Abed’s eyes widened as Zed’s rune exploded into a flood of fire. Normally, a blast of its magnitude would not scare him while his spell Titan of Wrath was active, but the spell was spent, dwindling away from overuse.
So fear touched him even if for a moment.
He raised his leg and stomped the ground, releasing the last trickle of his mana into the earth before him. A spell morphed into being in his mind as he conjured a wall of earth to shield him.
The wave of fire hit the raised earth, spreading out on all sides as the rest of the wave passed him by. With too little mana to hold it in place, the wall crumbled under the weight of the flames. Luck stood on Abed’s side, regardless, and his shield of earth died at the same time the flames guttered out.
The piles of earth and stone that forged an armor over Abed’s head was battered and broken so that it now protected only half of his face. From the opening he watched for a new attack as the flames guttered out only to be met with something absurd.
Zed stood in front of him, heaving like the tired. Steam rose from him like water spilled over an excruciatingly hot rock and something in the way he watched Abed didn’t seem right.
Worse, Abed could sense Zed’s new rank.
Category three, he thought, studying Zed’s unwillingness to attack.
It made little sense. From the little he’d gathered after joining up with Zed’s group, the mage had only just hit category two. There was no way he was now a category three. There had to be a lie somewhere, a practical joke he was not aware of.
Even though, he’d felt Zed’s aura at the party and the man had been a category one. Three weeks was an acceptable period of time for him to have somehow gotten to category two judging from what Abed had sensed then. But category three? No! It was impossible.
“What madness is this!?” he barked. “What have you done!?”
Zed said nothing, merely stared at him with a ferocious glare and spittle drooling at his mouth. He reminded Abed of a mad dog his father had put down once upon a time when he was a child. Or a drugged up thug with no control over his faculties.
Judging from the expressions on Chris and Ash who remained where they were, it seemed Zed’s situation was not normal.
The man had done something he wasn’t supposed to do. Abed understood that whatever power boost it had given Zed nothing would make a category three Beta mage strong enough to defeat a full-fledged category two Rukh mage. But there was a problem. Abed was a full-fledged category two Rukh mage but he had no mana left to fight with. Whatever battle he went into now, he would do it with nothing but the strength of his Rukh rank body.
And judging from Zed’s animosity in this moment, that posed a risk for him. Perhaps now was the time to retreat and regroup.
No, he disagreed. Now wasn’t the time to regroup. It was the time to retreat. Zed and his crew knew where to find him, and if Jason survived the mission, then Zed could easily convince his team to come after Abed, and he doubted the other powers would agree to stand in their way. After all, Zed also had a Knight mage in his corner.
Abed’s feet inched a step back and his eyes settled on Shanine. She remained motionless on the ground. If not for the faint wisp of aura he could still feel from her, he would have thought her dead.
“No,” Abed snarled.
He would not leave her here. She was his one true love. The only woman to ever see beneath his size and awkwardness to love him. He knew what people always said about how she didn’t love him, how she was only nice to him because it was the service he paid for. But they were wrong. She loved him.
She wouldn’t lie with him so frequently if she did not. And he had professed his love to her as well. Promised her protection and care.
In her current situation she was helpless and confused. Anything could happen to her, and a man did not leave the woman he loved when she needed him most. If he left her now, what would that make him?
A liar and a weakling. And he was none of those.
Abed’s hand closed around the hilt of his broken sword and he inched forward now. He resolved himself and attac—
Zed disappeared. Abed had barely registered him move and instinct was his only guide as he swung his sword in a horizontal slash.
Zed appeared in front of Abed and Abed’s sword slammed into his side. It hit his arm with the power of a Rukh. While the weapon was weak and blunt now, unable to cut, it was enough to break bones and crush flesh.
Abed heard the sound of bone breaking as Zed was carried by the impact of his swing. To his amazement, rather than flying off into the trees, Zed was thrown barely ten feet to the side.
Zed’s feet hit the ground and he was on Abed again.
Shock slowed Abed’s reaction and Zed’s fist connected with the chest of his armor. The blow bounced off stone but the force of the attack pushed Abed a step back.
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Abed scowled as he swung his sword again. It was madness to think a Beta mage could hit him with enough force to move him. He was a powerful mage, stronger in physical strength that most of his peers.
To be pushed back by a Beta mage was to be insulted.
He swung his sword down on Zed with one hand in an overhead slash and Zed raised his hand to meet it as he rushed into Abed.
The back of Zed’s hand connected with the flat of Abed’s sword, ringing loudly. The sound of Zed’s hand breaking cracked between them yet the mage didn’t even flinch. His hand deflected Abed’s attack, shifted the descending blade to the side and the sword came down heavily on the ground.
Zed’s attack had rendered his hand useless, his bone bent and broken, fingers bent at odd angles. With his other hand crushed from Abed’s first attack, he had only a few options of attack. All Abed had to do was move faster and he would connect first, before Zed could even—
Zed’s second hand came flying at him completely healed. Abed balked at the sight and reacted too late as a purple rune shone in his face.
He brought up his free hand to protect himself from whatever attack was coming. He felt force mana gather and the blast hit him like a freight train. It shattered the armor of earth that wrapped his forearm and sent him flying into the trees.
