The space detonated with blinding white and blue light. The moment the double hounds' claws touched the spongy forest floor, their twelve mouths unleashed intersecting bolts of lightning that formed a lethal laser grid. The dark zone converted in a fraction of a second into a sealed electrical execution ground, where parasitic plants evaporated and ancient tree trunks charred the instant they were touched by the arcing currents.
Dex was forced to leap immediately backward, avoiding a double bolt that nearly split him in two. He rolled across the damp ground, igniting Phoenix fire around both fists to form a temporary thermal shield that dispersed the charges striking the earth around him. But the moment he regained his footing, he grasped the terrifying truth: the Double-Headed Lightning Hounds' speed was breathtaking, surpassing every creature he had faced before. Charged by their own bodies, they moved like phantoms of pure light between the trunks, surging, vanishing, and reappearing from impossible angles. The first head of each hound handled vision and directing movement, while the second calculated trajectories and released the lightning bolts, making it near-impossible to predict their actions. Anticipating their movements was like trying to catch a lightning flash with a bare hand.
"Damn it, I cannot match them on the ground!" Dex's mind roared as he gasped, barely avoiding a predatory jaw that attempted to seize his shoulder. "My physical speed, even with Mana enhancement, remains within human Rank D limits. These beasts move by electrical pulses. If the fight continues here they will encircle me and reduce me to charred scraps."
The only option before him demanded an enormous physical sacrifice. Dex retreated swiftly, closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, and summoned the legendary Core residing in his chest. Rather than directing Mana toward his limbs as a weapon, he reversed the current entirely. He gathered every drop of Phoenix Mana, that pure gold and crimson energy, and drove it with brutality toward his back, precisely toward the junction point of his two shoulder blades.
He felt a sharp, tearing pain, unbearable, as though two daggers of molten rock were being driven from the inside outward. Dex released a stifled cry as he arched backward, his leather vest splitting. From his back erupted not flesh and blood but an explosion of absolute heat. Between the old scars covering his back, a pair of great fire wings emerged. Not phantom wings, they were dense, nearly material, composed of blazing crimson flame with sharp gold-edged borders, leaving spirals of burning ash with every beat. The wingspan exceeded four metres, and as they erupted, the humidity dissolved in a circle twenty metres across, and the hounds stepped back one pace under the scorching wave.
For the second time in his life, and the second time in actual combat, Dex flew.
He beat his fiery wings in one violent stroke, lifting his body from the electrified ground with immense propulsive force. Flying in a narrow space inside a dense forest and manoeuvring between intersecting lightning bolts was considered tactical suicide, but the Phoenix wings were not merely an instrument of flight. They were an extension of his soul. They responded to his thoughts before his mind could transmit signals to his muscles.
The Dance of the Burning Wings began. Dex spiralled through the air like a fire devil, converting his body to a helix of crimson flame that avoided the lightning impacts by millimetres. He slid beneath the bolts, folded his wings to dive through gaps between the electrical threads, then spread them suddenly to change course at a sharp angle defying gravity. His wings illuminated the dark vault of the forest, turning night into a bloodied day.
From above, he launched his counter-assault. He spread both palms and unleashed a volley of concentrated fire-spheres, compressed balls of heat sufficient to melt steel, toward the double-headed hounds below.
But the beasts were not foolish. The Lightning Hounds demonstrated a terrifying tactical intelligence befitting their dual consciousness. When the fire-spheres drew close, they did not attempt to flee. Instead each hound held its ground and raised both heads together. The twin heads began absorbing static electricity from the air and from each other, generating an intense electromagnetic field. Within seconds, a spherical plasma shield of crackling blue formed around their bodies. The crimson fire-spheres collided with the blue plasma shields, producing successive explosions that shook the forest's reaches and scattered sparks of fire and lightning like diabolical fireworks.
The battle was no longer a simple physical fight. It was a grinding war of attrition between absolute heat and devastating electrical voltage.