[Mana spring]
Watching the ogres' tamed beasts slam into the side of their opponent, Darganth applauded the ogres' ingenuity and skill. The ability to change size or fully transform granted its user quite a lot of flexibility. Larger forms offered protection and large-scale devastation at the cost of representing a larger target, while smaller forms offered evasion, precision, and mana efficiency at the cost of a reduced mass to absorb hits.
Consequently, the ability to switch between these two states can force an opponent to change tactics or risk being put into a disadvantageous position. In some cases, it can even negate entire battle strategies, with tactics like the nets the ogres employed simply not working on large enough creatures.
However, even with the tribe successfully baiting the beast into a disadvantageous position by exploiting these characteristics, Darganth remained cautious. While the tamed beasts were doing some damage to their foe, the power gap was still noticeable.
As such, when the beast caught one of the tribe's mounts with a lucky hit during its struggle against the nets, the unfortunate creature and its rider were sent flying. Catapulted backward, both were taken out of the fight as two of the mount's legs gave in and bent the wrong way immediately upon landing, causing the rider to be flung off as both tumbled over a few meters of the clearing.
Despite this, the other ogres and their beasts continue to press the attack. Switching tactics and cycling back and forth, the riders had their mounts dash at the beast for one or two quick attacks before hastily pushing them to retreat. Like this, they stayed ahead of their target's retaliatory strikes by just fractions of a second, always weaving out of the rather limited range of its bound limbs and preventing a second casualty for the moment.
Thrown around by the constant strikes from the ogres' mounts, the beast soon recognized that its attacks weren't working and paused. Not reacting even as the next charge struck its side, the beast ignored the attacks that followed. First, two slashes from the first attacker tore through its flesh. Then, the next charge struck it from the opposite direction and sent the beast stumbling. Another series of slashes and bites followed it, only for the attacker to again retreat and make space for the next one.
But this time the beast was prepared. Anticipating which ogre had their mount charge next, the beast ripped free of the nets binding it and swung around to face its attacker. And before the latter could react, it was already lunging toward him.
Evading the mount's charge by jumping over its head, the feral beast pressed one of its hooves against the back of the creature's head and pounced at the rider. Tackling him backward, it catapulted the ogre away from his companion, sending him flying toward the mana spring.
By the time the ogre reached it and disappeared into the waterfall, the beast was already turning toward its next opponent. Dashing toward one of the stunned ogres to its side, it struck its next foe before they could react. With a vicious chomp, the beast's teeth tore through the female ogre's right shoulder and tore it off her body, ripping her away from her mount in the process and sending her bleeding body plummeting to the ground.
Pivoting the moment it landed after this, the beast lunged toward its next target. Though that ogre was more prepared than the previous two, its sheer speed allowed the beast to rush past his attempted counterattack and deliver a devastating kick to his mount's side before it even finished turning.
However, before the feral beast could close in to finish off the rider, the tribe's chief arrived before it. Almost matching its compressed form in height, he managed to stop its charge by throwing his entire weight against the beast.
Using the brief moment this impact left the beast disoriented, the chief swung his flaming arm toward it. Having changed its shape to end in a long lance similar to the one his kin had used at the start of the fight, he struck without needing to close in, taking the beast by surprise and sinking his weapon deep into its shoulder.
Fighting back as the beast kept pushing forward, the chief grabbed his weapon with his other hand to better push back against his foe. Nonetheless sliding back when the beast reared up and threw its own weight into the clash, he was forced to crouch down to redirect more of the force into the ground. But while this worked and he stopped being forced backward, soon the chief's arms started to give in instead.
Just as the beast then closed in enough to have the chief in range for its kicks, Venrie intervened. Having used the thirty seconds Darganth and the tribe had bought her to charge her spell with both her own and the ambient mana, she had more than enough power at her fingertips to end the fight. In fact, she was confident enough to push her casting time below what her control speed would usually allow for such a powerful spell, reducing her mana efficiency and thus destructive output significantly. In turn, this allowed her spell to manifest so shortly after she finished the cast that even she herself didn't register any difference between its point of origin becoming visible on her mana sense and the physical phenomena appearing, making it next to impossible to evade unless one knew where she was aiming ahead of time.
And as the beast couldn't have known that, the scenes that followed were already a foregone conclusion.
Though aware of her casting and sensing it when she unleashed her spell, the beast felt the spell pierce its body before even registering its appearance. Immediately, it was lifted off the ground as hundreds of thorn-covered branches spilled forth from a small crack in the ground. Drilling through the beast's body and tearing apart its flesh with their sharp edges, they pierced through its body and burst out of its back.
Simultaneously, hundreds more such branches approached from the side, striking the beast's flanks and sealing its fate. Closing in from all sides, they tore into the beast's body like bullets as they punched new holes into its side in rapid succession. With each one, its state worsened as one organ or muscle after another ceased to function until, ultimately, one attack struck right between its ribs and found its mark in the beast's heart.
