The Narghul Sorcerer dropped through the last hundred tres of its descent, and the Hollow Avatar did not wait for it to reach the ground.
My body’s legs flared blue-white, lightning crawling up the inside of the channels and saturating the muscle tissue, and the Avatar drove the body upward in a vertical leap that crossed twelve tres of air in the ti it took to register the launch from the passenger seat.
I could briefly see that the bodies of the demons under , from where I erupted, had all collapsed into flaming ash as I was propelled not just by the strength of my physique alone, but by my lightning as well.
The demon’s shadow construct ca down to et my rising body, as the wagon-sized claw shifted from its descending angle to a defensive curl, the four eyes widening in the mont before contact.
The shadow construct had not expected a rising attacker.
They were powerful tools, but in the control of one that was so young, there was a slight gap between intent and execution.
The staff drove into the construct’s underside, and I did not attempt to break the shadow, since there was no need to waste so much power for sothing with minimal payoff.
My hands flared with lightning, boosting my muscles as I deflected the downward strike, disrupting the construct’s montum at the exact angle the Narghul Sorcerer had built it to descend through.
The construct rebounded, flaring sideways, the wagon-sized mass forced laterally by the impact as the demon’s flight path crossed through its own construct’s recoil, and the demon had to adjust mid-air to avoid being struck by the thing bound to its left side.
With the speed we were moving, there had been a brief possibility for the Narghul Sorcerer to be struck by his own shadow construct, and if that had happened, it would be an easy thing to follow through and take his head... but it had been a slim possibility.
’The Sorcerer may be young, but he had experience in battle.’
The construct is not part of the demon. They share montum but not coordination. The demon must direct it consciously, and at his level, consciousness is not instantaneous.
The Avatar’s strike had bought the body approximately half a second of the demon’s redirected attention.
Closer... Beco one.
My body landed on the corpse mound at the eastern wall, more than seven tres tall, an accumulation of chitin bodies that had been growing across the day’s combat.
The Avatar had aid for the mound and the top of the pile. I had elevation, and I turned to face the demon that was now below as he had touched down ten tres away on the lower ground.
His four burning eyes tracked my body’s new position as the shadow construct reford at his left side, sluggish from the recoil.
The demon sniffed, taking long, deep breaths as he slled my scent.
Inside this fragile body, all he would detect was lightning.
His mouth opened, and the voice that erged was a frequency that bypassed my ears and arrived directly in the hollow place at the base of my soul.
"Khaaz vel’tarakh, ish gorum sha’thrul. Nysra limire Achon?"
The aning of it arrived without delay.
"I do not sll your soul, child, and yet you move. Are you a branded cattle of the Achon?"
The Avatar did not answer, as my response was tactical, not verbal; speaking was a waste of energy.
My body moved again, the lightning in my legs flaring so bright you could see my bones, and I leapt from the mound to a second mound at fifteen tres. The Narghul Sorcerer turned to track, his right hand rose, and red-orange Fla Essence began to gather above his palm.
The Avatar did not let the cast complete.
My body launched from the second mound to a third that was closer and at an angle that placed the demon’s left flank between the casting hand and .
The Fla Essence in the right palm could not be discharged through the demon’s own body to reach , and so the demon would have to turn, and turning would take ti, and ti was the resource the Avatar was harvesting through movent.
The Narghul Sorcerer adjusted, and his shadow construct moved to intercept, but the Avatar did not engage the construct.
My body leapt again, to a fourth mound, leaving trails of lightning behind in the air that lasted longer than they should before they slowly dissipated, and the construct followed, sluggish, the connection to the demon’s directing attention degrading with each redirection.
The demon was casting and directing simultaneously, and the demon’s tactical processing speed, however superior to mine, was finite.
The Sorcerer’s range is constrained by its construct’s coordination, I understood, watching from the passenger seat as the Avatar exploited the constraint. Engage at the construct’s periter, and the construct compensates. Engage outside the construct’s coordination radius, and the demon must choose between casting and controlling.
The Avatar was making the demon choose, and with an irritated grunt, the demon chose to cast.
The Fla Essence released as a lance, making the air itself shriek in pain as the cast tracked my body’s motion at a velocity exceeding my evasion threshold under standard lightning allocation.
The Avatar did not increase the legs’ allocation; instead, my body fell, deliberately, off the fourth mound into the trough between it and the fifth, and the Fla Essence passed overhead by a margin of one tre.
Still, I felt the heat as if I were beside a furnace; a semi-direct hit would be enough to carbonize my body.
I rolled across demon corpses, the chitin scraped against my body’s left arm and tore the sleeve open, but the Avatar did not slow.
When my body ca up, I was three tres from the Narghul Sorcerer.
The demon had not anticipated the closure. Its right hand was still extended from the released Fla Essence, and the casting position was wrong for lee.
The demon began to rotate to face the new threat, and I did not let the rotation complete.
My right arm beca cloaked with lightning, forcefully holding lightning across my skin as another layer above it.
Discharging lightning in this pattern was breaking the small channels of magic of my body, but that was a necessary price to pay, and Mortal Shell would allow to work through this disability without losing too much functionality.
Before the demon could face , I drove the staff into the demon’s exposed flank.
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