A long pause. The trembling subsided.
The decoy held. Felicity's moment passed, Feng pulled her back, and the fight continued with Kitsara running on spite and Quinlan running on fumes.
Any other man would have wanted to be up there himself. Trading elemental volleys with the strongest mage on the continent, matching her spell for spell, proving he could stand in front of a Level 74 and hold his ground.
There was a version of this fight where Quinlan did exactly that, and it would have been a good fight. He loved fighting, loved the rush of an element answering his call at the exact moment he needed it.
But running his power through channels of pressed stone while his foxkin lover wore his face and sold every second of it, while his other girls and Scar's army held the line, while a plan he'd built with every single one of them unfolded exactly the way they'd drawn it up?
'Goddess's sexy lacy panties. I love these women so damn much.'
…
Morgana's next spell sent the earth around Quinlan's pocket groaning away from the surface. He felt [Cataclysm] building before she cast it, fire and earth fusing into a force that melted mountains.
"[Cataclysm]!"
Quinlan pulled his mana out.
Every channel went dead in the same instant. The pathways he'd spent the entire fight maintaining collapsed as he yanked his power back into his own body, and the decoy above went from a conduit of elemental energy to a hollow shell in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The foxkin's tail released its hold on the decoy's form at the exact moment [Cataclysm] hit.
Fire and earth detonated.
The shockwave drove through the ground and Quinlan felt it ing before it hit. He braced, pulling earth inward, pressing the walls of the pocket until the stone around him was dense enough to absorb the worst of the vibration. The ground shuddered and the pressure wave rolled through his reinforced shell like a distant earthquake, violent but contained.
He looked down at his own hands in the dark. No [Synchra]. No [Soul Reaper]. Just his mundane clothes and the faint glow of mana cycling through his palms.
Both of his most valuable artifacts were up there on the decoy. They had to be. Kitsara's illusions broke on physical contact, and Morgana's elemental fighting style threw enough debris and shockwaves that even a bystander would get hit.
The first stray gust of wind, the first bit of debris from a spell collision, and the projection would have shattered like glass if there was nothing protecting it. [Synchra]'s [Anima Ward] absorbed the hits that would have killed the illusion, and [Soul Reaper] in the decoy's grip sold the image of a man who came to fight, not a foxkin's tail wearing a mask.
If [Synchra] had been with him instead, that shockwave wouldn't have even rattled his teeth.
The vibrations faded.
Silence.
Then, through the link, he heard the screaming. Seraphiel first, then Serika, then Blossom's keening wail that was so convincing it made soldiers on both sides flinch.
The second decoy had nothing behind it. A remnant wind spell and Kitsara's last detached tail giving it shape. One hit would scatter it.
Morgana rocketed upward and hit the sky decoy center mass. It exploded into wisps of white light and fox musk, and her momentum carried her fifty meters above the battlefield with nowhere to go.
Kitsara spoke with utmost seriousness for once and the link was cut.
Quinlan's mana detonated.
Every channel that had been bottlenecked for the entire fight flooded to full in the same heartbeat and he didn't wait for the power to settle. Wind and lightning erupted from his body in a violent spiral that shattered the walls of the pocket. He launched upward through solid rock like a high-speed missile, parting the ground ahead of him with raw elemental force as stone screamed apart and collapsed behind him. A hundred meters of pressed rock carved open in under a second.
Fighting alongside his dangerously hot women was the first thing he loved more than anything in this world. But the raw flood of mana through fully open channels reminded him of the other thing he loved, the simple and primal satisfaction of being the one throwing the punch.
While Kitsara shook her sexy butt and her single fluffy tail at the Queen of the Vraven Kingdom with extreme satisfaction, the Primordial Villain was rushing up through the earth with extreme violence.
The earth split open.
Stone erupted beneath Morgana in a pillar that punched skyward faster than sound, and Quinlan burst through the surface in an explosion of rock and debris that scattered everything in a thirty-meter radius.
Fifty meters above him, Morgana's hands were still together, wind cycling between her palms, the beginnings of [Winds of Crestfall] half-formed and useless.
Her eyes found him.
Quinlan cocked his fist back.
Seven elements answered at once. Fire and lightning coiled around his knuckles, wind pressed the air ahead of his fist into a vacuum, ice encased his forearm in a crystalline gauntlet, water surged beneath it as a pressurized current that amplified the impact, earth reinforced his bones and magma boiled between the cracks, and beneath all of it the Abyssal Genesis Physique pulsed through his channels like a second heartbeat, binding the chaos into a single point of converging destruction that made the air around his hand scream.
Morgana's fingers moved fast. The wind between her palms spun into shape and she opened her mouth to finish the chant.
His fist connected.
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