An Owl's Rise

Just as Melisandre said, she only needed to worry about flying around at her fastest maintainable speed and let her master take care of the rest.

So far, she had not been so much as grazed by a stray attack or had a hostile individual get within half a kilometer of her.

Still, while Evelyn knew that being a target for some of the enemy's strongest fighters and keeping them occupied was helping everyone, she could not help but feel despondent about her lack of ability to fight back.

All she could do was run away and let others protect her. Even though she had worked tirelessly to gain power, it all amounted to nothing in the face of the threat currently bearing down on her. She was just too weak to be of any real use.

However, while Evelyn's mind wandered as she continued monotonously following behind Melisandre, her master suddenly came to an abrupt stop.

With her thoughts elsewhere, Evelyn put up her wings to halt her momentum just a second after everyone else and only managed to stop when she was right behind Melisandre.

From there she could see why her master had stopped and she herself went ghastly pale.

A rift in the air had opened up in front of them just as they were making their way towards the next bastion of the Roost where another group of owls was waiting to back them up.

This ambush had come at the most inopportune moment as they were as far away from assistance as possible.

With a quick glance Melisandre turned her head around them to see if they could go back the way they could, but clicked her tongue when she saw what was waiting for them.

The group that had been chasing them was still embroiled in a skirmish with a team of elite owls. It would be pretty much impossible to retreat that way.

"It certainly wasn't easy to break through all the spatial interference around you and time things just right with all your moving about, but I finally managed to catch up to you."

Coming out of the rift was a handsome middle-aged man with light blue almost sliver hair and two different colored eyes.

His appearance was striking, and it was clear at a glance that he was a unique and powerful individual.

  Coming up from behind him in the rift were several dozens of other people, one of which Evelyn recognized.

Standing in the back was the man with azure hair that she had encountered in the Elmot Gorge.

Back then he had been leading a team belonging to the Deamhain Sect, but now his position was obviously at the bottom of the totem pole among this group.

Nevertheless, his presence here allowed Evelyn to know exactly who these people were that had just appeared in front of her.

'They're the ones! The bastards that killed our parents and ripped our family apart!'

Her disheartened thoughts about being useless in battle vanished in an instant and were immediately replaced by rage the moment Evelyn realized that the leaders of the organization that had ruined her second family had shown themselves.

Here they were to destroy her home yet again, and her fury flared up to the same degree as when she killed her father in her first life.

With reckless abandon, Evelyn brought out all of the power she could muster and then some.

She showed no regard for her well-being or the situation at hand and simply unleased everything she could do.

Her normally precise and thought-out magic was nowhere to be seen and all that surrounded her was a mass of magic that was going out of control.

In her head she could faintly hear her companions and Melisandre shouting at her to control herself, but the roaring in her ears from her rage drowned them out.

All she could focus on in this moment was striking back at those that had caused her excruciating pain.

A blast of her fire, wind, and gravity magic headed straight towards the group of people she knew to be the ones in charge of the experiment that cost her so much.

The three types of magic she could usually blend together seamlessly were now an incohesive mess. Her attack relied solely on the tremendous amount of energy she had put behind it.

"A pitiful display." Dimed, the leader of the Deamhain Sect said.

Waving his hand, he created another tear in space the consumed most of Evelyn's reckless attack.

Yet, one aspect of her magic managed to get through. The intensified wave of gravity she had released was invisible and nearly undetectable. Allowing it to reach its targets.

Each member of the top brass of the Deamhain Sect were hit with gravity strong enough to kill a normal person in just a few seconds.

Of course, not a single person affected by Evelyn's magic was below the high tier of the arcanist rank that was equivalent to a tyrant rank beast for humans.

Her attack was certainly shocking as it got through Diomed's defense, but it amounted to nothing more than a discomfort to those that she had targeted. There was just too much of a disparity in their ranks for Evelyn's magic to beat any of them.

"So that is the marvelous power the divine item bestows upon its wielder. To think even I could not block it." Diomed said with a brilliant smile on his face.

He was looking at Evelyn with intense interest. Though not as a living creature, but a subject for experimentation.

'Damn… it.' Evelyn thought as she huffed and wheezed.

The attack she had just launched had taken a great deal out of her.

Blood was oozing out of her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and her body felt like it frigid water coursing through it.

She had channeled and unleashed more magical energy than her body could handle all at once and was suffering the backlash from doing so.

Getting lost in her rage may have slowed down her enemies for a few seconds, but ultimately it had left her in a terrible state and barely able to continue flying.