[Mana spring]
When the blast cleared a few seconds later, Darganth finally got the answer he sought. Slowly becoming visible through the cracks in space and ti that filled the blast radius with glass-like bends, endless expanses of absolute nothingness, as well as ti-loops and other temporal anomalies, the extent of the beast’s wounds was revealed.
Foremost among these was the missing left antler. Reduced to nothing more than a broken stump protruding from the beast’s head, the once-imposing highlight of the deer’s appearance had been almost completely annihilated when Darganth’s breath attack struck it directly. Only the fact that the beast had been channeling its own power into its antler had then saved it from at least a part of the blast of destruction that followed.
Though even with that, the left side of its head and upper neck were completely disfigured. Skin and fur alike were gone, giving the appearance that the beast had been flayed alive. But these areas were still intact compared to the part of its head closest to the blast. From the base of its left antler up to, and including, its left eye, the beast wasn’t rely missing its skin but had its flesh and muscles annihilated, often all the way to the bone.
Despite this damage, however, Darganth wasn’t satisfied with the outco. For one, he had been hoping to imdiately end the fight with this attack. And not just to ensure that their fortune couldn’t still turn against them, but also to minimize the suffering the fearal beast had to endure. Because while it might rely be a wild animal empowered by mana without any higher intelligence or sapience, and which would gladly eat them for the mana in their bodies, they could at least gift it with as painless a death as they could manage, even if that wasn’t much anymore.
Still, with this in mind, Darganth pulled on what little draconic mana he had remaining after this blast and prepared for yet another breath attack. But before he could even start charging it, his mana sense alerted him to at least two dozen clusters of mana just within direct contact with his body, with hundreds more appearing on his senses scattered across both the clearing and the forest.
Imdiately recognizing that these mana signatures didn’t match anyone from his group or any ogre, Darganth didn’t hesitate to turn his dragon’s breath onto the nearest cluster of them. Hitting the four individuals in it before they had any chance to react, the beam erased them in an instant before swaying to the side as Darganth turned his head. As it tore across the clearing on its way from enemy to enemy, explosions followed where the beam had passed, delaying so of the foes further away from closing in and adding to the chaos of the battlefield.
Only a full ten seconds later did the devastation of Darganth’s attack stop as his reserves of draconic mana ran low and forced him to switch to physical attacks and regular magic. By then, he had also identified what exactly, not just he, but their entire group, including the ogres, were facing, giving him enough information to form an efficient tactic.
“Elentals.” He mused as he briefly swept his gaze across the nurous tallic figures, both humanoid and not.
As living incarnations of their elent, their forms were limited only by its capabilities. For the tal Elentals before him, that ant that their appearance varied greatly in a multitude of ways. Foremost, despite being called into the physical realm by the beast’s magic, only slightly more Elentals than shared its leaning toward silver in how their magic manifested. The bodies of the others were anwhile made of everything from steel to gold, with even the magical tals like Mythril and mixes of multiple tals being found.
In addition to that, the state in which these tals were also varied. While so were well-processed pieces of solid tal, others were crude ore or looked like rusted junk. A good chunk weren’t even in their solid state, with these Elentals instead being made of a molten slag that shifted with their every move.
But one thing they all had in common, and which made it easy for Darganth to plan this fight, was the almost exclusive usage of their native elent. Unlike gods, whose divinity simply didn’t empower elents or spells that didn’t fall under their area of influence, Elentals were almost completely incapable of using anything but their elent. So, despite their impressive command over the elent they were born from, countering them with specific tactics was rather easy, at least when fighting weaker individuals of their kind.
As such, he didn't have to strategize for long before the first water magic spells ford around him. Briefly building up pressure, the first soon shot out as a wave that spread in all directions. Sweeping up one Elental after another in its path, it dragged the tallic figures back and cleared Darganth’s vicinity.
Just as he then prepared to fire the second spell, Darganth was interrupted when a blast of searing flas erupted sowhere in the forest. Burning hot enough that he still felt the change in temperature despite being hundreds of ters away, he briefly paused as he scanned its origin with his mana sense.
What he found was Scalladras floating in a lted crater, the lted remains of the ground and so trees bubbling as a small puddle of lava beneath him. Around the crater, splashes of tal slag and broken pieces of warped material indicated that there had been Elentals near him before his attack, though Darganth couldn’t sense any remaining life signals for at least a few dozen ters around him.
