Once more, Kai and the Abhorroid clashed over the landscape as titans, both of them falling back. But Kai could feel the end approaching, his armor sloughing away.
He instinctively tried to drain all the power from the world around him and instantly knew that it wouldn't be enough. If he consumed everything, all the mana and matter and people, it wouldn't buy him more than a second in this form. His time was up.
Instead of trying to continue physically, he drew all of the remaining phased chakra toward his head and expelled it as the most potent stream of Baleful Breath that he could. As it unfurled from his titanic jaws, he could feel the rest of his body dissolving from the feet up, his very form expending itself on the attack. By the time the stream of darkness ended, he was nothing but his normal body hanging in the air.
Baleful Breath burned across the Abhorroid, dealing it terrible damage... but one eye burned within the darkness. The beam caught Kai out of the air and slammed him to the earth.
For a while he just hurt, exhausted by his use of the other form. Even though he had been relying almost entirely on the phased chakra, it had taken something from his as well, and taxed his abilities to their limit. His monstrous hunger had risen another rank, which was an ironic comfort when he lay on his back, barely able to move.
This time, the Abhorroid hadn't knocked him far from its location: the beam had slammed him down, not into the distance. The shadow was approaching him, slower than before due to all the monster's injuries, but inevitably. He might be able to fight, but if he couldn't get moving and those crimson eyes turned on him, he was finished.
The ground seemed to disappear underneath him and Kai fell onto his back. He should have been able to react to such things, but the giant battle had taken so much out of him that he struggled to reorient himself.
"You alright, Kai?" Gunjin knelt beside him, and there was a portal overhead. Kai forced his neck to the side, locating the Abhorroid and the city: at range, but still visible.
There were tiny forms fighting the monster. Elites, he realized, hurling phased attacks at range. They were barely flickers of light against the monstrous sphere of the Abhorroid, but they were actually dealing damage. It was taking all they had, but they seemed to be fighting it to a standstill.
"I'll live," Kai said, forcing himself up. "What's going on?"
"We're trying to win the battle, is what's going on." Gunjin snapped his fingers and Fornil and Juray moved from behind him. The healer raised a hand in front of Kai, restoring his burned and battered body, while Juray handed him a potion.
"It's your own mana and blood," she told him with a wry smile. "So I'm just giving it back to you, but I don't think I have anything else that can restore you."
"That's plenty," Kai said. He drank it gladly, the power flooding into his parched body.
"This is all we have," Gunjin told him, "because we're still fighting on a lot of fronts. Any chance you can use that over-sized form again?"
"Not a chance, not unless we can get more phased energy."
"In that case, I hope someone else has a plan, because I'm tapped and it doesn't look like that thing is going to stop."
.
..
.
As they fought over Floodisle City, Zae Zin Nim was struck by how different this battle was from the last. Her father had seemed overwhelming, unstoppable, the pinnacle of cultivation. By contrast, though Yangix was far more powerful, he seemed almost clumsy by comparison.
For the first part of the fight, he refused to engage with her in hand to hand combat. She thought that he was keeping his distance because he preferred to fight at range, until she managed to get close. When he attempted a palm thrust and she swept aside his arm effortlessly, she realized that it was because he couldn't fight her like this. He had looked skilled against unphased opponents, but his movements were merely competent, no more.
She almost managed to strike him then, but her palm collided with a surge of qi. Instead of destroying his organs, it merely sent him flying backward through the air. The rush of his qi hit her as well, but it only burned off part of her sleeve, leaving her arm untouched.
Unfortunately, she couldn't underestimate this opponent, even now. Her mastery of phases was strong, and increasingly comfortable after she reached Sky Soul, but his was automatic and constant. She needed to be careful to keep a handle on her new power as well, which sometimes surged wildly in directions she didn't expect.
"What... what have you done to yourself?" Yangix asked. He managed to draw himself up and stare down at her. "You may have obtained a little power, but... this is a terrible fire deviation. Your cultivation is forever-"
"I don't think you know what you're talking about," Zae Zin Nim said.
