“I said.” Pierce swung his sword, red bolts of energy flying off it to spark to life. “I’ll handle you. Stop trying to pretend you can take us both on, Sylvan.”

  The Floor Lord just laughed. “The only one pretending is you, human. Now die.”

  Growth Mana curved around the Sylvan’s wrists, glowing red as rubies with their own, demonic light. And then they sparked. Electricity shot out faster and faster, making the air itself thrum, setting even Ray’s ears ringing with a painful buzz. That attack was not going to feel well.

  None of Pierce’s attacks struck true. The Floor lord didn’t even need to move much to stop them. All he did was raise his hands, and red lightning bolts shot off his rubylike Growth Mana to strike Pierce’s attacks down.

  “My turn now,” the Sylvan said. “Stand witness to true power!”

  He raised his arms even higher. The lightning sparking around his wrists grew stronger, larger, even more violent. They blitzed off his hands to strike the entire battlefield with detonating cracks.

  Ray wasn’t waiting for them to hit him, of course. His very first experience on the Third Floor had been eating a direct attack from the Floor Lord. He knew just how strong the bastard was. After all, he had taken down the Eternal Guardian with a single, oversized sabre constructed from his lightning.

  So, he had already cast Mottling Aeonguard to form a concentric series of temporal shields over himself. Pierce could take care of himself, so Ray didn’t need to worry about him.

  He was just thankful it worked. The blasts of lightning struck down everywhere with enough force to carve depthless trenches all over. Those fissures that had run through the whole area moments ago were nothing.

  Even a single Aeonguard orb alone probably wouldn’t have been able to stop the sheer power driven behind those bolts. But that was why Ray had layered them so. It was why he had made sure any of the bolts trying to reach him would need to force their way through multiple Aeonguard barriers.

  And even then, Ray was struck by a ferocious splatter of electric crackles. His defence had severely reduced the power behind the Floor Lord’s attack, but he still cringed away as the sparks struck his robes.

  Especially when the sparks left Growth Mana on him.

  Ray didn’t exactly understand how that happened, but it looked like the lightning was depositing little seeds of Growth Mana that quickly germinated into curving, spiralling growths on him.

  An instinctive cast of Mottling Aeonguard stopped them. He just had to angle the casts on himself, and temporal bubbles reversed the burgeoning Growth Mana until it was all gone.

  “Still alive?” the Floor Lord said. His form was barely visible through the smoky dust his last attack had thrown up everywhere. “How annoying. I suppose you must have some ability to cling to your meaningless life to have made it so far. But that all ends here and now.”

  The dust and smoke shot away as sudden pressure sent out a gust of wind in all directions, sourced from the Floor Lord himself.

  He was preparing another attack. His whole body was wreathed with thunderous crimson sparks, more rubylike Growth Mana curling over him. Ray swallowed. That didn’t look good either.

  “Not on my watch!” Pierce yelled all of a sudden, shooting in with his armour blacker than nightfall and his sword bared and glowing even redder than the Sylvan’s lightning.

  Ray had to blink a few times as he stood witness to Pierce’s direct clash against the Floor Lord. Not only had he survived that storming attack with the overpowering thunderbolts, but he was also counterattacking with matching ferocity.

  Pierce’s sword slashed and sliced so fast that it was actually difficult for Ray to keep up. The blade was nothing but a scarlet blur in his eyes, even after he pushed some Mana into them.

  What was even more amazing—and disheartening—was how well the Floor Lord was keeping up with the pressure. He was using his fists to fight against Pierce’s sword, his blood-coloured Growth Mana taking almost no damage from Pierce’s attacks, no matter how strong the hits were.

  The combatants parted. Peirce, seeing that he wasn’t making much progress against the Floor Lord’s defences, crashed his blade with an overpowering strike. It didn’t make the Sylvan budge much. But the exchange of momentum sent him back a few dozen feet.

  From where he started gathering power for another devastating blow. His sword gleamed with an even ruddier light, while his armour turned even blacker.

  “Not on my watch,” the Floor Lord said in mockery of Pierce’s battle cry earlier.

  He swung his fists. Growth Mana screamed off it. Pierce remained undaunted. He yelled out and burst straight at the Floor Lord with his armour turning pure black and his sword turning a shining scarlet bar.

  At the very moment he shot forward, he screamed, “Get ready!”

  The words were for Ray. He could tell that much. Not that Pierce needed to warn him. His nerves were on fire, his muscles standing on a cliff edge. He was ready.

  Pierce’s rush collided with the blitzing combination of the Floor Lord’s Growth Mana and lightning. The crimson blade grew to three times its size in the split second before impact, before exploding upon contact. It was only the Mana that Ray had pushed into his eyes that allowed him to keep a close watch on the combatants.

