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Threads Of Destiny(Eastern Fantasy, Sequel to Forge of Destiny)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Evilness42 said:
Xiulan is about to blast him. 'Completely unharmed' is a bit of a stretch, even more so if she doesn't need to worry about friendly fire.
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Assuming he doesnt have techs to serve as perfect defenses.

By contrast, eating HR, Sixiangs dispels, and Xiulans alpha strike is going to punch through any such defenses to prevent disengagement.

Blocking a hit from a peer is one thing. Blocking two while eating dispels to all your buffs at the same time?

It just doesnt work that way unless we're grossly outclassed, at which point the entire argument becomes meaningless anyway.
 
Speculation stuff, but what does anyone think this assassino's deal is? Connected to the Colour from Space, or is it something to do with the barbarians?
 
Jensaarai said:
Speculation stuff, but what does anyone think this assassino's deal is? Connected to the Colour from Space, or is it something to do with the barbarians?
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He's one of the Gnawing Ones by all indications--basically Cultivatorverse Skaven as best as we can tell. Not widely known about because they generally don't leave their underground realms, because the air up here is usually toxic to them in the same fashion that the Colour from Space stuff is toxic to us.
 
Alectai said:
He's one of the Gnawing Ones by all indications--basically Cultivatorverse Skaven as best as we can tell. Not widely known about because they generally don't leave their underground realms, because the air up here is usually toxic to them in the same fashion that the Colour from Space stuff is toxic to us.
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Oh, shit, are those a thing? I thought it was some creature from the Phoenix SA and the Twilight bastard killing each other.

...I guess that makes sense given LQ already fought the naked mole rat things with Suyin.
 
Jensaarai said:
Oh, shit, are those a thing? I thought it was some creature from the Phoenix SA and the Twilight bastard killing each other.

...I guess that makes sense given LQ already fought the naked mole rat things with Suyin.
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Yeah, these seem to be the same kind of creature, just the equivalent of a Gutter Runner as opposed to a party of rando Clanrats.
 
Not sure if anyone has brought this up, but how sure are we that this guy is the assassin? Could there be more of these guys around?
And is Xiulan still going to shoot with us in the line of fire?
 
TehChron said:
Oh its not an opinion.

Unless Xiulan and Ling Qi started sharing a health bar all of a sudden, its a plain fact.

What you posited, however, was an excellent example of a baseless opinion. And I thank you for providing it.
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Your words are an absolute fact, mine are a baseless opinion. Ok, whatever you say.
 
memoryofglory said:
Not sure if anyone has brought this up, but how sure are we that this guy is the assassin? Could there be more of these guys around?
And is Xiulan still going to shoot with us in the line of fire?
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If there's more of them around this valley, uh, we're probably fucked, as based on this guy's abilities, he is our final boss fight of the arc
 
So from what I am seeing:
  • SCS choice means the bottleneck is our perception. We don't take damage but we need perception if we want to be able to put down the enemy. I'd say it a°) increases odds of everything going alright, b°) decrease odds of assassin dying and c°) for once we'll be awake at the end of a fight.
  • TRF choice means the bottleneck is our health/defence. We don't need to rely on perception against a stealth specialist and we WILL take damage, but it means at least one guarenteed counter attack, and one where Sixiang debuff the shit out of him to boot. I'd say it a°) means we get hurt significantly no matter what and makes possible later fights harder, b°) increase odds of assassin dying and c°) likely means we'll faint at some point like usual.
  • Advanced skill wise, not sure SCS would give us anything, but TRF would very likely give Fortitude.
  • Narratively, not sure what theme SCS would play with, but TRF would definitely play well with TRF's own themes as well as cycles theme of vitality (of self)/ending (of enemies).
From this, I think SCS choice is more likely to end with either the assassin running right after the dodge, or us being on guard until they reappear and not knowing if their who their next attack would be one. It'd probably be a 'defend our friend from an invisible intruder' type of fight. OTOH, TRF choice would very much be a 'We take one for the team and then nuke him through the power of friendship'.

