I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1411: Mockery [Part 1]

Northern spoke to the royal family and laid out his plans before them. The core of the plan, the piece everything else hung from, was whether he would be able to create five hundred bows before sunrise.

Even now, it was almost the tenth hour of the night.

"Lord Northern, if you want to create five hundred bows and many more arrows... shouldn’t you be leavinxg?"

Prince Rhama spoke.

"Besides, how are five hundred bows supposed to ensure us victory against thousands of soldiers? The one thing the Empire has an avalanche of is men. Their forces are as vast as their seas. Five hundred archers against thousands of soldiers. Maybe even three thousand?"

Northern sipped a glass of wine. The atmosphere was lighthearted compared to what it had been a few minutes ago when the queen was talking.

The Princes were seated now, drinking wine and eating cakes. Prince Rhama, after talking, had simply moved to consume a chunk of cake. Prince Rieran, who had just asked Northern a question, was also sipping his wine, while the last prince, Rover, lay across a two-seat chair. He raised a piece of cake above his mouth and dropped it in from a height, catching it cleanly.

"You’ll see."

Northern said, after taking his sip.

"You really aren’t going to go start work?"

Northern looked at Prince Rhama.

"Who said I haven’t already started?"

The Prince nodded. "I see. Lord Northern is a very thorough person."

He paused and set down the glass of wine in his hand, then turned to his father.

"Father, I heard about Lord Eli’s death..."

His tone turned somber.

The King was silent for a moment.

"I’ve not been able to hear the full details about it. I heard the citadel is making necessary preparations. But the state of things currently has been making it difficult to mourn these heroes properly."

Prince Rhama nodded.

"First it was Burning Storm, although Lieutenant Dante deserved it. I heard he died in battle with Burning Storm... these two losses are a huge blow to the Central Plains. If the Empire hadn’t noted their absence, why would they choose such a time to attack us?"

The King shook his head.

"It pains my heart. When all of this is over, we should travel to his family and support them properly. Eli... he helped us so much."

The room fell quiet. Roma held her cup and rubbed her thumb around its rim.

Northern himself was silent, staring at the wine on the table, turning over its composition in his mind. It tasted like honey at first, but there was a faint sting beneath it, almost herbal.

’What could they have used?’

His heart tightened as he chased the thought, pulling apart the flavor, trying to isolate the ingredient that produced that sting.

Morning came, and Northern had prepared five hundred bows as he’d decided he would.

He was in the pit. His alabaster body was covered in soot and sweat, his hair darkened with it, almost black. The pit was a colossal furnace in and of itself. If there had been anyone else here, they would have been melting already, but Northern was resistant to heat. His clones flew out of the pit carrying bows and arrows in bundles.

Shelves had been carved through the midnight hours. Ultron had helped, commanding some of the other elven echoes. They had built display shelves around the pit and were also constructing a special demarcation for it, a round dais that would lead down to the furnace and double as a throne seat. There was still work going on across the area.

Northern stood up and stared at the bows that hung on the shelves around him. They sat still on their mounts, each one looking like a cathedral that had collapsed into the shape of malice.

The bow itself was two crescent limbs that unfurled outward like the ribcage of a dead leviathan. Between the limbs, multiple strings ran in parallel from one edge to another, each pulled to a different tension, a different pitch of destruction.

At the grip, a translucent eye pulsed and roamed. That was the ocular core, designed to feed the arrow with what the user was seeing. All they had to do was pour their soul essence into it.

Northern had crafted the frame primarily from ice crystals, which gave the bow its ornate silver-blue plating. The metal crawled over the limbs like frost claiming a curved bone.

He had managed to weave five abilities into the bow, none of which depended on the user’s talents. Only their essence mattered.

The first was [Parallel Volley]. When the user drew an arrow across those parallel strings, pouring essence, the arrow multiplied according to how many strings it passed through. More strings, more force, more arrows.

The second ability used the concept of the leviathan that the Chaos Prince had defeated. The translucent eye at the bow’s center could track multiple targets at once, all within the user’s line of sight. It didn’t matter if the user wasn’t aiming at them, didn’t even notice them. The ocular core would drive the arrows to hunt every marked target, and the arrows forgot the concept of stopping until they had concluded their purpose.

The third ability stole essence from the user as they fed the bow and stored it within the weapon’s bones. Northern had used Maw’Thoraxis’s bones to achieve that one. A reservoir that filled itself through use.

The fourth was [Crescent Reap], which allowed the user to swing the lower limb of the bow in a close-range essence sweep, slicing across multiple targets at best, and at worst, simply sweeping them off their feet.

The last was [Weight of the Crowned Sky]. Drawing from what he had learned of gravity distortion when he’d had Chaos Eyes and fought Rughsbourgh, Northern had woven a persistent, subtle gravitational field around the archer in a five-meter radius, slowing incoming projectiles by roughly twenty percent.

And he had named this beautiful weapon Mockery.

Northern stared at all of them. Mockery 1, Mockery 2, Mockery 3, all the way to Mockery 500.

He was very satisfied. Already looking forward to how this ambush was going to unfold.

He grinned.

’They should be arriving soon.’