Chapter 848: December 19th: A Miracle in These Hands
The Great Saint cannot take lives.
To travel between cities, it is necessary to defeat Area Bosses.
The Great Saint must absolutely travel to every city on foot.
At a glance, making all of those conditions co-exist is fundamentally impossible. After all, as long as defeating Area Bosses is the means to travel on foot between cities, it absolutely conflicts with The Great Saint, whose condition is "No-kill."
While that is indeed a fact, there is also one flaw in that logic.
───The Great Saint overcomes Area Bosses without killing them.
The Saint's holy hands possess the power to do so.
◇
"【Hand that Admonishes Ferocity】...... The effect is simple, an enchantment that dampens physical attack power in exchange for dealing damage to stamina."
"Stamina shaving...... huh."
In Shangri-La Frontier, you could say the stamina parameter is involved in almost every action related to combat. Swordsmen who fight mainly using skills are the prime example of this. Shaving away that stamina parameter—this was the first time Kaisoku learned such a thing existed.
"Then, I just need to not get hit by it...... is what I'd like to say, but."
"Fufufu, the fact that I didn't attack much wasn't because I was holding back, you know? I was just......... waiting a bit for the time to come."
Kaisoku was by no means underestimating Argent Owl. However, he had no choice but to admit that his estimation had been naive.
Argent Owl is Sylvia Goldberg......... before being the Best in the US, she is a fighting gamer, and above all, a gamer. People become so blinded by the grand achievements she has accomplished and the magnificent light radiates from that reputation of hers that they become unable to see that simple fact.
That even Sylvia Goldberg plays games other than the Galaxia Heroes series, and that she aims for the "strongest" according to that specific game's rules. And above all, they become unable to "calculate backwards" from a simple fact.
"Shangri-La Frontier is a one-round take-all, and there's no time limit to the round......... That being the case, the timing for the climax can be however many minutes later."
The strength of the character "Argent Owl," earnestly built by Sylvia Goldberg—a gamer, a fighting gamer excelling in PvP, and an individual who has reached the pinnacle of being Best in the US among them.
From this moment on, Kaisoku would come to fully realize the performance of The Great Saint, forged to defeat the world's fastest player—who is in all likelihood her fated rival.
"Fifteen minutes, the recast time for 【Pilgrim's Progress of the Saint】 is over. Now, Kaisoku! This is where the real thing begins, you still have stamina left in your brain, right?!"
"...!"
Fifteen minutes. Depending on the person, it could be called short or long, but at the very least, for Kaisoku who had continued combat maneuvers for fifteen minutes—even if it was a game—it was an amount of time that could easily be called "long". While he wasn't exactly out of breath............ facing Argent Owl, who looked as if she was saying the starting line was right here, a faint shadow of dread crept in.
But if he backed down here, what was he even fighting for? He had "cheated" to reach out his hand to an unattainable peak; at the very least, backing down from his own side was...... unforgivable. More than anyone else, Kaisoku himself couldn't forgive it.
"Ooooooooh!!"
Raising his twin swords, he activated his skills. Although his stamina had been shaved down by twenty percent, conversely, he still had eighty percent remaining. And as a vanguard swordsman, he had already acquired skills to suppress stamina consumption. Using them to compensate for his drained stamina while buffing his other parameters, he stepped forward.
(The Saint of Legend? I don't even know if it's magic or a skill anymore! But if it's Sylvia Goldberg, her final choice would be bare-handed! I'll seize the initiative by forcing the range of my swords on her!)
"90 seconds, showtime!"
"Wha.........!?"
Fast, the distance was closed, a skill she hadn't used until now—before he could even sort out and comprehend that information,
"Rise up!...... 'Touryuumon'!"
"Gu, bwah......!?"
The palm Argent Owl thrust out pierced into Kaisoku's jaw, and with that momentum, it launched Kaisoku's body upward.
