Source Origin(33)

What happened next was weird.

The lightning, hit by his own and resulting in a show of light that resembled a silver and a golden snake fighting and devouring each others tails until nothing was left, more of a figurative than real way to describe it, dissipated just as quickly as it had appeared, turning into nothing but empty air.

The woman still didn't move, inste4ad opting to do something else, shooting a sphere made of rock, big and powerful at him, be it not fast or strong enough to actually endanger him.

He just blocked it with another shield that dissipated almost instantly, his mana now down to only about 48 percent, this entire fight barely having taken two percent off of the grand total of his very big pool, a pool that was once said to be over seventeen times bigger than those of his same rank and age, an amount he had always been very proud of, a pool that was now even bigger in comparison to others of his rank and age, a weakness as well as a strength as he would one day realize.

The stone sphere fractured, as if made of a weak material, and the woman was already in front of him, about to kill him, but he had already realized that part of her plan, the plan where she would kill him, rip his head off with her bare hands, the part where she would take the rest of his swindling mana, for the mana in his body was not what he should worry about, he should worry about the maa he had put in the air, the mana that was already gone by over twenty-five percent, resulting in only about 39 percent being left over for him to see, understand and block, further resulting in his blocking to become weaker over time while she destroyed them and grew even stronger in relation to her attacks, perhaps even having gained the lightning she had shot from his very own overload active as he liked to call it.

He didn't even know how he managed to do it, but he did it, his body running backwards, away from what he had done, away from the beast he had supposedly been fighting all this time, the beast he had only really been running away from, not even realizing what he had done until he saw something flying away from where she had been running towards him, having heightened her speed to take care of him quickly after shooting the sphere, something quite understandable when one thought about it.

There it stood, the thing he had been trying to achieve all this time, and yet, the pressure didn't vanish.

The woman, he hadn't seen it himself, he hadn't even been able to fully comprehend it yet, he hadn't been able to understand how he had been able to do it so easily, had been decapitated, her headless body now standing tall like a rock amongst the raging storm of mana that should've thrown her over as soon as it began, though he had no recognition of when exactly it did begin.

He didn't know why, but he yearned to make sure that he wouldn't lose the head, perhaps because he still remembered Manug, who stayed alive within his brain even after being decapitated, yearning to not have to repeat that again, and especially not have the dead body pick up the head or something, something he was ever so slightly sure of being possible after all he had seen from this unstoppable beast, especially considering that she had been easy to cut apart, never having even tried to defend herself from the attack.

Cades kicked the head away, staring at the woman's headless body, still not collapsing, still not feeling the end of this battle as he had felt all the times before, still afraid of what was bound to come now, still terrified of whatever it was that this woman was in all actuality, still losing mana at a pace that would've been alarming to almost anyone else as old as him, with about half a percentage every second, alarming for most, with them losing perhaps eight percent every second and having to end this battle with their own demise after thirteen seconds at most, though he had a feel that there had to be a limit to such a skill, perhaps some kind of desperate thing the mana in ones body would do once it reached that stage, some kind of blockade to survive, but that wouldn't matter too much for him.

This entire battle had taken place over only about half a minute, losing about fifteen percent to this weird skill of hers, most of which had already been in the air, and he was more than ready to end this battle soon now that she was hopefully about to die, and, at the very least, even if she was still alive, her head not mattering to this beast, disoriented after losing her eyes, her balance, the ears, her hearing, both related to the ears, the nose, the neck even, and a lot more that had to do with, well, the brain... such as the ability to think, or at least he hoped so...

The head, covered completely in cloth aside from the happy mask bearing endless pain, was still rolling, far away, still moving, he heard it, but that was not what was important, instead, what was important was that the head wasn't the only part of the body still in movement, the body was still active, still moving.

It was rigid, forced, but it became more fluid as it stretched the once dead limbs, or perhaps, the limbs now controlled by another source of intellect, the limps Cades didn't even wish to understand anymore as they moved, his heart heavy, full of fear, his body unmoving, his feet unwilling to move, his brain incapable of thinking this over once more.

Then, a twitching sensation ran through the body, and something happened, it was as if tentacles wrung around something invisible, but the head, the capital of the body, was slowly regenerating, if this could be called slow when an entire bodily part, a head, was being recovered from nothigness.