Author's Note: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT! I Intend to take the Month of November off from my current fics and stories to focus on Na No Wri Mo. Remember to Check out the new fic I will be working on in November and tell people about it. Read, Review Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 133: The Bow Hero's Concerns
Trash and Fohl were sparring again as usual, or rather the thing that they did which they claimed to be sparring. Fohl has long since desired to beat the snot out of the man who had killed his parents, Trash wanted to spend more time with his nephew. Both of them wanted to develop their Sacred Gears more. It was an odd combination that they made but very effective.
The two Sacred Gear Fragments Fohl inherited was the Divine Dividing and the Boosted Gear, one absorbed, expelled and redirected the flow of energy the other amplified, transferred and penetrate with the flow of energy. Naturally although this power had taken on a weakened form due to being copies of the originals at the same time Fohl was working hard to restore it to its former glory. He had already chased down and killed several dragons and wrung their souls through the Bao Lei Sword Gauntlet that he received from Kuro and slotted them into the two weapon transformations via the Scythe Reinforcement method, he also kept several backup's slotted into other weapons so that if he risked burning the souls in his gauntlets out he could just swap them out. Combining these with the support from numerous bonuses such as crafting, cooking and potion making Fohl had successfully seized control of all the energy in the surrounding area.
Trash wasn't exactly idle during these years either, He was hard at work combining the various weapon transformations to create stronger forms. He had access to blunt instrument weapons from Jade, Takt's twice bastardised rifles from Tanya by some twisted logic, Myne's jeweled wands, Kuro's staff type Noble Phantasms, and Spear Staff's from Katarina, so he had a lot to work with. After upgrading transformations for a fire based staff, water based, earth, wood, metal, wind and Lightning Trash combined those into the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown. It was discovered through Trash's own research that while the five so called Eastern elements offered energy the Western elements on the other hand offered mass. With these seven elements combined with the seven divine magics Trash made a new innovation, a miniature world inside of the Staff, the description went along the lines of 'Yggdrasil Staff: Legends tell about a massive tree whose every leaf contained the essence of a miniature world, most of these leaves were picked clean from the world tree and used as materials in the creation of weapons known as World Items.'
Apparently the Staff was considerably close to one, and throwing in the materials Trash gave it was the final push that was needed to have it promoted into a true world item. Trash was manufacturing a limitless supply of monsters through this staff and was able to summon them to fight on his behalf. The two were having a short bout, Fohl vs one of the giant monsters Trash had summoned, it wasn't really a competition, the two of them just sat down, looked at each other and laughed before sighing.
"I really should've gone all in on Compassion when I had the chance shouldn't I?" Trash nodded his head in agreement.
"The knowledge of what she's been doing..." Both men just sighed, aware that the gap that had been created between the two of them and Kaede was as vast as the heavens. Then a distraction came.
"Everyone!" A familiar black feathered griffin with lightning claws swooped in from above and shouted at them. "Master's back!" And then Blitz flew off again.
Eh. It was better than continuing this pointless exercise.
"So as I understand it. You are going to concentrate a massive amount of Ki flavoured with the five elements and healing magic inside of my body until you achieve nuclear fission, pop it, let it tear me apart and put me back together again while pumping me full of nutrients." What had Tanya's life come to that people wanted to basically turn her into a nuke, and she was agreeing to it!
"Yeah kinda." Tanya has no idea where Naofumi keeps finding these mad scientist types but he should probably lock them up with Schugel. "Don't worry I've done it before." The man in the black lab coat explained as he turned various dials in his equipment and something screeched to a halt in Tanya's mind.
"You've done this before." Tanya asked unsure if she was hearing things correctly. "Concentrating healing magic into your body until it explodes in a nuclear blast is something that you do on the regular?"
"Oh yeah totally, I've even made an instructional video on how to do it." The man's coat grew a slimy black arm and stretched over to a recording crystal before dropping it in front of Tanya. "You can watch that while I work on these adjustments."
Tanya's eye twitched. A mantra started to emerge in her mind that started as 'reject reason embrace Ma-' but she stopped herself before she could finish.
"Will this incredibly stupid exercise in madness even turn me back into my preferred Gender?" Tanya asked trying to resist the urge to pound her head against a nearby support pole.
"Short answer: we don't know." Of course he doesn't. "You are a male soul put into a female body being supported by the Legendary Bow's growth Bonuses and Corrections is going to get pumped full of all different kinds of magical energy. Between your current body, your soul, the numerous influences stuck into you by your weapon and myself it's hard to know for certain how you'll turn out."
