They were both undead Thorns, their bodies so vaguely shaped that they looked like green mannequins. Lith didn’t recognize their energy signature, hence he had no idea what kind of undead they were nor what kind of abilities they possessed.
He Blinked behind their backs, cutting them in half with a single slash before setting them ablaze with the black flames of his tier five spell, Setting Sun. The undead cussed out loud, revealing themselves to be a male and a female.
They respectively unleashed a Chasing Lightning and a powerful pulse of darkness magic.
The first spell forced Lith on the defensive, while the other dispelled enough of the black flames that by sacrificing their lower halves the undead managed to escape by burrowing through the ground.
There was no way to dodge Chasing Lightning, Lith could only conjure a stone wall and block the spell. It took him just a second, yet it was more than enough to make it impossible for him to give chase to the two undead.
Meanwhile, Illum was aware of the gravity of his situation, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t manage to escape from the encirclement. Kalla had generated several shadow-copies of herself that had Illum completely surrounded.
To make matters worse, they were all casting darkness spells non-stop, making it impossible for him to distinguish the copies from the original. Attacking the wrong Wight would have meant triggering the attack of another mass of darkness magic.
Kalla’s first attack was wearing down his transformation, his flesh was slowly turning back into bark as his brown fur withered and fell out.
Moreover, Phloria kept conjuring stone constructs that restricted both his field of vision and movements, allowing the Wight’s spells to hit him with increasing frequency despite their slowness.
Friya, instead, kept appearing in his blind spot, hitting him with pulses of darkness just to disappear the moment he turned around.
‘Dammit! This was supposed to be a simple job. The plan was to blend in with the crowd and have the Awakened attacked by an angry mob, so that in the ensuing chaos we could easily kill them.
‘Master Gremlik sent me because not even Awakened are able to recognize a thrall from a normal living being, yet that bastard blew my cover in an instant. Time to get out of here.’ Illum thought, gambling everything on the strength his sire had bestowed upon him.
Even though as a plant folk Illum was capable of using dimensional magic, the Grendel form prevented him from casting spells. The fight had begun just a few seconds before, yet he had already witnessed how powerless his Treantling form was.
His only chance to escape was to break through the enemy defenses, but he couldn’t just run away. His reinforcements had just been defeated, so there wasn’t much time left before Lith returned, forcing Illum to fight alone versus four.
‘I just need to injure one of them, it doesn’t matter who. That way, I’ll get rid of two enemies at once, since the healer will not be able to chase me as well. I’m sure that I can beat even these monsters if we fight one on one.’ Illum thought.
Kalla was hidden among her shadows, Friya always retreated behind the wall of Wights, so his choice fell on Phloria. The annoying woman had foiled all of his previous strategies by moving one of her stone shields in his path at the worst possible moment.
The thrall charged at her while dodging Kalla’s darkness bullets too fast for even Friya’s dimensional magic to lock onto him. Phloria didn’t flinch, simply raising the only tower shield she had kept for herself while preparing for her riposte.
Normally, Illum would have laughed at her bravado, but he was aware that Mage Knights could express their full potential only in close quarters. With his life on the line, he forgot his pride as a plant folk and as a future ruler of the night, facing her like a peer instead of a bag of flesh full of nectar.
Illum pushed his speed to the utmost limit, circling around the protection of the conjured shield to avoid surprises, just to discover that Phloria’s skill allowed her to keep up with him.
Cursing his bad luck, the thrall lunged forward with all of his might. His left arm easily pierced through the shield and the soft flesh it was protecting. Illum clenched his fist to crush her organs and to make sure that the injury would put her in critical condition.
Yet the moment the attack landed, he found himself drowning in his own blood.
His left arm was cut in half at the elbow level, and the other half was still wriggling out of his own back, whereas the human was unscathed. Phloria had hidden a dimensional door behind her tower shield so that when the enemy had been foolish enough to attempt a frontal assault, she was ready.
A Grendel’s claws were sharp enough to pierce a Grendel’s skin, allowing her to turn the enemy strength into a weakness. Phloria had also dispelled the dimensional door the moment her shield had collapsed, so that the enemy would not have the time to pull his arm back and try again.
The bleeding stump and the hole in the chest of the thrall were too much for his already battered body. The shock from the massive damage taken and the darkness energy ravaging Illum’s body killed him on the spot.
“That was insane!” Friya couldn’t believe her own eyes.
She prided herself of being one of the few dimensional mages in the Kingdom, a title belonging only to those who had elevated a simple means of instant transportation into a battle technique, yet not even Friya would have dared to try such a thing.
“Opening a dimensional door from so close is too dangerous. Locking the coordinates of its entry and exit point takes time, plus you couldn’t know the angle the attack would come from. You could have gotten yourself ripped into shreds!”
“You’re only partially right.” Phloria said while checking that there were no more enemies. “I would’ve never managed to pull it off if I were fighting one on one, but I’m a Mage Knight and I rarely battle alone.
“The hardest part of this entire exercise was circling around the same spot without moving so that the entry point was always the same and I had only to adjust the exit point.”
Friya still had many things to say about the craziness of such a move and so did Lith. What Phloria had pulled off was more a matter of cold blood and timing rather than talent, things she had proven to have plenty.
Yet it was a highly impractical technique that required that the mage remained almost completely still and focused entirely on one target to the point that they would ignore their surroundings. Lith was afraid that the rage from being suspended was affecting Phloria’s mind.
She had never been reckless, which made him worry.
Neither of them had the time to say anything because the plant folks that had been watching until that moment were now surrounding the corpse of the Treantling, which had reverted back to a young weeping willow.
“Can you burn it?” Asked the Thorn woman who had defended the thrall before Lith exposed him.
“Don’t you want to bury him or something?” Phloria asked. Based on what she knew, plant folks would happily feast on their dead to assimilate part of their essence and power.
