Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 161: Ferrum Knight

"What the hell are you?!"

The cultist’s voice cracked somewhere at the top of that swarm of metal boots hammering on the rooftop, and that gentleness in his voice was completely shattered, and I’ll be honest...

That alone was worth the arm.

-Hahahahaha-!

I stood there leaning on my crutch, laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, while a literal tsunami of twelve-foot black-armored knights crashed over him from every direction at once.

And credits where it’s due, the dude was moving like a war god.

Every sword swing generated four more phantom blades, each one peeling off the original arc at an entirely different angle with its own sonic crack, and together they formed a constantly-shifting wall of cursed red shimmer that chewed through my knights with vicious, mechanical efficiency.

While the three phantom blades he was mentally commanding without so much as a wrist flick were handling the flanks, intercepting the knights circling wide, shredding them through the gaps between the sword swings.

Seven phantom blades in a single second, each one bisecting a twelve-foot knight clean through the torso, sending their severed halves collapsing into dissolving gold and black plate.

That’s right... seven per second.

I counted it precisely through the shared subconscious.

And those seven per second weren’t even close to be enough.

[This is batshit crazy!] I grinned, watching the newest wave surge out from my Domain’s edge with those massive ten-foot greatswords raised, closing from every angle with no tactical hesitation and absolutely zero self-preservation instinct.

And I was sending them out at the firing rate of 16 per second.

Chuckling and finally able to take a breather, I pulled out my latest little magic.

-Ding!

{

Ferrum Knight (Epic)

Description: A high-speed Metal-affinity Conjuration that materializes an autonomous armored construct within the Host’s Domain.

Unit is instantiated with a fixed upfront mana investment, forming a fully independent combat entity with strength proportional to allocated MP.

Units operate via a subconscious network, mirroring the Host’s combat instincts and coordinating with other Ferrum units seamlessly without direct input.

The knight possesses a finite internal mana pool and cannot be externally refueled. All actions consume this reserve until depletion, at which point the unit collapses.

Conjuration is near-instant, enabling continuous deployment at high frequency, provided the Host has enough mana.

Note* Unit is limited to the Host’s current combat proficiency and does not exceed their source.

Knights can also function independently, following decision-making patterns of the Host.

Mana invested per unit is locked and irrecoverable.

MP Cost: 10 minimum.

}

And the best part was, the activation speed was no different from firing an Ice Pebble.

Which meant taking the near-thousand-rounds-per-minute Gatling rate I’d already built into my casting reflex and routing it into Ferrum Knight conjuration had converted my magical output from a gun into a factory.

Sixteen knights per second, materializing from gold orbs within my Domain before stepping out of it, each one loaded with 60 MP of locked mana, running at 10 MP per second of output while they fought, which gave them 6 seconds of sustained combat before the pool ran dry and they collapsed.

But in practice, most weren’t surviving past two or three.

The outsiders below were Tier 3 Eldritch entities, and the cultist above was probably a Tier 3+.

While my 60 MP knights were no different from a Tier 1, Mid-Stage, Body Reinforcer. And that Tier can in no way handle something on Tier 3.

Individually, each one was a slingshot aimed at an armored tank.

But I was firing sixteen slingshots per second, and the tank only had two hands... or many if we’re talking about Outsiders.

[Doesn’t matter how strong you are... or how many tentacles you got...] I chuckled, watching the cultist and the outsider below shred through another wave with a brutal combination of sword and tentacle swings. [... Doesn’t even matter how efficient your technique is... It will not outlast Infinity.]

After all, if the dude killed 7, I sent 10 more, while directing the other 6 off the roof to handle the outsiders.

The net gain on him was three knights every single second, and they were pressing in from every angle, coming with their massive swords from above, below, left, right, and the cultist was genuinely, visibly beginning to slow under the pressure of it.

Not much, after all, men like that, running a top cultivation technique and powered by an Eldritch God, don’t slow that easy.

But the micro-adjustments were there if you watched for them, the slight recalculation in the sword arc, the phantom blades moving just a fraction of a second behind where they needed to be, you’d see the weight of sheer volume starting to register in his mechanics.

My little cultist was getting buried.

I let the knights handle themselves entirely, running them on autonomous mode, and they mirrored my combat instincts without costing me a single thread of cognitive bandwidth.

[Wait a sec...] I paused as it clicked... something that could’ve been my end. He hadn’t shot a phantom blade at me.

I was standing roughly 20 meters away, crippled, leaning on a crutch, like a genuinely embarrassing target by any metric.

