Now we know why Kaylin isn’t using skill attacks all the time and uses more mundane fighting techniques.
Artificial Incident
Now we know why Kaylin isn’t using skill attacks all the time and uses more mundane fighting techniques.
a smart adventurer doesn’t need them much
Both Sena and Aiya know terms and concepts from the out-of-character game system. I’m wondering how much Nyna’s ignorance is due to her age versus theirs, or if the knowledge Sena and Aiya have is supposed to be significant and unusual. Would others in the village be similarly mystified by this conversation, or Nyna be the only one to not know what was going on?
We still dont know what makes Sena more dangerous than Aiya. Her speaking about adventurer tactics with this level of familiarity definitely keeps some theories alive.
I´m not sure whether she is “more dangerous”, from how i understood it, it´s that she has a tendency to lose control over her powers, a sort of Berserk mode she enters, seemingly against her will, depending on certain conditions.
And Sena seems to be deeply afraid of either that state she gets into or the damage she causes when in that state.
With Nyna not knowing, that could very well just be her general cat-ish lack of interest in most things unless they specifically pique her attention.
Nyna’s not knowing comes from her being a monster growing up in a world without adventurers. Sena and Aiya both are from the old world. Sena is also explicitly stronger than Aiya as mentioned before without her “rampaging”.
Thanks for clarifying, i did not want to just assume which one is stronger.
However it is also clear that Sena seems literally scared of her own power, or at least of what she might do in this “rampage/berserk/frenzy” kind of state.
Is there a chance for her to control it somehow? Or am i too far ahead in the story for this detail?
So from both this page and last page, it sounds like Aiya’s power as the ‘skill crusher’ boss is that she has counters to punish any skill used against her, with the severity depending on the specific type of skill. Callum makes it sound like skills have to be USED for the Shadow Cat to counter it. That answers part of the question from the bathhouse fight – specifically at what point Kaylin realized what she was up against, which per her statement last page was when Aiya countered her spell theft with a double cast.
What doesnt fully make sense to me is that it looked like Aiya was preparing two Spirit Flame spells (one per hand) *BEFORE* Kaylin stole one of them, so the double cast afterward doesnt seem to be a reaction to Kaylin’s skill – at least not to the level where it should reveal “Hey this is a boss”. Does that mean that Aiya’s countering powers (i.e. the double casting) were activated just by being in combat with an Adventurer of a certain class? Or was something more subtle going on here?
Subtly is the mark of a very good/master GM/DM
Not saying… yet… that the malfunctioning(?) gaming system is a master system, but it does seem to still have master sub-programs operating.
Aiya doesn’t counter skills by using skills that counter them, she counters them by taking advantage of their weaknesses and uses tactics that avoid skills. She did conjure both magical attacks at the same time but that doesn’t mean she had to use them in sync to take advantage of the gap between normal skill use. Kinda like the cool down periods. Those are what she punishes and she uses tactics to make up for the things she cant avoid. So most of the things she did were tactical and calculated with little to nothing to go on.
Aiya didn’t know she had spell thief, but used the dual cast anyways timed to circumvent it. She also knew the fire blast would create steam in the bath to provide cover and uses her superior strength that she gauged earlier on an unarmed person. She’s by no means a perfect fighter though. Had Kaylin been using skills as they used to work Aiya would have adapted even more quickly and used more deadly counters.
Hmmm…
I LOVE this comic.
I’ve been thinking of starting a fantasy/sci-fi comic myself and never considered the idea of a computer/online RPG gone wrong