405. Vs Dravros (2)
In Kai’s experience, a trap only worked when the other side never realised one was being built in the first place.
That was hard enough against any strong opponent. Against an elder blood drinker, it was worse. Dravros wasn’t a Mage, but that didn’t matter much. The creature had centuries of battle behind him, and instincts sharp enough to smell danger even through a sandstorm.
Still, there was one thing he didn’t know. Kai can cast through his legs.
It was a card he rarely showed. Most of the time, he only used that spell path to keep himself in the air, binding it to movement and nothing more. Someone who wasn’t a Mage would never think to watch for it, and that gave Kai exactly the opening he needed.
So while the fight continued in front of him, he started building something below it.
He let one of the drinker’s attacks come close, then dropped lower through the storm to avoid it. Dravros immediately followed, sensing weakness where there was none. Blood rolled around the elder in thick waves, then split apart into a dozen swords that spinned once before shooting toward Kai.
They hit the dome, then the shield beneath it.
The impact made the barrier shudder, but Kai let it take the strain. He only needed it to hold a little longer. While Dravros pressed harder, Kai raised his left hand and answered with something smaller.
Thin reddish needles burst through the storm.
They moved too fast for Dravros to fully avoid, and a few of them struck his chest and arms. The elder only grunted. His claws move at once, tearing the needles free and tossing them aside.
“Your tricks won’t do anything to me,” Dravros said. “If that is poison, I won’t be—” he stopped there.
The skin around the wounds darkened first, then turned an ugly red. Kai noticed the change immediately—so did Dravros.
The creature’s face tightened for just a second—only a second, but that was enough.
Kai kept his expression steady and continued shaping the trap through his legs, feeding the last parts of it into the storm while Dravros was forced to split his focus between the fight and whatever had started moving through his blood.
Dravros tried to suppress the effect of the needles, but in the very next second his left hand burst open in a spray of blood and the blood drinker screamed.
Kai watched him closely.
The blood only spilled for a moment before it slowed, then stopped entirely. Flesh started pulling back together almost at once.
Dravros lowered his gaze toward him, one eye burning with hatred, and said, “Good trick. It won’t work next time.”
Kai stayed quiet and the elder went on the offensive immediately.
He raised his remaining arm and formed a whirlpool of dark blood in front of himself, then hurled it down.
Kai answered with a firebeam.
The two attacks slammed into each other in the middle of the storm. Mana crashed against dead mana until the clash burst apart into a violent mix of heat and blood.
Dravros used that cover at once.
His claws cut through the air, and from inside the explosion, a huge claw-shaped projectile made of dead mana came ripping toward Kai. This time it actually tore a large hole through the wind shield before he could fully reinforce it. Kai pivoted left just in time and let the remains of the attack rush past him.
Even without seeing it clearly through the storm, he knew the creature was probably smiling.
He didn’t let the creature press that advantage though. Instead, he threw out as many projectiles as he could in the space of a few breaths.
He didn’t want them to damage the blood drinker for him—he only needed time.
Knights, wyverns, and all kinds of burning constructs poured out from his palm, some diving with claws, some with blades, all of them rushing Dravros at once.
Kai already knew that they wouldn't be enough. That was okay, they didn’t need to be.
They only needed to keep the elder occupied for a few more seconds while the trap he was building finished taking shape.
And as Kai watched, it happened exactly the way he expected.
Dravros rushed straight down.
The first construct, a burning knight, met him head-on, but the elder tore through it with a single swipe. A wyvern dove next, and Dravros sent a blade of blood through its middle, splitting it apart before the body could even hit the storm. The rest of the constructs fell the same way, one after another, buying Kai almost no ground except the few breaths he needed.
Then Dravros was right on top of him.
Fuck, the creature was too close. He immediately threw up a wall of flames at the last possible moment. Dravros crashed into it anyway. His skin scorched red at once, and the smell of burnt flesh spread through the storm, but the creature didn’t stop. He kept forcing his way forward with a scream, dead set on reaching him.
