I gritted my teeth as I felt the load of holding back this spell in my channels, the four corners of the weave bearing the strike across my Concentration grip.

The spell wanted to break as the corners bowed, but with sheer force of will, I pushed, and it snapped back into place, as the dark light of Rex’s spell spread laterally across the surface of the lattice in front of me, and then it slowly dissipated. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

I had just survived two sure-kill spells in less than two seconds.

Rex’s expression did not change, but his breath did.

A part of me had watched him draw in a deep breath, and I saw this as a sign of someone who was about to cast a larger spell.

I had two seconds, maybe three, so I used them.

I came up to my full height, and I drew Anima from my reserves without holding back. This was a bad time for measurements. Now I was fighting to survive.

With Anima roaring in my channels, I built the second lattice two feet in front of me, anchored to the ground rather than to the air.

This was the same configuration I had been practicing for a while and never used in combat. The ground-anchored lattice was harder to maintain because the corners were pinned to a surface rather than held by Concentration alone, but it was also harder to break because the corners had something to push against.

It was a subtle detail, but the devil was always in the details, as I was rapidly learning with every new loop.

It was a fallback. If the front lattice failed, the back lattice would buy me one more pair of seconds, maybe even more, and at the rate the fight was developing, these seconds were the difference between a dead Elric and a live one.

Threadwork could be combined with offensive disciplines, but where they shone in the hands of mages talented with using them was in defense, and I did not like to toot my horn, but I was somewhat of a genius at Threadwork.

The cold spot on my chest moved, not by much, a finger’s width to the left, settling at the gap between my third and fourth ribs. Whatever Rex was about to cast was going to come at a different angle.

Then the third cast left his staff, and I understood what the dark light had been, because Rex had aimed the cast at the lattice instead of me, and the dark light tore through the first lattice I had made before striking the second one a few feet in front of me. If I had delayed a moment in the creation of this second lattice, I would be dead.

Unlike the first darklight that wanted to tear through my Threadwork and get to me, this one began to spread along the lines of the lattice itself, finding the structural anchors and feeding into them. The lattice began to come apart from the corrosive impact of the light.

The colorless lattice shone blue, and then it began to dim as the dark light unmade the threads from within.

I sucked in my breath in astonishment as this was not any of the elemental disciplines, but an occultic spell, and if I was correct, this was Veilcraft.

Veilcraft was the discipline that worked on the substance of magic itself, and I was seeing it here as it operated on the lattice rather than through it.

This discipline targeted the spell rather than the caster, and it was one of the reasons why Veilcraft was the discipline restricted by Anima Sensitivity scores, not by noble houses, as Rex had first told me, in the previous loop, when he had said that he could not study because he was a noble.

Veilcraft was already a Discipline that was hard to study due to its magic-breaking properties that would be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands, and it was why every user of this discipline was registered.

No one wanted their precious vault fortified with magic to be taken apart, or the defensive wards around their Magus Tower or their robes to be destroyed easily, so Veilcraft was an occult discipline with a rather strict learning process, and for one crazy moment, I almost wanted to know the effect of Veilcraft on Mortal Shell.

Well, all that did not matter; Rex had lied about learning Veilcraft because I was sure he did not learn it from the Academy, but this was just one small lie on the mountain of deception that Rex had turned out to be.

Even though I had anchored it to the ground, the lattice came apart. I felt the weave fail through my channels, the load releasing as the structure dissolved, but my staff was already pointed at Rex, Death-Touched, showing me the cold spot on my chest pulsing in advance of what was coming next, when the space around Rex lit up from the force of a Surge cast.

It came from the direction of our fire, and it crossed the camp in a flat line of compressed force that I recognized because I had been on the receiving end of Bari practicing his favorite spell.

Bari’s Surge had always been heavy, but it lacked the fine control of Surge casting that I was able to do. For instance, Bari would have a hard time combining Surge with Arc Lightning, but Bari did not much care for the intricacies of Surge casting when his spell could hit like a mountain falling on you.

The sheer weight of his casts was a thing the cohort had stopped commenting on because everyone was used to it, and no one wanted to be on the other end of it.

The cast hit Rex from behind, and apart from his body being highlighted with a bright red glow as if the air around him was being heated like metal in a forge, it did not throw him into the next continent... bastard must either have a powerful enchantment under his fancy clothes, or he was wielding multiple powerful disciplines at once, including a defensive discipline like Threadwork.

The shockwave from the hit made me stumble even though I was several feet away from Rex, who stood still and allowed the cast to wash over him like water rushing past stone.

Damn, he looked cool, especially with his dead-eyed expression like a fish, but it broke his concentration, and the dark-light cast that had been building for me dispersed mid-channel, and the cold spot on my chest faded to half of what it had been.