Jakel soared through the air, colliding with a tree before the angel's whip struck him in the head, snapping it back violently. The impact burst his right eye, and the subsequent crack of the whip echoed like thunder, causing blood to seep from his ears. Grace materialized beside him, delivering a powerful kick to his spine, breaking it and sending him scraping along the forest ground face-first.
Grace and the angel adjusted their tactics, aiming to inflict extreme pain on Jakel, hoping to knock him out through shock. "Are you sure you want to keep going?" the angel taunted, his voice laced with mockery. Grace remained focused on Jakel, observing his body emit a faint blue glow as his spine reattached. Despite the visible damage, Jakel slowly rose, his scraped-off face revealing a missing right eye.
"I don't plan on admitting defeat to either of you!" Jakel defiantly declared, the blood from his eye socket stopped pouring out as his skin regenerated, and a new eyeball grew to replace the lost one. *This is absurd! How much mana does this bastard have!?* the angel thought, gritting his teeth in annoyance.
Grace didn't have precise knowledge of Jakel's mana reserves, but she estimated them to be exceptionally large, far beyond what most magic users possessed. By her rough calculations, while most magic users had a mana pool of 100, Jakel seemed to have a staggering 10,000. It was like comparing a vast lake of mana to the modest pool most magic users had.
*We're getting nowhere with this. He can't really harm us with me being here, but we can't do anything to him either,* Grace thought, assessing the situation. The pain Jakel felt from their attacks wasn't enough to incapacitate him. It seemed he had trained his pain tolerance to counter such strategies, likely from past attempts to defeat him.
As Jakel finished healing, a wolfish howl echoed from another part of the forest catching everyone's attention. "What the hell was that?" the angel muttered out loud as it didn't sound like a typical wolf's howl. Grace, with her currently buffed abilities, sensed that the howl came from the vicinity where Xain and Zee were.
Suddenly, Jakel burst into laughter. "What's so funny?" the angel asked, confused by Jakel's laughter. "Sorry, sorry. It's just that you four are pushing both of us to go all out at the same time. This has never happened before, so I'm just laughing at the absurdity of it," Jakel chuckled, wiping a tear from his newly regrown eye.
Grace, reading Jakel's thoughts, understood what he meant. *Can the two of them fight a lycan?* she thought to herself. While she certainly wasn't an expert when it came to monsters, she knew that a lycan was a dangerous creature that only veteran monster hunters could handle. *I'll stay here a bit longer, but I might have to switch with the elf soon,* Grace thought before she started dashing towards Jakel.
Jakel tried to stomp on the ground to conjure some stone spikes to impale her, but just as he stomped, Grace snapped the fingers of her right hand and switched places with Jakel. "Huh? What the-agh!" Jakel found himself impaled by four stone spikes conjured by his own magic. One pierced through his stomach, another through his left thigh, another close to his heart, and another through his right elbow. Grimacing in pain, Jakel began to utter, "Nice trick, but this won't-" only to be abruptly silenced as the angel coiled his whip around Jakel's throat.
"Let's see you try and survive this!" the angel exclaimed, relishing in the act as he tightened the whip, gradually constricting Jakel's throat. However, before the execution could reach its climax, Jakel tapped his foot on the ground, prompting a stone spike to emerge with deadly precision. It aimed directly at the angel's heart, but before it could reach, Grace, with a swift snap of her fingers, blinked the angel next to her. The spike struck nothing but the empty air.
"I could have easily blocked that!" the angel protested at Grace, who chose to ignored him as she observed the stone spikes embedded in Jakel dissipate as a faint blue glow enveloped his entire body. The injuries rapidly healed as he turned to them with anger in his eyes.
*Oh? Now those are some interesting thoughts,* Grace mused as she delved into Jakel's thoughts. "I'm going to fucking eviscerate both of you! Not a single cell of your bodies will exist!" Jakel erupted in a fit of extreme anger, his threat reverberating through the air. Grace, unfazed, smirked in response. "Why the hysterics? It's not like you experienced death like your little brother, did you?" she taunted, her voice laced with a mocking chuckle. The angel, perplexed, looked on as Jakel took an involuntary step back.
"Wha-what? How did you?" Jakel's angry tone shifted into a hesitant stutter, his rage subsiding. Grace, taking a step forward, continued her psychological assault. "How could I not know? He died so pathetically, crying out for his big brother to save him. His screams were so loud that I heard them all the way here," she revealed, enjoying the bead of sweat that trickled down Jakel's forehead.
"W-why? Ho-how are you—" Jakel was left at a loss for words, grappling with the revelations. Meanwhile, the angel pondered, *What is she doing?* He recognized that Grace's actions stemmed from her ability to read thoughts, but something about this felt inherently wrong, almost evil.
"Are you just going to keep asking questions? Then again, I don't know what I expected from a man like you, someone who failed to protect their little runt of a brother. Tell me, did you stick to him because he was weaker than you?" Grace inquired, taking another step closer. Jakel, retreating against a tree, shouted, "Stop it!" But Grace only smiled, pressing on.
"Or maybe you let him be hanged because you thought he would become stronger than you. You were always jealous of your siblings," Grace continued, her words sinking deeper. Jakel's breathing became erratic as he backed up against the tree. Grace, now inches away from his face, recited with a sinister smile, "Help me, Evan, help me, save me, please, I don't want to die. Those were his last words, right? How sad he couldn't even die with dignity. Then again, he had you to look up to, so it should be expected. Weaklings following weaklings will die like weaklings." With that, Jakel collapsed to the ground, seemingly succumbing to a panic attack under the weight of his past.
The angel regarded Grace with a mixture of disgust and disbelief as she looked down at Jakel with disdain, treating him as if he were nothing more than garbage. "Why the hell did you do that!?" the angel exclaimed, his angelic instincts recoiling at the sight of such ruthless psychological manipulation.
Grace turned to him, her annoyance evident in her tone. "Why are you yelling? I just defeated him," she stated matter-of-factly. The angel, still reeling from what he had witnessed, couldn't contain his revulsion. "I see that, but the way you did it was wrong! It was sickening!" he retorted, unable to mask his disdain.
Grace let out a sigh, unimpressed by the angel's reaction. "I don't know how you angels do it in heaven, but this is how we humans fight. We use every tactic at our disposal to win, no matter how low it may seem. At least, that's how I do things. Any other way of fighting is just a loser's way of thinking," she explained, her words tinged with a hint of defiance. The angel clenched his teeth in anger, feeling a deep-seated frustration at her ruthless pragmatism.
*No wonder a monster like her is loved by those from below and above,* the angel thought to himself, a bitter realization dawning on him. Grace, unmoved by his disapproval, scoffed dismissively. "Whatever you think, keep an eye on this piece of trash here. I need to go help Xain," she declared before snapping her fingers. In an instant, Zee appeared in Grace's place, looking confused as she tried to make sense of her sudden appearance. The angel glanced down at Jakel, who now had tears streaming down his face, a hint of sympathy softening the angel's gaze as he watched the defeated enemy before him.