Valeria was as good as down, having been incapacitated by the simultaneous shrieks of a dozen banshees. Leon and Maia were still on their feet, but their magic power was in turmoil, and now the banshees were bearing down upon them.

[Stay here, defend, don’t attack,] Leon was able to mutter to his river nymph lover. He wanted them to stay where they could cover each other and Valeria, who was still barely able to keep herself off the ground. Besides, his entire body was flaring up in pain, he didn’t think he had the mental capacity to watch his own back, and from what he could feel through his and Maia’s connection, she didn’t, either.

There was no more time for words; the banshees were upon them. Black claws spewing inky black darkness like smoke extended from the flying creatures and were aimed at the two, but quick swordplay from Leon and a swiftly-conjured wall of water from Maia staved them off. It bought just enough time for Leon to begin regaining control of his magic power.

It started with a spark in his heart, a tiny blue speck of power that carried the Thunderbird’s lightning. In less than a second, arcs of lightning exploded out of that spark and traveled throughout Leon’s entire body, practically lighting him up from the inside with silver-blue light. The darkness that Leon hadn’t even realized had crept into his body was banished, and his magic power was his again.

He couldn’t help but roar in satisfaction as his power flooded through his body, filling him with energy and fighting spirit. After the brief but intense pain of the banshee’s shriek, Leon felt so good he almost leaped into the fray without another thought.

But he paused and focused on Maia. More specifically, he focused on their connection, the river of power that flowed between their soul realms. His power would enter her as hers entered him, making neither of them more powerful or granting each other their respective powers, but allowing them to sense each other’s thoughts and emotions.

Or so it was supposed to be. Leon wondered if he could possibly exploit that connection to aid Maia in her attempts to stave off the banshee’s attacks. Right now, he could sense her struggling to get her magic power under control, though she still had enough at her command to defend herself from the banshees. However, the ice wraiths were taking slow, ominous steps toward them…

Leon sent a spark of power, just a hint of the Thunderbird’s lightning into the river of power that connected them and hoped with everything that he had that it would be enough. After that, he conjured a silver-blue lightning bolt in his off-hand and hurled it at the ground near a pair of banshees. The lightning bolt hit the ground almost as soon as it left Leon’s hand, exploding on the forest floor and inundating the banshees with the lightning of the Thunderbird.

The darkness was stripped away from the monsters, revealing what appeared to be the desiccated flesh of a long-dead human child, still writhing in pain as lightning began ripping into its form and burning it from the inside out. The two banshees fell to the ground, dead.

In response, Leon noticed the ice wraiths pause in their advance, but another shriek from the remaining banshees captured his attention. Their shriek hit his ears like the horn of a charging bull, but Leon was ready, his power coursing through his veins and preventing any attempt at infiltration by this foreign magic; Leon remained unaffected, and a quick glance back at Maia showed her standing up straighter and back in full fighting condition.

Leon smiled, his racing heartbeat slowing as he began to internalize the fact that he could fight with these monsters, that they couldn’t harm him anymore. With two more lightning bolts conjured and hurled at titanic speeds, three more banshees fell to the ground, their corpses smoking as Leon’s lightning burned all their darkness away.

With only seven banshees left, Maia was able to hold them off with her powers by conjuring a pair of serpentine water dragons about as large as she was that encircled the three of them and, with large icy fangs as long as daggers, snapped at the banshees when they flew too close. This gave Leon enough room to conjure yet another lightning bolt.

This one, however, he held back on. This was not a bolt for the banshees, but for Valeria, to help her in the same way he helped Maia. Instead of throwing it like a javelin as he would if this were a real attack, Leon thrust the bolt out like a spear, letting it graze against Valeria’s shoulder. It was a light touch, but several potent arcs of lightning jumped into her, burnishing her armor and causing her body to seize up.

For just a moment, Leon was worried that he put far too much power into the bolt and that instead of aiding her, he’d caused her real harm. But then Valeria relaxed and jumped back to her feet.

“Thanks!” she shouted as she then conjured her glaive from her soul realm and stood back up, ready to defend herself. Her knees still seemed a bit shaky, but Leon could tell that she was otherwise fine and in fighting shape.

As he was tending to Valeria, Maia had one of her serpentine dragons lunged forward, thinning their defensive circle a bit but catching one of the banshees in its sharp fangs. The water dragon snapped the creature in half, but the darkness that coated the banshee’s body flowed into the dragon instead of dissipating. It dyed the dragon pitch black, causing its watery form to wither and writhe. Leon saw Maia immediately cut off her power to the dragon, letting it collapse in on itself before the darkness could spread further.

