Chapter 43 Damned Dragon
Isaac had known that Shaeo would be fast. What he wasn’t expecting was for her to cover the twenty feet between them in a hair’s breadth over a second. He barely managed to twist out of the way of her first attack as Lenna cast Mark of the Hunter using one of the scrolls they had ‘acquired’ from the leader of the Crimson Coins. They had only been fighting for three seconds and he was already completely aware that he was no match for the monster before them. He knew that he was the side character of this engagement. The real players would be Lenna and Shaeo with himself and Kahtesh only really serving to distract the drider.
Right when Isaac felt like he was about to need to teleport away Shaeo abruptly switched targets to Lenna and started pressuring her even harder than she had been pressuring him. It quickly looked like Lenna was about to get backed up the entire length of the tunnel until she would stumble into a trap when Isaac decided to go all in. Well, almost all in.
Isaac summoned Kahtesh while pulling a large chunk of his mana out and into a massive spear like the one he had used on the previously mentioned dwarf’s vault door. He knew that the odds of the spear working on the drider were low but low was not nonexistent. She felt what he was doing and turned to remove him. She once again covered the distance far faster than any being had any right to move. Isaac knew that he had no chance to dodge the wide swing. He focused on bringing the spear with him. He vanished and appeared on the other side of the drider next to Lenna and threw it with everything he had.
The party watched Shaeo’s sword cleave through Isaac’s shadowcloak that had been left behind an instant after he had left. Kahtesh opened his mouth and Lenna charged. She threw the entire weight of her aura against the drider. Her aura didn’t even faze the ancient being who turned to bat the spear off course. Her sword slammed into Isaac’s spear and Isaac felt himself be forcefully shoved to the side. He was so anchored to his spear both mentally and magically that when it was thrown into the wall from Shaeo’s swing he was pushed a whole foot in the same direction.
Lenna’s blade met Shaeo’s in the next instant as the drider continued to fight both of them. The momentum was clearly in the drider’s favor as she was going back and forth between pushing Isaac and then Lenna back. She couldn’t land a decisive blow which was why both of them were still alive. Thunder rolled and lightning crackled. A lightning bolt from Kahtesh impacted Shaeo’s back and she hissed. Her armor steamed and her face contorted in pain but she didn’t slow. The odd thing was that the lightning bolt didn’t pass through her. It was as if the entire thing was absorbed by her armor’s silk and distributed. There was no way the feeling of a lightning bolt being distributed across one's entire torso was a pleasant experience.
Lenna, while continuing to barely hold her own, offered a suggestion: “Her legs.” She grunted out while blocking a heavy horizontal swing with her entire left side and getting tossed a foot to the side with the blow.
Isaac vanished and teleported. While invisible he directed Kahtesh to keep charging and to aim for Shaeo’s spider body as it wasn’t covered in silk. He swung at one of her knees but was thwarted by it suddenly moving. Her legs were all in constant motion making it impossible to purposefully hit her knees. He opted to just swing and hope he got lucky. With each swing he would hit a leg and then have to teleport out of the way of another leg’s stab at where he had just been. She couldn’t follow him but she always seemed to know exactly where he had attacked from.
Fortunately Isaac’s interference was keeping Lenna from being pushed back as hard and she was able to keep her distance from the traps that were on the floor. Isaac teleported away from finishing another failed attack just as Kahtesh’s next lightning bolt hit Shaeo. The drider had seen it coming at the last moment and somehow managed to get her sword in the path of attack. The lightning was deflected slightly while searing a web of black scorch marks into the weapon.
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Lenna couldn’t capitalize on the opening because Shaeo was already back to attacking her relentlessly. The incredibly short reprieve had only given her enough time to get her feet back under her. Isaac took the opportunity to trigger one of the traps with a staff made of shadows. The staff was picked up and a trio of wider nooses snapped closed right in front of him. This time his staff had been caught in the full trap. The weapon was bent into a zigzag in an instant. The force was so abrupt that Isaac lost full control of the weapon and it fell apart. He gulped but quickly turned his attention back to helping Lenna fight the drider.
