Chapter 241 – In the Depths

Mirian started her attack with a barrage of spells, first opening up with greater lightning and then following it up with disintegration beam and force drill. The first spell splashed against the centiscerator’s carapace, sending electricity dancing across the black plates. The beams hit her target, but they seemed to do little. The force drill was the most effective, sending splinters of the carapace out, but she’d underestimated the spell resistance the abomination had. Despite its lack of a soul, the plated carapace was nullifying a great deal of her spellpower. Briefly, the thought that such a thing should be impossible flitted through her mind, but there was no time to think about it.

The abomination was nearly on top of her when Mirian used accelerated levitation to zip to the side. Several of the beast’s spines scraped over her black shield. She turned the arcane force generated from absorption into shatter stone spells. The centiscerator wasn’t actually made of stone, but the destructive force spell didn’t actually need to target rock to be effective. Hairline cracks formed along the places she hit.

Then, the creature skittered around in a circle, only as it moved, the front of it disappeared.

Mirian immediately closed her eyes, using her active divination spell to feel for where it was moving in the fourth dimension. It’s coming around to hit me in the back.

She zipped upward, sending force detonation spells out into the place the centiscerator was moving through. This time, she was rewarded with a screeching sound, but she’d forgotten to keep an eye on all the parts of it. Dozens of thin spines erupted from its back half, all aiming for her spot in the air. Her black shield was overwhelmed, as the needles had the same spell-resistant properties that the abomination’s carapace had. Three needles skewered her, piercing her gut, her shoulder, and her thigh. Her shield spell dissipated.

Mirian attempted to blink away, but she should have known better than trying to use a dodge through the fourth dimension against a beast that moved through it naturally. The volley of spines followed her and two more of them hit her, one in the chest and another in the leg.

Worse, though, she’d failed to do anything with the excess arcane energy her black shield had provided before it was extinguished. The arcane energy erupted like a cloud, parts of it spontaneously forming into other energies. Bits of electricity and flame spat out as she felt random pushes and pulls against her body, the force pushing around the spines embedded in her. Her concentration failed, and she released the other spells she’d been maintaining.

As she fell from the air, Mirian shifted her dervish stance away from Dusk Waves to Lone Pine to manage the pain. She was also lucky. The splash of arcane energy that had just gone off seemed to confuse whatever senses the centiscerator was using, and so as it reared up on its back legs and tried to bite Mirian, its legs and mandibles struck at the cloud where she’d been.

That gave Mirian a moment to put a shield back up. She fell back on prismatic shield, since she was far more practiced using it, just in time to ward off the centiscerator’s body as it dropped its front segments down, trying to crush her.

Mirian grit her teeth, using a move objects spell to rip the spines out of herself, then flooded her body with soul energy to heal it. Then, she pulled heavily from her soul repositories to coat her offensive spells—

—only to find the gathered soul energy sucked away by the enervator that her father was locked in combat with. She caught a brief glimpse of the bindings Gaius was weaving. It seemed right now he was caught in a defensive battle.

Then her attention was forced back to the centiscerator that was trying to crush her. Letting it consume more soul energy had to be a mistake, so she instead focused on the raw power of her spells, slowing her casting down in favor of hitting consistently in the 120 myr range.

She cast shatter stone once, twice, three times—then again, and the centiscerator reared back, letting out a terrible cry that seemed to come from every direction at once. Fragments of it were splashed across the room, and its head segment was in ruins.

Mirian turned her attention back to the enervator—it was doing something to dissolve Gaius’s bindings, and he was in a desperate struggle to ward it away—but then the headless centiscerator redoubled its attack, coiling around her not just in three dimensions, but in four, and then squeezing.

Mirian remembered, too late, that abominations of the Labyrinth weren’t anything like the life on the surface. Heads were just aesthetic choices to them. They contained no real necessary functions. Eyeball had alluded to all Elder creatures having similarly distributed biology. There was no weak point; she needed to destroy all of it.

Her mana was rapidly draining as she was forced to pump more and more of it into her prismatic shield just to keep it at bay. Mirian manifested Eclipse, driving the adamantium blade deep into the creature, then following up the attack with multiple force drill spells in every direction. She became a porcupine of force spells, each whirling cone of jagged force energy sending out splashes of carapace. The abomination didn’t relent, but her outward push of spells had given her enough room to maneuver. She shot upwards again with an accelerated levitation, then hit the coiled up creature with a full powered cascading inferno. Even through her shield, Mirian felt the heat wash over her as blinding flames streamed down and exploded, forcing the centiscerator back.

As the beast recoiled, Mirian didn’t relent. She continued levitating in the air and sent down spell after spell, beating the abomination back with force blast spells. With its carapace mostly shattered, she now used an enhanced version of her force blades spell.

A standard force blade spell involved around four or five thin lines of force, pushed at the target. Her modified spell involved dozens of blades coming at the centiscerator like a storm, the slashes repeating like waves of rain. The abomination screamed again, but Mirian’s shield suppressed the worst of it. It attempted to skewer her in the air again, but this time she was ready and wove around, dodging the spikes it flung at her as she continued her assault. The force blades tore up chunks of sinewy flesh and tendon, but the centiscerator kept moving. For all that it looked like an ice carnipede, it was far more resilient.

Then she felt a sucking on her aura, and the places where her mana was connected to her spells was siphoned away. She fell from the air, landing hard, and looked to her father.

He was retreating across the room, desperately putting up walls of runic bindings as the enervator advanced on him, floating casually toward the necromancer. Its four arms kept jabbing at Gaius, and every time they did, they sliced through his wall of bindings and sent ripples through his outer soul energy. No doubt, his own aura was under attack too. And if the enervator can do that while still interfering in my fight…

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Mirian slammed the centiscerator up against the wall with a force barrier, then aimed a full power disintegration beam at the enervator. She watched in horror as the beams fizzled. If the centiscerator’s spell resistance was high, the enervator’s spell resistance was unbelievable. Arcane spells would be useless against it.

The enervator burst through another of Gaius’s barrier and Mirian could see it siphoning pieces of him. She charged in, dashing through the air, slashing through one of the spike arms of the abomination. As the severed limb fell to the ground, the enervator spun on her, its three arms jabbing in and out. Her prismatic shield burst apart as they hit it, and she could feel the abomination trying to establish siphons to her aura. Now it was her turn to backpedal, trying to throw up a defensive wall of runic bindings and cutting apart the bindings the enervator was weaving.

The distraction lasted just long enough.

By now, the enervator had collected enough soul energy that Mirian could sense it, rather than the void it had held before. Gaius’s black line spell smashed into the central crystal where the soul energy was densest, detonating it. As untamed soul energy burst out from the enervator, more cracks appeared in its crystal. White light streamed out of the openings, cloud-like wisps floating about instead of blood. That meant it was leaking arcane energy. Hope flashed through Mirian. It can be killed. Then she felt something strange. The enervator was still moving the soul energy it was collecting somewhere, displacing it. As the movement of it increased, her divination now detected its movement. It was going from the enervator to the—