Chapter 680: Chapter 57: Ripple Sword
Christmas was approaching.
The second Christmas Night of The Azure Longsword was expected to be spent in Palermo City.
However, an eerie atmosphere pervaded the team.
To be precise, ever since their last team-building vacation from the seaside town, the strange atmosphere had persisted.
No longer did they sit together and laugh; more time was spent in groups of threes and fives, whispering secretly, discussing who knows what.
What puzzled Aske even more was that these “groups of threes and fives” were not fixed.
Take Thira, for example, sometimes she chatted idly alone with Peggy, at other times she conversed with Nora with a beaming smile, and at times she whispered secrets to Miel.
Sometimes she would also gather with Medea, seemingly discussing something private, exchanging knowing smiles from time to time, as if they had long been accomplices.
That being said, since you’ve already made friends with everyone, why the need for all these private conversations?
Although these clandestine actions caused some unease for Aske, he had no intention of forcefully demanding an explanation. After all, the intricacies of girls’ friendships were complex, and not something for a man to be part of.
Aske was no Jia Baoyu. As long as there were no issues with official duties, he let them be.
Aside from these trifling matters of the heart, the team’s overall combat strength had also received a great boost after defeating and subduing the Otwell Family.
Worthy of mention is the Navian Bone Tooth, which after nearly half a month of harmonization, Sigrdrifa finally made it recognize her as its lord.
According to Sigrdrifa’s description, Aske was able to confirm that the Navian Bone Tooth was an “Epic Divine Artifact” (that is, one that possesses powerful abilities but requires stringent conditions for its user), and its cost of usage was blood-drinking.
It required a certain amount of “killing intent” to be consumed daily to allow its user to continue wielding it. This killing intent could either be gathered automatically from the process of slaying enemies, or willingly offered by the user (that is, replenished through self-sacrifice).
Of course, the Navian Bone Tooth itself had the effect of storing killing intent, allowing for enough to be accumulated in advance to last for a year’s use, so Sigrdrifa did not need to kill daily as sustenance for it.
After recognizing its master, the Navian Bone Tooth would mostly heed only Sigrdrifa’s commands. Unless Sigrdrifa instructed it to help others, or if it was starved over a long period, causing it to be driven beyond endurance and choose betrayal.
However, this new master had authorized two little girls to use it on the day it recognized her, which also confused the Navian Bone Tooth.
“Summon another one!” Mia ordered the Navian Bone Tooth.
The Navian Bone Tooth, worn around Sigrdrifa’s neck, suddenly flowed with a mysterious radiance, and then the outline of a wolf appeared before the three of them.
Like a pencil sketch on a blank paper, it first presented the wolf’s rough outline, followed by the specifics of its shape, then the color of its fur, and finally, a live Fenrisulfr Wolf appeared before everyone.
A summoning from the Northern Realm.
The ability of the Navian Bone Tooth was, through consuming stored killing intent, to summon a Northern extraordinary creature that obeyed the wielder’s will.
This type of summoning was unlike Miel’s Fate Ability. Firstly, it was one-time, meaning the killing intent consumed could summon the creature, and maintenance of the creature’s presence did not require any additional cost.
Hence, the Otwell Family had long used it as a monster-spawning Divine Artifact to procure a vast amount of Spiritual Material for the training of the Northern Horn Army—this could only be considered an unorthodox method when the Divine Artifact had no recognized lord.
Secondly, the summoning mainly expended the killing intent stored in the Divine Artifact, plus a small amount of Spirituality to trigger it; returning the extraordinary creature back and dismissing the summoning could return a portion of the original killing intent consumed.
Under extreme pressure, this characteristic of conserving spirituality was naturally invaluable, meaning the summoned extraordinary creature was effectively free combat power.
As for the summoning itself, it was one of those super-boosting abilities.
For instance, only Thira, Eleanor, and Aske could fly in the original team, but Sigrdrifa could also summon a Siberian Thunderbird to carry her in aerial combat.
Or, for instance, when facing Peggy’s “Curse Death”—an irrational killing skill—one could summon an extraordinary creature to serve as a meat shield.
The summoned creatures from the Northern Realm were directly related to the user’s level and the amount of killing intent expended. Thus, for the entire morning, Mia, Miel, and Sigrdrifa had been researching the reach of the Navian Bone Tooth’s summons, and had already summoned nearly a hundred different Northern extraordinary creatures.
