No, rather than “wrapped around,” it was more like they ate the bullets whole. If I’d tried to strike them down with Blade Mode, Brunhild might’ve been consumed by the feathers...
Good thing I realized something was off.
The slimy gold substance plopped to the ground, wriggled about for a moment, and then took shape as feathers again and returned to Gould’s wings.
They’d definitely eaten the bullets—there was nothing left where they had been.
“Is that something you made with a Gluttony Slime that you turned into orichalcum?” I asked the Gollem directly. He looked slightly surprised at my question—what a humanlike crown. Even Gold struggled to express that much.
Was this the difference between a Gollem that had been initialized and one that hadn’t? Well, assuming that they were both the same kind of unit, of course. If that was the case, just how many experience points were in those parts that were wiped? Whatever Gold had lost, Gould still had. There was the chance he could fight like a human with sneak attacks, feints, and rear assaults.
We’ve definitely gotta be careful here...
“You are dangerous. You will interfere with our plans. I will now eliminate you. Gluttony Feather.”
It seemed he’d decided to stop holding back, since this time several feathers detached from two of the wings and homed in on me again.
Hmph, now that I know what it is, I can deal with it easily!
“[Gate].”
I deployed a gate in front of me, teleporting every last feather he threw my way. I’d sent them to the uninhabited wastelands of Isengard. Gates couldn’t be opened through a barrier, but if it was somewhere that was visible, or if you yourself were inside the barrier, it was perfectly possible to open one.
“What a shame, you’ve run out of so much of your ammo. Why not fire the rest?” I taunted. Most of the feathers were now missing from those two wings. I’d thought to myself that he wouldn’t be able to fly if he used the rest of them, but when I paid closer attention, I noticed that he wasn’t even flapping the wings to stay afloat to begin with, so it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Just then, the wings on Gould’s back began shining a dark gold.
“Reverse.”
“What?”
Suddenly, the [Gate] that I’d closed opened back up, and the feathers shot back through and returned to Gould’s wings. I felt like I was watching a movie in reverse.
“No... Is that your crown skill?!”
Crown skills were the abilities inherent to the crown Gollems, a power that required their master to pay a price. Doc Babylon had said that a gold crown made of a Slime that’d been turned into orichalcum could take the price of a crown skill like a mana tank. If what was on his back was what we suspected, then it must have been taking the price for him.
But Gold said that the gold crown didn’t have a crown skill. What was going on? Did his memory of it disappear together with the initialization process?
Well, whatever the reason, Gould could clearly use a crown skill, and it was the exact same type of time manipulation as the black crown, Noir. I was pretty sure he couldn’t use it at will, however. If he could, he’d have used it plenty of times before now. It was also worth noting that I wasn’t personally affected by the reversal of time.
Either he could only use it on himself, or there was a limit to its range. Or...he didn’t want to pay too big of a price. As if to confirm my theory, several of the golden feathers lost their sheen and fell to the ground before crumbling into dust. Was that the price of the crown skill?
In other words, each one of those feathers was a substitute that paid for the use of the crown skill. Without those, the only thing left he could use to pay the price with was his own body. No wonder he had to be careful about how he used it.
“Still, time manipulation is a scary beast...”
I could use all kinds of space-time magic; [Gate], [Storage], and [Accel] all came under that. If I asked the time spirits nicely, they might be willing to fiddle with time a bit for me as well, though I was pretty sure the range would be limited to the area around me. That said, it went without saying that the only one who had the power to affect the whole world was the goddess of space-time herself, Grandma Tokie.
It was likely Gould could only affect time related to his own body, or any area that he had control over. There was no way he’d be able to stop or slow down my time, right? Even without thinking about the range he could control, I knew he couldn’t use it so freely when he had to consider the price as well. The only reason he’d used it here was because he’d weighed the possibility of losing a large number of feathers against losing a few and decided it would be much better to rewind time.
Still, if we inflicted a fatal blow on him and he just turned back time, it would be as if we never did a thing to him. Though, if we were stubborn enough about it, he’d eventually run out of feathers to use...
“This one’s gonna be a hassle to take down.”
I tightly gripped Brunhild and glared at the small gold Gollem floating in the air.