[Ouroboros' End]
A grin flashed across Darganth's fanged maw when he sensed Scalladras' massive spell manifesting. For one, he was at least slightly surprised that the avatar his friend currently acted through had enough power for such a display. While Scalladras had said he'd do something flashy enough that it would attract even the goddess' attention once the report reached her, any mythic spell would've probably been enough for that.
The fact that Scalladras took it this far helped not just ensure they'd win the fight, it would also undoubtedly ensure the goddess wouldn't just learn of Neandra's power but rather their whole group. Even after the surprise amid which the initial five solar flares struck, each blast of plasma that burst forth from the miniature sun brought down another mythic rank, with no amount of preparation and barriers stopping it from chasing down its target and incinerating them. Considering how that Darganth suspected they were the smuggler's elite, it was almost as valuable an ability as the fact that enemies that relied on the fire element had been weakened to the point of almost being powerless.
Sadly, his own foe didn't rely on the fire element. Even as the effect of Scalladras' spell washed over them, the black darkness element-attuned aura that surrounded the man still held strong. The man himself also only faltered briefly at the sight of his ally's plight before quickly regaining his composure and following through with the slash at Darganth's flank that he had charged in for.
Though a good angle to attack him from, Darganth had centuries to learn how to cover the blind spots of his true form. Putting more force behind the next beat of his wings, he pushed his body up enough to briefly stay airborne even as he tucked his right wing against his torso, not only protecting the area his foe was trying to strike but positioning the limb perfectly to lash out once he came into range. Muscles strong enough to keep his massive form afloat now pushed his wing toward the smuggler, sending the outer edge where bone and flesh protected the membrane crashing into the man's torso.
The impact sent the aura user flying. However, the attack itself also left Darganth unable to capitalize on it. Forced to unfurl his wings and flap them rapidly just to regain stable flight, he only turned to launch his breath attack when the smuggler himself had also recovered. This allowed the man to push his aura outward just in time, forming a gauntlet and shield on his left arm that caught Darganth's breath attack barely long enough for him to throw himself out of the way.
A moment later the counterattack came. Aura surged forth from the smuggler's form, gathering into two dozen arrows that hovered around him. The man's weapon followed soon after, with Darganth's foe bringing it down in a wide slash that unleashed a concentrated blast of energy.
Gathering fire magic into one of his claws, Darganth met the strike with a blast of his own. Flames shot forth and crashed into the projectile, detonating both attacks. Moments later, the arrows burst through the ensuing smoke cloud. Already accustomed to such exchanges, Darganth responded quickly by conjuring a portal in front of himself and sending the attack back at his foe before also charging toward the man.
Or rather, where his foe had been, because at the same time that the attack shot back through the smoke, the man rushed past it on the side. Catching the movement in the corner of his eyes, Darganth turned just as the smuggler raised his arm, likely planning to launch the arrows still hovering around him.
But before the exchange of attacks could happen, Neandra unleashed a wave of mana potent enough that it shattered the constructs and destabilized Darganth's forming spell when it slammed into them. The resulting explosion then sent both of them flying backward into opposite directions, with Darganth flipping multiple times as he tumbled through the air. The uncontrolled movements caused him to quickly lose altitude, with his descent only being slowed by rapid beats of his wings as he tried to stabilize his flight.
But this was made difficult by the smuggler leader's desperate attempt to escape Neandra, resulting in spatial distortions and cracks forming all across the battlefield. What it was that she did to prompt this change in her foe Darganth could only vaguely make out, with a storm clouding his mundane sight while a raging mixture of fire, air, and poison magic made it impossible for even his eyes to discern any details beyond the fact that she herself was at the center of it.
However, what he could see were the attacks the smuggler was contending with. Neandra was unleashing an onslaught with all three of her specialty elements. Solar flares tore across the sky with the same regularity as Scalladras had conjured them, making one of, if not the most difficult of the basic fire spells look as easy to cast as a regular fireball. Only the constant twisting and bending of space kept them from burning through the smuggler even as the entire area became filled with them.
This reliance on spatial magic was also the only reason the smuggler managed to endure the wind magic Darganth saw flying in between the solar flares, ones he recognized as spells of Neandra's own creation. Had the man used conventional barriers or shields, these would've almost assuredly managed to slip past them, being able to exploit even the tiniest of gaps in gaseous form before striking with far more power than that should've allowed.
