“Now I’m ready.” The Suneater said.
“So am I!” Salaark clapped her hands, signaling the beginning of the fight and shapeshifting her ample red desert robes into skin-tight pants and shirt.
The fight started with a quick exchange of fists and kicks that surpassed the speed of sound.
The two contenders moved back and forth throughout the Blood Plains, riding the sonic booms to move faster and timing their respective attacks to create constructive and destructive interference.
Salaark and Tezka used the former to pile up their own sonic booms into devastating shockwave attacks and the latter to weaken the opponent’s booms. They moved through space on purpose, every spot where they clashed was a forced compromise between offense and defense.
Forced because neither of them was letting the other dictate the flow of battle but they had to exchange blows or they would be just staring at each other all day.
‘Fuck me sideways, I can barely understand what’s happening even with Solus’ help and the Eyes!’ Lith was terrified by the spectacle.
If not for the Battle Sense spell he would just see empty air.
‘Me too.’ Everyone else replied.
Zinya and her children were cut off from the conversation since they knew nothing of Solus and magic.
“You have definitely improved.” Salaark however, was already getting bored. “Your double core gives you a nice new kick but you are still nothing compared to the raw prowess of a Guardian who has mastered their powers!”
“You don’t say?” Tezka smiled at her as if she had complimented him. “Then you’re going to like this.”
The sky suddenly turned dark as his Eldritch Tier spell, Suneater, blotted the sun out of the sky.
Suneater used a burst of Chaos magic to bring a piece of Tezka out of Mogar’s atmosphere. From there, it would grow and spread like an umbrella, absorbing both the light energy from the sun and the cosmic radiation.
Suneater fed all the collected energy to Tezka in real time and in turn, he would convert part of it into mass and use the rest to fuel his spells and bloodline abilities.
Eldritches were made of energy and their black core was a bottomless pit. Their capacity to hold and control mana was endless, there was no such a thing as mana abuse for them.
Tezka suddenly became much stronger, faster, and heavier as the new mass his body gained matched that of the Guardian.
“So much for wanting to fight under the most unfair conditions possible.” Salaark laughed even though Tezka’s barrage of attacks was now pushing her back. “You have no violet core nor body casting.
“You had no time to weave Suneater with true magic unless you did it during your pep talk to the kids!”
“Victory needs no explanations whereas defeat brooks none.” Tezka replied as the frequency of his attacks increased without end.
He used not only hands and feet like Salaark but also nine of his ten tails and she couldn’t deal with all of them anymore.
‘That’s a low blow!’ Friya inwardly cursed. ‘I didn’t expect Tezka to be this cowardly.’
‘You are wrong.’ Lith replied. ‘As he said, life is always unfair. The secret to survival is making it unfair to your advantage.’
Friya and Kamila looked at him for a second, wondering if the Abominations weren’t wrong in considering Lith like one of their own.
As for the kids, they couldn’t agree with Tezka more.
‘We are on the pretty lady’s turf. If it gives her an advantage, Uncle Tezka has every right to cheat. She isn’t playing fairly either.’ They thought while cheering as hard as they could for the Eldritch.
“It was an amazing spell back then and it’s even better now but so am I!” Salaark abandoned her human form and shapeshifted into a blood-red Phoenix. “Don’t forget that I’m no human. I never was one. That silly form was a handicap I gave myself.
“I was doing you a favor but now it’s time for me to get serious!” Her feathered wings moved in circles in front of her, intercepting multiple kicks and punches at the same time.
The air currents accompanying Salaark’s movements neutralized the shockwaves while her soft plumage absorbed the physical impact. She didn’t take the attacks head-on anymore, she deflected them off her line with minimum effort, waiting for the right time to counter.
Tezka’s tails were supposed to still give him an edge but Salaark now could reply in spades. The long peacock-like feathers on a Phoenix’s tail weren’t ornamental. They darted from every direction, moving like a new limb each and intercepting Tezka’s tails.
She had more than nine of them so the Suneater found himself quickly on the back foot. The Phoenix’s wings and tail feathers intercepted everything Tezka dished out while her beak punished the slightest mistake with a surgical counter.
Tezka’s fur was thick and durable but even after hardening its tufts into spikes, the Phoenix’s beak cut through them effortlessly. To make matters worse, her extra feathers from the tail pummelled at him from every direction.
If the Suneater stepped forward, Salaark stepped back, and vice versa. She kept strict control of the range, limiting his offensive and defensive options by cornering him with her tails at every step of the combat.
“Does this remind you of anything?” The Guardian smirked. “This is an accurate replay of our last fight. Come on, do it. I know you want to.”
“This is nothing like our last fight!” Tezka smirked back, his form splitting into nine identical bodies.
Each one of the new Tezkas only bore one tail except for the one who also carried the atrophied Spirit tail.
‘What does he hope to achieve with this?’ Salaark and the spectators thought in unison. ‘The number of tails is unchanged and even though he now has more limbs- Oh shit!’
As explained before, an Eldritch’s black core was a bottomless pit with an endless capacity to hold and control mana. Even the small portion of the sun’s energy absorbed by Suneater was the equivalent of several nuclear explosions and that without factoring in the cosmic radiations.
Each one of Tezka’s nine bodies had the physical and magical might of the original. Each one of them had the same mass of a 50 meters (164′) tall Guardian. They moved with a single mind and purpose, surrounding the Phoenix in a seven-pointed attack formation.
“Oh, crap!” Not only were now the tables turned, with Tezka’s limbs outnumbering Salaark’s, but he also did more than rely on physical attacks.
Seven of them kept a constant pressure on the Guardian while the remaining two kept their distance and cast spells with true and fake magic for the rest of the group. A barrage of Cursed, Dimensional, and Gravity spells now rained on Salaark’s head along with blows powerful enough to flatten a mountain.
“Go, Uncle Tezka!” Filia started to jump while cheering whereas Zinya was simply terrified by the extinction-level fight taking place in front of her.
‘Is really Tezka that strong? How can the kids take all of this as some sort of game? What the heck happened while they were with him that they are used to such things?’ Zinya thought.
