From near its maximum range, the Grocknisch attacks no longer bring any meaningful danger.

Each attack that comes my way allows me a greater understanding of the rune structure and the pseudo willpower that gives the attacks this kind of range. I can’t replicate the effect. I wouldn’t even know how to start knitting it, but unraveling the thread that keeps it together becomes almost trivial.

When I get closer, however, I feel a shift in dynamics. Unraveling takes a hint more of my attention and it can shoot even more attacks giving it more chances to injure me. But nothing that worries me too much. After all, at this extended range, the willpower I’m supplanting isn’t connected to anything living. But if I cross an unknown threshold, I doubt it would be so easy to unravel the attacks.

Still, my mind attaches itself to the idea. It is a single enemy and though I don’t have the willpower of a hundred seeds to aid me, I have yet to encounter a single person with greater willpower than myself.

Maybe Merlin could match me with skill, but in raw horsepower, few even came close.

Holding roots, Qi and even my other resources in reserve, ready to make full use of my power to escape before this new enemy, I start to advance into new territory.

A real battle of magic against a single opponent.

A hint of doubt creeps into my mind, but I should still be able to dominate the combat.

At 300 meters the power of the attacks increases a small fraction.

At 200 meters that margin widens.

Then the shift comes as I reach 120 meters. The enemy reveals full command of its capabilities by infusing his actual willpower on his attacks and putting weight behind his every attempt to burn, freeze or otherwise magically injure me. And at this distance, my attempt that I make to wrestle control away from its hands meets real resistance. Not the bare hint of a fake will, but a fully living power with a mind behind it. And even if I’m stronger, it is like trying to overpower a cat or a dog.

Except this time I don’t care if I hurt my opponent.

The fireballs, come ever closer before I manage to take them away, with the range advantage compared to the Grocknisch. I’m not able to use and abuse inner world portals, to make the entire trip of the enemy attack like it was a few meters from me, but I’m still nowhere near the edge of my capability. This is only a stretching exercise trying to find my actual limits.

The world seems off, by the tiniest of margins and I realize he is trying to veil my perception under an illusion. But although it has a partial effect on the system’s skill, it does nothing for my own perception field. I throw a portion of my will against the delicate illusion construct dismantling it, while narrowly dodging a particularly strong water blade while at the same time I wrestle control from a magma ball away from him.

Instead of returning the favor as I believe most mages would do, I simply shoot it to the ground. Sending it back just sounds stupid. Maybe when I’m closer he will have less of a chance to ‘reconvert’ the familiar bundle of runes to his side.

Then I finally start to spin my own attacks in earnest. Drawing lightning, fire, magma, water and all the higher tier elements I learn to wield, only to have the system fighting my creations.

Still, even restrained by the system, my attacks start to chip away at the outer layers of its root “dome”. It never occurred to me given that I had yet to face anyone trying to steal my own attacks. But try as he might to wrestle control of my magic, he is fighting an uphill battle. A battle he lost before he even started given my usage of Qi and its inherent properties.

“It's MY resource.”

The trickle of mana he had been using until now, with incredibly efficient runic designs backed by truly marvelous will thickens up. Instead something closer to a real torrent of mana, not only in the final effect, but in its very inception flows from him. I hadn’t seen anything similar from single magic users, but still nowhere near the extravagant spending that I usually employed.

My perception field absorbs it all, and I can clearly see the stores in his staff and belt supplementing his own pool. He isn’t quite as limited as most single magic users I have encountered. If my impressions are correct, he probably has about ten times his pool when adding both devices together.

He triples the number of attacks and finally halts my advance.

Fighting off the system and him at the same time is a little much for me. Getting close to it is probably not the way the system intended me to fight, but I want, no… I need to slap his face. I can’t just forget that anything happened.

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I may not have a chance of fighting such a strong magic user for years to come in similar conditions. This is a rare training and gauging opportunity that I can’t let go to waste.

The semi intelligent being’s perfectly controlled attacks switch from ‘conscious actions’ to pure instinct as it fires off a barrage relying entirely on something akin to ‘muscle’ memory.

I split off most of my mental stas to my second half who had been ‘idle’ in wait until now and as his will blankets the area fully focusing on the magical battle, I step forward in the path of an attack.

A faint cut from a pressured water blade gets past my other half’s defenses and draws a hint of blood from my chest. But I just lean further on my movements and use the barest hint of Qi to glue my feet to the ground which allows me to get in position. These tiny acts of will and magic are simply becoming an aspect of my own ‘muscle memory’.

A point of Life here and there keeps any of the injuries from reducing my effectiveness, even if they don’t fully heal me.

