Chapter 146: Pinnacle Rank

While the long range attacks rattled her sphere Mira closed her eyes and recalled how the Soak Bubble worked. When hit with attacks the bubble would absorb the energy and swell up until it couldn't swell anymore and would turn into a normal bubble.

Mira thought 'Normal Bubble… Swell' and it came to her. The Soak bubble was exploding it was just doing it in a different way. Mira tried out the idea that came to her; she created a Nova bead and sent it out of the sphere. This bead had a grid of doors on its surface.

Over the weeks Mira had learned that the doors were just weak points that she made in the Novas, surfaces were the containment layer was weak enough for the explosions in containment to break out of them on their own.

The bead Mira made looked like a golf ball up close, it had many indentations which was where the doors were finely placed all over its surface. The doors weren't as weak as normal door hence they didn't break under the force of the explosion they were containing. The golf ball was immaterial when Mira sent it out of her protective sphere but she made it materialize and an attack hit it and it exploded like a normal Nova would.

Mira revised her structure and thought 'The doors are too many, the bead will just shatter the moment it is hit. I can just make the containment layer thicker overall but that means I'll have to measure the thickness depending on the power of the attack. That would be too much calculation'.

Mira created another Nova bead structure, her idea revolved around making a Nova bead that would let the energy from an attack inside it from a door and explode within the containment layer which would make the containment layer expand and absorb the attack fully because of the vacuum the explosion would create in it.

The next bead she made had the same golf ball structure as the previous bead but with smaller, fewer and thinner doors that would normally break under the force of the explosions they were containing. The only reason they didn't break was because the bead had a thicker containment layer where there were no doors compared to a regular bead.

The bead looked like a regular bead with few small pits regularly spaced on its surface. The pits had the shape of the frustum of a cone (A cone that doesn't have the pointy top but a circular top instead) with the smaller circle facing outward and the larger circle being the thin door. The pit was shaped so that it would tend more to complete cone as the bead expanded to prevent the doors that weren't supposed to break from breaking due to the expansion that would happen insided the bead.

When she tested the bead again by exposing it to the attacks outside her protective sphere, the results were quite satisfying to her. The door of the bead broke inward when an attack hit it or a place around it and this created a small hole where the explosion tried to flow out of but the attack's force overpowered the explosion and kept it inside the containment.

The explosion was pushed back against the sphere by the attacks force even as it went off and this created a vacuum as the bead expanded and filled the vacuum in space by sucking whatever energy was used for the attack until all the pure energy in the explosion turned into the same energy used for the attack.

The containment would then compress and fire back a beam of whatever energy was used for the attack back through the same hole that the attacks energy broke through sending the attack back to the sender with even more power and focus.

This structure worked in a simple way since it had a limit of energy that it could hold and when it reacted that limit it would redirect the attack energy back to toward the origin even if it hadn't completely absorbed the attack.

Mira was overjoyed when she saw the working of the new bead structure. Unlike the bubble armor which could only make Soak Bubbles into normal bubbles her skill turned them into Balloon Bubbles which automatically redirected the enemy's attack.

Mira changed the structure of the beads that she used to make her protective sphere and made them into what she called 'Karma Stars' since they reminded her of Funmi's martial art.

The situation of the monsters swiftly took a nose dive as the Karma Stars took out the long range monsters and Mira got back to being a symbol of death to the monsters as Shooting Stars wasted the close range monsters and flying monsters when the long range monsters stopped attacking.

The battle ended with a complete victory for platoon G and they returned to the new rendezvous point. Mira was very delighted to hear that her performance was the best out of all the peak Rank 6s on that day. The monsters had also used fitting strategies to combat them like they did with Mira and few of them could adapt their techniques on the fly or discover new techniques that rendered the strategies of the monsters useless.

In Anastasia's case the monsters simply used only long range attacks and stayed out of the range of her Blade Tree. So she focused more on protection her platoon with her blades while trying to turn the battle to a close ranged one but she didn't succeed.

Mira suppressed her joy and said 'They'll soon catch up anyway I have to improve my control of the Novas' she checked her stats:

[Previous State:

Strength: High (low)

Agility: High (intermediate)

Stamina: High (low)

Durability: Intermediate (high)

Intelligence: High (low)

Senses: High (intermediate)

Energy: High (high)]

[Current State:

Strength: High (low)

Agility: High (intermediate)

Stamina: High (low)

Durability: Intermediate (high)

Intelligence: High (low)

Senses: High (intermediate)

Energy: Pinnacle]

Mira's eyes shot wide open when she saw that her energy had reached Pinnacle. She had checked her stats in the morning but her energy was only at High (high). She thought 'I didn't even feel the change'.

Mira looked at her Intermediate (high) Durability and thought 'The only one that isn't in the major High rank. *sigh* Well I don't get hit often and I usually have Jade's great armor so it's expected that I won't have a high durability stat. Even my physical stats have had to wait but now I can focus on them, I'll just divert a constant stream of 10,000 en-code to my Energy stat in case I hit Transcendent someday'.

In Mira's mind she would only reach Transcendent Rank after Samuel and Kenny, after she had put in a ton of en-code in her energy stat. This misconception was because of the lack of knowledge about Transcendent Rank stats. The amount of en-code put into a stat wouldn't affect the speed at which a person reached Transcendent Rank.

Days passed as the monsters applied different strategies to their battles. It became obvious that a high Rank monster King was paying attention to the battles of the Rank 6s and that it was trying to learn strategies by exchanging the lives of Rank 6s for more experience about battle strategies so that it could protect the lives of its higher Ranked monsters with the strategies it learned from the worthless Rank 6 monsters.

Night City didn't mind the monsters learning, they had many tactical weapons that Jade had made for them that they didn't use because they wanted the skill of the people to increase along with their Ranks.

In a matter of two weeks there was barely any Rank 5 member of Night City, human or vampire but the monsters now used more intricate strategies to cut their losses. They knew when to advance and retreat, they also learnt to synchronize their different abilities and form groups and formations that utilized what they were good at to the fullest. The only things they were missing was how to prepare traps and to make their territory easier to defend.

The monsters would have won but a few factors stopped that from happening. Their numbers had greatly reduced over the weeks, the Ranks of the Night City members had increased compared to before along with their power and the monsters had nothing that could compete with the peak Rank 6s.

This was because monsters only instinctually got skills when their stats were at the required threshold and their race description, stats and body parts would always abruptly change when they reached the requirement for a higher Rank. Few of them were ingenuous enough to train so even if there were many Rank 6 monsters that had as much or even greater stats that peak Rank 6s in general the difference in prowess set Night City apart from the monsters.

It was during the end of the 5th month of the Coronation War Event during a night raid that Mira heard Jade's mental message about his entering into the Doping Pod. Jade didn't give her specific information he just told her that he would be unavailable for two months from now.