While I'm not a fan at all of Ling Qi fainted in every damn fight (shakes fist at @yrsillar), TRF choice does seem like the proper Team Power choice, and the one that make sure the tankiest of the likely target gets hurt (pretty sure Xiulan's own perfect defences are less tanky, and I doubt Zhengui will get attacked).

I do hope Ling Qi gets scarred/crippled for a while from this, though.

[X] Defend and Counter
 
Alectai said:
You're ignoring that the core argument in favor of blocking is "Punish the other guy for trying this in the first place because we have the tools to endure at least one alpha strike, because the danger of letting him try again--but this time with us having even less resources--is greater than the risk of him murdering us with a single blow."

"Use it for a fort/resilience buff" is like, bottom of the priority chain here in favor of "Fuck him up and terminate his stealth arts, kill him if we can but the point is making him think very hard if this fight is worth dying or not"
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Despite supporting the same vote, I think this is a very weak argument because it neglects to factor in what actually makes taking the hit (potentially) worthwhile as a strategy. If Ling Qi was by herself, dodging the hit would be unambiguously the correct decision. The only reason to take the blow is because of the risk to other people in the area, and to facilitate Sixiang's anti-stealth dispel attempt. Our personal attack is a nice add, but by itself insufficient to justify the maneuver and therefore incorrectly categorised as the core argument in its favour.

Hitting him back is sure to be satisfying in a "choking on our own blood" kind of way, but making the health trade without outside factors(squishy allies) would be dumb.
 
[] Move and Reorient isn't getting the love it deserves argument-wise, so I'm going to provide a justification for sick mechanical gainz. After dodging the attack and piling on her perception, her most pressing priority will be to stop the assassin from hurting her allies. PLR is well-suited to stopping a stealth striker, because Lunatic Whirl both traps them in being pulled around, preventing stealth + escape, and disables their Arm techniques, preventing attacks on allies.

Chasing after a deadly assassin and trying to Dance the slippery bastard into harmlessness seems perfect for pushing the skill past its bottleneck. The lives of her loved ones are on the line, after all. Plus some other people, I guess. We've got the motive, the practical application, and the motivation for Dance to break through to the next level.
 
Inserted tally
Adhoc vote count started by EternalObserver on Nov 1, 2019 at 5:16 AM, finished with 191 posts and 78 votes.
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yrsillar said:
"That concludes what I have learned of Officer Song's location," Ling Qi finished, her words short and clipped.

"I will discuss the matter with the local members of the garrison, thank you for your aid Officer Ling," the soldier who had been escorting her said bowing low. "What will you do now?"
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Probably should have realized the local scouts could probably start looking for the lost officer based on our scrying clues.

Scant from our perspective, but a Yellow cultivator should have it sorted given superhuman memory and close familiarity with the region.
yrsillar said:
The oppressive weight in the air, the clashing of qi so far beyond her certainly did not help matters, every time the storm wracked sky lit up, not with lightning but raw force of two fourth realm entities clashing, she nearly flinched. The rushing wind was nothing to the unnatural ripples that were spreading through the world in her spiritual senses.

She could sense beasts stirring even here, fear spreading like poison through the woods and hills. In the distance, she could see great flocks of birds rising from the trees, uncaring for species, uncaring for each other as they beat their wings and fled the brewing storm. She heard trees groaning and twisting, leaves raining down on the forest floor as they shied away from the south, and dirt and rock crumbling as roots began to move with ponderous but irresistible strength.

She just hoped that the commander and Liao Zhu were able to finish their clash soon. The disquiet in the world only grew worse as she flew further south, but she turned her mind from the forest below and kept her eyes ahead, on the gleaming blue ribbon of the river curving away ahead where the village she had left behind at the beginning of all this lay.
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Jebus, even the TREE spirits are trying to flee.
With the whole damn tree.