◇
【Pilgrim's Progress of the Saint】. A magic spell that only The Great Saint can acquire, and one of the three pillars—along with the ultimate resurrection magic 【Holy Birth of the Martyred God】 that auto-activates with the user's HP hitting 0 as the trigger, and one other—that gives The Great Saint job the performance worthy of a hidden highest-tier class.
Likened to the fifteen pilgrimages made during the great trial, it becomes usable for the first time only by surviving an excessively long recast time of fifteen minutes from the start of the battle.
So, after enduring a long fifteen-minute—nine hundred seconds—recast, during which the battle could easily be settled, what exactly does The Great Saint become capable of?
First and foremost, the magic's activation time is one-tenth of its recast time, which is ninety seconds.
Next, it sets the effect duration for all self-enhancement skills and self-enhancement magic activated during its effect duration to 0...... In other words, for ninety seconds, all enhancement buffs become permanent.
And finally, the substitution of damage dealt by all of the caster's offensive actions. During these ninety seconds, every attack unleashed by The Great Saint does not shave away HP, but instead shaves away MP and STM.
A miracle of The Great Saint that shaves away not the flesh, but the mind and soul. Those who face it and have their will to fight completely whittled away lose their fighting spirit despite their lives being spared. Or rather, it could be said that this means "death as a fighter."
Special State "Subjugation"; it ignores the target's remaining HP and treats them as "dead," forcibly ending the combat.
That itself is the sole method of victory for The Great Saint, the one who grasps miracles.
Author's Afterword
・The Great Saint
A hyper-irregular special victory job aiming for a forced end to combat by shaving down stamina and MP. The principle is the same as the Holy Staff Asclepius, substituting damage for something else.
Writing just this makes it seem incredibly strong, but naturally, 【Pilgrim's Progress of the Saint】 has its demerits. After using it, another fifteen-minute recast kicks in, but this recast time is also "added" to the skills and magic used while 【Pilgrim's Progress of the Saint】 was active. In other words, each skill's respective recast time + an additional fifteen-minute recast.
Furthermore, while "Subjugation" certainly allows one to achieve a practical victory without reducing HP, inherently strong monsters generally possess massive amounts of stamina and MP. Even if you can suddenly attack their MP and stamina for 90 seconds while you were chipping at their HP before, completely depleting those massive MP and stamina parameters in just a minute and a half is quite difficult.
And The Great Saint is about the only class that can attack MP and stamina simultaneously. Even if you form a party, the other players will normally be shaving down HP, so the synergy is poor (though if you extract just the aspect of reducing stamina and MP, they're contributing plenty, but their buff enhancements only apply to themselves).
The easiest targets to achieve "Subjugation" against are players who find it difficult to spec heavily into stamina and MP due to the nature of allocating their status points. However, given the nature of The Great Saint job, attacking another player has a high probability of resulting in the job being stripped. Thus, its use is limited to specific situations, like engaging Player Killers under the pretext of counterattack, or in limited scenarios like arena tournaments where combat stops before HP reaches 0.
Players who independently trigger the Unique Scenario to become The Great Saint are granted the "Subjugation" victory condition by Saint-chan and can learn the MP/stamina shaving magic considered the "Secret Art of the Saint."
In other words, even without 【Pilgrim's Progress of the Saint】, The Great Saint can shave down the MP and stamina parameters themselves............ Isn't that broken after all? (In party play, as long as The Great Saint isn't the one landing the final blow, they won't trigger the PK penalty.)
I used up way too much of my character limit explaining The Great Saint's settings, so I'll keep the rest brief without any extra words.
Volume 8 of the Shangri-La Frontier manga is now on sale to great acclaim!
Translator's Notes
- [1] Waterfall Carp Strike: A reference to the Chinese proverb of the carp swimming up the waterfall to leap the Dragon Gate (Touryuumon) and transform into a dragon. Author constructs the kanji phonetically using katakana and simpler kanji components (シ竜魚里才丁) to spell 滝鯉打 (Waterfall Carp Strike) (sorta like leetspeak, for the 'cool' factor), but read as "Touryuumon".
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