The resulting speed from Lith's flight spell plus the two clashing attacks allowed him to dart through the spawns and strike at Nalrond with the momentum of a freight train.
The hybrid spat out a mouthful of blood as his scales cracked and his bones broke. Lith had no time to play nice nor to explain his intentions to the crazed beast so he made sure to hit his unwilling ally hard enough to make Nalrond faint.
The moment Dawn's reinforcements stepped on the arrays Solus had placed earlier, Solus activated the magical formations, diverting the enemy's attention from their escape.
'I'm starting to believe that Acala was right all along. Maybe the gods really don't want him to achieve greatness. Why is everything going wrong?' Dawn thought while the arrays fooled her into believing that more intruders were coming through the tunnels.
She couldn't allow any witness to reach the surface and since the source of the attacks came from the only way out of the underground complex, she had to deal with the newcomers first.
The Bright Day ordered her spawns to block the tunnels leading to the upper levels while she took care of the threat, leaving only the two undead who were already chasing Lith after her prey.
Lith regretted not having killed them sooner, but the light beam he had redirected was already weakened. If he had used it to destroy the vampires, not only would their energy have flown back to Dawn, but the beam would also have lost even more power.
'My bet was that with Dawn dead or incapacitated, her minions would have followed. Too bad that I failed. Solus?' Final Sunset was about to run out of mana and he couldn't waste a tier five spell like that again.
'Two against one while protecting a hostage is suicidal. We've already lost the element of surprise. They know about me and I haven't got much mana left. Bright green mana core, remember?' She replied.
Lith sighed, dropping Nalrond as if he was a bad habit. The hybrid weighed half a ton and the undead were moving at near sonic speed while weaving several spells at once.
The vampire was so focused on her own spell that she failed to notice Lith's movements until it was too late. The living boulder met the flabbergasted undead like a windshield does a mosquito.
Blood and bones splattered everywhere on the walls as the living corpse was forced to a halt. The damage she had sustained wasn't enough to kill her, but the cracks the impact had opened in her prism would cripple the vampire's strength until she made a full recovery.
'That was mean but effective. One on one is much better' Solus thought.
Lith infused the Skinwalker armor with his mana, turning himself into an Orichalcum block before stopping abruptly. The remaining undead was expecting something like that so he slowed down and dodged Lith, blocking the corridor ahead.
'The enemy is trapped. I need backup to prevent them from escaping ag…' The mind link between Dawn and her spawn was abruptly cut off as the prism inside his chest shattered.
Along with his power, Dawn retrieved the images about his final moments as well. She discovered that when her servant had surpassed Lith, the third stone arm had struck like a scorpion's tail from the blind spot that the Ranger's metal body created.
The red blade of Ruin had merely grazed its target, but at such speed, it had been enough. The only silver lining was that Dawn had gotten a good look at Solus. Once metalized, the Skinwalker armor had no mantle anymore and this time there was no spell blinding her Life Vision.
"That's no artifact but a member of the family! Objects don't have a life force." Bright Day was flabbergasted. Her surprise turned into outrage when Lith executed the remaining helpless spawn.
"That's it! Family or not, I'm going to beat them an inch from death before I let them explain the secret of their success to me. I heard that Verhen found a big important Odi ruin, so maybe he had access to the research I'm looking for.
"If they play their cards right, once I'm finished with my dear 'cousin', I'll give them a painless death." Cursed objects used the term "family" only because they lacked an alternative.
Living Legacies were no race since each one of them was unique. Not even being crafted by the same hand gave them any sense of kinship. Dawn and her siblings had tried multiple times to kill each other so she was quite an expert at dealing with cursed items.
'I wish that all undead had such a blatant weak point. Sure, Dawn's prisms give the vampires a lot of extra powers, but I only need one good shot to take them out.' Lith thought. 'The problem is: what do we do now?'
Nalrond was badly hurt, so Lith healed him enough to make sure that the hybrid would survive while keeping his stamina low to prevent him from regaining consciousness.
'No Warping, no digging, and all our communication amulets are disabled. I've already tried everything I could, but even though it's old and patched up, the Odi array does its job. We should get some distance between us and Acala.
'We need to rest before looking for a way out, or at least I do. I'm beat.' Solus replied.
'Agreed. The Odi would often set up multiple exits to their complexes so we have two options. Find an emergency exit or one of the array's nodes and disable it. To fix them, Dawn needed to have access to their focal points so they must be around here.'
Lith lifted Nalrond over his shoulders and resumed flying. He followed the world energy flowing through the walls until he found what he was looking for.
'Bingo! Knowing the Odi's modus operandi and how two arrays of this magnitude managed to resist the passing of time without any maintenance, I knew there had to be a mana geyser somewhere.' Lith thought.
'It's not at full capacity.' Solus studied the geyser and how part of its energy was being siphoned. It was missing way more world energy than that needed to sustain just two arrays, but it was still more than enough to assume her tower form.
'The arrays prevent me from Warping and digging while the ceiling is too low to materialize even the first floor. The ground floor alone will have to do.'
'I don't trust much your light bending skills against a Light Master, but it's our best shot.' Lith walked inside the tower, bringing Nalrond with him.
It always amazed him how much bigger it was on the inside.
"I wonder how come you can't Warp but you can still bend space inside of here. You can't dig into the ground but you still managed to enlarge the door for him." Lith said.
"Because it's my body, dummy. Just like the earth blocking array can't stop your earth fusion, it can't stop me either. Inside the tower, I make the rules." Solus's appeared in her human form.
This time she wasn't wearing a dress but her own Skinwalker armor that was shaped to mimic Lith's uniform. As long as she was on the tower's premises, she could do much more than just provide intelligence.