The fight continued for a few more extremely similar exchanges until it was clear that Shaeo was going to hold out longer than Lenna’s mana. Lenna had to use mana with each strike, block, and parry just to keep up with Shaeo’s monstrous strength. Isaac appeared behind Lenna without his shadowcloak. “Block her.” He ordered and poured death mana into Lenna with as high a density as he could manage.
Lenna did as she was told and met each of Shaeo’s attack with one of her own so the swords would clash blade to blade. She felt her body go from barely holding itself together to being energized beyond belief. Even in the middle of combat she barely contained a groan from the combination of a rush, all of her physical exhaustion vanishing, and all of her pain disappearing simultaneously.
Isaac had meditated. He knew what proper mana flow was supposed to feel like. He also knew that mana didn’t have to stay inside a person’s mana pathways. If it did then he couldn’t sweat shadows like he did to teleport instantly or leave a trail of shadowy fog behind himself. Rather than letting his death mana do as it pleased and flow through Lenna’s pathways away from the point of contact he directed it. He could feel it move inside of her so now he just had to infuse its power into her properly.
Isaac had had an idea. Not a very good idea but an idea. He theorized that the reason warrior’s could get physically stronger than mages was because of mana. Specifically, a warrior who practiced with a light weapon like a rapier could hit harder than a smith who pounded metal all day or a logger who cut down trees for a living. That fact had never made any sense to Isaac until he had had an epiphany. What if the mana in a warrior’s body simply moved with their muscles? If that was the case then every attack would carry with it the warrior’s magical weight. The problem was that most warrior’s couldn’t feel mana. Lenna could however and she had told him that her mana did move internally when she attacked but only slightly and she often had to fight the movement in order to cast a spell while fighting. But Lenna wasn’t a warrior, she was a paladin. What if for warriors it was even more extreme, so extreme in fact that it made their every attack more deadly via pure magical weight.
Isaac had no idea how to properly test this theory until he was being pushed to his limits by the drider. He felt his heart pound in his veins. He felt his muscles contract as hard and fast as they could just so he could keep up. He also felt his mana not move at all with his movement. Unlike with Lenna, his class wasn’t supposed to give him strength. For Isaac this was only more evidence towards proving his theory correct. Now? Now he was going to bet both of their lives on his theory.
The power that Isaac poured into Lenna spread out and pressed into the same place as her muscles. It was unpleasant. She felt like she was bloated but in her muscles instead of her stomach. She felt sluggish but then she noticed that the attack that she had barely managed to meet with her own sword was stopped dead. It was harder for her to move but it was also harder for her to be moved. It wasn’t an optimal position to be in but it wasn’t any worse than before.
Isaac felt her muscles, he felt the fibers and how they moved. He smiled. Death mana started to move laterally with Lenna’s muscles as she moved. Slowly at first and then steadily quicker. As the mana sped up, so did Lenna’s movements. Soon Lenna was meeting Shaeo’s attacks with only her own physical strength and Isaac’s enhancement. Shaeo was no longer winning.
Lenna’s body burned. She felt her muscles trying to tear themselves apart but Isaac’s power refused to let it happen. She was stronger than any dark elf she had ever known. She felt like she could wrestle a giant. The bloated feeling had been slowly replaced with a burning pain from her muscles being forced to work well above their means. She felt her joints almost break with each clash but that was fine. As long as her body held up enough for her to hit back she could keep up their current pace until Isaac ran out of mana.
Isaac had cut all mana expenditure not towards Lenna or keeping Kahtesh functional. Even still he felt his mana slowly dwindling. All of his mana regeneration was going towards Lenna so the little bit that his eyes and Kahtesh required was coming out of his reserves. His reserves that hadn’t been refilled at all since the shadowspear. He could only hope that he could hold out longer than the drider.
Shaeo knew what was happening. She also knew that as long as Isaac continued pouring power into Lenna neither of them could move quickly. This left their third party member open. That damned dragon that kept throwing lightning around.