Then I touch the roots. From a distance, I was having trouble connecting to them, but I’m invited as soon as I touch them.

Simple as most plants are, nature has an appeal of its own. I don’t even push a hint of my own resources inside, I simply ask them to give way, to split off into a malleable form and they comply.

The system doesn’t take issue with my careful interaction, but the Grocknisch does. The very roots and brambles that had been opening the way to me, the simplest form of Life, below any conscious level, but still beautiful and that I wanted to protect if I have a choice disintegrates before my eyes.

I stare before turning to him.

Now, I don’t want to give a love tap as a warning if I could do it safely. Now I WILL rock his brain so hard, he is gonna have trouble standing straight.

I reach for the image of a steel spring in my mind telling a story of the moment. A hint of Aether flows out almost by itself as my Natural Aether field seems to flare. A warrior who has an entire arsenal of moments and my fingers blur through the air. The very blood in my arm tries to fill my veins closer to the extremities, but my body used to the forces, simply keeps it at a manageable level. I hit the enemy’s cheek with the full momentum of an arm swing with four of my fingers which induces something unexpected.

A moment of connection.

A moment that lasts forever as time seems to pause in the strange way of my perception stat. I learn its history and I can see its soul almost too clearly. Where I catch a glimpse of it overlayed in the whole world. And where the enemies is some 3 meters in diameter while mine is at about 10 in that strange overlapping that was only now starting to make sense.

Its history is strange. The system takes the Grocknisch places. The system considers it a useful tool and I can sense the purity of its Aether.

It hasn’t died to be brought back yet. Either an artifact of its powers or it's protected by the system. This is an old creature. At least a few centuries with the barest glimmers of time magic suffusing its cells and I realize so much more about the system.

Maybe enough teleportation could have caused it, but I don’t sense even the tiniest of threads of spatial energy left behind. So the system has put you in stasis, likely even longer than the people returning from the instance, otherwise, I would have felt that there is something different about your situation, but the loose threads I pull on feel closer to my first hypothesis.

I take his whole being in. He is an enemy and is trying to kill me. I will do the opposite of laying my head on the chopping block.

Some of my past actions come to my mind and insight about my next action strikes with the force of cannon. Pity and miserliness well up in my gut while I split off the smallest sliver of Aether and gift it to this mob, but I know I have to do this. This time to a full enemy, not even a ‘mindless’ beast.

Regret tries to drag me down, as I realize this is what I should have done for many of the thousands of HLZ beasts I killed.

I cannot do this for everyone, not as the numbers get more and more zeroes at the end. But what I have started I must finish and he carries potential. Potental like I saw int eh the hundreds of boys and girls that visited Pando, like I saw in Onix, my favorite wolf, Aster the bunny gramma and even from that flying Albatross.

The moment breaks. Everything that the system and myself pulled from it is gone. The enemy is now inches from me, wields a different type of energy, that seems really unhealthy for my complexion. So I take off running, so fast that I almost fear that my arms will start cracking the air like a bullwhip faster than sound itself.

Logically, I know I’m miles from that kind of speed. But I’m fast enough to almost avoid the wave of black energy that me. The distance helps dissipate the damage and spreads it all over my body. I only have to deal with molten hair, disintegrating clothes and a thin layer of skin. Luckily I don’t lose even more than a few grams of living tissue.

The energy tries to linger but my other half manages to extinguish part of it while pushing the rest away. I only keep a hint of it in the inner world pocket. If it lingers, I will poke at it.

My mind comes up with a hundred insights in that moment and I try to tune my reforming personal shield with a little protection from that form of attack. A plethora of options for altering the rune matrix comes to mind, but I settle on just three to keep the complexity manageable.

The enemy tries to explode roots underneath my feet, to grab me, but although he does have some advantages, I’m a friend of the forest and trying to use roots against me is fruitless.

I cross past 120 meters, but he still keeps shooting at me directly controlling the magic. That only stops when I’m almost 200 meters away when his efforts have to go back to the faux willpower. Willpower that is detached from a living being and only really useful against someone without my skill set.

More common varieties of attacks come my way at the edge of its range giving me a better glimpse of both the limitations of the technique and the barest of clues on how to replicate the effect. I don’t need this specific skill with my portal shenanigans. But even if it's much harder, it might be useful for someone like Merlin or possibly somewhere else I’m restricted.

With only the tiniest trickles of Life spread, I’m back to my normal state while the enemy keeps tapping deeper and deeper its mana stores.

The fight is all but over given our relative running speeds. If I don’t slow down, or turn around to poke at him, he will never catch up to me.

It almost feels too easy, so I prepare to head in again, holding a pair of the very attacks he sent my way on my hands.

“Let’s see what you make of this.”