Zed followed him, a maddened snarl on his lips and eyes bloodshot.
Abed’s journey ended as his back struck a tree loudly. His armor remained intact and took the brunt of the attack. For it, he was thankful.
His gratitude was short lived as he rolled away from the tree. Zed ran into the tree with a raised leg. His foot crashed into the tree with so much force that it shook the tree and let out a crack. A length of red stained bone jutted out of his leg, spilling blood and ripping skin.
This time Zed winced from the pain, but it did little to hinder him. He ignored it almost immediately and turned to Abed.
In a split second, he was moving again.
Abed refused to let his opponent strike first again. He stepped forward, sword held out to one side of him in both hands.
His swing would be devastating.
Zed’s aura flared out of him suddenly like a swarm of a thousand bees. It washed over Abed and everything went wrong. The weight of Abed’s sword became unbearable as his muscles stiffened as if paralyzed. His legs seized beneath him and fear played the guitar with his spine.
Zed drove his fist into Abed’s face. When something cracked, it did not belong to Zed this time.
…………………………………………
Jason swung his sword of light again, aiming to take the monster’s tail only for his weapon to gutter out. His hand moved past the tail, empty, and nothing happened. Sensing it, the creature swiped its tail at him and Jason brought his second sword up to take the blow.
The creature’s simple tail swipe flogged him and his sword of light. It threw him out of the melee and Jason tumbled into the ground. There was nothing soft about the impact of his body against the ground. Where he was tumbling through dirt and grass, it felt as if he’d been thrown through a building.
He hit something at an odd angle and felt his shoulder dislocate as he bounced again.
Ahead of him, the barrage of spells being thrown at the creature was dwindling. For one, Eitri’s guns had run out of bullets and he seemed to have run out of rune infused weapons. At this point he was now flinging weapons that did nothing at the monster.
Lady Long Leg’s spear no longer shined as bright as it once had, and where each mimed throw of the weapon had birthed a burst of lava shots, it now birthed a single shot that splashed against the side of the monster in a superficial spray of molten lava.
The others still played their part despite not being in Overdrive. Oliver continued to do his best to disorient the creature, holding it down or pushing its momentum in the wrong direction with gravity spells, but it did little in the wider scale of things.
Francis sent electricity lancing through the air but, with the chaos of so many Rukh mages in Overdrive, the mana was too distorted for him to achieve anything meaningful with it. If he really intended to leave any real damage, he needed to get closer, which was not an option. Any closer and the heat would start to burn while leaving him within the reach of a Bishop rank monster. His best was not good enough, but it was all he was willing to give.
Tulip stood cowering as close to the hedge as he could, overwhelmed by the weight of all the auras in the fight.
The Olympians were out of the battle. It seemed that with no more long range methods of attack, they were unwilling to close the distance to fight in the melee. That was until Daniel reached behind him and pulled out something long.
When he settled it beside him, he wielded a massive double-headed battle axe. Its handle was a length of grey metal and its blades gleamed yellow with lightning mana. Armed, he jumped into the fray.
His first contribution to the fight was a significant one. He ducked a swipe of the monster’s paw, his movements clunky with the weight of his armor, and worked his way beneath a reckless swipe of its tail. When he came up on its other side, it was with a raised axe.
Daniel brought the axe down with a savage roar and severed the tail from the rest of the beast.
The monster let out a guttural roar.
Its response was immediate and it turned to Daniel, ignoring Madam Shaggy’s dwindling battering of fire bolts as the woman now tried to keep her distance where she had once been more than happy to join in the foray.
Daniel entered a brief and short lived exchange with the beast where he dodged a number of blows, made three deep cuts in the creature, embedding his axe in its eyes before taking a vicious blow that threw him away.
His departure from the battle left his axe still embedded in the creature’s eye and his team gathered to take the brunt of his flying mass. Their success had all of them plunging into the dirt.
In time, everyone was spent.
The mages were barely left standing, panting and tired as their cores protested in emptiness. Jason stood, helped up by an equally tired Oliver, staring at the monster as it waited for them.
The creature was not without its injuries and it watched them with the wariness of a wounded cat. Blood dripped from wounds that weren’t cauterized by the heat of fire or concentrated light. It struggled, a wounded beast with a sword in its side and an axe in its eye.
Any mage watching would know it was dying. And like all dying things, wisps of death mana were beginning to rise from it, tiny dots in the disturbed air.
On one side of the clearing, Festus stood watching the monster Jason and the others had struggled to kill. In front of him was a dead spider. Its torso was settled on the ground and its legs spread out about it in death. Its size was still taller than the old man.
Festus spared it no attention. Neither did he look at the dying cat. His eyes were elsewhere, to the tree behind it and the mage he could not sense.
Big Man Desolate stood beside the massive tree with something that screamed too much power for its size.
It was a crystal he held in two hands as he stepped forward. He spared the beast a brief glance now that the battle was practically over before turning his attention to everyone.
“I truly appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made for me,” he said, as if giving an appreciation speech at an award ceremony. “None of this would have been possible without you, and I swear on my dying core that I will never forget your sacrifices.”