The magical energies circulated between his own and the staff, empowering it greatly, once he mentally triggered the activation a large cone of black cold smoke pulsed out from his hand, instantly covering a large area. The demon lord was caught in this and as soon as it enveloped him he started panicking, immediately halting his advance barely out of attacking range. The smoke was inhaled through the panic and worsened the situation, shallow wounds opened all around his body and blood seemingly evaporated as soon as it left the body. He fell to a knee, coughing and bleeding, strongly flapping his wings trying to get rid of the smoke around him. His regenerative powers closed the wounds in record time but this just caused new wounds to open, locking him in a perpetual state where new wounds open.

Gilliam, on the other hand, was feeling energized to an almost dangerous degree. His heart beat both faster and harder, it was the energy kick one would assume from shooting coffee and energy drinks at the same time without having resistance to either. His wounds healed within a second and he was feeling both great, terrified and nervous at the same time.

Aiming to use this extra energy he used the moment to boost himself, he needed extra... everything to have a chance in this fight. He hadn’t played around a lot with buffing spells but they worked somewhat in the training with Kintas.
Using the excessive energy and the brief moment that the demon lord was busy with the darkness draining, he set up several self-buffing spells. Preparing them at the same time felt like the logical way of doing it to save time. They all had a base of Aether and were targeting whatever they were attached to, but the differences were what kind of buffs they were. He first activated one with speed and reaction time runes, they didn’t collapse but rather remained as a smaller magical tattoo of sorts when they attached to his body. He only got a few seconds to do this so the ones he managed to activate were speed, reaction time, and physical strength, he took a little care to put an extra amount of power into the speed and reaction time spells.

These spells consumed almost everything extra that he had consumed from Vozellath, buffing spells takes a surprising amount of energy to work properly, but since this wasn’t his mana at the moment he didn’t care.

The moment of pause was brief as the demon had decided that getting out of the smoke was a better idea than blowing it away, and he took the logical path and went right for Gilliam.
In Gilliam’s eyes, the demon was moving a little bit slower than before, he hadn’t trained that well with buffing spells which were probably why, however, it allowed him to dodge the incoming attacks!

A punch was the leading attack, and Gilliam managed to dodge that without problems, the follow-up tail swipe was a bit harder due to the unfamiliar angle it came from but the extra speed and muscle power allowed him to jump over it fine.

Through dodging and moving about Gilliam had to stop channelling the darkness magic, which instantly removed the smoke. Intending to get some more distance Gilliam faked extending his hand again to try to get a brief moment he could activate a spell. Instantly casting the ice spell from before he managed to get in some of the runes but only got through the third rune before the spell circle was destabilized. Vozellath was well in range of attacking and Gilliam’s focus on the spell had narrowed his focus ever so slightly, which allowed another attack by the tail to land, again shooting him full of pain and sending him tumbling backwards.

The pain in his chest and whatever damage he got from ragdolling across the ground didn’t feel good, he hurt in everything. The only victory in this moment was that the little bonus energy that remained from draining the demon could be redirected to healing, which worked surprisingly well. Having to supplement with his energy to get the deal done he forced himself to his feet. Still not healed he felt a little slow, intending to get a barrier active he pulled on the needed energy but was interrupted as the Lord in front of him let out a strange-sounding word that sounded like it was the mix of several voices at once, the sounds overlapped but they all said the same word; Force. As soon as he did this a powerful expanding pressure wave extended from Vozellath and slammed into Gilliam before he could focus enough to get a barrier up.

The power of the shockwave didn’t only knock the air out of Gilliam’s lungs, it also cracked something in his body and like the earlier attack; lifted him off his feet and sent him flying.

He was in mid-air for several long seconds.
“Savia, land us somewhere safe.” He commanded his ally who returned only fear and frustration in their link.

“Savia can’t. It’s not working!” She sounded just as frustrated as the shared emotion suggested.

A brief thought that it might be the barrier interfering with teleporting magic, Gilliam did say he was capable of this after all.
Turning to getting a barrier cast before he landed he tried pushing through the pain to get it working. He tried to connect to the coat, but the activation failed as his focus was harshly interrupted by the stabbing pain of his wounds. He didn’t know how many failed attempts he had but he felt a wave of relief for a split second as he managed to activate the barrier before impacting. Due to the hasty and unstable activation, it didn’t have the same strength as the others, so though it seemed to save his life it did shatter once he made contact with Vozellath’s building wall. As the barrier shattered, so did some of the wall. Luckily enough collapsing around him more than on him.

