He who Fights With Monsters

Chapter 80 947: Second Chance to Make a First Impression

Floating in the air alongside Natala and Jason, Jota watched Kreegle and most of the crew stream out of the dimension ship. Some used the ship's personal flight disks, but many showed off an eclectic mix of personalised devices or used their own powers. The one uniform thing about them was being armed to the teeth, although even in that, there was a lot of variance. The array of potent weapons, armour and magical tools stood in stark contrast to Jason in his floral shirt and straw hat.

"Mr Asano," Jota said, his eyes locked on the avaricious grin of the approaching Kreegle. "As you don't appear kitted out for battle, you may want to…"

He noticed a dark cloud in the spot Jason had just been floating. It dissipated swiftly, revealing a figure in robes the colour of dried blood. There was a sword at his hip, echoing his power as only a soul-bound weapon could. Enshrouding him was a cloak and hood that looked like he'd somehow ripped the energy from a portal to drape around himself. From within the hood a pair of nebulous eyes glowed, casting just enough light to make out the sharp point of a chin.

"…make preparations."

"As you will soon see, Mr Withers, I have prepared quite thoroughly."

Jota watched as the pirates slowed down, becoming more cautious in their approach. They were gathered, not in any tactical array. Jota knew that Kreegle understood the advantage of numbers, but not how to use them. The man was pure thug, not a tactician, as reflected in his poorly plotted mutiny. But tactics or not, there were twenty three of them, approaching through the air.

Jota glanced back at Jason. He looked more the villain than the pirates come to kill him. His alien eyes stared at Kreegle and the mutinous crew like a spider watching a fly. Asano let his aura spread like a web, giving Jota his first real look at it. It confirmed that the scars on Asano's face weren't affectations, but marks of suffering and struggle. Of challenges faced and overcome. Jota was very familiar with pirates whose life was spent preying on the weak. Asano had the aura of a man who preyed on the strong.

With just a glance at Asano's aura, Jota knew he'd made the right choice. If Asano's companions were anything like the man himself, the only question was how many pirates would still be alive an hour from now. This was only reinforced when he noticed the most startling thing about Asano's aura: for all its power, it wasn't, strictly speaking, the real thing. Rather than a direct projection of the soul, Asano's aura was filtered from some other place. The body floating in front of him was an avatar.

"You're not even really here, are you?" Jota asked.

"No."

"So, our mission really was impossible from the start."

"I wouldn't use the word impossible. The impossible isn't as out of reach as most believe."

"Then what word would you use?"

"Doomed."

"They might be less doomed if your friends don't come out soon."

"There are many eyes on us, Mr Withers, and I have an oh-so-rare second chance to make a first impression. Before my friends join us, I have a point to make to the people who invited you here." Jota looked back and forth between the horde of gold rankers that were his now-former crew, and Jason Asano, facing them all alone. He used his disk to back calmly but swiftly away.

***

Lenora's bunker was silent as a tomb as she and her staff watched the events unfold. A wall of screens showed footage from the many surveillance drones and emplaced cameras, even tapping into the media drones as well. She had no idea how many people were watching the same thing, in other bunkers and across the planet via streamed feeds.

While the audio pickups got nothing but fuzz, the footage was crystal clear, aside from some blurring of the mouths. Lenora glanced at her lip-reading expert, who shrugged helplessly. Asano looked almost unchanged from the archival pictures Lenora had been going over for the last few days. If anything, he looked slightly younger, his features refined by another rank up. Even his lost-tourist manner of dress remained intact.

He spoke peacefully with the two invaders, who were human at least in appearance. Their clothes were shades of grey and off white, loose but practical. The muted colours were punctuated by armoured panels etched with intricate sigils. They didn't fit with the Earth conception of pirates, but Lenora would have been surprised if they had.

That surprise came when the rest of the pirates came streaming from their ship, looking every part the gang of space thugs. They were an odd mix of fantastical and technological, from glowing daggers tucked into belts to backpacks sprouting robot wings. Unlike the pair who had approached Asano diplomatically, these new pirates were plainly intent on violence. Even so, they had slowed their approach, not charging in headlong.

Asano had changed his own attire for the imminent fight, although none of the promised companions emerged from his vessel. He was now garbed as the cloak-wearing death dealer he was known as, although there were differences from the footage she'd seen. His cloak had always been made of supernatural darkness, rather than any physical material, but this was on another level. It looked like he'd ripped a hole in the universe and draped it about himself. It was pulled together at the front, making him look like a living portal.

