The moment it saw that energy beam — which looked like very bad news indeed — the devil zipped off to one side. "Master, this one's beyond me."
Before its voice had even faded, the beam was in front of Adam's face. Channeling mana into his robe, he extended a finger and fired a bolt of lightning to meet it head-on.
Current and white beam collided and annihilated each other, a fine, unbroken chain of explosions crackling and popping, a great vacuum of energy opening at the point of contact; in the end the two canceled out and a shockwave swept past.
"A very strange feeling."
"She clearly has an energy level past the critical point, and yet her attacks are this crude and inefficient? Just a plain energy discharge? How is that any different from wadding up your mana and throwing it at someone?"
Adam pondered silently.
"Blasphemer!"
Chains sprouted once more from the First Servitor's severed wrist. They shot into the sky and hung there, nailed in place, as though hooked onto something unseen; then flesh and blood grew along them, sprouting open mouths until the sky was thick with them.
"Receive divine punishment!"
Tongues thrust at Adam one after another, sheathed in white light like countless swords.
Adam unfolded his meditation method to the full, and rune after rune rose on his barrier like so many displays of knowledge. Then the current poured out with him as its center, flowing indiscriminately in every direction, grinding away at the white energy pass after pass and charring the tongues to cinders.
The First Servitor's brows knitted tight; her body trembled without pause, and pain showed on her face.
Adam, sped on by the lightning, flashed before the chain and seized it with his bare hand.
"Is this stuff energy, or is it solid?"
Once he had it in his grip, Adam burned the flesh and blood to ash — and the feel of what came next made him pause.
"Bone? She's altering her own body's structure outright?"
Adam had assumed the chain was either some other-plane magic or energy given physical form; it had never once occurred to him that it was made of bone.
"Take your filthy hands off it!"
At the rage in the First Servitor's voice, several faces sprouted swiftly along the chain and lunged at Adam, jaws snapping.
Adam swept out a few wind blades and sliced the faces away, then, ignoring the disgust, drove his hand straight into the wound and converted mana into a massive current, channeling it along the chain and the flesh upon it into the First Servitor.
"This thing conducts electricity."
With those words from Adam, the current poured into the First Servitor's body almost unresisted. She screamed in unbearable agony, her muscles splitting open under the current's assault.
"That weak?" The devil had appeared at Adam's side at some point, batting aside the Servitors' attacks as it spoke.
"Weak?" Adam didn't see it that way. He held the absolute upper hand right now, but he knew the First Servitor held far more total energy than he did; her problem seemed to be that she had no idea how to use it, and that was the only reason he was beating her down.
If anyone but Adam were fighting her, they would sooner or later lose the war of attrition and die.
But she had run into Adam — a man who could run several threads at once in the middle of battle to restore his spiritual power and mana.
Blood ran down the First Servitor's body and dripped at her feet. Suddenly the silver robe she wore lit up; its threads raced and shifted, first cutting the chain, then burrowing into her body and neutralizing the current bit by bit until none of it remained.
Just then Cristel and the other two reached the battlefield, and stood stunned at the giant altar floating in the sky.
"Bigger than the one in the royal city!"
"Look at the bones on it — at least a hundred thousand people died to make that!"
Adam wrapped his hand in lightning and sliced the chain apart with a sweep, then flew back. He showed not the least embarrassment over what had just happened. "The west has already been given up by the Church of the Supreme God. This thing in front of us should be the Church's headquarters." He watched the severed chain vanish in the air, fixed his eyes on the statue and the crystal skeleton in its arms, and said flatly, "That woman has an energy reserve beyond the critical point. Kill her, and retrieve that skeleton."
Without hesitation, the three charged the Servitors. At a moment like this they raised no objections, William included — he might slack off, but he had no doubt at all that if he got in Adam's way, he would be killed.
With three mage apprentices joining in, the Servitors fell faster still. When they died their flesh and blood vanished without a trace, leaving only white bone to add another brick to the altar.
The First Servitor lifted her head, her beautiful face ruined by countless wounds, and paid it no mind. She murmured to the crystal skeleton, "Baby, I've never been willing to use that divine spell. I was afraid that once I used it, you wouldn't recognize your mother's face."
Then she swept a hateful glare over Adam: "But now I have to. These bad people want you dead, so they have to die."
"You are my whole world. They want to destroy my world, so I'm going to destroy them!"
The First Servitor undid her robe and let it fall, baring her body. A knife appeared in her hand, and she began to cut away her own flesh, slice by slice.
Adam didn't know what the First Servitor had said or what she was doing, but it could only be some special incantation and ritual. With a price that steep, the power would have to be astonishing. An ill premonition rose in him, and he swept his hand, sending a dozen bolts of thunder crashing at her one after another.
Bones flew off the altar in sheets, assembling to block each of Adam's spells; those shattered by the blasts merged into the others, and together they formed a wall of bone.
The last thing Adam saw was the First Servitor gouging out her own eyes with the knife, becoming a skeleton through and through.
The wall of white bone cut off Adam's line of sight. He hurriedly increased his output, spending magic as if it cost nothing, and when at last he smashed the bone wall he found that the entire altar had drawn together into a single whole, closing around the First Servitor inside it, writhing and growing without pause.
Elsewhere, Ophelia's fist blew apart the last Servitor. They gathered at Adam's side and stared, dumbstruck, at the monster slowly growing before them, at a loss for what to do.
Cristel gathered another strand of wind of startling power and sent it sweeping over the altar. It destroyed part of the bone, but could not begin to match the pace of growth.
William and Adam hammered it with spells in turn, but nothing could stop it.
"If I'd known it would come to this, I should have saved Embers." Adam's brows were locked tight. He had to admit he had miscalculated: he had wasted his trump card on a bluff of a living sacrifice, and now he had no answer to what lay in front of him.
The white bone grew faster and faster until a humanlike form could be made out. By then Adam and the others found that their magic could barely affect it anymore — the instant a spell touched it, some unknown power canceled it out.