"Even if they accept me, what good is wealth if you never have the time to enjoy it? If we follow your plan, you'll die as you've lived, like a tool. If we do as I say, instead, we'll be the one on top and the Royals will grovel at our feet."
Dawn neglected to mention the part where she would erode his mind, take control of his body, and use everything they would be rewarded with to pursue her own personal agenda.
She wasn't as naïve, empathetic, and kind as Solus back when she had first met Lith.
Everything the Bright Day had explained and taught to the Ranger after they bonded came with a price. The more Acala relied on Dawn's abilities, the more she was able to manipulate his thoughts and actions.
Constantly having a voice in his head and a whisper in his ears even while he was asleep, had thinned the boundary between their personalities until Dawn had become the dominant and Acala her servant.
Fusing with a cursed item meant having two minds but only one body, and the Bright Day wasn't willing to spend a lifetime following Acala's pipe dreams. She had a goal to achieve, just like her siblings, Red Sun and Black Night.
Their mother had entrusted to each one of them a different duty, and being the firstborn, she couldn't stand the idea that one of her siblings could beat her.
Lith and Acala were placing their own arrays while an unseen Solus did the same, securing the nearest escape route. Unlike her, Dawn had been made to completely fuse with her host. The Bright Day shared with Acala both his mana signature and life force, making it impossible to distinguish her from her host.
Yet Solus didn't trust the Ranger and wanted to take precautions in the case Acala wanted to use Lith as a stepping stone for his own career or the missing undead did return untimely.
It took the two Rangers over half an hour to complete their task, but the final result was worth the wait. They had both centered their arrays on the undead's living quarters and laid a few others on the paths the enemies would be forced to take once the battle began.
Solus kept moving on her own, unseen thanks to her mimetic abilities and her cloaking ring, searching for anything or anyone out of place. Yet she wasn't able to find any trace of a possible ambush nor did she spot any danger.
To smoke the undead out, the Rangers activated a darkness array to weaken their enemies and an earth blocking array to leave them no way out but the doors that had been rigged as well.
Everything seemed to go according to the plan and the first five enemies died before being able to even scratch one of the Rangers. The arrays had been laid so to synergize their effects and amplify each other's effectiveness.
Darkness whittled away the vampires' strength while a gravity formation in front of the doors slowed down their movements and made it impossible for them to fly.
Lith and Acala attacked their respective marks from behind a conjured rock trench that protected them from incoming spells while Solus studied the situation from a vantage position in the ceiling.
Suddenly, the walls of the room burst open. The vampires had learned their lesson and instead of putting themselves in the line of fire like lambs to the slaughter, they had used their magic and physical strength to create new exits.
The ten enemies each took a different approach, flying, running, or crawling on the walls and ceiling to surround their respective target from every direction.
'This is bad.' Solus thought. 'And it can easily get worse if…'
As if the undead had read her mind, they started shooting small focused rays of white-hot light from their fingertips. The offensive light spell was a cantrip compared to the that the hybrid-scaled creature had employed, but still a cantrip capable of digging centimeters-deep holes into the rock.
'Damn my big mouth. I jinxed it. Somehow, they are all Light Masters. Judging by the low tier spell they use they can't do much without arrays. At least unless they can…' Solus managed to stop thinking about hard-light constructs, afraid to jinx things again.
Both Rangers used the trenches to block the light rays and create improvised mazes to prevent the enemies from surrounding them. Ruin was useless against attacks that fast. Lith could use his weapon to block the rays, but at the risk of damaging the blade.
'Interesting.' He thought. 'Maybe light magic doesn't split into an offensive and defensive branch just for tier five. Maybe it has two different branches from the start, with holograms being its first magic.'
Dodging low tiered light spells was easy for him. They could only travel in a straight line and the glow they produced before being conjured gave away their trajectory. For a veteran mage like Lith, a lightning bolt would have been more difficult to defend against.
Lightning bolts were as fast as light magic and would stun their target upon hit, whereas small light beams would inflict small, already cauterized wounds. On top of that, offensive light magic would lose power quickly with distance.
'I understand now why Professor Manohar only uses hard-light constructs. They are much more versatile and the mana to conjure them doesn't get wasted if the enemy dodges.
'My only question is how the heck can undead have light magic among their innate talents? Otherwise they wouldn't be able to use its true magic form without being Awakened.' Lith thought while impaling a thrall's heart with Ruin.
He had decided to take down the easiest opponents first to regain some mobility in the cave's confined space.
'Light and darkness are the two sides of the same coin. Maybe the energy signature they have in common allows them to convert darkness into light and apply their innate mastery over the darkness element to light magic as well.' Solus said.
Solus's train of thoughts was derailed when she noticed that in the time Lith had needed to take down a single thrall, Acala had killed two vampires with ease.
Lith was too busy fighting to notice that while his opponents used teamwork to cover each other openings to prevent Lith from delivering a deadly counter, the creatures fighting Acala were on their back foot despite their numerical advantage.
The Ranger seemed to be able to predict all their movement and strategies, dodging with ease even the more sophisticated attacks. Acala was so overwhelming that for a moment Solus thought that he was fighting normal humans rather than undead.
'This is really odd. If Acala is such a genius fighter that he can easily deal with five opponents of such caliber, why did he run away from six of them? Sure, this time they are weakened by the arrays' effects but he's so good that it doesn't make much difference.
'What really worries me is that his mana flow gets stronger with each enemy that gets taken down. Is it the effect of one of his relics or what?' Solus thought, unaware that it was just Dawn recovering the strength she had bestowed upon her fallen minions.
She was still uncertain whether to kill Lith or just bring him back near fatally wounded. On one hand, succeed where even the mighty Ranger Verhen had failed would have given Acala a lot of fame.
On the other hand, Lith's death would raise too many questions.
