Astra heard the footsteps long before she saw the alphoe, spinning to face it with a wild instinct and raising her hands in preparation. It charged unflinchingly towards her, face a mask of glee and monstrous, animal hunger. Fangs and tusks forming a perpetual grin far more terrible than she recalled from the last.

Her Gate was ready just as it reached her, and Astra leapt back to evade its scything blow. She emerged behind the monster, lashing its swollen back with a kick. Contorting muscles quivered as her shin struck them, turning the blow away without hint it had done anything at all.

The monster reached around before she regained her balance, and Astra threw herself backwards to roll from the first Gate.

She stood just in time to guard against a backhand strike, then convulsed with panic as the ground disappeared underfoot.

A tree caught her, shivering against the impact and driving pain to displace the air in her lungs. She landed, crouched, alphoe already coming on again.

Its shoulder struck the trunk as she leapt aside, then knuckles rang against her ribs like a gong as she retreated. Grey skin bulged while musculature danced beneath it, propelling the savage after Astra with an impossible swiftness.

She was retreating in an instant, finding no room to do anything more.

A Gate sprouted at Astra’s back just in time to give her another moment’s reprieve, connected to one five fathoms above the beast and depositing her high in the air as she lunged through it. She looked down on the creature as it tried to follow her through, grinned with satisfaction as it closed tight around the beat’s arms and held them in place. Strength suddenly challenged by will.

Her trap didn’t hold the alphoe for long, but it didn’t need to. The moment it was free, her knees came down hard on its neck from above. She felt her stomach lurch at the sudden impact, deceleration sending her guts to flip over one another as the enemy’s head snapped down.

Astra rolled, turned, struck the alphoe again while it still reeled. Darted back from its blind retaliation, then struck once more.

She pummelled it like a sack of flour, feeling her every blow absorbed uselessly by the creature’s body, persisting regardless. She didn’t need to defeat it, didn’t even need to hurt it.

Just anger it into blindness.

The wildest strike yet made its way for her, and Astra lunged simultaneously. She felt claws drag through the air over her head as she ducked, saw surprise widen the onyx eyes of her foe. Then she was on it, gripping its head tightly by the back, fingers closing around the control crystal embedded in its brow.

It took only an instant for the deadlock to break. Battering-ram knuckles digging deep into Astra’s belly, filling the air with her sour, strangled breath and throwing a wind in her ears as she hurtled backwards. The landing was hard, roll sharp. Stop almost a comfort amid the sea of blossoming pain.

Astra looked up to see the alphoe approaching again, fast enough that she had time only to let fear and dread drown thought. Then something blue flashed in her vision, too brief to see. Its effect was nonetheless clear.

A ceramic crunch rang out as the object broke against the alphoe’s head, cobalt debris flying in all directions from the impact and making the creature sidestep.

She seized the opportunity, standing quickly and backing off from the monster as she cast a single eye to the source of the attack. Her heart sunk at the sight of Deka standing thirty feet from them, hands outstretched and eyes wide with fear.

The alphoe howled like a wolf, its shock overcome and temper burned to nothing in moments. Before Astra could think to shout a warning, the beast turned and began charging towards the luminar. It took almost half a dozen paces before Astra collided with it shoulder-first.

Her strength was far beneath the alphoe’s, weight even farther, yet she succeeded in sending it stumbling to one side. Preparing a Gate, she added to its backwards momentum with a kick, feeling the blow rebound uselessly

Another projectile caught the alphoe as it rounded on Astra, proving far less effective than the first but grabbing its attention all the same. She struck it once more before leaping back to her Gate, stumbling free beside Deka and barking at the girl as she took off in a sprint.

“Leave!” She cried, finding herself past eloquence in the situation’s fire. Deka answered only with another attack, hardened magic shattering against the alphoe’s face like glass against stone.

Astra fought like she was a dog and her foe a lion, mind sharpened to a perfect edge by the tension. Her strength and resilience was as a child’s would be before an adult, and speed was all she had to fight with.

Evasion was an effective tool, yet one that terrified her to use. She’d seen enough of the alphoe’s strength to know the consequences of a single failed dodge.

Deka gave what aid she could, projectiles serving to distract the creature, if not hurt it. Buying precious opportunities for Astra to leap back from its blows or wriggle free of its hastened grabs, striking it with the regularity of a blacksmith as she did.

Feeling her hope die as it ignored the attacks like pinpricks.

A lucky blow sent Astra spinning, alphoe pouncing before she could regain her bearings. Millstone fingers closing tight enough to bruise her arm with a grab as it dragged her through the air, bringing a moment of weightlessness before she struck hard against a tree.

