He drifted through the sky on his board of light, slaloming in and out of the arcing bolts of electricity. They were coming closer and closer the faster he went. The head was starting to shrink in on itself, as if giving power to its fulminating offspring through the sacrifice of its own form. Whatever it was, it was certainly working.

  Edgar’s elemental domain had taken effect in the air around Jonthan, buffeting him out of the way of attacks too fast or close to dodge. However, even the power of an Expert Rank pathway skill was not enough to do much against the final technique of the storm mage.

  Jonathan found himself having to burn immense amounts of Void energy to survive, creating a cloak of purple annihilation around himself that nullified the electricity. Unfortunately, there was a limit to his strength. Eventually, his Void energy ran out, and he plummeted from the sky, before catching himself on a board of mana. Unlike the Void, externalized mana was a far more dangerous substance to its own wielder, and his armor started to heat up as he stood upon it.

  It was partly due to his own strength, and partly due to the fact that his armor was not as in tune with his power as he was. It was why he had to control the Void energy that he used around it. More importantly, he had less control over his mana than he did over the Void.

  Unable to go as fast, he was forced to tank another lightning bolt, the energy rampaging through his body. Flesh blackened further and his muscles seized with enough force to break steel. He let out a howl of rage and anger, letting the power of his Divinity loose through its runic medium. Now that the lightning had done so much damage to him, he could truly use his Rune of Revenge against it.

  Red energy spiraled around him in a series of concentric circles, centered on his fist. He punched as another lightning bolt descended from the roiling heavens, meeting it head on. Divinity and elemental power clashed, and the raw power of the gods easily won out, red light erupting up the length of the lightning bolt, tearing it apart from the inside. Unfortunately, there were dozens more to come.

  On the ground, the rest of the battle was going far smoother. Hushar had taken it upon himself to deal with the remainder of the enemy elites, those less powerful than the three leaders had been, but still strong enough to cause trouble. His sword flashed around like an oblong meteor, driving his opponents back.

  Eva fought alongside him, her spear darting in and out between his strikes, sliding through gaps in armor. Although she had a relatively low level, she had many other advantages, such as her class and titles.

  The spear master was less skilled than her opponents, given how little time she had been granted to train with her weapon, but she possessed other insights that her Tier 3 opponents, bloated on power, could not understand. Fighting at a level only a few times stronger than a mortal back in the Ash Heaps had given her a better understanding of the way her body moved and worked, rather than simply brute forcing it with stats as most did. The only person she had ever seen with a greater form of this was Jonathan, who had lived most of life without even knowing of the System, let alone having any sort of superhuman power. When he fought, he still relied on the old instincts of a being mired in the depths of weakness, someone who was unable to break a hill in half or shrug off blows capable of destroying armies of mortals. Although he had left Earth, Earth was still in him.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  On the other side of the battlefield, Edgar gazed up at Jonathan, manipulating the strands of wind around him. The aeolic mage was in his element, but it hardly seemed to be enough. His leader was besieged by an army of writhing snakes of energy, each of which contained enough power to kill almost anyone at his level. Edgar was concerned for the other man’s life, but there was little he could do. Lightning was not his domain. All he could do here was use the air around his friend to steer him away from the most dangerous zones.

  A shield of swirling wind surrounded the mage, protecting him from the lightning string all around him. Most of them were too far to affect him, but he had already been forced to direct a few away with his mastery over the wind. Although lightning was not under his purview, he could make it harder to travel by getting rid of the medium that it went through.

  All of the elements had their own conceptual specialties, and lightning happened to be a sub element of Fire, which controlled mundane energy sources. Edgar had no knowledge of concepts like electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, but if he had, he would have known that the Fire elemental energy was stimulating the electrons in the air, forcing them to align into lightning. Of course, given that it was made from elemental energy, it was far more powerful than the natural product of the heavens’ wrath.

  Jonathan made a perilous descent under Edgar’s watchful eyes, evading most of the crackling energy threatening him. Two still hit him though, and had his regeneration not been so immense, he would have already died. As it was, one or two more good hits would kill him. His skin felt like he had been dipped into a deep fryer for a good minute or so, and his bones felt enervated, responding strangely to outside stimulus. As for his muscles, they were the worst off. Spasms shook his body out like a wet dog, his armor clattering against itself as he fought to keep his body in check.

  It felt like he had been falling for hours, despite it only being a few seconds. When he finally hit the ground, he lay there for a moment, only to be forced to roll away by a sudden charge he felt building in the air above him. With a sigh, he shook out his arms and took in the battle around him. Unlike many of the previous ones, his relatively small army was not powerful enough on its own to defeat its numerically superior foe. Their only saving grace was the help of Hushar and Eva.

  “You alright?” Edgar asked, the wind carrying his voice over to Jonathan.

  “Could be better. We have a battle to win though. I can’t spare any time to recuperate. I could be dead, after all.”

  “Fair enough.”