It was then that the beast's transformation broke under this onslaught, and its impending demise became obvious to everyone watching. Continuing to struggle despite this, it fought off the swarm of branches that surged to replace those its rapid return to its true size had ripped apart. Biting and kicking even as its life force faded, it tried to launch one last attack at Venrie.
However, no matter what it did, its spells faded before they finished forming. With its heart mortally wounded and its life force thus fading, the anchor that kept its soul and physical form connected slowly disintegrated. As a result, its own mana started abandoning the beast, fading from its control and leaving its body in steady streams.
Amid this, Darganth suddenly dashed forward. Arriving in front of the beast's suspended form with one of his fore-limbs hued in black smoke, he grabbed the beast by its chest and jumped toward the mana spring with it in front of him.
The moment he made contact with the beast, its fading life force stopped simply diffusing into the environment and instead started gathering around his arm. There, the necrotic energy he had conjured up started feeding on it, slowly absorbing the beast's life force into itself and growing through it.
While that was happening, Darganth and the, by then barely conscious, beast soon plunged into the waterfall above the mana spring. Spreading his wings, Darganth didn't have a single moment to focus on the drastic rise in quality of the mana around him or appreciate the awe-inspiring sight as he flew toward the mana spring's center.
Just like in the skies above it, floating islands filled the massive hole that was the mana spring. In between, the waterfalls kept flowing downward, occasionally splitting into multiple streams when they fell onto one of the islands, and overall mostly obscuring the sight past the first kilometer or two into the hole.
Only occasionally would one see glimpses of what lay at the bottom of the chasm. And even then, it would only be the foamy white water that formed around the waterfalls as they fell into the subterranean sea found some four and a half kilometers below the surface.
Despite this, its effects were constantly felt as a strong current of ambient mana rushed up from it. Comprised of almost all of the combined mana emission that finds its way into the ocean from the core of the realm fragment, the mana spring acts as something akin to a vent for the built-up magical energy that allows the surplus mana to reach the surface.
This effect was at its strongest near the center of the chasm. There, neither waterfalls nor floating islands were found across the entire height of the mana spring, resulting in a pillar of mana barely ten meters wide where the magical energy could flow unobstructed.
Heading toward exactly that spot, Darganth closed his claw the moment he felt this denser mana on his outstretched arm. By then, the beast's life force was already little more than a flicker that wasn't even enough for it to stay conscious, meaning it offered no resistance as his claws tore through its chest and crushed what remained of its heart. And in the moment of death, this flicker stopped being life force and returned to being pure vitality as it burst forth from the beast's body.
Simultaneously releasing the tight hold he had kept on the necrotic energy around his arm, Darganth controlled both components of the death element, vitality and necrotic energy, and let them collide amid the stream of dense mana he was in. But unlike how the necrotic energy could feed off of the beast's life force, when it met vitality, the two energies immediately bonded with one another, resulting in just under half of the necrotic energy turning into vitality as the two energies sought to achieve an equilibrium.
However, before this could stabilize, the dense stream of magical energy came into the equation. Colliding with the sphere of death elemental magic between Darganth's hands, the mana then ripped individual particles of vitality and necrotic energy out of their equilibrium and shot them away into the distance.
As it did this, the mana took its place. Influenced by the death elemental energy on the other side of the veil, it mutated and turned into the same energy it had just replaced. But while this localized equilibrium was thus kept, the energy particle that had been ripped away created an imbalance somewhere else. And though a different mana particle would quickly connect to it to restore the balance there, the constant stream of them meant another collision was only a matter of time.
Through this, the small sphere of death magic in Darganth's hand soon started to propagate across the mana spring. With it, a column of gray smoke replaced the center of the mana spring, with the death magic propagating for dozens of meters to the sides. And though it reached further than that both up and down along the mana stream, its sideways expansion shrank the further from Darganth it was before ending at a steep angle at the very top and bottom, resulting in an oval shape just without a curvature at the ends.
Floating in the center of this, Darganth had by then turned into the focal point of this magical phenomenon. Strands of intertwined necrotic energy and vitality stretched toward him from all corners of the construct, creating a sphere in which darkness and a soft white light intermixed.
As this construct slowly stabilized, Darganth felt a messaging spell from Venrie reach him.
'Is everything going to plan?' She asked telepathically.
'The connection should open any moment now.' Darganth sends back, still keeping an eye out for any changes in the surrounding magical energy.
From then, it only took a few more seconds before the change he had been waiting for came. With more and more mana attuning to the death element and being compressed in the section of the mana spring Darganth's construct took up, its concentration soon reached the necessary breaking point. When he then released a pulse of mana into this dense mass of magical energy, a chain reaction shot through the entire construct.
In an instant, reality itself seemed to crumble away atom by atom and mana particle by mana particle. In its place, an endless field of ashen gray grass appeared around the nexus of death magic that Darganth had created, with a blood red moon illuminating it from above and casting the lifeless wasteland in an ominous glow.
For a few seconds, Darganth simply let his gaze linger on the environment. Smiling slightly, he watched with anticipation as the haze that had surrounded the death magic nexus at first lifted, slowly removing the last thing blocking him and revealing the realm of death in its full glory.