Elemental Cats

Asilean let himself follow his instincts as he fought doggedly with the buffalos around him. He could hear the sounds of battle from Toz and Scrael's fighting, but it went in one ear and out the other. Asilean began feeling the rhythm of battle. Even if he couldn't sense the buffalos' movements, he started getting a feel for how they would move and attack.

But he didn't use the extra time he got by getting used to their movements and dodging faster to think about how to improve his situation. He did the opposite. Asilean stopped thinking and let the previously dormant battle instincts take over. Instead of thinking another thought, he attacked one more time.

His attacks still didn't do much. But after a while, the scratches got a little deeper and lingered a little longer due to the space mana sticking to the wounds. It still wasn't enough to severely injure the buffalos, but he targeted the same buffalo over and over again, steadily accumulating superficial scratches on it.

And after piercing the surface, his attacks continued digging deeper. Asilean's attacks were barely enough to tear through the buffalo's rough hide. And after they did, solid muscle awaited his claws.

The rock-hard mass of muscle was even harder to dig through than the comparatively thin layer of skin. But eventually, Asilean got deep enough that the buffalo started panicking, and its frenzy was more due to pain and fear than due to mindless anger.

The smell of blood filled Asilean's nose as he continued to hound the buffalo he had selected as a target. He dodged the other buffalos' attacks more by instinct than by sensing them as he kept peeling away layer after layer of the buffalo's body.

The injured buffalo's panicked bleating seemed to awaken some kind of protective instinct, and the others rallied to it, trying to strike down Asilean with even more vigor than before.

However, since Asilean clung so closely to his target, the other buffalos did more harm than good since their attacks, more often than not, landed on the already injured buffalo.

The buffalos' angry stomping devolved into a frenzied panic that stirred up dust and splattered blood.

Thanks to the other buffalos' assistance and his own persistence, Asilean managed to injure the buffalo seriously enough to make it kneel.

At the same time as his target kneeled, Asilean had to dodge a slew of attacks from the other buffalos, and he dodged by jumping up.

While atop the kneeling buffalos head, Asilean saw, through a gap between the herd of buffalos, Mindle's flame. He saw her magic out of the corner of his eye. And he wouldn't even have thought much of it if he had been thinking. But he had stopped doing that when he sank into the rhythm of battle. Maybe that was why he instinctively realized that he was an idiot.

He had been staring at the answer to all his troubles for a while without even realizing it.

Aside from traversing the Void and occasionally dispelling enemy magic, Asilean rarely used his void magic. He didn't slack off in training it since it still strengthened his mana and body if he refined it. But he never really practiced or used it. And unlike Toz, he couldn't really combine it with a bunch of other elements and create amazing combination magic.

Asilean had treated his void magic as more of a necessary chore rather than an asset that actually improved his combat ability, which was why his thoughts of improvement were limited to what he could do with the space element.

He had barely even considered using void magic to increase his fighting strength since he mostly considered it useless.

However, he had already proven to himself barely more than a day ago that it was far from useless.

When Mindle defeated the Demonic Bull, Asilean helped her by using his void magic to dispel its demonic energy and rendering it practically defenseless.

Asilean felt ashamed and unbearably stupid as he realized that the answer to his question about improving his offensive capabilities didn't lay in learning some incredible spell or mastering his control over the space element. It was literally just a matter of broadening his perspective and opening his mind. He had been sitting on the answer without even considering looking under himself when he looked for it.

Now that Asilean knew what to do, it was only a matter of putting it to practice.

He had realized that he could use void magic to ignore and remove his targets' defenses, but the problem came when he had to do that at the same time as he avoided the frantic stomping and prepared an attack.

He considered combining his void and space magic. But Asilean didn't have as much experience combining magic as Toz did. And since he used his space magic to keep track of the buffalos' movements, he didn't dare rashly mix his two attributes.

Since he could lose his life or get severely injured if he made a mistake, Asilean had to be cautious. And he decided to be cautious, despite fighting wildly with a rampaging herd of buffalo at the same level of power as himself. Asilean realized the irony, but he showed it out of his mind as he focused on his magic.

He analyzed the buffalos' attacks and chose a moment where he would have the greatest gap between two attacks to use his magic.

Since his first target was already torn to shreds, Asilean chose another healthy buffalo.

After confirming his target and waiting for the right moment, Asilean hurried to cast his void magic.

He didn't have much time to attack the buffalo before he would find a hoof or leg disfiguring his head, so he concentrated his magic on where he would strike.

Asilean used his void magic to dispel the cloud of demonic energy hanging around the buffalo's shoulder. He then coated his claws with space mana and finally used his spatial shift to move next to his target in an instant. After arriving next to his target, he lashed out with his paw.