Ruthless V5Ch36-The Psychic King Part 2

When the first ball of lightning hit, it was as if the battle had just begun for the first time in earnest.

A ball of white-hot electricity the size of three men tore a massive gap in the Panther Army lines, striking at incredible speed and incinerating over a dozen Pantherfolk on the spot.

More such blows followed, as the Psychic King rained heaven’s wrath upon his enemies.

The Panther Army shifted to simply dodging and trying to scamper up the hill in between avoiding the terrible projectiles. They were incredibly agile, and even though the Psychic King’s entourage shifted their gun and arrow fire to restricting their movements, the Pantherfolk took a lot less damage from the bullets and arrows than they would have simply staying in position for the huge orbs of lightning and water.

Still, within thirty seconds, James estimated that about fifty Pantherfolk died. That had been only four orbs of lightning.

The Psychic King had eight more hovering overhead, and there were more clouds for him to draw from. The power around his body, that he was using to collect the projectiles, was only slowly diminishing—probably substantially helped by the fact that his environment itself was favorable. The home terrain advantage was a killer.

As the next mighty blow came crashing down, however, an answering blast of lightning came from the Pantherfolk side. The lightning was roughly equally powerful to the Psychic King’s ball, and the two attacks seemed to cancel each other out in midair just above the hillside. James looked to his sides and saw dozens of Mages, now all working on the same thing. The Panther Army had begun its counter attack.

Over the next several minutes, as the Psychic King threw every ball of lightning within reach, the Pantherfolk Mages countered him at every point. At first, there were some casualties—soldiers who were blown up from being too close to the collision between magical attacks on the hillside. This was a smaller number than it would have been if the balls of lightning had simply been allowed to tear through the Panther Army’s lines, making the interceptions still worthwhile. But soon, the counters became better and quicker, blocking the projectiles higher in the air before they could draw near the hill. At that point, no Pantherfolk were even dying from the Psychic King’s efforts. He had been thoroughly neutralized.

And on the hillside, the Pantherfolk had quickly formed up again and continued to advance.

The Panther Queen remained behind the lines, but those lines had shifted further and further up the hill in the absence of giant balls of lightning crashing down on them. The Panther Army, which had just focused on advancing when they were further down the hill, even began letting loose with their own projectiles, throwing spears and shooting arrows back at the humans who had never stopped firing at them.

Soon the two forces were close enough to see the whites of each other’s eyes—if the Pantherfolk eyes had possessed whites.

At last, the Psychic King seemed quite pressured by the sheer proximity of the Pantherfolk. Though he was at the very peak of the hill and had not directly been targeted yet, he looked to James like the squishy wizard type, ill-suited to taking even a single blow from the big cats he had picked a fight with. Several of those closest to the Ruler changed positions to block him from any direct missiles that might be thrown his way. James saw the color of the Mana around the Psychic King’s body shifting as he changed the underlying affinity to the clear affinity that James had also used before. He was giving up on lightning and switching to…

Hmm. That’s a pretty rare version of magic, isn’t it? he thought.

Sure enough, a moment later, the tempo of the battle seemed to change again. The first Pantherfolk entered melee range with the front row of humans. Each side swung their weapons, and they both landed. The humans drew blood with their axes and swords, while the Pantherfolk seemed to have struck an invisible wall.

There were two more such exchanges before it was obvious to the Panther Army what was happening. Then the Panther Queen, who had stood back, almost inactive, for most of the battle, used an ability James had seen before. The aura around every Pantherfolk’s body suddenly noticeably intensified, and many of the began fighting with incredibly long, extended claws—claws that now, with the Panther Queen’s power active, visibly drained energy from the Psychic King’s invisible barriers with each contact.

Soon, the claw strikes began cutting through the barriers and into flesh and bone, though the humans, still under the influence of the Psychic King, did not bother crying out in pain or retreating from the deadly blows. They simply continued fighting in ominous silence, like zombies.

James was almost completely certain the Panther Army’s collective ability was something the Panther Queen was giving the other monsters, because otherwise, there would have been no sense in so many of them dying from every blast of lightning earlier in the fight. If they all simply naturally had an ability that could even partially absorb Mana, that would have been a strong counter to the attacks. It would have at least weakened the impact and caused the lightning balls to kill far fewer people on her side.

This must be a very time-limited Skill, James assessed. She only pulls it out as a clincher. Probably burns through resources quickly…

As the enemy’s defenses began to weaken, the Panther Queen burst through the center of her lines and into the middle of the enemy’s formation, where she switched from barely participating to ripping humans asunder by the handful, cleaving her way through bodies on her way to the Psychic King. Her body looked stronger and far more powerful than before, as her muscle mass had bulked up to three times its usual size, and she was enveloped in a strong, thick aura.

Before she could fully cut her path through, however, the humans in front of the Psychic King parted, and the man, now only twenty feet away from the Panther Queen, finally made eye contact with her. He was visibly sweaty and looked like the fight had drained more from him than just Mana or Stamina. Some unquantifiable resource—or perhaps some Stat than James had simply never unlocked— had also been pulled from him over the course of the battle as he did everything he could to counter the Panther Army’s superior force.

The Psychic King raised a hand, and everyone on his side stopped fighting. More blows landed from the Panther Army, butchering a dozen humans who no longer resisted, before the Panther Queen also raised a hand and—James had to guess—seemingly sent out a telepathic message ordering those with her to stand down.

