Nym found it much harder to focus over the next day or two. Every time he repeated this process, he had to incorporate new elements into his being and make terms with them. His first echo had been so close to him that it hadn’t really changed much. The second layer echo had some conflicted desires, but they found common ground before even completing the merger.
The third one had caused problems before he managed to get a handle on that newly exaggerated facet of his personality, but this fourth one was something entirely different. He was just so peaceful and relaxed now that the desire to do anything at all had disappeared. His drive was gone, and without motivation, he had to fall back on sheer discipline and willpower to keep him moving forward.
“If you’re going to be this lazy about it, you’ll never actually ascend,” Rizin said.
Spite helped too.
He knew what Rizin was doing, but it worked, sort of. Integrating new echoes into his being was a process, and normally he’d have time to do that. The books recommended a month for the first two layers, then another month just for the third, and it only took longer from there. By all rights, he should spend the next year finishing the integration of the fourth layer and doing the entire process over again for the fifth.
But Nym didn’t have a year, so he was trying to muscle through it on contrariness and grit. It was going about as poorly as he’d expected, but he didn’t have a lot of choice. He couldn’t just spend the next year of his life sitting next to Rizin to stay hidden. That was a temporary solution at best. He could take his chances and go back out into the world, but that would either put him back under Niramyn’s thumb or get him killed by someone from Mylazik’s team.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Nym said.
“No you’re not. But you can try if you think you are.”
They appeared in the sky above a city that Nym didn’t recognize. “Where are we?” he asked, peering down at it with a perfect vision spell active.
“I don’t know.”
“Probably best not to linger,” he said. “There’s no reason to involve whoever lives down there in what I’ve got going on.”
The teleportation spell was unusually difficult in a way he hadn’t had a problem with since his very first days of having access to third circle spells. The arcana didn’t want to bend to his will at all. Nym struggled with it for a moment before eventually shaping it into the spell he wanted, and he teleported a few hundred miles east of the city.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Rizin asked.
“No,” Nym admitted. “But what choice do I have?”
“The choice not to do something foolish when you haven’t prepared yourself for it.”
“I would love to put this off. How do you feel about having a house guest for another two or three months? I promise I don’t eat that much.”
“Blech. Fine, I see your point.”
“No, really,” Nym said. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t think I’m ready. I can think of a dozen ways to help prepare for this, but I need time that I don’t have.”
“I agree, but to put it bluntly: what’s in it for me?” Rizin asked.
“Other than what we’ve already talked about? We both know there’s not much I can do for you.”
“That is exactly your problem, Nym. Your needs outweigh your ability to pay for them. I don’t envy you that position, and I’m not above a spot of charity, but no, I can’t and won’t be your guardian for years while you prepare yourself to finally ascend.”
“I get it,” Nym said. And he did, truly. As things stood now, he was only safe while he stood in Rizin’s shadow. As soon as he set foot back in the light, people were going to see him again, with no guarantee that it would be the lesser of the two evils that noticed him first. “What would you do in my situation?”
“Do I only have access to your abilities in this hypothetical scenario?”
Nym glared at the fox. “What would be the point otherwise?”
“I’d probably do exactly what you’re doing now. You’re drowning in the middle of the ocean and your only option is to keep kicking your legs and hope somebody saves you.”
Left unspoken was the implication that Rizin wasn’t going to be Nym’s savior. He wasn’t willing to exert himself more than he already had unless Nym could actually bring some value to the table. He definitely wasn’t willing to invest time and resources into keeping Nym’s head above water just for the promise of future value.
“So this is me kicking my legs,” Nym said.
He could do this. Adding the fourth echo made it harder to focus, to want to do things, but at the same time, it also smoothed over a lot of stress and concern. It didn’t really balance out, but he was scrambling for any advantage he could get at this point.
Nym cast the first location spell, then teleported in the direction it indicated. He repeated the process, by now a familiar one, until he’d locked down the proper location for the tunnel. Each time he did it, it got a little easier to force the arcana to do what he wanted. Now it was time to work with fifth layer arcana though, and that was a whole different skill set.
He struggled through the mental lethargy that dragged on him to form the channels. It was already clear that getting the timing right was going to be a challenge, but Nym was nothing if not disciplined. The last subjective year of his life had forced him to adopt a mindset that pushed him ever-forward. He took a breath, allowed himself to feel the weight of tranquility trying to tie himself down, and then pushed himself anyway.
The arcana poured through him, the tunnel formed, and Nym stepped through.