And he had a technique that could launch projectiles at the speed of sound.

[Don’t tell me... it requires a casting time to activate it?]

-Ding!

{Negative. The Third Sequence requires focus.}

[Yeah...] I laughed out loud, glancing at the absolute ocean of knights currently swarming him from every available angle. [That’s not happening.]

-Ding!

{I will admit. I did not fully think this through.}

"Think what?" I said out loud.

-Ding!

{Had I calculated that Ferrum Knight would become this in your hands, I would not have selected it.

The magic is conventionally designed for the conjuration of a single support unit or a small vanguard duo.

But paired with your infinite MP regeneration, it has become an infinite army generator.

The situation was urgent, and I failed to deeply analyze and account for the overarching consequences of this magic in your particular hands... hand.}

"Well," I cackled, watching the continuous waves of knights pour over the cultist like a golden tide. "I think it’s a little late for that~"

-Ding!

{Host. I have a proposition.}

"Oh, this ought to be interesting," I chuckled.

-Ding!

{I would like you to permit the dissolution of this magic.

In exchange, I will grant you a Legendary Magic Token.

I reserve the right to process such dissolution thrice, for situations when a system-purchased skill, magic, or affinity proves catastrophic for my Host, or in my Host’s hands.

This is clearly the case of the latter.}

"Nope," I giggled like a child running away after stealing a cookie from the jar, hopping on my one good leg toward the edge of the roof.

-Ding!

{Host, plea-}

And that very second, my Precognition detonated.

"DON’T YOU DARE IGNORE ME!!!"

A phantom blade, sound-barrier-breaking, aimed at the exact center of my skull, two seconds out, arriving from behind my right ear.

But I couldn’t even be bothered to flinch.

Four knights instantly materialized from gold orbs in my Domain in a single burst, snapping into existence in a line directly between me and the incoming blade, and they took it collectively.

-CRUNCH-!

The phantom sword hit the first knight dead center in the chest plate, and the sheer kinetic force skidded all 4 of them backward across the rooftop simultaneously, their massive armored feet carving deep trenches through the roof before 10 more joined them.

"Sure, if you say so... I won’t you anymore~" I said pleasantly before splitting my attention and routing four separate 5MP streams of standard fist-sized snowballs at him, each stream running at a full Gatling-gun firing rate.

And the roof exploded into white frost.

-Fwoom-!-Fwoom-!-Fwoom-!-Fwoom-!

Four independent cascades of freezing frost erupted simultaneously, converging on the cultist in overlapping waves that built layer over layer of thin coatings that accumulated faster than any sword swing could meaningfully address.

You cannot cut frost, after all, it simply coats everything it touches.

"How are you doing THIS?!" the man roared from somewhere inside the growing whiteout.

While I simply turned away from him and looked down at the basin.

Below the roof edge, the living quarters’ walls took the full brunt of the Outsider horde; hundreds of those massive, pulsating outlines of gold were slamming their long, serrated tentacles against my reinforced roots in a continuous thundering assault that vibrated up through the roof beneath my boot.

My barricade was holding on the blown-out door... but barely, and with decreasing confidence.

The six knights I’d diverted to the basin were down there fighting, and the picture wasn’t pretty.

A Tier 1 Mid-Stage knight against a Tier 3 Eldritch Outsider was, frankly, a joke.

One outsider could shred two or three knights with a single tentacle sweep before they got close enough to land a greatsword hit, and even then, a single hit didn’t kill one.

The knights needed sustained group pressure to take one down, and the Outsiders were stacked thousands deep.

I was sending six knights per second down there, and they were lasting barely two seconds each.

The numbers simply weren’t stacking fast enough to build a real defense at the door.

[Okay... let’s try this...]

The 60 MP/s Ice Reinforcement I’d been running as an even full-body spread got split three ways.

30 MP/s went straight into my brain, supercharging my cognitive processing further while the icy glint on my remaining eye intensified.

20 MP/s was routed directly into the stump of my missing leg, and my little experiment was a success.

Rapidly growing crystals of ice form, layer-by-layer, interlocking in a rapid surge downward from the amputation point, building outward and down with the structural logic of my leg, shaping itself around the ghost of what had been there until a full leg of dense, hard-packed ice stood in its place, each toe forming individually at the base.

I shifted my weight off the crutch and onto it, and it held.

Though I felt no sensation or warmth there, but even the ice toes moved exactly when I instructed them to, responding precisely to the motor signals my brain sent, but reporting nothing back.

It was like wearing a very expensive prosthetic made of something that could stop a cannonball.

