Page 181 of Elven Crown

She was so focused on trying to figure out how something like this was even possible in the first place, it hadn’t occurred to her how quickly this kind of spell would jump into action.

A lot more quickly than she would have given it credit for.

Which became disastrously clear only a few seconds later when the constant rapport of magical gunfire from below petered out into a tense, confused silence.

Then rose the first few sputtering chokes and gasps from below.

No…

Rebecca rushed forward, ramming herself to a stop against the balcony’s railing to confirm with her own eyes what her gut had already figured out.

The undulating filaments of the death cloud had now dropped into the firefight below. Augmented weapons had already lowered.

Several weapons toppled from baffled hands as magicals reached for their own throats instead, tugging at shirt collars, pounding nervously on their own chests until they realized the air they tried to draw into their lungs had nothing to do with the tightness of their top buttons or any natural reaction of their own bodies.

It was the spell.

Two enemy combatants just inside the auditorium’s double doors fell first, crumpling to the ground with solid, echoing thuds. Another slithered to the slanted floor and rolled down it before coming to a lifeless halt, already dead.

The coughing and wheezing worsened, joined by searing and gasping hacks and grunts while every living being stillinside the building fell beneath the ancient, deadly power of a necromancer’s final spell they couldn’t see.

And in the most basic sense, there was nowhere to go to escape its reach.

Rebecca knew the death cloud had already reached the members of her own team without having to see it. She’d already run out of time to reverse this thing, but if she hurried, she might be able to still dosomething.

Once again, she faced impossible odds and with an increasingly frustrating inability to clone herself and be in multiple places at once.

So how the fuck was she supposed to turn this thing off before it killed everyone, including her?

Then she felt the strangling hold of the death cloud’s reach taking root in her too, the tightness squeezing around her throat. The pressure in her chest. How damn hard it had suddenly become to breathe.

Oddly enough, it felt just like the homunculus poison that had coursed through her after such an equally stupid mistake in an unexpected battle against an unknown foe.

But Rebecca had found a way to reverse those effects once already.

What had helped her clear herself of the homunculus poisons so she could heal the magically necrotic wound that awful golem had left behind?

Consumption.

She’d recharged her own with the Bloodshadow magic she hadn’t allowed herself to use in so very long.

But there was no one here within range who possessed a spark powerful enough to undo the necromancer’s twisted spell. Even if the necromancer had still been alive, the spark of those who dealt in death magic was forever off limits to someone like her.

That conjured death cloud left to its own devices was too strong.

Rebecca’s lungs burned with the agony of trying and failing to draw as much breath as they needed.

Yes, the spell killing them all was incredibly strong, wielding power like she hadn’t seen in centuries and never before on Earth.

Enough power to run itself.

And magic always contained its own type of spark…

That was it!

She’d hoped to try such a thing with the explosive-ward traps set around the theater hall but had been denied the opportunity.

Now, while every member of her team succumbed beneath the death cloud’s ravenous destruction, every second lingering closer to the brink of death, Rebecca was up here on her own.

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