Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

But Oganj was still a dragon mage, and one famous even among his own kind. Even as Zorian watched, Oganj pointed his claw at one of the eagle riders and an expanding ball of razor-sharp threads exploded around him. If this was the start of the battle, the eagle rider in question would have evaded or shielded himself against the attack, but by now he was too exhausted and wounded to resist effectively. The tangled mass of severing threads instantly turned both him and his giant eagle into a bloody mess. Blood and chunks of flesh began to slowly fall to the ground.

The eagle riders weren’t going to last much longer, and when they decided to cut their losses and flee, Oganj was going to come here to turn the tides of battle.

He glanced further into the distance, where the angel cube was located, but the cube was opaque from the outside and he couldn’t see anything. He had no idea what was happening inside.

"What’s your point?" Zorian asked, a spark of light entering his eyes as he finally spotted an opportunity. "You aren’t still trying to turn me to your side, are you?"

"Heavens, no," Silverlake said. "Tell you what, though… if you give me the imperial orb, I’ll let you flee the city and pretend I couldn’t stop you."

The old witch really had a talent for getting under people’s skin, Zorian had to give her that.

He made his move. The whip-orb and the tiger-lizard had just tried to attack him together and landed very close to each other. He exploited this ruthlessly by casting a rather obscure spell on the section of the road they were standing on, ripping it straight out of the ground and catapulting it straight into the sky and away from his current position.

Before Silverlake could react to this, he mentally activated the explosives he snuck into the chunk of the ruined wall he had flung at the giant ooze. The wall section, still floating inside the ooze, blew up in a spectacular explosion that burst the gigantic potion elemental like an overripe melon.

It didn’t actually kill it, but it didn’t have to. It was temporarily incapacitated until it could reform, and that was all that mattered.

The path was open.

He teleported in front of the surprised Silverlake. She had hurriedly shielded herself to protect herself from the chunks of her own potion elemental flying everywhere, and was currently ill suited to protect herself.

The moment Zorian blinked into existence in front of her she sneered at him with an expression of smug triumph and he detected the trap ward she placed on the area activate. She knew he was coming.

Zorian’s mind went into overdrive. Time seem to slow down. Elsewhere, his simulacrums stopped what they were doing as the information about the ward as dissected and analyzed by multiple minds bouncing ideas and theories between each other. Before the ward had time to fully activate, Zorian had figured out what it did and where its flaws are.

Wordlessly, he stomped his foot and sent streams of non-structured magic all around him, poking and disrupting the rapidly-forming structure of the ward. Simultaneously, he fired off a simply magic missile spell at a seemingly innocuous glyph faintly carved into the nearby cobblestones, destroying it utterly.

The entire ward suddenly imploded upon itself, carved sigils burning out in a flash of blue light. Silverlake stumbled back, her mind hit by the backlash of the ward control function suddenly sending a bunch of gibberish at her. Before she could recover, Zorian was already casting spell after spell at her. Force projectiles powerful enough to turn stone to powder, fire spells hot enough to melt steel, potent disintegration beams… the attack kept coming and coming, giving Silverlake no chance to take a breath and center herself. She tried to activate some kind of recall object to teleport away but Zorian blocked it from working. Finally, her inexperience with these kind of battles began to show, and her shields broke.

A force projectile hit her straight in the head, and half of her face instantly became a blood mist. Instead of stopping, Zorian blew up the rest of her head as well, and blew a bunch of holes in her torso for good measure as well.

For a second, the scene was quiet.

But something was wrong. Her headless, mutilated body staggered back but didn’t fall. Instead, flesh grew out of her wounds at a terrifying rate, quickly reforming her head and healing the rest of her wounds.

Zorian couldn’t help but be disturbed. Even if she had drunk a portion of troll regeneration or something, a destroyed head was still a killing strike. He tried to incinerate her just in case, engulfing her rapidly regenerating form in an intense cone of flame. Unfortunately, by now the giant ooze had managed to reform itself and launched another attack at Zorian, forcing him to break off the attack before he could fully reduce her to ash.

The moment he stopped, he charred, skeletal corpse of Silverlake again started to regenerate at a terrifying rate, regrowing muscles and skin at a speed that even trolls and hydras would find amazing. Especially considering the damage was inflicted by fire.

The half-healed body of Silverlake started to shake and gurgle, before breaking into painful coughing and spewing out blood everywhere. After a few seconds, Zorian realized this was Silverlake trying to cackle.

"See? You can’t kill me," Silverlake said, almost completely recovered now. "It was a sure thing, and you are the fool here. This was so very worth it."

"No one is unkillable," Zorian said, launching a few more attack spells at her. She started defending herself again, though, so none of them actually landed on her this time. Hmm. She wouldn’t be defending herself if being hurt was inconsequential. She had a limit, somewhere. "I bet if I keep hurting you, you will eventually die for good."

"Eventually," she agreed, firing some spells back at him half-heartedly. The giant ooze tried to interpose itself between him and Silverlake again, but Zorian refused to let her out of his line of fire again. "But I bet it will take longer to exhaust my regeneration than it will to exhaust your mana reserves. Even with that cube acting as free defense, you still have to burn through your reserves to hurt me. And besides, Oganj will soon-"

A sound reminiscent of a ceramic plate breaking into pieces resonated somewhere in the distance. The angel cube, long silent, shattered and faded away, revealing the result of the angel-demon battle.

The angel tree was triumphant. Neither the massive demon torso nor its accompanying demon horde could be seen anywhere.

The angel had paid a heavy price for its victory. One of its main trunks was merely a stump now, and two of the others had the majority of its branches ripped and slicked off. Many of its eyes were missing, and the strange orange fires were no longer covering the whole tree, but were instead thin and faded. All but three of its accompanying wing balls were gone, and one of the surviving wing balls was clearly missing a lot of its wings and zigzagging across the sky as if drunk. Of the sinuous lion-serpent things that created the barrier, there was no trace. Maybe they used up all of their power to maintain that thing?

Regardless, the angel tree did not rest or waste time. It shook itself slightly, flexing its branches like a fighter warming himself up before the fight, and then immediately accelerated like a cannonball toward Oganj.

The dragon mage let loose a roar of frustration at all these distractions, but made no attempt to flee. He clearly had every intention of fighting the wounded angel.

Although she did not have flocks of iron beaks acting as her eyes all over the city, Silverlake must have seen the event in some way, because she immediately scowled in response.

"Don’t think you-" she began.