Furthermore, Neandra wasn't the only one causing problems for the smuggler. On the opposite side, Venrie had just finished her own fight and was now turning her attention toward the foe Neandra was chasing in her direction.
Below her, the tree she had conjured moved for this purpose the moment she had set her mind to it. The leaves momentarily shook before two massive vines burst forth, swaying wildly through the air as they rushed toward the smuggler and swatted at him. From below, they were aided by roots that burst out of the earth well over a hundred meters away from the tree itself. They raced skyward to intercept the smuggler, splitting open to form hundreds of branches that tried to wind around the man.
Before Darganth could watch any further, his foe rushed at him from the side. Exploiting the brief moment when the constantly shifting space left a straight approach between them, the man closed the gap in moments and thrust his weapon into Darganth's shoulder.
Barely having had a moment to notice the approach and prepare for it, Darganth recoiled in pain. Reaching up with one claw and slamming it into the spot where he had been struck, he forced the smuggler to quickly pull back. Still, the wound the thrust had opened started spilling blood, dyeing the palm of Darganth's claw red as he pulled it back.
By then, the smuggler was already darting back in for another attack. Turning sharply as Darganth snapped after him with his maw, the man first tried to land a quick hit against his chin, but the slash failed to pierce his scales. A second strike then followed soon after, scraping across the scales on his neck and ripping a few loose but otherwise also proving ineffective.
When the smuggler swung his weapon for the third time, the man had moved past the base of Darganth's neck. Feeling the strike impact on his back, Darganth twisted in the air, rolling around his own axis and swinging one of his claws into the vague direction of his foe.
Unsurprisingly, such a poorly aimed strike was easy for the man to dodge. Watching the smuggler weave in between two of the finger-like digits on his claw, Darganth still almost caught him by tightening it into a fist. Simultaneously swinging his second arm upward, he grazed his foe as the sharp edge of one of his claws cleanly tore through a piece of the man's clothing. However, it cut through too well to catch him, allowing the smuggler to escape back out of Darganth's reach otherwise untouched.
But that was where the man's luck ended. As he rose to escape Darganth's reach, he in turn caught Neandra's attention. Darganth's gaze snapped in her direction as his instincts warned him of a power surge amid the storm, only for the raging tempest of magical energies that obscured her form to break open before his eyes.
Through the gap, Darganth briefly glimpsed at Neandra. Clouded in darkness as no light managed to break through the raging energies around her, her massive form was only illuminated by the flashing of solar flares surging forth from across the entire width of her wings. Each pulse illuminated the inside of the storm in an orange flash that briefly cast Neandra's shadow against the dark green clouds that filled the edges of the hollow space in which she was.
Neandra's gaze then flickered to this gap, briefly meeting Darganth's gaze before drifting toward his foe. The man only had time to notice this before a grin crept onto her maw, followed by a solar flare bursting through the gap in the storm.
The moment he saw the spell take form, Darganth averted his eyes. Only catching glimpses of the orange-red streak tearing through the air at the edge of his field of view, he had just finished turning his head when a radiant orange-red explosion lit up the area as the solar flare struck the aura user.
Darganth didn't need to look to know that there was nothing left of the man. Neandra's attack had struck true, and that wasn't something anyone on the battlefield besides Scalladras could survive, nor did Darganth think for even a moment that anyone could block.
The ultimate confirmation of that was when Neandra's attention shifted back toward the enemy leader just a moment later. Darganth's foe had distracted her for but a moment, the constant volleys of solar flares that chased her own opponent barely even lessened in intensity in this second.
However, when her full attention returned to dealing with the leader, the onslaught grew noticeably more violent, far more so than it had weakened before. In quick succession, three solar flares slammed into his shields, their combined power straining space itself as the shields distorted distance to twist the trajectories of Neandra's attacks so that they barely missed the smuggler.
But the real attack came when the storm then opened up. Neandra's maw already hung open, the air between her teeth shimmering as it heated up from the gathering energy of her breath attack. A moment later, the beam of fire burst forth with a roar. Tearing across the skies, it made reality itself rumble under the pressure of its power, with the realm fragment cracking open around the edges of the beam.