“Or one could just blast through them with brute force.” Darganth said, letting out a sigh in response to this.
With it, he also unleashed his own spell. Imdiately, nurous beams of condensed water erupted all around him, appearing out of the nothingness before shooting toward one tal Elental each.
Though water elental magic isn’t known for its offensive potential, when these beams struck their targets, they cut through the ranks of Elentals with ease. Impacting with enough concentrated pressure to cut through all but the strongest Elentals, they knocked back any foes within two hundred ters around Darganth that they didn’t kill directly, completely clearing the area in practically an instant.
Once he had this space, Darganth pushed off from the ground and rose into the air. Rolling his neck as he prepared himself for the next clash with the beast, he turned toward where their opponent was fending off Venrie’s unceasing attacks. Floating far up and staying out of the Elentals range, she unleashed volley after volley of green energy, hamring the beast’s slowly crumbling defenses with beams while trying to sneak smaller, guided projectiles past its shields.
Further into the distance, Darganth could also see his sister leading the ogres of the left flank into battle against the Elentals. Covering their allies in the shadow of her wings, she sailed through the air above their roaring horde and unleashed her mastery over gravity on their enemies.
Each ti, her attack was announced only by a surge of her mana, with her massive form then diving from her position a few hundred ters in the air as she perford what essentially amounted to a dive bombing attack. In it, she’d release her mana as a simple gravitational pull that dragged the Elentals caught in its influence toward her, allowing her claws to easily tear through them and opening massive holes in the horde of hundreds that surrounded the ogres.
The sixty or so ogres below were however hard pressed to exploit these openings. Outnumbered two-to-one with dozens of new Elentals rushing toward them at every mont, they were constantly on the back foot. Though stronger individually, it took most ogres tens of seconds to bring down a single Elental, attritioning them down both in terms of stamina and through the mounting number of small, by themself harmless wounds.
And unlike their foes’ near-endless reinforcents, with new Elentals quite literally spawned into existence thanks to the lingering effects of the beast’s magic, the rest of the ogres were in no position to help. Due to the Elentals that spawned in the forest, they were being similarly pressured as this group, with every loss swinging the tide further in favor of their seemingly endless wave of opponents.
The only thing preventing them from being completely overrun there was the constant storm that raged overhead. Conjured up by Serania, it darkened the skies as clouds obscured the distant universes, with their light being replaced by the crackles of electricity that flashed in the storm with every bolt of lightning that shot out from it.
Acting in conjunction with her, Allaire was also visible through the thinned-out treeline. Though considering that she was encased in her aura avatar and towered above the remaining trees, even an undamaged forest wouldn’t have obscured her as she tore through the scores of Elentals that surrounded her from all sides.
Seeing this situation, Darganth briefly hesitated. Glancing back and forth between the beast and his pressured allies, he weighed the benefit of joining either part of the fight. On the one hand, Venrie’s favorable position ant that he’d have a good chance at ending the fight if he were to help her. On the other hand, the Elentals were currently in a similarly advantageous position.
With that in mind, though it took a short mont, Darganth soon leaned to the side before accelerating. Letting his mana radiate outward as he raced toward the forest, water surged beneath his flying form and cascaded outward in a whirlpool that dragged any Elentals caught in it along.
Reaching the treeline in under a second, he then abruptly shifted his trajectory into a steep upward climb. A second later, Darganth then shot past two hundred ters of altitude and switched to the second part of his maneuver. Unfurling his wings, he brought his body to an abrupt near-halt before rolling backward. The mont he reached past the halfway point of this loop, he thrust his wings upward.
Imdiately accelerating to his top speed, he reinforced his body as he sped toward the Elentals trapped in the maelstrom below him. Another beat of his wings pushed his speed past the limits of level flight, giving him ever so slightly more montum to work with as he struck his spell with outstretched claws.
Despite this, no earth-shaking impact followed, even as Darganth should’ve already crashed to ground with the full montum of his descent behind him. Instead, only a soft splash that was completely drowned out by the battle happening all around was audible as his form completely vanished into the maelstrom he dove into.
