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Grabbing the artifact from an elemental, while a fusillade of mages took shots at him, didn’t sound like a great plan to Zag. Most key was that he didn’t know how strong the elemental was — maybe air ones were not as strong as some of the others, but then again maybe that was fire? And either way it was strong enough to hold a fair sized rock up in the air, but would likely go away if the mages went down.
On the other hand, the mages might have defenses that were not obvious to him, so trying to take down three of them may be a losing game. And if he was holding the artifact there was a tiny chance that they would hold off from simply incinerating him. Of course they might incinerate Ex-Gladius, leaving him vulnerable to all sorts of magical manipulation.
Given two choices, where one of them required killing people until the spirit went away, the other was probably the less incorrect answer. He took two steps and made a diving tackle for the artifact, intending to use his strength, weight, and momentum to hopefully wrest the rock from the spirit. And if everything worked as well as he hoped he’d end up between the mages which may not be the worst possible location when they reacted.