Spark of War (Progression Fantasy)

El probably should've focused on evasion. A game of cat and mouse. On delaying the avatar and buying Nexin as much time as she could. Problem was… that wasn't really her style. So, no, more like an idiot, she flared her wings and blasted straight towards the avatar and its terrifying claw. There was a brief flash of horrible memory from when it'd used that exact same claw to nearly flatten her, but she pushed that out of her head.

And instead focused on pushing her sword through its head.

Rain swirled and froze in the instant it took her to close the distance, and she whipped her right hand around, rune-etched weapon trailing an arc of fire as it went. A detachable blade formed as she swung, then cracked against the upraised claw that appeared out of nowhere. Below, tentacles shifted atop the pool of dark water the avatar rode on, but a flare from El's left wing shot her to the side just as the limbs speared in her direction.

Using the monster's own claw to block its vision of her, El first dragged the ignited, blue-flame sword in her left hand across its chest. The hungry flames tore at the dark water – and the Current held within – more than it damaged the thick shell. Even as she did that to make the avatar think she'd continue around to attack it from behind, she flared both her wings straight down. The metal at her shoulders snapped the air as El bolted up, while she whipped her sword across in front of her, back and forth, back and forth.

Fast as lightning, four detachable blades screeched through thirty-foot space she'd opened up towards the avatar's face. With both its claw and armored hand coming around to block the attacks, El used the distraction to reforge the weapon in her left hand. Hidden by the angle of her body – and the avatar's own arms – the flaming sword thinned and then lengthened, a spear igniting to life. Like the blade before it, lines of dark liquid seemed to pulse through the weapon like veins, while more of the fiery streams ran like a lazy drill from the tip of the spear. Would that make the weapon any more effective?

Only one way to find out.

El snapped around at the waist, hauling the spear sidearm to launch it straight for the avatar's chest – and the hole Nexin had already punched through it. If she could hit that…! The spear howled as it fell, the roar of flames mixing with the boom of thunder overhead. The thing's arms were still in front of its face to block the last detachable blade as it struck, so there was no way it could see the spear coming. Or find a way to block it.

Except… dark water rushed up from the pool at its tentacled feet to form a shield in front of its chest. El's spear slammed into the liquid wall, the weapon spinning like a drill as it attempted to bore its way through. Dark lines of fluid-fire spread through the watery shield, and despite the distance, a small streamer of fire – no thicker than a gossamer thread – connected El's hand to the spear. Through it, her Spark greedily drank in every ounce of Current it could.

Deep in her chest, she could feel the source of her magic changing. Evolving. Like it'd done when it had merged with the Storm, something new was being formed, but it didn't have enough to completely fuel the metamorphosis. Yet. Every graze of the avatar's Current was like stealing the power from dozens of clickers. It was more pure. More… concentrated. A direct line to the source – the Fathom.

And the avatar seemed to realize the same thing as the burrowing spear finally flickered out, unable to pierce the wall of dark water. The instant the spear faded, the avatar moved. Fast like it could step the same way Nexin and El could, it was suddenly right in front of her. The claw almost as big as she was backhanded around too fast for her dodge, so El ignited a shield on her left arm.

A thought compressed the shield to the plasma state in the split second it took for the claw to arrive, and then – WHAAM – she was hurtling sideways through the air. Pain flared in her injured left arm from blocking the blow, but almost immediately faded. Whether it was the special armor pumping her full of magic painkillers, or offering enough protection to make sure she didn't break, El took what she could get.

A flare from her wings and the soles of her boots straightened out her flight, and she whipped around to snap her wings in the avatar's direction. A dozen triple-forged electrum feathers shot out like fiery daggers, carving lines of blue through the falling rain.

A casual flick of the avatar's armored right hand intercepted each and every dagger, most of them spinning harmlessly off to the side. Two, though, managed to lodge themselves firmly into the back of its hand.

Which really seemed to piss it off.

Green eyes narrowed at El before it roared and launched forward. This wasn't a step, as the whole avatar leaned towards El and blasted dark water from behind it like a geyser. Rain and sound billowed out from the launch point as the avatar barreled right for her.

Definitely not willing to see what it would do if it caught her, El flared her wings and burst straight up. If it was anything like the clickers and their inability to quickly change directions…

It wasn't.

The dark water didn't even curve – it simply ignored all laws of physics – and instead snapped around to bend at a ninety-degree angle, firing the avatar hot on her trail.

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Cat and mouse it is, then.

Not one to be afraid of a little speed, El forced more power into her wings, streaking up towards the clouds. Blue flames trailed her like a comet – which the avatar completely ignored by bulling straight through them – but El was still the faster of the two. Flying like she was, though, she couldn't swing her sword or use the feathers from her wings to attack the monster chasing her. And running wouldn't win this fight. She needed to change things up.

Lightning streaked among the clouds directly above her, while the boom of thunder made her frost armor shimmer from the sheer volume. Ignoring both of those things, she punched through the dark mist and immediately ignited a ball of flame in her left hand. Instead of focusing on a weapon's shape, she instead just pumped pure power into it.

