Caught in Time

Chapter XXI: The Principles

Both Kyleas and Anders were ready to fight each other for one final time. Anders tried to strike first but Kyleas simply created a mana dome to protect himself from all the vines that were attacking him. While still keeping the dome up, he created a small portal right in front of him and fired a stream of mana jet through it. As he did this, multiple small portals appeared near Anders. From all these portals, the mana jet streams all were coming towards him at once, but Anders managed to dodge them.

Anders continued to attack again using all the vines at his disposal, but none of them gets through the mana dome that Kyleas had put up. With all the small portals hovering around Anders, Kyleas then launched a barrage of mana bolts through those portals. Anders was still able to dodge or block most of the attacks using the vines, even though some did graze him.

While he was busy doing that, Kyleas suddenly blinked right in front of him and grabbed Anders' face with his right hand. Kyleas then gathered pure mana energy on his right hand, causing burns to Anders' face, and decided to send him flying and crashing into the wall.

Kyleas instantly followed up by blinking towards Anders and grabbed him by the neck. To which he then blinked towards the center of the room and slammed him on the ground. He then blinked backwards, away from Anders. Kyleas created a small portal in front of him again, but this time, three much bigger portal about the size of a human being, were surrounding Anders.

Anders struggled to get back up, but as he looked around him, he knew he had to do something quickly. He couldn't teleport away, because somehow Kyleas managed to lock his teleportation ability on cooldown.

"There's nowhere to run, Anders", said Kyleas.

Kyleas shot a continuous stream of mana jet through the small portal. As the portals surrounding him began to glow, Anders scrambled to put up a vine sphere to protect him. When the mana jet streams made contact with the vine sphere, they immediately disintegrated it. But Anders managed to constantly replace the disintegrated vines with new ones from across the underground tunnel system.

Kyleas doesn't let up the attack until literally every single vines that may be used by Anders is all used up, including the ones on Alicia, thus freeing her even though she fell unconscious. When Kyleas finally stopped firing the mana jet, Anders was left defenseless.

"As expected from the Grand Archmage himself, what a powerful spell that was!", exclaimed Anders.

Anders then opened his arms as if inviting Kyleas to come and finish him off. Kyleas charged at him as he gathered an enormous amount of pure mana energy on his right hand and highly-compressed it to create an ultra-concentrated mana bolt. Kyleas managed to get really close to Anders as he didn't even put up a fight anymore. 

"About time we end this little altercation!", shouted Kyleas.

Just as Kyleas was about to land the mana bolt on him, Anders suddenly opened his mouth.

"Such a concentrated mana energy will surely kill me, no?", Anders asked him rhetorically, just as he had planned.

Kyleas' eyes immediately opened wide as he realized what he was about to do, he then quickly redirected the mana bolt towards the ceiling instead. The ultra-concentrated mana bolt caused a huge explosion which blasted the ceiling of the room wide open and the excess pure mana energy continued to burst through to the sky, creating a huge bright purple pillar that soared towards the night sky.

Anders smirked at Kyleas and Kyleas looked back at him. As it turned out, Anders still had more tricks up his sleeves, some vines suddenly burst out from the ground and pulled Kyleas' both arms, forcing him into a kneeling position.