After all this they're going to need new maps.
And negotiators will have a fine time working out the new order when the spirits still around had been reshuffled and old stable holding patterns are disrupted.
yrsillar said:
Chaos awaited her return. In the flight south she had seen the first signs. Great flocks of birds rising from the forest, raptor and songbird flying side by side to escape the growing weight in the air. Beneath the canopy beasts howled and yowled in fright as the earth shook and the wind gusted, and the pounding of a multitude of paws and hooves against the dirt added to the cacophony. As she flew further, she began to sense the disturbance in the trees themselves, heavy branches swaying without wind and roots moving with ponderous but unstoppable strength as the tallest and most ancient trees seemed to gird themselves to endure the coming storm while their younger brethren shook and cowered.
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@yrsillar
Something for a later edit pass, but this paragraph is almost the same as the previous one.

Repetition for effect or accident?
yrsillar said:
It was nothing compared to the scene that awaited her at the village itself. She had left behind a peaceful farming village huddled on the shores of the river, with beautiful green fields extending far upstream, nestled at the bottom of a valley. What she found on return seemed more like an embattled fortress. The rolling fields had been trampled to ruin, homes, barns and other structures sagging where walls had been blown out in the rampage of some beast. Even now spirits streamed through the trampled fields fleeing in all directions.

At the center, however things were more dire. Ling Qi's eyes watered at the fetid heat that radiated out from the battlefield she saw there, sickly and familiar. She remembered clearing out that nest of disease spirits just a few days ago, but it seemed there had been more pockets further south, very many more.

They churned from the southern forest like a moving river of chitin; centipedes, locusts, worms, crawling and flying things that she could not name, all flooded out from the southern hills, their buzzing and chittering seeming to shake the air.
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Okay, this looks very likely to be pre-primed. Large nests of disease spirits shouldn't be forming unnoticed, they'd need to be fed somehow
yrsillar said:
At the top of the ridge that overlooked the river, a massive wall had sprung up, formed of twisted bulging branches and boughs of vital green wood, it rose over ten meters high and stretched on for hundreds, like a shield braced against the ground against the oncoming beasts. The Sect's soldiers stood atop the twitching, living wall. Four first realms to every second, the lesser cultivators rained crossbow bolts that left contrails of boiling steam down upon the advancing tide in a continuous rain, their hands blurring with the speed at which they reloaded the devices. Their captains swept the sky with fire, wind, water and lightning, while the wall itself crushed, impaled and destroyed the things that crawled upon it with grasping branches and creepers.
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Zhengui is really going all out in protecting the fields. Good boy!
Think he was extra motivated by the farmers having been giving him offerings, spirits don't much care about people outside of their tiny monkeysphere, but he's spent a few days with them and amiably considers them Nice People who give him food, and now they're going to have No Food which is terrible.
Its VERY nice to see him in his element for a change, the wall is basically FVM Anti Ground version for shredding enemies.
Xiulan: "Men, take the aerial attackers."
Soldiers: "What about the ground?"
Xiulan: "Zhengui has the ground."

Also huh, is that Argent Current in the boiling steam missiles?
yrsillar said:
She saw Xiulan standing at the center of the wall, a burning brand under the darkened sky. Heat radiated from her form distorting the very air and rendering her a miragelike appearance. Her gown seemed like a thing of liquid fire and her hair rose, smoking on drafts of superheated air. Heavenly energies crackled near the surface of her skin, shining through the faded scars of her triublation, as if her friend were merely a damaged container for an ocean of living lightning. Even as Ling Qi poured on further speed, blurring into a bolt of shadow in the sky, she saw Xiulan sweep her bandage wrapped hand out, and a river of blue-white flame boiled out, a searing beam that carved a trench through the advancing spirits, who died in their hundreds, incinerated or boiled in their own exoskeletons until they exploded in a shower of miasma. Where the beam passed, it left a molten trench in the earth, liquid glass and stone snapping and hissing in the suddenly cooling air.
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We hadn't ever really seen Xiulan where she could cut loose at range either without having to focus on melee guarding herself.

