Split Across

The mages bristled, their expressions a curious blend of wariness and morbid fascination as they felt the fierce potency of Gladius's manifestation wash over them. 

"What is this sharp aura I'm sensing?" one of them muttered under his breath, only for another to shake his head slowly in bewilderment.

"It feels like he's actually summoning some kind of..."

"Enough prattling fools!" the leader snarled, raising his staff as blazing runes sprang to life all along its gnarled length. "Kill them before this gets any more out of hand!"

In that instant, the woods erupted into bedlam. 

Gladius could only stand still, utterly transfixed, as a veritable firestorm of blazing mana erupted from the mages' staves in scintillating arcs of dazzling light. 

The air itself seemed to roil and shudder beneath the onslaught of eldritch energies, as cones of searing radiation and superheated plasma lanced through the tree canopy to unerringly track the Nascent beasts.

The lesser monstrosities shrieked and gibbered in primal terror, those too slow or feeble to evade the onslaught meeting an agonizing end as they were engulfed by the blossoming. Flesh crisped and sloughed away from charring bones in the blink of an eye, clouds of acrid smoke billowing upward in the conflagrations' wakes as wild avenues of vegetation were scoured from the forest floor by the sheer, devastating force of the mages' fury.

It was a brutal spectacle of one-sided carnage, a complete mismatch of power. 

The Nascent beasts stood little chance as the mages cut them down with calculated, almost mechanical efficiency. Their staffs were surgical instruments of destruction, each jab and flourish unleashing an annihilating salvo of arcane energies.

When the scorching mana struck the bark of the ancient trees, the effect was nothing short of catastrophic. Rather than merely detonating upon impact, the fiery blasts appeared to almost coalesce into luminous runes that hung suspended in midair for the briefest of heartbeats – strange, angular glyphs that pulsed with malefic power until detonating in apocalyptic waves of searing force and elemental cataclysm.

One particularly large, brutish specimen – clearly an alpha of some sort – unleashed a throaty bellow of fury as its beady eyes flared crimson. 

Gladius could sense the sudden, feral spike of power as the beast tapped into its berserk state, channeling every fiber of its being into closing the distance and rending the mages with razor-edged fangs and claws.

Yet even this showed scant more than a momentary pause to the merciless mages. In a blinding radiance of azure and searing amber, a concentrated lance of pure plasma lashed out to envelop the hapless beast in an incinerating cyclone of heat and force. 

Its agonized death shrieks were horribly abrupt, cut off by the sickening crunch of its sturdy frame being twisted into grotesque, unnatural angles by the esoteric onslaught.

All around him, Gladius bore witness to the terrifying destructive capabilities of the arcane forces wielded by the mages. His sword's edge seemed to thrum in tune with the fundamental energies permeating the woodland, reverberating with the power of creation and unmakings occurring all around him. 

There were patterns to this mystic force, intricate symphonies of power that ebbed, flowed, and swirled in accordance with ethereal laws far beyond mortal comprehension – yet ones that his spiritual blade somehow felt attuned to on an elemental level.

In what seemed like a mere handful of fevered breaths, it was over. An eerie, scorched silence fell over the ravaged woods, broken only by the faint sizzle of flesh charring and wood smoldering in the wakes of the firestorm. 

The once lush forestscape had been transformed into a nightmarish tableau, the ground littered with mutilated, still-twitching cadavers and the charcoal-black husks of trees clawing impotently at the slate-grey heavens above.

The crimson-tressed mage regarded the devastation with a look of cool indifference, her lips quirking into a smug moue as she caught Gladius staring intently at the horrific aftermath. 

One delicate hand toyed with the heavy tassels hanging from her sapphire robes as she leveled him with a look of supremacy.

"Hmph. We are merely Nascent Novice Mages, only beginning to grasp the true depths of magical power. Yet even at this early stage, we can unleash such devastating force." Her eyes glinted with the same fierce light as the flames she'd summoned. "You would do well to take caution around any mage – we are quite terrifying people, if I may be so bold."

Gladius offered her naught but a sidelong look, his gaze still fixated on the macabre scene of pyric destruction splayed out before them. Yet before he could formulate a reply, his senses suddenly detonated with a spike of alarm, an electrifying prickling at the base of his skull that set every instinct howling in primal warning.

