Remembering the carnage putting even a fraction of my strength had wrought so far, I decided not to just punch these reptile twats and call it a day. Regardless of how they'd treated me, I wasn't gonna jump straight to murder. Maybe if they'd been mindless beasts, I would've felt different, but nah.
Didn't want the knowing deaths of conscious beings on my conscience just yet. Didn't need to add to my concerns about all those 'achievements' I inadvertently unlocked on my way up here.
Luckily, I had considerably more options than just hitting the enemy and hoping for the best. I had all the options. So many that it had been hard to choose.
However, in this case, I'd had an idea from the beginning. One could say the idea had already been there before I'd even known I'd have a fight on my hands.
It went like this: I'd just spent my time having a grand old time flying around the sky, and I thought it would be a great idea to share that joy with my new pals here. A real bonding experience for us all. I was sure they'd love it.
[Gravity Tyrant]
The Level 1000 SSS-Rank Spell didn't require much explanation, really. Once activated, I now had very fine control of gravity over a very large area.
How fine, you ask? Enough to reverse gravity on the three snakes alone so they went rocketing up into the sky with a trio of distressed hisses. And enough to ensure that their weapons were torn from their hands as gravity pulled them in another direction.
How large, you ask? Enough that I still had complete control over their gravity even after they had risen several miles above the oasis.
It was a bit of a surreal spell from my perspective, this one. Gave me a completely new sense that didn't at all map onto the traditional five, which made it a bit hard to explain. [Emissary of the Water God] had basically just been a really weird version of sight, all things considered. This was another matter entirely.
But for the sake of clarity, I'll do my best: Imagine, if you will, that you could physically feel the tug of gravity on every atom of your body. Every single one, at the same time. Picture each atom as having its own 'tether' connected to the world's gravity, and they were all pretty much uniform in force; at the same time, the atoms have to be tethered to each other, right? Or you wouldn't exist.
I don't know if it actually works that way, but it doesn't really matter, because that was basically how [Gravity Tyrant] interpreted things. Every speck of existence was connected, pulling on each other, linked together, anchored, tethered. I had dominion over every single one, feeling them in a way that touch doesn't come close to describing, but was functionally the closest of the senses.
So even though I didn't understand how my brain was interpreting these signals, I could feel the three snakes flailing around in my tyrannical psychic grip. That they could flail around at all was of my choosing, since I had control of whatever the name was of the force that bonded the atoms that made up their beings together. I could've locked them in place or plucked them apart, too.
But it was funnier this way. My enhanced hearing easily filtered out all the noise of the forest, allowing me to hear their frantic hissing. They were trying to communicate, and… [Gravity Tyrant] could mess with that too, for some reason? I didn't know what gravity had to do with sound waves, but I could feel them travelling through the air and decided to mess with the gravity around them so they'd sound weird to each other.
When they were a few miles up, I juggled them around a bit, making them do elaborate tricks like the dragon and I had done, wanting to share the fun with my new pals. Waving my hands around like I was conducting a choir or directing a play, I basically chucked them around the sky.
The sight was comical. I could move them with my mind, no need for hand movements, but it was funnier to slash my hand to the right and see Red follow along the motion, only he was a few miles away so he'd actually covered a very large distance in the span of a second, with G-forces just this side of lethal, because I was a nice guy and didn't want to turn his organs to pulp.
Honestly, it looked kind of fun up there. It took some serious self-restraint to resist flying over and joining the party, but instead I turned my attention to Sssanya, even as I kept chucking the snakes about, flapping my hands about almost randomly.
"So, who are those dickheads?" I asked her with an unimpressed look. Douchebags who got super aggro over nothing always rubbed me the wrong way. Like, what the heck are you trying to prove?
"They are Warriors of the Great Green Sea Tribe," Sssanya said, her voice carefully neutral. If she had lips, I reckoned she'd be whistling
My unimpressed look deepened. "Yeah, I gathered that. They seemed to know you, though? They called you Honourless One. Said you're not friends." I paused, tilting my head. "Are they your old school bullies, or something? You don't need to be embarrassed. I know how it feels to run into someone you haven't seen in a decade and realise they're still stuck in that stupid juvenile mindset, believe me, and it reflects worse on them than it does on you."
Obviously, I knew perfectly well there was something deeper than playground teasing going on here. It took a moment for the snake lady to form a response to that, which I spent idly making the trio do spins. One of them threw up. Gross. Didn't think snakes could vomit.
