[X] Search and Rescue
The update could
definitively have been better written, Ling Qi is a massive deadly fog hundreds meters wide (i want to say kilometers wide but i don't remember the fog's range right now) that moves at higher than average speed for
middle green*. Having lowly reds or even most yellows manage to avoid her
and then somehow turn back to attack Shen Hu and the village strains anyone's SoD.
But the overall goal of the vote was still achieved: make the actual dangerous part of the barbarian group retreat away from the village, and it's evacuating civilians.
I see the last act as a resounding success: Ling Qi moved the battlefield from
<on the village> to
<kilometers away from it>, logically drained a major part of the green's and yellow's Qi reserves (those
over the top group speed buffs could NOT have been cheap! Not whatever those wind techs they used to save dozens of reds with...) AND managed to injure the Green 4+ barbarian overseer (and his mount).
I found the barbarian's
pathetic attempt of a taunt at pride to be
hilarious: when a
single individual routs your 100+ army you are in no position to taunt her about
anything!
Yes, the reds, surprisingly, survived, but they
are a non-issue. The update itself shows that Shen Hue merely considers them as annoying flies.
I think it's pretty obvious the barbarian army is in
no condition to make a comeback (though, I'd like to see them try...), nor to attack an other village. Not without some significant rest. And considering they lost the element of surprise i think the raid
My only disappointment is that Ling Qi didn't throw a
"Run away, little bitches. Run away to your desolate worthless reaches" last parting present. Hopefully, it'll happen in the next chap...
*Actually I want to go back on this part. By any reasonable metric, the fight should have been even
more one-sided than the little Ling Qi vs Sun Liling ambush last year.
That particular fight was a very good yellow spec'ed in speed fleeing from a very good
Green 1 cultivator that had benched most(?) her speed-enhancing arts in favor of combat and tracking.
The current fight is numerous
average red and yellows because barbarians
can not benefit from the same instruction quality as the Imperial Sect, though since they were mounted i guess we can say they were speed spec'ed, fleeing a very good above average speed
Green 3 cultivator.
Same thing if we take last year's tournament as standard.
Seriously, if the barbarians can more than make up for two cultivation levels
this easily the Empire should have been destroyed a long time ago...
Overall it seems to me that Yrs simply didn't bother to make the stat comparison between the barbarians, at the very least for the low tiers, and Ling Qi's stats. And ran the whole thing narratively up to allowing them to simply hang around her mist with no effect. Hence the lack of victims on the barb side.
Yrs said in discord he's around our level both in cultivation and in age, so I'm expecting we'll see more of him at some point.
I find that hard to believe. If the dude is on par with Ling Qi then he's mostly on part with the
ducals... If the barbarians have the kind of talent and resources needed for a random raid leader to be on par with the
Empire's highest of nobility heirs then the empire should have been burned to the ground centuries ago.
To answer this question, yes, he is the mystery presence. Cultivation-wise, he is around a similar level as us as well as being around us age-wise. In other words, we can assume he's pretty much as talented as us.
For it to be true he'd need to be a LOT more talented than Ling Qi. I just can't imagine the barbarians having anywhere
near the resources Ling Qi has, like cultivation with full Green Stones. Or the crazy 8fold pills and the new newer one from the inner sect market.
So, even assuming he has equivalent luck with spirit patrons and teachers, he'd still have to make do with the lack of resources with pure talent.
Other thoughts:
The time savings many people wanted for going to other villages didn't materialize. Li g Qi's committed to this village for a good while at this point.
If Ling Qi had PLR up, she's be able to kidnap enemy officers to force reactions and junk. Ending this encounter with dragging off the injured Green would be a lot more satisfying.
This isn't quite serious, but
@yrsillar can we get a refund or something on PLR? It's our on-paper most potent art currently known, but you would t know it. We went from being unable to use it, to barely using it, to using it exclusively for Joyous Toast in convoluted ways narratively focused on the performance of other arts, to solely using it for an SCS knock-off. Considering its connection to Sixiang, one third of our Lunar patrons, and our commitment to training an entirely separate skill purely for a
single technique of the art(which we didn't use here, and effectively never do) it's... not a great situation by any metric.
I get that the aesthetics of the art make it really difficult to write I to the tone of many scenes, especially considering our other arts, but there's nothing
we can do about that. Like, is Ling Qi just crap with it because she's too prudish to remember the party the art is based on. Blocking out the naked spirits? Idgi.
P.S.: the actual reason PLR isn't used properly is damage arts ruined our build
I agree it would have been
hilarious to have the barbarians, and their horses, to start dancing while attempting to flee.
