The enemy mage let out a roar of rage, and blood started to spray from his eyes and nose. The storm above him took a carmine hue, and Jonathan suddenly felt an intense sense of danger as the storm surged. It did not grow in size, but rather in power. The local metaphysical plane seemed to warp and bend around it, creating an inverted pyramid of power before him. Jonathan knew that if he was to survive here, he had to unbind the spell.
As Edgar worked to pick apart the elemental bonds holding the skill together, with increasing difficulty as the caster bled out, Jonathan gathered Maw of the Void. Colorless energy spread across his fingers, and he flicked it up towards the center of the maelstrom. The mage’s body started to come apart as blood was ripped from his form, swirling up and into the storm. Jonathan felt his feet begin to leave the ground, and as his foe drew his final breath, the sacrificial technique was complete.
Mud was sucked up into the sky in great quantities, compressing into a tight ball in the center of the storm. More and more came, the moisture in it sucked out by the howling winds. Around the ball of rock, a face started to form, painted roughly from the reddish energy of the storm. It gazed down upon the battlefield with a baleful glare, and twin bolts of lightning shot from its eyes, impacting the ground. Mud was turned to glass in the blink of an eye, and armored soldiers to smears of burning blood and shattered metal.
It fired indiscriminately, not caring who it killed. In the grand calculus of battle in a world of the System, a peak Tier fighter was worth far more than almost any number of weaker ones. Jonathan and his lieutenants were the main threat, not his allies. Sometimes, he took solace in the fact that even if all of his soldiers died, he would be able to continue on with only the aid of his strongest allies. Then the small part of his mind that was still a native of Earth expressed its horror at that sentiment, and he was forced to banish the thoughts to a hell far darker than the one he was stuck in.
Jonathan let loose with his skill, and a wave of consumption shot up towards the sky, eating through the energy that made up the looming thunderhead. The red light succumbed to his own power easily enough, but it started to resist the closer it got to the head in the middle. Jonathan had bad memories of sacrificial skills from the Ash Heaps. He knew just how deadly they could be. The entirety of a life condensed down into a single skill was an expression of power that could not easily be matched by anyone at the same Tier. It was some strange form of conceptual resonance, but the fact remained that it worked. For someone like a circle lord, with many subordinates to send into battle, such skills were valuable weapons in their arsenal.
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Jonathan tensed his muscles and sent stamina surging to his legs. Then he leaped into the air, the ground behind him cratering. A plate of elemental energy formed beneath him as he reached the zenith of his leap, and he landed on it securely. The engine of his willpower compelled the energy construct to move, and he lurched up through the air. His fists led the way, a stream of Void energy cascading from them as he went. This close to his body, his control was near absolute, and the disparate energy that made up the vast head looming over him was unable to combat it at such a local scale.
He let his energy carry him up, closed and closer to the sphere of condensed rock that seemed to make up the core of the visage above. It was simply a result of the gale force winds, but it looked like a physical part of some ephemeral monster beyond simply the last wish of a dying mage. However, there was no sapience or sentience evident in the glowing eyes of the construct. It was simply made to kill. Then again, so was Jonathan.
Divinity burned through his body as he moved, and he started to channel the excess into his runes. His fists lit up with a brilliant scarlet light, and he focused on the deaths caused by this battle, empowering his Rune to new heights. As opposed to Hatred, Revenge was a concept far more specific, and more powerful in that specificity. While Hatred could drive a man to kill another, whether just or not, Revenge would ensure that man would kill himself in search of justice, if that was necessary.
Twin meteors of energy blossomed over Jonathan’s fists, and he let them loose, surrounding them in thin layers of Void energy to help them penetrate the winds that guarded the center of his target. The Void cut through the energy like a sword through flesh, and carried the twin orbs of Revenge into the center of the head. Jonathan snapped his fingers and they detonated, sending plumes of fire through the energy construct. Vast rents opened up on the surface of the face, and it started to crumble apart. The eyes glowed brighter and brighter, and a single bolt of lightning surged towards Jonathan. It contained the majority of the remaining energy in the storm, more than enough to kill him.
He let the Void construct beneath him fall apart, and inverted his body, creating thrusters of mana on the bases of his feet. He accelerated downwards at immense speeds, just before the lightning bolt exploded through the sky. It was so large that streams of electricity forked off it, reaching all the way to the ground. However, the majority of its power was directed at Jonathan. Some of it was going to hit him. He just had to make sure that it was a small portion, rather than the full thing.
One of the small streams of energy struck him, and he felt his muscles seize and skin char as the power raced through his body. Jonathan let out a scream, but mustered his will once he realized that he was far from death. Although the bolt of lightning had hurt, it had only taken off a quarter of his total health. As long as he avoided the rest of the attack, he would be fine.