  To be ready for his part in proceedings.

  The eruption of power sent both Pierce and the Floor Lord back, though the Sylvan wasn’t displaced as much as his opponent. More importantly, that huge expulsion of Growth Mana wreathed in red lightning had completely shattered. Leaving him wide open.

  Ray yelled out, then pointed his arms forward. The Windbane maws wrapped around his hands, growing larger as he pushed more Aeon Mana into them with the Mana Infuser ring. The thunderous, lasering breaths they shot out would have pushed him back too, but he had Soaring Wings on his back to provide some much-needed stability.

  Bull’s eye. The twin blasts of compressed blue flames struck the Floor Lord in the instant after the prior explosion from Pierce’s attack. He got no time to react. His strongest defences had been wiped out.

  No wonder that he screamed out as he was sent flying off his feet. Ray’s two Windbane breaths crashed into the Sylvan and slammed him against the mountain wall, setting off another furious, fiery detonation. The wings of navy feathers shaded Ray from the flaming rocks and shrapnel flying everywhere.

  “He’s not dead yet,” Ray warned. He had received no kill notification from the System.

  Not that Pierce would need the warning. He was in the fight too. If the Floor Lord had died, he would have received a notification and some experience as well.

  The warning was even more unnecessary when their enemy growled out from the smoke, sending out curling sparks of lightning everywhere as he emerged from the gloom. “Pesky, annoying, insects.” For all that Ray had hit him with a direct strike, he didn’t look that wounded. “You truly think such meagre tricks would kill me?”

  If nothing else, Ray could at least claim that his hit had destroyed most of the Floor Lord’s uniform. That revealed exactly why the Sylvan hadn’t been harmed.

  There was another layer of Growth Mana under his clothes, a secondary layer of backup protection in case his first failed. They would need to break that down too if they wanted to deal a real blow to him.

  “And yet,” Pierce said, a wide smile lighting up his face. “You’re covered in dirt and your uniform’s torn. It’s only a matter of time before—”

  “Silence!” Thunder and lightning rippled along the Floor Lord’s entire form. “I will end you, here and now. You have caused so much grief to us, you have taken so much from us. You. Will. Die.”

  The Floor Lord looked livid. He was embracing a new form, though not as extravagantly different as Pierce tended to do. The Sylvan’s version was more of an extension of his current abilities rather than a drastic shift in powerset.

  The lightning extended and grew, forming a strange sparking coat over his torso. Smaller bolts curled around his feet and hands too.

  “Watch out,” Ray said. Even as he sent the verbal warning, he was casting his spells. Eternal Gravity would draw in all the power spent on the battlefield. He would just need to be judicious about when he cast Momentous Domain to make it all detonate. “Don’t let him touch you.”

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  “You don’t have to warn me,” Pierce said.

  The Floor Lord just laughed. “The sheer breadth of your audacity is never not amusing.”

  He attacked. Ray had thought he was powerful and fast before, but he turned it up an even higher notch with his new ability. Now he was moving so fast that Ray was one step back from reacting appropriately.

  All that saved him from getting hit at the very onset was Pierce. He was fast too. In a blink, he was right in front of Ray, his red sword swinging in with a violent scarlet arc.

  The impact between his sword slash and the Floor Lord’s cometing crash still sent off a shockwave that had Ray hurtling back.

  This wasn’t good. Ray’s ears rang, his whole body shuddering from a blow he hadn’t even taken directly. They were obviously strong. But Ray hadn’t expected them to outpace him this much. Would he even survive if he took one blow from the Floor Lord?

  Before Ray, Pierce was fighting back against the overwhelmingly strong Sylvan determinedly. His sword swung in, waves of power bursting free at every contact between him and his opponent. The Floor Lord was trying to hammer away at Peirce with Growth Mana-wrapped fists, both hands sparking with lightning. But Pierce was deflecting every hit for now.

  Enough. Ray was not a passenger in this fight. He cast Time Veil over himself to grant himself greater speed and power, compressing several versions of himself over the last few minutes into his own form.

  Next came Vengeful Plunder. Though, for that to work, he needed to get hits on the Floor Lord, which was going to be extra difficult now.

  The two combatants weren’t even still anymore. Ray might be able to see them moving now, but that didn’t mean he was fast enough to hit their enemy. The Floor Lord was flashing all over the battlefield, using his greater speed to imbue himself with more momentum behind every strike. More red lightning flashed and banged at every impact.

  Pierce was managing to block everything still, while also constraining his needed movement into a smaller region. But he was being pushed back. Ray could already see several wounds dotting his body, the ground stained with his blood as his singed armour smoked.

  “Pierce!” Ray yelled out. “Fall back, now!”