* * *
He hadn’t been prepared the first time his duplicate from the core reality appeared in his layer. But ever since then, the Nym echo had been watching and waiting. He knew when his opposite started working the magic, and he welcomed it.
The core version was an idiot to try this so soon, but the Nym echo wasn’t going to cut him any slack for that. He watched the tunnel form, prepared himself, and waited for his victim to come through. When the core Nym did finally appear, he looked around, confused.
That was when the echo sprang his trap. A massive web spread across the sky, and with it came a reflection on the ground. The echo’s magic pulled those two webs towards each other with Nym caught inside. The echo grinned as he watched his opposite struggle.
The grin faded quickly. Nym didn’t teleport out of the web like the echo had been expecting. It simply exploded away from him, hurled off and shredded into pieces while Nym floated in the air. The echo’s brow furrowed as he watched from his hiding place. He knew there were some temporal shenanigans going on with the core version of himself, but it shouldn’t have made that much of a difference.
Apparently, he’d underestimated whatever training core Nym had undergone. Even in an unfamiliar and hostile environment, he’d reacted to the trap almost instantly and cut his way free. The echo wasn’t done though. It sent beads of arcana streaking up into the sky, angled to splash into the earth overhead and be mirrored. The connection formed, and the echo laughed. “Got you.”
Lightning arced between the beads he’d cast upwards and their reflections below. The core Nym was caught in the center of a sudden storm before he could react, and struck no less than six times in a second. That had to sting.
Except that when the lights died down, Nym was still floating there, unharmed. There was no way he’d gotten off that stupid little storm catcher spell that fast, and no way it would have stopped that much lightning anyway. Something was wrong. The fight wasn’t supposed to go this way.
* * *
Nym felt amazing. Before he’d stepped through the tunnel into the fifth layer, doing anything but sitting there and watching the world go by had been a struggle. Now, it was the exact opposite. He could practically see what was going to happen before it did. Though he was a bit surprised at how violently his echo had attacked him, he wouldn’t be the first nascent ascendant to deal with a trial like this.
And all that sluggishness was just gone, or more accurately it had been focused into efficiency. His spells had exactly enough arcana to do what he needed, and they practically leapt out of his soul well. Something about being in the fifth layer had altered how he was connecting to the fourth echo. He couldn’t recall reading anything about this when he’d been studying, but he wasn’t going to argue with it.
His echo was somewhere nearby, hidden, but not for long. Nym pulled together a pinnacle scrying spell, one that sent his awareness out in a massive omnidirectional pulse. “Got you,” he said.
Once upon a time, Nym had sucked with fire magic. Even when he’d gotten sort of good with it, his abilities in that field still lagged far behind everything else. He’d always struggled to get the intent filters needed for second circle magic right, and once he’d progressed beyond that, the need for sheer destructive firepower had been more than covered with his other spells. Though he supposed an argument could have been made that he should have focused heavily on fire magic when he was helping with that whole undead disaster.
Regardless, he’d finally had the time to correct that deficiency. At Nym’s command, fire rained down from the sky, huge swirling spears of superheated air that scorched the entire landscape. They hammered into the mirrored surface below, each one smoothly slipping into the ground like it was made of water. Color bloomed under the mirror until the entire surface was glowing red hot.
His echo burst out of it in a cloud of shattered glass and shot straight up into the air, lightning dancing across his fingers as he hurled bolt after bolt Nym’s way. The lightning curved around the barrier Nym was surrounded by, playing across the surface of it briefly before shooting off into the ground overhead.
“You can’t do this,” the echo snarled. “You’re not stronger than me. You’re not!”
“You’re going to be a pain, aren’t you?” Nym said calmly.
A cloud of razor-edged ice crystals formed around him and started swirling rapidly. They scraped across the barrier a thousand times in a matter of seconds, but none cut through. His echo switched tactics, going from pure damage to arcana that would blind Nym, or make him sick, or a dozen other effects if they were able to get through.
Nym formed a needle of arcana so thin it was almost invisible. It flicked out and struck the echo mid-spell, but he deflected it away. “Please, like that would work on me.”
Sixteen more needles followed it, and Nym was pleased to see enough of them landed to disrupt the echo’s next spell. “So what’s the deal?” Nym asked. “I win, you become part of the collective being that is Nym. You win, and… what?”
“You become part of my being instead,” the echo said.
Nym blinked. “Can you even do that?”
“I can do anything you can do,” the echo snapped. “Anything.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“That’s because you cheated! You’re not supposed to be this strong.”
