To paraphrase an old joke: Do you accept the story premise that Nale was more prepared, more capable, and more driven to kill Malack than Malack himself was expecting?

Yes?

Then we're just haggling over price.

And if you don't accept that, if you think Malack deserved to win, then no amount of wasted panels showing spells and countermeasures would have changed that opinion. If I had put in a Word of Recall followed by Z counterspelling it or something, then there would have been some other strategy that you would have hung your hat on to say, "Why didn't Malack do this??" If you don't accept that Nale was already aware of all of Malack's defenses and had a means to counter them, then nothing will change that. If you do accept it, then it doesn't matter how much of it I show.

And if I had wasted Malacks one round with a Word of Recall, I would have lost the much-more-dramatically-impactful moment of Malack deciding to spend his one action trying to kill Nale back. I assure you that if the D&D rules gave vampires 3 rounds before sun-death, I would have spent one of those rounds on a Word of Recall attempt that was stopped by Z somehow. But when I only had one round, I chose to use it showing that Malack wanted to kill Nale just as much as Nale wanted to kill Malack. Because as I've said before, I care more about the emotional content of the story than I do about plausibility. I would rather have a story that felt right and was riddled with logical errors than a story that was logically flawless but repetitive and dull.

If you can get through the all-caps style, I recommend Film Crit Hulk's (very long) essay on plot-holes and logic. It's geared more toward movies than comics, but a lot of the same points apply.