Lith rushed back to the Warp room while keeping Life Vision active.
‘It must have happened after Yondra disposed of the magical beasts. That’s why no more dimensional corridors have been opened, our enemy must have captured Rainer while we were busy!
‘They didn’t want us around to keep us from meddling and be sure that they would manage to take him alive, dammit. This means that I have no time to waste. If Phloria and Quylla have been captured as well, the Odi can start the body-swapping procedure at any time!’
Lith was right and wrong at the same time.
It hadn’t been a plan, like his paranoia suggested to him. The Odi had simply exploited the opening that had been created the moment the group had split. Also, they would never start their experiments before being sure that nothing could mess with the first opportunity they had in centuries to walk Mogar again.
“Enemy incoming in front of you!” Lith said when he saw dimensional energies gathering in front of his comrades.
Yondra thought Lith meant “from behind” and tried to turn around, but Morok knew better and kept her still while summoning the tier five Battle Mage spell, God of Water.
A full armor made of ice covered his body while all the moisture in the air condensed throughout the room into spheres of water that would allow Morok to replicate the effects of all tier three and four water magic spells he knew without the need to cast them.
It was the spell that coupled with his blue eye had allowed him to single-handedly take down a lone Flesh Golem with relative ease.
A Warp Array opened, letting Jiira join his guests. He clapped his hands, mostly to compliment himself, for a job well done.
< "Too bad that old coots never survive being turned into Flesh Golems. With a brain like yours, you'd make an excellent slave."> He said as a green array formed all around him, enveloping the whole room.
Jiira had watched the fight through both cameras and small dimensional gates. He had always been a huge fan of gladiator pits, and the last show he had witnessed had taken place centuries ago.
< "As for you, filthy beast, no matter what form you take. You can't hide from us.">
Morok had no interest in listening to Jiira’s ramblings and attacked the Odi the moment he appeared. He didn’t care about the green array nor the warning Lith had received from the dying Golems.
‘This is going to be easy. The fucker can’t even use dimensional magic. So far they have always opened Warping Arrays, not Warp Steps.’ Morok thought as he commanded half the water spheres to freeze his enemy while the other half turned into icicles that darted toward Jiira.
The Odi just laughed at Morok’s efforts and the green array flashed for an instant. All of Morok’s attacks stopped a few centimeters away from Jiira, as an invisible force had prevented even the energy from moving further.
“What the fuck?” Morok and Yondra said in unison. The Ranger was flabbergasted. Suddenly he couldn’t feel the God of Water spell anymore, yet its effects were still visible in front of his eyes.
< "Nice suit of armor. I wish we were capable of such spells."> Jiira was engrossed by the dramatic changes that Silverwing’s legacy had triggered in the development of new forms of magic.
< "Yet to be really safe, you should wear it tighter, like this!"> Jiira clenched his fist, and the ice armor turned into a torture device which trapped its wearer and stabbed him with countless small ice shards.
A flick of the Odi’s wrist made all the conjured icicles fly across the room, to get rid of the beast and the old woman in one fell swoop.
‘Now I understand why the Golems warned me about the green array and why Rainer failed to defend himself despite the arrays Yondra had left him.’ Lith thought while studying the events unfolding in front of his eyes with Life Vision.
The moment the green array had flashed, Morok’s energy signature had been replaced by Jiira’s, allowing him to take control of the tier five spell.
Yondra had no mystical senses, but years of battle experience let her understand that conjuring a spell before having a clear idea of the opponent’s abilities might do them more harm than good.
She used her defensive amulet, which created an energy barrier that stopped the icicles and crushed them to bits.
‘First weak points of all arrays, they can’t be moved.’ Lith thought while using spirit magic to drag both of his companions outside the room without stepping inside the Odi’s magical formation.
< "What is that?"> Spirit magic was supposed to be invisible, yet Lith’s tendrils of mana were clear as day the moment they crossed the green array’s threshold.
One of the many reasons the Odi had lost the war was the Emperor Beasts’ revenge against them. They didn’t need Silverwing’s legacy to create tier four or five spells and just a few Awakened Emperor Beasts could turn the tides of every battle.
The green array, also called God’s will, was the solution they had found after countless experiments and sacrifices. To perfect it, many Odi had died and because of its limitations, it couldn’t be used outside Kulah.
Jiira was too surprised to react in time, so Lith managed to save his companions and dispel the tendril he meant to use to snap the Odi’s neck before it could be used against him.
“We have to run, now!” Lith said, unwilling to fight a losing battle,
‘Solus, how the heck can he conjure an array that fast? I thought that only Golems could do that due to their power core.’ Lith asked.
He was confident he could kill the Odi with his physical abilities alone, but he had no idea if the array had more than one ability or what to do if a Flesh Golem joined the fray.
‘There is a small bead hidden inside his ribcage.’ Solus replied. ‘That’s the source of the array, yet it doesn’t explain where the Odi gets the mana to fuel it. That thing combines the most powerful effects of a Golem’s power core and Silverwing’s Hexagram.
‘Even an Awakened one using Invigoration would have a hard time keeping it active. It seems that Quylla’s hypothesis about the Mana Reactor was correct.’
“Where’s Rainer?” Yondra asked.
“Taken. Ellkas is dead.” Lith said while Morok broke free from his armor with pure brute force. He was bleeding from many cuts, some even deep, yet they couldn’t afford to slow down.
Yondra gritted her teeth. All of her plans, all of her hard work to protect her beloved assistant had actually doomed the youth to a fate worse than death.
“There’s no point in running away.” Yondra abruptly stopped. “If we can’t defeat a single Odi, then we’ll never manage to save anyone.”
“We can, but only if we take down the Mana Reactor first!” Lith stopped as well, but only because Jiira was once again in front of them.
He had placed the Golems in strategic positions, allowing him to freely Warp from one point to another, sealing off the only escape route they had.
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