The duel did not go according to plan.
That was okay.
Neither Ves nor the Dark Apostle harbored an obsession about following a plan to the letter.
Anyone with enough experience in life would know that the future could never be completely calculated.
Perhaps the Polymath might disagree, but Ves never assumed he could predict with 100 percent certainty how a sequence of events would play out over time.
That did not mean that plans had no value, but people needed to be adaptable and ideally have contingency plans in place to account for accidents and the like.
Ves and the Dark Apostle entered the dueling ground knowing that the Unshakeable King was the second-strongest member of the Phase Lord Department.
What he had demonstrated so far truly exemplified his combat power.
Compared to conceited and close-minded alien phase lords that the Larkinsons had battled over the years, the overall qualities of this human phase lord was undoubtedly superior. His training and his use of tech and equipment already made him considerably stronger than the average lesser phase lord.
That made it difficult for the Dark Apostle to outfight the Unshakeable King, especially now that the latter had suffered a soul injury that sent him over the edge.
The Unshakeable King was overdrafting his strength. His phasewater concentration burned faster whenever he was actively clashing against the challenger. He seemingly had no other goal left in his mind aside from demolishing the man responsible for killing his companion spirit!
The logical response to such an unhinged display of aggression was to back off and let the Unshakeable King tire himself out. The greater the delay, the more his lack of fulfillment put him in a depressed mood.
However, the fight had already taken more minutes than it should have.
A duel between phase lords could potentially last for days or even weeks depending on how timid they were and how big their bodies had become.
The more mass at their disposal, the more hits they could take.
While it was possible to kill a phase lord quickly by targeting his brain or his most essential phasewater organs, the Unshakeable King understood this truth extremely well.
Even in his deranged state, his excellent fighting instincts and acumen still shone through. He defended his head and his torso against any attempt made by the Dark Apostle to target them directly.
The Teragon Plasma Spear had not been able to scorch the helmet once, and only inflicted marginal damage to the torso armor.
The Unshakeable King's raiment had plenty of buffer left to expend. The plasma spear would have to repeatedly scorch the same sections of armor in order to create a breach.
Then the Dark Apostle would have to slip in and target this single weak point, which the Unshakeable King would defend with great effort!
It was much easier for him to block or redirect the plasma spear strikes when he knew what it was targeting!
The only way to overcome this disadvantage was to create other armor breaches, but that would take precious minutes.
The Unshakeable King knew that time was on his side. As recklessly as he was fighting at the moment, he had never truly made any risky moves.
Whether he did so with or without intention, he had turned his furious display of aggression into a brilliant defensive posture, making it far too dangerous for the Dark Apostle to mount his own offensive.
This was why the Dark Apostle wanted to make use of the Sacrificial Spear Throwing Method sooner than they originally planned.
They ended to break the situation and strip the Unshakeable King of his signature thick raiment.
Now that they had come to this point, the Dark Apostle assumed a static position relative to his adversary and began to grip his weapon in a very different manner.
A mechanism hidden in the end of the spear shaft unfolded, exposing an integrated atlatl-like construction that would enable the human phase lord to hurl his spear forward with greater force and leverage.
There was nothing wrong with the classical way of throwing a spear, just like there was nothing wrong with building your own rocket if you were stuck on a planet and wanted to launch into space.
Ves at least tried to stick to the spirit of primitive warfare and kept it barebones. He did not add any electromagnetic launching mechanism nor did he add any aim assistance or target guidance functions.
This meant that there was a larger-than-zero chance that the Dark Apostle could miss his crucial throw.
In practice, this should not happen.
The Sacrificial Spear Throwing Method was not a joke. It imparted a great amount of expertise to Ves and his alter ego on how to throw spears, to the point where they could probably join a sports competition and achieve good results.
Perhaps their real experience may be lacking, but at this distance, the probability of missing was minimal, especially now that the Unshakeable King's control over the surrounding space had degraded!
One of the downsides of losing his cool was that he was unable to maintain enough concentration to shake or solidify the surrounding space with his phasewater organs.
He was still able to cause momentary disruptions, but these effects ended far too soon to divert a spear thrown at this distance.
As the Dark Apostle assumed the right stance, he utilized his own spatial abilities to anchor himself into position as much as possible.
Unlike the Unshakeable King, the Dark Apostle had yet to implant the lesser Tarsei organ, but that did not mean he was unable to pull off this particular trick.
Just as phase lords were already capable of teleporting short distances without the use of specialized phasewater organs, the Dark Apostle was able to anchor himself in a specific coordinate in space, though only relative to a nearby satellite such as Jotunheim.
It was much more difficult to pull off this technique well outside of any nearby gravity wells.
Though the Dark Apostle had to strain himself a lot more to keep his position fixed, it was more than worth it as he could leverage the full power of his leg and back muscles into his throw.
At the same time he relied on his acquired skills in spear throwing to execute the correct throwing posture, he also used the more esoteric side of the method to pump the Teragon Plasma Spear full of fire energy.
They did not blindly mingle with the hyper materials, but they also activated the D-arm's ability to saturate itself with far more fire energy than was safe!
As the fire continued to absorb more fire energy, it grew increasingly hotter and less stable.
Heat and light wafted from the shaft as an excess of energy induced greater strain onto the structure of the weapon.
Even if it was designed to contain all of this fire energy, it did not mean that it was able to maintain this state forever.
Once the Dark Apostle chose to sacrifice the spear, he started an irreversible process that could only end with the weapon destroyed.
There was no going back at this point.
The Minor Demon that had been forcibly reshaped to serve as its artifact spirit also knew what was going on.
It had previously cooperated perfectly with the Dark Apostle.