[Mana spring]
When the blast cleared a few seconds later, Darganth finally got the answer he sought. Slowly becoming visible through the cracks in space and time that filled the blast radius with glass-like bends, endless expanses of absolute nothingness, as well as time-loops and other temporal anomalies, the extent of the beast's wounds was revealed.
Foremost among these was the missing left antler. Reduced to nothing more than a broken stump protruding from the beast's head, the once-imposing highlight of the deer's appearance had been almost completely annihilated when Darganth's breath attack struck it directly. Only the fact that the beast had been channeling its own power into its antler had then saved it from at least a part of the blast of destruction that followed.
Though even with that, the left side of its head and upper neck were completely disfigured. Skin and fur alike were gone, giving the appearance that the beast had been flayed alive. But these areas were still intact compared to the part of its head closest to the blast. From the base of its left antler up to, and including, its left eye, the beast wasn't merely missing its skin but had its flesh and muscles annihilated, often all the way to the bone.
Despite this damage, however, Darganth wasn't satisfied with the outcome. For one, he had been hoping to immediately end the fight with this attack. And not just to ensure that their fortune couldn't still turn against them, but also to minimize the suffering the fearal beast had to endure. Because while it might merely be a wild animal empowered by mana without any higher intelligence or sapience, and which would gladly eat them for the mana in their bodies, they could at least gift it with as painless a death as they could manage, even if that wasn't much anymore.
Still, with this in mind, Darganth pulled on what little draconic mana he had remaining after this blast and prepared for yet another breath attack. But before he could even start charging it, his mana sense alerted him to at least two dozen clusters of mana just within direct contact with his body, with hundreds more appearing on his senses scattered across both the clearing and the forest.
Immediately recognizing that these mana signatures didn't match anyone from his group or any ogre, Darganth didn't hesitate to turn his dragon's breath onto the nearest cluster of them. Hitting the four individuals in it before they had any chance to react, the beam erased them in an instant before swaying to the side as Darganth turned his head. As it tore across the clearing on its way from enemy to enemy, explosions followed where the beam had passed, delaying some of the foes further away from closing in and adding to the chaos of the battlefield.
Only a full ten seconds later did the devastation of Darganth's attack stop as his reserves of draconic mana ran low and forced him to switch to physical attacks and regular magic. By then, he had also identified what exactly, not just he, but their entire group, including the ogres, were facing, giving him enough information to form an efficient tactic.
"Elementals." He mused as he briefly swept his gaze across the numerous metallic figures, both humanoid and not.
As living incarnations of their element, their forms were limited only by its capabilities. For the metal Elementals before him, that meant that their appearance varied greatly in a multitude of ways. Foremost, despite being called into the physical realm by the beast's magic, only slightly more Elementals than shared its leaning toward silver in how their magic manifested. The bodies of the others were meanwhile made of everything from steel to gold, with even the magical metals like Mythril and mixes of multiple metals being found.
In addition to that, the state in which these metals were also varied. While some were well-processed pieces of solid metal, others were crude ore or looked like rusted junk. A good chunk weren't even in their solid state, with these Elementals instead being made of a molten slag that shifted with their every move.
But one thing they all had in common, and which made it easy for Darganth to plan this fight, was the almost exclusive usage of their native element. Unlike gods, whose divinity simply didn't empower elements or spells that didn't fall under their area of influence, Elementals were almost completely incapable of using anything but their element. So, despite their impressive command over the element they were born from, countering them with specific tactics was rather easy, at least when fighting weaker individuals of their kind.
As such, he didn't have to strategize for long before the first water magic spells formed around him. Briefly building up pressure, the first soon shot out as a wave that spread in all directions. Sweeping up one Elemental after another in its path, it dragged the metallic figures back and cleared Darganth's vicinity.
Just as he then prepared to fire the second spell, Darganth was interrupted when a blast of searing flames erupted somewhere in the forest. Burning hot enough that he still felt the change in temperature despite being hundreds of meters away, he briefly paused as he scanned its origin with his mana sense.
What he found was Scalladras floating in a melted crater, the melted remains of the ground and some trees bubbling as a small puddle of lava beneath him. Around the crater, splashes of metal slag and broken pieces of warped material indicated that there had been Elementals near him before his attack, though Darganth couldn't sense any remaining life signals for at least a few dozen meters around him.
