Cades was frantically moving around in the air looking for the raven, but then his armor began heating up and he realized that it was hiding on the ground, casting a spell to slowly cook him inside of his armor.
The armor, however, was not nearly powerful or large enough to cook Cades and even if it was, he wouldn't be killed by such a relatively weak spell.
He violently crashed into the mountaintop once more with as much mana as he could muster in that very instance without incapacitating his body, causing a grand explosion of violet shockwaves.
Hekima was caught by that very explosion and Cades could see it as it was thrown about a thousand feet away, its feather dress burning with a violet flame that seemed to quickly be extinguishing as it turned around and cast another geomancy spell.
That very spell controlled the ground around the whole mountain and caused it to greatly shake, it was not complicated, it was simply a peculiar and unique spell that most would never think of using in such a scenario.
Hekima was using contractions and exchanging mana loaded with opposite mana to cause a great earthquake.
At the same time it was using the splintering stone to create a citadel above Cades and trying to keep him inside of it, that wasn't very useful as Cades utilized the violet burning flames dancing on his sword once more and cut through the ceiling of the hundreds of feet high stone citadel.
Cades swiftly flew up but at that moment he realized something, the crow had expected this, the citadel was build so that it would cause the sides to crush him if he were to destroy the ceiling, which he did.
The stone walls of the citadel weighed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of tons and were about to crush the flying ehetrian with an unprecedented speed.
The ehetrian, however, was able to escape as the citadel was wired to crush those that stood near the ground and he was already almost outside.
And as he saw the raven it multiplied into the thousands.
Cades was certain that only one of these things was the real crow, but he had no idea which one it was.
The crow had countless tricks in its metaphorical sleeve, one of which it used now.
Cades felt a ball of spit accumulating in the back of his throat, stopping him from breathing, Cades however wasn't particularly limited by that, he could probably last about fourteen minutes without struggling to breathe at all.
But Cades still began shooting waves of powerful flames towards the constantly moving mass of thousands of copies.
As the flames collided with the illusions they, the fakes, exploded into a violent chaos of greenish flames, some exploded into icy chaos, some caused water to sprinkle atop other.
It was pure chaos, but the original crow was nowhere to be seen.
At that very moment Cades realized something and quickly spun around, catching the flaming, violet spear headed towards the back of his head.
Cades didn't know how but the raven had used his own magic against him.
The brightly burning spears flames spread onwards to his shoulder as he spotted the raven and began throwing the violet burning spear towards the quickly flying raven that was barely able to escape being impaled by the searing spear.
Hekima was barely flying, he seemed exhausted as he opened his beak and send a wave of light purple ice towards Cades.
The ice consisted of freezing masses of water extracted from air itself, floating in nothing as it ran towards Cades like a train weighing hundreds of thousands of tons, burning with violet mana and exuding pressure towards lesser monsters if they were to even just gaze at it.
But, towards Cades it was of barely any danger as he quickly tried retaliating with his own spell, but, as he tried taking a deep breath he realized that he still had the ball of spit in the back of his throat.
As he frantically began working on dissolving the ball, not thinking about other ways, he was hit by the gigantic mass and pushed down into the mountain that finally began collapsing under the weight.
It took Cades only about three seconds to dissolve the annoying ball in his throat but the raven was already more than nine hundred feet further away within those few seconds and Cades was falling through the stone that the mountain was made of, pressed into the gigantic stone, dozens of feet down, creating a hole with his body.
Cades was barely able to push the mountain of ice back and escape from the crushing effect by annihilating the stone surrounding the hole he was pressed into.
He began sending out pure, violet strikes of lightning everywhere by overloading his entire body with magical energy and, finally, he struck his target with one of these random strikes.
The raven collapsed and fell down onto the ground, far beneath the mountain as Cades jumped after him with his sword in his hands and attacked with as much power as he had once more.
With a ruckus they were back in the library, the stone shelves were crushed, the violet flames were gone and the sword in his hands was too.
A voice resembling that of his fathers, a warm, lower tone began resounding in his head as he began realizing where he was once more.
"You won, though I must admit that I've made some mistakes."
Cades looked at the small raven sitting on one of the shelves that had fallen down and began talking once more.
"What... where are we.... what happened ?"
The raven opened its weirdly unrelated beak and began explaining.
"We were in the place where your mind was, a mental projection, not the reality."
Cades was still weary of the raven as he didn't know what would happen now after he had finally won against the trickster demon and returned to the library.
But he knew one thing, Hekima would now have to teach him about what it knew.
And as he was thinking this the raven began talking with its nonsensical beak once more.
"Lets start right away. I know exactly where you are going to have your first lesson."