He was certain that he had only stunned the beast for a moment, rather than inflicting any lasting damage. Fortunately for Nick and his unborn children, a moment was all that he needed. His wand had bought him all the time that he needed, and his opponent was too dazed to dodge.
Half a heartbeat later, his spell was ready to cast. “Piercing ray,” he intoned, taking aim as a churning ball of force congealed in the space between his hands. He visualized his trajectory while dense bands of kinetic energy swirled inside the spherical field, like a raging vortex locked inside of a child’s snow globe.
Nick willed the ray to fire before his opponent had time to recover. Faster than thought, a thin beam of force mana lanced out from the spinning mass of magic. The whirling white drill bit came streaking out from the surface of the sphere to land on target. Touching down at a point right between the bug’s beady black eyes.
In the second and a half that it took for the centipede to regain its wits and comprehend that its life was in imminent jeopardy, the ray expanded from the width of a pencil to as fat as Nick’s thumb. The ball in his hands rapidly dwindled, as the spell’s mana transferred additional energy into the rotating bit capping the end of the ray, causing it to spin faster and faster as the pressure behind it grew.
Please. Let this be enough to finish the fight, Nick prayed to anyone who might be listening. He had already used far too many of his limited tools and abilities. If he was forced to burn through more, he would be seriously fucked if he was drawn into subsequent battles, an eventuality that seemed inevitable by this point.
He watched as his spell began to scratch the bug’s dense natural armor, as the magic in his hands shrank from the size of a basketball to that of a tennis ball.
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Over the next three seconds, Nick’s piercing ray battled to break through his opponent’s carapace. He was growing more nervous by the heartbeat, adrenaline churning in his veins. The spell was about to run out of juice, and it had yet to penetrate the thick plating covering the surface of the beast.
By this point, he could tell that it was going to be close. Thick slices of chitin were falling to the ground as the spell reached its full power, boring into the centipede like a great, ghostly drill. But the ball of mana in Nick’s hand was no larger than a walnut, and the rapidly rotating ray only lasted for a heartbeat longer before its power was expended.
But in half that time, it broke through the creature’s exoskeleton. No longer restrained, Nick’s spell surged forth in a flash. The ray bored straight through the beast’s body lengthwise, drilling a hole the size of a quarter all the way along its abdomen before emerging out the other side in a thick spew of ichor.
Shaking with exertion, he sank to one knee. His thoughts were muddled, and a wave of dizziness broke over him. Nick didn’t have time to rest and recover, and he forced himself back onto his feet. The fight wasn’t over just because he was ready for a time out.
He pushed through his disorientation, raising his blade while preparing himself for round two. But when he saw the extent of the beast’s wounds, he was able to relax at last.
It’s already dead. It just hasn’t quite realized it yet. He opened some space just in case, leaning his back against the cavern’s wall for support. Nick stared out over the shadowed sands, straining his senses to detect any sign that more flesh-renders were on the way.
Meanwhile, the stricken beast writhed in agony as its bodily fluids pumped out onto the bedrock, splatters of bioluminescent ichor adding splotches of purple to the stone’s teal glow.
He was worried that the creature might have some kind of final ability, triggered by its imminent demise. It was a convention common in the games he had played all his life, and he expected to run into something similar sooner or later.
But not today.
As it happened, the big bug boasted no such ability. It finished dying a few seconds later, curling in on itself then going still after a final twitch of its limbs. Nick let out a weary sigh and lowered his body to the ground, bathed in the cavern’s azure glow.