There was, of course, a reason I was doing so much better now than I had been earlier. You see, manually activating an Art had more benefits than just expanding the Art’s range and increasing its damage. For one thing, as long as a player knew the proper motion to trace and had the proper amount of MP, they could use advanced Arts even before their character was able to learn them. In addition, if you manually activated an Art, you could use abilities outside of those tied to your weapon class. There were a good number of Arts that absolutely required that you have a specific weapon-type equipped, but even so, this ability expanded a player’s repertoire of usable Arts by a significant margin.
Shockingly enough, those abilities were only the very beginning of what manual activation had to offer a player. The method’s true strength lay elsewhere, due to a special interaction it had with a Thief-class skill called Arts Plus. When used alone, Arts Plus allowed the user to increase the power of any Art they used. To keep things balanced, the skill also doubled the MP cost of said Art. If Arts Plus was used in tandem with manual activation, however, the skill gained the ability to stack Arts together and multiply their damage.
Now, normally you couldn’t activate two Arts at once outside of the set combinations already in BB, but if the first Art you activated ended in the same gesture as the second Art began with, you could activate the Arts Plus skill in between the two and reset the game’s Art parser. This meant that the final move would benefit from both the initial and ending Art’s damage multipliers.
For example, you could start off a combo by activating an Art called Cross Slash, which is made up of two gestures—a vertical movement which by itself would activate an Art called Vertical Slash, and a horizontal movement which by itself would activate an Art called Horizontal Slash. You could then follow up Cross Slash with an Art called Bisect, which consisted of the horizontal movement that would activate Horizontal Slash used twice. If you used the Arts Plus skill after Cross Slash’s initial vertical gesture but before its final horizontal gesture, you could fool the Art parser into chaining together any second Art as long as it began with the same horizontal movement. As Bisect was made up of two horizontal movements, it would be the perfect Art for this particular combo.
It was only by using this quirk of the game engine to chain together the damage multipliers of several Arts that I was able to damage the doom demon despite its much higher stats. That being said...
I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.
Chaining Arts together in the way I had had burnt through a great deal of my mana—Arts Plus doubled the MP cost of every individual Art, and since I was using two at once I’d essentially been using four times the MP I would for a regular attack. To make matters worse, all Arts had a cooldown which ranged from a few dozen seconds to a few minutes. If I didn’t keep an eye on which Arts I used when, I could end up trying to activate an Art during the set amount of time it was unusable, leaving myself wide open to the doom demon’s attacks. A mistake like that could very easily lead to my death.
To be frank, the only reason I’d even managed to make it this far was because I’d buffed myself up with the consumables I’d gathered back in the Wyvern’s Promenade. Without them, I’d have already run out of mana and the monster would have killed me. That said...even with the additional boost, I was starting to run pretty low on MP. It didn’t help that this was the first real life-or-death struggle I’d ever been in, and I was starting to struggle to remain focused enough to keep myself out of danger. Every time I dodged an Art by the skin of my teeth, every time I barely managed to parry an attack, I could feel my nerves fraying. The pressure to not make a mistake was overwhelming.
The exhilarated rush I’d felt before as I’d run circles around the doom demon was now starting to wane. Exhaustion swelled in its wake, sending my mind spinning. My limbs felt oddly light and yet incredibly heavy at the same time.
Is any of this even real? I wondered weakly, sweat running into my eyes and blurring my vision. Regardless, I’m almost at my limit.
Lightheaded, I looked over at where the doom demon stood. It had been injured badly enough that it didn’t attack immediately, as if it feared I’d retaliate with yet another counterattack. For the first time since the battle began, there was a lull.
I’m not in the best shape, but that thing shouldn’t be doing much better, I thought. Its health should be pretty low.
At a glance, I could tell the demon was feeling just as exhausted as I was, possibly even more so. Its wings had been completely shredded, and there were deep gashes all over its body.
A few good hits might even be enough to kill it at this point...
I couldn’t get too cocky, though—the difference between the doom demon’s stats and mine still remained, and all it would take was one small misstep to get me instantly killed. The monster wasn’t just throwing out attacks willy-nilly anymore either. It was eyeing me warily, looking for a gap in my defenses.
Maybe I should just fight defensively and wait for help to come, I mused.
But the moment the thought passed through my head, the doom demon looked back over its shoulder, looking at where Radd and the others huddled together a few yards away. The three kids were dead silent, their hands clenched together in what could have almost been prayer as they watched the doom demon and me fight it out.
Don’t look at me like that, guys, I thought, staring at their pitiful faces. Everything’s gonna be okay. I’m not gonna let this thing hurt you, and I’m not letting it kill me either.