FMH: Everything ~ Twenty-Four

Taylor peered up at Luke, trying to puzzle out a way for them to coordinate their efforts in the upcoming chaos. Even if Zed used his strange Mastery that allowed him to whisper directly into their ears, she was uncertain if it would be effective over the din of battle. “I trust that I will be able to find you wherever the fighting is the most difficult?”

“Yes.” Luke didn't even attempt to sound reassuring, merely stating his answer as an absolute fact. “Stay out of the way.”

“Right; that’s what I'm trying to figure out before we’re in the thick of it. How can we coordinate our attacks so you don't Shockwave me to death, and I don't accidentally blast a hole through you?” Her concerns earned her a snort of derision, and she raised an eyebrow at him. “I have multiple Tier seven and higher Spells. I feel confident that some of them could accidentally hit you and deal significant damage.”

To prove her point, she started casting Thunder Beast’s Eye, investing one hundred mana for the initial cost, then began charging it. Layer after layer of dense electrical power was packed in, and the fact that she had been able to boost the Spell to level nine had decreased the additional cost for adding extra lightning strikes to only twenty-five mana per every five bolts. The Spell that had once been practically impossible for her to control now allowed her to walk around with the equivalent lightning capacity of a true thunderstorm.

It carried fifteen charges in total, which would generate seventy-five strikes before the eye would dissipate. Between the lightning and the sonic damage formed after each strike, she could deal approximately seventeen thousand damage. Her main limitation was going to be the fact that the Spell had a maximum time limit of five minutes, at which point it wouldn't merely discharge its power, but instead fizzle out entirely. Luke pointed up, then nodded as if she had made some kind of grand gesture. “Good. I will be able to avoid hitting you, if you keep this thing up.”

“Great, you will know where not to hit me, but only if I keep a giant target painted on my head,” she sarcastically rebutted, her nerves getting the best of her for a moment. A meager nine mana remained in her total pool of four hundred eighty-six, but she was able to fully refill her power in approximately seventy-seven seconds. That gave her some peace of mind as she continued preparing her battle. “You’re pretty sensitive to mana, right? What if I start upgrading my Nullify Spell? It's on cooldown anyway, so I might as well use this time to bump it up in power. Will you be able to follow those fluctuations and figure out where I am?”

“You're overthinking this,” Luke promised her, though the anxious clenching in her gut disagreed. “Feel free. Who knows? Might be useful. Plus, if we survive this, you get a boosted Spell. More strength is better.”

Not seeing any downside to upgrading the Spell immediately, beyond disliking her main defensive option being out of commission—and it already was—she added the final one hundred Potentia into the Spell, causing it to begin the process of upgrading to Tier five. She had slowly been adding the strange energy to the Spell over time in preparation for a scenario just like this. The chaotic energies of the world shifted toward her, far faster for her than they had for Zed, even though the two of them held the same potency within their Mana Channels. “Being bound to the world pays off again.”

She attributed the higher speed to yet another side effect of the Earthen Node drawing her into its power and restructuring her body from the ground up. She paused and considered using that saying as a joke for Andre later; she was sure it would prompt a chuckle from him. As far as Taylor could tell, unlike her Druid friend, there seemed to be no negative drawbacks to the trait that had been added to her. The world didn't request or require anything of her–it merely changed how things worked for her to a very slight degree.

But the time for philosophizing had passed, and about half of her pool of mana had replenished since she had created the eye in the sky. Happily, she didn't need to forcibly insert herself into the press of bodies that was forming along the shoulder-height border wall. Since her lightning Spell was hovering in the air above her head, she designated a target and allowed the charged storm to move.

*Zzt.* *Boom.*

The delay between the strike of the lightning and the subsequent sonic damage was less than half a second, but it was still distinctly noticeable for anyone close to it. There was an odd incongruence to it, and she watched curiously as the deadly light passed through scores of bodies that didn’t know they were already corpses, only for them to jiggle a moment later as the concussive retort converted the fried air to thunder.

That was enough for the cooked bodies of the basic humans to explode as though a necromancer were using a particularly nasty Spell.

She wouldn't have wasted her mana on the press of people, had it not been for the Dire Wolf-sized hound that was prowling amongst them, exuding a red mist that seemed to egg the nearby combatants on to higher heights. The lightning struck true, and the summoned aspect of the wolf vanished with a pained howl.

Damage dealt: 270! 225 Lightning damage, 45 sonic damage.

“One bolt used, seventy-four to go.” In almost all other circumstances, Taylor would have put her chances of absolute, crushing success near one hundred percent guaranteed. Faced with the vast array of forces aligned against her, she could only swallow her fear and try to focus on taking out high-value targets. “I see a dog over there, but I can’t find its summoner… where could they be hiding? How far away from an Ascender can their summoned creature go, or is it fully autonomous?”