The man in the black coat explained as he loaded a fluid of questionable origin into a tube. Tanya's eye twitched again. Wordlessly, the Hero of the Bow turned to the support beam she was standing next to and whacked her head against it. The hit was hard enough to draw blood and cave the front of her skull in, yet a green light came from the pole in question and instantly healed her like she hadn't just tried to cave her head in.
"Pretty cool huh? 'Nuke' leaves behind a type of magical radiation of whatever element you use it for that automatically applies its effect on anything that enters the affected area." Tanya turned her head to face the mad scientist her eyes wide with horror. Then the front door slammed open and a familiar figure flew in.
"Master!" Blitz shouted as she flew in and immediately went for Tanya.
"GET ME OUTTA HERE!" Tanya snapped clinging onto the last vestiges of her sanity. Blitz grabbed Tanya and flew out of the room with her, the mad man who was like poison to sanity didn't even notice that she was gone. A few moments later Tanya was dumping several buckets of cold water over herself as she managed a panic attack, memories of nearly getting killed by Schugel's madness flashing back to her as she worked to keep her lunch down, and ultimately failed quite miserably.
"Yeah. Cid's more of an 'organic' guy." Tatsuya stated as he walked into the room next to where Tanya was in the middle of her panic attack, he didn't enter the bathroom proper yet more out of manners than anything else.
"Tatsuya. I'm having a small crisis here, could you please be somewhere else!?" Tanya proceeded to dry heave into the toilet again as the sound of Tatsuya's footsteps left the room. Did it say more about Tanya or Schugel that she got more PTSD from his experiments than the entirety of her time on the frontlines? Weapons damn it she wasn't ready to put herself through this kind of thing again.
"Master? Are you okay?" Tanya held out her arm for Blitz to help her stand up, pointedly not answering her question as she left the bath room.
"I don't want to be here again." Tanya stated immediately planning on picking up some food while she was being supported by Blitz and carried out of the bathroom.
"Are you alright?" Trash asked as he approached Tanya from the side, who shook her head in the negative. "Then I suggest that you allow Blitz or Fohl to carry you." Trash stated indicating the arm that was still covered in fur. "Because we should have that looked at at once."
Tanya was led to a small temple built within the more oriental block of the city. The priestess outlined the process for her, after completing a purifying bath she would come in use her mouth to suck the Tiger's essence out of her body and expel it and that would temporarily turn her arm back to normal. Overall Tanya described the experience as vaguely kinky, but given the alternatives she was okay with that.
"Last time I checked Katarina was already following Kaede's 'advice' on upgrading her transformation, and Kuro has already taken both of their instructions to heart." Tanya stated as she let out a sigh. "It seems that no matter what I do we're destined to throw our humanity to the curb." Tanya explained while looking down at her arm. In the worst case Scenario, she has the Syrphine to fall back on. "Alright lets get this over with."
The General was the name given to the weapon that Cian had become, Tanya didn't know if that was a reference to Cian or to her nor was she in the mood to honestly give a damn at the moment. Tanya had gotten lots of guns from Katarina, Most of them oddly enough came in groups of four, what was she supposed to do attached them to her feet like they were high heel shoes? What was she a Dominatrix for gun enthusiasts? One had given Tanya pause though. The Gates of Tartarus, a Earth affinity weapon, currently dormant, it would seem that whatever this 'Umbran Clock Tower' was it had better things to do than talk to her, no matter Tanya didn't want to form a contract with it anyway, she likes her soul she wants to keep it. The default form of the Gates was what it sounds like large pair of double doors that someone had fashioned into a pair of shields, why she was able to copy this was a mystery to her, right up until the double gatling guns popped out when the doors 'opened.'
"I have no idea how this works but I like where it's going." A few moments later the Gates had been integrated into her sacred gear. Of course Tanya already experimented to confirm that black smithing could snap materials off that it had attached to her weapon. And having confirmed that Tanya and Cian took to the pair of tiger themed gatling gun gauntlets that they just produced with enthusiasm. Taking aim as a statue of a nutcracker Tanya had made she proceeded to unload both weapons on it shattering it and grinding the broken pieces into dust.
"I'm okay with this arrangement." Cian stated in reply to the light line of questioning that Tanya had made.
The second of the guns that caught Tanya's eyes was the Garnet roses, shotguns that carry the souls of fairies who apparently pollinate the flowers in hell, sounded like a decent enough thing to focus all of the Spirit Tortoise weapons in her arsenal on to upgrade it's flower power.
