The closer I got to the source of the beam, the harder it was to dodge it. That might have been a problem if I wasn’t already so familiar with the spell, but I’d been on the receiving end enough times to have a good idea of both the spell’s and the person controlling it’s limitations. Seven aimed the spell visually and seemed unable or unwilling to use divinations to assist with that. I had a theory that he just wasn’t a good enough mage to channel a master-tier spell and cast anything else at the same time, but either way, it meant he had a lot of blind spots.

One of those was that he couldn’t see what was directly next to the beam since it blocked his own view, though he compensated by shifting it in a slight circular pattern to fry anyone who tried to hide there. Even without that, the amount of heat rolling off the beam was enough to cook anyone who got that close.

It was a powerful spell on its own, made all the more dangerous by the fact that Seven had a full squadron of mages supporting him. They worked the divinations that fed him information and protected him from retaliatory magic. They were also the ones who tried to pin me down with telekinesis or mental attacks, to slow me enough to let Seven catch me. Really, they were the ones I was fighting right now. Without his support mages, it would be trivial to dance around Seven’s death beam until he ran out of mana.

So, I didn’t target Seven directly with my counterattack. He was too well defended, anyway. Instead, I latched onto one of the dozen or so defenders on the platform working both to cover him and to maintain the wards, and I drove a massive mind spike into the man’s brain. He cried out in pain and collapsed on the spot, leaving a small hole in the platform’s coverage. Automated wards partially compensated for it, but it was obvious the system had been designed to have humans holding its hands. It wasn’t robust enough to read what was attacking it and respond accordingly.

Without that guidance, there were vulnerabilities to exploit. Normally, something as complex as wardbreaking wouldn’t be done during live combat. However, in this case, messing the wards up would most likely result in an explosion that killed everyone on the platform. Since that was pretty much the goal, and because I wasn’t going to be anywhere nearby when it happened, I sent a surge of mana into the hole left by the mage I’d already dropped.

It wasn’t subtle. There were certainly better ways to unravel that defense, but I didn’t have time for that, nor did I particularly care about breaking anything. My mana was a hammer, and I swung it with the intent to break something.

As it happened, the wards looked to have been made by some mages who didn’t really know what they were doing. It had been slapped together with nothing to anchor it to and no mana reserves outside what the mages could feed into it. When I hit it, I didn’t just break something. I broke a lot of things.

Miniature explosions filled the platform, outright killing at least four people and injuring a handful more. A few of them had personal shield wards strong enough to survive the catastrophic feedback the fallen ward let out, which unfortunately included Seven. I’d give him his due; his concentration never wavered.

His aim, on the other hand, got a lot worse all a sudden. I accelerated and got another hundred feet of distance from the beam even as I closed the distance on its source, and Seven couldn’t keep up with my abrupt change in speed and direction. His magic sliced through the air, but by the time it reached where I’d gone, I’d already disappeared again.

I was still too far out to use any sort of conjurations without having to worry about them being dispelled, but that was a risk I was willing to take. The mages left alive were still reeling from the failure of their wards. While it was a safe bet that just because they could dispel any spells I threw at them didn’t mean they actually would.

Force bolts spiraled through the air, striking unerringly and throwing bodies off the platform. I closed in, spinning a large loop to keep ahead of Seven, whose shield ward was still intact despite everything. The difference between Seven’s gear and the average army mage’s was night and day.

“Damn it!” Seven bellowed, finally releasing the beam of fiery destruction and spinning to face me as I approached. Mana welled up in him and burst out into four smaller beams that curved around to meet with me as their focal point.

Unlike the big one he’d been trying to cook me with, these ones were pure mana, designed to punch through shield wards, and not even close to up to the task. Maybe if I’d been using the kind of shield wards that appeared to be standard issue in Ammun’s army, I’d have been in trouble. Instead, I brushed the spell off like it wasn’t even there. I probably could have done it even without my shadow enhancing my magic.

There were six feet and two shield wards separating us. A look of absolute rage twisted Seven’s features as he glared at me, though I wasn’t quite sure why. We were enemies, sure, but we’d barely ever had any personal interactions.

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Oh. Right. I’d killed a few thousand soldiers. He probably had some friends in that group. That would do it.

“Just die already, you monster,” he screamed at me as he conjured up some sort of steel ball. It shot across the platform, grew spines and dug into my shield ward, trying to break it down. I shattered it with a pane of force and sent three blades at Seven. The feedback let me know that, despite everything, his defenses were still holding strong.