Almost immediately, it grew wildly unstable, and El clenched her hand to bring it to the plasma state. Even then, it wasn't more than a second away from rupturing, so El let go.

The ball of condensed – unstable – plasma fell behind her as she burst out of the top of the clouds.

BOOOOM, the explosion from a certain avatar hitting a certain bomb of blue flame tore through the entire cloud. Wispy cloud-stuff froze in an expanding ring from the central point, an almost beautiful matrix of icy veins seemingly connecting the sky.

Then the whole damn thing fell.

The cloud – almost a mile wide – dropped frozen out of the sky towards the island below. Beyond reason, it stayed intact as it plummeted, carving a hole through the storm to let in sunlight on its path to the surface.

"Look out below…" El said weakly in disbelief, then shot to the side as she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. A flare and then a step got away – just barely – from the avatar that hadn't been stopped by the explosion. Really, it'd been a vain hope and nothing else, but at least it had slowed it down.

And from the patches of stained-white on its shell, her dangerous flames had done some damage. Just… not enough, and the monster charged back in at her. Maybe because she wasn't completely fleeing as she had before – or maybe it was wary of another plasma bomb – the avatar didn't launch itself at her. It still came in hard, but it was the pool of dark water carrying it instead of the geyser.

Taking the hesitation as a good thing, El likewise darted in, a detachable blade leading the way. The fiery arc got swatted aside like it was nothing more than an annoyance, but it wasn't like El had expected that to end the fight. Instead, it acted as a decoy, forcing the avatar's bulky arm up to block its line of sight on her.

Using that brief window, El changed the direction of her flare and ignited a sword in her left hand. Up and over she shot, off-hand weapon already swinging for the avatar's face. Shiiing, the blade sparked across the open palm of the avatar's other hand, perfectly placed to block her blow.

It anticipated what I was going to do.

Worse, from where the hand was placed, it jerked up to grab El as she passed overhead. Powerful, shell-covered fingers closed to grasp her leg, and if they caught her, she was done for – triple-forged electrum armor or not – so El flared the toe of her boot.

The maneuver didn't shoot her ahead any faster, but it did jerk her leg up and just barely out of reach. While also sending her into a somersault through the air. Having flipped and spun through the air more than a few times in her career, El flexed her shoulders and hauled both of her weapons around as the rest of her body twisted.

Plasma-edged blade and ignited fire sliced across the avatar's exposed back, the second weapon sucking down Current while the first carved a hard line into the shell.

Another roar of frustration escaped the avatar's lipless mouth, and it whipped around to try and backhand her like it had before. Too bad – for it – El had already learned from that painful lesson, and she'd continued her flare to shoot her down past its back. A single slash with Felps's sword drew a line of blood from three tentacles as she swept past, but it was the pool of dark water beneath them that held her attention.

Cutting the power to her wings and rolling in the air, El immediately flared again as soon as she was right-side-up, then thrust with the sword in her left hand. Sure, the fleshy tentacles seemed easier to wound than the rest of the avatar's shell-covered body, but she wasn't trying to stab through the water. No, she was stabbing the water itself.

As soon as her fiery blade pierced the water, El simultaneously flared and condensed her sword to its plasma state. However, instead of solidifying or becoming sharper, she focused on shattering the sword. Deep within the oddly endless pool of liquid, her sword condensed and then burst, shards of blue-fire plasma scattering within the water holding the avatar aloft.

And, despite her sword being in pieces, it was still connected to her through dozens of those same gossamer threads. Like a starry sky on a clear night, the liquid lit up from the shards embedded within, even as the flickering flames consumed the Current. Streams of the power flowed through the connection and deep into El's Spark, almost like a tidal wave itself.

In her chest, the three powers roiled as they met, more and more of the Current circling her blue Spark, while tiny hands snapped out to steal its power. Whatever she'd taken from that Ember all those years ago was hard at work, consuming every ounce of energy it could.

Unfortunately, the avatar wasn't just going to let her sit there and do it. In the two heartbeats that'd passed since she'd stabbed the pool, the monster had caught on to her plan, and spears of dark water – along with a few tentacles – speared down at her. A cross-body parry with her electrum sword deflected the worst of the strikes, while a flare of her wings bolted her to the side to evade the others.

Leaving her ignited sword where it was, El flipped around and threw a pair of detachable blades at the avatar. Both attacks slammed into the thing's upraised claw, though it wasn't immediately giving pursuit. In fact, it hardly seemed to be paying attention to her, its tentacles trying to grasp the flaming sword embedded in the pool allowing it to fly. When the limbs couldn't seem to grasp it, the whole chunk of dark water it'd been stabbed into fell away.

That didn't do anything for the dozens of broken shards still within and stealing its power. As the head whipped around in her direction, four eyes glaring green at her, she didn't need to read its mind to know what it was thinking.

If it couldn't remove the shards, killing her should end their threat.

"Give it your best shot," El said, and the two combatants flashed towards each other to begin the next round.