Nym gave his echo a serene smile and said, “Someone told me once that when you’re in a fight, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough. We have a deal?”
“Deal,” the echo said. Then he smirked and triggered the spell it had been building behind Nym. A massive flash of light eclipsed them both.
Nym found it much harder to focus over the next day or two. Every time he repeated this process, he had to incorporate new elements into his being and make terms with them. His first echo had been so close to him that it hadn’t really changed much. The second layer echo had some conflicted desires, but they found common ground before even completing the merger.
The third one had caused problems before he managed to get a handle on that newly exaggerated facet of his personality, but this fourth one was something entirely different. He was just so peaceful and relaxed now that the desire to do anything at all had disappeared. His drive was gone, and without motivation, he had to fall back on sheer discipline and willpower to keep him moving forward.
“If you’re going to be this lazy about it, you’ll never actually ascend,” Rizin said.
Spite helped too.
He knew what Rizin was doing, but it worked, sort of. Integrating new echoes into his being was a process, and normally he’d have time to do that. The books recommended a month for the first two layers, then another month just for the third, and it only took longer from there. By all rights, he should spend the next year finishing the integration of the fourth layer and doing the entire process over again for the fifth.
But Nym didn’t have a year, so he was trying to muscle through it on contrariness and grit. It was going about as poorly as he’d expected, but he didn’t have a lot of choice. He couldn’t just spend the next year of his life sitting next to Rizin to stay hidden. That was a temporary solution at best. He could take his chances and go back out into the world, but that would either put him back under Niramyn’s thumb or get him killed by someone from Mylazik’s team.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Nym said.
“No you’re not. But you can try if you think you are.”
They appeared in the sky above a city that Nym didn’t recognize. “Where are we?” he asked, peering down at it with a perfect vision spell active.
“I don’t know.”
“Probably best not to linger,” he said. “There’s no reason to involve whoever lives down there in what I’ve got going on.”
The teleportation spell was unusually difficult in a way he hadn’t had a problem with since his very first days of having access to third circle spells. The arcana didn’t want to bend to his will at all. Nym struggled with it for a moment before eventually shaping it into the spell he wanted, and he teleported a few hundred miles east of the city.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Rizin asked.
“No,” Nym admitted. “But what choice do I have?”
“The choice not to do something foolish when you haven’t prepared yourself for it.”
“I would love to put this off. How do you feel about having a house guest for another two or three months? I promise I don’t eat that much.”
“Blech. Fine, I see your point.”
“No, really,” Nym said. “I don’t want to do this. I don’t think I’m ready. I can think of a dozen ways to help prepare for this, but I need time that I don’t have.”
“I agree, but to put it bluntly: what’s in it for me?” Rizin asked.
“Other than what we’ve already talked about? We both know there’s not much I can do for you.”
“That is exactly your problem, Nym. Your needs outweigh your ability to pay for them. I don’t envy you that position, and I’m not above a spot of charity, but no, I can’t and won’t be your guardian for years while you prepare yourself to finally ascend.”
“I get it,” Nym said. And he did, truly. As things stood now, he was only safe while he stood in Rizin’s shadow. As soon as he set foot back in the light, people were going to see him again, with no guarantee that it would be the lesser of the two evils that noticed him first. “What would you do in my situation?”
“Do I only have access to your abilities in this hypothetical scenario?”
Nym glared at the fox. “What would be the point otherwise?”
“I’d probably do exactly what you’re doing now. You’re drowning in the middle of the ocean and your only option is to keep kicking your legs and hope somebody saves you.”
Left unspoken was the implication that Rizin wasn’t going to be Nym’s savior. He wasn’t willing to exert himself more than he already had unless Nym could actually bring some value to the table. He definitely wasn’t willing to invest time and resources into keeping Nym’s head above water just for the promise of future value.
“So this is me kicking my legs,” Nym said.
He could do this. Adding the fourth echo made it harder to focus, to want to do things, but at the same time, it also smoothed over a lot of stress and concern. It didn’t really balance out, but he was scrambling for any advantage he could get at this point.
Nym cast the first location spell, then teleported in the direction it indicated. He repeated the process, by now a familiar one, until he’d locked down the proper location for the tunnel. Each time he did it, it got a little easier to force the arcana to do what he wanted. Now it was time to work with fifth layer arcana though, and that was a whole different skill set.
