The Narghul Sorcerer dropped through the last hundred metres of its descent, and the Hollow Avatar did not wait for it to reach the ground.

My body’s legs flared blue-white, lightning crawling up the inside of the channels and saturating the muscle tissue, and the Avatar drove the body upward in a vertical leap that crossed twelve metres of air in the time it took me to register the launch from the passenger seat.

I could briefly see that the bodies of the demons under me, from where I erupted, had all collapsed into flaming ash as I was propelled not just by the strength of my physique alone, but by my lightning as well.

The demon’s shadow construct came down to meet my rising body, as the wagon-sized claw shifted from its descending angle to a defensive curl, the four eyes widening in the moment before contact.

The shadow construct had not expected a rising attacker.

They were powerful tools, but in the control of one that was so young, there was a slight gap between intent and execution.

The staff drove into the construct’s underside, and I did not attempt to break the shadow, since there was no need to waste so much power for something with minimal payoff.

My hands flared with lightning, boosting my muscles as I deflected the downward strike, disrupting the construct’s momentum at the exact angle the Narghul Sorcerer had built it to descend through.

The construct rebounded, flaring sideways, the wagon-sized mass forced laterally by the impact as the demon’s flight path crossed through its own construct’s recoil, and the demon had to adjust mid-air to avoid being struck by the thing bound to its left side.

With the speed we were moving, there had been a brief possibility for the Narghul Sorcerer to be struck by his own shadow construct, and if that had happened, it would be an easy thing to follow through and take his head... but it had been a slim possibility.

’The Sorcerer may be young, but he had experience in battle.’

The construct is not part of the demon. They share momentum but not coordination. The demon must direct it consciously, and at his level, consciousness is not instantaneous.

The Avatar’s strike had bought the body approximately half a second of the demon’s redirected attention.

Closer... Become one.

My body landed on the corpse mound at the eastern wall, more than seven metres tall, an accumulation of chitin bodies that had been growing across the day’s combat.

The Avatar had aimed for the mound and the top of the pile. I had elevation, and I turned to face the demon that was now below me as he had touched down ten metres away on the lower ground.

His four burning eyes tracked my body’s new position as the shadow construct reformed at his left side, sluggish from the recoil.

The demon sniffed, taking long, deep breaths as he smelled my scent.

Inside this fragile body, all he would detect was lightning.

His mouth opened, and the voice that emerged was a frequency that bypassed my ears and arrived directly in the hollow place at the base of my soul.

"Khaaz vel’tarakh, ish gorum sha’thrul. Nysra limire Achon?"

The meaning of it arrived without delay.

"I do not smell your soul, child, and yet you move. Are you a branded cattle of the Achon?"

The Avatar did not answer, as my response was tactical, not verbal; speaking was a waste of energy.

My body moved again, the lightning in my legs flaring so bright you could see my bones, and I leapt from the mound to a second mound at fifteen metres. The Narghul Sorcerer turned to track, his right hand rose, and red-orange Flame Essence began to gather above his palm.

The Avatar did not let the cast complete.

My body launched from the second mound to a third that was closer and at an angle that placed the demon’s left flank between the casting hand and me.

The Flame Essence in the right palm could not be discharged through the demon’s own body to reach me, and so the demon would have to turn, and turning would take time, and time was the resource the Avatar was harvesting through movement.

The Narghul Sorcerer adjusted, and his shadow construct moved to intercept, but the Avatar did not engage the construct.

My body leapt again, to a fourth mound, leaving trails of lightning behind in the air that lasted longer than they should before they slowly dissipated, and the construct followed, sluggish, the connection to the demon’s directing attention degrading with each redirection. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

The demon was casting and directing simultaneously, and the demon’s tactical processing speed, however superior to mine, was finite.

The Sorcerer’s range is constrained by its construct’s coordination, I understood, watching from the passenger seat as the Avatar exploited the constraint. Engage at the construct’s perimeter, and the construct compensates. Engage outside the construct’s coordination radius, and the demon must choose between casting and controlling.

The Avatar was making the demon choose, and with an irritated grunt, the demon chose to cast.

The Flame Essence released as a lance, making the air itself shriek in pain as the cast tracked my body’s motion at a velocity exceeding my evasion threshold under standard lightning allocation.

The Avatar did not increase the legs’ allocation; instead, my body fell, deliberately, off the fourth mound into the trough between it and the fifth, and the Flame Essence passed overhead by a margin of one metre.

Still, I felt the heat as if I were beside a furnace; a semi-direct hit would be enough to carbonize my body.

I rolled across demon corpses, the chitin scraped against my body’s left arm and tore the sleeve open, but the Avatar did not slow.

When my body came up, I was three metres from the Narghul Sorcerer.

The demon had not anticipated the closure. Its right hand was still extended from the released Flame Essence, and the casting position was wrong for melee.

The demon began to rotate to face the new threat, and I did not let the rotation complete.

My right arm became cloaked with lightning, forcefully holding lightning across my skin as another layer above it.

Discharging lightning in this pattern was breaking the small channels of magic of my body, but that was a necessary price to pay, and Mortal Shell would allow me to work through this disability without losing too much functionality.

Before the demon could face me, I drove the staff into the demon’s exposed flank.