  It was a good thing he listened. That they had gotten to that level of trust was difficult to believe, but Ray definitely didn’t have time to think on it in the middle of a battle like this.

  He just cast Mottling Aeonguard. Temporal blue orbs formed around him, and he shot them out in the very next instant. As Pierce fell back, the Aeonguard orbs took his place. And the Floor Lord shot right through them.

  Vengeful Plunder activated as he hit them, raising Ray’s power by several degrees just from that one exchange. New empowered strength flooded him.

  Ray grinned. “Now!”

  Another effect of Aeonguard was reducing the state of whatever was within to a previous time. To a point where the Floor Lord wasn’t as overwhelmingly powerful as he was showcasing himself to be. His cloak of scarlet lightning was reducing, the sparks running over his body dying down in the couple of instants he was slowed down inside the Aeonguard orbs.

  Pierce saw it too. Recognized the warning that Ray was giving him. The opening Ray was providing him.

  His sword burned brighter than even the Floor Lord’s lightning as he struck.

  With Ray’s temporal orbs reducing his power and defences, the Floor Lord was obviously more vulnerable than before. That was what allowed Pierce to capitalize and hammer in with an overpowering slash. An oversized crescent of shining red energy crashed into their enemy, and the Floor Lord screamed as he was sent flying back.

  Of course, at the very instant that Pierce’s strike was about to land, Ray turned off Mottling Aeonguard. The power reduction had already taken place. He didn’t need the same effect to affect Pierce’s strike.

  Ray’s blood burned with ferocious satisfaction as the Floor Lord flew back with a yell that was as angry as it was pained.

  “No time to waste!” Pierce said as he followed in for a follow-up blow.

  Ray yelled out in agreement, casting Resurrect Recollect and Aetheric Trace. Windbane maws erupted into flaming being, both in the air around him and on his hands. All of them fired out their blistering breaths of blue fire.

  Pierce had shot in with his swords bared as well. His whole body was cloaked in ruddy light as he almost flew in for his final strike.

  With an explosive thunderclap, the Floor Lord rose out of where he had fallen. He did so quickly, well before either Ray’s flaming blasts or Pierce himself could reach him. Then he dodged them with far too much ease.

  Ray cursed. He needed more power to beat the Sylvan, and that meant landing more hits on him. The bastard didn’t even look winded. Pierce’s powerful slash had hardly cracked the under-armour of Growth Mana on his body. This asshole was something else.

  “You fools,” he shouted. “True power isn’t going to be contained by such parlour tricks your kind employ.”

  He exploded with more lightning.

  The coat made of crimson sparks was back, cladding him from head to toe now. But worse than what that suggested was the lightning storm erupting off his body, curling bolts shooting everywhere on the battlefield. Ray could protect himself with a combination of Mottling Aeonguard and Impenetrable Shell.

  But it looked like the Floor Lord didn’t care. Hitting them directly wasn’t even his main concern.

  Wherever his thundering bolts struck, it left brilliant red Growth Mana strands and cables everywhere. It wasn’t just growths and protrusions rising from where the bolts landed on the ground. They formed along the entire length of the curling lightning, forming a weird, twisting cage of the Floor Lord’s version of Growth Mana all over the battlefield.

  “I don’t like this…” Pierce muttered.

  His intuition was spot on. The manic grin on the Floor Lord’s face and the way his horns glowed were definitely not good signs.

  With a thunderous, barely perceptible rush, the Sylvan attacked them. He was aided by the cage of Growth Mana he had crafted with his lightning. Every strand and cable and bar writhed like living vines trying to spark and choke them.

  Pierce and Ray did their best to meet their opponent. Pierce’s swords slashed through the curling Growth Mana trying to cage them in. Ray aimed his constructs to burn them down as well. He also cast Resurrect Recollect to call up his mimic as insurance.

  Unfortunately, attacking the Growth Mana projections caused them to burst into lightning that tried to shock them. Getting electrocuted was what led to Pierce getting caught.

  His sword swings brought him too close. As he was shocked by a Growth Mana strand he cut down, his whole body froze up as the Floor Lord arrowed for him.

  His own quick thinking was all that saved him. Just as the Floor Lord reached him with a thunderclap, Pierce used his transformation trick. His whole body glowed as he changed form and the Floor Lord’s attack passed harmless through him.

  The Sylvan sailed past Pierce and Ray, but the cage was still writhing and twisting and sparking with deadly power. Hemming them, caging them in one spot.

  Forcing them to remain closer together for the Floor Lord’s own benefit.

  The only good thing was that Ray was at least gaining more power with every writhing, electric red vine he burned down. Vengeful Plunder activated even when he was attacking abilities created by his opponents.

