Ina responded to the provocation by bursting into motion. She ran straight towards the giant creature, and to the left, and the right. She had created Illusions of herself and Mike couldn’t tell which one was the real her.

The Treant didn’t seem too bothered by the action though and It took a step forward with one trunk like limb and swung its crown of golden leaves, arcing with electricity. There was a sudden flash of neon light and the three forms of Ina were struck by golden lightning bolts.

The hunters didn’t seem disturbed by this though. Each of them held their bows steady and reached out to touch the railing of the tree. Mike watched as they drew arrows from the tree itself, as he had seen Crosse do from his bow. These arrows were different from those though. Each had an arrowhead of gleaming gold that had an aura of gold that could only be Metal mana.

All three Inas simply vanished. Leaving the field clear of any sign of her. Mike then saw a bolt of Light mana shoot up from a spot to the right of the Treant and in the middle of a shaft of sunlight that shone down through the canopy. The mana reached about three metres high then shifted into a tiny white dot that hovered in the air.

All of the hunters drew back their new arrows and fired at the dot in the same moment that Ina appeared from invisibility in the shaft of sunlight.

Everything that happened next was simply too fast for Mike to truly understand it in the moment. There was a bolt of lightning that ripped its way towards Ina from the leaves of the Treant’s crown. There was a glint from the Mirror-like plates covering Ina’s arms as they reflected the direct sunlight.

Then there was a flash of heat and light and suddenly there was a line of fire running between Ina and the Treant. Mike watched wide-eyed as he saw all of the arrows that the three groups of hunters had fired at the spot above and in front of Ina float to the ground as ash.

The Treant roared again and Mike saw that one of its arms and almost a fourth of the branches of its crown had been sheared off. The shorn branches of its crown and the stump of its arm were charred black on the ends, where whatever spell Ina had cast had cut them off like a hot knife through butter.

Ina moved backwards elegantly, seemingly unbothered by the roar of rage. She spoke as she walked back, but this time Mike didn't understand her. Her speech didn't sound like the gibberish of an unacclimated language. Instead, it sounded like wind through leaves and the crackling of a fire in the hearth, then alternated into the sound of gale force winds breaking leaves and the roar of an inferno.

Mike felt the tingle of a notification from the tattoo and had to restrain himself from immediately checking it, this wasn't the time or place.

The Treant took a step forward covering as much ground than Ina had, in one step. Then to Mike's surprise, it began to laugh, or at least Mike could only interpret the motions of its crevice of a mouth and the deep rumbling that it produced as anything but laughter.

Then it spoke back. Itss voice sounding like crackling electricity and burning wood. As it spoke Lightning arced from its remaining canopy of leaves to the still smoking branches and severed left arm. It took another step towards Ina and to Mike’s astonishment, the branches that the lightning was arcing to began to regrow.

Mike had known that Magic was a powerful force in this world, he had seen Ina do things already that boggled his mind, but it had still been just use of energy in his mind, an incredibly useful one, but still just energy.

It was only now as he watched these two Magical titans fight, both so different and yet both powerful, that it sank in, this world had Magic. True Magic. Not what he had read about in stories or used in video games. Not just a mystical force that he had spent hours of his life dreaming of, here it was real and he could do it. Do things that were not only considered impossible back on Earth but here as well, as the only Human capable of using Magic.

As his mind was processing, the fight continued. The regenerating Treant made its way towards Ina one step at a time. Though it was apparently confident, or just mad, as Ina had initially stated, it seemed depleted. The Lighting and neon light that had filled its canopy previously had dimmed significantly.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

When it was what looked like almost thirty metres from Ina, the shaft of sunlight between them, it suddenly leapt. Its legs bent, a knee and heel joint that had previously seemed much less flexible. They launched it off the ground at an insane speed for something of its size hurling it towards Ina.

Mike’s hands clutched at the railing, just as the possibilities of what Magic could do were dawning on him, he had realised that if Ina couldn’t beat the thing, then it would ‘Wreak havoc’ as she had said. He knew with little doubt that he could do nothing to this creature. The whole corp of hunters could probably only just annoy it. If she lost it would butcher anyone it could get its hands-on, or until it was satisfied.