"Shot Gauntlets this time?" Tanya asked herself looking at the weapon in question that she had just made, she blamed the influence from Maple's weapons for this, either that or Fohl's. Shrugging her Shoulders Tanya took hold of the weapon in question and fired it at the latest nut cracker statue she had made blowing it to pieces in the process, the pieces of stone drifting with a light floral scent. "I can work with this." Tanya stated as she looked at the last three weapons that she had to modify. Unlimited Lost Works, Netherworld Water Bow and the Hou Yi bow.
The Hou Yi has already been integrated with the Phoenix materials, the question here was would combining it with one of the weapons Katarina had given her provide a upgrade, of the weapons she had left to work with there were four sets of four derringer type pistols, with increasingly larger barrel counts. The contract from that hot mess led her to a butterfly of all things, which was again not something that Tanya thought would be useful, when she attempted to destroy the redundancies she instead managed to make another set of four with six barrels instead, which actually shot up the approval of the butterfly woman by several notches. What was wrong with this woman?
"I don't want to deal with you right now." Tanya prepared to throw the weapon away and get back to her main objective of upgrading the Hou Yi however she received a contact from the so called Madma Butterfly instead.
"Now now don't be like that milord." Horror compounds upon horror. "Even if you only carry a piece of the Wrath lord's soul isn't it too cruel of you to reject us?" Tanya paused as she focused on the weapon, a voice appearing in her mind.
"Who or what the Bloody Hell are you supposed to be?"
"I am in awe, even if only a fragment of one of the hell lords is before me how could I possibly ignore it?"
"I've had bad experiences with gods." Tanya stated making her opinion known. "Let alone... whatever you are."
"In life? I was one of the Great Umbran Witches, one who had the misfortune of falling in love with one of our rivals the Lumen and producing a child. Though I was separated from my child when she was still young I've taken great pains to reuinite with her. But if you truly do not wish to form a contract with me milord, at least allow me to post one of us to escort you back to us when you return to Inferno. One who has held onto far more of their humanity than I have." Tanya's H.U.D. switched over to another weapon, the Col. Slade.
'Col. Slade: A grenade launcher containing the soul of Col. Slade, a man who traded his eyesight to a demon to save his troops, only to be deceived by the hellish denizen and find himself consigned to Inferno. Each shot fired from the launcher's tube is filled with Col. Slade's endless malice.'
Tanya was filled with something she rarely allows herself to feel: sympathy. A decent, intelligent human being who made a hard decision to protect those under him, and failed. Just picking up the weapon increased Charity's level, but also the bow of Wrath/Pride, which the Demon Dragon was all to happy to gobble up again.
"Fine. I accept this boon in the spirit it was given. Do not contact me again until after I've died." Madama Butterfly gave the impression of bowing before she left. "If you attempt to betray me in any way..."
"Treachery, is not my strongest suit." The weapon spoke with a slight demonic tinge. "If it was, I wouldn't be here."
"Emiya..." Tanya asked her bow.
"I will ensure that there are no problems."
Thus Tanya focused on the weapon itself and had the H.U.D. bring up the options to combine it with her other bows. After a few moments the weapon had undergone a few changes. It was like someone had taken the Hou Yi Bow and stuck it onto the business end of the Col. Slade. Making another statue Tanya took the Col. Slade in had and quickly found the trigger, a pull handle similar to a bolt action rifle and pulled it back, before squeezing the handle and firing it at the nutcracker blowing it up in the process. Then Tanya pulled back the bolt reloader and fired again. "Bazooka... yeah you're definitely a keeper." Tanya put the weapon transformation away for now as she looked through the remaining two weapons to find upgrades for, the Underworld River bow and the Unlimited Lost works.
"Might as well start with the easy one first." The Cassiopeia was a giant anchor turned balista, pulled directly out of the body of a demon known as the Kraken, a massive sea monster that lives in a bloody river in hell. Augmenting it with the Netherworld River bow had the intended effect changing it from gold to silver though it did nothing to shrink down the unwieldy weapon. Still Tanya brought up a target and fired, getting a slow but heavy shot in the process, but she also discovered that the anchor could detach and get swung around on a retractable cable, plus the whole thing was sort of like a pick like weapon as well, albeit with the blades placed oddly.
