He had been humbugged, and now he was on the back foot.

Frozen dew glistened on the now vacant grass patch where Rehtul had stood not a second before. As Enpera’s edge carved through nothing but air, finishing its deadly arc at Shinsou’s hip, the wily Cryomancer sprung his trap.

A biting wind stirred; the freezing chill gripping the Telgradian’s senses. A sudden blue light emerged in the trodden grass below that was as bright as the sky, casting its blinding glare upon him. Shinsou tried to react in vain, his heart skipping a beat as three jagged spikes of ice suddenly roared out of the ground and careered into his left arm. The resulting pain made him scream, the sheer force of the magic ripping through his sleeve and horribly puncturing the muscles on his forearm.

Shit! The Telgradian seethed through clenched teeth as he shattered the icy stalagmites free with a swing from Enpera, Stupid mistake, Shin. He’s got you pegged. Watch his magic. Buy some time.

The clearing in front of him was already starting to feel the effects of Rehtul’s magic. Thin veins of freezing ice seemed to want to choke the landscape. Beneath his feet, snakelike tendrils of that same ice suddenly started to coil around his feet. Wrenching shards of the icicles from his injured arm and discarding them, Shinsou’s senses were playing merry hell. Though Rehtul was calm, the feeling he got from the young man was now more akin to an oppressive Salvarian blizzard. None of his senses interfered with the angry white cacophony he could feel inside.

There was only one way to deal with this.

A nebula cloud of black, electrified particles rose from the shrivelled ground beneath Shinsou’s feet as he raised his hand right, blood spattering the blue frost as his left arm ran in red rivulets.

“You’re clever,” Shinsou stated as a murky cloak of dark matter began to manifest into reality, “Which means you’re dangerous.”

Clearing his mind, Shinsou wove zephyrs of marbled black into a wall of air behind him; a swirling cocoon of the arcane. As a maelstrom of momentary silence and then thunderous cacophony resonated through his ears, Shinsou’s mind settled into the calm of an empty room, the tranquillity of a full moon. Words of power slipped past his lips, contained in a single breath.

Enpera Kurohitsugi.

At the touch of his thoughts, thirty lances of pure dark matter, woven from the void behind him, were carried to fore of their portals. The air itself momentarily shimmered as the dark wall of purple and black magic chewed through the foliage and disturbed the calm waters of the nearby river.

With a single wave of his hand, fifteen lances of the thirty burst forth from the portal in an aggressive flurry of electrical hissing, and tore straight towards the Cryomancer.