"Or one could just blast through them with brute force." Darganth said, letting out a sigh in response to this.
With it, he also unleashed his own spell. Immediately, numerous beams of condensed water erupted all around him, appearing out of the nothingness before shooting toward one metal Elemental each.
Though water elemental magic isn't known for its offensive potential, when these beams struck their targets, they cut through the ranks of Elementals with ease. Impacting with enough concentrated pressure to cut through all but the strongest Elementals, they knocked back any foes within two hundred meters around Darganth that they didn't kill directly, completely clearing the area in practically an instant.
Once he had this space, Darganth pushed off from the ground and rose into the air. Rolling his neck as he prepared himself for the next clash with the beast, he turned toward where their opponent was fending off Venrie's unceasing attacks. Floating far up and staying out of the Elementals range, she unleashed volley after volley of green energy, hammering the beast's slowly crumbling defenses with beams while trying to sneak smaller, guided projectiles past its shields.
Further into the distance, Darganth could also see his sister leading the ogres of the left flank into battle against the Elementals. Covering their allies in the shadow of her wings, she sailed through the air above their roaring horde and unleashed her mastery over gravity on their enemies.
Each time, her attack was announced only by a surge of her mana, with her massive form then diving from her position a few hundred meters in the air as she performed what essentially amounted to a dive bombing attack. In it, she'd release her mana as a simple gravitational pull that dragged the Elementals caught in its influence toward her, allowing her claws to easily tear through them and opening massive holes in the horde of hundreds that surrounded the ogres.
The sixty or so ogres below were however hard pressed to exploit these openings. Outnumbered two-to-one with dozens of new Elementals rushing toward them at every moment, they were constantly on the back foot. Though stronger individually, it took most ogres tens of seconds to bring down a single Elemental, attritioning them down both in terms of stamina and through the mounting number of small, by themself harmless wounds.
And unlike their foes' near-endless reinforcements, with new Elementals quite literally spawned into existence thanks to the lingering effects of the beast's magic, the rest of the ogres were in no position to help. Due to the Elementals that spawned in the forest, they were being similarly pressured as this group, with every loss swinging the tide further in favor of their seemingly endless wave of opponents.
The only thing preventing them from being completely overrun there was the constant storm that raged overhead. Conjured up by Serania, it darkened the skies as clouds obscured the distant universes, with their light being replaced by the crackles of electricity that flashed in the storm with every bolt of lightning that shot out from it.
Acting in conjunction with her, Allaire was also visible through the thinned-out treeline. Though considering that she was encased in her aura avatar and towered above the remaining trees, even an undamaged forest wouldn't have obscured her as she tore through the scores of Elementals that surrounded her from all sides.
Seeing this situation, Darganth briefly hesitated. Glancing back and forth between the beast and his pressured allies, he weighed the benefit of joining either part of the fight. On the one hand, Venrie's favorable position meant that he'd have a good chance at ending the fight if he were to help her. On the other hand, the Elementals were currently in a similarly advantageous position.
With that in mind, though it took a short moment, Darganth soon leaned to the side before accelerating. Letting his mana radiate outward as he raced toward the forest, water surged beneath his flying form and cascaded outward in a whirlpool that dragged any Elementals caught in it along.
Reaching the treeline in under a second, he then abruptly shifted his trajectory into a steep upward climb. A second later, Darganth then shot past two hundred meters of altitude and switched to the second part of his maneuver. Unfurling his wings, he brought his body to an abrupt near-halt before rolling backward. The moment he reached past the halfway point of this loop, he thrust his wings upward.
Immediately accelerating to his top speed, he reinforced his body as he sped toward the Elementals trapped in the maelstrom below him. Another beat of his wings pushed his speed past the limits of level flight, giving him ever so slightly more momentum to work with as he struck his spell with outstretched claws.
Despite this, no earth-shaking impact followed, even as Darganth should've already crashed to ground with the full momentum of his descent behind him. Instead, only a soft splash that was completely drowned out by the battle happening all around was audible as his form completely vanished into the maelstrom he dove into.
