Chapter 318 – Vs Ankleshanker Round 2 [Nia POV]

“Finally, a fistfight,” Jeff announced above as Nia rode the tingling mana platform down to the arena.

 The rim of her long skirt fluttering in the still air of the arena, she listened to the lizardman, who was afraid of her powers, respond. “They both use weapons.”

“Semantics,” the man with the funnily tall hair waved off.

“No, not semantics. The difference between choices of weapon is big enough to give birth to sayings,” Dra insisted.

“All I am saying is that I look forward to a melee instead of these constant mage battles,” Jeff defended his position.

“Then just say that,” the lizardman shook his head and took a sip of ginger ale.

If Nia had anything to say about it, this fight wouldn’t be particularly long. The fighting style she had been taught was to grasp at victory as soon as it was available.

Now her instructor had insisted on them training her physical body a lot, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t made her own plans for how to go about this battle. Everyone had been saying how low her chances were to win here.

She couldn’t exactly say she agreed, but they seemed so convinced that she just went with their assumption until now.

“I am going to cut you up!” Ankleshanker announced, brandishing his knives.

“I do not consent to that. I am not into knifeplay,” Nia answered as blankly as ever. That did seem to throw the goblin off the rails a bit.

“That’s not how this works, you should brandish your own battlecry, for fuck’s sake,” he complained. She cocked her head.

Realizing she didn’t have the cards John gave her, she simply stated out loud, “I am confused. Why?”

“Because if I am not assassinating people for once, I can at least enjoy some banter,” the unpleasant voice said.

“We would like to remind everyone that Fateweaving DOES protect Ankleshanker from simply getting deleted by Nia’s powers,” the sober commentator above announced as the biome wheel started spinning; “Not that I think she can just do that without fading herself in the process. Just saying for all our concerned magical races out there.”

Nia barely placed any attention with the biome lottery. The result was as important to her strategy as toilet paper was likely to create a papercut.

“I will defeat you?” Nia suggested as the crowd started their countdown.

“No! Say something cool and thematic!” Ankleshanker threw his short arms into the air; “Like: I will send you to the void!”

“It’s nice over there, do you want to go?” the blank’s answer caused the assassin to groan.

“I am going to enjoy stabbing you,” he announced.

“You won’t get the chance,” Nia replied with what was, to the best of her knowledge, fact.

“Now that was actually pretty go-UARGH!” the countdown hit zero. Ankleshanker, sure of his victory, wanted to finish their little talk.

A tactical misstep.

Nia quickly wove together her energies into a pattern that was meant to selectively target only certain kinds of magic. She had been practicing this whenever she had gotten the chance.

It ripped out in a wave that washed out all blue and red from the world around her, leaving everything weirdly green tinged. It connected, burying the goblin under a pile of his own weaponry and clothes as they sized up to their maximum.

Then she quickly bridged the one step distance between them and thrust her black spear at the goblin’s head. As he was a being of magic that did him in pretty much immediately, and the Fateweaving transported him away before his being could be eradicated.

‘Why was everyone so afraid I would lose?’ Nia asked herself and spun towards the exit.

She returned back up to the platform under the stunned silence of the audience. “What… what just happened?” the pink-haired girl that had the contract with John that was also his girlfriend that also had a warm and cuddly cat as her elemental asked Nia when she arrived back at the top.

“I made his weapons go up to their maximum size and then stabbed him,” Nia answered the question. She didn’t take it hard on Rave that she missed it; in her situation, Nia would have been preoccupied sniffing John and patting the cat.

“We saw that, you bleached blonde bimbo,” the scary, angry, tiny girl cursed at her. Nia once heard that small people were always angry for a certain reason.

“Is it true that you are closer to Satan?” she asked after looking into Thana’s violet eyes for several seconds.

“What – the – fuck?!” Thana asked and started saying things that would have made a lot of small, religious animals very sad if they could have understood it. Nia couldn’t help but phase out and imagine baby seals in priestly robes and nuns habits.

“No, but seriously,” John, the guy who smelled amazing, spoke up. Nia stepped closely up to him, reminded of his existence, to be closer to that smell. She would have to thank Nathalia later for making him smell this amazing.

“How did you do that whole ‘flood him with his own weapons’ thing. Explain it to me slowly,” he requested.

“Size changing enchants have three sub-enchants. One for scaling up, one for scaling down and one for noticing what size is needed. I removed the scaling down and the noticing, so all the weapons and clothes could do were scale up. So that’s what they did,” Nia did as he wanted and then, having smelled enough of him for the moment, went to look for Copernicus.

“The partial elimination of magic should be far above what you are capable of,” Lydia said. “That is something only a chosen few blanks ever did.”

“Yes.” Nia didn’t see why that was important. She could do it, so what?

“And you just… did that?” John asked further, looking after her as she moved.

“Size changing enchantments are standardized. I trained for this whenever you or my instructor didn’t force me to run around and gave the depleted daggers to Momo,” Nia said.

