When facing an Eldritch, damage didn't matter. The only way to kill them was to force the Abomination to consume all of the energy that comprised their bodies.
Before Vareen could fully reform, Inxialot Warped from the shadows and unleashed all the spells that he had kept at the ready. The King of Liches didn't care one bit for the apprentices and had been waiting for the perfect opportunity for a sneak attack.
'He who strikes first strikes twice, but he who backstabs gets a lot of free strikes!' He thought with a huge grin on his skeletal face.
Inxialot emptied his magic holding rings and exhausted his artifacts' power cores in a single attack that created an explosion so powerful that now Urgamakka became visible from the surface.
The young Awakened had survived the blast only thanks to Inxialot Blinking them at a safe distance.
"Another Lich? What the heck is wrong with this place?" Vareen said in frustration as the undead Blinked away as well. "Come back here, you coward!"
"It's not cowardice avoiding an opponent you can't beat, Vareen. It's wisdom." A feminine voice said as a white Warp appeared in front of him.
"When Salaark asked me to deal with an Eldritch asshole in exchange for a pardon, I didn't know that it was you nor that you were attacking my disciple. Otherwise I would have done it for free. Lucky me."
The woman in front of the Eldritch looked to be in her early forties, about 1.60 meters (5'3") tall with seven streaks of different colors almost entirely covering her light brown hair. Her dark brown eyes brimmed with white light as she stared at Vareen.
Her features were human, yet Solus's mana sense could see the full-red blood core burning inside her chest while a bright white mana core shone from the necklace hanging from her neck.
'A Lich! That woman is a white cored Lich!' Solus said to Lith as he returned to his human form after closing the hole in his chest.
"Aylen! How can you still be alive?" Vareen said with greed and surprise.
They had met millennia ago in the real Urgamakka, back when she was still a young apprentice and he was already a powerful Eldritch.
"Master, what are you doing here?" Inxialot asked from a Gate, ready to close it the moment things turned for the worse.
"I have come to clean your mess and settle things up with an old friend." She replied.
"Answer to my question, woman. Did you achieve the white core thanks to my research? Is this how you are still alive?" The Eldritch didn't like being ignored but he could use that time to conjure his pets and absorb them to recover part of his lost strength.
"Yes and no." Aylen replied, glad to have the time to weave a few more spells. "Urgamakka fell long before that. I had to turn myself into a Lich in order to survive long enough to achieve the white core."
"Then I have found not one, but two sources that will allow me to return back to life!" Vareen retrieved the Chaos and the life force that the corrupted animals had stored and jumped at the Lich with renewed vigor.
"About that…" Aylen unleashed Silverwing's Annihilation, a Spirit formation that required seven violet-cored Awakened to reach its true power, but a white-cored could use it on their own.
Seven differently colored rays of light showered the Eldritch, inflicting upon him pain as he had never felt before.
The black ray sealed the Chaos ability to absorb or at least weaken the other elements, allowing the other six to deal to his defenseless body so much damage that it turned Vareen into dust again.
"What trickery is that?" He said while rebuilding his body for the fifth time in less than five minutes.
"A spell devised to fight Guardians. I expected it to deal more damage." Aylen scratched her chin in confusion while studying the Eldritch with Life Vision.
"If you ever fight a real Guardian, you should use something like this!" Vareen unleashed his tier five Chaos spell, Shredding Void.
Countless wind blades imbued with Chaos filled the air, making the Gate from which Inxialot spectated collapse and cutting his head off.
"This doesn't bode well." The Lich King said after he failed to retrieve his head and it became food for the Abomination along with all the relics it wore.
Shredding Void would not only destroy everything in its area of effect, but it would also feed the collected energy from the ground, the air, and from any life form present directly to its caster.
Aylen activated Silverwing's Bastion, another of the magical formations that the First Magus had shared to allow her fellow Awakened to withstand even a Guardian Tier spell.
Thanks to the array, the Lich suffered no damage but, seeing how Vareen became stronger by the second, she understood to actually be in a pinch.
'Dammit, all this work for just one pardon? I should have never accepted to fill in for Sinmara when she asked me to. I bet that she set me up to study my most powerful spells.' Aylen had brought her phylactery with her because it was the only way to not end up like Zolgrish.
At the same time, however, it made it impossible for her to run away or accept defeat. If the Eldritch put his hands on the magical gemstone, Aylen would become his slave or die.
"Nice barrier. I've never seen anything like that before." Vareen snapped his fingers, making more of his infected animals appear and attack the Bastion.
Between the Shredding Void and the horde of Chaos beasts, the array started to crumble faster than the Lich could regenerate it.
"Well played, old hag!" Aylen yelled to the skies, where she was certain that Sinmara or another member of Salaark's nest was watching the fight. "You cornered me, forcing my hand. Here is what I can do when I get serious."
The Lich started to move her right hand clockwise, making spheres of different elements appear at the six points of a star.
"Silverwing's Hexagram?" Vareen blurted out in surprise. "Is it the old age or the isolation that made you go senile?"
"No, moron. Mirror Magic." Aylen said, yet her words made no sense to anyone, from Lith to Sinmara who really was watching the fight from the sky.
A black sphere of Chaos had appeared above the Lich's head, followed by a red sphere of Cinder at her right shoulder. A brown sphere of Corruption formed at her shin, quickly followed by a silver sphere of Decay right above her feet.
Then also a blue sphere of Zero and a yellow sphere of Choke appeared. All the six elements had been stripped of their respective counterpart, destroying their balance.
"What? Did you really think that Chaos was the only cursed element?" The Lich unleashed a burst of Chaos the size and speed of a maglev train. "You can't mix them together and they are highly volatile, but when it comes to destruction, they are great."
She acted cool, yet only thanks to both halves of her core being close and to the Bastion array did Aylen's regenerative abilities manage to keep up with the damage that conjuring the cursed elements inflicted upon her body.