"They are not closely connected to me, personally." Her voice was even more neutral, somehow, but the answer itself wasn't totally evasive, at least. Then she continued: "The warrior of red scale, Hasssaya, is mated with my elder sister."
"... that kinda sounds like a close personal connection to me."
"He is one of the strongest warriors in our tribe," Sssanya continued as if I hadn't spoke, and some kind of emotion burned in her eyes when she looked at me, though I didn't think it was meant for me, directly. Satisfaction that I was beating up her sister's hubby without even trying, maybe?
"The sister you beat in that duel of yours, was it?"
There was a moment of silence. Sssanya went still. "Yes," she said after a while, voice strained. For the first time since I'd met her, her tone lost that melodious quality, descending to a register closer to what I imagined it would sound like if a regular snake tried to speak human words.
It occurred to me a second later that she might not actually have mentioned that incident. I'd learned it from [Observe.]
Oops.
Social faux pas were nothing new to me, but I did feel like a bit of a dick again.
"How old are you?" I asked.
Sssanya did a sideways blink at the non-sequitur. "I have seen nineteen cycles, Great One."
I winced. "Aaaaand how long does one of your people typically live?"
"Najavi of importance have been known to live for thousands of cycles."
My wince deepened. "Uh huh. And what about on average?"
"Two hundred, typically. Three hundred if we live well."
Damn it. Have I really been bullying a kid all this time? There's no way, right? She seems so mature! "And when is a Najavi considered an adult, culturally?"
"That depends." She gave me an odd look. "If you are asking me if I would be considered a child by the standards of most people of my race, then yes," she said with undeniable anger in her voice, "I would."
My shoulders slumped. Crap. "And how long since you were exiled, exactly?"
Another pause. When she answered, her voice was caustic with venom, "Four cycles."
I groaned. "Guess I'm gonna have to beat up your tribe, huh?" Then something occurred to me, and I pointed at her accusingly. "Wait a minute. Why did you attack me if you've been exiled that long? Why follow the rules of some shithead tribe that treated you so awfully?"
Sssanya's eyes went wide, and she seemed in danger of breaking her back with how violently she bowed her head, practically smashing her skull into the ground. "Please forgive me, Great One!"
"What did I tell you about that nonsense?" Seeing her behave this way felt even worse, now. "Come on. Up. I don't care about the attack. Water under the bridge. Just wanna know why you even bothered." I paused, eyeing her. "You weren't doing it to try and get back in their good graces, were you?"
Her silence was telling, as was the fact she kept her head pressed firmly to the floor.
I could only sigh. Honestly, I wasn't usually this expressive of a guy when I wasn't in the midst of my death-defying stunts. For the most part, the time between my fixes of adrenaline had been spent a bit numb, my body going into a sort of standby mode as it waited for the next rush of adrenaline, of emotion. I didn't actually deal with other people all that often, recently.
A bit sad, when you thought about it, but I hadn't cared at the time, and didn't feel like starting now. Doing my best to blank my expression, I turned my attention back to the trio high in the sky, multiplying gravity on them so they came plummeting down like snake-shaped meteors.
"Well, whatever. Got anything you want to say to those three guys, by any chance?"
Sssanya kept her head bowed even though I wasn't looking at her, but I could feel through [Gravity Tyrant] that her face was flickering through a myriad of emotions. "There are many things I want to say, but it would be wasted on them."
"Fair enough. I, on the other hand, have a lot to say." I shrugged one shoulder as the snakes splashed down into the lake.
Three massive geysers erupted in their wake, and that looked pretty cool, so I indulged myself in the fun of bringing them up and slamming them back down to see how high of a spout I could make. Since I'm not a child, the lustre wore off pretty quick, and I dragged them over to the shore. I'm no snake expert, but they looked a little woozy from the experience, the wusses.
Unfortunately for them, I was a bit angrier at them than I had been when I'd first selected [Gravity Tyrant] as their punishment, so they were actually about to get a lot woozier.
"First thing's first," I said, approaching them and releasing the Spell's hold at once, dropping them unceremoniously on the ground from a couple of metres up.
To his credit, the Red one—Hasssaya, was it?—was up and ready to fight in less than a second. The other two weren't far behind. Impressive resilience, I had to admit.
I raised my eyebrows at the sight, wondering how these dudes were going to fare against my [Way of the Heaven-Shattering Saint].