The first two pirates had clearly come around to Asano's side, backing off before the fight began. Asano's eyes turned from the pirates to look around at the sky. Wherever his gaze fell, the sky turned dark until the city had gone from day to a strange magical night. There were no stars, but lingering echoes of sunlight left the city in an unnatural gloom. Lenora liked to maintain a stern professionalism in front of the staff, but even she had her limits.

"Did he just BLOT OUT THE GOD DAMN SUN?"

"Uh, it looks that way, boss," Barry said, equally wide-eyed.

"How?"

"By looking at it, from what I could see."

The pirates on the monitor were unfazed, compared to their observers. With Asano now alone, they moved to the attack. The lead pirate conjured a harpoon the size of an electricity pole and hurled it at Asano, who gave no reaction. The pole shot through the cloak that wrapped his entire body, revealing it as the portal it appeared to be. The monitoring algorithm even pulled up a shot from one of the drones, showing the spear flying through whatever void lay beyond.

This took the pirate aback for only a moment, but it was a moment Asano used. Shadowy figures poured from the void cloak, all but invisible in the gloom. The algorithm estimated two hundred or more, data points appearing on one of the monitors, but Lenora couldn't make out much of what was happening. The pirates didn't share her confusion, immediately unleashing attacks at the shadows.

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The observation suite in the command centre had an array of useful tools to monitor the fight. Composite shots from multiple cameras, event tracking and a variety of replay functions were managed by a mix of human operators and sophisticated algorithms. They picked out critical moments from the gloom and violence playing out at gold-rank speeds.

The computer started attempting to map out the dark battle, using wire frame overlays and colour blocking to try and clarify what was happening. Asano had vanished in the chaos, but one of the staff wound back the footage. They watched a replay of his cloak turning dark, allowing him to disappear into the gloom.

Lenora had trouble tracking the fight, even slowed down, curated and enhanced. It was a storm of dancing shadows, weapons blazing with light and spells flashing with power. The pirates attempted to cut down the shadows to hunt their elusive quarry, but the shadows kept reforming. They did not take attacks one-sidedly, either, sprouting strange arms that left them looking like squat, sinister trees. At the end of each arm was a gleaming black and red dagger.

The video footage caught glimpses of Asano in the melee, the algorithms slowing and highlighting any time he appeared. Like the shadows he was hiding amongst, he had sprouted the twisted shadow arms that were attacking the pirates. His key identifier was the sword wielded by one of his shadow arms, his real ones hidden beneath the cloak still fully wrapped around him.

The daggers held by the shadows were black with ruby-like embellishments. The ornate weapons looked better suited for ritualistic sacrifice than frenetic combat, and the results of their attacks bore that out. While the pirates were slashed, time and again, the cuts were shallow and superficial.

Even Jason's sword accomplished little in terms of wounding his enemies. It shared a colour scheme with the daggers, with a black blade etched with glowing red sigils, but the design was simple and practical. That practicality did not translate to deeper wounds, however, as it flicked around wildly but never bit deep into flesh.

Lenora was aware of how Jason fought, so she knew that each of those seemingly minor wounds left blight and poison in their wake. It was not helping him in the moment, however, when the pirates at least seemed unaffected.

"Is he going to fight them all alone?" one of Lenora's staff wondered aloud.

Lenora considered the point well made. Impressive as it was that he hadn't been dogpiled immediately, the fight was far from one-sided. The gold-rank enemies were clearly not at Asano's level, but they left any of Earth's gold-rankers in the dust. The gloom was clearly not affecting them as badly as it was the observers of the fight, and they were clearly adapting, finding and striking at Asano with more frequency. The algorithm picked up each hit on Asano, putting it into a playlist screening on one of the side monitors. None of the hits were serious, but the pressure on Asano was mounting.

***

Jason had spent years in his soul fighting hordes of nameless great astral beings, and that experience paid off as he took the fight to the pirates. Using his aura to treat the air like solid ground, he danced through them, one shadow amongst many. His blade was a light touch, delivering the afflictions that would ultimately grant him victory. There were a couple of healers in the group, but Jason's afflictions not only absorbed the healing but inflicted more damage as they were removed. To push through his afflictions, the pirate healers would have to make things worse before they could make them better.

