The vampire shuddered at the memory of the energy beam that Nalrond had earlier unleashed against Dawn. A single spawn wasn't able to use powerful constructs, let alone to defend against an attack big enough to engulf the entire tunnel.
Unaware that the battle was already over, Lith used an air spell to fly behind the undead without using his wings. He wanted to keep as many secrets as he could in the case that they failed to escape and had to face Dawn.
"What are you waiting for? I'll keep her busy until you cast Nightfall." The spell Lith mentioned was one of the most powerful tools the Griffon Kingdom employed against the undead.
Both the Rezar and the Chiropteran looked at each other in confusion. The former had no idea what he was supposed to do while the latter looked at Nalrond with a mix of admiration and fear.
Dawn cursed her bad luck. She knew from Acala's memories that Lith was a Great Mage, but the Griffon Kingdom entrusting a state secret of that importance with someone that young was unheard of.
'The Ranger must have shared Nightfall with the Rezar while we lost track of them.' Dawn thought. 'Luckily, my strategy made Lith lose his spells and the kid is too green to fight properly.'
Dawn ordered the Chiropteran to run away. Winning in a two against one scenario was impossible. If either of them finished casting Nightfall, she would lose another vampire.
The creature flapped her wings while using air magic to increase her agility to its utmost limits. Thanks to her superior air maneuverability, she managed to escape from the encirclement and reached the tunnel.
Exactly where Lith wanted her.
In such a confined space, the Chiropteran's huge frame was a fish in a barrel, incapable of dodging an area of effect attack. Lith's tier five spell, Raging Sun, created a blast of purple flames right in front of the vampire.
The heat and the shockwaves produced by the blast bounced on the corridor's wall time and time again, attacking the Chiropteran from every side as if it was in the middle of a volcanic eruption.
Pieces of stone turned into lapillus that pierced her flesh while the shockwaves pulverized her body and the searing heat made it impossible for her wounds to recover. The explosion also made the tunnel collapse, closing the only way to the underground lab under tons of rocks.
'This should slow Dawn long enough for us to escape.' Lith thought.
"What the heck is Nightfall?" Nalrond could finally heal his wounds and regrow the scales he had lost.
"Wish I knew." Lith sighed, using Invigoration at every breath.
He had only heard about it during the boot camp. Nightfall was an army secret on par with Royal Forgemastering, something that would be mentioned to the troops with the goal of encouraging them to do their best and join the elite anti-Balkor corps.
Lith's bluff had exploited Dawn's mind link with Acala. He was a Ranger as well and knew how dangerous such a spell was. Otherwise Nightfall would have just been a random word.
"Which way is the exit?" Lith asked.
Nalrond pointed at the second corridor on the north wall and took flight.
'This is my only chance to get out of here alive.' He thought. 'If I stay here, Dawn will kill me. If we run away together, Solus will kill me. Next time, I need a proper strategy on how to contain the Bright Day once I kill her host.'
Fighting the spawns had been an eye-opener for him. Driven by his blood rage, Nalrond had never truly understood the burden of the task he had undertaken. Like the Rezar himself had said earlier to Lith, he was no warrior.
He had no experience against undead and had managed to survive until that moment only by sheer luck. Hunting down the Bright Day had been madness, let alone facing her without having a plan.
Unfortunately for him, panic and enlightenment only made him forget that they were still inside enemy territory. The array placed in front of the exit detonated the moment Nalrond stepped into it, burying the Rezar under a ton of rocks and sealing the only way out.
'Fuck me sideways!' Lith cursed the hybrid's idiocy. 'Even though Dawn and I have the same problem, our situation is like night and day. We both can't use earth magic to clear the tunnels, but…'
A pillar of light that reached thousands of degrees vaporized the debris blocking the tunnel where the Chiropteran was buried. Despite light magic's short range, the light pillar had still enough power to cross the cave and dig a hole the size of a rail tunnel in the opposing wall.
Acala slowly floated inside the cave. The Ranger shone like a sun, emitting white light from his every pore as if he had broken past the boundary between energy and matter.
A priceless gemstone was bulging out of his chest, emitting rhythmical pulses of light akin to heartbeats. Heartbeats that melted the rock and made the ground quake. There was no spell actually lifting Acala's body.
The energy surrounding him was so dense that it almost reached a physical manifestation. It was the sheer force of Dawn's mana pushing against the ground that was making him float.
"Do you have any idea of the delay that your meddling will cause to my plans?" The feminine voice was furious and it definitely didn't belong to Acala. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find the right undead to enslave?"
'Great.' Lith thought while weaving a spell for each one of his fingertips. 'Not only is Dawn at the peak of her power due to recovering the strength she had borrowed to the fallen spawns, but I have also to listen to her deranged rants.
'Where the heck is Solus?'
'Right here.' She replied. 'Sorry if I'm late. I've never attempted to take full control of a mana geyser while in my gauntlet form. That time against Thrud doesn't count because she had already tapped into the geyser to fuel Arthan's Madness, leaving me only the crumbs.'
'You did what?' Lith couldn't believe their own shared brain as the massive flow of information about the procedure flooded his mind.
"I usually don't enjoy taking down a fellow cursed object, but for you, I'll make an exception." A longsword made of light appeared materialized in her hands as she performed a downward slash aimed at Lith's head.
The mana blade emitted enough heat to distort the air and contained enough power to split a mountain. All the more reason why Dawn froze the moment she realized that her attack had been easily blocked.
A blue aura engulfed Ruin's red blade, providing it with so much mana that the runes covering its surface became visible to the naked eye and all the mana crystals embedded along the blade turned into small suns.
The white and the red blade clashed only for a split second. The mana supporting them was equally matched, but it wasn't the same for the arms wielding the weapons.
Dawn found herself crashing through one of her conjured libraries before the stone wall behind it stopped her flight. Ancient tomes rained upon her until the Bright Day was buried under thousands of pages describing the Odi's forbidden magic research.
