A short bit ago…
One hundred meters beneath the battlefield, Quinlan Elysiar sat in the dark.
The pocket he'd carved was large enough for his body to occupy it fortably. He floated at its center with his legs crossed and his palms resting on his knees, suspended by a gentle cycling of wind that kept him motionless in the pitch black.
His eyes were closed.
They'd been closed since the fight began.
The mana flowing out of him climbed upward through a hundred meters of pressed soil and rock, threading through the earth in channels that split into dozens of hairline veins as they neared the surface. They surfaced beneath the decoy's feet and fed into the illusion from below, pouring elemental energy into the projection that Kitsara's detached tail wore like a skin.
It was, without a doubt, the most intricate application of his magic he had ever attempted.
Channeling fire through a hundred meters of earth and stone while keeping the output stable enough to look natural at the surface was like trying to thread a needle while someone violently shook him by the shoulder.
Every element had to travel the full distance, maintaining coherence through layers of rock that wanted to absorb it, dissipate it, or redirect it along the path of least resistance. Wind was the worst. Wind wanted to scatter the moment it left his hands, and forcing it through solid earth required a constant pressure that ate mana like a furnace ate kindling.
He sat perfectly still while his mind fought a war.
He couldn't speak out loud, for a hundred meters of earth separated them. Everything went through the link.
Kitsara moved the decoy's left hand, and Quinlan felt the shift through [Overlord's Eyes] as the illusion adjusted. He saw what the decoy saw: Morgana hovering above them, mana cycling, the field scorched and smoking around them.
He poured fire into the channels.
The element surged upward through the earth, racing through the pathways he'd carved, and erupted from the surface beneath the decoy's feet. It traveled through the illusion's legs and into its palms, and from Morgana's perspective, the Primordial Villain conjured flame in his hands the same way he always did.
The shockwave from the collision propagated downward through the ground and Quinlan felt it in his bones, a deep vibration that reminded him exactly how much power the woman above him was throwing around.
'And I'm trying to match it from down here,' he thought. 'Through solid rock.'
He grinned in the dark.
Channeling through that much stone ate a good chunk of everything he sent upward, and Morgana was reading his diminished output as his actual limit. Which was exactly the point.
Quinlan felt Morgana's mana spike through the link and he shifted focus, sending stone screaming upward to form the dome. [Infernal Gale] hit it and started grinding through, and underground he clenched his teeth and fed layer after layer into the channels faster than the lance could eat through them.
The lance died. He exhaled and rebuilt the shattered pathways. Every big spell fractured the channels he'd threaded through the rock, adding a half-second delay to every exchange that Morgana read as him slowing down.
Quinlan's eye twitched behind his closed lids as he listened to Kitsara ramble about skill issues and how Morgana's a loser and everything.
She paused.
Quinlan could feel through the link that the tail maintaining the illusion was trembling with the foxkin's anger. If she lost her grip the whole facade would shimmer.
A long pause. The trembling subsided.
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