At this point, with half of the banshees dead, the remaining six pulled back. Leon, Maia, and Valeria were by no means out of the woods yet, though, for the ice wraiths now took their place.

The one closest to Leon was only about thirty or forty feet away, and it extended its ethereal hand toward him. The ice that covered the ground beneath it suddenly exploded up and outward in the shape of a hand, five finger-shaped spikes rocketing toward Leon with nothing short of lethal intent.

Without hesitation, Leon switched from lightning to fire and let loose with an intense gout of orange flame. It splashed across the oncoming ice like a wave on the beach, halting it completely. But the ice wraith just pushed harder, the massive ice spikes flattening into a wall of ice that spread past Leon’s wall of fire, trying to go around. Leon just extended his fire wall to compensate, with both pressing against each other with all their power. The surroundings quickly filled with the resulting steam, and many of the flowers and trees around them caught alight.

Leon could hear the crashing and battering of battle behind him, but the ice wraith in front of him held his attention. Spikes tried to bore through his fire, their demonic qualities protecting them from his fire just enough to poke through but not quite reach him. Leon could only crank up the power, letting magical energies flow from his soul realm, into his blood, and then out of his hand.

He spared just a little for his blade, smiling as the blade heated up and began to burn, the Adamant metal resonating with his blood. Leon then swept the blade across his body like he was trying to cut through the ice wall. A wave of fire erupted from his sword and added enough additional pressure to stop his fire wall from being so easily penetrated, but it wasn’t enough to push the ice wall back.

Realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to just overpower the wraith, Leon grimaced and just pointed his weapon at a single point on the wall and let his power explode out of it. A stream of potent fire was released from the tip of his sword, traveled through his fire wall, and splashed against the ice wall, failing to completely penetrate even with a more focused approach.

But Leon wasn’t deterred. He could sense a momentary waver in the aura of the ice wraith on the other side of the rapidly-growing walls, enough to know that it had taken a noticeable amount of power from the demonic creature to patch whatever damage he’d managed to do.

A smile once more spreading across his face, Leon pressed on, twisting his sword like a drill and letting his fire both hold the ice wall and bore into it. He didn’t want to try and break through everywhere as the wraith was doing, he wanted to break through in one place and force the wraith back.

It seemed that the wraith thought Leon could do it, for a moment later, an ear-piercing shriek tore through the clearing as the banshees returned.

Leon screamed back, both in pain and in anger as he was forced to cut off his fire and call upon his lightning once again to fight off the banshee’s dark powers. This also allowed the wraith’s ice to proceed unchallenged as Leon’s fire fizzled out. Half a dozen ice spikes bore down on Leon as he fought off the effects of the banshee’s shriek.

Roaring in frustration, Leon didn’t have the time to switch back to fire even with his lightning-enhanced reflexes. All he had time to do was to let loose with as large a blast of lightning as he could, doing nothing more than directing it toward the ice spikes.

Silver-blue lightning illuminated his body as it poured out of him, arcing and dancing across his form before exploding outward and slamming into the ice spikes below and the banshees above. In one cataclysmic blast of power, nearly draining Leon of everything he had, the ice spikes and the ice wall behind them shattered under the heat and the power behind his attack, while two of the remaining banshees fell to the ground, dead.

Behind the ice wall, the wraith cocked its head, looking for all the world as if it were shocked at what Leon had just done, or at least that was the impression that Leon got. Whatever the reason for it, the wraith paused for just long enough for Leon to take stock of his situation.

He had Valeria and Maia fighting the other three wraiths right behind him. He couldn’t take advantage of his prodigious speed without leaving them vulnerable, so he’d have to fight his wraith head-on. The aura coming from it seemed to be seventh-tier, but it was hard for Leon to tell with such an alien being. Regardless, it had shown enough power to stand against him and not come out the loser even with Leon using all the power he had at his command.

That left one option. He’d have to close the distance, attacking it straight on so that it couldn’t attack Valeria or Maia behind him.

Leon pulled every ounce of power he could out of his soul realm to replenish his depleted mana supply and then charged without another moment of hesitation. He wanted to end this as soon as he could.

