tried to push her advantage with her arms since her Fortifications let her attack speed rise even without swords now. Yet the Elf wasn't slowing down either.

He parried every hit so far.

She started to get embarrassed that her martial skills weren't living up to her husband's creation.

'As expected, I can't transmute properly upon contact.' Xin pumped her arms with lightning mana and punched them out while transmuting part of her arms.

Throwing punches from every direction and spawning them with what appeared to be fire portals left in her punches' wake.

She wasn't fighting with swords and this was her first real battle after evolution so she didn't want it to end too fast.

Fortunately, this Elf wasn't all talk.

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Ebony was disappointed when he saw Luna'Myrr's confusion after he was unaffected by the man's skill activation.

It wasn't that the poison didn't work. He wasn't even poisoned from the start.

Something went wrong with the delivery method.

But the Elf was too busy blocking the punch barrage to blurt his shock.

'Hmm…' Ebony was also pleasantly surprised by the Elf's close-range combat proficiency.

For an archer, space mage and poison user. Nothing about him explained the high close-range combat proficiency that he was showing off.

'He's expanding tiny pockets of space to dilute the heat and even impact. The moment her fist touched his tree bark shield spell's mana skin, space expanded to disperse the force?' Ebony continued to watch, but his mana didn't stop moving.

The space expansion spell upon contact wasn't that potent. It shouldn't be enough to completely defend him from Xin's slightly higher strength.

Then he realised that Lunar Bioclock was going a bit haywire around the Elf.

'Lunar energy…mana? I see, that's what's preventing the tree from burning.' Ebony stared upwards.

It was not nighttime till a few more standard hours. Luna'Myrr was dragging lunar mana from extremely far away to him and his poisonous tree.

Lunar and solar energy can be said to have some similarities with ice and fire mana. Lunar had chill, solar had heat. One key difference was that lunar and solar hurt the spirit more than the physical plane, but it doesn't completely take away the cold or hot properties.

Luna'Myrr was using compressed mana, just shy of liquid mana. His mana purity, while not equal to an Emperor, was higher than most humans and even the Elven Kings that Ebony knew.

Ebony guessed the Elf had mana density, compressibility Fortifications just like him. Other than that, there were a few more Fortifications that worked with lunar energy more so than space or poison.

The poisons might be the Noxa Manchineel work and nothing to do with Luna'Myrr.

Next most likely was plant-based Fortifications which made sense from what he was seeing. Except that he was not familiar with plant magic and its related Fortifications. This wasn't common knowledge and even Eidolon wouldn't be much help.

No one really shares their most important Fortifications. Journeymen and Masters were one thing. Their Fortifications were generic and after some time, common ones are easily identifiable.

Past Master Fortifications start to get more unique for everyone, even if they had the same class.

Xin wasn't fighting one person. She was fighting an Elf with his dear plant.

Luna'Myrr left pretty much all physical defence to Noxa Manchineel's quick and precise Bark Shield activations. He supported it with lunar energy and plant magic to guide some of the tree's counterattacks.

'He's not moving away…guess that space spell is rooted here to strengthen him.' It was rare to see a space mage in action even for Ebony, so he wanted to see what kind of spells they had.

Luna'Myrr was using it very differently from Kong Jing or any of the Kong Clan members.

It was more flexible than Ezekiel's bullet-dependent space magic but much less potent and spatially controlling than the Kongs.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He needed to modify Xin's martial skill further. The fact that her transmutation can be affected very differently by every unique magic body and spells solidified the fact that his design needed to lean towards less magic-based moves for her.

Luna'Myrr was in trouble the moment he let the battle drag. He realised that a few seconds in but that was much too late.

Xin's build of up speed and power by Cascades was much more intense than Ebony's Fluid Blitz. Her Cascades also used momentum but more so relied on combos and preceding strikes.

Ebony's style of free-flowing moves doesn't follow patterns, breaking his momentum with awkward moves all the time prevents him from fully copying Cascade's style of building up speed and power.

The weakness of her Cascades was predictability. The strength of it was that if her speed and power increased exponentially, predictability wouldn't matter.

Luna'Myrr sweat rolled down when his trusty Bark Shield enhanced by his space expansion spell cracked. After the first crack, it didn't even take another 2 punches before every conjuration of Bark Shield shatters per punch.

His wife was throwing tens of thousands per second and it was only getting faster at an alarming rate for the Elf.

Ebony was much too used to it. This was only the beginning for her.

Before he could wonder if Luna'Myrr could see the next phase of the Art he designed for her, the Elf finally broke free from the predicament of being forced into a defensive by attacks from every angle.

Thanks to training with Ebony all the time, his wife has already gotten used to assuming her opponents had an unlimited mana pool.

This idea was good to have against any mage, especially Elves and other Domain mages. Even Ebony assumed that when he was in the Elven Domain.

It was easy to store mana externally. With the help of a Domain Core, this external mana can easily be used and doesn't have to be reconverted for a mage to utilise it.

Having unlimited mana wasn't a scary thought. What was scary is the amount of mana the mage could use simultaneously.

Dusk's seals, while requiring volume of mana wasn't a test for total accumulation. It was a test of how much mana the mage can control at once, either for a single spell or multiple.

As expected, when push came to shove, Luna'Myrr abandoned the area he was in. Tossing away the advantage he had within the space spell he previously cast in advance, but regaining the advantage of distance.

Xin's mistake was to let him slip out and go back to shooting arrows at her while backing off.

Luna'Myrr was moving towards the Elven Domain.