Gilliam needed time, he had the mana and mana stones, but he needed to heal himself. Though superpowered as far as magic went, Light and Dark magic worked a little bit differently. Healing magic took a moment unless you were an expert, if he survived this he would need to train more specifically on these things.

Through the little healing he had going he managed to focus enough to get a proper barrier activated through the staff, which he somehow didn’t lose this time.
As soon as the barrier was created he realised he again only had seconds to do something. Turning to desperation he took out a fist-sized gem from his ring and used telekinesis to shoot it at the ground near where Vozellath was at the moment, as this became a grenade whether he dodged or not was not that important.

He sent the crystal flying and not only didn’t the lack of proper focus cause him to miss where he intended to hit, but the demon managed to dodge as well, gaining even more distance from the crystal as it hit the hard sandstone ground. As the crystal shattered it released a powerful explosion of water-aligned energy. The water, being incompressible, formed hyper-speed droplets flying everywhere, carrying with them the water energy of their creation. This hit Vozellath fine and through it, it seemed like it caused some minor damage this healed itself in a second or two.

However, this did have him stop his charge for a brief moment, giving Gilliam those sweet seconds of healing. Not wanting to waste this prepared a second attack; he took out all 8 Aether crystal darts, connected to each of them with a strand of mana for Telekinetic movement and lunged them forward. They were moving quite a bit slower than if he had launched them, but in this way, he could remote-stab them into him much easier.

Vozellath looked confused for a brief moment but as the crystals were just about to hit him he gathered and pulsed out energy as he cast a spell which briefly manifested a single rune inside a circle, just as fast as it was created it collapsed in a very familiar way as it formed a sphere of vaguely visible yellow energy around him.

Being taken off guard some of the darts impacted the barrier and exploded as expected, but never got to attack properly. He managed to stop most of the darts but the Lord again shouted Force in the weird way of speaking, which pulsed out faster than Gilliam could pull the darts back, triggering them and having them detonate outside the barrier.

The only good thing was that this had given Gilliam several seconds of proper focused healing, he wasn’t fully healed but the internal damage was stopped and his ribs were somewhat healed. There was still some pain and probably fractures but he was fine enough to move.

Forming the ice spell from before, the one that locked down the storm mage from the other landmass, Gilliam got through most of the runes but didn’t get in the final one nor activate it before Vozellath had again managed to cover the distance between them. Though he couldn’t grab Gilliam directly he could grab the barrier around him. This had Gilliam swap to unstructured magic and just create ice, something he realised he should have done earlier.

The ice was created but instantly stopped as Vozellath started slamming Gilliam into the wall repeatedly, tearing it down more and more. Gilliam took the sword out of the ring and activated the large blade towards his opponent’s chest. The back-and-forth movement allowed him to get a solid penetrating attack that seemed to do a lot of damage, however, this ended up a false victory as he simply stopped moving Gilliam back and forth, and forcefully pulled him back which in turn pulled the sword out of the wound. Strongly slapping the side of the blade he took some damage to his hand but the force was enough to force it out of Gilliam’s hand, sending it bouncing off the ground further away.
The barrier around Gilliam could only take so much and as the demon threw him into the wall, he bounced off it as the barrier broke before he again found himself tumbling along the ground he struggled with focus, multiple blows to his head probably didn’t help.

Gilliam was looking like shit as he did his best to get to his feet, the only reason he was able at all was the ongoing healing magic that constantly made everything better.

“Is that all?” the demon gloated, seeming to still find amusement in this. “You talked so big. You were going to kill me and take my place as Lord. Where is that energy now?!” Shouting in an almost disappointed tone it seemed that he wanted more than this.

He kicked frustratingly through a patch of debris in Gilliam’s general direction, though he was peppered by pebbles and sand it wasn’t enough to hurt him as the general defense boost in the coat took care of this.

Gilliam was in a crisis moment, he was not going to win this. He clearly had the power but he’s not able to get enough runes out to make a spell powerful enough to do any substantial damage. He knew the demon Lord would have some spells or powers as he had consumed tons of hearts. It didn’t always give powers but if he had eaten a thousand, statistically speaking he should have gotten at least some. The more common ones such as barriers, which every V’idan mage learns in the academy, should be expected.

He would have to rely on unstructured magic, something he could do, it was very versatile, but it took much longer to obtain the same power level as structured spells, which was the tradeoff. He had lost the sword and though he could call it back through telekinesis he wasn’t good or fast enough to use it for what it was. He internally cursed himself again and again for getting caught in the spectacle and getting conceited in his powers as time went on. He wasn’t sent into the Fractured lands because he was the best mage they had, he was probably sent in because it seemed like a potentially viable solution while they worked for something else.