“I appreciate your reasonable approach to battle,” the Psychic King breathed. “You fought well, and—”

“You cannot save yourself,” the Panther Queen growled. “Kneel before me now, and I will do you the favor of making your death quick and sparing any from your side who you care about.”

“We’ll see about that,” the human Ruler replied. His lips twitched in a half-smile for a moment, and James saw a glint in his eye and knew what was about to happen.

The two Rulers’ bodies froze in place. James recognized that there was an inner battle occurring, one that would determine who the true winner of this conflict was. It would be absurd if the Panther Army failed to win this, after they had successfully ascended the hill, killed a large number of the humans, and whittled the Psychic King down physically and mentally.

But that was Rulers for you. Their sides rose and fell with them, in this new world, that meant a duel between a King and Queen could undo the work of two armies.

They stood still for only a few seconds. Then the Psychic King’s nose began to bleed, and his head snapped back as if he’d been kicked in the face by a mule.

“Well do—”

His words were cut off as the Panther Queen extended two blade-like claws and stabbed him through both sides of the chest. If James had to guess, both lungs had just been punctured. The Psychic King’s mouth began to trickle blood, and every breath seemed to come with ragged, gasping motions, his whole body heaving and shuddering with the effort.

He tried to whisper something, but even James could not hear what he was saying. The Queen bent close and tilted her head so that she could listen to his final words.

“Gotcha, bitch!”

As the Panther Queen looked confused for a split second, the Psychic King’s mouth twisted in a creepy grin. A massive haze of Mana flared up around him, and without any further warning, his body exploded outward, a suicide with great force behind it.

James saw several of those closest to the Psychic King, who he had been using as human shields fall to the ground with pieces of his arm bones and leg bones sticking out of their sides and heads. They would never rise again.

The Panther Queen, meanwhile, staggered back, bits of the Psychic King’s rib cage protruding from her chest and pieces of his skull sticking out of her muzzle and neck. She breathed heavily, her mouth opening and closing randomly, her head showing a shocked expression, as if that explosion to the face had been one of the most unpleasant and surprising experiences of her life.

James supposed it probably had been.

But none of her wounds were deep. Her increased muscle mass and thick aura seemed to have protected her from the worst of the explosion that had essentially ripped everyone else near the zone of impact apart, striking a half-dozen humans and killing all those affected but the Panther Queen instantly.

Already, her wounds were healing—her body’s healing ability was actually pushing the chunks of bone out of her flesh as her form sought to make itself completely whole again.

Mankind’s creativity and malice knows no limits. This experience should have taught her never to underestimate us. Never to fuck with us unnecessarily. But it seems like she has yet to learn that lesson…

“This battle is over!” shouted one of the stronger Mages who James had noticed prominently in the last battle—and also in this one. “We’ve won!”

The humans all around—the roughly half of them who had survived—shuddered and seemed to come alive again as if waking from a sleepwalking episode. They looked all around themselves and raised or lowered weapons, depending on their character, but no one moved to strike. The odds were too clearly one-sided, and they also seemed to have something of a hangover from having been mind-controlled by the Psychic King. The collared nonhumans similarly did not raise any resistance, though unlike the humans, they did not even dare to raise their eyes and look at the overwhelming force that now surrounded them.

The Pantherfolk had outnumbered the humans from the beginning, but they had ultimately lost significantly fewer soldiers than the humans had, mainly because the fight progressed to melee fairly quickly, and that had been where most of the casualties occurred. Now, where they had been outnumbered three or four to one, it was close to seven or eight to one. The losses were not entirely disproportionate, but the Psychic King’s army simply needed their people more.

Now the survivors stood shuddering, looking like they were already cowed prisoners rather than the remnant of a once deadly army.

Mind control is a hell of a thing to do to a group of people like this, James thought, not considering the fact that he had more than one Skill especially intended to influence others’ minds.

The Panther Queen seemed to finally get a hold of herself and regain her ability to speak.

“Congratulations!” she said in a raised voice. “You have all been liberated by the Panther Army. Now, rather than serving the despotic Psychic King, you will serve me.” Her tone of magnanimity made James chuckle silently. Then she turned her head to the side, addressing her army. “Remove the collars from our brethren, and put them on the humans!”

That stopped his laughter.

And James watched as the process of freeing the nonhumans and apparently enslaving the humans took place with mixed feelings. On the one hand, this conflict seemed from all of the context clues to have been the fault of the humans, and the Psychic King had been a real piece of work. On the other hand, the Psychic King also seemed to have been controlling or at least manipulating his own side rather than them following him willingly. And, of course, James was rather fond of humans as a general rule.

In the end, as the dream began to fade, he could only shake his head. It didn’t matter what his moral judgment was, only the end result.

And the end result for him was that he had learned a lot, both about the Panther Queen and Panther Army’s capabilities and their preferred fighting methods. It was wonderful what seeing a battle against a force in an open space could show you.

He had learned that the Panther Queen did not really show any flashy Skills in the midst of a full scale battle that she hadn’t shown in the siege. He had seen that she was more of a close combat beast—an absolute nightmare to have a slugfest with, considering her durability in tanking that point blank explosion. And she had demonstrated that she was susceptible to mental influences, but her brain was too strong to be dominated easily by mind control, even from someone who seemed to have been far more specialized in that area than James was.

The backlash from even attempting mind control on her had left the Psychic King bleeding from the nose—from the brain?—and apparently defenseless when she launched her next strike.

There’s one thing I know for absolute certain after that show she put on, though, James thought. I’m definitely coming back here…