As more and more Golems swarmed near their position, it was only a matter of time before Lith and Phloria had to fight again.
"I can't use Origin Flames like that again. Also, I think it would be a waste of time anyway. Look!" Lith couldn't believe his own eyes.
The black pools that looked like tar were bubbling and writhing in the attempt to regain their shape. The Origin Flames seemed to have temporarily cut them off their power source, but they weren't enough to destroy the Gargoyles for good.
"Stay behind me. I want to try something." Phloria said while activating her tier five Mage Knight spell, Frostmourne.
The temperature in an area of twenty meters (66 feet) around her plummeted as snow fell from the sky and ice covered the ground. Only the eye of the storm, where she and Lith stood was safe.
The black pools stopped moving while the Gargoyles that dived on them from the sky froze in mid-air. The ice covering them made the constructs miss their targets and, once shattered, they couldn't reconstitute their bodies.
"Nice trick. Is this the advanced version of Frozen Guard?" Lith asked while helping Solus to recover and searching for the golems' power source amid their fragments.
"No, it's one of my original spells and it's much better than that. Look." Phloria released short bursts of darkness that the ice absorbed and focused into its victims without weakening the water magic component of her spell.
After a while, the frozen pools turned into dust as darkness destroyed the magic that had animated the constructs.
"Can you keep this up for an hour or so?" Lith asked while his brain spun at full gear to solve that mystery.
"I'm sorry. I can hold it for a few minutes at best. And that's solely if I run out of Invigoration and no one disturbs my spell." She replied.
'I think I know what's going on. We'll keep in contact via Solus's mind link. Watch my back.' He said while Blinking out of the area of effect of Frostmourne and forcing Solus to activate the Eyes again.
'Please, no.' She whined as pain invaded her stone form again.
'I'm sorry, but we can't run away without humiliating Faluel and we have no chance to win on our own. The silver lining is that I want you to search solely for this energy signature and ignore everything else.' Lith shared with her the data about the Gargoyles, using the Eyes of Menadion to locate the real enemy.
'That I can do.' Solus replied.
The energy source that fueled the constructs managed to reach them throughout Urgamakka. To do that, however, it had to spawn tendrils of energy every time a Gargoyle was broken.
The tendrils stretched out from the same point in the ground, making it easy to triangulate the source's position.
Lith ran through the city, Blinking whenever he was cornered rather than wasting his energy with pointless fights. As soon as he reached the place directly above the power source, he used an earth spell to make the ground collapse.
He found himself in an underground tunnel filled with elemental blocking arrays that sealed his magic. To make matters worse, the Gargoyles swarmed from the hole in the ground and from every side as well, seeping through the cracks in the walls in their liquid form and leaving him no way out.
***
"Cheeky little bastard. This will teach you a lesson." Inxialot said while making the Gargoyles converge on Lith's position.
"What has that woman done to you?" Zolgrish pointed at Lith's human form while losing another hand of Mogar's equivalent of poker against Inxialot's cat.
"He foiled my plans to take over a World Sapling." Inxialot sighed. "I had invested a lot of time and resources into one of my associates in Laruel, yet it was all for nothing."
"I'm sorry for your loss." Zolgrish's mourned the failure of any experiment more than he would the loss of any living being. "Listen, why don't you kill her along with everyone else so that we can go back home?"
"Excellent idea! I wonder why I didn't think of it before." Inxialot clapped his hands with enthusiasm, moving to the max the lever that controlled the energy flowing into the Gargoyles.
"Master, that's no woman. That's Scourge." Ratpack said.
He was a small humanoid, barely 1.3 meters (4'3") tall, with pale grey skin and thick grizzled hair. He had small pointed ears, pitch-black eyes, and wore a yellow mage's robe that Zolgrish used back when he was still a child.
Ratpack was a chimera formed by combining parts of a dead elf child with that of a Balor that Zolgrish as raised as a Vampire with Necromancy in the hope to create the ultimate being.
An immortal, natural shapeshifter Vampire in perfect tune with the world energy like an elf and with a Balor's Evil Eyes that would allow him to amplify all kinds of magic.
What the Lich had obtained, instead, was an undead creature as weak as a child with the same inability to process the world energy of a Balor. Zolgrish had somehow ended up combining the flaws of all the three species that comprised Ratpack's body without keeping any of their innate abilities.
Ratpack had jagged teeth and claws at the end of his limbs, yet he used them mostly to cook or to perform house chores.
"Who?" Zolgrish asked in confusion.
"Scourge! Your associate. You have mine together, remember?" The small undead was also the Lich's secretary and was tasked with remembering the names that his master kept forgetting.
"By the gods! Scant shapeshifting abilities know no bounds. Maybe you actually kept something from the Balor bloodline for recognizing him despite his disguise." Zolgrish said in amazement.
"That's no disguise he always looks like that!" Ratpack left the magical stove where he had been cooking until a second back to point at Lith's human and definitely male features.
"I'm still not convinced, Ratpack. Kant was blonde, short, and cheerful. That guy instead looks like a buff mortician." The more Zolgrish stared at Lith, the more he was certain that he had never met the gentleman before.
"What the heck are you doing?" The sudden appearance of Raagu's hologram interrupted the master-servant quarrel and made Inxialot fall from his chair.
Somehow, the black cat didn't fall, it simply moved on the Lich's back without ever changing its resting position.
"I'm just doing my job. You asked me to activate the Gargoyles and kill them all. Make up your mind, woman!" Inxialot replied.
"What in the gods' name are you talking about? I only asked you to activate the Gargoyles the moment an apprentice made a mistake. This is supposed to be a teamwork lesson, not a culling!" Raagu stared at the Lich with such hatred and fury that it made her the fairest maiden to his eyes.
"Are you sure? Then who suggested me such rubbish?" Inxialot asked in honest surprise.
"Zolgrish." The cat said.
"My master." Ratpack said.
"Did the cat just talk?" Raagu felt the veins on her forehead bulge out of stress and outrage.
"Meow." The cat replied, realizing his blunder.
"Don't be silly, sweetheart. Cats don't talk, they just make odd noises from time to time." Inxialot sat in his chair again while holding the feline by his chest, to show her it was just a regular house cat.
