Across the battlefield, standing on a ridge overlooking the scene, Rykker felt the air grow heavy, charged with necrotic energy.
He quickly formed pillars of water in his palms, ready to blast any enemy Lycanthropes or Obsidian Hands who dared to come at him.
“General Rykker,” Feroz’s voice boomed, amplified by dark magic, echoing through the empty ribcages of the fallen soldiers he had just raised.
“Your death is imminent!”
Feroz moved with a slow, deliberate motion, his hand tracing menacing circles in the air that left trails of sickly green vapor.
Feroz’s figure was coated in dark energy as he raised his staff then slammed it down, cracking the bedrock beneath it.
“Rise,” he whispered, the word carrying a weight that seemed to chill the very air.
The ground crackled and groaned as over three hundred skeletal warriors, armored in rusted, mismatched steel, clawed their way out of the ground.
The mass of skeleton warriors and shambling zombies that rose from the crevasse aggressively rushed toward the ridge where Rykker stood.
Seeing centuries of undead, Rykker didn’t answer with words.
He raised his arms.
With a sharp movement of his hands, he brought the sky down.
Rain—blastial, freezing water, began to pour, instantly transforming into sharpened ice arrows upon reaching the undead army.
He harnessed the moisture in the air to create massive tidal surges, lifting his hand as water ripped from a nearby lake turned into shards of ice and slammed into the horde like mini battering rams.
The undead were speared and forced back, but they did not stop.
Feroz laughed, his eyes glowing with a menacing, neon green hue.
“Your ice water cannot wash away the stain of death!” He cast a curse over the field, deflecting the impact of the sharpened icicles, and channeled dark energy directly into his skeletal minions, forcing them to continue forward.
With his ice-spears rendered useless, Rykker immediately shifted his tactic.
Drawing a deep, centering breath, he pulled raw fire into his palms until they glowed like white-hot coals.
He thrust his hands forward, unleashing a violent surge of crimson flames that engulfed the skeletons in a roaring inferno.
While the intense heat warped the steel of their ancient armor, the undead did not burn; instead, they merely paused, their bones blackened and smoking, before advancing through the flames with relentless, mechanical precision.
“The undead do not fear fire either, Elementalist,” Feroz rasped, his voice a loud, but dry, rattle.
Unwilling to yield, Rykker shifted tactics, channeling lightning from the sky and slamming his palms onto the wet soil, his eyes flashing with amber light.
“Then they will fear the ground,” he roared.
The ravine trembled violently, and bolts of chain lightning tore through the water-logged field, turning it into a lethal electric conductor.
The electrified water exploded, turning the ground into shrapnel that shattered the skeletons into splintered piles of bone.
Before Rykker could celebrate, Feroz raised his legendary staff.
A sickly green fog, smelling of stagnant water and decay, seeped from his robes as he gestured toward the broken remains.
The fragments vibrated, clicking and snapping as they melded together, reassembling into a giant, lumbering bone spider—a grotesque mass of ribs, femurs, and grinning skulls that towered over the battlefield with sickening speed.
The creature charged, swinging a jagged bone claw with enough force to cleave an ironwood tree.
Rykker reacted instantly, bringing up a solidified wall of rock and granite, shielding him from damage.
The claws screamed against the stone, sending sparks and rock chips flying, and Rykker was forced backward by the sheer physical force of the barrage of blows.
Rykker dug his heels into the mud, his muscles straining against the immense pressure of the spider’s claws.
The granite wall was already fracturing under the assault.
With a primal roar, Rykker held the shield steady; forcing it outward, as the shattering stone ruptured into a cloud of jagged shrapnel that drove the bone creature back.
Taking the initiative, Rykker brought his hands together, clapping them with the force of a thunderclap.
The electrified, water-logged mud beneath the spider exploded upward, not just as water, but as hardened, magnetized spikes of dense earth, trapping the arachnid’s legs and momentarily locking it in place.
Feroz, watching from the ravine ridge, merely smiled, his staff pulsing with putrid green light.
The bone spider shrilled—a sound like a thousand graves being dug—and its legs snapped the spikes with violent, jerky movements.
“Physical constructs are transient, old man,” Feroz mocked, his voice echoing with necromantic power.
“But death is eternal!”
The creature, undeterred by the loss of a few appendages, opened its massive, skull-laden maw.
Instead of a bite, it unleashed a blast of thick, black sludge that coated the air.
