My Servant System

Chapter 1078: Chapter 1077: Bascra (4)



Kat PoV

The breath that I had been holding threatened to burst from my lips as I watched my lover -n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

the woman for whom my heart beat - get smashed into the ground and covered up completely by sand until nothing of her remained visible to anyone.

This Fiend we had been fighting was only making any progress thanks to the raw prowess it was exuding and the favorable terrain upon which we were fighting, the countless grains of sand providing it everything it needed to battle us and then some, but where it excelled in making use of said prowess, this Fiend wasn't really adept at reading and controlling the battlefield, as shown by the fact that it had yet to realize that one of its opponents was missing.

Hera was standing far away from us just watching as everything happened, the Death Jackal's job in this moment and time being to just ensure none of us died, or at the very least allow us to experience this battle to the fullest without her coming to our aid and giving us an easy way to win this fight and kill the Fiend, so the Fiend had ignored her so far, which was smart.

Any attack sent to her was likely to be met with a retaliatory attack that would only draw her into the fray and add another variable to this dance of ours, and that wasn't something that the Fiend would want; you didn't need to be an adept strategist to understand that one, so I wasn't surprised that Hera was being left out.

Nor was I entirely surprised that it had seemingly forgotten about me since both Jahi and Leone had made themselves rather flashy targets that were drawing most of the Fiend's ire, with the golden clad Demoness trying to close the distance while Leone stood atop a pillar of rock Anput had made for her, wreathed in flame and sending out a myriad of attacks to try and crack through the Fiend's defenses.

Anput wasn't doing as much as she usually was, but upon watching Jahi freeze in the air for a brief second-where she was seemingly staring at empty space doing nothing at all - before being slammed into the sand below, the Jackalkin took up Jahi's mantle in this battle as she darted forwards to engage the Fiend in close quarters as well.

So I wasn't surprised that I had lost most of its attention, and I wasn't going to be arrogant and conceited enough to believe that this Fiend had forgotten about me completely in this short span of time, but considering I was crouching behind the blue skinned, iridescent feathered Fiend and slowly and carefully drawing my mana from my Core and creating a spell, it would seem that the flashy headdress didn't correlate to the Fiend's intellect.

Most of my body was shrouded in a thick yet almost imperceptible layer of mana that would protect me from a good amount of spells and other attacks, while my armor was already of a good enough quality to only make me all the more assured that I could survive at least one blow from a Fiend, at least one blow from a Fiend of this nature.

I wasn't entirely invisible either - that was something that was still far beyond what I was capable of with Wind Magic or Water Magic - but I was partially concealed by making use of both of my innate magic types as well as my understanding of some more advanced science theories that I wasn't sure were entirely known in this world, primarily that bending light through the use of water as a medium can achieve something similar to 'invisibility'.

There was most definitely an actual invisibility spell somewhere out in the world, as well as the enchantment to match, and most definitely something out there was living with an organic, built in invisibility cloak allowing them to become borderline undetectable, but for the here and now I was hoping that those things were all rarer than rare, since I was relying on tricking the Fiend's sense of sight with this spell of mine.

Since I had gotten accustomed to moving without making sound, and I had the ability to walk over 'unstable' ground like sand without leaving behind a trace, as well as my ability to conceal my scent - and technically my 'taste' as well - within my Mana Cloak, I was capable of practically vanishing from everyone's primary senses, but I had no idea how Fiendish senses worked...

I really need to force Cali to give me a textbook to work from for this...

Either way, I was crouching behind the Fiend - barely able to be seen, not able to be heard, smelt, and tasted, and while I could be felt, it was unlikely that someone would be able to do so without those other four senses - charging up a spell that made use of not only my Ice Mana that I had continued to painstakingly ignore, but also the Lust Mana that I had gotten a deeper understanding of last night.

To be accurate, I was using a spell I knew far too intimately to count as something I needed to focus on to create as a way to carry and disperse the actual spell I was trying to make use of, one that worked in ways I was unaccustomed to and worked in ways that required immense control and concentration, which was almost broken by the sight of my lover being buried in the sand.

Even more of those tiny grains of silica began to pile up onto the spot that Jahi had been slammed into, the Fiend trying to make use of both its own magic as well as physics as it buried her alive and tried to crush her beneath the weight of all this sand.

It was both crude but also rather ingenious in how simple it worked, since the Fiend's control over the entire area meant that trying to retrieve the Demoness would be an almost impossible task without defeating the Fiend first, since trying to break through that sand coffin it had laid her into was a failing effort no matter how powerful we were.

Sand was beyond abundant in this location, so anything we removed would just be replaced immediately and then fortified even more than it already was, so what was the purpose in trying to retrieve her directly?

That was why I had almost broken out of my concealment, this singular act causing my entire being to falter as I realized how close I was to dying in multiple ways; if Jahi perished, I would too since she was the holder of my soul, both literally and figuratively, and even if I didn't by some leap of miraculous, divine intervention, I wouldn't be able to keep on living a life that mattered if she died...

I just don't think I could muster up the will to live now that I had everything I ever wanted right within reach, all thanks to a single incredible woman who was perfect for me, even if she herself was nowhere near perfect.

But... the only way I could help her now was to push through this emotional turmoil that was threatening to rend me apart and finish what I had started, my concealment from this Fiend allowing me to do something that I had done to myself and to Leone once before, although it had been by accident.

That one interesting quirk that Lust Mana seemed to have, the way it worked that didn't really seem that obvious or correct since - to almost everyone else - the word 'lust' almost always was sexual in connotation and rarely used for anything else, at least not upon your initial hearing of the word.

That quirk being the 'lust' that drives everyone to do anything at all; more specifically - and honestly what it's name should actually be - desire to live, to breathe, to work towards a goal and achieve something for yourself, for the collective, for the world... that was that fun little quirk that I was beginning to focus on, and whilst I used it last night to amplify the desires everyone had to have sex, right now the best use of that magic was the complete opposite. I wanted to force this Fiend to experience the emptiness of being void of desire in it's entirety, to have all the color and light from it's existence sapped away completely for however long I could manage to catch it by surprise.

So, I poured my mana into this formless spell and molded it to my own desires, giving it shape and purpose even as it's own purpose became... nothing; where my icicle spell relied on logic and symbology to give it shape and purpose, this Lust Mana required my will and

nothing else.

As long as I desired for this formless pink energy to become something, it would do so, at least as long as I was capable of wrangling this almost sentient magic to do what I wanted it to do, which was almost a herculean task as I funneled it into the icicle and aimed it at the Fiend, knowing that I had to get the 'catalyst' close enough to the Fiend for this to work. Boulders continued to appear and splinter apart at the Fiend's discretion, the sand of the desert moved against us at a constant rate, flames flashed inside the sandstorm and burnt everything it touched, turning the sand into something new as it turned into glass, only for it to shatter again as something crashed nearby.

The battlefield was still hectic, but for now, in this small portion of it, a rather unassuming

pinkish blue needle was flying straight at the back of the Fiend, ignoring the winds and producing little sound that could be caught by anyone's hearing thanks to the blasts and explosions happening around us.

All of my hope was inside that little needle as I maintained the connection between me and the pink mist swirling around inside it, using my Lust Mana for the first time inside of a real combat situation that had stakes involved.