By then, though, Kai’s plan was ready.
He pushed more mana through his legs, far more than before, enough that it felt like he was forcing a whole circle’s worth of power through a path never meant to carry that much.
Then, just as Dravros’s claws reached his shoulders, the spell activated.
Chains burst from the ground all around the storm. Not one or two, but dozens.
They rose from the sand in every direction and snapped toward Dravros before it could pull away. The elder twisted hard, trying to escape, but the chains wrapped around his limbs, his torso, and his wings. At the same time, a tornado of flames erupted from Kai’s legs and twisted upward, feeding on the sandstorm around him until fire and sand became one raging column.
The chains dragged Dravros straight into it.
The elder thrashed the moment he entered, trying to tear himself free, but once he was inside the firestorm, getting out was no longer easy. His wings suffered first. The storm tore into them, heat and wind punching holes straight through the flesh, burning past the blood defenses he had wrapped around himself. The chains tightened and pulled harder, pinning him down each time he tried to break loose.
Kai watched him strain. He won’t get out quickly, he thought.
What he had just released was a sixth-circle spell built on top of several fifth-circle foundations. In some ways, it was closer to an array than an ordinary spell, every part layered to support the others and make escape harder with each second.
The chains were one part of it, the firestorm was another with wind aspected mana mixed through it to make the whole thing harsher and faster. Then he had added spell binding at four separate points to keep everything locked into one place instead of letting it spread uselessly through the storm.
Even the sandstorm itself became part of the attack.
The heat kept turning the sand into shards of glass, and those shards tore through the air inside the storm and struck Dravros again and again.
All of them combined together became something the elder had never seen coming.
That was the only reason it had worked. Dravros had been too focused on killing him to notice the mana Kai had been feeding through his legs, and now the creature was paying for that mistake.
But the fight was far from over.
Kai knew too well how strong an elder blood drinker could be. At best, he had two minutes. Three if luck stayed on his side. Even with the chains and the firestorm grinding against it, Dravros’ regeneration was monstrous, and Kai had no intention of underestimating that.
Throwing more fifth- or sixth-circle attacks into the storm carelessly was also out of the question. Anything too large would start disturbing the flow of the storm itself, and that was the last thing he wanted.
So he changed approach.
Instead of adding one lower-circle spell after another into the firestorm and hoping the pressure would be enough, Kai reached for something else. A sixth-circle spell. One his master had, for reasons, named [All Things at Once].
As six separate spell structures formed in front of him, Kai couldn’t help but smile. He fed all three of his aspects into them, and each structure shone with a different light as it took shape.
It wasn’t a fast spell. Nearly a full minute passed while he built it.
And in that time, Dravros managed to tear one of the chains around its waist apart.
But then the spell finished forming.
Kai pushed a huge amount of mana into it at once, so much that the light bursting out of the six structures swallowed everything around him for a brief moment.
Then, the spell broke apart in motion.
Hundreds of second-and third-circle spells poured into the firestorm, letting the storm carry them forward, and all of them tore into Dravros from every direction.
Smaller attacks slammed into the elder one after another. Some burned, some pierced, and some burst apart only after digging into flesh.
They kept chipping deeper and deeper under the surface while Dravros tried to force more blood mana out to shield itself, but in that raging storm there was no way to keep those defenses steady. They broke apart almost as quickly as they formed.
Kai saw blood bursting out from torn flesh in thick sprays. He saw strips of ruined muscle hanging loose.
The ripped opened up so badly that dark bones showed through the shredded meat, slick with blood and dead mana, while parts of its wings looked more like burnt scraps than anything that could still fly. Flesh kept trying to close, only to be opened again by three more spells in the next instant.
The storm didn’t let the creature settle for even a breath.
Dravros screamed.
It kept screaming as the spells ripped into it from all sides, and for a few seconds, Kai truly believed that this might be the end of it.
