Of course it would be the absolutely worst option. Yisstendahl is beyond an archmage. He has pools of S P that include enough to cast multiple ninth circle magics. Worse, I don’t recognize the spell he’s currently casting.
Hesitantly, trying to disguise the fear in my voice, I call out, “Te, take cover!”
Yisstendahl unleashes a spell, and a familiar feeling spreads over me. I begin grinning like an idiot, and laughing, which catches Yisstendahl completely off guard. He stopped time. The fool stopped time, against perhaps one of the few people in the universe that can perceive while within stopped time. Now, to be fair, I’m still completely frozen in place, because this time stop isn’t at my behest. The fact that I was able to grin and laugh surprises me as much as Yisstendahl. I know that he won’t be able to do things that directly affect us in stopped time, but whatever preparations he’s about to make won’t be in secret. Since I don’t react further, Yisstendahl attempts to shrug off my facial expression, and emotive outburst. I assume that he assumes it was either a quirk of the spell not having finished taking hold, or that he was imagining things.
Ah, he’s conjuring delayed explosions, and setting a host of fire traps. Those will become more and more powerful the longer this stopped time draws on. The smirk doesn’t leave my face. Partly because it can’t, partially because I love it when enemies waste precious power trying fire on the Shellcrackers. I can sense his grasp on the flow of time weakening, and his ability to hold it at bay ebbs. Yisstendahl focuses another spell, and heightens its raw power, and efficiency, by casting it through a much higher circle of magic than it normally requires. He conjures a circular wall of flame around me and Teuila, despite our distance apart, and I can tell that he has enough power to manipulate the spell after the fact, despite its usual stationary aspects. Yisstendahl takes to the air, seemingly assuming that neither of us could reach him. His flight is still low enough to the ground that he doesn’t risk getting struck by lightning, but he is quite out of range of conventional leaping and fisticuffs.
Obscured from Yisstendahl’s view by his own conjured flames, I shake my head, smiling as I try not to laugh. The pillars of flame surrounding us are quite high, but I know that he hasn’t seen the heights to which Teuila could jump. If she wanted to, she could flee the wall of flame in a heartbeat. She’s not going to want to though. Te’s going to march through this burning ring of fire, and use Shellcracker’s Iceflame Spark to accept some new burns, in order to help rejuvenate her arm and fist.
As expected, when we rejoin the usual flow of time, Teuila is momentarily spooked by the sudden appearance of a wall of fire closing in on us. Te however grins wickedly, planning to make use of the magical flames exactly as I’d thought she would. I chuckle while shaking my head. Before Teuila can get too far ahead of herself, I point out the delayed explosions that Yisstendahl had distributed out about the battlefield during paused time.
Yisstendahl does seem to have a nearly limitless well of mana, or S P to draw on, but thankfully, he’s made all the usual choices that wizards and sorcerers and evokers tend to rely upon, and more thankfully, those choices are wrong against the Shellcracker family. Yisstendahl’s sniveling, cowardly grin is backed by eyes glinting with anticipation, and outright glee, at the thought of our demise. Teuila and I wait for the wall of flames to close in on us before striding through the flame, hand in hand, so that we can both take in his expression simultaneously. The sheer disbelief on Yisstendahl’s face is priceless.
I can sense his fear, and I recognize a rune for lightning in a spell that he’s conjuring. I float Teuila a bit behind me with telekinesis, as I prepare to conjure, and replace my squares of telekinetic force in rapid fashion. Yisstendahl’s aim is off as he unleashes the lightning bolt, but I’m pretty certain I understand what’s going to happen. I signal Teuila to brace herself, and sure enough, the lightning bolt triggers one of the delayed explosions off to our left, nearby enough that the concussive force nearly bowls me over as it sends me skidding to my right. The lightning then chains to the next nearest target, me, but I have two panels of telekinetic force for it to pass through, and each is considered a target, against the spells shallow limit.
The spell still manages to strike me, but I allow myself to be overcharged as I draw the additional electricity towards my fists and feet, bringing me closer to maximum peak efficiency. It’s still agonizing being struck with lightning, like having ghost pepper juice splashed in wounds all over my body, but I’m not unaccustomed to this exact pain. The bolt of the spell attempts to continue towards the next nearest target, Teuila, but I’ve had enough time to resummon my constructions of telekinetic force, providing two more barriers as targets. The lightning bolt shatters one more as it continues traveling, but it dissipates entirely upon striking the second.
I breathe a sigh of relief as I wipe the blood from my nose, due to the repeated shattering of my telekinetic grip. Whew. Yisstendahl makes note of my seeming vulnerability, as his eyes take on a predatory gleam, and I almost want to laugh that he’d think to capitalize on that. I can already sense him conjuring another lightning spell, one with a longer duration. It would make sense, that a metallic golem might be vulnerable in some ways to electricity, if I were an actual robot that could have my circuits overloaded. Instead, I get to shake my head and smile as I try not to laugh, knowing what he’s up to.
Teuila takes off, eschewing my telekinetic aid for the moment, so I screw with Yisstendahl. I drag his right eyelids closed, the eye on the side that Teuila is approaching, and I can sense the momentary flutter of his heart in panic while he doesn’t understand what’s happening. It’s a massive waste of my telekinetic powers to focus both of my telekinetic grips on something as simple as eyelids, but affecting organics seems incredibly difficult, and I know that whole bodies can break my telekinetic grip with shows of strength or willpower. I’d rather not have my TK grip expand to the size of a dragon, and then have it shatter. The nosebleed and headache would be as enormous as his body is long.
