Unholy Player

"Attack power of a Rank 4 Practitioner?" Thalira took a cold breath, and the confident, battle-loving composure on her face began to crumble.

After her power-up with the Synergy Crystal, she had certainly gained immense strength, but where she stood at the moment was, at best, the peak of Rank 3, still far from the power of a Rank 4 Practitioner.

She hadn't even had time to register the extra talent slots she had gained from her rank advancement. There was still plenty of room to grow, yet even with that, she did not think she could reach that level now.

"What is your best attack? You are still hiding one, right?" Brakhtar asked hurriedly, watching the void around them twist tighter and tighter as the moments slipped by.

Thalira nodded, then shook her head. "I don't think it will be enough."

Brakhtar did not look disheartened. "Be ready to unleash it. I will support it."

Then he turned to the other Practitioners, the Lunari and the mixed-race group, whose faces had gone pale. "You all get ready to use whatever you have."

At once, his intention became clear to everyone. Expecting the power of Rank 4 from a single person was impossible, but by combining all the power of those present, they could still have a chance.

Yet there was a catch, and Maruun voiced it. "How do you plan to combine all the attacks?"

There were too many distinct types of attacks from all the races. Forget trying to combine so many forms of power; if unleashed at once, they might cross into each other's paths, counter one another's force, and reduce the total attack power.

Fortunately, Brakhtar had an answer for that as well.

"Just use whatever you have. I will coordinate everything." As his words fell, the transparent hands extending from his body began to change shape. "Do not resist," he added. They widened and lengthened, then wrapped the bodies of all the Practitioners who had gathered around him, Thalira included, like a transparent balloon.

"This is…" Maruun's eyes flew open as he felt the energy field close around him. The gills on his neck flared, opening and closing in a quick, rapid rhythm.

He felt it working within his body. Something unseen seeped into him, filling him with unexplainable strength. His muscles tightened and swelled, and his confidence rose with it.

"Is this a buff?" Thalira felt the same surge and asked, while the electric currents still visible across her entire body grew in intensity and steadied, as if she were being overcharged.

Brakhtar didn't directly answer her question. ''Unleash your strongest attack inside the field and let the rest to me. ''

He looked confident, his two faces set in a self-assured look, and it made everyone see the light of hope. They started using their Spark skills.

For the Gorathim, they all used their best mind-attack skills. As soon as those skills left their bodies, they were drawn into the transparent energy balloon that surrounded each of them.

The effect was clear to the eye. Threads of faint light peeled off every mind skill the moment it touched the membrane, like steam condensing on glass. The balloon converted those skills into neutral, base energy and fed them along the clear "strings" that ran from each balloon to Brakhtar's hands.

In his grip, those strings behaved like hoses under pressure. He guided the flow and shaped another construct in front of him, a single collector sphere, and every skill flowed into it like air inflating a reservoir.

Seeing how it worked, the mixed-race group released their skills in quick succession. Their balloons caught the attacks the same way, stripped them to base energy, and pulled them in.

Lines of different colors slid through Brakhtar's fingers and into the collector sphere, each color marking the origin and type, like different wires feeding a single battery.

Nothing leaked. Nothing clashed. The membrane did the translation, so raw fire, water, kinetic pulses, and psychic strikes no longer interfered. Inside the collector, all of it became one thing: compressed attack potential measured as rising pressure.

Next, the Lunari joined after an approving nod from their lady and unleashed their best skills, letting the ogre take them as energy forms.

Their flows braided neatly into the manifold. Brakhtar kept the streams separated at first, like a smith sorting molten metals before the final pour, then slowly braided them together at matching tempo. If a surge came too fast, he pinched the line to bleed turbulence and prevent backflow. If a line weakened, he opened a valve to keep the pressure even. His two faces never lost their calm, and the sphere swelled with steady, controlled force.

The last one was Thalira, who looked to be preparing her best attack slowly but steadily.

The electric currents that had been dispersing around her started to recede into her body. Her upward-floating, charge-filled hair slowly lost its energy and fell, and the bright lightning in her eyes began to dim. For a breath, she looked as if she was losing everything, like a storm pulling back from the horizon.

In the next instant, when they all thought she had lost all electrical power, it rushed back at once.

The charge gathered tight around the silver tip of her rapier, the way a thunderhead knots itself before a strike, and it burst as a single bright beam from the point.

The beam did not shoot free. The transparent balloon around her caught it the way a lightning rod catches a bolt, skimmed off the chaos, and turned it into a dense, silver thread of energy. That thread ran clean through her conduit to Brakhtar.

The balloon surrounding Thalira swelled in a heartbeat, like an overfilled bladder, and everyone thought it would burst from the insane amount of attack power. The membrane flexed and held. It gulped the overflow, channeled it, and sent the last of it into the collector sphere already grown enormous in front of Brakhtar.

Everyone understood the mechanism now: outer balloons collected and purified, strings carried and stabilized, and the collector compressed. No crossfire. No canceling. Only pressure was climbing toward a single release.

Now every gaze turned to that single collector sphere. Inside, clusters of energy rotated in different sizes and colors like packed storm cells.

The largest and most striking cluster, silver in hue, belonged to Thalira's attack. Around it, narrower bands from the Gorathim's mind skills pulsed in rhythmic waves, while the mixed-race contributions ran like layered rings, each orbit feeding momentum to the next. Everyone waited for Brakhtar's next move.

''O Lady Aetheris, keep ward upon my soul; suffer me not to stray from the Path.'' He gave a small prayer, while the other Gorathim bowed their heads in respect and murmured in a chorus.

"O Lady Aetheris, keep ward upon our soul; suffer us not to stray from the Path."

Brakhtar fixed his 4 eyes on the energy clusters inside the giant sapphire sphere before him. His features tightened; beads of sweat formed on both heads and slid down as the change began within.

All the energy clusters, each different in color and size, started to fuse under the 2-headed ogre's control, coalescing into something new, something whole.