Chapter 285: Infiltration
Elara’s boot crunched against a rock.
“Who goes there?” a man’s voice called out. In the cavernous expanse of Erandur, the sound echoed oddly, enhancing the very slight quaver that the man was trying to hide. A bit of uncertainty, perhaps.
Maybe even fear.
Elara certainly hoped it was fear - and if it wasn’t, she was sure that it certainly became that as she walked closer to the source of the sound. Not that the man was hidden in any way. He positively shone in the darkness, the wind-aspected mana that suffused his armor and weapon limning his figure in a whitish glow.
To anyone else, it would probably be an intimidating sight. Especially with the other two figures that stood beside him, each just as brilliant as the first. But to Elara, it meant less than nothing.
Not while she was wearing her stolen set of armor.
As she moved closer, Elara let the enhancements on her plate pulse, the shadowlike metal setting itself alight with an eerie glow that, despite its apparent illumination, wasn’t all that illuminating in truth. The black-purple light all but disappeared into the shadows around her, making it quite clear why the one who’d once owned the armor had been known as a Shadowguard.
With a further effort of will, the effect stretched itself slightly further, wrapping around the sheathed blade at Elara’s side and the pack strapped across her back, preventing them from slipping through her increasingly ephemeral form. Elara still wasn’t sure how it all worked, given that Orken’s own nullsmith hadn’t been able to decipher the methods that were used in its creation even after some time to examine the gear, though she was sure - after everything she’d seen and heard since coming to Erandur - that the ability to turn the effect on and off was due to the xenlite embedded in the chestplate’s center.
The malleability of the effect might have been due to the same, but maybe not. Elara was sure that, despite her feelings about Virtun and the things that they had done, they were more skilled than anyone she’d ever met when it came to manipulating mana captured from Cores. Even the White Tower’s equipment, just as enhanced by xenlite as her own stolen set of armor, didn’t have the same sort of control to it. The armor and spears that Valera captured had been tested thoroughly; they could turn off and on, but the strength of the effect never truly changed and couldn’t be stretched. Not like Shadowguard armor could.