"It seems I overlooked your species. If your kind is capable of collecting this much celestial energy, then perhaps I should start hunting for them specifically," the voice said.
~Satelite Beam~ Lucius chanted, attempting to silently cast the spell.
"Vim extermina," the creature said right after.
"Don't bother. I can read the fluctuations in your crux. And besides, it's not as if you have the rena to cast it anyway," the voice said before the space around Lucius began to wobble.
A humanoid mushroom at least 6 feet tall, dressed in a robe made of leaves emerged from what seemed like a hole in the very fabric of reality. Behind it were two massive orbs, one black, and the other violet.
Instinctively, Lucius's tail thrashed out, attempting to impale the creature in the head. But just as suddenly as the attack was unleashed, the undead creature grabbed it.
~It got faster?~ Lucius thought to himself, remembering how slow the creature had been the first time he had encountered it.
"You can still move?" it asked.
Lucius whipped his tail to the side, before releasing a cloud of poison from its tip. The poison burnt the necromancer's flesh, disfiguring it as it attacked its orifices.
Using the cloud as a smoke screen, he used Elmando to snake the vines tied to his waist toward the necromancer in an attempt to tie it up.
"Solar beam," he chanted right after, pushing him through the mental strain that he was already suffering to.
The necromancer's body was now nothing but a burning stump, tied to the ground by a bundle of vines.
"You are a third-tier creature, yet you fight like one of the more intelligent ones," a voice whispered from beside him. Lucius quickly turned around to find the necromancer, sitting atop a throne made of corpses.
The world around him began to wobble, and the dummy necromancer he had been fighting turned to ash.
"When- when did I get here?" Lucius whispered to himself, finding that even his surroundings were not familiar. He was currently inside the temple, surrounded by undead on all sides.
It was like a mosaic of abhorrence. He hadn't noticed it from the outside, but the temple wasn't made from vegetation, but rather corpses. All the skulls and undead decorations on the walls were lost on a living creature like him. To him, it all seemed so... macabre.
"Of all the creatures to attack me, you have come the furthest. Of course, that is purely because I allowed it," the necromancer began speaking, before waving its hands.
With just that gesture, a pile of bones moved toward Lucius in a snake-like manner. Lucius lashed his tail out to stop its advance, but the bones merely disassembled and reassembled once they had gotten past it.
Right as they were about to reach him, he tried jumping over a few of them and punching the others in an attempt to shatter them. However, they did not yield. It felt like he was punching titanium, normal bones weren't supposed to be that strong.
"Bursting trace," he chanted, sending out shockwaves of explosive energy around him. The toll was massive, for a second he had blacked out due to the mental strain, his will being the only thing to pull him back.
Sadly, the trace did nothing more than send the bones back for a moment.
~Fuck this,~ Lucius decided, before locking eyes with the necromancer. He dashed towards it, dodging the undead that stood between him and the necromancer, before striking at its head with his claws.
The necromancer made but a simple gesture, and a hand made of bones extended from its throne to block the attack right as it was about to reach it.
The undead behind Lucius attempted to attack him, but he quickly foiled them with his tail before sending out a head kick to the necromancer.
Once again the necromancer made another gesture, and another hand appeared to block it.
At this point, Lucius's attacks lacked the strength or the speed to kill anything. Attempting to cast the moon's wrath earlier had mentally drained him.
~What was that spell? Vim extermina?~ Lucius thought to himself, before dashing backward, right to the center of the temple.
'Run. You're going to die. Run.' The words came like thunder in his mind. Though he paid them no heed, after all the necromancer knew mind magic, of course, it was attempting to do this.
The question was; if it was this powerful, why hadn't it killed him yet?
"Frustrating isn't it? Having that much mana, but no rena to use it," the necromancer said, before standing up from its chair.
Lucius's poison tank was completely empty, and unlike spell casting, there was no pushing it. Once it was empty it couldn't be forced.
Lucius quickly ran through all his options as the creature slowly approached him. He could try fighting it, but that would just tire him out. And besides, he could sense that there were stronger creatures than the ones he could see hiding in wait. And amongst them, one of them was at least a bit stronger than he was even at full strength.
His other option would be to attempt to cast moon's wrath and risk overheating his mind. It seemed that whatever spell the necromancer was using to counter it took a toll on it as well since it hadn't attempted to cast it to block Lucius's other attacks.
However, this would mean certain death for sure, if anything around him survived.
"Why are you playing around? Do you find some sort of sick pleasure in tormenting the living?" Lucius asked, attempting to buy more time.
"Attempting to buy time? No... it's only right that the weak do anything in their power to win," the necromancer mumbled, almost as if it were talking to itself.
"Did it seem like I was playing around? Perhaps it would seem that way to a creature of your level," the necromancer continued, its twin cruxes moving in a calculated manner as if preparing to cast a spell.
"I was testing your capabilities. It would seem that your species is the strongest... second strongest I have encountered in this domain. Your affinity for celestial magics is what makes you the most interesting," the necromancer mumbled to itself once more.
It seemed that it had a few screws loose.
"Celestial magics?"
"It doesn't matter. You will soon die and join my ranks. However, before I do that, I have one question," the necromancer said.
"What were you originally? Before you possessed this vessel. I can tell you've died before,"
