Capítulo 132: Wives' Endeavours I
It was a few days after Jun's gathering with his wives to discuss his meeting with [Shiki] and what he had learned there.
He was currently enjoying a paradisiacal retreat with Cleria, on an artificially created environment, a reproduction of a tropical island surrounded by clear water, a nice wooden cabin for the two of them to spend time in and infinite refreshments.
Meanwhile, Scathach and Penthesilea had begun their brutal training routine, with Scathach even diminishing her teaching time after warning Jun and her students.
The two warrior queens underwent harsh physical training designed through a joint effort, with Scathach taking her original methods and combining them with Penthesilea's amazoness training to produce an even more brutal routine.
Part of said, routine, involved sparring that would only stop when either one of them became unable to battle.
Taking advantage of their immortality thanks to being bound to Domina Coronam and Scathach's power to deny death to a certain point inside her Crown of Undeath: Dun Scaith, the pair literally clashed like mortal enemies, fully intent of killing the other party with extreme prejudice.
One such "spar" proceeded as such . . .
Penthesilea and Scathach stood face to face, the latter with her black skin tight celtic bodysuit and two red spears, her Gae Bolg Alternative in her hands while the former only had some leather covering her breasts and crotch with metal greaves and clawed gauntlets as her only weapons.
Despite both of them being accomplished warriors with mastery over a multitude of weapons, Scathach always held the spear as her best and Penthesilea's wrath of past, the vestiges of her rage made her quite partial to her massive clawed gauntlets.
Goddess of War, the amazon's sash filled with divine power wrapped around her waist like a summer sarong as divine power of colossal proportions coiled around her entire body.
Scathach stood against her fearless, her power and magical energy tightly contained in her taut body and twin spears without the slightest leak. As a woman who slaughtered countless Divine Spirits and Near Gods in her day, a "little" Divine Energy would giver no pause.
Penthesilea's release of it, was not show of force or attempt at intimidation, her Authority of Conflict as a true goddess of war was coating her entire body, not only enhancing her offensive abilities to the extreme but also providing a very powerful conceptual defense.
This was her preparation for Scathach's anti unit use of her Gae Bolg Alternative, the strike that reversed causality. This meant that rather than a pierced heart resulting from the red spear being thrust instead, the thrust was the consequence of the heart having already been pierced.
Same as Cu Chulainn's, it was powerful ability to deliver certain death but it was far from infallible. At face value, it was unstoppable since technically, the opponents was already dead the very moment the noble phantasm was activated but there were a few ways around it.
The first and most accessible way was to keep out of range since the thrown version of Gae Bolg, while carrying more destructive power, lacked the reversing of causality effect, making it blockable with purely enough defensive power.
As a pure close ranged fighter however, this method was not suited for Penthesilea. Another method, was a sufficiently high Luck Parameter, preferably combined with a powerful Clairvoyance, Mind's Eye (False) or Instinct type skill.
For example, Artoria, with her Luck Parameter lowered to B due to Shirou's lack of ability, along with an A ranked Instinct, was able to turn the fatal blow into a mere flesh wound, serious but far from deadly to a Servant.
Unfortunately, Luck was not one of Penthesilea's strong suits, with her having a mere D rank in it, making Gae Bolg impossible to avoid, a matter only made worse by her lack of predictive abilities.
Another way to avoid the noble phantasm was to simply lack the concept of death. Granted, this was something almost impossible unless one was not a God or something close and even then, even gods had destined deaths and could most certainly be killed.
Scathach herself, having lost the ability to die, was immune to the anti unit use of Gae Bolg, causing it to wildy veer of course and miss her completely whenever it was used on her.
While the Gods of Olympus lacked death in truest sense, being reduced to Divine Spirits had them lose their absolute immortality, and Penthesilea, being a Divine Spirit lacked it as well.
With all of the "exploits" that could be used to avoid Gae Bolg's anti unit attack out of Penthesilea's reach, she could only resort to using the proper way to stop it.
Pure defensive power could not usually stop a conceptual fate altering attack. However, a good enough conceptual defense would stop it in its tracks.
In other words, either a conceptually superior defence could stop Gae Bolg without issue and a "shield" with powerful enough magical energy could overwhelm the spear's own power to stop it even if it lacked a direct conceptual counter.
Now, Penthesilea's Authority was based on the one possessed by her father Ares. As a result, since he embodied the more aggressive aspects of war and conflict in general, defense was not his strongest suit but it was still very high as it is a necessary part of battle.
And so, by covering herself in massive amounts of divine energy imbued with her Authority, Penthesilea could ensure that Gae Bolg's anti unit reversal of causality would merely be an unavoidable hit rather than a death sentence.
In other words, she had to use this great power just to make sure Scathach did not instantly one shot her at the start of the duel . . . As for how she would fight the Queen of Dun Scaith after having to put so much effort just to protect herself from one of her tricks . . . That remained to be seen.
The power ranking of Jun's wives had Morgan consistently at the top with Scathach as second and Penthesilea as third but she had been closing in ever since binding herself to the Crown of Heaven: Celestia.
Would these "spars" become the deciding factor in a change of the wife power rankings?
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