The skies above darkened for a dozen miles in every direction. With the cloud below gone, the lion ascended amidst a crackling mantle of bright blue lightning. A river sized bolt shot down from above, meeting the monster midway. Sam shielded his eyes, unable to see both in the real world and the world of the Dao.
The lion hung suspended in the air, connected to the air by a fulminating cloak of thready electricity. Thousands of tendrils of lightning sprang from every corner of the monster's body, and stretched off into the firmament. It howled at Sam, and those bolts of lightning gathered around its mouth. Between one second and the next, a titanic surge of gathered electrical power shot down from above, and towards Sam.
Sam stood his ground and cocked back his hammer. It was still blazing with the light of his previous attack, and he had plenty of fuel left in the tank to strike again. Like a baseball, he swatted the incoming surge of electricity back towards its sender. The stream of lightning bulged as it was forced back up the same stream that it was coming down. The entire serpent of blue energy collapsed in on itself with a crackling boom.
The elemental felt the backlash in every corner of its body, tiny blasts of energy ripping chunks off of it. Sam moved in and teleported next to the monster's head. It bit at him, spectral jaws of lightning forming around its mouth. However, it was too late. Terra's Will slammed down into the center of the monster's head. Sam used his Domain, pitting it against the conceptual bindings that held his foe together. That finally ended the beast, and it came apart in a shower of sparks.
The soul of a Teriuvarian woman rose out of the dispersing elemental dust, and smiled at Sam before vanishing into the air. Sam had already freed three, which meant that he only had six more to go before he could move on.
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Finding more of the elementals was far easier than it should have been, given that he was on the eightieth layer of the Tower. Still, fighting them was another thing entirely. It seemed that the three that he had killed first, the two bears and the bull, were weaker than most. The vast majority of the elementals were as strong as the lion, or even stronger. In the process of finding and killing another six, Sam found his talents begin to stretch. Many of the monsters possessed power comparable to his own. While they were still a bit weaker, it did add up, especially conceding how quickly he was making his way through the realm.
The final elemental had posed the most trouble, and as Sam watched the hundred foot long cobra fade away, the soul trapped within finally freed, he nursed a dozen wounds, each of which glistened with poison. The cobra had used an especially nasty type of venom, one that interfered with Sam's control over his own body with the power of elemental lighting.
While he lacked nerves or muscles that would have normally been impacted by such an attack, it went beyond the bounds of the mortal body, and into the realm of the conceptual. Just like how Sam could alter reality with his Dao, the very nature of the cobra's venom had reached into his body, and forced it to act as if it were made of mortal flesh and blood once more.
Even worse, this effect lingered, just like the real venom of the elemental's earthly counterpart would have. It wasn't deadly, but it did severely inhibit Sam's ability to move properly. His limbs jittered, and his vision swam as he tried to keep going. Eventually, the effect ran out, but only after he swept his entire body with a wave of cleansing Dao energy. At this point in the Tower, all of his foes had Daos on an equal, or greater, level than his own. That didn't mean that they were necessarily stronger, as Sam possessed other boons to his Dao strength, but it also meant that he had to watch out when his foes used their Daos. Being struck by a technique now would seriously injure him, if not hamper his strength for a good portion of the floor.
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