But the cloud parted, then passed by on both sides of the Sha'Kar woman harmlessly. She gave him a penetrating look, a look that unnerved him despite the distance between them, and then she gave him a chilling smile. "Now," she said, and then she raised delicate hands limned over with the ghostly radiance of Magelight.
She could use High Sorcery too!
She was a Weavespinner!
The sight of that caused his human mind to retreat, to literally drag the Cat out into the forefront. He needed all his power, he needed the rage of fury to give him the power to control his own magic. He needed everything he could possibly find, because he was facing an opponent who had the power to beat him at his own game.
With a building roar, Tarrin's body exploded completely into Magelight as he relaxed the constraints he had placed on himself, and it responded by trying to burn him to ashes. Rational thought was scoured away, leaving behind only the instinctive impulses of the Cat, a mind that did not need to think in order to function. Power that would kill a linked Circle roared into him, through him, saturated his being with its power. It sent a shockwave of pain through him, pain that his Cat nature could block, ignore, shrug off, as the animal within ignored the dangers to the body in order to protect itself from an enemy.
So fast that most Sorcerers would not be able to follow it, with a speed borne of familiarity, Tarrin wove together that chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Water, and Divine flows, with only token flows of the other Spheres to grant his weave the power of High Sorcery, and then unleashed it on the dark figure. A blinding, incandescent bolt of pure magical power, a bar of light containing heat beyond anything natural, ripped through the air as it hurtled directly at the Sha'Kar's body. But the Sha'Kar slapped the bolt aside with a hand casually, and it deflected in its path and struck the ground a few hundred spans behind her. That touch caused the rock to vaporize, and then to explode, sending a shockwave of flying debris, dust, and loud noise roaring across the small forest of rocky pillars.
The Sha'Kar responded with a whip-like tongue of fire that emanated from her hand, and then she lashed it at him over the distance between them. It moved with a speed that defied rational thought, but to Tarrin's heightened senses, it moved with a ponderous slowness that he could easily track. He wove together a weave of Fire and released it, forming it around his paw, and he caught that tendril of fire as it tried to strike him. He felt the nature of the weave, then charged it with a huge surge of Air. The Fire mixed with the Air, and he sent it back towards the Sha'Kar like throwing a burning pot of pitch. The tendril detonated along its length in rapid succession, but it winked out as the Sha'Kar countered with flows of Water into the tendril to counter the explosive mix of flows.
He didn't hesitate. His Cat mind was already working on the next gambit, weaving together a weave of High Sorcery that was primarily composed of Earth. It was the magical effect he'd seen Jegojah use before, and he released it by stomping on the ground. It created a seismic shockwave that raced in the Sha'Kar's direction at shocking speed, causing a line of dust and flying shards of rock to follow in its wake as it shattered the rock through which it travelled. But the Sha'Kar rose up into the air, allowing the shockwave to travel under her harmlessly. He felt her weaving spells now, using High Sorcery, a weave of Water, Air, and Divine mainly, and then she released it. A pale beam of cold blue erupted from her hand. He didn't have the time or the presence to study the weave and create a counter for it, so he simply dove aside as it hit the ground where he'd been standing. He looked back, and saw that the ground had been covered by a thick layer of ice.
The human in him wondered at this. She was strong. She could do all the things he could. So why such small things? Was she toying with him?
There was one way to find out.
Setting his feet apart, he wove on a massive scale, flows of Air mainly, forming the first stages of the air shockwave that had proved to be so devastating all the other times. Eyes blazing with white light, a vicious snarl on his face, the air before him took on a reddish hue, an irregular reddish haze as the weave began to form-
– -But a lance of Fire struck his weaving, Fire laced with weaves of Air. The Air weaves in her counterstroke interacted with the flows in his, causing them to cancel one another out. The weave collapsed in on itself violently, then the flows of Fire interacted with the remaining flows in an odd manner, reforming into a new weave that immediately manifested. It formed as a ball of intense burning flame that suddenly exploded in all directions. An inferno of hellish fire blasted towards him, and he barely had the time to erect a Ward of Fire flows, a shield against it, before it engulfed him. He covered his face and flinched away instinctively as the fire blasted over him, but his Ward protected him from the fire. The Ward itself seemed to be caught up into the fire, as latent magical flows in the fire itself attached to the Ward, consumed it, ate away at its integrity, causing it to fail. But not before the fire exhausted its magical energy and dissipated.
Even the Cat was impressed. She used his own weaves against him!
The fire winked out, and in its wake it left a rocky ground that was blackened and smoking. The dirt and sand that had collected were now pools of clear glass laying on the blackened stone.
She had struck at his weave! While he was weaving it! And she even set up her attack so it used the flows not cancelled out to reform into a new spell. She had caused him to use up his own energy to create a spell of her design!
This was a true Ancient.
But the Cat understood its mistake. The weave took too long to create. Against her, he had to use fast weaves, things easy to create and with power. If he gave her an openeing, she would destroy his attempts to weave, maybe even turn them against him once again.
Weaving Air again, this time he used something fast and quick, something that could be realeased as quickly as it was woven. It released as a scythe of pure Air, a rush of air with a cutting edge more lethal than any sword or blade, and it lashed out like a whip towards the Sha'Kar as she drifted to the ground. The Sha'Kar simply raised her hand to meet the leading edge of that weave, then deflected it with a slash of her hand, deflected it to the side. It continued on, striking a rock pillar, then slicing it in half at the base as neatly as a knife cut butter. The pillar shuddered, then slid off its sliced base and then toppled over in an explosion of dust and a ear-splitting boom.
The power rebuilt in him as quickly as it had been expended, and he felt the stress. He was starting to wear out, to tire, and the power was becoming harder and harder to control. But there was no room for weariness here. The Sha'Kar was advancing on him confidently, advancing through the dust cloud that had concealed her for a moment. He had to use something that would burn off the power inside, give him a chance to catch his breath, but not something that she could disrupt.
He could feel her counterstroke building within the Weave itself. Earth. It had something to do with Earth. Whatever she was doing wasn't High Sorcery… it was that other-magic that she used, a type of Sorcery he couldn't sense, couldn't see. He reacted too late to sense the weave as the ground beneath him began to shudder. He tried to jump aside, but a massive hand of stone rose up from the ground, and it closed over him. Crushing pressure struck him, broke his tail and one of his arms, and it squeezed a ragged cry from him as the hand tried to snap him in half. The power within shuddered as the pain made him lose control for a split second, then he quickly wove a weave of Air and Fire, then unleashed it outwards from his body. The effect was purely explosive, like gunpowder put to the torch, and it shattered the stone hand in a loud blast of dust, fire, and black smoke.
The pain had been too much. The Cat rose up within in a heartbeat, going from unwilling participant to fully in control in the blink of an eye. The Cat completely dropped all his defensive measures, opened itself up to the Weave without hindrance. It thrust out into the Weave with flows, and then snapped them back to make them form a small spiderweb of little strands to feed his power, to directly connect him to the Weave itself. The power that flooded into him went from a flood to an absolute deluge, causing the nimbus of Magelight around him to intensify, to expand visibly. The connection to the Weave intensified his sense of it, and he could feel its power pulse and flow like blood, circulating through the Weave, but it coalesced in the strands nearest the Sha'Kar, as if her very presence saturated the strands with power. In that fleeting moment he realized that all strands were not the same, that the power within one strand was not the same as all other strands, as he'd been taught. It was something that he'd seemed to comprehend already, but he hadn't realized it until he saw the effect the Sha'Kar had on the Weave, an effect caused by her very presence.