"Alright. That just leaves the last one." The Unlimited Lost Works, a metal affinity weapon, as surprising as this was to learn there wasn't a whole lot of those here. "Pandora..." Tanya has seen a lot of weapons in her time, she's seen a lot of things that made her question why her bow was able to take their form, and yet she was met with the weapon that challenged her suspension of disbelief at long last: A briefcase. A clearly supernatural briefcase yes, the entire thing was covered in glowing rainbow lines all of which led back to a demonic skull emblem. That said...
"You don't look too special." A new weapon appeared in Tanya's vision.
'Pandora: A demonic weapon filled with six hundred sixty six calamitous forms, each capable of spewing misery and disaster for countless foes.'
This description was followed up with a description for literally hundreds of additional weapons, all of them a alternate form of Pandora. Tanya just stared ahead at what she was looking at.
"Tanya's been in there for a while now." Fohl stated looking at the yard that Tanya booked for her own experimentation with her weapons, and to decompress from her trauma with Cid. "Should we help her?" Suddenly the walls of the Training yard were blown away.
"Nah. I think she's good."
Tanya emerged from the smoke, simultaneously creating targets with her earth magic and blowing them away with a giant tribarreled bazooka, laughing mad.
"She's finally lost it." Fohl said and Trash and Blitz nodded sagely.
Tanya continued to laugh as she unleashed a gatling gun, a rocket firing bazooka, a giant laser cannon, a huge tribarreled boomerang, a full blown weapons platform complete with a seat for her to sit one she fired projectiles in all directions. It was a good day for Tanya.
"Shall we upgrade the Pandora?" Cian asked sounding pretty smug with herself.
"Does it have a demon inside of it?" Tanya asked sprawled out on the ground and was still laughing to herself.
"No, the original contained various evils which caused it to be turned into a demon, but those evils were then unleashed upon the world thus the box instead simply absorbs stray demonic power from nearby destruction."
"Make it so!" Tanya commanded and various metal element weapons disappeared from her weapon's list and started to augment Pandora, including the Unlimited Lost Works, meaning that now the weapon makes it's own shrapnel. Speaking as someone who spent three years on the front lines, you physically cannot appreciate having an overwhelming wall of Dakka like this at your beck and call.
"Shall we move onto upgrading the suit now?" Well, it can't all be fun and games. "Let's see what we can find in the market place then."
Strengthen the Suit using the muscle tissue from Cian's body that Tanya still possessed, add in the overly gluttonous black slime that Cid guy made for mana capacity and to act as blood, strengthen the bones with fantasy metals and for the final touch.
"This was your doing wasn't it?" Tanya hissed at what she was looking at, a full blown Gundam head with built in machine gun turrets on the sides.
"You make it sound like I did something bad." Ernesti stated shrugging his shoulders.
"You used valuable resources that are supposed to be dedicated to fighting the bitch goddess to make a toy!" Tanya growled, when this was over she was going to find Katarina and spend some quality time with someone who doesn't do mad science.
"It's only a toy if you don't weapon copy it." Ernesti countered using flawless logic. "So really which one of us are wasting resources at this point?"
"Hmm!" Tanya slapped her hand on the Gundum head. 'Weapon Copy-'
"Just slap it onto the Asura already!"
Tanya started with her Sacred Gear, the weapon turned into particles of light and fused into her body creating the image of a tiger demoness in the process. This was then followed up by forming the Asura armour around her body, and then the enhanced beast transformation resulting in a 50 foot long sixteen limbed tiger from nose to tail. Then came the weapon transformations. For the back Legs Tanya equipped the newly upgraded Garnet Roses shot Gauntlets, for the lower pair of arms coming out of her sides Tanya chose the bazooka bow of Col. Slade creating a set of wings in the process, the shoulder mounted arms on the other hand were equipped with the anchors of the upgraded Cassiopeia weapon, the Krakken wasn't willing to go anywhere near it now, after all the water from the Underworld River erases the memories of souls who coming into contact with it and forcibly reincarnates them, there was no way it was getting near that, the two front paws of Tanya's body were transformed into the most important weapons of all, the twin gatling guns of the Tiger General, while either side of the tiger's head adopted a familiar pair of brief cases, which then popped open to reveal matching gatling guns with a black blade and white blade, the newly upgraded Pandora, which given their placement on the beastly form looked like a pair of boar's tusks stuck into the griffin like body.
"I look stupid." Tanya growled one of her eyes twitching.
"Has master turned into a Griffin?" Blitz asked looking at the scene in confusion.
Trash and Fohl both looked at each and came to identical conclusions of 'sure lets go with that.'