Deka screamed as Astra fell, pooling yet more magic into her hands and finding her fury swell in the face of its impotence.

She saw her petty limitations demonstrated again as another luminox javelin tore from her, soaring through the air like an arrow and striking the alphoe square in one shoulder. Blood wept from a gash as the construct spun away, falling in droplets where Deka aimed to draw pints. Grey skin barely broken by the attack.

The creature turned on her, black eyes ablaze with hate, and charged. Deka fled without a second thought, sprinting as fast as her pathetic magic and worthless body could manage.

It took three strides only before the alphoe was on her heels.

Deka threw magic out and felt it harden, encasing her body in a great cocoon, sent rolling as momentum carried it onwards. She threw all her will and power into its face, hardening it to a stony shell.

The barrier held against a single blow as Deka was driven downwards, sinking into the dirt while she stared as cracks and fissures grew like tumorous death across the face of her wall. Another blow proved greater than it could withstand, rending the luminox apart and leaving it to rain upon her like falling stars.

Were it not for the magic flowing through her mind, Deka might have curled up in fear as the beast broke through. Instead Utalis kept her wits steady, Cutaris filling her with a blazing rage as she realised the shattered barricade had been made her prison.

Raising a hand, she loosed luminox once more into the alphoe’s gaping maw.

Deka might have grinned at any other time, so perfect was the impact of her magic against its eye. Instead she merely grit her teeth and focused, unravelling the luminox barricade at her back and scrambling out through the hole its collapse caused. She was on her feet an instant later, yet still the alphoe came. No more impeded by the attack than any others.

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You should be writhing on the ground, down an eye. Deka snarled, urged to give her thoughts voice even at the cost of slowing down. It was a dangerous hint of how much Cutaris she was drawing on.

Even recognised, the rage didn’t abet. She was glad for it. Nothing had ever brought Deka as much strength as the fury she felt at her own magic. A worse betrayal than she could have imagined, weeks ago. As unthinkable as her own arm strangling her.

Unthinkable, and calling adrenaline like nothing else in its severity.

A sudden heat dragged Deka from her thoughts, so intense she thought blisters might grow against her back, accompanied by a familiar roar deep and terrible enough to banish all doubt of the source.

She ran as Balogun’s fire continued burning behind her, surely bringing the alphoe to a stop. Surely saving Deka from defeat, given how close she’d heard its cry of pain ring out from. For the second time she kept her back to the enemy, fleeing where she ought to be fighting. Showing cowardice where she had potential.

Something turned cold inside her at the thought, and almost before Deka herself even knew what was happening, she turned.

Balogun stood far to one side of the alphoe, face her strain clearly as she forced will into magic. Deka watched as the girl’s fire enveloped the alphoe, watched as the creature closed slowly in on her heedless.

Fury drowned her terror, frustration smothered her despair. Every step the monster took towards Balogun was a twisting knife thrust into Deka’s gut. Every flickering of the girl’s fire a testament to her own lack of mastery.

Thoughts cannot be created. She told herself, words ringing hollow in her mind. She repeated them mindlessly, standing still as the alphoe reached Balogun and crushed her against the ground. Repeated them still as it turned back to Deka.

Repeated them even as the beast began to charge again.

Fear washed over her again, growing like a cancer in her mind until it eclipsed everything else. Leaving nothing but the frightful quivering of panic to sour her cognition. She couldn’t move, so scared was she, couldn’t even think before a great hand closed tight around her neck, lifting her upward like a weightless doll and bringing her to peer into the alphoe’s onyx marble eyes.

There was an instant of stagnation, nothing beneath Deka’s feet but air, nothing in her head but imminent destruction. All frozen as her mind raced seconds into the future, mulling it over in a stupor.

And then a great emptiness overcame her.

Fear died like flame without breath, worry following a moment later. Anxiety, apprehension, anger, desperation. Even the exhilaration that came from the touch of adrenaline and magic seemed muted to her.

It was a fascinating process, and one Deka studied absently as it played out. Almost as if she’d reached some mental limit to her emotion, burning it out entirely through overindulgence.

She moved her mind from the matter, deeming it unimportant in the moment and finding far more demanding things to focus on. Raising a hand, Deka allowed magic to fill it once more. Studied its flow, the torrentious force behind its movement. Born from sheer volume and mass.

There was no passion in her estimation, no emotion at all, but there was room enough in her considerations to be pleased by the knowledge that her magic was moving, finally, in its entirety.

