Cyril leapt straight upward, his pillar-like legs driving against the ground like pistons to fling him thirty paces overhead.

He marveled at the newfound power of his earthen body. It should have felt more cumbersome and unwieldy, but his closer resemblance to a miniature Behemoth tapped into the Titan’s own instincts. It had occupied its own body for an eternity longer than Cyril had inhabited his own, after all.

Nine staffs lifted in a synchronized effort, cerulean qi coalescing within the ouroboros rings adorning their tops. Streams of energy uncoiled and latched onto the neighboring weapons, connecting them together into a magical circle. Runes stitched themselves into existence along the perimeter of the ring.

Cyril cursed--was she also an array master? He desperately poured Gravity qi into his mental channels and activated his domain. Altering the distribution of energy throughout the technique required more willshaping effort than he expected, but he managed to skew the balance unevenly across Firouza and her Reflections.

As he had suspected, they tried to respond to the threat identically, forcing some of them to overreact. The sudden pressure threw off their perfect unity and disrupted the technique. Their magical circle broke apart into disparate rivers of energy; some vanished, while others went wild, lashing out like tentacles that tore gouges into the ground.

Cyril was confident he had identified one of her weaknesses, though he wasn’t sure he could exploit it as much as he needed to. Firouza and her Reflections operated under some sort of law of forced symmetry, unable to react individually without causing discord within their formation.

Cyril pointed his right arm downward and fired off a dragon’s breath of Sun qi. The magical circle snapped back into place an instant before the inferno descended upon them. It battered down upon the array uselessly. Runes flared, and the dragon’s breath collapsed into an orb, a marble, a singularity, then vanished from existence.

Some sort of imprisonment array, he guessed. Perhaps it teleported the target to a specific area under heavy guard by the Cult of Leviathan--or maybe it erased everything inside it from existence. He didn’t intend to find out either way.

Their entire exchange had taken place within a couple seconds, a curious dance to feel each other out. Now, he was beginning to fall back to earth, directly into the magical circle.

He cast another Pressure Cantrip beneath him, slowing his descent slightly. The timing was near-impossible while in a free fall. Shoving away his misgivings, he cast a powerful Pressure Cantrip directed at himself. Even with his resistance to Gravity, the invisible explosion of force flung all his limbs backwards and sent him flying up and to the side in a steep parabola.

The world spun about him in a confusing blur as he lost all sense of direction. With the sky reflecting the world below, it was impossible to determine which was real. After a few seconds, he managed to sense the faintest hints of gravity--the connection between himself and the true earth, pulling his body into its greater mass. It reoriented him enough for him to twist in the air and right himself.

As planned, the Pressure had knocked him off course, so he was no longer falling into Lady Firouza’s web. Good enough.

Cyril circulated the Transmute Cantrip into his hand and released his favorite new material. For an absurdly low cost, he sent a continuous waterfall of basic desert sand beneath him. It billowed outward, spiraling unpredictably along air currents and forming his own earthen version of mist.

Through sheer quantity, much of the material ended up piling onto the Ladies Firouza and their magical circle. He hoped to overwhelm or disrupt the technique through sheer quantity of sand, but their array seemed more than capable of absorbing anything that came their way. An irresistible force, similar but not quite the same as gravity, drew the particles into the ravenous center of the ring, where it vanished without a trace.

Not that he expected mere sand to cause her a problem. It helped obfuscate him slightly from vision, and while Firouza must have had other means to sense him, he hoped that Behemoth was able to shield his aura from someone of her caliber. From the way the cultists had misinterpreted his cultivation level, they must not have been able to detect him well with their spiritual senses. He counted on Firouza suffering from the same blindness. To better hide himself, he halted the flow of his internal qi outside of maintaining his golem form.

Another benefit of the sand was that it mingled with the ambient water vapor. He suspected Firouza’s technique relied on manipulating it--creating reflections, gathering it into attacks, and the like. The small sandstorm he had created interfered with the natural humidity from the oases.

At least one of his gambles paid off. Cyril crashed into the ground some twenty paces away from the Firouzas, on the outskirts of the oasis. He grunted from the impact, his head ringing from battering himself with a self-inflicted Pressure and the unexpected force of his landing. A few cracks formed around his knees, but the rest of his blessed stone frame held firm.

