Mica saw the ice walls going up around her and couldn’t help but be impressed. It had been a while since she had seen Emery and Avuri, and even then, she supposed she had never seen them actually act at full strength.

Though, to be fair, she also wasn’t sure that this large-scale ice technique was even near the top of their limits. They had mentioned in passing that they had a Bonded Domain now, and that threw the natural balance of things off quite a bit, so it was anyone guess what they were truly capable of when push came to shove.

Pushing her thoughts about her cousin and her wife away, Mica turned back to face down Firmis.

The man was pounding the ice away from his body with a quickly conjured bludgeon made of stone. The hammer, which was shaped like a massive, oversized bell, was moving at an unnatural speed for its size as Firmis swung it around with ease. Somehow, even as he bashed the huge stone against his body to break the ice he remained uninjured.

That sure was a nifty trick.

With the few moments that they had to prepare while the enemy finished freeing themselves, Mica and Cove prepared themselves for battle.

While they both had studied in the Stone Breaker Sect, Mica had been an earth Qi focused Cultivator from the start. And while both she and Cove were sure the Stone Breaker techniques would be particularly useful against these Cultivators from the Deposits, Mica had more techniques that were earth based at her disposal.

And there was one in particular that was disliked pretty heavily in the earth-focused Stone Breaker Sect because it ruined a lot of the techniques available to earth users. But it was the perfect opener for her, especially when she was fighting alongside Cove.

She fell into a wide fighting stance and shifted her feet until they dug into the ground. She focused on her Qi, sending it spinning through her meridians before thrusting a huge portion of it into the ground - which immediately began to shake violently.

She focused on the size of the area that Avuri had deliberately split off with her ice walls, and it gave Mica a perfectly sized arena to work with. The ground in the area went from shaking to a more vicious and fast-paced vibration and then began to fall apart. Her technique focused primarily on the upper few meters of earth just below the surface and ripped it apart with her Qi. The entire area that they were currently locked in was basically all loose dirt and sand within seconds.

Firmis and his three fellows had used their Domains to keep the ground immediately around them stable, but it was also a clear indication of their levels of strength given how far they could extend their Domains beyond their bodies.

While Firmis was still standing on a patch of solid ground with roughly a two meter diameter, the other three Cultivators were standing on much smaller patches of dirt. Patches that were already beginning to crumble as Mica’s technique turned the earth underneath their patches to sand.

“Well that’s an annoying technique you have there.” Firmis muttered, as he tried to fight against Mica’s Domain influencing the space.

Mica smiled as she felt him try to push her back and she just brushed him off. She had spent extra time training herself on making her Domain as resilient as possible, knowing that her most common opening move relied on it. And when her most common opponents were other earth Cultivators in the Stone Breaker Sect, she needed to be sure they couldn’t just turn around and undo her technique.

So, she had focused all of her Domain practice into making it as solid as she could. She may not be able to extend her Domain impressively far, and she wasn’t good at pushing back enemy Domains with her own, but if her Domain occupied a space already, it was as sturdy as the earth itself.

And even among earth Cultivators, it was rare to open a fight with your Domain sunk into the earth - which almost always gave her a head start when it mattered.

With her opening move in place, Mica turned her attention to her second move. She glanced back at Cove with a wide grin. “You’ve got the mooks?”

“Of course.” Cove said with a quick thumbs up.

As Mica sprung from her starting place, Cove wound up his Qi. Unlike Mica, who had begun her training as an earth Cultivator, Cove had originally focused on water Qi. His techniques were focused on flexibility and utility - growing up in a merchant family had led him to be trained to be useful - but after the three of them had joined the Stone Breaker Sect, he had altered his techniques to be more useful to him in combat.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

And when you’re a water-focused fighter amidst mostly earth and stone users, the most common medium for you to work with was mud and wet sand; and that’s exactly what Cove did.

In a smooth motion, he borrowed some of the ice that Avuri had left behind and melted it into the ground. There was more than enough to immediately drench the dirt and sand that Mica had so graciously gifted him, and the weapon was put to use immediately.

Cove’s control was impeccable as he spiraled the wet sand down into the earth, creating large pits of quicksand around each of Firmis’ three supporters. They may have been able to keep the dirt immediately under their feet steady, but they weren’t able to project their Domains far enough to keep Cove’s technique at bay as he swallowed up the ground around them.

Avuri’s ice had been just tenacious enough that Cove had enough time to reach out with limbs of mud and sand to grapple each of the fighters, and was surprised to see how easily he was able to drag each of them underground. Despite struggling against the technique, Cove felt little resistance from their Domains as they sank below the surface.

