[Ouroboros' End]
Lowering her staff, Serania felt her magic raging above the battlefield and smiled. Through it, she could sense everything beneath it, allowing her to know the positions of everything beneath the dark clouds, from the mightiest mythic ranks to the most insignificant mana-less soldier.
Invisible waves of static electricity pulsed downward from the clouds, perfectly mapping the physical world beneath them and creating a mental map for her with each mana signature, however faint, highlighted. It wasn't perfect, far from it, but it was enough. Enough to sense the dragons momentarily pulling away from the battle to recover. Enough to feel the clashes of magic as mythic ranks collided in battle. And enough to sense the two enemies that moved into position on opposite sides of her while spell engines readjusted their aim toward the edge of the clouds.
The latter of these would be the first ones to go, she decided. Raising her left arm, the loose sleeves of her robes shifted to reveal a skin-tight layer composed of dragon scales beneath. At her hand, this layer of armor ended in five metal prongs in the shape of a dragon's claws that covered the backside of her fingers. Both pieces of equipment then lit up with enchantments as she channeled her magic through them, shortly followed by a surge of lightning that erupted from the metal claws on her fingers.
Fanning out as it rushed forward, the lightning stretched across nearly fifty meters before the spell took form. Centered around a single massive lightning bolt, two massive branching bolts split off to the side and swept backward while a horizontal split at the front of the bolt finished the rough outline of a serpentine dragon. To round out the picture, millions of tiny static discharges surged outward around this core, forming the appearance and texture of wing membranes and scales around and in between this skeletal structure. So detailed were these that at the front, even teeth and eyes were formed in what was the figure's head, completing the draconic replica made from pure lightning.
"Dragon lightning." Serania intoned as her spell finished taking form, only for her to unleash it in the same instant.
The moment Serania unleashed the spell, the dragon's coiled form jumped forward. Twisting and rolling in the air as it streaked across the skies, it dove straight toward the first of the spell engines. The soldiers stationed around the magical machine quickly responded with a desperate attempt to stop Serania's spell, launching arrows and weak magical attacks toward the lightning dragon, only for all of them to burn up upon reaching her spell.
Then, the lightning dragon struck. Opening its maw, the construct did as a real dragon would've and bit down onto the spell engine as it crashed into it. The lightning formed teeth easily cut through the wooden cart atop this spell engine was mounted, sending splinters flying in all directions. When they then struck the iron structure that held the majority of the enchantments, the lightning surged through the weapon's metallic body, charging it statically before the impact flung it into the distance.
Furthermore, the spell didn't end there. Carving through the earth as it pushed past where the spell engine had stood, its trajectory leveled out as it turned toward the next target. In its wake, it left a deep gash in the soil as the lightning dragon headed for the next spell engine.
By then, Serania was already forced to shift her attention toward the two mythic ranks. Confident that neither of the other two spell engines could dodge, she left her spell to follow the path she had given it and turned toward the aura user approaching her.
Raising her staff, Serania called down a lightning bolt in her enemy's path. As the woman then turned to the right to dodge, she sent a blast of wind magic toward her. This again forced the aura user to dodge, causing her to veer off course even more.
Before Serania could chain another spell into this series, the other mythic ranks that had moved to encircle her approached from behind. Spinning around the moment she sensed him setting into motion, Serania responded to this with a swing of her staff and a lightning whip conjured from it.
Though her enemy responded to the strike by raising the spear he fought with, the whip largely missed its mark. Winding around the shaft, its tip only graced the man's cheek, searing a small gash into the side of his face.
But that was just the lesser of two consolidation prices for the lightning whip coiled around the spear three more times. When Serania then pulled sharply, the crackling energy construct tore through the weapon's wooden shaft. Wooden splinters shot out as the lightning whip tore through the weapon, disarming her foe as his weapon was torn in two.
Yet Serania didn't manage to follow up on this opportunity. Already holding out her left arm and gathering lightning into her palm, she was forced to abandon the attack on her second foe when the woman he was working in tandem with dashed toward her back, likely intending to approach stealthily and take her by surprise.
'A mistake', Serania thought. The woman had barely even started accelerating before Serania had sensed her moving.
Her answer also followed immediately. First, a chaotic discharge of electricity kept her other enemy off her back as she turned toward the woman. Then, the smell of ozone filled the air as Serania gathered her magic, causing her foes' eyes to widen in a mixture of shock and fear.
