Chapter 50 - The Calm Before the Storm - III
"Cough... cough... cough..." I coughed, emerging from a cloud of smoke.
Before I could process what was happening, a stone pillar shot up from the ground, hitting me square on and hurling me across the room.
Still in the air, sharp stalagmites jutted out from the floor, trying to impale me.
"Dammit, Hera, let me breathe!" I shouted, using gravity to push my body into the air, dodging the spikes on the ground.
Here was an annoying dichotomy between my maids. Fighting Dália was like a sticky time bomb that accelerated its countdown with every minute of combat. The start was slow, controlled, and I had the pressure and initiative, until the bomb exploded and all my efforts were thrown out the window by sheer domination and terrain control.
But with Hera, it was the complete opposite. She was a powerful earth mage at the Lower Champion level, but she wasn't far from breaking through.
Unfortunately, her affinities were excellent at countering my main offensive element, electricity. And that was frustrating.
However, her affinity wasn't even the biggest problem I faced—it was her skills as an alchemist.
Her fighting style mixed earth attacks with smoke bombs, poison, disorienting gas, flashbang pellets, and so many other tools that it could only be classified as unbearably irritating.
And that was her goal: to irritate her opponent to the point where they threw away their rationality and attacked recklessly. That's usually when they'd lose. I was living proof.
My body floated in the air for a moment, in a zero-gravity point, as I accumulated lightning in my arms and legs. The gravity shifted, making me weigh ten times more and accelerating me toward the ground.