Selthia slammed brutally into the stone floor, completely unable to initiate a spatial jump at any point during the descent due to the massive cranial concussion rattling her skull.
Ren weaponized the resulting up wind to fuel his ascent, riding the shockwave of his own attack and supplementing it with sharp bursts of wind elemental control to rapidly scale the massive spiral staircase leading back toward the primary vault.
But dozens of Selthias abruptly materialized directly in his flight path.
For a fleeting second, every single copy sported a severely caved-in skull, a gruesome phantom echo of the devastating physical blow he had just delivered to the original. A heartbeat later, the entire swarm flawlessly regenerated in unison.
They looked genuinely furious…
But the eerie, playful laughter had vanished entirely.
Ren registered that specific behavioral shift as a moral victory, though he did not slow his ascent for a millisecond to celebrate it.
