The battle had never been easy.
Evan knew that from the very beginning.
That was why he seized every opportunity to inflict as much damage on the avatar as possible, because the longer the fight dragged on, the greater the chances that something would go wrong.
And now it seemed one of those exact scenarios was about to play out.
He turned just in time to see a rain of those strange heads falling.
He didn’t know what they were, but that didn’t stop him from assessing the attack.
Whit his sword, already enveloped in Void Energy, he lashed out at one of the heads, catching it in time.
He’d expected some kind of explosion, but nothing of the sort happened.
The head simply split in two, both halves dropping to the ground. Soon the rest of the group of heads hit the ground too, some striking Shadow’s army, others missing entirely, but none of them did anything, none of them hurt anyone.
The only thing that happened was that they smashed against the ground, cracking open and leaving behind what Evan could only describe as strange pulp.
"What the hell is that thing trying to do?" Evan muttered, a bit uncertain about the enemy’s intentions.
He refused to believe the avatar had resorted to meaningless tricks simply to intimidate them.
An enemy like this wouldn’t waste energy on something so pointless.
There had to be something else behind it.
He’d already determined that aside from being an extremely high concentration of void energy, that pulp didn’t seem to pose any real threat, not to him, not to his subordinates.
The situation would surely be different for anyone else here who didn’t have an affinity with the void, but otherwise it seemed harmless enough.
The battlefield became covered in that strange pulp, the remains of the head-fruits scattered everywhere like some macabre seeding. Evan watched the scene with growing suspicion, wondering what the avatar’s real purpose could be behind such a seemingly pointless attack.
He didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
The pulp, instead of staying inert on the ground as he’d expected, slowly began to be absorbed into the soil itself, disappearing into the earth like water poured over sand.
Evan’s eyes narrowed at the sight, and he felt more and more certain something was wrong.
An alarm bell went off immediately in his head. He focused his perception to trace every trace of void energy in the area, and what he sensed made him go rigid.
Beneath the surface, the energy was moving. Not scattering, not dissolving, it was reorganizing.
Strands of that substance slid toward each other as if drawn by some invisible pull, merging into denser and denser clusters, which in turn slowly began to take shape.
A shape he didn’t like one bit.
His eyes went wide the instant he understood what was about to happen beneath their feet. He didn’t waste a second, a silent command went out to his clones, a sharp, immediate warning to brace for what was coming.
At that exact moment, the ground trembled.
It cracked open in several places, and from those cracks, hands emerged.
Long, twisted, made from a dark, fibrous material that resembled bark far more than flesh.
Then, in rapid succession, the rest of the bodies followed, rising from the ground as if they’d been part of it until an instant before.
They were tall, grotesque, deformed. Beings that seemed born from some unnatural cross between plant and man, their faces devoid of any recognizable features except for slits that looked like mouths, gaping open in a silent, ravenous grin.
Dozens of them, scattered across the entire field, hauled themselves out of the earth, surrounding Evan’s forces from every direction.
Evan had held the upper hand since the start of the battle thanks to a crushing numerical advantage, one that, however weak on average compared to the enemy, more than made up for it in sheer numbers. That advantage no longer fully applied now that the avatar had decided to play its trump card.
"Great, just what we needed," Evan muttered, his eyes darting quickly over the fresh threats scattered all around.
It didn’t take him long to size them up. They weren’t as numerous as Shadow’s army, roughly half at a quick count, but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up for in quality.
Most of them sat at least at a base C-rank, and several, scattered here and there through the ranks, gave off a far more potent pressure, B-rank, almost certainly.
Shadow’s forces were about 70% D-rank, with only a few at C-rank, in other words, the enemy held a crushing advantage in power over them.
Evan assessed the situation in a split second and immediately reorganized his forces.
He ordered Shadow to handle the C-ranks, since the numbers still favored him there, while he decided to deal with the B-ranks himself, no more than ten in total, and with his current strength he could take them down without too much trouble.
Shadow gave a simple nod, and then he and his army surged against the wave of strange plant-type creatures, making up with sheer numbers what they lacked in individual power.
Ash, still hovering in the air, kept hammering the avatar with relentless bursts from the Ember Crown, keeping it under constant pressure, enough to stop it from intervening while the other two dealt with the new threat.
Evan lunged forward, his blade infused with void energy cutting through the air with surgical precision. The first B-rank stood in his path, a being nearly three meters tall, its body etched with pulsing dark veins. It had no time to react: the blade ran clean through it before it could even raise those deformed arms of its.
But just as the body collapsed to the ground, lifeless, Evan sensed something was wrong.
An instant later, the creature exploded.
It wasn’t an explosion of blood or torn flesh, but a sudden burst of sharp spines, each one soaked in the same void energy that saturated the entire area. The shards scattered in every direction, striking everything within range, allies and enemies alike.
Evan sidestepped just in time, feeling a couple of spines graze his side, though they did nothing to him thanks to his high affinity with void energy.
’Now we’ve got ticking bombs too.’ he thought, his jaw tightening slightly.
He couldn’t afford to make that mistake again.
Killing a B-rank directly meant triggering that same trap, and with several more still scattered across the field, there was a risk of hurting his own side with his own hands.
He needed to change his approach.
His eyes narrowed as he weighed his options, and the answer came to him almost instantly.
Law of Space.
If he couldn’t afford to let them explode, then he’d simply make sure they never had the chance.