Luminox was woven with the speed of a blinking eye, then uncoiled from her fingertips like striking vipers as it lashed the alphoe’s face. Hardness and force both exceeding by far anything Deka could have hoped to produce before. The impact had an appropriate effect.

A roar lit the air as the alphoe’s head snapped back, eyes closing tight and grip opening wide with shock and pain. Deka was summoning more of her magic before she even landed, splaying her hands as she drew an angled shield out in front of her.

It held fast against the predictable retaliatory blow thrown by the alphoe, though Deka was sent hurtling backwards with the force of it.

Dissolving her shield with a thought, she allowed herself to land back first. Rolling over her own body and climbing swiftly to her feet as she struck the floor.

The alphoe was charging already by the time she rose, yet her magic was quicker still.

Luminox formed in the air before her as miniscule flakes, each small and sharp with an edge of death and a face of steel. Like a hundred talons torn from a hundred gnarled digits.

She threw them with a force to shame her previous displays, each flying like an arrow and striking the beast mid-charge. Iron flesh parted before the flachettes, blood spurting as their pin-prick edges cut deep and thin.

The alphoe stopped instantly, screaming in pain as Deka rushed it.

All within her calculations. She knew first hand how disastrous a sensation-seized mind could prove.

Luminox was shaped into javelins as she ran, tearing ahead to sink deep into the alphoe’s gut just as it regained its bearing. Another scream erupted from the creature, blood oozing from the small gashes littering its body and spurting out around the protruding blue rods. Another opportunity.

She was on the predator before its thrashing stopped, leaping to land against the beast’s chest and reaching for its crystal. Strong hands closed around her forearms, binding them in place. Monster recovering faster than she’d thought it would.

Deka didn’t allow panic to render her still as she had before, didn’t feel it at all.

Merely let luminox froth to solidity at her fingers, jerking her wrists to give the matter motion and sending it scything across the alphoe’s face.

It threw her with a roar. Deka flew fast, her back crashing against a tree and her body sent spinning to one side by the impact. She felt the pain blossoming in her spine, found herself fascinated by the way it diffused through her flesh, the fragility it revealed. An impact like that might have snapped her spine, had it landed a minute ago, it was painful even still. But didn’t even faze her.

Thoughts are energy. She mused, turning the words over as she never had before. Truly understanding them for the first time in her life.

Energy could be changed, she’d known, but so too was it an ephemeral thing. Possessing no inherent substance, measured only by the effect it had on whatever held it.

Deka was beyond the effect of her own mind, now. Beyond its distractions and derailments. Obtaining mental mastery, and through that progressing to command of her magic. Pain had no weight to one such as her.

It was just another sensation to be dulled, dismissed and ignored.

The alphoe was running again, but it gave Deka no haste. She examined the monster dispassionately, drinking in the sight of it and deducing what she could from the information its visage betrayed.

A limp racked one of its legs, surely born from the gut wound she’d inflicted, and there seemed a great weariness to it. Whether caused by exsanguination or simple fatigue, she wasn’t sure. A palor marred its already grey flesh, bulging muscles seeming deflated beneath the skin and weakness displacing hate on its face.

Deka knew that she’d have found vindication in the sight, even just minutes ago. Felt triump from the reduction of her enemy.

She was above such pedestrian thoughts in her present state. For her, the alphoe’s diminishment was nothing but an advantage to be weighed and exploited. She did both with practiced haste.

Her first projectile struck a knee, straining the joint and breaking the charge. Her second and third hit the head, toppling the beast while it wavered off balance and knocking it flat.

She stepped forth while preparing the next, studying the writhing monster- hands covering its wounded leg with an impotent, dazed anger.

Deka assessed it, decided she had time enough to end things, and began to shape her biggest construct. It took seconds to complete, even with a mind made unblunted by emotion, yet the alphoe had barely let its screams die down by the time she finished.

It fell over the animal as a great sheet, curved around its body and pinning arms and legs in place. Weight held it still for a moment, and a moment was all Deka needed.

Before the alphoe could dislodge the trap, she’d already produced its jaws.

Deka had left several holes in the seal, diagonal to her. Thrusting a rod of luminox through each. Driving it deep into the ground and locking her enemy in place with the very earth itself.

Within seconds she’d placed a half dozen, and the alphoe’s convulsions were imperceptible beneath the weight atop them.

Deka made her way around to stand beside its head, peering down at the trapped monster and studying its face for a moment.

She found herself certain, in spite of all she’d heard about the creatures, that the alphoe’s face was lit by something more than pain or rage. Fear. Primal and hot, born as it was in the heart of any caged animal.

Filing the information away for later, she reached down to seize the crystal embedded in its skull.

There was no further resistance.