The intensity of the blast looks like its designed to deal with undead or regenerators though. A little overkill otherwise.
yrsillar said:
With her other hand, she wielded a many tailed lash of red flames, which snapped and coiled through the air, hissing with heat as it snatched a locust the size of a large dog from the air and flung it away from the wall.

The tumbling bug was snatched from the air by a pair of gigantic serpentine jaws, vanishing with a crunch down Zhen's throat as Gui stomped through the tide, uncaring of the insects that swarmed up his legs biting and gnashing futilely at his scales. Like clockwork, with every rumbling step, roots speared out from the earth, impaling scores of spirits before withdrawing back into the churned earth. Yet he was not unharmed. Ling Qi's eyes swiftly fell upon the patches of torn scales along Zhen's body, and the glowing crack that spiderwebbed across his shell, glowing with magmatic heat.
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He Snacc.

Zhengui is just ignoring everything below a certain power threshold, I'm pretty sure the low Yellow and Red bugs aren't even doing damage, they're just dying.
yrsillar said:
The one that had inflicted them was obvious, hanging over the field like a macabre banner, she saw the body of a truly massive insect, a centipede over twenty meters long, impaled upon three sharp wooden stakes the size of small trees, it's grey-brown shell pitted and burned through by fires and it's head a charred ruin. It's legs still twitched and writhed feebly despite that, and fetid gore that stunk of sickness and rot dripped from its perforated body, leaving bubbling pools in the dirt below.
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Call a hazmat team, because that thing looks Green.

yrsillar said:
As Ling Qi swept over the village, rattling window frames and kicking up dust in the streets, Zhen opened his jaws, baring his fangs to the sky, and a little spark of fire perched like a crown atop his head flared brighter as a sheet of hissing, bubbling venom shot from his mouth over a far wider range than he was normally able, melting and burning the flying vermin trying to pass him.
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Oh hey, when then Zhengui get a hat?
A range buffing hat!

yrsillar said:
However, despite everything, the diseased things pouring from the southern forest were still numerous beyond counting, and so as she swept in, Ling Qi curved her flight to one side, the side least supported, and raised her flute to her lips. The dark melody of the forgotten Vale poured forth with an unusual energy, and as mist began to billow out, heavy with hungry phantoms, a ragged cheer rose from the wall. It came first from a handful, presences Ling Qi vaguely recognized from patrols and training runs, only to quickly be taken up by others as her mist engulfed the mass of flying spirits and their shredded remains began to rain down on the earth below.

Some were hardier than others, their chitin resisting phantasmal claws, but Hanyi's song, rising in counterpoint to hers, allowed that to be taken care of while conserving Ling Qi's own dwindling qi.

With her help, sweeping across the battlefield in a bank of deadly mist, the tide at last receded, leaving a field of twisted, miasmic sludge of insectoid bodies dissolved into diseased pools.
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Looks like Ling Qi's rep is getting out there.
Miss "Kill arbitary numbers of lesser foes" is go.
yrsillar said:
As Ling Qi ascended to the top of the wall, heat and cold clashed where their auras met, violent winds rustling the cloaks of the soldiers nearest by, yet beyond base physical interaction, she felt Xiulan's domain, it was a hungry ambitious thing, lightning stabbing down from the heavens, a wildfire raging through dry brush, but it did not reject hers. If anything the flames roared higher and the lightning flashed more brightly as Ling Qi's own melody washed over them.
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Domain Handshake!
yrsillar said:
"You kept them all out of the village then?" Ling Qi asked cautiously, she knew it was only due to their fortitude as cultivators that they could stand the miasma rising from below, even so she had felt her skin crawl with sickly heat when making a pass through the worst of it.

"Of course," Xiulan sniffed. "Though only thanks to that spirit of yours."
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Yeesh, thats a scorched earth attack plan if I ever saw one. These guys say "you lose even if you win"
yrsillar said:
"I protected everyone!" Gui boomed proudly, his voice echoing across the ruined field as he stomped back toward the wall. "It was really hard, but I did it!"