In a flash of light and tremendous roar of thunder, Leon seemed to vanish and instantly reappear in front of his ice wraith, his sword already raised and coursing with silver-blue lightning. The wraith had only enough time to begin raising an arm before Leon brought his blade down onto the creature’s icy form.

It was a powerful monster, there was no doubt about that. Its defenses were formidable, protecting it from almost any attack, especially more mundane slashing or blunt force wounds. However, when Leon’s blade slammed into its icy ‘flesh’, its body seemed to melt away before the fury of Leon’s power. Silver-blue lightning tore into it, cracking, ripping, tearing into the monster’s body.

In a moment, the wraith shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, while a significant portion of its torso was instantly liquified by the heat of Leon’s lightning.

The wraith was dead, but it had cost Leon a great deal of power. He almost fell to a knee after it, and the banshee shriek that followed almost immediately after its fall didn’t help. However, it did serve to galvanize Leon’s fighting spirit and help to give him the visceral, furious motivation to stay on his feet.

Turning, Leon saw that Valeria was just barely managing to hold her own against her wraith. She was vastly outclassed, with only her armor and one of Maia’s water dragons keeping her in the land of the living. Maia herself, on the other hand, was doing much better facing off against the other two wraiths, with three more water dragons keeping them on the defense. However, those four water dragons were weakening with every banshee shriek they endured, creating more and more opportunities for the ice wraiths to successfully strike against the ladies.

Summoning every last scrap of power that he could, emptying his bloodstream of magic power, practically reducing his physical strength to that of a regular human, Leon prepared one last magical attack. He was hoping that Maia and Valeria would be able to finish the job after this because he knew that he’d need quite a bit of rest to recover his strength once this was over.

His sword sparked and crackled with silver-blue lightning as Leon’s power flowed into it. He held nothing back, letting the blade glow silver with a halo of blue light from the sheer amount of power he pushed into it.

The Adamant metal held it all and seemed greedy for more. Leon felt like he could push every spark of power he had in his soul realm into this weapon and it still wouldn’t reach its limit. So he kept going, far past the point where any other sword, even those well-enchanted to hold lightning magic, would’ve exploded. Only when his body was left dry did Leon stop and finally swing his blade.

All of the power that Leon had built up in that moment of preparation surged out into the air, sending one large bolt of silver-blue lightning tearing through the tree canopy and incinerating a huge portion of the leafy forest ceiling. More importantly, the blast caught all four of the remaining banshees and tore them to pieces, leaving little behind but a few wisps of smoky darkness.

Most importantly, though, was that the ice wraiths were also caught up in the blast, though not to quite the same extent. A few arcs of lightning reached out from the blast, barely missing Maia and Valeria by Leon’s flagging willpower, and embraced their bodies. It seemed almost graceful until the ice wraiths were hurled back, their bodies cracked and leaking dark blue blood, their glowing blue eyes dimming.

Leon fell to his knees, unable to do anything more, feeling weaker than he had in years. Maia, however, wasted not a second as her water dragons pursued the ice wraiths. The weakest one that had been fighting Valeria was enveloped by one of the serpentine dragons before it could recover and squeezed to death, its body collapsing into thousands of ice shards. The remaining two came out a little better, conjuring ice walls that prevented the dragons from immediately wrapping their snake-like bodies around them and keeping their fangs at bay.

However, they didn’t try to stay and fight. The dragons ripped down the wall almost as if it were made of plywood, but by then the ice wraiths had vanished. Leon hadn’t been able to see how they did it, but after several long, quiet seconds, it became clear that they were gone.

What had once been a dark, peaceful section of forest had been completely changed by the battle. Nearly all of the vegetation around the three of them—especially where Leon had been throwing around fire—had been destroyed, either burned up or torn up by Maia’s water dragons. A hole almost dozen feet wide had been created in the leafy ceiling, ringed by fires started by Leon’s lightning, that allowed the early afternoon sun to stream in, bathing the battlefield in sunlight. Nearly all the trees around Leon had been blackened by fire and lightning, while a few sheets of ice remained from the wraiths. The remains of twelve banshees were scattered around, emitting a terrible fetid stench that would’ve turned everyone’s stomachs if they hadn’t been otherwise distracted.

For Leon, though, all of this destruction wasn’t the important takeaway. Rather, he was consumed by the fact that this had only been a relatively small group of wraiths and banshees, and they’d only just passed the halfway point on their way to the northeastern corner of the Vale. If this was what they were encountering here, he didn’t want to even think about what they might encounter deeper in the forest.