""Yes."" Both men replied at the same time.
"Well I've discarded my humanity." Tanya's voice echoed from the giant cyborg gun totting griffin. "I hope you're happy now Maple."
Letting out that sigh Tanya just opted to just fly around the city, get use to the new body before the Disphoria kicked in, lord knows she doesn't already have enough body issues. Blitz joined Tanya in the air, her own monster transformation blending in her weapon's own Sacred Gear Demon combination to produce a set of lightning claws, even though the being inside of Blitz claws was classified as a god, it was also a demonic god hence Blitz's claws counted as both Sacred Gear and demonic weapon. Shrugging their shoulders Fohl and Trash went back to grinding until the two winged beasts came back down and then the four of them had a meal together.
"So, we got thrown into a bunch of different war-zones, but the sixteen of you have just been sparring against each other?" Tanya asked her adoptive relatives suspiciously. "What about Maple? Has she just been taking a city's worth of danger for the past three years?"
"No I would say that she's been taking several planets worth of danger for the past three years." Trash stated as he bit into a bit of rolled egg.
"...say what?" Tanya asked stupidly not quite comprehending what she heard.
"Ours is not the only world that has come under threat, if not from this Medea then those like her. Using the Miasma of this world she created several techniques to connect to those worlds and allied herself with the people there." Trash explained simply.
"I was given to understand that Dedicated Affection drains her health to work, the more people she's protecting the more of her health that it drains." Before, when they had status and health was a meter it would've been bad enough, now by the sounds of things she had connected to somewhere between thousands and billions of people, not to mention all the attacks that they were taking that were being transmitted to Kaede.
"She also got something she calls the 'Death Knight Shield' and it's equip bonus is that 'so long as she has mana to spend she will survive with one point of health.'" Fohl gave a horrified and distant look. "Do you have any idea how much Ki, Spirit and Mana is being pumped into her body?"
Tanya's face started twitching as she processed the horror of what she was hearing. Even if Kaede could theoretically 'survive' like that what kinds of unimaginable horrors is she putting her body through to do this? Has her 'miracle' made her immortal or something?
"What the hell would drive her to do this to herself?" Tanya asked having lost her appetite.
"We don't know." Trash stated finishing his rolled egg.
"One day, not long after you all left, Kaede asked her weapon why it chose her as a hero, and the answer made her track down both of her parents, hug them and then cry herself to sleep." Tanya looked at her food, considered tried to wolf it down, and instead opted to put it inside of her weapon and stood up.
"I need to go find Maple and make sure that she isn't killing herself."
Yet another shard of crystalised mana joined a pile of them in a basket on the side of the bath. One of the Bonuses unlocked from upgrading the Soul Eater several times was intangibility, albeit very limited intangibility, throwing a few skill points at it increases it's effectiveness, but only barely. Still when you're reaching inside of yourself to pull out shards of mana crystal every little bit helps. She had what like another ten of these things to get rid of today, maybe twenty? That was just the shards of mana that currently existed. She'd just polish off the sharp edges until the cool-down on the skill is finished and she can pull the rest of them out, not a perfect solution but nothing was really. The double effect of using Dedicated Affection the way that she had been using it was that her body was filled with ultra dense mana which contributed to and accelerated the development of these mana shards which turn up mainly when you're near death, and Kaede was closer to death than most. A loud banging echoed from the door.
"Kaede! Open the damn door! Right now!" Tanya's voice echoed out laced with anger.
"Tanya? I'm in the bath right now! Whatever it is it can wait!" Maple shouted by way of reply. The sound of something charging echoed on the other side of the door. Kaede swallowed her breath and dived beneath the water of her bath, then the door blew open, standing on the other side was Tanya and Myne.
"Maybe I didn't make myself clear earlier."
Author's Note:
RonaldM40196867: True. Probably.
Dakota Bruder: 1. Yes. 2. Some people were killed, the elderly, the ones with heart conditions, the ones already at risk of a fear induced heart attack mostly, to be more accurate it induces a intense feeling of fear that is accompanied by Tanya's memories of her time at war. 3. I try. 4. Earth=Solids, Water=Liquids, Wind=Gasses, Fire=Plasma and Lightning=Electricity. 5. Tanya won a war for the planet before it could even begin, I'd say by the definition of a Balance Breaker, the power to upset the balance in the world, it qualifies, but she's also had the time and materials to develope others as well.
Nightshadegirl: For a given definition of Normal.