"Even foolish Gui can accomplish something in a pinch, but it was only due to I Zhen, that things went so well," Zhen hissed proudly. "It was my fangs that finished the beast!" Atop his head, the tiny flame, which Ling Qi only now recognized as Linhuo let out a crackling laugh.

"I've no idea where he learned such bragging,"
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So cute.

Also Linhuo is back on screen! Buffing specialist?
yrsillar said:
Xiulan murmured before raising her voice. "Soldiers! You have fought well, and with great bravery! It pleases me to have been able to lead such a fine force this day! I am certain we need only hold a short time more."

Her words brought a tired cheer from the men and women on the wall, though they kept their eyes and their crossbows trained on the south.

More quietly, and masked by the crackling heat her friend's expression grew more serious. "It is well that you returned. I am already down a half dozen men, the disease was too much for them, I have ordered a temporary camp set up for the wounded, since we cannot bring them into town. I am feeling a bit winded as well."
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Keeping morale up is good, but if the disease has already started taking down cultivators, that doesn't seem like a sustainable defense.

Wonder which faction arranged it.
yrsillar said:
Ling Qi's eyebrows climbed at the frank admission from her proud friend. "I am not at my best either," she said quietly. "The other villages, they're holding, but there won't be any help coming from there. Have there been any other messengers?"

Xiulan grimaced, sparks spitting from her fingertips. "Only one, warning us to keep away from the South. Sect forces are inbound, but it seems this was not the only plague brewing in Sect lands, nor the only instance of higher raiding."
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Hell, messengers are actively being interdicted rather than opportunistically?
yrsillar said:
From the silhouette of icebreaker peak, she saw a long, sinuous limb, a titanic tendril of some unknown thing, rise from the massive dust cloud where it had impacted the earth. For a second, Ling Qi stared, unable to comprehend the sheer size of the thing, which was visible from many kilometers away.

She was only able to stare, stupefied as something far too small to see smashed the thrashing tendril aside with enough force to tear a chunk of flesh that must of been the size of a house free. She watched the arc it described through the air toward them, a lumpy squirming mass of runny black ooze studded with mouths and eyes of innumberable shapes, already rotting in fast motion as it slammed into and flattened a grove of trees only a few kilometers away. She raised her arm to shield her eyes as a moment later, the wind of that blow buffeted her sending her hair and dress flapping behind her from the gale.
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...that does NOT look anything like a native of the peak.
That in fact looks a lot like the Corrupted Hill.
yrsillar said:
Xiulan shot her a sour look, as if detecting the thrust of her thoughts, and then turned away to address the shaken soldiers. However, at that moment a great cacophony arose from the diseased grove to the south, and the sound of wood splintering echoed as a massive red and brown form rose from the trees. Meters wide mandibles snapped, and hundreds of legs churned the earth as another grotesque titan of a centipede emerged from the earth. Below her, Zhengui bellowed a challenge, turning with surprising speed speed to face the new foe and the resurgence of the diseased spirits that came pouring out with it.

"Ling Qi!" Xiulan's shout drew her attention, even as Sixiang let out a wordless cry of alarm in her head, who stared at her with eyes wild with alarm, her bandaged hand was outstretched, fires already blooming from her fingertips, everything seemed to slow down as she saw the gleam of metal beneath her chin, saw the curved and serrated blade just a hair's breadth from her throat, and the slim grey skinned hand holding it, with digit's just slightly too long and thin to be human, reaching over her shoulder. Even now, she felt no presence, not any qi, nor even a breath across the back of her neck, despite the shine of deep purple venom practically dripping from the blades edge.
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And there's the Eshin Gnawing One Assassin. Timed impeccably too, taking out the AoE is the only way to ensure this wave does as much as possible.

I'm guessing if we had pursued the trail we'd probably have caught up just as the assassin took a shot at Xiulan, but since we top speed flew back, we outpaced and taking out the supporter first beats taking out the artillery.

Actually, I'm pretty sure they waited for Zhengui to be distracted by the giant bug so his tremorsense wasn't a factor.
 
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