With one last Air Blast, Kiba beats down the grenade into the wood cultivator, Lin Laotian. It had taken a few attempts, but he had determined that while Lin would stand up and keep attacking after every cycle, the poison and fire cultivators just decreased their rate of fire dramatically and maintained an active defensive shield. The fire cultivator, Yang Ming, coated himself in steel, whereas the poison cultivator Wang Yun covered himself in a dome of purple sludge and only sent out attacks either once every thirty seconds, or whenever Lin took enough grenades to the face to be slightly dissuaded in his attempts to use Kiba as a mechanical gopher. That reduction in projectiles meant he could discard two of his other dodge cards, and he had used the opportunity to double up on his Reflect and Air Blast cards. Now he could double chain his combo chain, for a massively increased projectile strength.

None of the reflected projectiles had managed to do anything different, or break through any of the defenses. A grenade with sixteen times the reflected force didn’t have any more effect than a single reflected grenade on Lin, a sixteen times more powerful sludge attack didn’t do anything to Yang’s steel frame, and launching Lin into Wang at sixteen times power only healed Lin faster. He simply got stuck in the ooze and turned around without his hammer penetrating to the crunchy human within.

Now though, every one of the miniboss squad had been taken to red health simultaneously.

Kiba feels his body stiffen as a cutscene triggers. Great, that guaranteed that he’d be alive by the end of it, while still allowing the setting to show he was massively outclassed by three opponents who were holding back while fighting him, according to the obvious plot. That set them up to be recurring antagonists, and when he got more powerful card’s he would probably beat each of them individually at full strength followed by a final group fight where he was expected to deal with the thing shown in the cutscene with his normal strength, likely when they use it as a regular attack.

Standing up from the kneeling position, Lin raises an arm and a twisting mass of vines blast up from the chest armor up his makeshift plant guide trellis thing into the sky.

“Combine the elements,” he demands to his companions, who each drop their shields.

Yang starts, a blast of fire eating its way up the vine, growing in intensity as it feeds on the wood, which itself keeps ascending into the sky, supported by its own involitility imparted back when it was created. Next, Wang separates out the goop from his sludge, distributing it into a ball of pure water and a rock. Throwing the rock at the pillar of fire, it builds on the sheet of ash flowing off the burning wood, encroaching on the ascending tunnel of wood. Yang follows the growing mountain by throwing a completely normal ball of metal into the spike of earth. Bursting out from the airborne ground, metal coats the ascent.

High up in the atmosphere, the vine leading the way starts to trace the outline of the moon, followed by the section of fire chasing after it, the earth chasing the fire, and the metal chasing the earth. Piling on, Wang adds the ball of purified water onto the metal, which immediately spreads to cover the entire tower. Lin pulls his arm away, and the water follows the other elements up into the sky to circle the moon.

As the spiral spins around and hits the back end, the vines grip onto the water and accelerate their growth. With more mass to burn, the fire blazes hotter, generating more ash. The ash solidifies, and the generated earth burst out metal, which condenses more water. Spiraling around, the elements feed on each other as the reaction accelerates, swirling about the air faster and faster.

Combining into a formless grey cloud, the five elements merge into a massive clod in the sky. All three of the cultivators raise an arm, and bring them down simultaneously. Deforming into a downward facing spike, the grey cloud jets down toward Kiba, frozen in place. He definitely would have been able to Air Jet out of the way if this wasn’t a cutscene.

Smashing down into the wood of the dock, the blast breaks apart the entire structure.

Well, that explained why it was a cutscene. Since when could a non-scripted attack have an actual effect on the environment? Kiba found himself floating on a panel in an otherwise clear part of the water, ‘miraculously’ unharmed by the sanctity of cutscene nigh-invulnerability. It was one thing if he was going to be killed by himself setting off a chain of events that ended with a spear through the face, since death cutscenes from stupid decisions were a time honored tradition, but a main plot cutscene? There was no way anything permanently negative would come from one of those.

From what he could tell from his now prone position on a floating plank raft, the entire dock area had been blown into chunks. Floating islands dot the sea, some of which he can vaguely spot as having a random chest on them. Always the ones furthest away, which would require platforming to get to, of course. Maybe if he stopped to collect that, he would be able to afford the upgrades he’d been ignoring. Odds were the upgrades would actually be in those chests though, which was the whole reason why he’d been skipping over the low tier area loot. Early treasure was almost always worthless compared to the amount of effort it would take to hunt it down. Once into a higher difficulty zone, the loot would improve along with it, and he could make more than he would have with several starting towns in the course of opening one extra chest.

Over where the ship had docked, now simply floating near an island with a gangplank leading up to it, pirates stream up onto the deck. Each of the three miniboss cultivators jump off the platforms they had been left upon, shooting off into the air and down onto the ship. For some reason, Kiba doesn’t have control of his body returned to him immediately following the bosses leaving. Instead, he just stays laying down on the makeshift raft, and sees the child he stole the card from, wearing that distinctive robe, being dragged across the various islands. The pirate actually jumps, whereas the child drags one of his heels while kicking and flailing with the other leg and the arm that isn’t being held by a kidnapping pirate. Kiba is pretty sure he could hear the word ‘help’, but beyond that…

Oh right, he had subtitle options. He quickly turns that on for just a minute, and reads that the child is saying ‘help, help, this man is attempting to force his will upon me by force of arms’. Surprisingly eloquent. Kiba turns the subtitles back off, as they are a bit distracting if he can actually hear what is being said. Focusing on reading when he could be using his mental energy on deciphering the visual cues displayed facially when people spoke was not the best trade off, not unless it was a situation where he needed the clarity of what was being said.

Behind the pirate and the kidnapping, the Demon King follows behind. He splits off, and comes close to the defenseless duelist, bearing his wickedly sharp teeth at the prone human in a facsimile of a grin.

“Don’t follow me unless you seek death,” he states, “This is your final warning. Not that you would be capable of such a feat, now that the entirety of the potential assistance available to you has been burnt to the ground. Without a ship of your own, your pathetic chase was doomed from the start. Forget your feeble dreams of heroism, and resign yourself to a life of mediocrity while you still have the opportunity to draw breath, for your world is doomed and the time of its destruction is nigh.”

With that, the Demon King stares at Kiba with its one eye, and with a sickening squelch the other, missing eye grows out from the dark hole that it had revealed throughout their previous confrontation. Flesh spews forth from the severed tail as well, marking it as having returned to a healthy state.

Now that he thought about it, that was probably what he was talking about in town. It was annoying when world character models didn’t match the cutscene and battle models.

Falling backward, the Demon King splashes into the sea, the warning delivered. Kiba still can’t move until he sees the Demon King climb extremely slowly up onto the island with the gangplank, then make his way onto the ship, gangplank being raised behind him. Obvious hints were obvious, the pirates were working for the Demon King, the Demon King burnt the town to keep Kiba from following them directly to the next area, and the scene director didn’t think much of his intelligence to figure any of this out on his own at all.

Gaining control of himself again, Kiba stands up and Air Jets immediately to the furthest away chest. Opening it, he finds it full of Imperial Clothing, which goes into the Key Item section of his inventory. Key Items was completely empty other than that new addition… The Demon King had powered up by stealing the thing from the forest. His additional searching had betrayed him, and set off the entire sub-plot!

At least it was still part of the script. The next step was clearly to go back to the Faction Headquarters and get either a new mission or a vehicle for exploration. He’d meet up with the Demon King eventually, he was sure.