Then, before the woman could react, the dark clouds above burst open as a crimson red bolt of lightning shot down. Striking Serania's foe in the back, it tore through the woman's torso as if her armor wasn't there. In one moment, the aura user was racing forward. The next moment, her body jerked back with one final spasm just before her eyes glazed over and she started to fall toward the ground.
This turn of events even shocked Serania herself. Never having expected this strike alone to kill her foe, she was already in the midst of preparing a follow-up, intending to fully exploit the fact that she could call down lightning from the existing spell without a separate cast and intending to utilize it for a rapid series of attacks. For a brief moment, she stood frozen due to this, the wind magic gathering around her staff almost growing uncontrollably before she snapped out of it and dispelled the spell.
Still, this momentary lapse was enough for the spearman to close the distance. Though only armed with two halves of his broken weapon, he reeled back with the arm that held the sharp tip and lunged for Serania's back. His strike was met by a swing of her staff in turn, battering it aside as Serania spun around to face him.
Despite also being a pure mage, the smuggler kept pressing in close quarters. A swing of the lower half of the spear collided as Serania raised her left forearm to block, sending a painful jolt up her arm. Pivoting, she countered by raking the metal claws of the same arm's gauntlet toward her enemy's face, forcing a dodge backward that gave her enough space to swing her staff.
Crossing the two pieces of his weapon in front of himself, her opponent managed to catch her swing. Gripping her staff with her second hand too, Serania then pushed down onto her opponent's block, leveraging the fact that as a beastwoman, she was stronger than the human she was facing to force his weapons down until her staff pointed at the man's head.
Letting her confidence in victory show through a smirk that crept onto her face, she cast the spell that would end their fight. "Lightning charge."
Immediately, electric currents surged forth from her body, coiling around both her flesh and her weapon. With the rumbling of thunder, she was then catapulted forward, a trail of lightning in her wake as she rushed forward multiple hundred meters in a single instance. In the process, the cloak of lightning around her hardened into both armor and weapon, protecting her and forming a sharp tip as she drove her staff into her enemy's chest. As a result, the usually blunt tip of her weapon pierced through the shield spell that encased her opponent's body like a second layer of skin and sank deep into his flesh.
Coming to a stop some two hundred meters away from where she had clashed with her foe, Serania pulled back her staff and let the man's body plummet to the ground. Now, rid of her last opponent, she used the moment of calmness to survey the rest of the battlefield.
Darganth and much of the rest of their group still had not joined the battle, she noted to herself as she watched smugglers and townsfolk clash. Of their group, only Allaire and the vampire following Alicia were already fighting, mingling with the town's forces and appearing as just another mythic rank amid the almost two hundred their side was fielding. Admittedly two particularly powerful mythic ranks thanks to both their own prowess and the by far superior equipment the two wore when compared to almost all other combatants, but still not as attention-catching as Darganth, Scalladras, and the rest would be once they joined the fight.
Next her attention wandered to the ruined remains of the three spell engines that had aimed at her. As she had predicted, her spell had struck true even against its second and third target. More than that, the dragon-shaped lightning construct had seemingly struck a few dozen of the smuggler's common soldiers. Perhaps Serania should be feeling more compassion as she looked down onto the battered and charred remnants of armor and uniform that lay between two of the spell engines she had targeted, but they stood in the way of Darganth's plans, if not necessarily on purpose, so she found nothing of the sort in her.
Only then did her focus shift toward the battles of the mythic ranks.
Even when compared to these, she hovered far above, her own battle only ever having moved upward, whereas not even half of the combatants had managed to stay afloat amid the domains of different aura users that ran rampant below. Through her spell still clouding the skies, Serania sensed these happenings from across the multiple kilometers-wide battlefield all at once, allowing her to lend her support where necessary.
Somewhere nearby, an aura user was too busy fending off the spells one of the smugglers' mages threw at him to notice the second enemy that sneaked behind him. Lowering her arm to point in their direction, Serania conjured a wind current that pulled their ally toward her just as this second enemy dropped the darkness magic that had hidden his approach and slashed his two short-swords toward the town's mythic rank.
When the aura user's blades then passed through empty air where just before one of the town's mythic ranks had hovered, much to the man's surprise, Serania was already shifting some of her attention elsewhere. Another casting of dragon lightning, a spell she truly favored for the power it displayed in the hands of someone who, like her, could draw on the legend of dragonkind to empower it, saw an enemy that had overextended during the pursuit of an opponent fall to her might.
