*
With her hold over water, a vital component of most living beings, even if she couldn't manipulate the enemy's body she could manipulate her own. To dissolve more oxygen, to dissolve more magical particles and carbohydrates, one could say she was constantly using her skill as an ivy drip to strengthen her body.
She kept her body in tip top condition at all times and trained extensively with it, memorising stretching and muscle building techniques. She also dabbled extensively in weapon handling and martial arts, determined to find and use anything she could learn. That was why she was always a step ahead of Kaori, to the point that Kaori's strategies were very ineffective when accounting for Barius' processing power.
Even at this moment, she saw Aubrey's moves with perfect clarity, the lizard man could not escape her ocean of predictions. She was the type to memorise every opening in her first week of chess. Even if Aubrey converts his body into a green organic sludge, she could tell where he would go next by simply analysing his thought processes.
When he turned into sludge once more, the dark greyish green sludge split into multiple direction. Then the sludge stopped moving. They were still under Barius' Oblivion Magia, she stopped their time locally and froze them in ice.
Barius shatters the ice, causing an ear shattering noise to reverberate throughout the Oblivion Magia. Barius continuously cycles through this procedure of freezing then shattering, each time she shaved down some mass off of Aubrey. But what could he do? He was completely caught in her Oblivion Magia. This was the price of underestimating Barius.
***(HuoLi)
Hmm? An ancient Demon God? Embodiment of the demon castle? Who cares! Euclidia fires off beams of antimagic. Antimagic was versatile in that if magic was used to maintain the integrity of anything, such as substance constructs like the ones that HuoLi uses, it would be easy to corrode such constructs regardless of the properties they possess. It was the greatest barrier that could negate any attack magic, at the same time it was the greatest Killing tool, dissolving and crushing any barrier or skill.
Beams of dark red soar through the darkened sky, occasionally splitting off to crash into the ground, causing pandemonium. The offshoots vaporise the ground and implode, it's force unearthing most of the surrounding ground like a buckshot or a landmine, only they were the size of buildings. HuoLi began a chase, running away accordingly to dodge the antimagic beams that seemed to emerge from Euclidia to no end.
Her figure was microscopic under the vast skies, a measly dot zooming past the air and dodging all obstacles. The ground quaked and cried under the tremors of destruction wreaked all around the castle entrance. Accompanying the vast ravines formed by the explosive antimagic energy, some large swathes of land were sent by peripheral shock waves of their battle to protrude into the air like giant daggers pointed at the sky.
HuoLi coursed through the air at unimaginable speeds for a human, to her she merely felt like she was effortlessly gliding. Perhaps she had a couple centuries up her sleeve, or maybe it was a testament to her hard work. Flying through the air was practically second nature to her as she used her first skill to create the timeless substance, shaping it into an ultra thin film that acted like the wings of an insect. It flew at speeds fast enough to imitate them, though most of the propulsion was from her simply jumping away from the ground.
In the first place, what was a god? An undying being? The one who created the universe? One who rules over the laws that make up the world? Why were there so many of them? God magical girls... In this manner, the term was used to refer to an entity familiar to the asians. Polytheism, the worship of multiple gods, commonly associated with the primordial practice of anthropomorphism, assigning a god to traits of nature and worshipping them.
These traits include the sun, the weather, the earth. In such cases, these gods were not all powerful and it wasn't uncommon for infighting to have occurred. As if they were imitating humans, generations or factions of God's could culled by one another. This was what the term meant when referring to the god magical girls or the demon gods. They were all powerful beings who seemed to be able to do anything, but they weren't infallible when facing one another.
Euclidia was not invincible. HuoLi rolled her body through the air as multiple antimagic lasers blast past her body. The sensation of heated air passed her as she flew faster and faster. She materialised the substance in mid air and used them as footholds to run in the sky. A constant cycle of diving and gliding. She formed spears out of the substance and shot back at Euclidia.
Forming barrage after barrage, some of the spear's managed to slice into Euclidia's skin, with one hitting her shoulder and another grazing her waist, slightly altering the trajectories of her lasers. As a result some of the laser bent nearer towards the ground that that Euclidia directly flew over, lightening the pressure that her attacks were building on HuoLi.
A lighter shade of crimson red permeated the air as large pillars of antimagic light rose from the ground, blocking, huoLi's flight path. Through firing her smaller lasers, Euclidia realised that HuoLi had difficulty changing directions while flying. What she was doing was an imitation of flying after all, she was forming footholds to hop off of in midair while somewhat gliding by using her wings.
The large pillars that were as wide as trucks impeded her and forced her to slow down in speed just to turn around the pillars. She then focused her lasers closer towards HuoLi. Almost like magic, HuoLi sped up and left the lasers behind with ease. With that small leeway in time, she summoned a larger batch of spears from the ground, gathering them into a pillar large enough to eclipse the sky, they flew high into the air before arching into a parabola aimed at Euclidia.
A single red beam illuminates the early morning, slicing past large swathes of the sky as rapidly as it could. Chunks of spears vanished, other spears lost momentum, and the spear's at the foremost front lessened in ferocity as they thinned. Some of the spear's manage to weather the storm, one slice through her collar bones, another stabbed into the stomach and was promptly erased by her antimagic constitution.
Soon, more spears followed in their paths, there was an entire pillar's worth that could rival the Eiffel tower. Small slices appeared on her body, complementing the accompany larger slashes that leave gashes in her body. Her skin gaped open as more spears increasingly barraged her body, the surrounding spears prevent her from flying away, threatening to impale her if she did attempt.