Where the sludge hit the electrified ground, the lightning was extinguished, instantly hardened into a brittle, slick crust.
Rykker gasped as the air itself became hard to breathe.
The spider lunged again, not with a claw, but with its entire body, rolling over the slick terrain with impossible speed.
Rykker barely dove to the side in time, the creature’s leg smashing where he had stood a second before, turning the rocky ground into dust.
Seeing his geokinesis1magic repelled by the cursed miasma, Rykker shifted his elemental focus yet again.
He reached up, grasping the raw energy of the storm above, ignoring the surge of agony as lightning tore through his own veins.
His eyes turned from amber to a blinding, brilliant white.
“If the ground won’t hold you,” Rykker roared, his voice crackling with electricity, “the air will burn you!”
He threw his hands upward, pulling down a concentrated pillar of white-hot plasma.
The bolt struck the bone spider dead center.
The creature shrieked, the sickening green light of Feroz’s magic flickering as the bones began to glow cherry-red, then white, turning from inanimate bone to molten calcium.
The monster stumbled, trying to scramble away, but Rykker was unrelenting.
He moved his hands in a churning motion, and the molten bones began to twist and reshape under his command, the lightning turning the creature into a screaming, white-hot statue of its own twisted design.
Feroz sneered, seeing Rykker torture the bone spider, he began a new chant.
Raising his staff again, he chanted a spell that created a low-frequency vibration, making Rykker’s teeth ache, as he prepared to tear the life force directly from the Elementalist—a soul bond.
A dark, glowing chain formed, a bridge of shadows connecting Rykker’s chest to Feroz’s pulsing staff.
Rykker felt his strength begin to wane, his very essence was being tugged toward Feroz’s staff.
He needed to break the line of sight.
Shifting tactics, Rykker targeted the ground beneath Feroz rather than the staff or the spell.
He returned to using geokinesis, converting the wet soil under the necromancer into a thick, viscous mud.
Feroz started sinking like he was in quicksand, his chanting faltering as he struggled to maintain his balance in the shifting mire.
The spectral chain flickered and snapped, breaking the connection.
Skillfully, Rykker focused his energy to create a powerful, high-tier spell: a volatile combination of water and lightning—a powerful electric storm.
Feroz, still trapped in the mud, barely managed to erect a trembling, protective necro-energy shield before the lightning struck.
The resulting explosion of energy and mud shattered his barrier, plunging the area into a thick, swirling plume of green and blue smoke.
Through the obscured vision, Feroz frantically pulled the “Orb of Souls” from his robes while Rykker was preoccupied neutralizing a stray fireball threatening a fellow mage.
Seeing his chance, Feroz hurled the silver artifact, hitting Rykker squarely in the chest.
The effect was instant: Rykker’s world went silent as his essence was torn from his body and trapped within the orb.
His body, now a hollow shell, slumped lifelessly onto the overgrown grass.
***
Horror rooted Gorem in place.
He watched as Rykker’s body collapsed to the ground, lifeless—or more accurately, soul-less.
A fierce pain tore at his heart, his breath ragged, but the sight of the pulsating soul-catcher broke him out of his trance.
Gorem tracked the fist size object as it whistled back toward Feroz like a loyal hound, thriving on the stolen vitality of his friend.
Adrenaline overrode Gorem’s panic.
With a desperate, tearing gesture, he fractured space in the path of the retreating orb, opening a bruised-purple wound in the air.
The orb slipped into the aperture just as Feroz reached for it, denying him his prize.
Feroz screamed in frustration as he watched the sphere vanish into the ominous gateway.
As the rift sealed shut, Gorem’s thoughts were conflicted.
On the one hand, he was able to successfully rescue Rykker’s soul from the clutches of Feroz, an evil necromancer known for his ruthless treatment of his captors, but he did not know where he sent Rykker’s soul.
He was in such a hurry that he simply sent the orb “away,” and not to a particular destination.
Gorem’s hands shook, the sudden emptiness of Rykker’s presence heavier than any blade.
He had cast his best friend’s soul into the unknown void, a desperate gamble to keep it from Feroz Ogwi’s blackened grip.
Better to be lost in the infinite than enslaved by a monster—or so he told himself.
But as the portal’s crackle faded into a suffocating silence, the “right thing” began to feel a lot like a death sentence.
How would he explain to a wife that her husband was now a ghost in the machinery of the universe?
How would he look an Emperor in the eye and admit he let their greatest champion vanish into thin air?
ground manipulation: equivalent to earth magic