Lodawg's response was a guttural chant. The crimson storm intensified, lightning strikes hamring down with renewed fury. The lake beside them began to boil, steam rising in thick clouds.
Jolthar gathered his three powers at once. Green telekinesis ford a do around him, deflecting lightning. Silver voidwrath spiralled along his arms, hungry for release.
Blue phantom blades extended from his forearms, longer and sharper than before.
With a shout that seed to shake the heavens, Jolthar thrust his hands outward. The green do exploded outward in all directions.
The telekinetic shockwave ripped across the clearing. Trees snapped like twigs. The ground itself buckled and heaved. Lodawg's lightning storm dissipated instantly as the wave struck him, lifting him off his feet and hurling him backward.
Jolthar didn't give it the chance.
Silver voidwrath streaked from his fingertips and around his long blade, Knashii.
He closed in on Lodawg, who was struggling to his feet. The mage's mana flickered erratically—a sign of dangerously depleted power.
"Your mistake was thinking I'm just a boy who stumbled into power," Jolthar said, green energy swirling around his clenched fist.
"I paid for this power in blood and pain."
Lodawg spat blood and raised his staff defiantly. "You don't even know what you are," he growled.
The Naemarys mage lunged with desperate speed, his staff raised in the air again, attempting to cast a spell.
Green telekinesis seized the staff, and the green-coloured energy coiled around Lodawg's arm.
Jolthar swung his long sword, and the blue phantom blades slashed across the mage's chest in an X-pattern, cleaving through his ornate robes. They were enchanted to protect him from everything. But they couldn't withstand the attacks of Jolthar.
Lodawg scread, pain coursing through his chest. The green energy converged on him, lifting him into the air as they constricted around his form.
"I know exactly what I am," Jolthar replied, tightening his telekinetic grip.
"You should shut your mouth when you fight, old man."
With a final surge of power, Jolthar slamd Lodawg into the ground.
The impact created a crater twenty feet across, spiderwebbing cracks extending outward. Dust and debris billowed skyward. The water poured from the walls of the crater. The crater was just beside the lake. The lake was almost destroyed, and the water splashed here and there.
When it settled, Lodawg lay broken at the centre. The powerful mana around him had vanished entirely. Blood pooled beneath his shattered body. His chest still rose and fell in shallow, ragged breaths, but his eyes were unfocused.
The once proud Tier 9 Grand Mage of the Naemarys clan was reduced to a half-dead state by the Jolthar's wrath.
Such was the devastation wrought by powers that were never ant to clash so directly.
Lodawg had greatly underestimated Jolthar, thinking he was just so normal Tier 8 swordsman.
Johamma watched from the relative safety of the treeline, their expressions a mixture of awe and horror at the display they had witnessed. This was more than just combat between powerful people.
Jolthar stood at the centre of destruction.
Cleora, who was told to run away, stood with his drake, watching from a distance. She didn't want to leave behind Jolthar and go away.
Even though Jolthar told her to leave, she didn't. Maelruth also had the sa intentions, so they stopped here. Even though the drake was a beast, it had great intellect. Cleora was impressed with the beast, but she was too focused on what was going to happen now.
Jolthar just killed a dragon and wounded Lodawg.
Victory had been too swift, too easy.
Jolthar was watching the dragon, and then his gaze turned to the bodies. He could sense a few presences in the forest; he assud they were the remnants of those elite mages of the Naemarys clan.
He frowned, watching the forest. Why aren't they coming to their lord?
That's when he saw Lodawg raise his hand. Jolthar was so focused on the battle that he didn't see the ring on his finger. Lodawg also had a storage ring; Jolthar was surprised, but his focus was soon drawn by the vial which appeared in Lodawg's palm.
A cylindrical vial.
Lodawg's fingers had already closed around a crystal vial.
With a movent too quick for his prone position, he shattered it against his own chest. Crimson liquid splashed across his face and throat, seeping instantly into his flesh like water into parched ground.
Lodawg's laughter erupted—no longer the confident chuckle of before, but a wretched, gurgling sound that seed to emanate from sowhere other than his throat. His body convulsed, back arching impossibly as the transformation began.
Jolthar drew Knashii, the blue-coloured aura flaring to life around the blade. But Johamma gripped his arm.
"Don't go near him. Sothing is not right," she said.
Johamma then said, "He is using a strange magic which I didn't see before. I assud it was dark magic, but it seems far more sinister than that."
Jolthar could also tell. He felt repulsed as soon as the strange transformation started, like he wanted to kill him imdiately.
Before their eyes, Lodawg's skin hardened, taking on the texture of burnished bronze. Veins of glowing crimson spread beneath the tallic surface, mapping pathways of forbidden magic throughout his transforming body. His fingers elongated, nails extending into curved talons of gleaming tal. Bones cracked audibly as his fra expanded, growing taller, broader—inhuman.
"I don't want to say this, but we need to leave. I don't think it's sothing you can handle."
Johamma said in a firm tone, pulling at Jolthar's arm. "Now, while the transformation disorients him."
But Jolthar stood transfixed, the Beast King's power stirring within him. The green energy that connected him to all living things was reacting strangely to Lodawg's tamorphosis—sensing neither life nor death, but sothing aberrant, sothing that violated the natural order.
"What is he becoming?" Jolthar asked, unable to look away as Lodawg's face distorted, features lting and reshaping into a grotesque approximation of humanity.
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