If there was one proper way to kill an elder blood drinker, it was this. One had to give it too many wounds—too many points of damage at once for the regeneration to decide what to fix first.
An elder blood drinker could regrow a heart if given the chance, but Kai had no intention of leaving enough of a body behind for that to matter.
So he pushed the spell harder and the attacks grew even denser. And then Dravros’s screams rose in intensity again.
This time, something about the sound made Kai’s heart tighten.
It wasn’t frightening, but parts of the elder's body suddenly darkened further, and in the very next second, a wave of dead mana erupted out of it.
The worst thing he had predicted had happened after all. Even if some part of him had still hoped it wouldn’t.
But things were never going to go the way Kai wanted.
He already knew Dravros was a high-ranking member of Maleficia. That alone meant the creature would have what Kai had started calling blessings, gifts from Malefic that twisted the body and dead mana in ways normal enemies could not match.
He had wanted to kill Dravros before that blessing showed itself, but that had clearly never been in his hands.
Even as he watched, the elder’s body started stitching itself back together at a pace that made his chest tighten.
Flesh pulled over wounds and torn muscles closed. Another chain snapped apart under the pressure of that growing strength.
Kai didn’t waste time watching. He cut off the sixth-circle spell at once, letting it collapse, and grabbed at the mana still hanging in the air around him. Then he built another sixth-circle spell as quickly as he could.
It… wasn’t clean.
A few lines were off. The foundation of it felt shaky, unfinished, but he still pushed it out ten seconds later before Dravros could recover any more ground.
A burst of white fire tore through the storm.
It slashed across the space between them and hit the drinker’s remaining arm, spreading into the dead mana moving through his body. Black steam burst out immediately as the two forces tore at each other, white flames trying to devour the corruption while the dead mana pushed back just as viciously.
Seeing that only made Kai feel worse.
What he had just used was a sixth-circle spell, a stronger version of the white flames he had relied on so many times before, yet the dead mana in Dravros was potent enough to hold against it. Worse, the elder’s body kept changing in front of him. With every second, he looked less like a creature of flesh and more like something being rewritten by rot itself.
Dark tendrils moved under the skin of his chest in a grotesque way, like something alive was crawling through him from the inside.
Whatever blessing Dravros had received, it was far stronger than anything Selenia or Regina had shown.
Before Kai could form another sixth-circle spell, Dravros released another wave of dead mana. This one came out thicker, harsher, and it slammed hard enough into the storm around them that even Kai’s wind shield cracked under it.
He immediately flew back to get away from the spreading corruption, and in the very next second he understood what the blood drinker was doing.
As he watched, the dead mana didn’t simply disperse. It mixed into the storm and spread through the sand and wind and kept growing.
Panic hit Kai at once.
He knew exactly what that meant, and he also knew there was only one right move left. So he dropped every thought of pressing the attack further, gave up on tearing more flesh off Dravros’ body, and turned to run through the sandstorm instead.
For a brief moment, his mind flashed toward Maari, the other tribal, and anyone else who might still be alive somewhere inside the storm. But there was nothing he could do for them right now.
At least he had left a barrier behind. If luck held, Maari and the other man would still be safe inside the cave.
So Kai pushed more mana into his legs and forced himself faster.
He had gone deep into the storm by then, but behind him he could feel the dead mana spreading through the atmosphere, mixing with the ambient sand-aspected mana and trying to consume everything it touched.
Kai immediately created wings on his back and used them to drive himself forward even harder, moving through the storm like a missile.
Soon he saw the edge of it—where the sand had begun to thin.
The pressure loosened.
Kai pushed even more mana into his body until he finally broke free of the storm, and kept moving, trying to put as much distance between himself and that spreading corruption as fast as possible.
But then, a chill ran down his back, sharper than before.
Kai turned his head to look behind him, and the moment he did, he saw it.
A giant tendril of dead mana was rushing straight at him.
***
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