  “He’s coming again,” Pierce warned.

  “I’m ready!” Ray said. “Wait for my signal.”

  The determination in his voice was clear. Pierce had better be ready too.

  They ought to have counterattacked, but that Growth Mana cage had distracted them for too long. Now, the Floor Lord was glowing with too much power again, looking like nothing less than a nuclear explosion.

  “You’re mine!” he yelled as he blitzed with a speed that would make the very element he embodied proud.

  He was bursting through the very cage he himself had crafted. At the moment before he struck, Ray cast Temporal Passage with Pierce in tow.

  Like everyone else, that idiot Floor Lord thought that cutting his imitator construct in half had killed it. But the fake version of Ray had never been alive to begin with. It didn’t need a whole body to function.

  It just needed to exist for Ray to teleport to.

  “Now?” Pierce asked.

  It was always infinitely harder to teleport with someone in tow. He swallowed down the pain bursting in his head, casting Aetheric Trace to call on the Petrified Vines with the last of his Aeon Mana to drag in more of it from his surroundings.

  Ray turned to see where the Floor Lord had shot himself to the other end of the battlefield, colliding with the mountainside. “Hold it…”

  The Floor Lord wasn’t just going to stay down and let them attack. Another explosion of lightning had him bursting free of the dust cloud he himself had created, shooting at them meteorically again, pulling in all the strands of Growth Mana from all around.

  “Die, you imbeciles!” the Sylvan yelled. The Floor Lord’s charge destroyed the battlefield. He meant to end them—and probably everything else in the vicinity—with one last blow.

  Fine by Ray.

  Pierce readied his own blow. He drew his spear back, its end lighting up and blasting out energy as though it was a jet engine. “Now?”

  No, it was Ray’s turn. “Hold it.”

  In the mere instants before the Floor Lord drew in, Ray cast Resurrect Recollect in quick succession, calling forth Impenetrable Shell each time and pushing in extra Aeon Mana with the Mana Infuser ring to raise each of their Tiers.

  As the Floor Lord crashed in and crashed through, each impact counted as a hit for Vengeful Plunder as well, raising Ray’s power and the strength of each Impenetrable Shell as well.

  The contacts sent out screeching detonations as lightning flashed and burst everywhere, threatening to blind Ray.

  “Now?” Pierce asked in the very instant that the Floor Lord struck in.

  “Now!” Ray shouted. “Give it everything you’ve got.”

  In the very instant that the Floor Lord crashed through the last of the Impenetrable Shell barriers, they countered. Pierce launched himself with his spear blasting out the jet-engine power behind him. His blood-curdling scream amplifying Ray’s own adrenaline.

  Ray joined him. He aimed both hands forward, firing off compressed blue flames. At the same time, all his surviving constructs sent out lasering breaths of their own power.

  Hopefully, Pierce himself was going to survive the explosion. Not that Ray particularly cared either.

  The detonation of all of their powers meeting had to be the most blistering explosion Ray had seen in the Tower yet. If he didn’t have Mana infused into his eyes, he was pretty sure he’d have been blinded by the flash. His ears definitely popped at the thundering crack resounding from the impact of all their abilities.

  But it worked. Ray cursed loudly, triumphantly, as the combination of his many Windbane breaths and Pierce’s spear attack overcame the depowered charge from the Floor Lord.

  For the second time in that fight, the Sylvan Lord of the Third Floor was sent flying back, screaming as he collided against the mountainside.

  Ray turned to his right, where Pierce was standing perfectly fine. “You’re still here…”

  “I didn’t rush forward personally,” Pierce said. “Just released my spear.”

  Ray looked forward where the mountainside had collapsed to bury the Floor Lord. “No kill notification. We might not be done yet.”

  “Mm…” Pierce looked up. “It doesn’t look like we’re the only ones who’re busy.”

  Ray frowned. Despite the landslide from the fallout of their final attack against the Floor Lord having ended, the whole mountain was still shaking. It wasn’t hard making out the furious battle going far, far above them.

  The source of the ongoing tremors sliding down the mountain.

  “You go on,” Pierce said. “Even if he’s not dead, I’m sure I can take care of what’s left.”

  Ray raised his eyebrows. “You being generous cause you owe me?”

  “No. It’s because you’re still too weak to take on the Floor Lord on your own.”

  “Oh, yeah. If I hadn’t been here, you’d be a lightning-fired shish kebab right about now.”

  “Just screw off already, will you?”

  Ray took one last look at the little molehill of broken rocks that had buried the still-living Floor Lord. Not his problem anymore. Right now, he had to get up the mountain and stop that lying, traitorous bastard Sameer from claiming everything.

  With a flap of Soaring Wings, Ray began ascending.