The individual skill of Jason's enemies was better than he had expected, but he could see how a life of piracy had shaped them. Used to soft targets and punching down, they were not maximising their advantages. Their chief advantage was numerical, but these were selfish and untrusting mutineers. Always watching their fellows for a dagger in the back, the lack of group tactics allowed Jason to use their numbers against them. He came and went, sowing discord and confusion, one more fleeting shadow amongst many. He suspected that if Jota had still been in charge, the fight would have been much harder, forcing Jason to call on his friends for a rescue.

While they failed to pin Jason down, not everything was going his way. The pirates did have skills and were learning faster than he'd like, cataloguing his tricks and adapting to them. More and more, they would anticipate an attack, or spot the subtle differences between him and the Shades, allowing them to counterattack.

More than anything, it was their dizzying array of magical devices that caught him out. On the simpler side was armour that reacted to any attack, usually with a force blast or gout of flame. More complex devices included nanowire nets or small constructs that protected the blind spots of their owners.

Jason's Amulet of the Dark Guardian was working overtime as more attacks landed. For every affliction his powers delivered, the amulet added to a shield that weakened attacks against him. As the shield energy was consumed, it was converted, in turn, to health regeneration. It wasn't enough to keep Jason functional alone, but was just one of several effects that allowed Jason to heal most wounds in moments.

The Leech Bite special attack delivered a new affliction at gold rank, Thief of Life. Although it did not stack like many of his powers, it drained a small amount of life from each affected enemy, feeding it to Jason. Like all his health regeneration, it was further enhanced by the blood robes Colin conjured for him.

The bloodthirsty familiar was making his own efforts, Jason using Colin in his original swarm state. He left clutches of the toothy leeches on each enemy he clashed with, delivering yet more afflictions and life drain. This left distracted pirates trying to remove them, with varying levels of success. Scraping and plucking accomplished little as the clutches self-replicated using the very life force they were draining. A few pirates did manage to escape the leeches, often by blasting themselves with self-destructive area attacks.

The last familiar, Gordon, remained inside Jason for two reasons. One was that his distinctive orbs would draw too much attention. The other was that, when not manifested, he enhanced Jason's aura strength. Jason aura was strong already, but at silver it had been an utterly overwhelming force, relative to his rank. The same was not true at gold, as the avatar was linked to Jason's soul but did not contain it.

Even so, Jason was single-handedly negating the biggest advantage the pirates should have had: more than twenty aura powers, variously enhancing them and diminishing him. He was suppressing every single one of them, however, through a combination of native strength, the boost from Gordon and Jason's own aura power.

As the name suggested, Hegemony was an aura power based around dominance. Within Jason's hegemonic power, he made the rules. That manifested in various ways across the ranks, most notably in how any attack on him or his allies became a sin. At gold rank, he gained the power to determine whose aura powers were allowed to flourish and whose were crushed beneath his boot. He was still required to suppress auras using his well-honed strength and mastery, but he could now affect every other aura with his full power simultaneously, instead of needing to split it. As a result not a single pirate was bringing their aura power to bear.

The battle continued, Jason dosing the pirates with his affliction suite, while they pushed him closer and closer to the edge. They were catching him out faster and hitting him harder, drawing closer to a definitive hit. If they could ring his bell hard enough, they could dogpile and finish him with their numbers.

Slowly but surely, the tide was turning against Jason. The pirates were showing signs of their afflictions, but he was getting no kills off the gold rankers. Without weaker minions to kill and drain for buffs, he was not growing in strength, one of the weakness of his combat style.

He took a pummelling after he was caught by a harpoon that affected him with the Inescapable condition, shutting down his shadow jumping so long as the harpoon remained embedded in his body. The pirates would not give him the chance to yank it out, pouncing on him as they smelled blood in the water.

As Jason sent out a chat message, the pirate leader yanked on the chain affixed to the end of the harpoon. Face was split in a savage grin of triumph as he yanked on the chain with strength akin to Humphrey or Taika, pulling Jason towards him. With Jason's face shrouded in darkness, the pirate failed to see Jason grinning back. What he did spot was a crystal rod that grew out of his own chest armour.

He looked down in confusion at the offending item. Tethers of force shot out, connecting to each member of the pirate crew. In that moment of confusion, Jason tore the harpoon out of his body, the brutal tines pulling blood, bone and flesh with it. With a gaping hole in his torso, Jason vanished, leaving only a floating, empty cloak.