A gigantic tsunami lood over him.
He was an ant before it, its vast width blotting out the skies and bearing down like a god’s wrath made manifest.
The physics of it made no sense, nor did the sheer concentration of aether he felt pressing against him; in what world did sand move as fluidly as this? As fluidly as water?
’I’m going to die.’
PAH!
His elental aether mantle flickered weakly against the avalanche, then promptly shattered, the foreign ice and wind aether in his body thickening to a point of almost no return.
The sudden spike of pain tore him from his daze, and his expression hardened.
His core exploded into motion, cycling swaths of aether across his body, tearing through everything in its path, whether it be his own bones and flesh or the foreign aether invading him.
He didn’t have the luxury of carefully minimizing harm.
FAH!
His mantle reford in a blink, and he rose to his feet, his limbs still relatively limp and loose. With fluid grace, he bent down, etching dozens of formations across his legs and thighs in swift, practiced strokes.
’No I’m not!’
The formations activated just as he turned and pushed with as much power as he had left within him, every last strand of aether cycling into his shells.
BOOOM!
Sand burst into the air as he exploded forward, away from his coming doom, each of his steps carrying him dozens of tres at a ti.
In his wake, dozens of craters ford, rapidly filled by the shifting sands that closed in by the second.
By now, the curved tip of the falling tsunami was already over and beyond him, his figure drowned in its expansive shadow.
He could see it ahead, slowly swallowing him and every possible exit he could take.
He wasn’t running against ti but against the inevitable.
It seed pointless.
And yet he pushed nonetheless, and he did so with a mad grin splitting his face, panic, thrill, and fear mixing in his heart to form a dangerously intoxicating cocktail that left his runic scar burning with power.
He swung his arms forward as if trying to grab the very fabric of space to launch himself farther, his feet whipping forward, mighty and relentless, veins lining his calves and sweat soaking his body.
DOOM! DOOOM! DOOOM! DOOOM!
Thunderous echoes followed his steps, yet they were swallowed by the sand beneath his feet and the white noise of the approaching wall of destruction not far behind him.
’Faster.’
His aether cycled so rapidly across his flesh and veins that the residual heat he gave off began to lt the sand upon which he ran.
’Faster!’
Runes flickered across his mantle of aether, formations upon formations layering over it, his entire repertoire of augntation spells blooming at once as he beca an arrow piercing through space.
He blurred forward so rapidly that his bones and shell began to wane and give way, and yet, he forced himself harder.
’FASTER!’
He pushed again.
By now, all that surrounded him was darkness, a tiny point of light, his exit, lying far in the distance.
In but a few monts, the impact would co.
’I’m too far.’
The realization sent his heart reeling in palpitating waves.
The statue was still hundreds of kilotres away, and he couldn’t move any faster than he already was, aning he wouldn’t be able to outrun the tsunami.
Death.
Its scent was so thick in his nostrils that, in the darkness summoned by the sky, which was nothing but sand, he felt he could see the gates of the underworld opening for him.
In the shadowed crevices around him, silhouettes of ancient grim reapers seed to appear, cackling and patiently waiting to reap his soul.
Death. Death. Death.
[To live was to fall, then inevitably rise, after all—or sotis to fall and inescapably remain in the abyss.]
[To live was to gamble and oscillate between the two.]
A gamble.
"Damn it!"
Uriel chose to gamble.
His wood elent faded to smithereens, and from its ashes his sand elent rose, thick sunset-orange aether spiraling into the air around him.
The sand beneath his feet, soft, yet firm enough to stand upon, suddenly collapsed inward, an opening forming through which he promptly fell.
The opening sealed itself in his wake.
WHOOOSH!
And then—
BANG! BOOOM!
—the tsunami slamd down, striking the earth so violently that the air itself imploded and ignited into radiant flas that filled the world, sonic booms ringing out one after another.
Chaotic explosions of aether erupted in rapid succession, and the ground shook as if it might fissure at any mont.
"..."
And then another wave ca.
RUMBLE!
Another sand wave crashed down.
...
Dozens upon dozens of kilotres beneath the surface, a small pocket had ford, supported by countless overlapping vines that acted as pillars for the circular space.
BOOM! BOOOM!
The small pocket trembled repeatedly as far above, titanic waves continued to slam down. Though that was the case, it held firm nonetheless.
"Huff... huff..."
Uriel lay within the pocket, sitting slightly curled in the cramped space, his lungs expanding and compressing as he struggled to regain his breath, the taste of tal thick in his mouth.
He was half-naked, his tunic torn, his flesh covered in purple bruises and streaked with blood.
But he was alive.
’That was close,’ he thought, sitting in the deep darkness of his little refuge.
From the beginning, Uriel could have used his sand affinity to move across the desert at breakneck speed, but also to hide and defend himself.
This entire expanse had been a gift to him.
But he hadn’t, for the simple reason that he didn’t understand the sand’s properties well enough.
What he knew was that it rendered all aether chaotic.
To control elents and aether external to himself, he needed to attune both his core and mind to it, and in so cases, even his body.
At the mont, only the aether in his core was chaotic.
But if he reached out and tried to control the sand of the desert, what if his core itself beca chaotic in structure? What if that chaos extended to his mind? To his body?
It would have been foolish to try.
Had his tool been online, he might have given it serious consideration, but it wasn’t, so he hadn’t.
Until he had no other choice.
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