This was not going to be quick, not unless I stumbled across some flaw in his shield ward, and unfortunately for me, I still had the rest of the army stationed here to deal with. I’d gotten ahead of them momentarily, but now that I’d stalled out, they’d quickly catch up. I needed to end this fight before circumstances forced a draw.

There was always the easy way. I could just dump tons of mana on Seven’s head until the shield ward just couldn’t take it anymore. If I was fast enough, I might even get away with not chaining master-tier spells so that I could recover all the mana I used. As much as it pained me to once again use the hammer, I didn’t know what the right tool for this job was and I didn’t have time to experiment.

I dumped lightning on Seven’s head. I flash froze the air around him. I bombarded him with force bolts, lances, and crushing waves. I cycled through various powerful conjurations, enough to break a small army, and when that still wasn’t enough, I started attacking him with divinations and hexes as well. I didn’t need any one thing to stick. I just needed to find the last straw that would prove too much weight.

Seven wasn’t stupid. He understood exactly what was happening. I was turning our fight into a contest of who had more mana available, and the fact that I might run myself dry killing him, only to be killed in turn by his allies, probably wasn’t all any sort of comfort to him. The way he won this was to stall, to turtle up and reinforce his shield ward long enough for his allies to arrive.

I didn’t think he realized that, not fully. Conventional wisdom was that attacking forced an opponent to split their attention so that they couldn’t hit back quite as hard. And, for the most part, I agreed with that. However, lossless casting allowed me to win any sort of contest over who had the most mana by default, which meant I didn’t need to budget or be clever.

When Seven tried to distract me with his own spells, I let my shield ward take the hit and kept my focus on hammering him down. He quickly gave up on trading spells with me and shifted focus to blocking as many conjurations as possible while pumping mana into the shield ward. It was a losing proposition for him, but if he was lucky, he’d last just long enough for someone to save him.

At least, that was what I assumed he was thinking right up until he decided to be a bit more proactive about the whole thing and threw himself off the platform. Lightning chased him down, striking him no less than six times and sending skittering lines of electricity across his shield ward. Then his flight magic caught hold of his weight and whisked him toward his allies.

I ripped up chunks of stone to pelt him with, the smallest the size of my head and the bigger ones more than three feet across. It wouldn’t stop him, nor did dealing with repeated kinetic impacts make it harder to fly since his shield ward apparently wasn’t sophisticated enough to push him aside to lessen the mana load. Instead, he just took and stopped each attack, probably spending triple the mana and making this easily the most viable way to break through.

The thirty seconds or so I’d estimated I had left to finish him was shrinking rapidly, down to five or six before he made contact with the rest of the army, so it was time to do something a bit more drastic. While Seven was fleeing, I started setting up a master-tier spell. There was no chance anyone would interfere from this distance, but even so, I put it together as quickly as possible. It still took a good fifteen seconds, allowing Seven to rejoin the ranks of his supporters. He spun in the air to flash me a condescending smirk, but the expression slipped off his face when he realized what I was casting.

Rather than explain to the rest of the mages, he turned and fled at maximum speed. No mana was spared on defense, not when he knew how pointless it would be. He managed to get a quarter mile or so away before I finished the spell I’d been building while he flew.

Then a beam of fiery destruction split the sky, instantly vaporizing anyone caught in its wake. I swung it across the approaching army, killing a hundred people in a second but not catching Seven. Unlike the erstwhile heir to now-defunct House Adelyn, I was more than capable of casting other spells while I channeled Seven’s signature fire beam. I didn’t need my eyes to tell me exactly where he was, and it was easy to tweak the spell’s parameters to extend the beam’s range.

Now it was his turn to dart and weave through the air, desperately trying to keep ahead of me. I even let him think he could for a few seconds while I set up the next part of my trap. Perhaps he thought to just flee beyond the spell since I wasn’t chasing after him. Or perhaps he was too panicked to think of anything beyond staying alive for another moment.

Either way, he wasn’t prepared for my modification, when the fire beam split from one twenty-foot-wide bar of destruction into ten two-foot-wide tendrils. They lashed out like living things, corralling Seven between them and quickly caging him in on all sides. Then, without pausing, they collapsed back together, catching him in their deadly embrace. His shield ward vanished like smoke on the wind, and Seven was reduced to a cloud of ash lightly drifting toward the ground.

I turned the beam on the rest of the army. There was no point in wasting it when I already had the spell up and running. It cost more mana than I strictly needed to spend, but it got the job done. Survivors fled in all directions, more than I could possibly hunt down. I let them flee. My work busting armies was just about done for the day, anyway. If any of them dared to regroup, I’d do a second pass and show them the error of their ways.

For now, I was ready to head back home.