406. Vs Dravros (3)
Time seemed to freeze for Kai the moment he saw the massive tendril of dead mana rushing toward him just after he broke out of the storm.
He knew right away that it was fast enough to catch him if he kept moving like this, so he used the oldest trick he knew.
He dropped.
At once, the flight spell cut off. The wings on his back vanished, and he fell straight through the air. He also used the opportunity to let off the wind shield since it was partially corrupted, but his focus remained on the tendril that still came at him, but now he had the angle he wanted. As he dropped, he raised his hand and released a spell.
A long, white dragon burst out of it and slammed into the tendril immediately, coiling around it and biting down.
The explosion that followed boomed through the air and threw Kai lower.
He moved at once. A spell formed through his legs, and a bed of wind appeared beneath him just above the ground. He hit it, sank into it for a breath, then pushed off again and launched himself back into the air, creating his wind shield back.
That was when he finally saw Dravros properly.
The blood drinker was hovering just outside the storm, but he barely looked like the same creature from before. His arm had grown back, and the rest of his body had changed. Darkness clung to him in an unnatural way and tendrils moved across his flesh, and through the air around it. His eyes—they had turned a deep blood-red.
The killing intent came off him like bolts of lightning hitting Kai like a physical force.
It was so thick and vicious that Kai was sure a few lower-circle Mages would have died on the spot just from being too close to it. Higher beings could kill with pressure alone, yes, but even then he had not expected Dravros to release something this heavy.
Kai immediately pushed more power into his defenses, shielding himself further against that crushing presence while keeping his eyes on the monster in front of him.
For a few seconds, Dravros simply hovered there in the air.
The tendril he had launched earlier pulled back slowly until he slid into his chest and vanished from sight. The white dragon Kai had used to stop him was already gone, leaving nothing between them now except open air and the weight of what Dravros had become.
The blood drinker stared at him with a face that had gone almost completely blank, and when he spoke, his voice came out deeper than before, stripped of nearly all emotion.
“You should have died quietly. Instead, you made me waste the great lord’s blessing. Do you even know what it cost me to use the power it gave me?”
Kai could guess.
Dravros was already standing at the level of a progenitor now, maybe even worse than one in some ways, and those tendrils made the whole thing uglier. Kai had never heard of a blood drinker using something like that before, not even in the dead mana-soaked future he remembered. Personally, he hated opponents with tendrils.
They were troublesome in every possible way. They were hard to predict, lock down and kill cleanly.
And these tendrils were worse because they were made entirely out of dead mana, which meant that he couldn’t rely on simply burning them away unless he used the right kind of spell at the right intensity.
So while Dravros spoke, Kai’s mind was already turning over ways to cut those things off.
An ugly scowl spread over the creature’s face when Kai didn’t reply, probably taking his silence for dismissal.
“Of course you won’t answer,” he said. “Honestly, I admire the fact that you are still standing. But not for much longer.”
The next second, Dravros raised its hands.
Kai frowned, then felt his stomach tighten as he saw something he had not expected at all.
The dead mana storm behind the blood drinker began to shift. Not like wind, but rather moved like something alive was waking up inside it.
Two tornadoes peeled away from the storm itself and came straight for him.
Kai didn’t have the luxury of thinking for long.
The moment the two dead mana tornadoes rushed at him, he thrust his hand forward. Thick sheets of ice formed in the air right in their path. The tornadoes slammed into them at once and tore straight through, breaking the ice apart into a rain of shards that scatter over the desert below.
Kai created more, and formed one wall and another. But each only bought him a breath at most.
Behind all of it, Dravros hovered in the air and watched.
“Let it go! There is no way for you to resist your death now, filthy human!”
Kai didn’t answer.
He couldn’t afford even that much distraction.
If his focus slipped even for a second, the storm would swallow him whole. He kept moving, throwing up more sheets of ice to slow the tornadoes down. But it was already obvious that the plan was failing. The storm kept grinding through every barrier he created.
He tried changing direction again and again. And much to his displeasure, the tornadoes suddenly began bending toward each other, slowly joining into one point as Dravros watched from above like a fisherman waiting for the hook to sink properly.
Kai saw the shape of it and kept his face hard, but his mind was moving faster than ever.
In truth, he knew Dravros was paying for this more heavily than the creature was willing to show. If Kai was right, the blood drinker’s insides were probably being torn up even now.
That much dead mana didn’t come without a cost—not even for something already twisted by it. Mana poisoning is still poisoning, and dead mana poisoning was the worst kind of it. Dravros would have to deal with that damage later if he survived.
The problem was that Kai may not get to that later.
The more he watched, the clearer it became that simply dealing with the tornadoes in front of him won’t solve anything. There was still more dead mana behind Dravros, more storm waiting to be shaped and thrown at him. So he dropped the idea of holding out like that any longer and changed strategy.
Mana surged through him, and this time, he called up one of his own firestorms, pushing into it as much power as the structure could safely hold.
Then, he sent it straight into the dead mana storm.
The two storms crashed into each other at once, both of them trying to devour the other.
Fire twisted against dead mana, the air between them tearing and screaming as the two forces chewed into each other.
Kai already knew how that clash would end. His firestorm would not last long against something like that.
At best, it would buy him a handful of seconds. So he turned those seconds into pressure.
His eyes locked onto Dravros and he created hundreds of the same reddish needles he had used earlier to burst open the drinker’s hand. They shot forward in a thick swarm, but Dravros saw them coming and immediately swept out a hand, pulling dark blood into a wide circle around himself to catch them.
Instead of letting the needles strike head-on, Kai curved them. The whole swarm bent around the shield, trying to reach Dravros from the sides.
