That way, the array would still work, but its effects would be greatly diminished with each lost node. Even while Jiira was studying his predicament, he saw tendrils of Lith’s mana coming up from below the floor and crush another node.
“Come on, pal. You just have to turn it off and on again to reset it.” Lith said while a blue aura erupted from his body and several spells could be seen on the verge of taking form.
Looking at Lith’s savage smile, Jiira felt an endless fear taking hold of him. Sure, the Odi could do as Lith had suggested, but taking down the array meant remaining completely exposed to Lith’s spells.
Jiira was in a pinch. As long as God’s Will was active, the enemy could only engage him in physical combat. Yet the longer they fought, the weaker the array’s power focusing ability would become.
Lith had attacked only one function of the array on purpose, to ensure that his opponent didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. Lith could almost taste the blood of his enemy, almost hear his dying screams.
Lith’s teeth became the size of small knives and his cheeks covered in scales. Jiira involuntarily took a step back from the grinning monster in front of him. The Odi had seen the monster moving, the second he would need to reset the array was a second too long. At least as long as the creature remained on the fringes of God’s Will.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t just move the array, so its area of effect was fixed until he replaced it with a new one.
A clicking sound made Jiira look down, just in time to notice that somehow, the human female was now free. Yet instead of running away, Phloria placed her hands on his abdomen, releasing a fireball from point-blank range.
What the Odi had confused for ramblings of agony were actually magic words. The moment a chance of survival had appeared, Phloria had started to cast all of her best spells.
Yet after seeing the Odi controlling Lith’s spells as if they were his own, she had been forced to change her tactic. If she had to die, she would die fighting, without leaving the Odi anything but a broken carcass.
The fireball exploded too fast and too close for even God’s Will to have any effect. The detonation smashed Jiira against the back wall and cracked both the table and the mana crystals.
Her own mana couldn’t hurt Phloria, but it could still hurt Lith and Solus, who was hiding under the table after undoing Phloria’s bindings. Lith rushed forward, uncaring of the flames and the heat.
It was his opportunity to both rescue his partner and put down his enemy. The Orichalcum enveloped Lith, protecting his lungs from the hot air that was making it hard for Jiira to breathe.
His midriff was shredded, only the constant infusion of light magic from the Reactor had prevented his innards from pooling on the floor rather than in his abdomen where they were supposed to be.
Jiira saw Lith approaching, the air element coursing through Jiira’s body allowed him to follow the monster’s movements. The Odi joined his hands, focusing all the energy he could muster into the biggest energy beam he could conjure in such a short amount of time.
He used water magic to cool the air and hopefully turn the enemy into a popsicle.
Even if weakened, the green array made the beam too fast for Lith to dodge, but weak enough to be blocked. Lith’s right arm deflected it while his left arm pierced the enemy’s brain first and heart immediately after, releasing powerful spells that made the Odi’s body parts explode like water balloons each time, emitting a wet sound.
Lith was about to strike at the sphere that controlled the array when Jiira overloaded his life force, causing an explosion powerful enough to send both Lith and Phloria crashing against the door.
‘This is impossible.’ Lith thought. ‘There is no spell that can keep you alive with your brain and heart destroyed. I’ve seen his life force fade like what happened to all those who I killed in the past. How could he activate such a spell and why is the array still standing?’
Lith was right, Jiira was dead. Yet the same didn’t apply to all the other Odi he was sharing his body with. When Kulah’s researchers had understood that no one was coming to save them, they had used the Body Merging project to halve their numbers but double their lifespan by alternating who was in control of the body.
Only the active life force would be consumed, while the other would be preserved. Yet it also meant halving the speed of their research, since there was only so much work that a single body could do.
With each of their failure, the Odi’s number would decrease, until they had decided to merge all inside a single body, to buy as much time as they could while waiting for rescue.
The tank where they had slept slowed their metabolism to one-tenth, so that each one of them would only lose one day of life force after 10 days. The Odi had spent the last few centuries switching from one body to another, prolonging the existence of their doomed race.
When the other Odi had felt Jiira’s consciousness fade and his precious life span go to waste, they had activated the detonation spell engraved in his body to buy enough time for the next of them to take charge.
Lith used Invigoration on both Phloria and himself while trying to make heads or tails of the events. She was just wounded while his frozen right arm was seconds away from shattering into pieces.
Only when he saw Jiira’s body shapeshift into another much more muscular body, did Lith understand what Life Merging meant. All the injuries he had inflicted upon his earlier enemy had disappeared and even though the hair color was the only thing that physically distinguished Jiira from Rizo, their energy signatures couldn’t have been more different.
Rizo took an elaborate longsword and a heavy armor out of Ellkas’s dimensional ring that was now his own. Once their owner was dead, their imprint on an enchanted item would disappear.
Dimensional items were easy to use and the Odi had seen their specimens use them multiple times from their cameras, so the first thing they had done after killing the useless old coots was to find one and use it to store all of their best equipment.
In that single ring, there were the results of countless experiments conducted in Kulah, plus the best equipment that the Odi could craft during their empire’s golden age.
***
“Wake up, kid!” After Quylla’s seizure had stopped and Morok had made sure that nothing bad had happened to her with his diagnostic spells, the Tyrant had tried his best to make her regain consciousness.
Up to that moment, healing magic, buckets of cold water, and yelling had proven to be useless.
“If we don’t do something, we’re all going to die. At least tell me what the heck this picture means!” The open Odi book didn’t make sense to him. It only showed a hatch and the Reactor, but that was something he could see with his own eyes.
