Chapter 533: Disaster
Tala seized Rane’s aura—her husband's aura—and knew it to be her own.
With that knowledge, she flickered into the space beside him, Flow already out in void-sword form.
Meallain’s eyes widened, but everything had happened too fast—and in too close a space—for her to react even with her aura, which was concentrated around her protian weapon for what she’d hoped would be a killing strike.
Tala took the woman’s arm at the shoulder, severing more than just the physical connections between limb and torso. She cut the very reality node that was the basis for Meallain’s makeup, instantly making the arm and held weapon distinct from the woman they had previously been united to.
Knowing the versatility of protian weaponry—as well as the skill of the one before her—Tala didn’t want the separated weapon to come back and form a new arm for the elfin Eskau. She simply didn’t trust that severing the reality nodes would be enough.
That in mind, Tala slashed at the still falling arm, purposely feeding extra void-magic into Flow, causing it to practically slurp up the protian weapon—along with the elf arm—allowing the soul trapped within to move on, just as Flow’s void-magic had allowed for Io’s core so long ago. Just as it had for the other souls she’d sent on in the years since.
Meallain had sprung backward at Tala’s appearance, and only after her arm and secondary weapon were gone did her feet touch the ground once more.
Tala’s burgeoning soulsight perceived something trembling in the space that the protian weapon no longer occupied. More than anything, it felt like a child who had just dropped his treat in the dirt, deciding whether or not to throw a fit.
On the physical side, Tala’s initial stroke had inadvertently mirrored Meallain’s strike on Rane just moments earlier. Though the elf had explicitly not been given time to recover her weapon as Rane had.