The blood moved with them, stretching and twisting around the drinker to keep every needle away from his flesh. For a few moments, that was enough to hold the creature’s attention, and Kai used that time to think.
There was no straightforward way to kill Dravros anymore. Not with a clean bombardment of spells. Even if the creature’s regeneration was being pulled in too many directions and part of him was focused on not being consumed from the inside, Kai knew going all out with raw firepower would only leave him more exposed, and that was the last thing he wanted with the dead mana storm still raging nearby.
So he kept thinking through spells, paths and every option he saw in the moment.
Even after every consideration, only one answer remained—something that Dravros would never expect.
The problem was that it would also leave Kai exposed if it failed, and because of that he needed to keep enough mana in reserve to run the moment things went wrong. Running was not something Kai liked doing. Most of the time he would rather force a battle through than retreat from it.
But battles like this were not about pride.
They were about surviving long enough to win.
With everything resting on his shoulders, Kai would rather be called a coward than end up dead.
If things truly went wrong, falling back to Valkyrie Tower was still an option. He could recover there, think properly, and find another way to kill the drinker. That thought stayed in the back of his mind even as the two storms finally finished tearing at each other. In the end, the dead mana storm devoured his firestorm and rolled straight toward him.
Kai didn’t move. He had already planned for this.
The moment the storm surged closer, he let the needles Dravros was still guarding against burst apart. Around two dozen of them were still hanging in the air around the blood wall, and when they exploded, the force of it rocked the elder backward hard enough that the wall of blood splattered apart over the sand. The dead mana storm broke apart with it for a moment, the control slipping as Dravros lost focus.
Kai used that chance at once.
He shot higher into the sky, knowing he only had seconds before the elder recovered and answered with another attack. As he rose, he forced more of the soul mana he still had left through his mana veins.
Roughly half of it remained after using the earlier soul spell, and he could only hope it would be enough now.
Then he pushed that soul mana into his eyes. At once, they lit up gold.
The world around him changed in an instant. He could still see the real world, but now he also saw the spaces inside it, the thin hidden dimension resting in the gaps between things. Right there in the air, Kai started building a spell, one he hoped would be the end of Dravros.
Every second bled more soul mana out of him.
Unfortunately, Dravros recovered quickly. Dark arrows of blood came rushing toward him through the air.
With the soul spell still building, moving around too much would only ruin it.
So Kai stayed where he was and pushed mana through his legs instead. A spell structure formed there in a blink, and the next second ethereal hands of wind rose in front of him to catch the blood arrows racing his way.
The arrows hit hard enough to blast through the hands one after another, but they still lost enough force that Kai himself was not thrown back.
That alone was a win.
But his glowing golden eyes and the fact that he had stopped moving were more than enough for Dravros to understand something was happening. The blood drinker knew he was building a spell. He didn’t look worried, probably trusting that once the spell came, he would still be fast enough to dodge it or knock it away before it could land.
Still, he sneered, clearly irritated that the battle had dragged on this long.
He raised his hand and the storm behind him began to move once again.
Kai’s heart sank the moment he realised this was not just another part of the storm being pulled loose. This time, the whole thing was coming. The entire dead mana storm that had been held in check till now shifted at once and started rolling toward him, wide enough to swallow everything in front of it.
There was no way to defend against something like that for long. The only real answer should have been to run.
But Kai couldn’t run right now.
Dravros clearly knew that.
So he chose this moment to try and grind his body apart through the storm itself—and in the end, Kai had only one choice left. He took another of the circles he still had in reserve and poured all of it into the wind shield just moments before the dead mana storm hit him.
It felt like being struck by a cannonball coming from every direction at once.
The impact slammed into his shield and into his body through it, and even with all the extra mana reinforcing the barrier, Kai was pushed around in the air hard enough that he had to fight just to stay in one place. His whole vision turned dark. There was no sky anymore, no desert, no Dravros.
Only the thick, crushing black of dead mana all around him, pressing, grinding, eating away at the wind shield from every side. It roared against the barrier like a sea trying to crack open stone, and Kai could feel the shield straining under it, layer after layer of wind being worn thinner while the corruption kept trying to force its way through.
And the storm started winning.
Cracks spread across the wind shield one after another, thin at first, then wider, and Kai knew he had maybe two minutes at most before the dead mana would reach his body. Maybe less. At the very least, Dravros did not seem to be moving in to finish him personally.
Through the soul spell still weaving itself in the gaps of the world, Kai could feel the drinker staying in one place, completely unaware of what was forming around it. It probably believed the storm would be enough.
That turned the whole thing into a race. Kai couldn’t afford to lose it.
So he pushed more soul mana into the spell and refined the structure as fast as he could, even while more cracks spread across the wind shield. One of them split open enough to create a small hole, and dead mana leaked through it at once, sliding into the space inside the shield like black smoke. The corruption began to spread there too, and panic hit Kai hard enough to make his chest tighten.
He shifted away from that leak instinctively, but he already knew it would not matter for long. More holes would open. The shield was already failing.
So in the end, he stopped checking the spell. He stopped caring whether every line was perfect.
And pushed the last stretch of soul mana into it and activated it.
A bright golden light tore through the dead mana storm.
Right in the middle of it, Dravros let out a startled cry. The creature was still shielded inside a dome of dark blood, but that no longer mattered. The spell Kai had used did not belong to the same layer of reality the drinker was trying to defend against.
Golden bindings appeared out of nowhere and locked around Dravros’ body, pinning it in place so completely that even its tendrils stalled for a moment.
Kai could feel the elder trying to force more dead mana out to break free.
It didn’t work.
The bindings held. And then the screaming started.
Inside the storm, the golden restraints began to melt through Dravros’ body.
***
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