There was no one nearby with whom she could dissect her concerns and hopes. She decided that, if the Ascenders were opting to hide in the very back lines instead of joining in combat, it was very possible she was going to scream. Another bolt of lightning arced out from the eye in the sky above her, startling her nearly as much as the creature it had caught. The biggest difference between the two was that she was able to survive the use of the bolt. That thought made her smirk, but it also enticed her to focus on the battle at hand, instead of speculating what the battle could turn into.

With the opposing army rushing toward them at full speed, Taylor ultimately decided that her priority should be working to take down any Druid she could locate. The flows of mana shifted back and forth, faster than they had any right to be doing naturally, which was a clear indication of the fight Andre was putting up against the enemy Ascenders.

To his great credit, and her delight, unless the opposing group of Druids managed to work together, Andre was able to hold and maintain his influence over any given area. As the dynasty’s legions moved forward, they were forced to walk across a handful of rough stone bridges that had been hastily created by the Ascenders on their side.

They were only able to maintain a few of these siege ramps, which rose over the stone spike pit and connected to the top of the short earthen wall that Andre had generated. Working in tandem, the opposing Druids were able to set up five such points, although anytime they tried to exceed that, Andre would push back and directly dissolve the work they had completed, dropping tens of men onto the stone spikes and likely ensuring their death. Each time a bridge was dismantled, it seemed to become harder for the Druids to retake the same location.

Taylor knew that this was a byproduct of having an influx of blood that was automatically absorbed and used by her Druid’s Abilities, expanding and solidifying his influence over the area. Even without actively working to wrestle the land away from his opposition, Andre’s influence started creeping farther into the Dynasty of Dogs’ terrain with each new death.

The Mage’s eyes snagged on a man that seemed slightly out of place, the people around him standing awkwardly straight and sweating more than the physical exertion should produce. With a slight squint, she zeroed in on him and directed her lightning to lash out.

A small dog, which could not have weighed more than five pounds, jumped in front of the bolt and seemed to be fully confident in stopping it. To the trainer’s great credit, that bolt was fully expended on the tiny beast and went no farther–nor did the dog's life on this plane of existence. The man pointed at the eye, and Taylor heard a slight, “Ha!”

The follow-up bolt took the Ascender in the face, deleting him as a threat for the future.

Deciding to become more actively involved, Taylor reserved her lightning for an active defense and instead used her fully regenerated mana pool to cast Frozen Trident and Fingers of Flame as rapidly as possible. Fingers of Flame had once upon a time been known as Flame Lance, and its increased Tier allowed her to create five lances of flames, one over each finger on a hand, and launch them at different enemies. That was a strange restriction that this Spell had: each of the lances must impact or at least be targeted at a distinct target. When the flames hit, they were currently dealing four-hundred-fifty damage per lance.

Frozen Trident had been upgraded from Shatter Shot. Its Tier four Multitarget Bonus allowed the spawned spike of ice to detonate into three smaller spikes that launched out at oblique angles from the original projectile, though none would ever move backward. This allowed her to use it without fear of inflicting friendly fire on herself. However, those angles were otherwise random, and while the fragments could hit the same target multiple times, most often, they would fly to the sides and take out other creatures if they were nearby.

More often than not, when fighting a single creature, only the initial blow would hit, while the other spikes would split off and zip into the ground or off in a different, still useless, direction. Even so, she considered it a phenomenal upgrade, primarily because each of the newly generated spikes would deal full damage, which meant that each shard of ice at this level was impacting for two hundred forty-five damage. Taylor still had the option to purposely shatter the Spell before it landed, giving her a higher chance of sending three full-powered shards into a single target.

However, she hadn’t figured out a way to control that, other than getting it as close as possible to the target before making it *pop*. If that managed to land, she could hit a single target for seven hundred thirty-five damage, which was spread between the damage types of ice and force. This allowed her to hurt a creature, even if it was resistant to one of those two types. Very few creatures could ever be resistant to both.

With her game plan in mind, Taylor began stalking the battlefield, searching out any other Ascenders that she could find. Whenever she did manage to locate one, lightning would herald her realization. Soon, she had to order the eye to float in a different direction than she was actually looking, otherwise the Ascenders would duck deeper into the cover of the expendable bodies around them or retreat fully until she passed by.

“Well, at least I'm getting good practice with my other Spells as well.” Taylor reluctantly allowed, burning a screaming Ascender’s heart out with a Finger of Flame and causing the basic humans around him to sizzle and melt as they became the unwitting distinct targets that the Spell required. “Hopefully, I can get used to this fast enough that I stop puking every time I need to kill another person.”

She grimaced and wiped her mouth with her pristine robe, leaving a small streak that vanished as her passive Spells cleaned her up. With no other choice but forward, her hunt continued.