Fenrisulfr Wolf, Siberian Thunderbird, Dream-eating Snake… Countless unseen extraordinary creatures kept appearing, dazzling the three girls.
“Stop playing!” Seeing Mia dismissing the Fenrisulfr Wolf again, Miel quickly intervened, admonishing, “Don’t forget what we’re here for!”
The extraordinary creatures summoned by the Navian Bone Tooth did not belong to this world, not even to this era; in essence, this ability contained certain “Space” and “Time” laws.
Studying its summoning ability to complement one’s own intuition of the laws was exactly what Mia and Miel needed to focus on urgently.
“Alright, alright,” Little Mia was very obedient to Miel, so she earnestly began another summoning while intently observing the entire process with her Spiritual Intuition.
In Mia’s perception, the summoning phenomenon was quite miraculous.
If space were compared to a uniformly distributed sponge, then the summoning ability of the Navian Bone Tooth was like the sudden appearance of a large glass ball inside the sponge.
Due to the sudden presence of an alien object inside, the surrounding uniformly distributed sponge got squeezed outward, causing an uneven distribution.
This imbalance in distribution only occurred for an instant, and then quickly returned to the stable state of uniform distribution.
Because the volume of space was so large, almost infinitely large compared to Mia’s observational range, adding a new object into it caused the surrounding space to twist, and this twisting quickly propagated outward. With each transmission over a certain distance, the extent of twisting slightly decreased until it was completely smoothed out at an infinite distance.
It was like a drop of water falling into a lake, causing ripples to spread out. It would disrupt the lake’s stable state for a short time, but soon the disturbance would disperse and gradually subside until the lake returned to calm.
Hmm…
Mia suddenly had an inspiration and took out Lancelot’s Dagger.
Her Spiritual Intuition had a subtle premonition: she had understood the latter part of the Ripple Sword, which was to appear at a designated spot.
But what about the first part of the Ripple Sword, which was about how to disappear from the original position? What was the principle behind that?
So, she canceled the summon again.
With her Spiritual senses, she saw the surface of the Navian Bone Tooth flash with Radiance, and then a point appeared inside the Extraordinary Creature.
More precisely, it was a “collapse.”
Mia suddenly recalled a class from the past, where Thira had talked about the principle of “gravity.”
The essence of gravity was a gravity well, the distortion and collapse of space.
It was like punching a hole in a two-dimensional surface. The two-dimensional objects on that plane would “collapse” into the hole, ending up as a one-dimensional line, which meant that the two-dimensional objects were completely dimensionally reduced.
However, once a collapse occurred, the two-dimensional object would leave its original plane position, which is what’s called disappearing—perhaps that was the principle behind the disappearance of the Extraordinary Creatures when cancelling a summon.
Therefore, if one were to “collapse” oneself first, disappearing from some place in this world, and then “reverse collapse,” would that allow one to reappear somewhere else in this world?
But how could one precisely control the disappearance and reappearance locations to achieve the pinpoint Teleportation of the Ripple Sword?
Mia thought harder and harder, her expression gradually becoming blank as she fell into a nearly fanatic state, as if she were stuck at a bottleneck and couldn’t quite have a breakthrough.
Miel watched her silently, first using gestures to signal Sigrdrifa to stay quiet, and then she pulled out a sound from Aske from a past moment.
It was right after they finished an instance at Heaven Mountain, when Mia and Miel hadn’t yet joined the team, Aske had explained to everyone the principle of the Heaven Mountain Half-plane:
“…The main world space we’re in is like a page of a book.”
“…We are the two-dimensional characters on the page.”
“…If we bend the page…”
In an instant, upon hearing this, Mia broke through her mental bottleneck as if enlightened:
It’s not just about collapsing.
It’s also about controlled twisting.
Like the points A and B on the page of a book, walking from A to B requires traversing the length of the line segment AB.
However, by folding the page, bringing points A and B together, the distance along line segment AB can be shortened.
Then, I perform a self-collapse, briefly leaving the page from point A, and then re-entering the page at point B.
That is the secret of the “Instant Teleportation” of the Ripple Sword.
As for the method of self-collapse, of course…
Mia looked at Lancelot’s Dagger in her hand and swung it without hesitation.
Then, she disappeared from her original spot.