Through these gaps, the astral realm flooded into the physical reality around them. The physical world itself dissolved wherever the astral bled into reality, with matter and elemental energies alike being subsumed by the primordial nothingness that existed between universes. However, just as quickly as it appeared, these slowly expanding blobs of nothingness vanished as the realm fragment pushed back. Once it did, reality stitched itself back together, with air rushing in to fill the vacuum and returning the broken area back to its normal state. Yet at the same time, another tear would always open up mere meters away as Neandra's breath attack still pulsed with energy, creating a constant cycle of annihilation and reconstruction.
And that was merely the power the beam bled off as it raced toward the smuggler. The beam itself was brimming with enough power that even though the smuggler's shield tried to twist space and divert it, Neandra's breath attack continued straight. Wherever it passed, space shattered, with all but the deepest layers, those that belonged to the astral realm and were the foundation on which the realm fragment rested, breaking under its power.
Frantically, the smuggler called upon every drop of power he possessed. Darganth vaguely saw a pulse of silver energy erupt from his hand only to vanish into the approaching beam of fire, soon followed by a white burst of light magic after the smuggler summoned a glass container of some sort into his hand and shattered it. But just as the man's own spell, this borrowed power was little more than a candle before the storm that was Neandra's breath attack.
Venrie's aid only served to further hasten the smuggler's assured death. A surge of mana from her direction was all that Darganth sensed before their foe's skin started to shift and transform into brown bark. The man's expression twisted in agony during the process, with desperation flashing across his face as he roused his own mana to push back against Venrie's spell.
But before this clash could even start to determine a winner, Neandra's breath attack struck. Fire washed over the smuggler, encasing his body from head to toe in the massive beam that had erupted from Neandra's maw. Darganth still saw an elemental transformation wash over the man's form in a last desperate bid to escape the attack, but it wasn't enough. Even through the dense mana of the breath attack, Darganth sensed the smuggler's life force burn up almost instantly, his elemental transformation having bought him not even a single full second.
As Neandra then closed her maw and let her fire breath fade, silence fell over the battlefield. By then, Scalladras had already finished dealing with the elites that had joined the battle shortly after the smuggler's leader, leaving only the lone enemy facing Yldra from their powerhouses.
With the strongest from their ranks dead and now starting up at Neandra, Scalladras, Darganth, Yldra, and Venrie all flying or hovering behind them, the smugglers broke. The mythic ranks acted the fastest, abandoning their current fights in near unison and rushing to scatter into all directions. Most barely even dared to draw on their mana to defend themselves from the attacks that chased after them as the town's mythic ranks shook off the surprise of their sudden victory, likely fearing that anything more would draw the attention of their group.
Still, a few tried to fight on, being either too proud or too desperate to recognize their situation. While their colleagues fled in droves, their mana surged even further as they drew on every last drop of power they could muster, desperately lashing out at the town's forces. For some, that meant charging the nearest mythic rank. For others, it meant aiming down and trying to take as many of the food soldiers with them as possible. However, in both cases these men and women quickly became the target of all of the town's nearby mythic ranks, leaving them surrounded and making them the first group to fall, often even before they could rally any of their food soldiers to the cause.
Only a few chose neither of the two options and surrendered. Why only so few did that Darganth couldn't definitively say, but neither he nor that town's forces truly cared. The latter simply approached each one with caution, watching each of them in groups of two or three until mana-dampening items could be arranged.
The soldiers below took a moment longer to react, but they too recognized the futility of continued resistance and abandoned the fight. Some simply surrendered, but most followed the example of the mythic ranks and ran. However, unlike their colleagues, they didn't have the luxury of flight. Cavalry soon broke free from the rest of the town's forces, chasing down the enemy soldiers.
Unlike among the mythic ranks, surrender wasn't always accepted here. In the chaos, it became difficult to make the distinction between soldiers who rallied for a last stand and enemies who were ready to lay down their weapons. And with the chain of command breaking down in the sudden shift of pace, even friendly fire incidents became commonplace, soon forcing a few of the mythic ranks to break off their chases and reestablish some order among the units chasing the fleeing enemies.
Barely having a moment to overlook this happening, Darganth's attention was soon drawn away from the cleanup of the battle as a familiar starweaver descended nearby. Recognizing the insectoid creature standing at its helm, he briefly glanced at Neandra before moving to meet with the goddess' servant.