Phloria's amazement didn't stop her from also using her brain. Afraid that their enemy could once again steal the power of their spells, Phloria used earth magic to change the pattern of the floor to Lith's advantage, making it slippery where Rizo was and rough where Lith stood, giving her friend a better footing.
Sometimes she would make small bumps appear where she predicted the Odi would move, making him almost trip more than once. Fighting three against one without the green array was too much for Rizo.
He conjured it again, but before it could fully form the Eternal Blade was ripped off his hands, quickly followed by his head. Lith knew what was going to happen, so he quickly stepped out of the array as Rizo's remaining life force was detonated to buy the time necessary for the next Odi to step out.
'I need to rest, sorry.' Solus slipped back to Lith's finger and the Skinwalker back on his body. Between her near-death experience and her weak core, Lith was surprised that she had lasted for so long.
He gave Solus his most heartfelt thanks while hurling a constant stream of Origin Flames against the green array. By the time the explosion had faded and Veiga's body was fully formed, the magical formation was in shambles.
\u003c "Rizo, you damn idiot!"\u003e Veiga said, taking her magical staff out of her dimensional ring. Thanks to the array's power amplifying effects, her tier three spell filled the room with ice shards as big as a person, giving her prey no chance to escape.
Phloria used her tier four earth spell, Tidal Wall, to make the ground in front of her and her allies rise like a wave, buying Lith enough time for a full breath of Invigoration.
Veiga sneered at the ugly female's attempts to stall for time, conjuring one volley of shards after another, in a constant onslaught that soon brought the magical protection on the verge of crumbling.
She didn't care about how much mana was left in the Reactor, the only thing that mattered was her own survival. Lith pondered his options, trying to find a way out of that pinch.
'Dammit, that's a spell worthy of the name Checkmate Spears. I can't Warp in due to the array and since the offensive spell covers the entire room, I have no place to dodge. I could tank a wave or two, but I would die long before reaching that crazed mage.' He thought.
Quylla shared his opinion, but while Lith had fought putting his life on the line, she had done the best that she could to study the God's Will array. Quylla was no Warden, but she knew the Array detecting spell and how magical formations worked.
She also knew many more runes than Phloria, especially those the Odi used due to her thorough study of their magical discoveries. After seeing the green array being used so many times and how the various missing runes affected its working, she had a pretty good idea of how to make the assault stop.
She focused her Disarray spell on a single rune near one of the array's power nodes, triggering a domino effect that the already faltering magical formation wasn't able to bear.
Its structure collapsed, reverting the above tier five spell into an average tier three. When Veiga realized that despite the fact that the God's Will was still standing, its effects had completely disappeared, it was too late.
Lith exploited that opening to Warp in front of her, ripping the sphere from her chest with his left hand and squashing her head like grape with his right hand. Without the God's Will array, there was no need to dodge the life force explosion, so he could breathe a stream of Origin Flames that engulfed the corpse and smothered the detonation.
While the next Odi was still forming, Lith ripped her heart off before hurling a new jet of flames. He kept killing them non-stop, even though he felt that something was wrong.
Invigoration or not, he had never used Origin Flames so many times and his instincts screamed at him to stop. His life force was close to suffering more damage.
\u003c "Please, have mercy!"\u003e Guuna said when her turn came. \u003c "You are killing an entire race. This is genocide."\u003e
Lith's reply was to tear her asunder before stepping back to avoid the ensuing explosion. His eyes were blurring and his strength dwindling yet he didn't dare stop his work.
Only the Odi could actually see that as more of them died, the eyes in the room converged into a single point until they assumed a physical form that got closer and closer until they could feel its breath down their necks.
The black hands had disappeared once the spirits of the dead had been dispelled by the God's Will array but now Mogar's consciousness had coalesced to be ready to take her prize, leaving only the darkness originating from Lith behind.
Each of their forced rebirths drained more mana from the Reactor until nothing remained. Without its nourishment, the lump of flesh in front of Lith stopped squirming as time finally moved forward and demanded its toll from the Odi.
Their collective body withered and aged until they all turned into dust.
Only then did Mogar disappear. Finally its mistake had been mended and over time, from all that death life would blossom again. Along with the planet's consciousness both the silver and the black pillar disappeared, leaving Lith back into his human form.
"Well, that was interesting." Salaark said. "I'd say it was worth the trip.
"Really? I think the fight was really good as well, but from a battle crazed warrior like you I was expecting a lot of criticism about that poor kid." Tyris said. "Also, the only effective part of the Odi's plan was managing to hide themselves from us. Reactor or not, they wouldn't have stood a chance."
"I'm not talking about the fight, even though I have to admit it was pretty decent. I was referring to the anomaly's companion speaking with Mogar. It rarely speaks to non Guardians. By the way, what do you think the two pillars mean?" She asked while looking at Leegaain.
"It's a good sign. The first time the anomaly underwent a tribulation, the pillar was black, like that of an Abomination. Now there's also a silver one, which probably depends on the fact that he's not technically a beast and we've never seen the pillar related to humans.
"I think the two pillars mean that his nature is getting more stable, no more lost in between species but giving birth to a race of his own." Leegaain replied.
"It's more than that." Mogar materialized in the middle of its Guardians, appearing to each one of them in the form it had assumed back when they had met the planet's consciousness for the first time.
To Salaark it appeared as a blood-stained beast, to Tyris like a pregnant woman, and to Leegaain as the World Tree.
"Both hybrids are conflicted about their nature and are troubled to accept the changes they are still undergoing. Yet while the female is driven by her feelings and hindered by her memory loss, the male is almost a lost cause.
"He keeps living in the past, carrying a burden that drags him down no matter what choice he makes. That's why he still carries the mark of Abominations."
