Page 810 -- XCII.

Melchor was not long delayed. The Redwaters all pounced on him at once, their mixture of powers accumulating into a confused frenzy of attacks. Their varied crystals and metals and gases all combined and ignited, engulfing the man’s liquid body in flames while simultaneously bombarding him from every conceivable direction.

And Melchor ignored them. He pressed through their combination attack as if it were nothing more than smoke. He went for Diego again.

Diego was ready for him, though. Emiliana knew his power as well: nitrogen transfiguration. A surge of mercury came for his head, but Diego ducked right under it and gripped Melchor’s amorphous body with both arms, going for a ride as Melchor kept leaping across the room like a wild bull. Emiliana could see him attempting to slow Melchor down with a bath of liquid nitrogen as he flailed, struggling to hang on.

Dimas took the opportunity to rear back from across the room and punch a hole into the south wall. Emiliana saw the air visibly distort as the impact shattered Melchor’s frozen mercury. “Go!” the man yelled.

Emiliana turned to run, only to find Joana already pulling her and Marcos along. But it made no difference. Before they could reach the hole in the wall, the mercury filled back in, leaving them still trapped in the room with everyone else.

The group of Redwaters moved to attack again, but two broad pillars of mercury converged on them, one down from the ceiling and the other up from the floor, meeting each other like the teeth of a giant’s jaw. Emiliana could hear their bones crunch and see their blood go flying as the frozen mercury claimed five servants at once.


Chapter Ninety-Two: ‘The weight of the rain...’
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Dimas Sebolt glanced at the dead. He’d never seen Melchor’s power firsthand like this, but he’d heard Xuan speak about it at length. It was only supposed to be mercury transfiguration, but the man’s mastery of pan-rozum completely changed the equation. In Dimas’ mind, Diego’s earlier confidence had been entirely unfounded. Being outnumbered meant virtually nothing to someone like Melchor Blackburn.

Fool that he was, however, Diego could still prove invaluable in this fight, Dimas knew. Diego himself had control of pan-forma, a kind of simpler hyper-state exclusive to transfiguration and materialization users only. It was much less versatile than pan-rozum, not breaking down the barriers between ability classes and instead affording three blanket enhancements to durability, regeneration, and connectivity.