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This fight suddenly turned into a battle of wills. Which would hold out longer? The rampant liquid darkness or my soul. The soul flames pursued the liquid darkness as it chose to flee. Knowing that fighting the soul flames was pointless.

I knew there was pain coming. Unimaginable pain, but I didn't have any other choice. Either the spell beasts died or they would decimate this entire region. Not that I really cared about an elven world. I just needed to repay the favor that this world had done for me by awakening these lethal flames.

Maybe I would regret it later, but for now I didn't have much of a choice. It was the liquid darkness or Sekka. Sekka was doing surprisingly well against the spell beasts. I guess darkness really was their weakness after all. If darkness harmed it then that meant that this mass of liquid darkness was alive.

If it was alive then it could die. If it could die that meant I could kill it. I'd felt my hand brush up against something solid when it had enveloped me entirely.

***Warning death immanent***

I cut off the flow of life force to the flames. Pain wracking the whole of my being as the backlash from my Reset spell, and my use of my life force to fuel those ethereal flames both hit me at once. I stilled only for a moment as I scanned through my memories for where that little bit of solid had been when it brushed my hand. I remembered it had the feeling of my mana within it. All I had to do was trace my mana.

The body of the spell beast didn't have any mana so I just needed to look for the one small spell beast that did. Time circulated in my eyes, and I looked for the core of the beast. I'd never looked for something specific like this before so I halfway expected it not to work. Looking through time itself for an imprint of the spell beast's core wasn't exactly easy, and the information I was bombarded with told me that this creature was quite old, but the shape of it's core had never changed. That perfectly round marble of black darkness barely bigger then a tennis ball.

I realized then that I'd seen this beast's core before. That odd wand the bandit leader had been brazenly swinging around. How someone had snatched his core away from him was beyond me, but I now knew that it had been done. That wand tortured the beast into submission every time mana flowed into it. Today the beast had just snapped as the last of it's sanity frayed.

It didn't care about pain anymore so it just attacked everything with the goal of devouring the world just as it had done the first time it came to this planet. Going dormant once it ran out of mana to eat. I didn't know exactly how the creature had come to be, but I did know that it was an artificial life. The wand had been made to contain the creature, but as long as the wand existed the creature was in pain. My intent flowed into the mana around me as the spell beast's rushed towards me to devour me whole.

I lashed out with my soul blade. The blade was far more effective now that the vast majority of the beast had been burned away. I had tunnel vision as I hacked, and slashed. I wanted only the part of the beast that contained the core. I didn't care about all the little pieces of it that were trying to attack me.

Anything that got in my way was slashed. The speed at which I slashed it was beyond impressive if you were to watch me fight without having ever seen such speed before. Sometimes it simply appeared as if my arms disappeared only to reappear somewhere else. This heightened state of battle honed me like a blade. My mask had long since cracked in multiple places so that those watching would catch glimpses of my crazy smile, but somehow the well crafted mask managed to cling to my face.

Just barely concealing enough of my face to keep me unrecognizable. Pain exploded throughout my body as the rebound for my soul damage, and spell both hit me at once. My nose, and eyes bled as I fought back the pain while continuing to move. It would only get worse once I stopped so I chose to accelerate instead. The speed at which I was moving went up several notches as divine energy flowed through me without restraint.

I wasn't used to using divine energy, and I knew I wouldn't be able to erase this whole battle from time. In fact I was more then a little certain that I wouldn't be able to move at all once I stopped. I knocked the lethal attacks of the spell beasts aside. I wasn't able to completely deflect all of them so I lost chunks of my body to the spell beasts for the second time. My rage flowed into my aura unrestrained as I closed on the main body of the spell beast.

My divine energy allowed me to literally see the core of the spell beast. It shined like a beacon. Drawing me to it with far more force then anything I'd ever felt before. I didn't just want that core right now. Some integral part of me needed this victory.

It was almost as if I would learn something important from that core when I got ahold of it. If that truly was the case then I was going to do whatever it took to get that damned core. Divine energy didn't stop me from overexerting my muscles as I rushed into battle. My bruised arms, and legs continued to take more, and more damage as I pushed my body harder then it had ever been pushed before. I felt legitimate joy despite my body being wracked with more, and more pain.