Jonathan could feel the energy building behind him, empowering itself through merging its many parts. When it hit, it would hit with the force of a cannonball, or perhaps even more. It was nowhere near as powerful as the attack that had been leveled at them the previous day, but it was still enough to kill Jonathan if it all hit him at once.
Granath was still on the ground, looking up at the two men with a grin on his grotesque features. They were already over the wall separating the main city from the center, but they were still within his domain. The worm slapped his tail onto the ground, and a nearby building shifted into a tentacle of stone and metal, stretching up into the sky to grasp at Jonathan and Edgar.
The two men jerked to the side, and the tentacle followed, trying to grasp them before they could avoid the rain of red spears. Granath was quite physically weak for his level, which wasn't really saying much, but his magical power was off the charts. He was only about two or three times stronger than Jonathan physically, but his total destructive capability was far higher.
Edgar was desperately manipulating his control over the wind to move the two men out of the way of the encroaching tentacle of rock and metal, and for a few moments, it appeared as if they were successful. Then Granath grunted, and summoned another rocky tendril, sending it in pursuit of the two men.
Jonathan gritted his teeth and sent his awareness out into the world around him, trying to usurp Granath’s magical control over the rock and metal that made up the tendrils trying to grab them. It was like trying to push a boulder up a mountain, but Jonathan managed to slow the tentacles down somewhat with his newfound control over his elemental energy, courtesy of discovering his little trick with conceptual resonance. Elemental energy was not like mana, and it was almost flavored in a way towards the overarching desire for the element. His Void element wanted to destroy all it touched, and he could use that desire to his advantage if he was clever enough about it. It was like holding a very large dog on a leash who was too strong to control fully. You would have to use its desires to make it do what you wanted. In this case, his Void mana filled that role well enough, and the mana threaded through the rocky tentacles was enough for it to race towards them, looking for an easy meal.
However, this slowed down Edgar’s flight skill, without Jonathan supporting it anymore, and the red energy bolts neared them. Soon, they would make contact, no matter how fast they were going. Edgar had a sudden flash of inspiration however, and he swooped around one of the tentacles, almost hitting it in the process. The bolts of red light tried to curve around the tentacle, but they were too slow, and about a quarter of them impacted the rocky tendril, shattering it. Their energy expended, the bolts of light that had struck the rock faded away. However there were still hundreds left, and their odds had barely gone up at all.
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Granath quickly established control over the rock around him again, sending up spears of stone, heedless of the damage he was causing. This was his city, and it was his to do as he saw fit with. Thirty foot long lances of rock shot up into the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, taxing Edgar’s concentration. In addition, the other tendril of rock was still there, and it kept coming closer and closer to the two men. As well as all that, the wave of red light was still following them. Edgar would run out of mana eventually, and when that happened, they would be dead, or even worse, captured by Granath.
Screams erupted from the people below them as the spears of rock came crashing to the earth, destroying buildings and digging long furrows into the streets. People ran for cover, but did not find any, as the stone spears were too large to be denied. Only a nearby dwarven district was left mostly unscathed, as its buildings were all underground.
“You can’t run forever, Jonathan! Your friend will eventually run out of mana, and then you will be mine!”
The situation was becoming worse and worse by the second, and Jonathan could not see any way out. He could not use Smite for a while, without killing himself in the process, not that it would do much anyway. The only thing that he could think of was using his runes, but he didn't know how they would apply to his situation. He started to search through his various skill runes, trying to find one that would be useful to his purposes. In the very center of his Touch of Decay skill matrix, there was a rune that looked promising. It looked like a spiral, leading into an infinite abyss. He started to create it in the real world, inscribing it onto his flesh with one of the spikes on his gauntlet. It hurt, but not that much.
A moment later, a powerful suction erupted out from the rune, tearing the nearby mana out of the air and into Jonathan. He screamed as he felt white hot energy entering his body, and he fought to keep himself from canceling the rune. It was working the way that he had intended. The nearby tendril of rock started to crumble apart, and the spears of light lost some of their luster. He was rapidly losing health at this point, one of the reasons to not simply pull runes out of nowhere without testing them first. A notification blossomed in front of him, but he pushed it away for now. That could wait until he had gotten out of here.
More and more mana entered his body like a tide of blue acid, scorching his skin and the very fabric of his being. The mana bar on his stat sheet started to tick up above its normal maximum, burgeoning at an impossible speed. His core began to crack, but Jonathan slammed his will down on it, desperately fighting to compress it back into its normal shape. He could feel his pathway skill increasing as he did so, but the thought was useless to him at the moment. He had been unable to mitigate the effects of the rune, and now it was expressing itself to the utmost with the confines of his Divinity stat, which meant that all he could do was enjoy the ride.