‘I don’t like this situation.’Lith thought.
‘The shaman seems to always know where I am. She caught us unprepared twice, so it’s likely that if I stand for too long in the same place, she may attack us from a distance.’
‘Agreed.’Solus replied. She had regained about half of her strength, but they couldn’t afford to wait much longer. If the Sergeant returned with the reinforcements the crystal would be lost.
‘We need to aim for a quick exchange. We have to get there fast, before she can siphon any element so that we can Blink in for the kill.’
Lith nodded. That kind of approach was outside his comfort zone, but there weren’t many options left. He took off, flying at full speed towards the location where he had killed most of the members of the Grey Wolf tribe.
Ragh’Ash hadn’t gotten far. Moving the holy crystal was a delicate job. She couldn’t fly with it. If anything happened and the spell was broken, the holy crystal would be lost. She just made it float a few centimeters from the ground, pushing it while she walked back towards the camp.
The silver lining was that thanks to the constant contact, she could sweep her surroundings from time to time to check on Lith’s whereabouts. As soon as Ragh’Ash noticed him getting closer, she knew only one of them would come out alive from their next meeting.
<“Go back to the village and hide! If I don’t return within a few minutes, run away and never turn back!”>Ragh’Ash ordered. The youths never thought, even for a second, that the shaman was doing that to protect them.
Her only purpose was to protect the last members of the tribe, who were too weak to be of any use in actual combat. Ragh’Ash had seen how Lith had turned her own living bomb against her orc warriors. It was a mistake she couldn’t afford to repeat.
She watched the two youths disappearing in the woods as she pondered about her strategy. Ragh’Ash wasn’t used to fight alone, without any warrior providing her assistance.
‘The demons’ magic is unpredictable.’She thought.‘My only option is to overpower them quickly with the help of the holy crystal. If only that stupid beast helped us earlier, I wouldn’t be in dire straits now. What kind of pet doesn’t protect its owner?’
The earth trembled below her feet. It was the only sign that the creature was still following her. Ragh’Ash called it her pet, but its motives were still a mystery. It had helped her to survive many times, yet its timing was always unreliable at best.
Ragh’Ash placed her hands on the crystal, channeling air magic through it to conjure a huge storm cloud above her position. Monsters’ mastery of magic was shallow. Due to their Fallen nature, they would seldom be able to research complex spells and would even more rarely pass them down.
In a ‘might makes right’ society, sharing knowledge or power was like digging your own grave. That limited the shaman’s knowledge to the first three tiers of spells. Thanks to the holy crystal though, Ragh’Ash could replicate tier four spells’ effect or at least equal their destructive power.
As soon as Lith spotted the shaman with Life Magic, he also noticed a pillar of mana going from the ground to the sky. The storm cloud was pitch black and covered a radius of 100 meters around the shaman’s position already.
‘She’s stealing my thunder, literally!’Lith thought. He was actually scared by how fast Ragh’Ash had summoned such a huge thundercloud. It was something he was still unable to do.
‘I wouldn’t worry about that.’Solus chimed in.‘There is something wrong with the ground below her feet. I thought the lack of earth element in the world energy was confusing my perception, but even now that the balance is restored the anomaly is still there.’
‘What kind of anomaly?’Lith’s paranoia sense was tingling. Life Vision showed him nothing but trees, grass, the shaman, and the crystal. Yet he didn’t doubt Solus’s words for an instant. He knew her senses were far better than his own.
‘It’s a blur, so I can’t tell you what it is nor how strong it is, but there’s something moving there. It could be some kind of spell, a creature, anything. Just be vigilant, okay?’
Lith mentally nodded as he charged the Gatekeeper with all elements but light magic. As soon as Ragh’Ash’s eyes met Lith’s, she unleashed a natural lightning so big that its flash turned the whole world white for a second, almost blinding her.
Lith was able to react in time only because he had done the same thing in the past. The moment he saw a pulse of Ragh’Ash’s mana reaching for the thundercloud, he Blinked behind her back, aiming for her head.
Lith’s timing had been impeccable, the precision of his lunge surgical. Yet instead of relieving the shaman’s neck from the burden of its head, Lith was sent flying before he could even understand what was happening.
Something big and black had jumped out of the ground, as nimble as a shark after a seal. Solus had no way to describe it if not as a worm, but it was a worm like she had never seen before.
Its skin wasn’t pink nor soft. The creature looked like made of obsidian, with several bumps and deformities all around its body like a lazy artist had given up the job halfway through.
The worm was as big as a bull and about 4 meters (13′) long. Its gaping mouth was big enough to easily swallow an adult man whole. Solus could see it had multiple series of jagged teeth which somehow were rotating at high speed like a buzz saw.
It had been the impact between the teeth and the Gatekeeper to thwart Lith’s death blow. When the clash happened, the enchanted blade managed to resist the teeth’s destructive force, but it couldn’t escape their grasp.
The centrifugal force had spun Lith and the blade as if for a split second they had been trapped inside a washing machine, before all the accumulated magic in the Gatekeeper had forced the creature to release its prey.
Between the impact and the spinning, Lith’s vision was a blur. Yet the black worm wasn’t faring much better. It writhed on the ground like a beached fish, spitting blood and teeth before reaching again for the safety of the earth.
‘What the heck was that?’Lith and Ragh’Ash’s thought in unison. Whereas Lith was wondering why the magical beast had interfered, Ragh’Ash’s was shocked by dimensional magic.
Both the magicians recovered quickly from the surprise, moving on to their own plan B. Lith Blinked away, not giving the shaman the time to aim at him with a second lightning while Ragh’Ash’s embraced the crystal starting to chant a second spell.
Lith threw against her several Fire Roots, to force her to interrupt her casting and focus on defending the crystal. Yet the moment the Alchemical tools touched the ground, small holes opened below them making them disappear.
When they exploded a few seconds later, they were already gone so deep that the explosion was completely muffled by the ground, sounding more like farts. Everything happened so fast that Ragh’Ash didn’t even have the time to notice the threat.