She stood still, the denser parts of her body endure the spear attacks, deflecting them away as they shaved off the weaker parts of her body. She was a newly formed being, depending on the entity, when a being is newly formed their magic could be concentrated at one spot rather than being equally distributed throughout the body. Her center happened to be her chest, at her heart.
"... It can't be... You think this will be enough?" (Euclidia)
She turned her gaze to HuoLi as the last of the spears ran out and dissipated back into magical particles. HuoLi gazed back, a small twitch in her lips betrayed her emotions. HuoLi swirls the substance around her body, dancing a single spin in mid air right as her figure vanished from any possible spectating eyes. Mixing the centrifugal force generated from the little spin and the strength of her legs, she forms a little foothold with the substance under her feet and launched forward faster than a rocket, piercing sound effortlessly.
Her body gradually rotates as if it still had some of the spin left over, using the substance to form a sharp spear head right above her head. Right below the spear head, her right hand flicks its wrist, releasing numerous strands of the substance, forcing them to spin she generates further centrifugal force and acceleration. Like a drill piercing the arriving dawn, layers of tendrils formed from her substance, spinning clockwise at the same time.
Despite the added mass, what if she were to supplement the spinning with magical energy instead? If there was enough momentum to ignore the added mass, wouldn't that solve the issue? Every single part generated more and more force, none of the parts stopped as she only continually grew faster. The drill she created blasted through the air, its resulting shock waves blew a monumental hole in the large surfacing clouds of the sky that were only beginning to get illuminated by the rising dawn.
It missed, Euclidia was closer to the earth than she was. This was the scope of her detection system, her excellent vision was a little similar to clairvoyance in that she could observe her surroundings in the third person. In this case, her vision was like flying a little drone high in the atmosphere as it took in everything surrounding in the nearest 50 km radius. This clairvoyance like passive was limited to this sort of observance, it doesn't track a target or anything and most of the times things were too tiny to be made out. She could see far and around her, but that was it.
But she knew where Euclidia was, she was that floating dot surrounded by dark red light that flickered like an ember at all times. Euclidia didn't hesitate to release her aura, she might not actually have a limit to her well, perhaps Euclidia didn't have such a concept as stamina. HuoLi would have to finish her off while overpowering Euclidia's skill set and combat ability, as an attrition battle would be impossible for HuoLi's side.
In a single shot, HuoLi swung the spear head into the opposite direction and each individual spinning tendril that made up the lateral sides of the drill inverted instantly, they kept spinning to preserve the momentum, but since it had been inverted it now spun anticlockwise. The surrounding air rumbled loudly, pulling more air along the drill. It began to create lightning sparks with how the air was generating intense friction, causing to sky to heat up even further.
The drill seemed to pull along the entire weather along itself as clouds distort and release lightning like an apocalypse was breaking out. The sound of air rubbing against air caused a loud and noisy drilling sound that roared in the sky, if any normal person was nearby it might have burst their eardrums. With the same speed as before, this time it shot toward Euclidia properly. It didn't need a charge up, its speed instantly accelerated to its maximum as it chased her down.
The booming sounds of air scraping air reached closer and closer, Euclidia retreated by flying backwards while firing a rain of antimagic lasers. While it did damage a bit of the drill, most of it was deflected into the sky and ground, causing large explosions that left craters in the already devastated ground near the demon castle.
*VRRRRRMMMMM!!!!*
In a single movement, it struck Euclidia's neck with the tip, the drill began to break apart as her body released large amounts of antimagic that her lasers could never match up against. Her entire body was composed of constantly self replenishing antimagic, there was no limit to her well as she kept churning out more and more antimagic. It decomposed the drill like bacteria, the substance turned black and began to rot, withering off like a dead plant.
After the spear head was completely destroy, the spinning sides collapsed quicker than ever before, crushing itself into fragments under the momentum and smashing against Euclidia's body in a last ditch attempt to do damage. One of the fragments managed to carve out a chunk of flesh in her abs after repeated assault on the same area by the other fragments.
Without pause, HuoLi materialised a blade out of the substance and stabbed that very hole with all of her strength, the sword broke but it managed to stretch a deeper wound into Euclidia.
Euclidia released a little smirk. Why would she give her a free attack? Using the blade attack as a trap, she grabbed ahold of HuoLi's wrist right before it shattered. The blade's shattering caught her attention instead before she realised she was stuck. Lasers shot from all directions at the both of them, the sky glowed a fearsome red before energy beams of a similar hue toar through the sky to reach their destination.
HuoLi was surrounded from all sides. Out of a built up reflex she brought up her substance and expanded it to serve as a shield... But since the surface area was extended it was less dense. The anti magic pierced through her shield. The slight resistance it granted barely saved her. The antimagic instantly collapsed the protective augmentations that a magical girl would have and shaved off the side of her neck.
Blood exploded out as she created a distance by running away. She needed time to heal up. Usually this would be enough to kill a magical girl, the residual antimagic would prevent healing and augmentation, the magical girl would die from a state of shock concomitant of excessive blood loss. HuoLi happened to concentrate her magic around her neck in anticipation of the attack, using up the antimagic allowed her to rapidly heal.
Other than the explosion of blood at the moment of collision, it was immediately stopped and regenerated.