Chapter 143: Unexpectedly Important
Tiff was returning to the city much faster than she had left it because she was moving at her own speed which was much higher than that of the scouts she had been following. She was also moving in a straight line because there was no longer a giant she had to avoid in the middle of the city.
Getting to the city Tiff made herself invisible and dashed over the first wall then headed towards the Alchemist guild hoping Jon would actually be there. She was pretty sure he lived there full time and now wasn't exactly a time someone would want to be out and about so she hoped once she got close enough and turned off her invisibility he would see her no problem and come give her the dagger like he said he would.
Getting outside the Alchemist guilds barrier Tiff headed towards where she had been watching the Alchemist guild the other day because it was the closest she could get to her mark when she had still been tracking Jon. She had spent most of a day sitting here the other day waiting for him to come out of the guild so she could ambush him but it wasn't a good hiding place if you weren't invisible because she was literally standing on the roof of a huge building.
Turning off her invisibility and making herself as visible as possible Tiff just hoped Jon was actually watching the fight and took a second to look down at the city because she was sure most people would be looking straight up into the sky now. Looking up into the sky herself now that she had time she saw that the temple had given up on the trying to hide how many of them there was plan because at a glance she saw 11 dots of golden light that were members of the 23 and there were also attacks coming from the ground that was giving away even more of them.
Actually the temple had probably just been unable to get the others under control before they all rushed out to help however was in the sky and almost been killed. The other members had most likely all reacted like she would have if she had had her dagger which was instantly joining the fight before she received her orders.
In the time it would have taken for the new orders to come down, whoever was up there fighting all alone could have died. She was sure the temple was going to be mad at them all later for this but the fact that one of the three swords hadn't been killed would probably lessen how mad they were and if they were lucky the temple would agree with their decision.
As she watched she had to say it seemed the 23 hadn't all rushed out so their exact number was still hidden which was what the temple wanted at most only 17 of them seemed involved at the moment which was close to the two of them per one giant rule the temple had set for this fight.
As she watched the current balance of this battle Tiff had to say it seemed it was under control. She could tell the 23 were having a hard time actually getting their attacks to land but that was also true for the giants and with there being more of them that meant even if only 10% of their attacks were landing it was slowly whittling down the giants.
It seemed what the temple had said about the effects of Holy mana on undead had been true. It seemed they did in fact have a huge advantage element wise which was weird because the Demon Lord had literally just flipped the principles of the Holy element to make the Unholy element.
When you first heard something like that you would think the elements would be even and cancel each other out. This must be the fact that the Holy goddess was an actual god even if she was currently dead and the Demon Lord had yet to ascend. And you saw this in the way the two elements reacted when they clashed the Holy mana erased the Unholy mana and while it weakened in the process there was still enough to deal significant damage to the giants when they were unable to dodge.
It was almost like they crumbled which reminded her of the early days of their training when the temple had shown them an undead for the first time to show them what they would be fighting against. It hadn't been a giant or anything just a normal undead and their handlers had shown them how tough undead could be by cycling through different spells and elements and while a few had been able to kill or damage the undead at the end the handler had called Greg forward to use a holy spell and the undead had instantly returned to what it was supposed to be which was dust.
Undead had the opposite of what normal creatures had in them that gave them life and it was what kept them together and allowed them to exist in the first place, a lot of people called it unlife but tiff had always thought that sounded weird; Holy mana obliterated unlife because it held principles that granted life/healed normal creatures.
This life principle had later been used by another god to make the Life element they would champion to become a god of this world but it had originally been part of the Holy element. Of course the Life element wasn't as effective against undead because it only combated one principle the Unholy element had instead of all of them like the Holy element did.
Also, the Life temple didn't really ever get involved in battles other than to heal people that had been injured so they were mostly considered neutral. Not completely neutral though because they were clearly unable to heal the army of undead the Demon Lord used to fight so only humans benefited from their help making it that the life temple helped them more than they did the Demon Worshipers.