The Firouzas twisted their heads about in eerie unison to look for him, convinced he was still in the air.

Though his mind was shaken, his body continued to carry out the flimsy plan he had managed to concoct while soaring through the air. He planted his palm on the ground. An instant later, an eight-foot bronze spear erupted from the earth below the nearest Firouza.

She sidestepped daintily, a sneer upon her face. The spear missed completely. All of the Firouzas sidestepped along with her, and found themselves in the path of more of the bronze weapons erupting from the ground, the placement adjusted to account for their movement.

The Ladies broke apart in a chaotic flurry, their harmony evaporating as each one weaved through the growing phalanx of bronze spears. More and more of the weapons emerged until a small forest had appeared; many of them had been fashioned from lower-grade materials, even basic stone, in order to conserve his qi and hopefully overwhelm the Firouzas with threats.

Even with Behemoth acting as an open conduit, his core drained constantly, each speck of qi spent the moment it entered his body. As a reward for his efforts, one of the bronze spears finally struck true. A single drop of ichor fell from one of the Firouzas’ cheeks--an unnatural cerulean hue from her constitution having fused blood and qi into one.

The droplet of ichor splashed against the ground.

For a moment, the world went still. Then the hurricane of the Ladies’ fury billowed outwards, almost throwing Cyril off his feet. The miasma of drifting sand blew away, exposing his position. He leapt to the side, landing next to his intended target--the large supply container, knocked over from the buffeting winds of their confrontation.

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Cyril shattered the container with a clenched fist. His grasping fingers reduced most of the food into a pulp, but he managed to locate Hunger-Made-Alive’s soul gem, as well as the box containing the amethyst gem dust.

He glanced up in time to notice a disturbing sight. The flora of the oasis turned brown and withered into dry husks, leaking their vapors into the air. Ripples spread throughout the placid lake of the oasis; then it caved in on itself, swirling ominously until it formed a raging maelstrom. A quick glance confirmed something similar happening in the other oasis, its verdant aura decayed and unstable.

A sense of impending doom settled upon his shoulders. Though he wasn’t quite sure what Lady Firouza was doing, it was no doubt a grand working--an ultimate technique capable of leveling a city, empowered through harvesting all of ambient water qi.

Cyril had one mad, final hope: ascending to the Third Sphere of Gravity. While he doubted the breakthrough would allow him to properly contend with the elder cultist, it may help him counteract the forces behind her intended technique.

As hopeless as it looked, if he managed to deflect all of her techniques until she was exhausted, he had a chance. Over millions of years, earth could shift and grow until it dominated the sea, or the forces of erosion could reduce the mightiest mountain to nothing. He had to pray that he could, somehow, outlast Lady Firouza.

His plan had many obvious problems, most of them stemming from the fact he couldn’t properly control his own breakthrough. He knew of no recorded instances of ascending to the Third Sphere happening instantly--the vision and internalization of the breakthrough could span from hours to years.

However, there were no recorded histories of Vessels for one of the Titans, either.

He pried open the box of amethyst dust and plunged his hand into it. Though his skin and flesh had been mostly replaced with blessed stone, the Gravity-infused powder made his fingers tingle. Though he felt no pain from it, he watched in alarm as the potent energies began to ravage his transformed hand.

Cyril took a deep breath, focusing on the deep well of Gravity qi before him. In his periphery, he saw that the Firouzas had gathered back into formation. A titanic ball of water had begun to gather overhead, already large enough that it blotted out the reflected heavens; it expanded rapidly as tributaries of water from the surroundings fed into its ballooning mass.

That’s not important, he told himself. Focus.

He absorbed the power of the amethyst dust through his hand. Immediately, the foreign Gravity qi clashed with his innate energies, attempting to tear his channels apart. His transformation had reinforced his spiritual network enough to handle the strain, just barely.

987/1000. 991/1000. 997/1000. 1000/1000.

Cyril forced his eyes to remain open as one vision after another assaulted him. His fear, his desire to live, his outrage at the Cult of Leviathan settling down within his desert. He drew on everything he could to keep his eyes open, resisting the mental pressure that threatened to pull him into the depths of a breakthrough vision.