In another instance, a twist of her wrist conjured a small hurricane amid a section of the enemy army that scattered its soldiers and delayed two mythic ranks that had briefly pulled away from the fighting. A few moments later, she spun into almost the exact opposite direction and layered an enhancement spell onto over three hundred of the town's troops as they rushed after the ogres into an opening the latter had created, speeding up their charge toward the smugglers' reserve in that area with winds that sped up the soldiers every step.
However, all of this didn't go unnoticed by the other mythic ranks in the vicinity. And though her allies did a good job of keeping all of the enemies occupied and away from her, with the second one at first being accidental and only becoming purposeful with this attention that fell on her, there were bound to be mistakes at some point.
Thus, it didn't surprise Serania when one enemy found an opening. As long as her allies kept most of the over thirty enemies found within a kilometer of her at bay, she doubted she'd have a problem.
This sentiment didn't change even as temporal magic started to form around the enemy heading toward her. In some sense, she felt, it might even be the best-case scenario. While she rarely sparred with Darganth during training, she still watched him regularly during it, so there were few who could claim to know more about time magic than she. Perhaps even some mythic ranks specializing in it weren't as knowledgeable in what time magic could do. But in either case, this familiarity negated one of the advantages that using time magic brought, namely its rarity and the lack of experience many had in how to best counter it.
Serania meanwhile knew that, ironically enough, time and patience were her best weapon. Practically, this meant a fight of attrition and to never overly commit to one singular attack. Time magic excelled at manipulating the user's surroundings. But doing so was exhausting. As such, her plan was to never cast a spell where that cost was worth it and never commit to the offensive enough that any sort of temporal trick could create an opening.
With a snap of her fingers, the air between herself and the approaching enemy thus became flooded with static electricity as well over a hundred spheres of crackling electricity scattered into the area. So fast did these appear that it forced the time mage to call upon a spell to dodge. Temporal energy surged in response, erasing around three dozen of the magical constructs as time turned back to a point before the spell had formed.
Serania didn't even pause a moment at this. A quick motion of her staff caused her foe to be assailed by three different formless spells. Despite the sharp drop in potency as they came into contact with the mage's own magic, all three took hold on him. From one moment to the next, his speed dropped by a third, causing him to lurch forward as his momentum still carried him further for a brief instance. Simultaneously, lightning shot through his veins, not enough to do damage even to the barely enhanced body of a mage but enough to momentarily tense the muscles and cause a short lapse in focus.
However, before Serania could follow up on this, the mage's form briefly blurred as temporal magic surged around him. Though only lasting for a fraction of a second, Serania immediately knew that it was effective as she felt the spells placed onto her opponent vanish as the physical attacks had done before.
Still, this was expected. As such, Serania wasted no time before forming the next spell and hurling a volley of electric spars at her foe. Though unlike the previous attacks, her opponent managed to avoid these without relying on likely mana intensive time spells, his dodges still kept him at bay, which ran in line with Serania's tactic.
But this success didn't last much longer. While another three magical exchanges also saw Serania achieve advantageous trades of mana reserves with her opponent, doing so took up her entire focus. As such, her attention was spread too thin to still notice every detail of the battlefield around her, leaving her oblivious when another of the mages fighting with the town's mythic ranks suddenly vanished in a brief surge of spatial magic.
A second later, the woman reappeared behind Serania, spatial blade already in hand. Only then did the latter register her presence, though that was already too late for a planned counter.
Instead, Serania was forced to disappear in a burst of wind and lightning. Both surged away from her position, splitting apart to flow around the spatial blade without touching it, before reconstituting into her form almost half a dozen meters away. As she reappeared, she was visibly pale from the strain even such a short moment in the elemental body state had placed on her mana reserves, something that forced her onto the defensive as the space and time mages both kept pressing.
The first bolt of temporal energy was caught in the invisible shimmer of a lightning magic barrier that Serania conjured in front of her palm. Shifting her arm, she then caught the crescent slash of spatial magic that flew toward her in it too, though that left it unavailable to deal with the second bolt the time mage shot toward her. Still, a short burst of wind magic catapulted her far out of its path, even managing to create enough space to give a moment to prepare two more defensive measures for the next wave of attacks.
Though that proved unnecessary just a moment later. Already moving the barrier of raging winds before her to intercept the space mage's next spell, Serania watched as space ripped open another time and Darganth burst onto the scene. Already having his spear readied to strike, he ripped through the approaching spatial magic projectile with a quick slash before continuing onward onto the two mages.