The first of the thorned vines was poised for Kurt's neck, and he barely managed to duck it. The second had been directed at his leg, much to his dismay because, in his cureent crouching position, all he could do to avoid it was to jump back without a thought, which he did, landing on his ass.

  He was quick to roll over and blast away, which proved to be the right move when three more of those thorned vines were brought down onto the ground he had been sitting on just a second before, piercing through the soil as if it were water.

  He rushed away from the wyldfae, trying to find a distance those vines of her couldn't reach. He had almost made it to the edge of the clearing before he realized that, whatever was their top range, it was more than large enough that he probably wouldn't be abe to exploit it. So, with yet another of those thorned appendages looming over his head, no doubt waiting for him to slow down to try and punch a hole on the back of his head, he mounted the first defense he could think of.

  Calling forth his foci and conjuring a Blowtorch through it, Kurt spun on his feet, and stabbed the mystical implement at the vine, directing the waves of heat emanated from it right at the vegetal appendage. Sure enough, the vine's end flared and scorched on contact, and the rest of it snapped back at the wyldfae, who was screaming in pain.

  She can feel pain through those things, Kurt realized.

  Two more vines shoot from her sides, curving to hit Kurt's right flank. Without missing a beat, he stabbed his wand at them. The vines were separate enough that Kurt could only stab one of them at a time, clearly an experimental attemp from Ruth's part to pierce through this new defense. It was a good plan, if Kurt was being honest, attacking from more than one angle at the same time so that the enemy can't defend from all of her attacks no matter what.

  It could have worked, really. Hadn't Kurt's defense been so unusual.

  The vine he had reached for burst in flames, just like the last one had, and Kurt immediately directed the heat generated from this reaction, which having been set up by his Blowtorch spell was quite infused with his SP, at the incoming second, which blackened and shriveled with no apparent cause before snapping back. And again, this retreat came accompanied by the screams of a wyldfae.

  "You bastard!!!" She roared, caresing the first vine that Kurt had burned. Her body bulged grotesquely, brimming with green energy, and a veritable storm of vines, almost two dozen in number, exploded from it, blasting towards Kurt.

  The attacks came from every direction: Seven vines at each flank, five coming down at Kurt's head like whips, and two more crawling through the grass like snakes, poised for his legs. She had apparently decided that the only flaw on her multiflank strategy had been the amount of attacks being launched at him at the same time.

  And she had been right. While Kurt could use the precise heat control of Blowtorch to defend from vines outside his wand's reach, this was something he could only do with the vines that were relatively close to it so, at most, he would be able to cover one of his flanks, leaving the other three exposed to the skewering those vines could no doubt subject him to.

  With his mind working at top speed trying to reach an answer to this dilemma, Kurt grabbed his wand in a closed fist, so that only both ends of the implement, one of which still held the sphere of super compressed heat, would stick out.

  He conjured a second Blowtorch on the free end of his wand, and threw his fist forward, fingers facing down, so that both ends of his wand would be as close to the vines coming from either side. Those were the most dangerous ones, not just because of their number, but because they were actually aiming for Kurt. The ones coming from above and below were closer to just lashing at his general direction.

  He allowed the heat coming from each sphere to jump at each of the seven vines. Having to increase the number of targets like this meant that the damage couldn't quite match the previous showings. The vines were neither scorched nor set ablaze. At best, they were be dried up by the heat, and some spots of their surface blackened. Thing was, they didn't need to destroy the vines: The pain of being burnt had already been place on Ruth's mind and, as soon as the heat reached them, they jolted back.

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  This left him with just two angles of attack to worry about.

  The seven remaining vines snapped at him at the sime time, closing on his position like the maw of some gigantic beast. And just like the bite of a beast, they moved wildly and predictably, enough that he could simply sidestep them and, spinning on the balls of his feet, cut them with an overhead slash of his sword.

  The tips of the vines fell to the ground, twitching like dying snakes, as the twenty-one wounded limbs snapped away from him, and back into the wyldfae's torso. The damage taken by her thorned appendages was now showing on her: Entire sections of her body no showed scorch marks of varying intensity, and the vines Kurt had cut, which were now part of her left arm, were bleeding sap quite profusely.

