Keeping his eyes on the two giant golems, Eli started by reaching for the safe and familiar. Like a favorite blanket, the air thickened around him and hugged his body until it felt like he was standing within a heavy syrup. He toggled on Manasight, the area around him filling with countless tiny lights with different hues of fog swirling along as if in a slow current. With so many colors and lights clumped into little groups bound together by some unseen force, he was again reminded of star clusters or galaxies on a miniature scale.

Trying not to get distracted by the beautiful sight, he focused on the two golems still standing frozen in the empty arena meters away. With the time his ability bought him, he examined the internal energy already building within their forms. While both had the matchstick man glow he'd seen before, they also had grapefruit-sized cylinders inside their skulls that went well with their increased body size. There was a similar muted brown light with bits of red flecks flowing out to their longer limbs, but there were also smaller cylinders like shiny soda cans inside each forearm.

Like the last battle, the golems started by turning their heads to focus on Eli, but otherwise, they didn't move. Unfortunately, his Manasight picked up a disturbing display as the colored clouds of light in the air swirled around the two umber giants. The chaotic currents started to noticeably flow and disappear around the golem's arms like their bodies were sucking in the tiny lights out of the air. At the same time, their arms lit up with an orange color that only intensified as he watched within his slowed-down world.

The vortex of colored lights in the air was oddly familiar, and a vision of the night he healed Wolf suddenly flashed across his mind. He remembered the exhaustion and a similar whirlpool of swirling lights that had somehow energized him enough to finish the job, but he'd forgotten about the phenomenon until now.

Frustration and anger bubbled up in his chest, realizing he only had himself to blame. There were plenty of excuses for the oversight, like his exhaustion that night or that it was a split-second observation in the middle of saving another person’s life. He'd also been a bit blind to the idea, working under the assumption that the mana lights didn't interact with the physical world outside oaths to the Oververse. In hindsight, the idea seemed particularly dumb since mana was considered a type of energy in the fantasy stories he'd read, even if they were only stories. Clearly, he'd been wrong as the golems' arms continued to brighten within the building storm as the tiny lights disappeared into their bodies.

A glance back at his opponents’ heads brought more bad news. The grapefruit-sized cylinder in their skulls was growing in brilliance, though more slowly than the ones in their forearms, and it looked like they were somehow powering up. He couldn't let that happen, figuring these things would put up a hell of a fight without any more powers or abilities.

He pushed his body to approach the still golems meters away, the thick atmosphere resisting his efforts. Each step was glacially slow to him, yet his bare feet still kicked up little bits of loose earth with each stride. Pushing away the fear that flared up as their glowing orange circles unerringly tracked his approach, he focused on the rightmost golem.

With Bash in his hands, he started pulling the weapon back while continuing his approach, nervously aware that he was already within easy reach of the monster's freakishly long arms. Not trying for anything fancy, he planted his left foot solidly in the earth. Pivoting around his hip, he brought the weapon forward and up, the golem's two orange circles serving as a convenient glowing target. Almost a meter taller, the thing's head was at an awkward angle for the strike, but Eli still swung Bash like a crazy kid trying to smash a piñata to smithereens.

The golem had only lifted the nearest arm a few centimeters as if to block, but it was far too slow. Intent on the target's movements, Eli was able to minutely shift the weapon mid-hit to adjust for the motion of the dodging construct. Bash's metal-capped end made contact with the empty spot between the two glowing orange circles in the golem's face. A resounding thump seemed to make the air vibrate for a moment, the staff rebounding violently even as a thunderous cracking noise erupted. Faster than his eyes could follow, even within his slowed reality, a fissure appeared near one of the orange circles that rapidly spiderwebbed outward. Before he could react, a tremendous force tossed him away while the world flashed white.

His vision swirled while the landscape crazily flipped around him until he skidded to a stop along the hard dirt ground. Feeling the hard air still surrounding him, he glanced up to see one of the golems rapidly closing on him. Its head was now misshapen and cracked with only one glowing orange eye, the other dark and blackened like a short-circuited wall outlet, yet it still moved quickly. The second golem remained frozen, only its two orange eyes locked unerringly on Eli, though the cylinders in its arms and head continued to brighten as the little lights in the air were sucked into its body.

With the slow and resounding thimp-thoomp of his heartbeat thudding within the time dilation's effects, he dug both hands into the earth as he began the slow climb back to his feet. A moment later, he had to pause, the pain from the explosion and brutal landing finally registering as cold electric heat flared across his chest. His teeth were only beginning to clench against the slowly spreading agony, and he sent a wave of healing energy into his body.

Realizing that he'd become dangerously distracted by the injury and with no chance for anything elegant, he shoved off from the ground and rolled to the right. The giant's legs pounded the earth around him, missing him as bits of dirt were kicked up from the force of the blows. Narrowly escaping from another descending foot, Eli turned his rolling body by planting a knee in the earth and using the momentum to get back on his feet.

As he stood, Bash was summoned back to his hands, the feeling of the wood reassuring in his grip. Turning towards the relentless golem that had tracked and followed him throughout his dodging moves, Eli again swung toward the thing's head even as it moved an arm up to block. The construct was too slow again, but before the strike could land, a bright sheet of light materialized along the golem's arm, looking like a pane of orange-colored glass. The barrier blocked the attack, and Bash bounced off to the crackling sound of electrical chaos.