A man alone could not have managed. That is why mortals learned to bond with spirits--to subvert their mundane destinies, to rely on another to shore up their weaknesses. The strength of his emotions was not enough to overcome the laws of reality itself; Behemoth’s attention had thrown his mind into a muted state, like a walking trance, where even death felt like a distant worry. A problem to be solved.

The disassociation, the loss of his human form, all of it combined to turn his mind into an impregnable fortress--a bastion of earth standing proud in the midst of a terrible storm.

Visions flitted across his mind, across his eyes: he watched an ancient moon from the early days of the world breaking apart, throwing off spirals of debris and countless meteors that rained down from the heavens; he wandered through a thunderstorm that shook and tore the world apart, unmindful of the raging tornadoes that unraveled the moment they made contact with his--Behemoth’s--innate conceptual domains; a clash with Leviathan itself, an unfathomable shadow within the depths of the sea, forming a maelstrom to attempt to drag him down, only for it to reverse course after a flex of Behemoth’s will.

One after another, the Titan of Earth’s memories played through his mind, all variations of swirls and spirals and rotational forces on a grand scale. Overhead, Firouza’s ultimate technique continued to expand.

Finally, the visions stopped. Only seconds had passed, but Cyril’s mind was shaken, in flux. So much information, so many grandiose sights, packed into a few seconds. The shock of it left his mouth agape, his eyes wide.

But even if his mind was uncertain, his body and his spirit knew what to do.

Cyril clenched his fist. The dregs of qi that had refilled his core transformed into Gravity energy. Spirals of the ethereal purple qi rotated throughout his body, then drifted from his hand like curlicues of smoke.

He could sense the conflicting forces within Firouza’s technique. Reflections upon reflections, magnifying and multiplying upon themselves, channeling her cerulean qi in on itself. Such a grand undertaking, and it was almost flawless. But no mortal could be considered truly perfect. Here and there, ripples of discordant energy clashed with one another--minor imperfections in the technique's pattern.

It was into those flaws that he directed his spirals of Gravity qi. They rose up to the massive orb of water qi and slipped into the cracks, their rotational mysteries drilling deep. Slowly, ponderously, eddies formed upon the surface of Firouza’s working. They grew into small maelstroms, mere ripples upon the great expanse of the orb. They tunneled deeper and deeper, distorting the careful symmetry and precision.

To destroy was almost always simpler than to create.

Cyril collapsed to one knee in exhaustion, staring up with hope in his eyes.

Firouza noticed his interference immediately and flung her superior will against his, attempting to correct the disturbances. Yet despite her higher level of cultivation, she couldn’t correct the flaws in her understanding so easily; they were weaknesses in her very foundations, ones she hadn’t managed to perfect over the long course of her life.

For thirty seconds, they remained at a standstill. Firouza couldn’t complete the technique, and Cyril couldn’t disrupt it further. Then, slowly, the overwhelming power of her spirit began to overcome his insidious threads of qi, breaking them down under a flood of higher-quality energy.

Cyril prepared himself to try again, to send up new spirals of Gravity qi. Now that she understood his intentions, he doubted he would have a better opportunity. What else could he do, though?

The sky turned to pure night. Not a single star around. Simply darkness above, obscuring all vision. Cyril would have been blinded if for his spiritual senses, revealing only the looming promise of Firouza’s ultimate technique. For a mad instant, he thought that hours had passed before his eyes. No, that doesn’t make any sense.

Then, he heard a choking sound. A gurgling, fleshy noise.

The darkness vanished, and the world returned to normal. No longer did the sky reflect the Earth below from Firouza’s influence; the sun blazed overhead, returned to its rightful place within the heavens.

Cyril blinked and glanced over in the direction of Firouza.

Only one of her remained, clutching her staff in trembling hands. An obsidian knife protruded from the side of her throat, cerulean ichor dripping along its length. Black qi leaked into her flesh. Necrosis crept up her swan-like neck and into her quivering jaw.

It was difficult to focus on the man wielding the weapon, as if he had wrapped himself in a metaphysical darkness that confused the eye. Cyril made out hints of a pale face and black, flowing hair. Armor that shimmered like ephemeral silk. A giant of a figure, towering over Firouza as if she was a small child.

Cyril took a deep, shuddering breath. It looked like he had managed to not only incur the wrath of the Cult of Leviathan.

It seemed the drows wanted him for themselves.