Velik’s mana reserves were dry. He’d blown it all super-charging that [Dread Lance]. He was hurting, too, having done more to harm himself than Zelamir had managed the entire fight. Now was not the time for someone else to interfere.

Snarling, he resisted the newcomer’s attempt to force his arm back, but the man’s strength was truly monstrous. Even if Velik had been fresh, he wasn’t sure he could have overcome that level of sheer physical power. His free hand snaked up to grab hold of the stranger’s arm, but even that wasn’t enough to stop the man.

“You are far stronger than anticipated,” the man said. “And your arrival without your escort is an ominous omen. Tell me, what did you do to them.”

“Same thing I do to every monster I meet,” Velik spat out. “Did you think your little group was special just because you’re the biggest bullies in town?”

It was easy to run his mouth, but Velik knew he was in trouble. Eslaka’s words came back to him. ‘The strongest is Reisha.’ Surely that was this man. Even with all the essence Velik had consumed, he couldn’t match the man’s physical might.

“Powerful, but wild, undisciplined. Willful, contemptuous. I fear to think what balances you’d upset were you given leave to do as you pleased,” Reisha said. With a sudden surge of power, he snapped the bones in Velik’s arm and pried his fingers loose.

Zelamir fell back, his eyes glaring balefully at Velik. He’d resumed his human form even before he hit the ground. “An astounding specimen.”

“I think we shall have to destroy it,” Reisha said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“But, Reisha, the possibilities. We could make new divine beasts!”

“I believe this one has already eliminated at least one of our number.”

“Impossible,” Zelamir protested, but a hand came up to his throat as he said it, and he didn’t sound so sure.

Technically, Velik had killed two divine beasts, though he was willing to call it one and a half to give Eslaka partial credit. He liked to think he’d have killed Tesir on his own given enough time, but there was no doubt it would have been a long, drawn-out battle. But the important thing was that the bastard was dead, not who’d done it.

Velik didn’t just stand there waiting for them to finish their conversation, of course, but he was learning something new: his regeneration didn’t work on a broken arm if the man who’d broken it was still holding it there. It was actually an extremely distracting sensation, a strange mix of pain from the break itself and a constricted itching where his arm kept trying to force itself back into position and failing to do so.

Stopping his regeneration wasn’t something Velik had ever considered trying. It was just in the background, keeping him in perfect physical condition. But now, his magical reserves were so low that he couldn’t afford to waste anything trying to heal a wound that wasn’t healing. He needed more power to drop a [Dread Lance] right into Reisha’s chest before he could worry about fixing his arm.

“Halifex never came back,” Reisha said, unconcerned with Velik’s struggles to free himself. “This human isn’t sneaky enough to have evaded him, but he is surprisingly strong. I suspect the two did meet, and Halifex failed to overpower him.”

Zelamir’s eyes gleamed as he considered Velik. “All the more reason to keep the specimen, at least long enough to figure out how to replicate the results. Once I have that process perfected, we could easily triple our numbers just by rewarding some of our trusted subordinates.”

The mana was right there, just a few feet out of reach. It hung off Zelamir in knots, waiting for Velik to consume it. Either the fox beast had correctly gauged the radius of Velik’s skill, or he’d gotten extremely lucky in his positioning. Probably it was a little bit of both, the knowledge and experience to recognize a mana consumption ability and take an educated guess at how far it extended.

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I could up the range, but spending essence right now could be… disastrous, and that’s putting it lightly.

The idea that he was going to be locked in a cage and used as a test subject for Zelamir’s experiments was objectionable enough without considering what would happen when his LPS started to starve. Best case, it would cannibalize one of his essence configurations, breaking his skills back apart and leaving him weaker. Worst case, the whole thing would fall apart, leaving him with a mass of essence he had no way to control.

In short, capture was not an option. He needed to win or, failing that, escape. The frustrating part was that he’d thought he’d prepared enough. He was more than twice as powerful as when he’d battled Tesir. It should have been enough. Against Zelamir, it was. But Eslaka hadn’t been joking when she’d said that Reisha was on a whole different level.

