I’m sure no one was surprised that Max wasn’t for real murdered by this attack. But for the record, without ManaVore, Final Blade would have actually been able to pierce her armor, because of the crazy amount of magic behind the attack. It wouldn’t have killed her outright, but it would have hurt.

I read/listen to a lot of LitRPGs, and so many of them have abilities like “This Skill can block any single attack, but has a five minute cooldown.” or “Activating this Skill makes you undetectable for 3 minutes, or until you interact with an object.” The problem with a skill description with an absolute in it is either there’s some fine text The System isn’t telling you about, or those skills are wildly exploitable. I mean, really, ANY attack? You could block the Chaos Titan Gamemaster’s Reality Schism?  Zeus’s lightning bolt? The Death Star’s main weapon? A stinging comment? Which is a sort of social attack, but still an attack!

I’m not suggesting using The System should require fine text or a 38 page user agreement or that the most common class should be “Lawyer” because everyone has to initial in triplicate every time they acquire a new skill and store a copy at The System Hall of Records. Just a little clearer wording would be immensely useful, like “This Skill can block any single attack up to three tiers higher than itself. Has a five minute cooldown.” Something like that.

Now, with all that said, “Final Blade” was genuinely supposed to be an unstoppable attack, because it was a skill Ryzyl got way back when he was Bronze Tier, and now he’s S-Tier… or uh, I guess he’s be Platinum tier if the lowest tier was a metal. The skill is also a Platinum Tier attack and is the sort of thing you’d use, pretty much exclusively, on other Platinum Tier adventurers, demi-gods, Armageddon level monsters, that sort of thing.

Originally, I’d planned on Max catching the blade, (because she’s ridiculously fast) but it would keep inching toward her sternum no matter how much strength she put against it, while Ryzyl explained how the attack is unstoppable. In that scenario, Max would have flown into space, dragging Ryzyl along, and wait for him to expire in the hard vacuum. While kind of a cool solution, it didn’t really make sense, since the boundary of the arena is only 5 KM up, and it would take Ryzyl longer than the allowed 30 seconds to expire, since he’s a high-level adventurer, and not a 3rd level Rogue rolling D6/level for his hit points.

The only goofy thing about this result is that ManaVore doesn’t have a fuller, which is the indent that runs down the center of some blades, usually from the cross-guard to halfway or 3/4 of the way up the blade. Supposedly it “reduces its weight and improves balance, handling, and flexibility.” You can see one on Ryzyl’s dagger in panel 6, though I’m not sure how helpful it would be on a ten inch blade. What that means for Ryzyl is that his knife is just pressed against the flat of Max’s sword, and it seems like just a tiny readjustment of the angle or a little twist of the blade could cause it to skid off into her back. But I guess that’s not how Final Blade works. Once activate, it’s just straight in to the heart. (Final Blade has no effect on creatures without hearts.) <- See how easy that is, The System?

Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.

Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.

I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.

Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.