"You dare?" Yangix pretended to rage, but she thought she saw the insecurity behind the anger. "None of you in this miserable backwater have the slightest understanding of the truth of cultivation! You've seen how easily I took over this continent... you strut around calling yourselves Earth Souls and Sky Souls, but these are dead ends unworthy of true sects."
In response, Zae Zin Nim took a leap toward him. Yangix hurled another massive technique at her, but it struck her as unformed, an imitation of other techniques with nothing to support it except raw power. She spun in the air, wrapping her Coldfire Corona around herself, and pierced through, driving much closer to him.
"I think you're wrong about that," Zae Zin Nim told him. "I think y-"
"You think - always think, never know!" Yangix let out a cold snort and then sneered at her. "True cultivators do not hesitate, they act, seizing-"
Again she leapt closer. This time Yangix attempted to aim his finger at her, to explode her body with his first technique, but she was a shadow on the wind, never where his finger pointed. When he unleashed his qi, a rooftop exploded harmlessly and she was even closer to him.
"I think that if you could make your qi denser, you would, but you can't." Zae Zin Nim took a deep breath, circulating her qi within her dantian. "You're the one who took a cheap path to power, rushing to the second stage. If I reached the second stage right now, I would be far stronger than you, wouldn't I?"
"Preposterous!" Yangix tried to hurl another technique at her and hit nothing but air. "You couldn't possibly break through in this qi desert. Even trying is hopeless."
"I'm not going to try. I'm going to beat you here, and keep moving forward, and become stronger than you've ever imagined. But you won't be alive to see it."
She took another leap, and this time Yangix pulled out every trick he had. Walls of qi erupted in front of her and she braced herself, plowing through with the Pure Yin Shroud. But no sooner had she broken the walls than a flood of qi swept at her from all sides, forcing her to duck low, skidding across the ground.
Zae Zin Nim swept back up to her feet only a step away from him... but Yangix had his finger pointed at her. While she had been dodging, he had been building up all the qi he could in his finger, preparing his central technique.
"Die!" he screamed.
"No." Zae Zin Nim raised a hand and felt the qi strike her, but she was a complete cultivator now, every element of her power fused together with her Blackblood Physique. All his technique attempted to do was tear apart the opponent's body, and it could not overcome her, so her hand pressed closer to him.
"That's... that's impossible..."
"This technique..." Zae Zin Nim reached out and grasped his finger. "This is amateurish."
She snapped it backward and Yangix let out a scream of pain. As he collapsed to the ground, coughing up blood, Zae Zin Nim realized that he expected all his opponents to be fragile because he was: all destructive power and no endurance, expecting every battle to end in an exploding body while he laughed and boasted. Now that he faced someone who was close to his equal, he folded.
But she wouldn't grow lax, not now. First Zae Zin Nim stomped her foot into his chest, cracking multiple ribs and making sure he was stunned. She could have killed him then, but she had a better idea.
"Cragrila?" As she called the name, she extended her hand to one side. "I'd like to borrow something back from you."
The Krysali woman appeared beside her and set the Deathwind Spear in her hand.
"Thank you." Zae Zin Nim stabbed the spear into Yangix and then copied both her spouses: she began to drain all of his life qi into the spear. "This should be more than enough."
"You're going to use his qi to ascend?" Cragrila asked.
"No, his qi is impure." That wasn't quite accurate, because she had abandoned simplistic ideas of purity, but it was definitely true that his qi was unsuitable. If she tried to take it into her dantian, she would only weaken her own cultivation... and she had told the truth, she was aiming for heavens far above Yangix. The only way to make use of his qi would be to filter it through another method...
At last it was done. Yangix was a husk of himself, no longer phased, and Zae Zin Nim was too disgusted to even kill him. She turned back to Cragrila, keeping her grip on the spear that now thrummed with overflowing qi.
"There are still three invaders on the continent," she said. "I only have one potion, and I have to go... can I take this and trust you to handle everything here?"
Cragrila gave her a firm nod, as if they were back in the revolution. Behind her, Wan Fei limped closer, astonished, but when their gazes met, he bowed respectfully.
So Zae Zin Nim pulled out the teleportation potion and drank, hoping she wasn't too late.