When he popped out of the space spell he set up, Xin had to fly out the extreme distance once more.

'Space magic is really good for escaping.' It was a redundant thought of his.

Dusk was only a few hundred metres in radius. Luna'Myrr could escape into the Elven Domain without passing by Ebony.

Too bad he already got his wife in a duel frenzy. Unwavering Immortal's Pulse thundered across space.

'Her heart can take this much now? Most of her Potential went into evolving her heart after all.' His skin shivered.

The palpitations in the air broke through Mantle of Reservation with her heartbeat and ran across his skin and into his muscles.

He scratched his head, 'how many tons of ancient ranked meat flesh did she burn with that one pulse…'

Those poor animals' lifetime and calories all went into strengthening her temporarily.

Ebony ignored Luna'Myrr and got busy readjusting his training plans for his wife now that he knew the new heights she could handle.

'My own training regime needs to change, I'm not exhausting myself fast enough.' He recalled his previous Priming session in their training field.

It took too long.

While he needed endurance training, he didn't have all the time in the world. Training for weeks at a time for a few skill levels might not be enough now that he knew his lifespan or time limit to evolve was about a hundred years.

Fortunately, the Training Field the Xu made for them was rated up to Emperor. At most, it needed some modifications when their requirements changed. If Spine was the safest location at home, then their Training Field was the most dangerous.

For one, it was capable of magnifying gravity beyond any spell Ebony could cast. And he didn't even know how it was doing it. It surely wasn't a large amount of gravity mana.

More like a small amount was being powered up to the extremes.

So far, he had been keeping the training field up without any resources. He knew it required a power source but he didn't know what and where that power source was.

Shi Ling told him over dinner one day that one of the Qin Clan members had enemies who chased her all the way to their home. An Assassin.

The Qin Clan member was busy training and couldn't hear or sense outside the training field but the assassin could see her.

When she came to the end of her training session and turned off the isolated space expansion, she found a corpse at the corners of her training field.

After this event, the Xengs shared the useful trait for their descendants to take note of. It was also after this that the Xu Clan was given monetary support to make all their Training Fields as highly rated with better control as possible.

Even younger generations got high-quality fields. Oftentimes, it needs to be modified as time passes since they develop new skills and physique mutations.

Xin was fast, but the space mage didn't need to fly.

While he retreated, Luna'Myrr created a barrage of arrows that lodged in space all around them.

Except this time, none of it penetrated Dusk. Ebony had used Will to imagine a spatial lockdown but without someone manipulating space it was clear that Dusk wasn't working efficiently.

Now that he had the initial tests, optimising his Domain against external spatial manipulation was more effective. Not to mention, the Scion's hurried arrow barrage spatial embedding was weaker than before.

Then these unmoving arrows locked in space suddenly collapsed inwards.

'Like my gravity vortex.' The arrows weren't the poisonous branches from Noxa Manchineel anymore. It is a two-step spell and violently compresses a sphere of space upon reaching its target location.

Xin noticed the additional layer of danger even if she were to transmute into flames, and her Intuition had her manoeuvre awayfrom certain locations instead of taking the arrows on by turning gaseous.

Luna'Myrr was a hybrid mage archer that had close combat proficiency around Tier 4 mastery when working with Noxa Manchineel. The tree would slow Elves down, but not a space mage that can bring them along at any time.

Clearly, the poisonous tree wasn't effective against his opponent so he had been focusing his energy on space archery. Ebony was too far away to sense the manas now but the Elf probably had some Lunar-based enhancement.

It would have some similarities with ice elemental enhancement but honestly, probably a lot weaker in physical augmentations. It would be far more effective against spirit opponents. Perhaps that was actually good against an opponent that turns into flames but he wasn't willing to let her close the distance anymore.

Luna'Myrr already got into the Elven Domains' range. He probably called for help the moment he reached but it was also at this time that Xin started throwing punches mid-flight.

Ebony nodded to see that phase two worked.

Before, she had to materialise her fist back to physical form to deal significant damage. After her speed and power built up to a certain point, she can throw her punches so hard that even as a bundle of flames, it would compress and connect by sheer force that she threw them. It would even get 'harder' than the soft human flesh on impact.

No longer required to materialise, she can conjure fire instead of transmuting and tossing it out as fast and hard as she wants.

Ebony hurried into the Elven Domain to protect the poor plants from catching on the rain of fire, no different from a machine gun that was much too precise. However, he was mildly impressed once more than no burning occurred immediately. 'The Manifestation of Natural Preservation here is so thick...a large portion of their Will is used to maintain that.' This one combined spell that was cast underground for the Tetramythian war was many times denser and firmer within the Elven Domain.

Xin was in range the moment she decided to throw hands.

Luna'Myrr raised a thick wooden shield, gleaming with lunar mana in defense when he felt a zap of lightning numbing his mana skin.

"Whe-!" Why did he feel so sleepy all of a sudden!?

Xin swung her knife hand, lopping off the Elf's head before a scorching rain of fireblasts exploded onto Noxa Manchineel's manipulated wooden shield.

Ebony Oscillated, grabbed her burning body even if it meant evaporation of mana wrapping him up. Took a step, and was back outside the Elven Domain with a frozen Elf, a corpse and his toxic tree.

They left the Elven Domain about six minutes ago. Xin first reached close contact with Luna'Myrr to test her martial mastery three minutes ago.

Luna'Myrr successfully retreated into the Elven Domain two and a half seconds ago.

No one in the Elven Domain answered his call for backup during his two and a half second sense of relief.