The Bashe was heading toward the chosen pillar's base when the wolverine appeared above her without prior warning.
It hadn't erged from the tower's base as Liora had expected but from a considerably higher elevated point, using the shadow cast by the pillar itself to transport instantly from its hidden position underground to an optimal location for intercepting the descending serpent.
What one mont was empty air… The next mont, a solid beast.
No transition nor telegraphing. Just instant repositioning that changed Liora's entire strategic model of how this battlefield worked.
The realization hit her.
This had been a trap from the beginning.
The wolverine had never truly been restricted to moving only through the earth pillars as she'd assud. Her entire tactical frawork had been built on a false premise, sand instead of stone.
It could use any shadow cast by the massive structures to jump freely around the three-dinsional field Ren had created.
The towers weren't simply launch platforms for stakes but a multi-path transportation network giving the wolverine mobility that exceeded what the Bashe could match even with its spiritual flotation. Every tower cast shadows. Every shade was a doorway. The field wasn't a cage for her… it was a playground for him.
She'd thought she understood the battlefield. She'd analyzed the geotry, calculated the angles, prepared for the obvious threats.
But she'd missed the fundantal reality: Ren didn't build battlefields with only one purpose. He built them with three or four.
The towers were weapons. They were defensive structures. They were mobility enhancers. They were psychological traps making opponents focus on the wrong threats.
And she'd fallen for it.
The wolverine fired a blessed water sphere against the Bashe from its superior position, an attack exploiting gravity to increase descent velocity.
The projectile was large and dense with compressed primal energy. Light and water mixed in "blessing" that purified rather than simply damaging, each elent amplifying the other's effectiveness against corruption.
The serpent couldn't dodge the high-speed projectile coming from above while she herself was committed to a descending trajectory. Physics didn't allow for sudden course changes at this speed. Montum was a harsh mistress.
The miasma shielding her was fundantally weak against that light-and-water combination Ren had mixed. It was like bringing a shadow to a fight against the sun… you could try, but the outco was predetermined.
Liora reacted in the fraction of a second available before impact.
Her mind raced through options at superhuman speed, bond with the Bashe allowing thought-speed communication that would have seed like telepathy to observers.
Dodge? Impossible… Too fast.
Tank it? The blessed water would burn through miasma like acid through paper.
That left only one option.
Counter-attack.
"Release," she commanded through the bond, an instruction the Bashe understood imdiately.
Not an order to fire miasma breath that would lose against its weak elent, but to sacrifice stored energy for active defense.
The serpent expelled a wind elental push, power it had absorbed from Ren's attack minutes before and had been saving as reserve.
The Bashe had been holding it carefully, keeping the stolen wind mana separate from its own spiritual energy to prevent contamination. Stored like ammunition in a chamber, waiting for the mont when it would be needed most.
This was that mont.
The wind intercepted the blessed water midway, the collision between elents creating an explosion that dispersed both attacks before they could reach their intended targets.
BOOM
The shockwave rippled outward, a sphere of disrupted air expanding from the collision point. Blessed water scattered.
The Bashe beca slightly smaller, visible contraction communicating loss of mass it had previously gained.
The power it had absorbed from Ren's wind during the battle's opening, approximately half of that stored energy had been released defending against the blessed water. It was regression negating a portion of the growth the serpent had achieved, partially returning it toward the initial disappointing size.
The difference was maybe 5%. Not catastrophic, but noticeable. The serpent that had approached Selphira's White Serpent in scale was now clearly smaller again.
In the stands, those keeping ntal tallies of the resource exchange winced. The Bashe had burned reserves to achieve nothing except survival. And Ren had already expected exactly that response.
He'd calculated that Liora would sacrifice stored energy rather than allow blessed water to penetrate miasma and cause direct damage to the Bashe. It was the logical choice any competent tar would make in that situation, preservation of the beast over conservation of secondary resources.
You could regrow mass. You couldn't fight with a dead serpent.
And he'd prepared a follow-up exploiting the mont of vulnerability that massive energy release would create.
Fraction of a second. That was all Ren needed.
The wolverine vanished into the shade of the pillar it had jumped to again, disappearing from position above the serpent before Liora could order an appropriate counterattack.
Liora's eyes tracked the shadows frantically. Which one? Where would it erge?
She had to guess. Had to commit to a defensive position. But there were 5 towers dozens of potential ergence points.
The wolverine could be anywhere…
It reappeared in another tower, specifically one containing a launch stake near that altitude Ren had completed.
Not the nearest tower. Not the most obvious one. A lateral tower at an angle requiring the Bashe to turn 90 degrees to face it, turning that would cost precious milliseconds.
And it fired the stake at trendous speed without ceremony or posture that would telegraph intention, pure launch converting projectile into a barely visible blur crossing distance between tower and serpent.
The stake had been pre-positioned, pre-charged, pre-aid. All the wolverine had to do was release it. The preparation ti had already been invested during the tower construction phase. Now it paid dividends in reaction speed.
The Bashe had nowhere to escape now.
She was committed to a descending trajectory she couldn't alter sufficiently fast to dodge. And the stake ca from an angle exploiting exactly that temporary vulnerability, perfect timing demonstrating how much Ren had planned each step of this sequence.
He hadn't just built a trap. He'd built multiple overlapping traps, each one feeding into the next.
In the stands, several spectators inhaled sharply with recognition that this was the decisive mont.
If the stake connected with full force and the roots established grip before the Bashe could recover, the battle might end in the next few seconds.
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