Knocked back a couple of steps from the rebound, Eli winced at the painful static and high-pitched energetic discharges that nearly deafened him in their roaring fury. He gritted his teeth against the little twinges of spastic muscles, figuring he'd taken a bit of a shock from the hit. Pushing through the pain, he turned and swung left-handed in desperation as the golem came in again. Bash came up towards the thing's head, but another orange sheet appeared along its other forearm to intercept the strike.

Within the confines of his ability, where Eli's mind processed actions at an almost frenetic pace, he had time to recognize the situation and shift the angle of his swing again. Instead of a solid hit to the thing's head, he aimed a bit lower. It wasn't much, just a few centimeters, but it was enough that Bash slipped under the edge of the glowing plane of light to crush the umber orangutan's side, just beneath the arm it had lifted to block. Cracks appeared, and tiny stone chips flew off into the air, even as the golem lurched to the side.

Taking a single step back and not bothering for another windup, Eli stabbed forward, aiming again for the thing's remaining glowing eye. He couldn't get a lot of strength into the jab from his poor angle, but his earlier attacks must have hurt the thing as Bash's end caved in much of the golem's face with a solid chunk, like a sledgehammer smacking into concrete. Its head tilted up and back, revealing an open cavity filled with liquid orange light. Even as Eli pulled Bash back for another hit, a beam of umber light suddenly erupted from the hole towards the dark curtain hovering overhead, but the light simply vanished upon contact with the blackness. The beam of light shut off, and the bright cylinder inside the golem's skull went dark while the high-pitched sounds of crackling electricity and zaps filled the arena.

He tried not to sigh in relief as the giant slowly fell backward with a crash onto the hard-packed soil, with more debris and dust kicked up. Ducking under the erupting mass of dirt choking the air, he blinked away tears as some of it got in his eyes. Coughing while taking another step back, his remaining opponent was partially obscured by the cloud of expanding particulates. Luckily, Manasight quickly picked up the different illumination sources within its matchstick form even as the golem's brightly burning orange "eyes" remained locked on him.

As if the death of its fellow was the signal it had been waiting for, it suddenly moved. In the way a machine could go from zero to batshit-crazy speeds in a split second, it was upon Eli almost before he could think. He'd barely started to lean away and turn to dodge, but the golem's body smashed into him. The force of the collision sent him back towards the center of the arena as the world spun. He tried to tuck and roll with the hit, but his body was slow and unresponsive to his desperate commands, and he only ended up tumbling into a heap along the ground.

Struggling to raise his head and get a view of his opponent, he barely glimpsed its lightning-quick form as it came in again. Following his instincts, he shifted perpendicular to its charging attack. There was the scrape of rock against dirt and a whistling sound near his ear as if something heavy had just missed cracking open his skull.

Feeling like something was wrong with his body, but with no chance to check, Eli forced himself onto his back just as the giant loomed large overhead. With few options left, he brought both hands together at the wrists and pointed his open palms at the thing's two glowing orange circles. With the desperation of a man facing his death, even as the golem lifted one heavy leg to end it all, flames erupted in a foosh of blinding light.

Unlike his previous experiments, a small plume of whitish-blue flames lay within the core of the fire near his hands that shifted into the usual orange and red at the end of the fiery stream. The roaring fire sent waves of heat beating against his skin, and he squinted against the glare yet continued to hold the flames on his target, bathing the golem's face. Almost instantly, the umber stone blackened while the orange circles cracked and darkened, but the leg was already descending. There was a thunderclap with a flash of heat and light, and the golem's head exploded up and outward in a thunderous blast, filling the air with orange energy and tiny bolts of lightning.

The thick air suddenly vanished, the world speeding up as the golem wobbled on shaky legs. Eli tried to roll away, but his muscles and limbs rebelled as if utterly spent from the last attack. Trapped within an unresponsive body, he could only watch helplessly, hoping the dead construct didn't land on him. There was a breathless moment as it teetered, but then it slowly toppled backward out of sight, following the momentum of the fiery blast. The sound of a massive weight thumping heavily to the ground along with the cracklings of broken electronics was a welcome relief, even as more dirt billowed up into the already thick atmosphere.

Laying there on his back, he took in heaving breaths while his heartbeat pounded away almost painfully in his head. He tried to shift and move but found it almost impossible at first, like his body had forgotten how to work. Instead, his muscles twitched and spasmed with tiny movements while the taste of iron filled his mouth. Unable to fight it, he tried to grit his teeth against the uncomfortable sensation of a million ants crawling along his skin. Without warning, the uncontrolled quivering shut off like a switch had been thrown, and he almost gasped in relief. A moment later, something seemed to shift inside his body like a tightly coiled spring he hadn't been aware of suddenly relaxing, and power flushed through him again.

Sighing with relief, his body listening to his commands again, he planted an elbow into the suddenly hard floor to try and get back up. He paused, doing a double-take at the mysteriously warm surface under him. Confused, he lifted his head up a bit more to look at the battlefield, but the dust that had been choking the air only moments ago was gone along with the floating currents of colored lights. Instead of the arena, the white tiles and ominous black curtains were back, defining and limiting the extent of his existence again.

How the hell?

Pushing the worry away for the moment, he carefully rolled onto his stomach to try and relieve the fresh stabbing agony along his left leg and side. Relaxing with the warm tiles under his chest, he simply lay there and basked in the glow of his survival.