Once they were under the ground, he wound mud quickly over their airways, hoping to cut off their air long enough to knock them out. He didn’t want to kill anyone outright yet, especially not the people who may just be following orders. Removing them from the fight would be good enough for now.

And when Cove turned back to Mica’s struggle, he felt like he understood why the other targets were so easy to deal with; Firmis clearly didn’t feel like he needed any actual protection.

Mica intercepted a full swing of Firmis’ hammer with a huge slab of rock that she had called up as a shield, and the thing just shattered. Mica went airborne, flying a good few meters before landing on her back - hard. The contact clearly knocked the wind out of her, and Cove moved to try to give her a second or two to recover.

Firmis was, thankfully for the moment, focused on Mica’s prone form. It would allow Cove to close the distance quickly and knock Firmis off course. Cove did his best to weaken Firmis’ footing with sand and mud, but found that it was mostly ineffective. The man’s Domain was clearly focused under his feet now, and was strong enough to penetrate deeply into the ground around him far and wide enough to stop Cove’s normal tricks.

Giving up on his longer range techniques as he closed the distance, Cove tried to decide what his best option was. Clearly, he was outmatched on strength, which made him hesitate on whether or not he could actually injure Firmis enough to knock him off course. Instead, he decided to focus on the attack itself.

Cove gathered a thick shell of sand around himself and barrelled straight into the side of Firmis’ hammer as he swung it down. The shoulder check, supported by the shell of mud, was enough to successfully knock the hammer off course and it impacted half a meter to Mica’s side.

Thankfully, Mica was already in the process of getting back to her feet - which only took her a second - but it was still enough to allow Firmis to land a kick square into Cove’s back, sending him stumbling forward. Before Firmis could follow up on his kick, Mica was back on her feet and getting back in his face.

Mica’s fighting style had been built around her being steady on her feet, even when the ground wasn’t supporting her. Firmis being able to strictly overpower her with force alone was a bad sign for their matchup, and Cove and Mica were quick to recognize that they were outclassed. They knew that they would need to rely on one another to have any hope of taking on Firmis, and their teamwork wasn’t exactly something they had worked on very extensively.

Sure, they got along, but they had no cooperative battleplan.

Mica quickly called up armor made of stone, which was a pretty common earth Qi technique. Mica’s version of it had a few personal alterations courtesy of her mountain Qi. Her armor was connected to the land itself by links of Qi, meant to help her absorb and shrug off attacks. It also was designed to make her harder to lift off the ground or throw.

The second alteration was spikes. Sure, it was common enough for Cultivators to add some kind of spiky exterior to their Qi based armors, but Mica’s was so saturated with Qi that they were more sturdy than most. Where a good solid strike could typically knock an average stone spike off of the armor, her mountain Qi infused spikes were much harder to destroy.

And it was with a shoulder encased in that armor that she tackled Firmis. It was an attack thrown with abandon, Mica hoping to stop the follow up attack aimed at the vulnerable Cove - but she also had to rely on him to recover quickly enough to cover for her as well.

Firmis abandoned his attack and turned to intercept Mica. He simply grabbed the two most prominent spikes on the armor and stopped her charge dead. With a shout, he spun and dragged Mica around him in a semi-circle, and shoved her past him forcing her to follow through on her charge.

She doubled down on her momentum, and kept moving to take herself out of his immediate range of counterattack. She just barely made it far enough, and could feel the wind pressure buffet her back from the titanic swing that Firmis swung at her.

“Cove!” She shouted as she dug in her heel to turn back toward Firmis. The man was resting his massive hammer on his shoulder and fixed a cocky smirk on his face while staring her down. Cove quickly made his way over to Mica’s side, and they faced Firmis down together. “We need a plan.”

“I know. But I’m not sure what will work on him.”

“What’re you two mumbling about over there?” Firmis taunted, as if he couldn’t hear them. He almost certainly could. “Care to share?”

Cove sighed. “Just complaining that you’re too strong and how we’re going to need to be creative because you clearly have us beat otherwise.” He said in explanation, knowing full well the man already knew.

Firmis laughed. “Fair enough!” He lowered his hammer as if it weighed nothing, pointing the head of it toward the cousins. “You better come up with something fast though, because if you don’t you’ll both be crushed to paste before long.”

Mica took the momentary respite to stretch while her mind was racing for some kind of solution to this particular problem. It wasn’t the first time she had been completely outclassed in strength, but it was certainly the first time where her life was on the line. “Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us then.” She grinned at Cove, even though he couldn't see the smile through her stone helm.

“Better make good use of our last few minutes of being not-paste.”

“Minutes? You have seconds!” Firmis bellowed as he swung the hammer out behind him and charged.