Chapter 5 Part 16

Morteous had been quite perturbed about the lucky deflection of his disintegration spell. He saw the oncoming fireball and made minimum efforts to dodge--he had magical defenses against this kind of attack. But when the spell hit it nearly fried him to a crisp. He was taken aback. His defenses were capable of absorbing a direct attack by one of the lesser gods without harm. Yet this one attack had breached his defenses and almost killed him in the process. Had his wards been down he would no longer be among the living.

Arrogance gave way to intellect. The enemy had regained more of their power than had been expected. Morteous knew he would never withstand another attack of that nature so he activated a last resort spell of his own and vanished.