I tried pressing my mental advantage, but new mental defenses snapped into place, walling off its mind. The thing was so strong!

Before I could try Mana Beam again, the wood imprisoning my limbs began to pull, creeping apart at a slow but inexorable pace. I gritted my teeth and heaved against the restraints, but it was like trying to arm wrestle a mountain. Despite my insanely high strength, this thing possessed power at an entirely different level, and I'd conveniently jumped down its throat into the heart of its strength.

Crap.

I tried to trigger Phantom Step, but nothing happened. I felt my mana try to flow out, but an invisible force blocked it.

"It can nullify my spells too? Really?"

Soul Feed's touch-based energy drain hadn't activated either. I hadn't encountered any monsters strong enough to block it other than the disgusting Puppetmaster. Of course, the Colossus was many magnitudes more powerful, so I guess I shouldn't feel surprised. It was still stupidly unfair.

Cyrus didn't bother answering. Probably wise because I didn't want to hear another dumb platitude about digging deep and putting on a good show for invisible fans. I struggled and heaved against my slowly stretching restraints, but made zero progress. My arms and legs were totally stuck. My left hand was actually free, but my left wrist and most of my arm were stuck, so that didn't help much.

I dumped Scalebiter from my stuck right hand back into my inventory. I considered summoning it into my free left hand, but I lacked the leverage to wield it even a little. Just a few inches of freedom for my wrist and I could twist my hand around and hack free with the rare blade.

Think, Lucas!

I scanned my inventory and spells, considering and discarding one idea after another. The Colossus was too strong. I couldn't hurt it while trapped, and its Ironwood hide was tough enough to withstand my magical attacks. Plus it was immune or resistant to most elements, and its mana pool too deep to overwhelm.

Or was it?

I willed a crystal throwing dart into my hand. Twisting it as far as I could, I still lacked the leverage to get the blade to even scrape the restraining wood. I was stuck, and within a few minutes, the Colossus would tear me apart.

For a moment, I considered just waiting and letting the monster rip my limbs off. I'd survived losing half my body. It wasn't pleasant, but it was possible. Unfortunately, then I wouldn't have any hands to fight with, and I doubted it would give me time to regrow anything before crushing or suffocating me.

Dammit! I just needed a break, just a little mobility.

I wasn't getting it. Lacking any other options, I triggered Spellseer's Gaze. The little room grew brighter, the colors deeper and more vibrant. The blue glow around the Colossus's central sphere blazed like a miniature sun, while the air was packed with rich earth mana.

The monster seemed content to simply rip me apart while it healed, so had momentarily stopped attacking my mind. Was it just waiting until it regained more health? Maybe I'd scared it off. More likely, it figured I was already dead.

I pushed convergence mana out into the air around me and focused on converting the nearest earth mana to more convergence mana. If I still had Immolation, I'd try to generate another void tornado, but useless wishes were a waste of time. So I focused on doing it the slow way. As more and more mana transformed, I pushed my mana out farther.

I managed to fill half the tiny chamber with convergence mana before the Colossus reacted. Earth mana pressed into a solid wall across the chamber and flashed once, transforming into a barely tangible barrier. It wasn't quite wood, wasn't quite stone, and wasn't totally physical, but somehow it blocked my convergence mana from passing through.

"Shostakovich!" That could have worked. I had not expected a giant hulking Colossus to possess such advanced mana control on top of everything else.

I wanted to thrash against my bonds and scream in frustration, but that would waste energy and time I was quickly running out of. Instead, I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax in the wooden rack to focus on a crazy new idea. I'd been practicing with mana strings and gotten very close to making them dense enough to interact with the physical world. I didn't need much, just a tiny bit more.

Nothing like pain therapy to force me to progress.

So I turned my entire focus to my only other idea, forming 5 slender strings of mana, like ethereal fingers. Focusing all my intent, I willed them to wrap around the little throwing knife sitting in my open palm. That part was easy, but willing the mana strings to lift the knife proved fruitless.

The strings of mana slipped through, although I felt a whisper of a scrape, like a burr of metal catching when a blade was sheathed. That meant I was close, right?

So of course the Colossus chose that moment to start pushing spikes of ironwood out from the wall behind my back. They didn't grow fast, but with that same inexorable creeping of the wooden shackles slowly stretching my limbs.

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"You are such a Bach," I growled.

Not content with just ripping my arms and legs off, it wanted to impale me too. My timetable had just shrunk. The spikes wouldn't punch through my layers of armor easily, but eventually they'd push me away from the wall far enough to either drive through or help rip my limbs off sooner.

So I tried again, then again with my mana strings. Sweat beaded my face as the pressure on my back slowly intensified and the stretching of my limbs changed from annoying to painful. Dying in battle was an ever-present reality on Arasha, but this slow death by ironwood torture sucked.

No. I refused to accept it. So I closed my eyes and forced myself to ignore the growing pain. Drawing deep from my Meditation skill, I walled off the rest of the world and even my physical plight and focused my entire will on those 5 slender strings of mana.

Again and again I wrapped them around the dagger. Again and again they slipped through without moving the blade. But each time, that almost imperceptible burr grew a bit bigger, scraping at the pommel or the edge with an almost audible rasping sound.

