Meesei tried to charge a quick lightning bolt to open the fight offensively, but already, Neesa was showing her advantage. The vampire was able to both charge and fire a standard bolt of lightning much quicker than Meesei could accomplish, forcing her to abandon her attack in favor of a ward. It was easy enough for Meesei to resist that attack, but Neesa, of course, did not stop there. She quickly unleashed a brilliant blue pulse of lightning: a sudden burst of energy meant to overwhelm and destroy Meesei’s ward. It was essentially what she had done in their last encounter, but this time, Meesei did not fail so easily. Her ward wavered, the blue restoration energy fading, but it did not break. Nevertheless, Neesa maintained her stream of lightning as Meesei struggled to keep up the strength of her ward through it all. 

“Well well, so you have improved. I seem to remember it being over by this point last time. You know, I do appreciate that kind of dedication. It’s always more satisfying when I feel like my opponent is actually trying.” Neesa commented. Slowly, she started to step towards Meesei, grinning. The Vampire Lord seemed to have no trouble dividing her concentration and still maintaining her spell, while Meesei’s hands were shaking as she focused wholly on the ward. “I mean, just look at you. Standing up so [i]bravely[/i] against a Daedric Lord, challenging one of your betters to a duel just on the [i]hope[/i] that you might accomplish a miracle. You actually remind me a bit of myself in my youth. Back when I was also an idiot. Who knows? Perhaps, in a few hundred or so years, you could actually make something of yourself? Get rid of that self-sacrificial nonsense in your head and put that energy towards something actually helpful to you. It’s almost a shame to kill you, really. I would be curious to see if you could accomplish something of any measurable importance. Oh well, I have killed far more interesting people than you for far less than this, so I think I shall get over it.” 

Meesei could not break her focus enough to pay attention to anything that Neesa was saying. The sparks of lightning striking her ward illuminated the room, and were even branching off and striking the stonework around her. Even being near Neesa’s intended target would be dangerous. For Neesa’s entire speech, Meesei’s situation was looking more and more grim. Keeping up her ward was as if she was trying to hold back a dam on the verge of collapse. However, Neesa taking the opportunity to gloat was something that Meesei had been hoping for. The entire time that Neesa had been talking, Meesei had been carrying out her final, desperate plan. There were many mages who could absorb the magicka from enemy spells through a ward, of course, but it was usually little more than a way to power a ward for longer than one would be able to otherwise. The conversion was usually not completely efficient, but recently, Meesei had the opportunity to observe something that was. The had only possessed the Staff of Magnus for a relatively short time, but Meesei had begun the process of studying the relic. The manner in which the staff directed magicka from a ward into the staff was entirely different from any method that Meesei had studied. It was almost bizarre, twisting and shaping the energy of the spells in ways that were frankly confusing, and yet, the staff could absorb most of the magic from incoming spells. Granted, it was an Aedric relic, but the way in which it functioned was still, fundamentally, magic. Meesei could not even begin to hope to match the capabilities of a piece of Magnus himself, but that did not mean she could not learn from it. The method she had intended to try was, up to that point, experimental, and entirely unproven in any real scenario. Meesei had bet her life on a theory, but by the grace of Hircine, the Hist, or whatever other deity might have been watching, it seemed to have worked. 

During Neesa’s gloating, Meesei had been absorbing the energy of her lightning far more efficiently than even Neesa was likely capable of doing, thanks to the lessons she had learned studying the Staff. Meesei’s intense concentration was not on her ward as much as it was on retaining the immense amount of magicka she was absorbing. The Staff of Magnus could contain the power of a god, but Meesei had nowhere close to that capacity. Nevertheless, for as much as she seemed to be struggling to even keep herself alive, onlookers with keen magical senses might have been able to notice her power overflowing, if they could look past Neesa’s lightning. In the moments before Meesei acted, Llarvan’s eyes widened in surprise. 

True to her plan, Meesei took all of the magicka she could muster, along with Neesa’s magic that she had been struggling to contain, and focused it into perhaps the single most concentrated lightning spell she had ever cast. She had to lower her own ward to even be able to cast it, which allowed Neesa’s lightning to finally strike her. But, by that point, the spell could not be stopped. All of the power she had absorbed was focused into an electrical orb bright enough to momentarily blind anyone in the room. Even if the affects could not be seen, they could certainly be heard. Neesa scrambled to focus what magicka she could into a ward of her own, but even she was not quick enough to form an effective defense against such a concentration of power. Neesa’s ward, as powerful as it was, broke under the sudden burst of magical energy. 