With him, the Elementals caught by the spell also disappeared. Dragged along either directly by his body or by the suction force created in its wake as he plunged through the pool of water from his spell, they too ended up in a seemingly endlessly deep mass of water that shouldn't be able to exist inside the barely five-meter-high spell.
Sinking through this endless expanse of water, Darganth's fall slowly slowed to a stop. Floating in place as the metal Elementals sank past all around him, he reached out toward the spatial component of the spell with his magic and prepared for the final step.
Then, he unleashed all of the stored kinetic energy from his impact. In an instant, the spell burst open as a flood of water from inside the expanded space came rushing into reality. Exploding outward, these hundreds of thousands of liters of water blasted through the surrounding forest, shattering trees, gouging through the soil, and sweeping Elementals aside.
In the middle of all of this, Darganth reappeared where the center of the maelstrom had been with his wings unfurled. Paying little attention to the devastation happening around him, he swept his gaze across the battlefield, searching and soon finding Scalladras.
With a nod from Darganth, the primordial of fire then jumped into action. Turning his attention away from the group of Elementals he had directed his flames against the moment before, he raised an arm toward the expanding wall of water and called upon his divinity.
"Boil."
Not relying on a spell, he instead commanded reality to listen, which it did. In an instant, the already destructive wave erupted into a second explosion as water turned to steam and expanded. Pushing against itself, the burning hot fog was scattered across the entire battlefield by the resulting pressure, literally melting through the metal Elementals too close to where the wave had been.
But more importantly, this shifted the elemental energies in the region enough for Scalladras to call upon an army of their own. Reaching beyond the veil into the realm of fire, he let his mana surge along this connection and shatter the part of the barrier keeping the Elementals from crossing.
However, unlike the accidental summoning of the beast, he also commanded the fire Elementals found there. As such, instead of manifesting in the hundreds as even the weakest among them tried to claw their way into the physical realm, filling up the capacity for crossings and thus preventing the stronger Elementals from manifesting, Scalladras kept those below a certain standard from using the crossing he had made.
That meant that only two dozen flaming figures appeared in the first second. Despite this, the combined pressure of their presence nearly matched the hundreds of metal Elementals that had manifested in the thirty seconds that had by then passed since the first ones had appeared.
What had been a slightly slanted but still contested fight thus quickly turned into a one-sided beat-down. Charging forth, the fire Elementals scattered across the battlefield to hunt the distant kin of theirs that were attacking Darganth's group.
Weakened by the humidity in their air as the two foreign elements clashed with their own nature, the metal Elementals only barely managed to mount a resistance. As such, the individually far stronger fire Elementals picked off every lone metal Elemental they came upon, with flaming weapons and limbs melting through the metal bodies of their opponents.
However, this didn't happen without losses on their side. Though initially acting with the element of surprise on their side and cleanly picking off all lone metal Elementals, once the latter started rallying, their numerical superiority showed its worth.
The moment one of the fire Elementals pushed too far into the crowd, metal Elementals would jump it from all sides. Rushing in without fear or care for their lives, they would continue their assault until their opponent was buried under the melted remains of their slain kin. Once trapped like this, the surrounding metal Elementals would launch all manners of attacks at their trapped foe, stopping only once the fire Elemental died in a fiery detonation.
Despite this wild abandon, Scalladras forces were slowly but surely regaining the ground the metal Elementals had taken. With it, they contested the lingering metal magic that had been blasted out when the beast's antler had exploded. Though this didn't reduce the number of metal Elementals being summoned, it forced them to appear in an increasingly small area of the clearing.
This naturally wasn't a chance that their side's heavy hitters would let go. Following Jennia's example, Alicia, Vika, and Sonita thus took up position at the edge of this area. Acting in coordination, they stayed at a distance and launched spells and breath attacks at the metal Elementals, turning a few hundred square meters of the clearing into a pandemonium of explosions and other elemental attacks.
Meanwhile, Darganth was by then already turning back around toward the beast. Having flown a quick circle over the forest to pick up some speed, he spotted the ogre chief as he led a small group of the strongest of his kin on the expedition in a charge against the beast. With a quick turn, Darganth joined them in this, covering them in his shadow as they joined in what was likely to be the final phase of the fight.