He also cursed himself for not just ignoring all of this control over the army thing and just nuking Vozellath from afar and trying to take over the remainder of the people later.

“So this is it, then?!” Vozellath was turned annoyed. Thinking back Gilliam realised he was smiling most of the time they fought, he might not have fought anyone able to... survive that much damage before so he probably finally got some outlet for pent-up energy.
“You made it seem like you had a chance, but you couldn’t even get through my barrier!” Frustration was heavy in his voice as he took a few steps towards Gilliam as he was talking.

This made something click in Gilliam’s mind. That was a good point, he cast a barrier. In itself, that was not that amazing but he did it almost as fast as the coat and with a single rune.
He didn’t get the time to check out what the rune was, but could proper spells be cast with a single rune? Everyone taught him that he needed a full spell circle with all the different runes to program the spell. Repeated use could have you cast it faster, yes, but you still manifested the whole thing and still needed to imagine them all, which is why speed-casting was surprisingly hard to master even though it was simple in concept.

Nobody had told him about single rune casting, or rather they did but then only with the element rune to cast the basis of the element. This was how Gilliam produced water, just the water rune and it just created water the more he gave it mana. But could proper and detailed spells work like that as well? Pondering for a second as Vozellath was rambling on about something had him query his knowledge about the magical rune language. He knew it as well as he knew English, the language he had grown up with.

If this was a thing, why had nobody told him about this before? Casting a barrier with all those runes, could it be limited to just ‘Barrier’? He wanted to test it, but that could cause the next attack to happen. He could try to camouflage it as a barrier, or just try to cast a barrier.

Gilliam focused, considering all the runes that meant whole words that could work for this he chose a single rune and pulsed it into existence before activating it. A single circle without any geometric lines and the single rune for Barrier in the middle. Activating it and giving it an arbitrary amount of mana without using the staff he wondered what would happen.

The spell circle blinked into existence, accepted the given mana and activated it as a normal spell. Collapsing into a vaguely visible energy field around him.
An epiphany hit Gilliam like a metaphorical fist; The reason he wasn’t taught this was due to the limits of knowledge about the magical language, mages use their lives to discover a single page's worth of runes that they use for spells, he knew all of them. Based on what Jial explained discovering runes was a problematic process, and if you used weeks to months to find one; didn’t you want a versatile rune rather than one that could just cast a barrier?

This made a lot of sense, he was so dumb. He forgot the basis of good learning; question things. Why is it like this and what can be done differently.

“You think that little barrier is going to save you?” The frustrated demon lord had slowly been walking towards Gilliam, still some distance away but it was only a matter of time before he would be within striking distance, and probably just eat him there and then.
“Well fuck it, I might as well just end it, then. I thought you could entertain me more with your magic, I felt so much more from you but you’re just. A weak. Human.” Stepping closer and closer his voice became angry through frustration.

Feeling back on the barrier spell, it took more than just Aether energy. He tried remembering it properly and it took Aether but also the converted Light element, normally it needed a dedicated rune for that.
It finally made perfect sense, not just time used to discover runes but if spells just took whatever mana they needed, then most mages wouldn’t be able to use this way of casting, Aether and light are fine for an Aether mage but not for a fire mage, a fireball might need something else and would then not be accessible without that element.

“I think you showed me something good, just now.” Gilliam stated through gritted teeth but still sporting a small smile. The healing had done wonders in the time Vozellath had used to rage about the situation.

“And what would that be?” The demon asked slightly surprised that there was still life in the walking meal in front of him.

Not answering but forming a spell circle with the Runeword for IceSpear he pointed his hand towards the demon and activated the staff as he fuelled it with energy. An ice-blue circle with some vague streaks of yellow formed in front of him spawned a single rune within and collapsed immediately before launching off at blinding speeds. The brief flow of mana was mostly Water. Or rather the Ice sub-element, as well as some light Aether.

The reaction to dodge was enough for the spear to miss its centre-mass target, but the speed and sudden creation were enough to catch him just enough off guard that it passed through his side instead. It tore through his body without effort and shattered against the barrier around the plaza.
Vozellath’s wound was already healing, but he had stopped and was clenching it with both his hands as he looked confused at Gilliam.

Though this isn’t unique to Gilliam, it does feel like a specific way of casting that benefits more elements, it seems to have the most use for a Heptagon Mage.

Gilliam replied with a smirk that was somewhat overshadowed by the aggression in his eyes.
“You showed me something good, indeed.”