The Life temple also attacked anyone that entered what they called the Life domain so that was something else that made them not exactly neutral. Tiff thought it was a dumb stance to take but the Life temple wasn't the only temple that was neutral so maybe they knew something the Light Temple hadn't bothered to tell them in fear it would make them all abandon the war.
She couldn't really think what that big secret could do to change the fact that the Demon Lord killed a lot of people though. The Demon Lord was clearly a bad guy so the fact that so many of the gods chose to stay neutral in this war was weird to her. Of course, even her ability to find secrets probably wasn't good enough to learn what was going on in the background between gods.
Snapping out of what she was thinking about Tiff threw her arms up in the air and whan "Woo." One of the giants had just started to fall from the sky and that was something worth celebrating because unless these giants had come to commit suicide that meant the battle should end soon with them retreating before they lost anymore of one of the strongest things the Demon Lord had going for him in this war.
Looking back at the Alchemist guild Tiff reactivated her invisibility, she had come here to get her dagger so she could join the battle but that was no longer necessary and it didn't seem like Jon was going to come out to meet her no matter how long she stood here and waved her arms around like an idiot.
The most likely thing to happen was actually her getting noticed by some of the Alchemist guilds guards and it causing an awkward interaction between the Temple and them. She could just picture the Alchemist guild asking the Temple why they had sent a person to wave at them the whole battle.
And she now had something more important to do anyway. The giant that had died in this battle wasn't a normal monster. It had some Divinity in it, even if it was just a small amount. That meant the goal of this battle had just changed to what she had been trained for harvesting the kills they got.
She was the perfect person for this job because any corpse that had divinity in it became a target for every person that was around. All you had to do to harvest the divinity was get your hands on the core, so it because a true treasure even if you didn't have plans to use it on yourself and she was the best of the 23 for this job because she was the least effective of them in battle and the sneakiest so she could harvest the giants core and the other giants wouldn't even realize she had done it if she did a good job so in their efforts to reclaim the divinity that had come from the Demon Lord they would open themselves up to more attacks.
If they were lucky this would lead to another giant dying in the ensuing fight over the devine core. There was one problem though her stealth wouldn't work on something like one of those giants without her dagger not with how high their stats were they would literally be able to see not only her but the ability itself.
She hadn't seen it herself but people or things that had Perception over 100 had what people called God Eyes this wasn't a skill just the effect of perception getting to the next level. This gave them the ability to see things like skills given from jobs when they were activated if the person they were observing wasn't divine themselves.
That meant she wouldn't be able to be sneaky this time but she was still pretty sure she could be the first to the body. It was falling and all the people in the sky were chasing it while fighting and the fact that they were fighting made them too slow to be the first to it. So it was between everyone on the ground and she was very fast with her Agility at 130 with all her skills that affected her speed activated.
Racing towards where she thought the giant would Land Tiff beat it to the spot with her being faster than something could fall. As soon as the giant landed on the ground sending up a huge amount of dust Tiff ran towards the body with her sorry excuse of a dagger to start the harvest. Using imbue to coat the dagger with Holy mana, Tiff started to dig into the giant's chest in the search of the core.
Because of the dust she didn't know how much time she had till the others would be here or if she was the only person currently trying to dig into the giants body but with her use of the holy element she was the only person here who wouldn't be digging through the flesh of a demigod with nothing but her brute strength.
Quickly getting into the rib cage Tiff saw what she was there for and remembering what she had been taught in preparation of this process Tiff made sure to grab the glowing rust colored core with covered skin. She wasn't really in danger if she didn't do this but a divine core wasn't really something you should spend long periods of time in contact with as a mortal.
Now that she had it she didn't waste any time in going to the one place she had truly been trying to avoid until the other members of the 23 returned, the temple. With something like this in her hands she was in more danger out here than at the temple because she didn't believe for one second the giants wouldn't be after her now that she had it and even if they did give up on retrieving the core in her hands and decided to retreat she wasn't going to risk a look over her shoulder to look.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from f(r)eeweb(n)ovel.𝒄𝒐𝙢