Rizo was the one that was going to take Phloria's body. The other Odi might consider her ugly due to her height and strength, but to a fighter, she was just perfect.
\u003c "Get away from my vessel, kid. I'd hate for my new form to be tainted by the blood of a filthy beast."\u003e Rizo's movements were calm and controlled while he pointed his sword against Lith as a challenge.
"Fuck off." Lith replied, unleashing all of the spells he had kept at the ready for Jiira. The two men didn't understand each other's words, but their faces spoke volumes.
Rizo's was full of pride and contempt, whereas Lith's was brimming with unbridled rage and killing intent. Two hands made of living streams of lightning, each one the size of a person, clutched on the Odi while a jet stream of black flames pierced through his chest.
Lith's tier five spells Final Sunset and Death Grip struck Rizo to no avail. The swordmaster laughed while activating his Great Fortress armor's enchantment. By imbuing it with mana, it generated an energy barrier that blocked the incoming attacks.
Its limitation was that it required a lot of mana to protect its master from such powerful prolonged spells, yet mana wasn't an issue for Rizo. The Reactor made it the absolute defense, with no weak points.
\u003c "Not bad, kid. I wish I had some decent meat for a barbeque. Your flames make you a poor excuse of a mage but an excellent stove."\u003e Rizo laughed, showing the monster that a true noble didn't need the God's Will array to prevail.
Solus quickly analyzed the armor and gave Lith the results of her observations.
'Hence, that armor is almost perfect.' She thought.
'Thanks, Solus. It's just as I predicted. This guy is just a moron that uses a tool without having any idea about how it works. Let's teach him a lesson.' Lith replied.
Jiira had been a difficult opponent and Rizo appeared to be even worse, yet Lith thought nothing of him. After watching Yondra die between his arms, after seeing Phloria being tortured, he could feel something twisting inside of himself, clawing to escape.
He could feel it in the low rumble of the earth around him, in the unnatural warmth of the air in the room. Burning inside of him there was a black flame born of force and will that for some reason couldn't find its way out.
The Odi had taken a lot from Lith. The thought of being able to put an end to their entire race by killing those in front of him was the best payback he could think of.
Lith moved his spells, making them flank Rizo and leaving his front exposed before hurling a river of Origin Flames which started to attack more than just the barrier, striking at its very enchantment.
\u003c "Origin Flames? Guuna, it seems we've got you a furnace!"\u003e Rizo laughed again, but the laughter died when he noticed that there was no end to the flames. Lith kept inhaling and exhaling as fast as he could, piling up more blue flames than he ever did before.
\u003c "It must be a monster, not an Emperor Beast. Only monsters are crazy enough to waste their strength like that."\u003e Rizo said. The first wave did nothing to his barrier. The second and the third produced no effect as well, but from the fourth onwards he felt that something was wrong.
No matter how much water magic he used to cool the surrounding air, Rizo felt burning.
'You idiot!' Guuna screamed inside his head. 'Our bodies were modified to withstand infinite mana, not your armor.' The Odi had no concept of pseudo core, but they had learned from experience that there was no enchanted object capable of perfectly channeling mana, not even those made of Adamant.
That was not because of a metal's fault, but due to the crafted pseudo core being unable to process the constant flow of energy. A pseudo core was just like a mana core: if abused it would overload and explode.
Unlike a living being, however, there was no risk of an Abomination being born, only of junk. Lith had aimed for the armor first, to strip his conceited opponent of an advantage that in the latest stages of the fight, when they were both exhausted, might have been decisive.
Now, instead, the Great Fortress armor's pseudo core was already on the verge of collapsing, before the fight even started. While Guuna cursed him for his incompetence in handling her masterpiece, Rizo finally activated the God's Will array.
Alas, it was too late. The two spells from Lith, his Origin Flames, and the powerful explosion that struck Rizo's back were the final nail in the coffin of the ancient armor.
Even though she was still shocked and traumatized from the recent events, Phloria refused to be just a spectator. While Lith hammered the barrier, she was taking care of the body-swapping machine.
Countless blades made of ice, fire, and earth had cut the entire device into pieces no bigger than a cup of tea. First, she had disposed of the stone table to make her weapons, then she had cut off all the cables in sight, and finally she had struck at the protruding mana crystals, making sure that their opponent would shield them from the conflagration with his own body.
Suddenly the Great Fortress armor was just a heavy lump of metal, offering no more protection to Rizo's exposed head and arms due to the collapse of its energy field. To add insult to injury, the Odi discovered that not even God's Will could do anything against Origin Flames.
The array had just been created but the blue flames were already eating at its entire structure, greatly reducing its effectiveness. Rizo could turn it on and off to once again reset it, but that way nothing would stop the Origin Flames from turning him into charcoal.
***
"I'm going to search for a Golem, you stay here and don't touch anything." After a few tries, Quylla had already understood the Mana Reactor's basic commands.
Her problem was still the same. She needed a sacrifice loaded with enough firepower to damage the Reactor's internal mechanism but without damaging its outer shell. A Flesh Golem was her best bet.
During her imprisonment, she had all the time she needed to think about how to take them down and had ended cursing her own stupidity for not realizing it sooner. Yondra had been right since the beginning, fighting was the wrong move for Quylla.
"Are you sure you don't need a bodyguard? Those things are nasty." Morok asked.
"Damn sure. I might need your help to move them, though." Quylla went downstairs, making as much noise as she could. She had no idea where the constructs could be hidden, but she was certain that the Odi had to keep them close.
They had shown her multiple times that without the Golems' Warping Array they were incapable of using dimensional magic. Once back in the lower Reactor room, she used her Forgemaster spells to scan the walls and search for Recharging arrays.
Her efforts triggered a hidden mechanism that released the last two Flesh Golems. The rest had been destroyed, which was the reason why the Odi had ordered them to remain hidden.
