Chapter 138: If a Druid Transforms Into a Small Animal, Will Whatever's in Its Stomach Burst It Open?
[Detected: you have cleared the Castlevania III Secret Realm stage while partnered with Alucard.]
[Your available permanent mappings for Castlevania III have expanded. Currently selectable characters: Trevor C. Belmont, Alucard (new).]
[You may only have one Castlevania III character permanently mapped at a time.]
[When you select Alucard as your permanent mapping, you will gain the following abilities: Emission Affinity (Grade A), Triple Fireball (Grade D), Bat Form (Grade C).]
[Alucard will arrive in the current world through a natural sequence of events, retaining his own memories as well as memories of his adventure alongside you.]
The Alucard standing beside Ross began to go blank. The projection had replaced him; the real Alucard had already been placed somewhere in the Hunter world. Ross had given him the Sky Arena's location and his phone number in advance, so contact could be made whenever Alucard was ready.
How long the man would stay stunned by the revelation that his own father was attempting to resurrect two mothers for him was anyone's guess.
Ross knew he would have been rattled for a good while himself.
Alucard was done. Grant and Sypha were next, and for the second slot, Sypha.
Ross took a moment to look over the abilities Alucard had brought in.
Emission Affinity. Grade A.
The corner of Ross's mouth rose on its own, because he had just completed the full set. Every type except Specialization now had a 100% affinity bonus.
Enhancement was sitting at 120%, technically.
But with Emission Affinity at Grade A, his Mega Buster's attack power would double on the spot.
The excitement aside, Ross was a little puzzled. Why was Alucard's affinity Emission type? Going by the Triple Fireball and the bat transformation, it should logically be Transmutation.
Was his own understanding off somewhere?
He moved on to the other two abilities.
Triple Fireball was fairly ordinary in its current form. It fired three fireballs with limited directional adjustment. The burn output was roughly comparable to Rando's Fire Palm Fist, the kind that Kuwabara's Spirit Sword could bat straight back like a baseball. Speed was nothing special either. At any meaningful distance, even an ordinary person could dodge it without too much difficulty.
But Ross, as a veteran of the later games in the series, had already seen where Triple Fireball went in subsequent entries. Push the technique's proficiency high enough and it could at minimum reach lava ball territory. And if it could be extended along the lines of Symphony of the Night, there was a possibility of adding spatial displacement properties to it. A skill worth grinding.
Bat Form was a different matter entirely. To be precise, it had kept all of its partner-mode functions while also incorporating certain capabilities from its BOSS-mode form.
[Bat Form: Grade C, Lv1 (0/500), active ability. The player may fully transform into a vampire bat, gaining flight capability and a special emergency escape function.
In bat form, the player's aura drains slowly and continuously. When aura reaches zero, the player is forced back to human form. The only additional attack available in bat form is Triple Fireball.
When the player would take a lethal hit, they may instead dissolve into up to six bats, each with 1 point of absolute HP. The player may designate any one bat as their primary consciousness host; the others act on instruction. Consciousness may be transferred between bats freely. As long as one bat survives, the player can reconstitute into human form.
When all six bats are alive, the ability functions normally.
When two to five bats survive, the player's maximum aura is temporarily reduced by a percentage corresponding to the number lost, recovering slowly over time. If the multi-bat form is used again during recovery, the maximum number of bats that can be produced is equal to the number that survived the previous use.
When only one bat survives, the bat form becomes temporarily unusable, and the player's maximum aura is permanently reduced to one sixth of its original value.]
A high-cost ability, but when facing something genuinely impossible to overpower directly, a survivable fallback.
The bat transformation itself was straightforward enough, granting flight capability, though the specific sensory changes and other details would need separate testing. More importantly, there was something Ross had been wanting to confirm for a while now.
Specifically: with a druid-style animal transformation ability like this, what happened to whatever was in your stomach.
It was a strange thing to wonder about, but he was genuinely curious. If there was something in the digestive tract waiting to be expelled, and the player transformed into either a significantly larger or significantly smaller body, would that material scale along with the transformation, or would it stay at its original volume and density?
If it stayed the same and you went from large to small, wouldn't the contents of your own stomach blow you apart from the inside?
The thought occurred, so he tested it. Ross's body shifted, a flash of aura, and his solid human form compressed down into a bat roughly the size of a Shiba Inu, wings still folded.
He sniffed left, sniffed right. Everything about his body felt wrong. Ross began beating his wings with slightly clumsy effort and flew out through a window in the collapsing Castlevania.
The flight path was somewhat irregular, but that was understandable. Whether flying or transforming into a bat, this was the first time in his life he had done either. The closest thing to flight he had managed before this was jumping off a height with an umbrella. Getting airborne at all without being flipped over by Castlevania's bizarre upper-level air currents was already an achievement.
Controlling it was, frankly, harder than every other ability he had learned combined. If one bat was this difficult to manage, controlling six simultaneously would be complete chaos.
He was going to need dedicated time to train this.
Before landing he did remember to spit a fireball. In this form, the mouth was the only reliable projectile delivery method.
It gave Ross the distinct sensation of being the player-controlled unit in a vertical shooter. Very strange.
Though if he ever managed to get his hands on cartridges for Salamander, Tatsujin, Gradius, Kyuukou Zaidane, Zanac, or Raiden and could combine those flight-shooter abilities with the bat form, the results might be interesting.
He looked at himself. Then glanced over at the Alucard projection beside him, who had also transformed into a bat and was flying alongside him with complete serenity, raising no objections about his own form.
The elegance of that flight was something else entirely.
Ross landed somewhat ungracefully and shifted back to human form, and in doing so, figured out why Alucard's affinity was Emission type rather than Transmutation.
Because the bat transformation was, in a certain sense, a Nen beast summoning.
When the ability activated, it created a bat Nen beast, while the user's physical body was temporarily stored in a pocket dimension that traveled along with the bat. Consciousness was projected into the bat, but the physical body itself was not changing form.
For some reason, upon confirming that Bat Form was fundamentally an Emission-type Nen beast technique rather than a physical transformation, Ross's expression settled into something that could only be described as a faint, inexplicable disappointment.
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