And I’d take that any day over a cheap crutch.

The remaining 10 MP/s I kept cycling evenly through my body.

The very next second, the full-coverage ice armor that had been gleaming over my arm and leg faded to a thin, circulating current.

"Better," I sighed, sending the crutch back into my inventory before raising my right hand and pointing it down at the basin, bringing the second Spell Splice slot housing Ice Pebbles fully online.

The 20 MP I’d been using to keep the cultist’s frost coverage maintained from that slot got dialed back to a bare minimum holding pattern, and the remaining forty MP went straight into Fragmentation Pebbles.

I had delegated 20 MP to my little cultist, and now it was time to bring out the remaining 40.

-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!

-BOOOM-!-BOOOM-!-BOOOM-!-BOOOM-!

The sing rapid stream of 40 MP Fragmentation Pebbles shot out at the Outsider below at the speed of sound, tearing down in a relentless, supersonic volley of concussion and shrapnel, each one detonating on contact like a small RPG and sending hundreds of tiny fragments ice, tearing outward through their dense black meat in every direction.

The shrieks that erupted from below were immediate and satisfying in equal measure.

And the death rate among the knights fighting down there dropped noticeably within seconds.

The Outsiders, I was shredding with Fragmentation. Pebbles were pulling attention away from the knights while injuring or straight-up killing the Outsiders.

The knights were now surviving closer to four seconds instead of one, and the net knight count in the basin started climbing; some were even managing to pull kills.

Six per second accumulating, then eight, then ten as the surviving knights began pushing momentum.

[There we go...] I breathed, watching the knight accumulate while one of my knights walked toward me before dropping to a single knee beside me with a resonant thud that sent tremors beneath my feet.

It knelt there with its head bowed and both hands extending outward, and in its gauntleted palms, presented with both hands, was my shotgun.

I stared at it for a second... After all, I hadn’t ordered it to bring it to me.

[You absolute legend!] I cackled, taking the shotgun.

And the second, I did, the knight immediately stood, turned, and launched itself right back into the fight without a single wasted motion.

While I stood there with my streams of Fragmentation Pebles and Snowballs drowning every enemy in sight.

Jamming it in the underarm of my left hand, loading port up, I pulled the 4 fresh Mythril shells in a quad reload grip, before jamming them in the tube.

[I’m definitely gonna need this...] I sighed, gripping it in my right hand and leaning it on my shoulder as I straightened up and turned back to check on my dear cultist just in time to see him pull something from his belt.

He pulled out a dark red piece of paper, held between two fingers, before throwing it onto the roof.

And the very next second -

-KRAOOM-!

The deep red shockwave that erupted from the point of contact was pure, concentrated concussion, a perfect hemisphere of pressurized wrongness expanding outward from the talisman’s location with enough power to send every single knight within twenty meters airborne simultaneously.

Those twelve-foot armored golems were launched through the air like toys scattered off a table, crashing across the roof, tumbling over each other, some even clearing the edge entirely.

And the immediate space around the cultist was completely clear for the first time in over a minute.

He stood in the eye of it, frost still coating his shoulders, but the red glow behind his visor was no longer dripping that calm confidence.

"Huh," I said, tilting my head while I watched the knights I’d already conjured as replacements beginning to close back in. "Maybe I should invest in some talismans too."

"I will rip you to shreds, you damn brat!" the cultist snarled before taking a massive leap off the rooftop and down, into the basin, landing in a thunderous impact among the Outsider horde below with a shockwave that scattered the nearest Outsiders across the ground.

I watched him land from the roof’s edge for exactly one second before jumping down too, landing before the barricade with both feet, and the ice leg absorbed impact without complaint.

Now that both the Outsiders and him were in the same direction, I sent the full current production of knights directly at the incoming Outsider mass, all sixteen per second funneling outward from my Domain in a continuous gold-shimmering tsunami, the subconscious network coordinating them across the basin without a single direct instruction from me.

As the man faced the horde, he raised his sword and roared, and I actually felt it in my sternum.

"The Way of The Sword Saint! Sequence Three!"

-CRACK-!

And the sky above the basin was no longer the sky.

It had become a carpet of red-shimmering blades.

Thousands of phantom swords he conjured into the sky, each hanging in the sky with a terrible stillness.

Even the Outsiders shrieked in something that sounded, for the first time, like genuine alarm.

The man’s red eyes swept across the horde, across my knights swarming in from every direction, across me standing at the barricade with the shotgun on my shoulder with a wide, stretched grin on my face.

And he roared just one word –

"DIE!"