Velik had been stupid and arrogant. He could have easily ramped up his power even higher if he’d just taken a month or two, if only he’d known what he had wasn’t enough. He’d thought he’d been prepared, but he’d underestimated exactly how large of a power gap there was between Reisha and the other divine beasts.

There was no use berating himself over it. For all he knew, if he’d tried to keep hunting for essence and delayed his approach, Reisha could have come out looking for him and forced the confrontation. Either way, it didn’t change the situation he’d found himself in now, one where he needed to replenish his magical reserves if he was going to win.

It was a simple problem. Reisha had him by the arm, the mana he needed was just out of reach, and Velik couldn’t physically overpower his captor. Fortunately, simple problems often had simple solutions, and animals all over the world had figured this one out a long time ago.

Velik manifested a flickering blade of darkness, a spear head with no handle, and cut his arm off at the elbow.

His magical reserves evaporated, and with them gone, his regeneration no longer blunted the pain. It spiked to a level Velik had never felt before, threatening to overcome his reason completely as he fought through it. There was no time to truly grapple with and overcome the pain though, and besides, he had a better solution standing just a few feet away.

Leaving Reisha holding the shattered limb while it spurted blood all over, Velik pivoted and pounced on Zelamir. [Sun Eater] started its work, devouring the divine beast’s mana net, and instantly, Velik’s regeneration kicked back in. The pain dulled to a manageable level and the stump of his arm stopped bleeding as new meat grew.

The next three seconds were a chaotic blur of motion as Reisha leaped to restrain Velik again. He twisted about like an eel, writhing around Zelamir and dragging the fox-beast with him, using him as a living shield to protect him from Reisha while simultaneously draining him dry. Zelamir’s earlier smugness shifted fully to panic, and he started wildly blasting out unstructured bursts of magic in an attempt to get free from Velik’s clutches.

That only helped replenish Velik’s reserves even faster, so fast in fact that he manifested a trio of spears to add to the confusion. Reisha could overpower them easily, but the point wasn’t to hurt him, it was just to stall and create some space. For that purpose, the spears worked just fine.

Unfortunately, Reisha was too powerful and too fast to be denied for long. Velik got about four seconds to steal as much mana as possible from Zelamir before he was forced to break contact. That was probably enough to regrow his arm, but the truth was that he didn’t need his arm the way he needed mana to fuel [Sun Eater]. Velik fought in three dimensions now, and losing the ability to run on solid air was more crippling than missing a limb, especially when he no longer needed to physically hold a spear to manipulate it.

They crashed around the black, burnt remnants of Zelamir’s garden floor, Velik preserving his reserves as best he could while Reisha relentlessly pursued him. He was the faster of them, but his refusal to use any sort of magic gave Velik the advantage, however temporary it might be.

The more Velik got his measure, the more convinced he became that Reisha wasn’t unbeatable. If he’d been at full strength, he could have put up a hell of a fight, but two-against-one wasn’t something Velik thought he could win. The only correct move was to retreat, harvest enough essence to take both divine beasts at the same time, and return when he was completely sure of victory.

Reisha didn’t seem inclined to cooperate with that. He bulled through Velik’s attempts to slow him down, and Zelamir wasn’t stupid enough to feed Velik more mana. Instead, he pulled an actual physical weapon out of nowhere, a small sickle on a long chain, and started swinging it around in wide, sweeping motions that seemed to defy physics.

A little bit of magic in the chain, but not enough to be worth stealing.

Velik would take it anyway if he got the chance, just to deprive Zelamir of his weapon’s enchantment, but keeping ahead of Reisha was taking all his focus. The stolen reserves were holding for the moment, but that wouldn’t last much longer. If he was going to break free, he didn’t have much choice.

Velik hurled a [Dread Lance] directly into Reisha’s chest from three feet away, then turned and sprinted for the exit under the cover of the skill’s light.