As the Treant entered the beam of sunlight though, things shifted on a dime again. A wave of Magic burst from Ina into the ground and two roots, as thick as the Treant’s legs, burst from the ground beneath it. They reached towards it like striking snakes, coiling around its legs. In less than two metres, the Treant’s momentum was completely arrested and it fell against the ground with a crash, the sound of cracking and splintering wood echoing out from it.

The whole area shook. Mike needed his anxious grip on the railing just to stay standing as the tree shook with the intense vibrations that the huge tree creature sent through the ground with its crash. When Mike was finally stable he looked back to the conflict.

Mike watched as the sunbeam widened and shifted, his eyes flicked up and he saw the branches above moving, shifting to make what was essentially a giant spotlight. Mike’s eyes were drawn back down as Ina began to speak once more, this time in Gildaic.

“Let the sun burn hot as it always has and always will, let it burn you from the inside out as it does to life in drought,” she said her words filled with focused power as she reached one hand into the beam of sunlight.

Light Magic burst from her hand and engulfed the entire ray of sunlight from the canopy to the ground. Mike couldn’t take his eyes away as he saw the mana that had been present in the aether, was stirred by Ina’s spell; the ambient white of the Light mana and the yellow that he hadn’t understood. As it blended into Ina’s spell he believed it must be something between Fire mana and Light mana, Radiant perhaps?

Mike watched the spell take effect on the Treant almost immediately. Steam rose from its bark skin, and it withered at a visible rate, as if it had been withstanding the desolation of drought for years, not seconds. Then something even odder happened.

Mike watched as black mana began to aggregate towards the Treant in the Aether. Dark mana? Was the Treant was being steam-cooked in the direct light of the sun? No, Mike felt out as a wave of this new mana emanated out from the growing cloud and felt nothing. This wasn’t Dark mana

What was this new mana? Mike had no idea, it was black, but not in the same way as Dark mana, it seemed more cloudy and less… present. In frustration, Mike willed the AI to swap Dark Magic out for Arcane Magic. Maybe the peculiar non-element could shed some light on this situation.

When his second of frozenness was over Mike almost gaped. The feeling of the Arcane mana around him was the thickest he had ever felt from just his attunement sense. There was more than a thousand mana just in the three-metre space around him, and it was getting thicker. Mike looked back to the fight with Mana Sight on and watched the scene as if through new eyes.

The world seemed over-saturated as it had the last time he had equipped Arcane Magic, but that had been at night, during the day it was a very different experience. He remembered his reason for switching and looked down at the fight. The black mana that was surrounding the Treant in the Aether was getting denser and denser as the Mad Spirit withered further.

As Mike watched, the Treant began to glow with brown wood mana of its own, in an attempt to resist Mike thought, but then it began to shrink, freeing its legs from the roots and making less surface area for the light to hit it shrank at a steady pace until it was almost the size of a person, reaching its arm out towards Ina at the edge of the light, her own hand extended.

Ina closed that hand into a fist and closed her eyes with it. She said only one more word, and Mike was certain that it was the element of this new mana type, “Death.”

With that one word the mana that had been gathering in the Aether integrated into her spell, and the withering Treant, now only about seven feet tall where it lay on the ground let out one last creaking groan, all its lightning gone, and died. It slumped to the ground and Mike would have sworn that it was fossilized.

And with that one word, the Arcane mana in Mike's surroundings increased in density by almost double.

The colours of the brown ground, covered in leaves, the golden leaves that had fallen from the treant with its crash withering to brown dust in the light. He devoted his mind to doing the calculations while he watched the Ina with the hunters, who had remained silent and calm throughout it all.

Mike had so many questions that he couldn’t get them straight in his head, he just looked to Crosse and found the man looking back at him with a small smile. Mike then closed his mouth, he was pretty sure it had been open for the whole fight.

“Wha-what?” was all he could manage to make of his confused mind, as he finally managed to get the reading of the mana in his surroundings. Eighteen hundred Arcane mana, just in the air around him.

“Now you see why I insist on calling her Lady even though she makes a fuss about it every time. She doesn’t seem to think she deserves the title, but she is the Lady of this Village more than any Human noble ever could be,” Crosse explained.

Mike just nodded.