With him, the Elentals caught by the spell also disappeared. Dragged along either directly by his body or by the suction force created in its wake as he plunged through the pool of water from his spell, they too ended up in a seemingly endlessly deep mass of water that shouldn’t be able to exist inside the barely five-ter-high spell.
Sinking through this endless expanse of water, Darganth’s fall slowly slowed to a stop. Floating in place as the tal Elentals sank past all around him, he reached out toward the spatial component of the spell with his magic and prepared for the final step.
Then, he unleashed all of the stored kinetic energy from his impact. In an instant, the spell burst open as a flood of water from inside the expanded space ca rushing into reality. Exploding outward, these hundreds of thousands of liters of water blasted through the surrounding forest, shattering trees, gouging through the soil, and sweeping Elentals aside.
In the middle of all of this, Darganth reappeared where the center of the maelstrom had been with his wings unfurled. Paying little attention to the devastation happening around him, he swept his gaze across the battlefield, searching and soon finding Scalladras.
With a nod from Darganth, the primordial of fire then jumped into action. Turning his attention away from the group of Elentals he had directed his flas against the mont before, he raised an arm toward the expanding wall of water and called upon his divinity.
“Boil.”
Not relying on a spell, he instead commanded reality to listen, which it did. In an instant, the already destructive wave erupted into a second explosion as water turned to steam and expanded. Pushing against itself, the burning hot fog was scattered across the entire battlefield by the resulting pressure, literally lting through the tal Elentals too close to where the wave had been.
But more importantly, this shifted the elental energies in the region enough for Scalladras to call upon an army of their own. Reaching beyond the veil into the realm of fire, he let his mana surge along this connection and shatter the part of the barrier keeping the Elentals from crossing.
However, unlike the accidental summoning of the beast, he also commanded the fire Elentals found there. As such, instead of manifesting in the hundreds as even the weakest among them tried to claw their way into the physical realm, filling up the capacity for crossings and thus preventing the stronger Elentals from manifesting, Scalladras kept those below a certain standard from using the crossing he had made.
That ant that only two dozen flaming figures appeared in the first second. Despite this, the combined pressure of their presence nearly matched the hundreds of tal Elentals that had manifested in the thirty seconds that had by then passed since the first ones had appeared.
What had been a slightly slanted but still contested fight thus quickly turned into a one-sided beat-down. Charging forth, the fire Elentals scattered across the battlefield to hunt the distant kin of theirs that were attacking Darganth’s group.
Weakened by the humidity in their air as the two foreign elents clashed with their own nature, the tal Elentals only barely managed to mount a resistance. As such, the individually far stronger fire Elentals picked off every lone tal Elental they ca upon, with flaming weapons and limbs lting through the tal bodies of their opponents.
However, this didn’t happen without losses on their side. Though initially acting with the elent of surprise on their side and cleanly picking off all lone tal Elentals, once the latter started rallying, their nurical superiority showed its worth.
The mont one of the fire Elentals pushed too far into the crowd, tal Elentals would jump it from all sides. Rushing in without fear or care for their lives, they would continue their assault until their opponent was buried under the lted remains of their slain kin. Once trapped like this, the surrounding tal Elentals would launch all manners of attacks at their trapped foe, stopping only once the fire Elental died in a fiery detonation.
Despite this wild abandon, Scalladras forces were slowly but surely regaining the ground the tal Elentals had taken. With it, they contested the lingering tal magic that had been blasted out when the beast’s antler had exploded. Though this didn’t reduce the number of tal Elentals being summoned, it forced them to appear in an increasingly small area of the clearing.
This naturally wasn’t a chance that their side’s heavy hitters would let go. Following Jennia’s example, Alicia, Vika, and Sonita thus took up position at the edge of this area. Acting in coordination, they stayed at a distance and launched spells and breath attacks at the tal Elentals, turning a few hundred square ters of the clearing into a pandemonium of explosions and other elental attacks.
anwhile, Darganth was by then already turning back around toward the beast. Having flown a quick circle over the forest to pick up so speed, he spotted the ogre chief as he led a small group of the strongest of his kin on the expedition in a charge against the beast. With a quick turn, Darganth joined them in this, covering them in his shadow as they joined in what was likely to be the final phase of the fight.
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