Chapter 405: For As Long As We Have Breath
"You utter, fucking dick!" Malzkael shrieked at the stone door that had just been slammed in Ferro’s face. She didn’t say it, but she couldn’t help but think What the fuck would the gods want us to have to do with that kind of demon asshole?
Her nerves were frayed from the hike. From the battle just days ago.
Ferro looked at Anko, who was having trouble breathing. "We need to stabilize her... start getting her to concentrate on her magic."
The girl had at least a broken arm - cracked at least, along with her ribs. She’d spent a lot of her mana trying to heal faster as they’d kept moving to get as far from the slavers they’d encountered as possible.
If Malzkael was at full form, she might have had the mana for healing, though it wasn’t her strong suit. But even with her reserves nearing two-thirds, she had experienced only pain-filled flashbacks when reaching for her magiform. The memory of having three of her four wings ripped off... The last one had become Maledict’s little reminder of her loss, as well as a branch from which to harvest her feathers.
Those feathers were growing back, and helped her absorb just a little more mana, but her wing was useless for flight. Just like she was being useless... Useless enough that she’d needed to trick Anko into helping her escape Maledict’s clutches.
Malz shook her head and focused. As much as she hated what had brought them together, Malz knew that she had more rapport with Anko than Ferro.
"Set the tent up over us. I’ll talk to her." As Ferro quickly got to work, she put as much calm into her voice as she could. "What you’re feeling is a large amount of foreign mana. You need to push it out - but don’t try to mix yours with it. Alternate pushing and stopping with your breath." After repeating herself a couple of times, Anko started to focus. The demonkin started to breathe, even though every other gasp made her body flinch with pain.
Her mana would be fighting hard to resist the demonkin’s, Anko realized, which meant they must be highly incompatible. It also meant that whatever fine control her mavenry gave her over her body, including the ability to block pain, would be to her detriment to use, given the sheer weight of the foreign mana attacking her. She would need all of it to resist long enough to be tempered.
Even as she did her best to guide Anko, she pondered what the black-quality mana around them meant.
That demon could just stand in a square of mundanes and barely-awakened and it would be a slaughter. Weaklings and the untempered would be crushed, their bodies exploding or even twisting apart at the whims of their internal magic getting a sudden, unstoppable injection of power.