As the king of the Bestiral Kingdom was meeting his match, the daughter of Dur’kor Wildheart was engaged in a duel of a very different kind. While King Laiyun had never really respected the use of magic, mostly due to him seeing it as cowardly and partially due to the fact that Werean generally did not have high magical potential, he did have a Court Mage. It was this mage, whose name is irrelevant and unneeded, that had tried to snipe Blaer Wildheart out of the sky with a sub-par [Fireball] spell.

Unfortunately for the nameless Court Mage who, might I add, was sporting a six-pack (because there was no way that the King would allow a scrawny weakling to be his Court Mage), his skill with magic was grossly inferior to Blaer’s. Despite being ripped for a mage, all the muscles in the world would not boost one’s magical potential and ability. To be brutally honest, there was a very good reason why magic users were generally scrawny and wimpy-looking. It takes a lot of energy and time to build muscles, and it takes just as much time and energy, if not more, to learn and master the mysteries of magic.

Those with the potential can either waste it by getting physically stronger, or they can skimp out on building their bodies and instead hone their prowess with spells and the like. King Laiyun’s insistence that his Court Mage be physically fit was now coming back to bite the poor fool who had made the cut. His stats and class levels were not ideal for either the role of Mage or Fighter, and he was, instead, a poor hybrid of both, having few of both classes’ strengths and many of their weaknesses. All in all, he was poorly built, and Blaer was exploiting the hell out of that.

As she flew around the trees and between the bodies of the Werean military men/ women, the hopelessly Court Mage could not let a spell go without invariably hitting one of his own. Blaer, on the other hand, was not in the mood for targeting such a poorly built fool. Instead of focusing on one of the few mages in the Bestiral Kingdom (or what was left of it), she laid down buffs on her allies, debuffs on her foes and dropped the occasional damaging spell on any Werean unfortunate enough to be in sight.

While the unnamed Court Mage desperately tried to follow the winged Beastman Shaman/ Witch, the forest was dark and filled with the sounds, sights and smells of the ugly free-for-all that was taking place within it and Blaer had decided that being in the eyes of the fool was too much of a hassle. It would have effectively been divine intervention for the nameless Werean mage to spot Blaer at this point, let alone hit her with anything now that she was purposefully playing hard-to-get. However, the mage did realize that if he didn’t do anything about Blaer, the situation would only get even worse.

Therefore, he concocted a plan that he was certain would allow him to secure a chance to target and defeat the owl-winged animal person. He gathered the few mages left of the already quite few that had joined the fight and began to pretend that they were conducting a dangerous ritual designed to generate a massive blast of fire. However…

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Blaer peeked out from behind the leaves as she stood up high above the battle taking place below, the branch of the tree she stood upon barely noticing her weight at all. She could tell that the wannabe muscled mages were just trying to deceive her, and she was not going to have any of that. She could easily tell that they were only pretending to channel their combined power into a larger spell, as could any magic user who had spent enough time interacting with mana on a fundamental level. These ‘mages’ were amateurs at best and absolute idiots at worst. They seemed to have no idea that the mana that they were channeling together into the fake spell was not simply going to come back to them once they stopped.

She could just waltz over to them and wipe the floor with the lot of them, but she had a better idea. In her mind, it was better to wait until they either ran out of mana altogether (a dangerous position to be in for any mage, even the muscled kind) or until they realized that their trick was not going to work which of course would almost certainly be after enough of them lost all or most of their mana in their pointless exercise.

When that happened, she had a spell that she had prepared just for the right situation. Blaer had hoped to use this little horror of a spell on the damned king of these Werean, but her father was already done killing the bastard, so she would have to settle for these imbeciles. She had never used it on a mage before, though, so the mad mage within her was very curious as to what, if any new effects would take place. The last time she had used this spell, the look on the faces of the victim and of those who were collateral damage were priceless, and Blaer nearly squealed in delight as she pictured the mages faces contorting in agony and fear.

She did not have to wait long until the Werean mages stopped channeling their mana into the fake spell. As it seemed to Blaer, the Werean Mages were just as impatient as their now dead monarch and had given up their attempt to lure Blaer out into the open only a few minutes after it had begun. Now both physically exhausted and with a good chunk of their mana pool depleted, Blaer knew that now was the time to strike.

She raised her staff into the air and began channeling her own mana into a spell that no good person would ever use. The Werean Mages felt the surge of energy building in the treetops and hastily began shooting their magical projectiles up in Blaer’s general direction, but their accuracy was heavily limited due to their exhaustion and their own short emotional fuses.

Blaer smirked as she unleashed her spell, shouting the name of it for all to hear.

“[Monstrous Re-Evolution]!”

The power of her spell surged forwards like a tidal wave, crashing into her intended victims and funneling itself into their bodies, eventually fusing with their minds, bodies and even their very souls. At first, nothing happened, and this elicited jeers and mockery from her targets, but soon enough they began to feel the effects of her cruel and inhumane curse that had been placed upon them.

Laughter turned to cries of pain and then shrieks of fear and the retching sounds of stomachs being emptied. These were then followed by the cracking of bone and rending of flesh as the bodies of the mages began to twist and contort into new and monstrous shapes. Their forms bulged and shrank again and again until at last the men and women they once were existed no longer and in their place was some unspeakable abomination of meat, bone and sinew.

Blaer looked down upon her handiwork and patted herself on the back before ordering the grotesque monsters she had created to turn on their former comrades, and with that done she once again took flight, this time heading for where Vaile was supposed to be