His head whipped around instantly, cold eyes zooming in on a smoldering pile of charred flesh amidst the pyre of embers and smoking tree limbs. 

The other mages remained oblivious, their arrogance already dismissing the gory scene as they began turning away to resume their travels. 

But Gladius could sense it – a twisted, bestial presence lurking amongst the death and char, biding its time as it fed upon the mages' own hubris.

In an explosive blur of smoke, ash, and foulness, the malign power surged forth in the form of a horrific, half-melted abomination – a Nascent beast whose torso and skull had been horribly mangled and melted by the mages' mystical firestorm, yet whose broken spirit still clung to what remained of its mutilated form with rabid tenacity. 

Its piercing shriek of berserk fury shattered the silence, a shockwave of pure malevolence slamming into the unsuspecting magic-wielders like a physical force. 

Moving with unnatural swiftness for a creature so crippled. But even in this state, the beast was burning all ounce of Mana within its ruined blood but more importantly its soul. The fuel of its soul, the dying ember of its will that wanted to kill, it greatly boosted the beast's prowess to a point where the EmberForge Mages couldn't react while sensing a genuine threat to their lives!

The beast lashed out with its remaining razor-tipped limb toward the closest available target – the crimson-tressed maiden whose beauty had served as such an offense to its primal sensibilities.

Too late did her violet eyes fly wide with shock and fear, too slow did her lush lips peel back in a silent scream as she realized her folly. 

Caught hopelessly flat-footed amidst the afterglow of her own arrogance, she would never raise her staff in time to deflect the lethal swipe aimed squarely at her exquisite face. Those jagged talons would ravage her delicate porcelain beauty, rending the softness of her cheeks to bloody ruin as easily as a dagger slicing warm silk.

Yet even as that wicked claw flashed forward, a pale blur thrust itself in the path of the deadly strike. 

Gladius's sword seemed to materialize from the ether itself, the ghostly weapon trailed by coruscating motes of argent fire as his entire form fell into a blur of peerless motion. 

There was a meaty thunk, followed by a visceral torrent of blood, viscera, and pulped organs as the razor edge cleaved in a single sublime arc directly through the beast's torso, sundering flesh from bone with surgical precision. 

So swiftly did the spirit blade part that warped, burnt frame, so potent was the mystic force behind that flawless stroke, that it seemed to defy the beast's own forward momentum – separating its ravaged corpus into two neatly sheared halves that crashed to the scorched loam in finality.

A stunned, suffocating silence reigned in the bloody wake of that devastating riposte. 

All around, Gladius found himself the convergence of utterly dumbstruck stares, the remaining mages gaping in blank astonishment as disbelief battled outrage and denial across their features. 

They were just barely able to see the mere blur of the sword, witnessed the near-impossible speed and unerring lethality with which Gladius had dispatched a threat that would've been able to injure anyone of them..yet their senses flatly refused to accept what their eyes beheld.

This was completely different compared to how they first met Gladius. At that time, they only saw him plunging his blade through the Chimpazes beast's skull to kill it. They didn't witness anything else from that battle.

And now, they saw it all.

How could a lowly, mana-less vagabond react with a swiftness beyond their own heightened perceptions – not to mention effortlessly slaying a beast that could have slaughtered one of them? 

It flew in the face of all their preconceptions, forcing these self-styled elite to confront the galling notion that the ruffian before them may be something far more than what his rough exterior implied.

The cocksure arrogance that had shone in their eyes mere moments ago was now shattered, replaced by a churning maelstrom of confusion, frustration, and something that whispered hauntingly of respect earned through violence. They did not wish to accept this uncomfortable reality, no matter how heavily it might press against their denial.

Gladius paid their volatile reactions little heed. With a subtly flourish, he returned his sword to its extradimensional embrace, turning his cold gaze toward the mage whose eggshell complexion had flushed to a furious shade of scarlet. 

Her chest heaved beneath the finely wrought sapphire bodice of her robe, her amethyst eyes blazing with humiliation and something that could only be described as smoldering wrath.

"Your earlier words were wise, despite their arrogance," he murmured in a tone as chillingly impassive as his gaze. His head dipped a fraction in a subtle nod of respect. "Only the foolish would dare provoke beings who command such terrifying might. I will be cautious...but make no mistake, Magic is just another force of this world."