“And here I thought I was just getting the Artificial Spirit equivalent of chocolate…” Momo mumbled while reading on the table, completely unfazed otherwise. Nia wasn’t quite sure why it couldn’t have been both. Just tossing them away would have been a major waste.

“…Wait, are you saying that the Horned Rat was wrong?” John asked, coming slightly closer.

“All of you were, yes,” Nia answered blankly.

“Well, why did you insist on going last if you could have beat him this easily?” the princess that was her first friend demanded to know.

Nia tip-tapped over and kissed her. She felt a bit faded. Lydia let it happen for a second before pushing her off and saying, “And now I have to issue a public statement because of you.”

“John said we should do what we want,” Nia cocked her head.

“…We will deal with that line of reasoning later. Answer my question first, Nia,” Lydia started sounding a bit demanding.

“My instructor insisted on me needing every single day to train my body, he is usually right,” the blank answered. “It is good to have back-up plans.” She personally felt that all of this talk was highly unnecessary. She had won. “Can I go search for a cat now?” she asked.

“No, I want to understand exactly how this happened,” Lydia spoke and crossed her arms. “If you were this capable, why didn’t you tell us?”

“You never asked,” Nia stated, going over to the bag John had gifted her, opening the metal cassette and then shuffling through. What was she feeling right now? Irritation? Yes, that sounded about right. She showed the card to Lydia.

John had informed them about this new system, which had generally found fans amongst these people she regarded as her friends. Except for Thana, she was scary, and she had laughed at her for these cards. Long and loud had she laughed.

But that was beside the point.

The braided princess opened her mouth in what seemed to be the start of a five-minute lecture about the world. “Okay, let’s break the situation down,” John stepped in; “We assumed that Nia would lose because we underestimated how she could use her powers, Nia is as bad at communicating as ever, and Richard was wrong about something.”

“Why do ya care so much about that last thing?” Rave spoke what Nia was thinking but felt hard to put into such precise words.

“Because I will never let him forget about this,” the Gamer gloated to himself. “I am allowed my vices. Still, Nia, if you could, would you tell us how you can do that sort of stuff? From what I know about anti-magic, it just eliminates magic.”

“I can try,” Nia said and held up her Uncertainty. Everyone looked at her anticipatingly then she took a deep breath to get all of it out at once. “Magic is a ball in the upside down corridor of existence that hangs in the point of overlap of all nothingness as all nothing factually is all nothing is something and emptiness is void but magic is a ball because it is a ball the vetr’-waves interact interchangeably with the incarnation of specific hives upon the electronic sub-structure of being that acts, lives in and feeds itself in and on the void between atoms and thus replaces everything with swinging nirvana screaming into the shape of blue butterflies that represent that first wave and…”

“Stop!” Lydia said, rubbing her temples- “Can you say this comprehensively instead of using weird metaphors?”

“Magic is [

],” she said and everyone held their ears as if they had just been blasted with incredibly loud, high-pitched interference sounds.

‘Nia,”Nia,( Nia,” Nia, Nia,’) the world became less and less colourful as she was pulled to the other side by the great empty one. His form was the shifting monolith of complete stillness, like the frozen ripple of a pond in the turbulent ocean, and he waved his shape with amusement.

“Th[ey ‘cannot quite’ ‘make (sense of what you’ are) trying to” tell them]. The laws of sound were completely anulled for him. His voice was just there, etched into the quietness of endless white snow. [“You won’t be] able to tell them no matter how hard (you try). You show them a piece, if you were stronger.”

“I understand,” Nia said.

“\/\/ I-I y don’t you stay forever? (we [all] can make sense of you.”

“No. I like this side,” she answered.

“Such. conviction. Another time, then [“look” out for that dress],” the Great Empty One bubbled out of the textures of the colourless world as she slipped back over to her side, the one most people regarded as more real than the one that had just tried to claim her because she said too much.

A process greatly put at ease by John grabbing her. “That was the second worst headache I had in my life,” he said between gnashed teeth. “Right between Undine ripping SEP out of me and Observing the Metracana. Anyway, you were fading a lot there.”

He said that last part kind of nonchalantly, but even Nia could hear that it was the actual crux of his words. “The Great One told me that telling you was futile, so I won’t try again,” Nia stated as blankly as ever and grabbed the ‘Sorry’ card.

“I don’t even want you to, for fuck’s sake,” Thana grumbled. “Just do THAT next time you want to surprise an opponent.”

“No,” Nia said; “It pulls me over dangerously far. I won’t do that again.”

“Yes, do not,” Rave said, shaking her head to chase away the lingering pain as if it was a buzzing fly. “You are quirky, I like quirky.”

That was nice to hear. “I will go find a cat now,” Nia put the bag over her shoulder and walked away. She felt like patting a grey one.

Lydia: 8, Maximillian: 8