And it's not like she's going to just let it hit her, either. She's not nearly as fast as Taharqi but she can still Snap. She's also consuming her spiritual spheres as she goes, and as they go down her hits become less powerful and fast, so she has to step away again to renew them. Really, the only reason she can concentrate on that is because Arik is distracting the monster and Taharqi is dealing with the constant streams of smaller spirits.

This... this feels good. This might be what it's supposed to feel like. Blood in his mouth, lungs burning, bones jarred from ringing steel - and still fighting, not just for his own life but for theirs.

Annika is kind of surprised that this is actually working. She'd have assumed killing this thing would be at least rank 2, if "get information about it" was rank 1. Then again, this person seems to have some very heavy-duty self-healing and incredibly high pain tolerance, she's not sure she's seen anything like that outside the Church's own Crusaders, so he might be kind of carrying all of them. ...then again, he clearly couldn't have actually taken it down on his own.

That's called teamwork, Annika.

It's unclear what tips the balance for the spirit, but it is smart enough to eventually realise that it's not going to win this, and so it decides that it should, actually, retreat.

Has it considered, instead, being extremely stabbed.

It has! It has decided against it. It turns around and starts to run—

Snap.

No it does not.

Taharqi doesn't have cool sound effects when he appears out of nowhere—it would, in fact, rather defeat the point—but he does have the ability to do so and intercept the spirit. This means that the smaller flame spirits are not being dealt with, but if they can take the bigger one down they'll probably dissipate.

Annika can optimise for something else, now that Taharqi is doing the damage-dealing. A change in her stance, a change in her punches, and now they're destabilising the creature rather than directly inflicting damage. Messing with its momentum, targetting specific points of balance, compensating for everything it tries to do to leave.

It may be able to become silent and incorporeal but clearly it still has an Actual Shape, and even though it tries going smaller again that doesn't seem to help, so instead what it'll try to do is go big and claw Annika open from head to toe.

...maybe she should've been expecting this but she wasn't, actually.

"Shit." Okay now they really need to kill this thing.

Oh, fuck that. Grab Annika's wrist and heal - it's always harder when it's on somebody else - oh that's much harder, actually. But the glowing brownish void in the center of his vision doesn't matter, she's back in one piece. He lurches forward for more stabbing, forcing blood to move through deadened limbs to kill this fucking thing.

"—hold it still," Annika says, and starts meditating.

Whhyyyy did that sound like she is about to do something very ill-advised.

Well, he'll do his best. He's not as good as she is at this but he can buy her time.

Arik can do it too. He... doesn't have any specific tricks under his belt for this, but he has gumption, and blood slowly flowing back to his brain and extremities.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Then she reabsorbs the spheres into herself, and static starts to crackle on her skin and her, her eyes glowing.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

"Out of my way."

...yeah, that seems like the thing to do.

It sure fucking does!

Her Snap skill is a modified Teleportation, in that it actually translocates the caster and passenger without going through the intervening space. What's happening here instead is sheer overwhelming speed, faster than anything Taharqi's done so far, faster than the speed of thought.

Annika is in the middle of a mid-sized crater, her fist buried in the stone, in the place where the spirit was just a moment ago.

The spirit and its summoned minions are quickly dissipating, and the feeling of overwhelming cold and the negative spiritual pressure are all going away with it, leaving the place feeling very...

...mundane.

And she collapses and starts screaming.

Arik grabs her shoulder and tries to heal her, ready to pass out and - ah. Nope. Not the kind of thing he can heal, apparently.

...but, actually, he's had a very big day, and he is in fact going to pass out anyway.

When he comes back to, he's in a bed, inside a dark room somewhere. He can see soft light coming through the gaps around a wooden door, as well as moonlight seeping around curtains made of cloth covering a window to his left.