  "What was that about smaller attacks being more effective?" Asked Kurt, smiling despite himself. "Or perhaps they were more effective for me? Because they sure made it easy to put the pain on you, you tree bitch!"

  The woman didn't answer. Instead, she raised her arm, the one bleeding sap, and clenched her fist. The bark on the limb grew porous, and then outright segmented, like the hide of a pangolin. Before Kurt could make any sense of what she was trying now, she gave him the answer.

  The wyldfae brought her arm down in a whip-like manner, and one of the wooden scales covering detached, the momentum of its mother limb causing it to shoot forward. Right at Kurt.

  The wooden projectile coursed through the air in a straight line with bullet-like speed, way faster for even Kurt to see it as anything but a blur of motion. It was only the highly telegraphed nature of the move that initiated its course that allowed Kurt to barely move out of its way.

  He tilted his body to the left, and heard the bullet pierce the air as it passed just besides his ear, almost brushing against it. It was enough to make that ear ring.

  He was so centered on his barely dodging the projectile that would have otherwise gone right through his skull that he wasn't paying attention at his enemy. It was only the sound of a whip cracking that warned him to move.

  And so, move he did, crouching just in time for the second bullet to pass above his head and not right through it.

  "What's up, you little bastard?!" She exclaimed, cackling all the way. "Can't use your fire against this 'small attack'?!"

  Again she brought her arm down, and again a scale of wood was shot as if from a cannon. Kurt barely managed to dodge that one, and so it brushed against the side of his chest, carving a thin gash on his shirt and, if the growing feeling of heat coming from that are was any indicator, doing the same on the skin below.

  The pain was enough to tense his body, to make his joints rigid and movement impossible for just a fraction of a second.

  That was all the time his foe needed.

  Ruth shot yet another scale, right at the center of Kurt's chest.

  Kurt's eyes widened in shock, and justa moment later his mind managed to churn out a response at the situation. A response that came in the form of five simple words.

  I am not dodging that.

  And he really wasn't: Not only had her last attack managed to stun him long enough for this one to be midair before he noticed it, but she had also aimed right at his chest. It didn't matter what direction he tried to dodge towards, he was still taking a very nasty injury from that.

  Try to move left or right? The bullet would go right through at least three of his ribs and most likely pierce one of his lungs.

  Ducking? The bullet would get his throat and, given the sheer speed behind it, probably punch a hole through the rest of his neck, spine included.

  Hell, even if he had tried to jump over it, all he wold accomplish would be a castration.

  So no, there was no dodging that. So he would have to block it.

  Almost without any conscious input, the hand holding his wand darted forward. The magical implement glowed a soft amber against the dark of the night, without any trace of the crimson of fire sorcery. It wouldn't serve him now. So, instead, he conjured the light green of wind, and casted a spell he had figured out just that night.

  An Air Cushion the size of a beachball materialized right from between his clenched fingers, forming itself around his fist like some cartoonish boxing glove. A cartoonish boxing glove that would be the difference between him living or dying.

  The bullet clashed against the air construct, punching halfway into it until it almost touched Kurt's middle finger, and, for a moment of supreme tension, the world was reduced to his spell.

  All his eyes could see was the light green ballon formed around his hand, bent around the bullet it was meant to stop.

  All his ears could hear was the groaning coming from the mass of solidified air. It was a sound like the stretching of rubber. A groaning that was reaching a horrifying crescendo.

  And finally, but certainly not less importantly, his newly developed magical sense, the one sorcerers called Third Eye, felt the strain of the spell. It felt the energies both physical and mystical that held it together, solid against all logic. And he felt those energies, and the structures holding them together, give away one by one with every quarter of an inch, with every milimiter that tar black projectile burrowed itself in.

  Kurt knew, on an objective level, that it couldn't have been more than a second this clash lasted. But for him, it felt like eternity.

  And suddenly, all three of his senses came together to deliver a singular new: His eyes saw the cushion trembling violently, his ears heard it snap, and his Aetheric Attunement informed him of the truth the last two senses had already all but said.

  The spell broke down. And the bullet hadn't been stopped.