Lith darted in the air, thanking his latest breakthrough for the second set of wings. Despite the fact that they were nigh-atrophied, they still gave him a bit more speed and enhanced his flight stability.
"I love when they play hard to get." Night chuckled as she lunged with her spear and emitted another black burst of energy.
Her laughter died when a light pillar struck her from above, making her plunge several meters underground. The light element carried so much heat that her black crystal armor turned red and enough kinetic energy to give her the impression of having been swatted by a giant.
Lith had yet to become a Light Master, but he had learned how to cast up to tier three offensive light magic spells and how to mix them with fire and Spirit magic.
"Are you a one-trick pony or what? Because unless your ramblings count as an attack, you're boring me." Lith's banter would have been much more effective if he didn't run away.
Night laughed while regrowing her hair and repairing her skin.
"Do you want me to stop going easy on you? I'm fine with it." The Horseman unleashed her tier five spell, Ice Coffin.
Suddenly, a swarm of black crystal daggers filled the air, each one of them enveloped in a frost aura so cold that it started to snow. It wasn't their razor-sharp edge nor the darkness energy they carried to make them lethal so much as their ability to stick to their target.
Dodging them all was impossible and once one of the daggers hit, the frost aura would fuse the ice crystal to its victim's flesh. The cold would suck away the heat just like the darkness imbued within ate at the life force, leaving the target of the spell no way out.
Not even Lith's bright blue Origin Flames could fully defend him from the swarm. For each dagger he vaporized, two more would form from both the steam and the water condensed due to the spell's frost aura.
Ice Coffin needed but a few seconds to paint the Skinwalker armor black, turning Lith's flight into freefall as life abandoned his frozen limbs.
"Thanks for the lesson, sucker. I'll do my best to learn this spell." Lith said, leaving Night with her mouth agape.
She could see with Life Vision that, for no apparent reason, the ice daggers had left his body, allowing Lith to recover with Invigoration the strength he had lost. The Horseman focused on her spell, discovering that somehow the water element had been drained from Ice Coffin.
Without its key component, the spell had faded away.
'After Balkor, now even Lith can use Domination?' Night couldn't believe that both the husband she had chosen could be so alike.
'It doesn't make sense. He has no streaks in his hair and even if he has a black colored eye, he failed to Dominate any of my attacks so far. Why should the blue eye be any different?' She thought while unleashing her tier five spell, Stardust.
A wave of light magic infused with darkness flooded the sky, moving toward Lith's house like a tsunami. That way, even if he dodged, the spell would still hit the defensive formations of the house and weaken them further.
Only when the light element disappeared and Stardust fell apart did Night remember why she had avoided using big spells until that moment.
"Oh, shit!" She said when she noticed that now five out of six points of Yurial's Hexagram now burned with power, leaving only one missing.
"Thank you so much." Lith flew above his house, outside the range of the air sealing array.
He called upon his best tier five air spell, Mjolnir. A bolt of lightning as strong as a natural one descended from the skies and hit Lith's house for no apparent reason.
Yet this time the Horseman didn't let Lith's nonsense fool her. Mjolnir had disappeared just like Starlight, lighting the missing point of the blue Hexagram that surrounded the Verhen Household and activating its full effect.
'This doesn't bode well.' Night thought. 'Now I understand why Lith taunted me to use powerful spells and why did he run away. He was trying to use my own mana to fuel that knock-off Silverwing's Hexagram.
'The only question is what the heck does that thing do?'
"What the heck does that thing do?" Captain Locrias, the man in charge of one of the five-man units of the Queen's Corps tasked with protecting the Verhens asked.
After the undead's initial assault, all three teams had sought the protection of the array system after rescuing their respective marks. Between the arrays and the arsenal that each member of the Queen's Corps carried with themselves, Locrias had managed to keep the house safe until Lith's arrival.
After the arrival of the magical beasts and the Demons of the Fallen, the Captain had focused on helping his allies to stall as long as he could until Marchioness Distar sent reinforcements.
"It's a very powerful weapon." Elina tried and failed to remember how Yurial's Hexagram worked.
Lith had explained it to her many times yet Elina had never needed to employ any of the house's defense systems. She knew how to activate the array but she had forgotten what it did.
She knew that the Hexagram could stop up to six different elemental spells and that was the reason why she had used it to block Night's most powerful attacks, leaving the rest to the array system and the soldiers of the Queen's Corps.
"I get that." He grunted. "I'm just asking why you don't unleash it and why Faluel's apprentice attacked it. So far, that thing helped us against Night and your son is supposed to be under the Hydra's protection.
"We won't resist long if you hold your punches or if that Wyrmling turns traitor."
"How dare you?" Raaz's anger almost scared the Captain. "That's not a thing, that's a person. A person who's risking his life to protect us!"
Hearing such disrespectful words towards his son while watching Lith engaged in a deadly battle was more than Raaz could handle.
"I didn't mean to offend anyone. It's just that beasts look and sound all the same to me. I had no idea it's- I mean, that he's a male." Captain Locrias's words only added fuel to Raaz's rage fire, forcing Elina to intervene.
"Hold tight, this might hurt." She said while wielding the seemingly common wooden spoon that actually hid an Orichalcum core and enough mana crystals to control all the arrays around the house.
"What do you mean, it might hurt?" The soldiers asked in unison.
Elina couldn't remember for her life if the Hexagram would attack a single target or an area of effect. Yet she had seen Lith completing the formation after luring Night near the house.
She focused on the Horseman and ordered Yurial's Hexagram to attack her. The array followed Elina's will and shapeshifted into the tier five Warden Spell, Immortal Fetters.
A swarm of chains of blue energy struck at Night who countered them by creating a thick barrier of darkness magic. The power behind the chains, however, belonged to six tier five spells that the array had woven in the form of high-density energy.