Meesei could not see through the light, but she heard the ward break, offering her the one and only opportunity she would have to seize victory. Ignoring the pain of Neesa’s lightning, Meesei bolted forward, enveloped in lightning, straight through Neesa. The electricity discharged into the vampire’s body, stunning her for just long enough for Meesei to turn around behind her. If Meesei wasted even a moment and allowed Neesa to raise another defense, then she knew she would be doomed. She had to devote every last drop of magicka she had remaining to her attacks, as anything else would be a pointless waste of energy. Extending out both hands in front of her, Meesei unleashed a combination of lightning and fire into Neesa’s back. The lightning was intended to stun her and drain her magicka, while the fire was to take advantage of one of Neesa’s few weaknesses. Indeed, vampiric flesh was quite easy to set ablaze. 

With how quickly Meesei had acted after stunning Neesa, there was no opportunity for Neesa to defend against Meesei’s relentless assault. Meesei held nothing back, immolating Neesa’s body from head to toe. Neesa’s water-soaked robes had done little to protect against the intensity of Meesei’s flames, and even the ancient and powerful vampire lord could not stop her natural instinct to scream. But, Meesei still did not relent. For as long as Meesei had magicka, she was going to continue delivering her punishment. Meesei could not grip a living being with telekinesis like Neesa, but she could achieve the same effect with a blast of telekinetic energy that slammed Neesa’s charred body against one of the stone walls with easily enough force to break bone. With another wave of her arms, Meesei threw her once more into a stone support column before finally allowing her to fall to the ground and slump to her knees. 

Meesei allowed herself only a moment to breathe as she cast her eyes up to the stone wall, noting a pair of spears crossed over a weapon rack. They were not silver, unfortunately, but since Meesei still had magicka remaining, she extended a hand to grab onto one, pull it from the rack, and guide it through the air and straight through Hal-Neesa’s stomach from behind. Neesa’s head lowered, and her burnt hands grasped at the now-bloody haft of the weapon that had penetrated through her. With that angle, Neesa was also witness to the second spear that Meesei pulled through her chest seconds later. 

By this point, many of the cultists were confused, worried, or even outright afraid. Llarvan was enraged, his hands enveloped in flames, while both Lorag and Kaleeth had their weapons in hand, staring him down and waiting to act if he interfered. 

Meesei was almost completely drained of magicka by this point, put with the last bits she had remaining, she pulled the Staff of Magnus from Sabine’s hands into her own. It had been charged with quite a few soul gems before they left, so with it, even after the fight, Meesei had access to more magicka than she had started with. 

Meesei appeared in almost as much of a rage as Llarvan. She growled at him with an intense, threatening glare as the Staff of Magnus began to glow with a bright blue energy in her hand. Meesei’s own magical weakness from the fight was irrelevant with the Staff; the stonework of the floor itself cracked when the energized staff just tapped against it. “Is that [i]worthy[/i] enough for you, Molag Bal?” Meesei shouted. “I will slaughter every single one of your minions if I have to. I will tear off their limbs, grind up their bones, and feast on their flesh myself! They are [i]nothing[/i] to me, do you understand? I do not care how many centuries they have to their lives, I will kill them all the same. Because I have my mission, I have a god to kill, and if you and your pathetic servants cannot be of use to me, then I need to stop wasting my time here and find a Daedra who will. You hear me? Answer me, demon!” 

The sheer ferocity in Meesei’s voice made it difficult for even those who knew her well to be certain whether or not she was exaggerating her anger as an act, or was actually, truly so enraged. Such raw, unrestricted anger was not characteristic of the Meesei they knew, but it was certainly as convincing as it was frightening. As for Hal-Neesa, there was hardly an inch of her body that was not burned through to the muscle and bone. Her form was now a grotesque, charred mass of flesh. Her eyes had practically boiled from the heat, her ribs had been broken, and two were now snapped and protruding out of her chest. If not for her tail and muzzle, she would not be recognizable as Argonian, and that was not even to mention the blood-soaked spears impaled through her. Any sane individual would have expected her to be dead, but whether it was a result of some magic, or just a testament to the durability of a vampire lord, she was still clinging to life. For now.