As the troll, a much smaller one than before, was looking at the air atop Cades with great fear that very same Cades attacked with the intent to destroy the troll as he himself didn't register it yet and was simply using the weakness and inattention of his opponent, something that resulted in the troll going down even quicker than the one before.
But after the troll went down in a rain of splinters that would've caused any normal person to curse at the god of wood he began realizing it as well.
There were countless diagrams made of a translucent threat, all concluding into something that resembled a thick rope that were floating in nothingness, each one with nothing to feel, and yet each one was incredibly intimidating.
There were stars, pentagrams, circles, rectangles and so many more, but most of the time they were full of weird symbols that shifted with each and every single second, and Cades soon thereafter realized something important about all of these circles that were now floating in the air as if the air itself had become a drawing board for whatever being it had been that had summoned these monstrous apparitions.
Cades had already realized that these creations resembled the basics of artificing but with some other additions that Cades had no idea on how they even worked, he didn't even really know how he had realized that these creations resembled artificing, in truth it was more of an instinctive reaction born from his constant practice in that very art for almost his entire life, at least the parts of his life that he could remember.
But just then, when he had finally started to panic after understanding the basics of this sequence that had been written into the air with magic that he could've never imagined that it would ever even exist, the circles and rectangles began lighting up and burning in a orange light that resembled the liquid that was flowing through the higher-ranking members of this battle as if it was their blood, and just then Cades began to finally feel the flow of mana from a specific direction, the direction in which there was the supposedly unfinished mage.
But instead formless mass of squirming wooden roots that had been constantly moving atop the puppets waist there now stood an actual, completely formed puppet, one that resembled a ehetrian child without wings, one that was about eight years old, Cades couldn't tell what colours her body consisted of but he could tell that she was female and had been quite a beautiful child in her lifetime, but much worse than that was the creepy light that was shining onto him from the depths of her eyes, so much so that it looked as if her soul had been engulfed in an orange flame that was slowly devouring everything.
Her small body was clad in an oversized robe and a comically large mage hat that consisted of a large circular base and a oversized tip that seemed to be almost half as big as her, who was only about four feet tall, about average for a ehetrian child of that age who grew slightly slower than members of some other species that Cades had heard of.
However, different from a normal child of that age her face was covered in scars that seemed to show just how long she had been stuck in this horrible place, and while the rest of her body that had appeared from what seemed to be thin air was perfect, this part of her body, well, actually every little bit of the skin shown that he could see, was covered in abhorrent scars that would've made child service workers cry for a whole week had they seen it in a normal situation, added on top of that there was a disgusting smile decorating her face, one out of which there seemed to be gushing a small amount of the orange liquid, albeit in a much more gooey state.
And that grotesque smile that seemed to be full of delight as it was looking at Cades was now readying itself, starting to move its arm, and Cades felt how he was pushed away, flying across the river and landing on the other side, over 150 feet away but still very much in range for her attacks that were now really warming up.
As Cades struggled to stand up once more and face the mage the magical apparitions that had appeared all around him and were now glowing in an eerie orange light began to move at great speeds.
They were activating.
The first one to activate was a apparition that resembled a two-layer circle surrounding two overlapping triangles that burned in an incredescant orange light, separating it from all the other apparitions that were glowing in a much less increscent shade of orange, although it began burning in a kind of white light that radiated a feeling of insanity as soon as it truly began doing what it was seemingly supposed to do in the first place.
A translucent halfmoon shot towards Cades who barely managed to raise his body and block the entire thing using his sword, splitting the magic into two parts and causing it to hammer into some of the tree trunks behind him, causing them to splinter in a similar way to the puppets he had previously slain.
After he managed to deflect the first attack he did however feel how the other apparitions started moving up, and yet, as if it couldn't get any worse, he felt something grab him from the air as if he was stolen by a giant, perhaps one of those that hadn't finished transforming yet.
But just after a small moment of great panic and almost dicing up the being that had lifted him up he quickly realized that the being was flying away as fast as it could, and he finally also put one and one together and realized that the beings name was most likely Manug.