Strike with your magical power!

The golem is weakened, soft earth and fine sand flowing from the hole you created like blood from an open wound, and you feel a bloodthirsty urge to strike it down while it is weak fill you. It is not your bloodthirst, however, as you realize it is the malevolent **** within the gauntlet that is pushing you in such a way. It's own dark instincts seem to be attempting to influence your own and, for a moment, you feel the blood lust and rage fill you as you flex the steel-encased hand into a fist and start to draw it back so you may strike out.

But no! You hold yourself back, stifling the Artifact's malevolent blood-thirst so you can think more clearly. A physical attack on the soft earth and sand insides of the golem will do nothing. It has not soft muscle or tissue to rip or tear with steel. Perhaps with the raw magical energy of the gauntlet you could do some damage, but not enough to bring it down. No, you need to weaken it more, make it slow and break it's stability. And, as you look at the gaping hole you had already created in the golem, you realize just how to do that.

You concentrate all of the energy and power you possess into your left hand, the mark upon it glowing and the aura of blue light surrounding it as you thrust your hand into the soft dirt and sand interior of the golem. As soon as you do, you summon forth the power you'd taken from the naiad and water surges from your palm. It hits the dirt and sand, thickening it into mud on contact. You continue to let the water flow, pouring all of your power and energy into it as it spreads within the stone creature and turns its interior from fine earth into thick mud. And, as it does, you start to see the results of your efforts in the golem's movements.

It is...slowing down. It seems that the mud inside of it is weighing it down. Moreover, as it spreads to its limbs, you see the cohesiveness seem to weaken as stone skin begins to flake and slough away to show muddy "flesh" beneath. Again, you hear that odd golem roar combined with that strange high-pitched cry in your mind as brackish muddy water begins to break through the golem's exterior as it springs leaks here and there where the pressure of the water within it begins to become greater than it can handle.

It is good this is the case as you can feel your own reserves of energy flagging. You are still unused to using magic and it drains you greatly, your body slick with sweat and your breathing coming harder as though you'd just run miles. But you press on, willing yourself to continue your magical onslaught until the rock giant's legs, softened into mud, buckle beneath its own weight and it falls to its "knees". It roar/cries again and tries to reach for you, but its arm falls apart, rock falling away to soft and malleable mud that seems unable to support the weight of the stone that had once been its skin. It is losing cohesion, it seems, as rock has started to shed almost completely and you know it needs only one more push to be finished.

To that end, you yank your arm out of the golem, your bare skin stained with mud, and then gather your energy into the gauntlet. Pure raw magical energy coalesces around the obsidian steel as you pour the last of your energy reserves into it and clench your metal-garbed hand into a fist that glows with a blood red nimbus of power. You give a loud war-cry as you drive the gauntlet forward, slamming it into the muddy flesh of the golem before letting that energy concentrated in the gauntlet to burst outwards. With a brilliant flash and a surge of heat and sparking energy, the golem blows apart in an explosion of dark magic and you are sent flying backwards from the **** of it.

You slam hard into the wall and stars flash in front of your eyes at the impact, your breath knocked from you as you fall to the ground in a mud-stained heap. You try to recover, to stand back up, but you have expended so much of your energy in addition to being slammed into hard stone and manage only to shakily get up to your hands and knees for a moment before falling back to the ground in exhaustion. You cannot stop yourself from succumbing to that exhaustion as your eyes shut and darkness falls over you, your consciousness leaving you as you pass out on the cold hard ground.