I pushed off the wall and healed the wound in the same motion.
Not completely. Enough. The cracked ribs resetting, the internal bleeding stopping, the damage to the muscle at the point of impact closing to functional. Full healing in the middle of a fight against something this fast was a liability, the attention it required pulling from what the fight required. Functional was enough.
The demon lord watched me do it.
"Instantaneous self-healing." He said. "While maintaining the mana sword construction." He looked at the blade in my hand, still burning with the same cold light it had carried through the corridor. "Most fighters can't split their concentration that way."
"Most fighters." I said.
He moved.
His sword came out in the same motion, the blade manifesting from dark mana the way mine had manifested from my aura, the construction different in character but similar in principle. He had been watching how the mana sword worked in the corridor. He had built a counter for it before we engaged directly.
That was the intelligence I had underestimated.
The blades met in the center of the throne room and the sound of it was not the sound of metal. Two mana constructions meeting at full output produced a resonance that moved through the floor and the walls and expressed itself in the stonework, the first crack appearing in the ceiling above the throne at the point where the shockwave of the contact traveled upward through the structure.
We separated and came back together before the crack had finished spreading.
He was fast. I had catalogued this in the first exchange and catalogued it again now with the additional information of his full commitment, the speed not the mechanical speed of something with a strong body but the speed of something that had been moving in combat for centuries and had stopped having to think about where to be because it had been everywhere enough times to know.
I matched it.
Not easily.
He came in with the sword high and the free hand low, the attack split between two levels, the blade aiming for the upper body while the dark mana working built in the lower hand aimed for my legs. The two components arriving simultaneously, neither one the feint, both of them real.
I took the sword on the mana blade and let the contact run, the disruption pushing back through his construction the way it pushed through the demon units in the corridor, and used the moment of contact to redirect his angle while my free hand met the lower working with a compression of my own.
The compression cancelled his working.
The angle redirect put him twelve degrees off his line.
I hit him with the mana blade in the space the redirect created.
He made a sound.
Not the frequency the units had produced. Something lower. The sound of something that had been operating under the assumption that the contact was manageable discovering that the assumption needed revision.
He pulled back.
The throne room had acquired additional cracks. The ceiling above the throne had opened in three directions from the first impact point. The floor between us showed the marks of the footwork, the stone pressed and fractured at the points where our weight had been committed in full.
He came back with both hands now.
The sword in his right and the dark mana working in his left building into something larger than the lower working had been, the full commitment of his left hand to the construction rather than the quick deployment he had used before. It took two seconds to build. In two seconds I could end the fight or I could wait and see what he was building.
I waited.
The working released.
A wave. Full width of the throne room, floor to ceiling, the dark mana moving as a sheet rather than a directed strike, the coverage designed to eliminate the footwork and positioning that I had been using to avoid direct hits.
I went through it.
Not around it. Through, the same way I had walked through the demon unit's compression in the corridor, my own aura meeting the wave and absorbing it as I moved, the dark mana becoming part of my output the way the earlier compression had.
I came out the other side of the wave at half the distance from him that I had been when it released.
The sword hit his guard.
He blocked it with his blade and the contact point cracked the floor between us three meters in each direction, the resonance of two full-output mana constructions in direct contact at that proximity expressing itself in every surface it could reach.
The east wall of the throne room developed a vertical fracture from floor to ceiling.
The throne itself shifted on its base.
We separated again, both of us reading the space, the throne room significantly smaller in practical terms than it had been when we entered it, the damage to the structure reducing the available angles.
He was breathing differently.
Not labored. Adjusted. The breath of something that had been running at full output and was managing the output against the drain, the way any sustained casting required management over time.
I was not breathing differently.
He noticed.
"Limitless." He said. Not a question. The tone of someone confirming something they had suspected and finding the confirmation significant. "Your mana doesn't deplete."
"No." I said.
He looked at me across the damaged throne room.
"Then this is not a fight I can win on attrition." He said.
"No." I said.
"And you're faster than I calculated." He said.
"Yes." I said.
"And the mana sword disrupts my own construction when we make contact." He said.
"Yes." I said.
He was quiet for half a second.
The half second of something intelligent arriving at a conclusion.
He turned.
Not away from me. Downward.
His free hand dropping, the dark mana working building in it faster than the throne room working had built, the construction different in character, aimed not at me but at the floor, at the structure beneath the floor, at the lower palace beneath the structure beneath the floor where five artifacts were holding their barrier function at maximum output against the pressure of what he had absorbed from the palace grounds.
The working in his hand reached its peak in two seconds.
He released it downward.
I was already moving.
The distance between us and the angle of the working and the speed of my movement produced a calculation that resolved in the same instant the working left his hand.
I was not going to reach him before it hit.
The floor of the throne room cracked open along the line of the working's path, the dark mana driving downward through stone and foundation and the spaces between, following the path of least resistance through the palace's structure toward the lower level where the children were.
Where the artifacts were holding.
Where the barrier function was already at its limit.
The working hit the barrier.
I felt all five artifacts flare simultaneously, the Frostina-scale construction responding to the direct targeted strike with everything it had left, the mana output of five small stones against a working the demon lord had built with the life force of an entire palace's worth of people inside him.
The artifacts held.
For now.
The demon lord looked at the crack in the floor.
Then at me.
"How long do you think those last." He said pleasantly. "Against another one of those."
I looked at the crack.
At the light coming through it from the lower level, the faint glow of five artifacts burning at maximum output.
At the demon lord standing between me and the floor with his free hand already building again.