Dimly I felt my chest bowing outward under the pressure of the slowly growing spikes, my arms and legs on the verge of dislocating, my body wracked with pain. I acknowledged the situation, then let it all go and delved deeper into my mana.

What was the problem? I used mana all the time to affect the physical world with my spells. Why couldn't I do it? I'd cut the ethereal with Soulrend, a weapon in the real world, I turned my body ghostly, then back to physical with Phantom Step.

That gave me an idea and I tried Phantom Step again. With my concentration so deep when I triggered it, I clearly sensed the spell reaching into my mana pool, gathering mana, then trying to push it out to the rest of my body. For the first time, I noticed the outer edges of the mana flowing into the spell twisted into a rippling script of familiar characters.

Runes! The heart of my spell contained runes. Cyrus had mentioned runes were like the basic programming language of magic and even spells had them, but somehow that hadn't really clicked until now.

I couldn't read the complex runes in that brief, half-seen vision, could not sequence such a complex spell, but the realization triggered a flash of insight. Dimly I sensed an achievement from Eva, but I was way too deep to read it or hear her voice.

Then my right shoulder dislocated with a jarring pop that almost yanked me out of my meditative state. My body was drenched in sweat and pain, every muscle quivering from the strain, but I forced myself to ignore it all and immersed myself deep into my mana pool for my last attempt before I started losing limbs.

Again I summoned the 5 strands of mana, again I wrapped them around the blade, but imprinted on the surface of the strands the basic rune for iron. Softly glowing patterns swirled through my mana strands and they suddenly shone brighter in my Spellseer's Gaze.

The blade lurched, then lifted into the air.

"Yes!" I shouted, knocking myself right out of my meditative state.

Pain tore through my conscious mind, as if it had been pounding on the door, eager for a chance to get in. I groaned as all the pain and torture I'd been ignoring blasted through my thoughts. My entire body twitched from the agony, and that movement added just enough pressure for my left arm to dislocate too.

That time I did scream. Pain tolerance was great, but even I had limits. My limbs were stretched to the breaking point, my torso arched painfully from the wall as sharp spikes of ironwood bit through my jacket and pressed against my eelhide inner layer with agonizing intensity.

My lungs ached from the pressure, my neck screaming from the topmost spike punching through the muscle right next to my spine. I hadn't even felt that happening. I panted, managing only shallow breaths. I had only moments left.

Growling, I focused my anger and refusal to die into pure intent, and crafted another hand of mana fingers. This time it flowed out so much easier. I knew it would work, and knew how to do it, so what had seemed totally impossible before now seemed only kind of impossible.

With those fingers of mana, I lifted the tiny blade. It wobbled, but did not fall. With an enormous mental effort that strained every last point in both Intelligence and Wisdom, I lengthened the mana strings to push the blade across the distance and pierce that barely tangible wall protecting the Colossus's mana from mine. The blade tore through with no resistance. As I'd hoped, the barrier couldn't stop physical objects.

The Colossus probably didn't consider a tiny dagger any threat. Good, because the tiniest bit of resistance would knock the blade from my control. With every ounce of concentration, I manipulated those fingers of mana to scratch the tip of the blade across the protective wooden sphere encasing the Colossus's heart.

No way I could drive it in with enough force to even make a scratch on the super hard wood, but the entire sphere was coated with a fine layer of ash from the fires raging outside. Scraping the blade through it was like drawing on a really dirty car window, and it left a readable mark. With as much haste as I could without losing control, I traced a rune with a single modifier onto the ash-covered wood.

Just as I finished, my left hip popped out of socket and the searing pain tore apart my concentration. The blade fell, but through tears of agony, I grinned. Then I bellowed my defiance as I poured every ounce of my mana into that little rune. It blazed like a new sun, and streams of the condensed earth mana encircling the Colossus's wooden heart poured into it, then back out again, transformed to water mana.

Within seconds, even as my body was pushed to the uttermost breaking point, water mana filled the chamber, replacing all the earth mana. The Colossus could not use water mana, and the bright glow of its heart gem flickered for a single second. More importantly, in that second the invisible suppression preventing me from using my spells also flickered.

Instantly, I triggered Phantom Step.

Relief poured in like a river as I slipped my bonds and stepped into the ethereal realm. In my phantom state, the glow from the Colossus's gem heart blazed brighter than ever.

I lunged across the small room, plunging my ethereal hand through the ironwood barrier surrounding the Colossus's heart gem. Touching it was like shoving my hand into a fire, and it wasn't the kind of fire that my fire resistance could help with.

I unleashed Fernand's Mercy.

"Ring of Fernand's Mercy. Rare. When Mercy needs to become Justice, tap into the energy of the Tesla Coil bracelet to deliver a jolt of pure damage on physical contact. You choose the percentage of available energy to include."

I hit it with everything, dumping all 100% of the vast amount of energy my bracelet had absorbed from wounding the Colossus so badly. I'd spent some in the minutes of the increasing torture, but most of the enormous pool of energy remained, and it eclipsed my own life force many times over.

A titanic wave of pure force smashed into the Colossus's gem heart and the backblast shattered the protective wooden sphere and sheared off all of the ironwood rods linking its heart core to the rest of its body.

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