(***Soma POV***)

Sophia rushed at Soma and launched a flurry of punches. Soma raised his arm to block the attacks but he still received a massive amount of damage from the aether contained in the attacks. He was forced to cover his chaos claws in hellfire in hopes of reducing the damage. While the hellfire did reduce the damage, it wasted too much of Soma's remaining mana.

Soma was rapidly being pushed in a corner since his mana kept decreasing at a rapid rate and without it, his claws would disappear. Even though Soma was in a dire strait he still remained calm and observed Sophia’s attack and tried to find the pattern. Soma notice that every 4 attacks she would attack his left shoulder with her fists. As he watched he started to notice her patterns of attack and slowly began to control where her punches would hit reducing the amount of hellfire needed to block the attack.

Sophia started to notice what Soma had been doing and decided to finish him off with a big attack. She threw a powerful punch that pushed Soma back and gathered her power into her fist to deliver 1 powerful blow. As she readied her punch Soma's vampiric hearing kicked in and he heard the sound of Sophia’s muscles tensing up and the sound of her feet as she prepared to leap. Soma had already gathered all his remaining mana into his claws for defense so switching to offense was easy. Soma rush at Sophia who had left herself defenseless to prepare for the attack and unleashed his own finishing blow.

Soma gathered every ounce of hellfire he could into his right claw causing it to absorb the hellfire and transform the claw into a dragon’s claw made of lava. Sophia was unprepared for the attack and failed to gather all the aether she could into her gauntlet but still attacked hoping to deflect Soma’s attack. When their 2 fists clashed a blinding orange, light shot up into the sky and an explosion occurred. When the light died down and the dust partially cleared Soma was revealed to be standing but his entire right arm was blown off from the clash. Soma collapsed on the ground in the next second and Sophia’s figure could still be seen standing in the dust.

When the dust fully cleared Sophia was revealed to also be missing her right arm plus a large chunk of her chest had also been blown off in the clash. She had a pained look on her face as she turned into particles of light and disappeared. Soma stood up and clutched his shoulder that was bleeding profusely before using the last remaining scraps of his energy to stop the bleeding but he lacked the mana to regenerate the missing limb.

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Suddenly a body flew out of nowhere and ran into him as he stood there. He managed to catch the flying person and saw that it was an unconscious Valna. He then notice the other Sophia attacking from the sky and tried to dodge but holding Valna and having no mana remain Soma failed to dodge far enough. When Sophia’s attack struck the ground splinters of earth shot out and stabbed into Soma’s bare arm and back as he covered for Valna. Soma collapsed on the floor dropping Valna. His consciousness began to fade as he saw Sophia walking closer to them. He had nothing left; he could no longer regenerate and had no mana left. Soma cursed as his vision grew blurry and bloody from his own blood before passing out.

(***Valna POV***)

10 minutes before

{Be careful Valna this is the original Sophia. She’s injured but we don’t know what she has up her sleeve. Proceed with caution and try to wear her out with your spears if possible instead of facing her directly.} said Hikaru

{Understood.} replied Valna

Valna control her 6 flame spears and launched 4 of them at Sophia who unlike before could only dodge them rather than deflecting and destroying them. Faced with this troubling situation Sophia could only teleport to dodge the spears as her body was still injured from Yoko's last strike. Sophia tried to teleport and attack Valna but found her protected by her last 2 remaining spears. She need a few seconds to heal but the spears were relentless in their pursuit.

Valna then transformed the 4 dark flaming spears into spears of wind mixed with the darkness attribute. The wind spear were twice as fast as the flame spears and managed to give Sophia some superficial cuts on her skin before she could teleport away. These cuts weren’t doing much damage but as she teleported more and more cuts would appear slowly increasing the amount of damage Sophia was taking.

Desperate Sophia once again split herself and her copy rushed towards Valna. Valna’s 2 flame spears launched to protect her but 2 spears could hold back the copy as she easily dodged them and released a palm strike but Valna managed to block it with her spear although the force of the attack still sent her crashing into the ground. The damage of the attack caused the wind spears to stop pursuing Sophia enough for her to resume healing but she stopped when she was around 60% as the spears suddenly began their pursuit again. Sophia then vanished leaving only her copy causing the spears to stop in place.

Valna took to the sky and attack the copy with a trust but the copy dodge to the side and readied a counterattack but was forced to retreat by the flaming spears. When the copy flew back to avoid the flame spears she forgot about the wind spears that moved to slash her repeatedly. Sophia was bleeding heavily as the spears had managed to leave cuts all over her body.

“You’ll pay for this said the copy.” said the copy with a smile

Seconds later Valna's chest was pierced by a flaming sword from behind. Shocked Valna turned to look behind her to find Sophia holding her aether sword. When Valna looked at the copy with cuts she found that the copy vanished like a mirage.

“Did you have fun playing with my mirage?” asked Sophia with a smirk