Yisstendahl’s new spell takes effect, and for a moment I don’t understand what has changed, until I’m struck with a bolt of lightning from above, and then struck again, and again. I stagger and stumble under the pressure of the new, intense charge building up within me. He conjured a personal lightning cloud. I get it now. I wouldn’t have noticed due to Rayileklia’s permanently darkened skies. I try to reduce the impact of the lightning bolts by temporarily giving up my grip on Yisstendahl’s eyelids. I use my now freed-up pair of TK grips to form square barriers above me, for the next expected strike, but the sheer force of the bolt barrels through both barriers unimpeded, sending a shearing pain through my skull.
I’m knocked flat by the force of the blast, just as Yisstendahl is rocked to the side, and knocked into a tumble. Ol’ Yiss is sent skidding by a haymaker that snapped his neck to his left side so hard that I’m almost convinced that his spinal cord is either severed, or he’ll be suffering whiplash. Two forms hit the ground, and the larger of the two leaves a shallow ditch in the moist, acid-eroded soil as it skids to a halt. Teuila lands and strides through the dust towards Yisstendahl’s face as she dusts her hands off before spitting to one side in disdain. Thankfully the incredible force of the strike seems to have disrupted his concentration on his conjured lightning storm, because the aura of control for it that he’d had around him dissipates.
I see Yisstendahl’s throat bulging with frost though, and my heart catches in my throat. Yisstendahl takes wing once more, and aims his maw at Teuila as Te draws Gae Buidhe.
Te is quick, but not quick enough to make it forward for a strike before Yiss’s breath weapon is unleashed. A head-on leap would take her directly through the blast, and we haven’t gauged his breath weapon yet. It’s too dangerous. I re-conjure my TK force as quickly as possible, providing two layers of barrier between Yisstendahl’s face and Teuila, just as he’s exhaling a condensed, pressurized jet of frost. The first barrier shatters instantly under Yisstendahl’s breath’s onslaught, but the second barrier pauses the forward advancement of his breath beam for the fraction of a second that Teuila needs to reposition herself in order to flee to safety. I pant with exertion as I begin to coalesce the charge built up within me that far exceeds my maximum safe capacity.
I’d better use this electrical charge, because he’s swiping his maw my way, and that frost beam looks like it might be able to actually slice me in half like a water jet cutter. Teuila leaps to one side, and signals me for an air step, so that she can angle her leap from a flight to an advancement, while I have Yisstendahl’s attention. It isn’t perfect, and my TK barrier shatters under the power of Teuila’s leap, but it does redirect her the direction she wanted to go. Teuila makes the most of it, and shreds the dactyl leather in Yisstendahl’s right wing, grounding him again.
Simultaneously as Teuila is making her move, I’m shunting myself towards the side, and unleashing electrical charges in short bursts to use as thrusters. Five more runes, four more, three more, two more. Strafe and roll around the edge of his breath weapon, use the TK barrier to minimize the distance I have to dodge, letting it almost clip me. One more rune. I place my hand just inside Yisstendahl’s left nostril as I stand atop his scaled lip, staring him directly in his hateful, predatory eyes. His draconic speech, that alien brain-melting hiss, has been going the entire fight, save for when he’d been utilizing his breath weapon, and it’s back again. It has a sniveling, whining tinge to it, and I cluck my tongue as I finish the last rune for greatest shadowy evocation.
I utter one word, to aid in visualizing my intent, “Balefire.”
The fear that overtakes Yisstendahl’s face is the agony of a thousand lifetimes cut short by an ant. It’s both utmost surprise, and utter despair. A roaring burst of flame travels up Yisstendahl’s snout, and the black flame, the stuff of shadows, licks hungrily at all the soft tissue that’s scarred with the path of the excess lightning that I’m directing into Yiss’s face. I unleash the far, far overbuilt charge to daze and paralyze Yisstendahl, in order to prevent him from fleeing or countering the effect as my flames overtake his skull from the inside. The black flames flicker and dance as if alive, with a frightening intensity as they consume Yisstendahl from within.
The infernal flames hunger for destruction as they twist and spread, as they appear from cracks in Yisstendahl’s facade. His veneer of cowardice drops and is replaced by true terror. His once pristine scales are quickly turned ashen and charred as they fall from his snout, being loosed from the flesh that once resided beneath them, as that flesh is disintegrated. Yisstendahl’s eyes, once bright with a predatory gleam that clued me in to the cunning intelligence beneath the wormy facade, reflect instead the flickering shadows of the dark fire that approach them. The fire chars the scales surrounding his eyes, and in the next instant, they’re scorched away, leaving the sockets hollow, and lifeless.
Yisstendahl’s jaw hangs slack, as the muscles within his maw are snatched up hungrily by the balefire. His roaring scream of agony is drowned out by the crackle of the voracious flames. As the flames sear the flesh inside Yisstendahl’s throat, they also reach his brain, and in that moment, Yisstendahl is no more. Teuila takes the opportunity to behead him, realizing that the balefire could possibly consume his body, when I need to at least reach his heart first.
A thermal scan tells me another dragon is approaching, perhaps hoping to lay claim to Yisstendahl’s dragonforce, but Teuila hears my thought train, and prepares to take the fight to anyone who would intrude on that which will save and extend my life. Yisstendahl’s face quickly becomes naught more than a charred skull within a seemingly endless black funeral pyre as I levitate myself towards his chest. I head in the direction necessary to begin prying open the scales directly beneath his heart. I dismiss my balefire with a casual wave of my hand, leaving Yisstendahl’s skull mostly intact, signifying my control over the blaze. As I’m making a show of dismissing the balefire, I utilize my dual TK grips to pry apart the most vulnerable, most loosened scales of Yisstendahl’s chest.