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Just beyond the knuckles of his two fingers, a self-sustaining jet of water materialized--thin and precise and inheriting an overwhelming amount of forward velocity. It was a pressurized water drill, strong enough to cut through solid metal under its own power, and when he strengthened it with his soul, even Lawrence’s radium would give way. So when Zeff collided with the dome, he pressed the jet into it like a needle into a pincushion.

With nothing to hold onto, Zeff let himself drop back to the ground, but he kept the water jet exactly where it was, and on the way down, made two more and pressed them into the wall as well. He’d created three points of structural weakness, which wasn’t much, but it was a start. He knew that if he used only one jet to cut a large enough hole for himself, Lawrence could just fill the thing back in before Zeff even finished cutting. Multiple jets were more efficient and would prove difficult for Lawrence to get rid of, since they would cut through anything they touched. The only difficulty was keeping it all straight in his head. They were tiny burning dots in space, held in place by his mind alone, and he needed more of them, but he first needed to buy more time for himself.

Radium tried to clap around his body, but the ice armor that was already there resisted, and Zeff broke free with a storm of crystalline spikes. He ran alongside the blue wall, throwing another tidal wave with his left hand while readying a fourth jet with his right.

A cliff of radium rose to Lawrence’s defense, and the water broke upon it, protecting not just the General but also the other servants rallying behind him. The chemical reaction sent huge, sizzling streams of hydrogen gas into the air. And then, without warning, the gas detonated.

An enormous fireball lit up the whole castle. There was no way to tell what ignited it; many different servant abilities could have been the trigger.

Zeff shielded himself with water.