He struggled through the mental lethargy that dragged on him to form the channels. It was already clear that getting the timing right was going to be a challenge, but Nym was nothing if not disciplined. The last subjective year of his life had forced him to adopt a mindset that pushed him ever-forward. He took a breath, allowed himself to feel the weight of tranquility trying to tie himself down, and then pushed himself anyway.
The arcana poured through him, the tunnel formed, and Nym stepped through.
* * *
He hadn’t been prepared the first time his duplicate from the core reality appeared in his layer. But ever since then, the Nym echo had been watching and waiting. He knew when his opposite started working the magic, and he welcomed it.
The core version was an idiot to try this so soon, but the Nym echo wasn’t going to cut him any slack for that. He watched the tunnel form, prepared himself, and waited for his victim to come through. When the core Nym did finally appear, he looked around, confused.
That was when the echo sprang his trap. A massive web spread across the sky, and with it came a reflection on the ground. The echo’s magic pulled those two webs towards each other with Nym caught inside. The echo grinned as he watched his opposite struggle.
The grin faded quickly. Nym didn’t teleport out of the web like the echo had been expecting. It simply exploded away from him, hurled off and shredded into pieces while Nym floated in the air. The echo’s brow furrowed as he watched from his hiding place. He knew there were some temporal shenanigans going on with the core version of himself, but it shouldn’t have made that much of a difference.
Apparently, he’d underestimated whatever training core Nym had undergone. Even in an unfamiliar and hostile environment, he’d reacted to the trap almost instantly and cut his way free. The echo wasn’t done though. It sent beads of arcana streaking up into the sky, angled to splash into the earth overhead and be mirrored. The connection formed, and the echo laughed. “Got you.”
Lightning arced between the beads he’d cast upwards and their reflections below. The core Nym was caught in the center of a sudden storm before he could react, and struck no less than six times in a second. That had to sting.
Except that when the lights died down, Nym was still floating there, unharmed. There was no way he’d gotten off that stupid little storm catcher spell that fast, and no way it would have stopped that much lightning anyway. Something was wrong. The fight wasn’t supposed to go this way.
* * *
Nym felt amazing. Before he’d stepped through the tunnel into the fifth layer, doing anything but sitting there and watching the world go by had been a struggle. Now, it was the exact opposite. He could practically see what was going to happen before it did. Though he was a bit surprised at how violently his echo had attacked him, he wouldn’t be the first nascent ascendant to deal with a trial like this.
And all that sluggishness was just gone, or more accurately it had been focused into efficiency. His spells had exactly enough arcana to do what he needed, and they practically leapt out of his soul well. Something about being in the fifth layer had altered how he was connecting to the fourth echo. He couldn’t recall reading anything about this when he’d been studying, but he wasn’t going to argue with it.
His echo was somewhere nearby, hidden, but not for long. Nym pulled together a pinnacle scrying spell, one that sent his awareness out in a massive omnidirectional pulse. “Got you,” he said.
Once upon a time, Nym had sucked with fire magic. Even when he’d gotten sort of good with it, his abilities in that field still lagged far behind everything else. He’d always struggled to get the intent filters needed for second circle magic right, and once he’d progressed beyond that, the need for sheer destructive firepower had been more than covered with his other spells. Though he supposed an argument could have been made that he should have focused heavily on fire magic when he was helping with that whole undead disaster.
Regardless, he’d finally had the time to correct that deficiency. At Nym’s command, fire rained down from the sky, huge swirling spears of superheated air that scorched the entire landscape. They hammered into the mirrored surface below, each one smoothly slipping into the ground like it was made of water. Color bloomed under the mirror until the entire surface was glowing red hot.
His echo burst out of it in a cloud of shattered glass and shot straight up into the air, lightning dancing across his fingers as he hurled bolt after bolt Nym’s way. The lightning curved around the barrier Nym was surrounded by, playing across the surface of it briefly before shooting off into the ground overhead.
“You can’t do this,” the echo snarled. “You’re not stronger than me. You’re not!”
“You’re going to be a pain, aren’t you?” Nym said calmly.
A cloud of razor-edged ice crystals formed around him and started swirling rapidly. They scraped across the barrier a thousand times in a matter of seconds, but none cut through. His echo switched tactics, going from pure damage to arcana that would blind Nym, or make him sick, or a dozen other effects if they were able to get through.
Nym formed a needle of arcana so thin it was almost invisible. It flicked out and struck the echo mid-spell, but he deflected it away. “Please, like that would work on me.”
Sixteen more needles followed it, and Nym was pleased to see enough of them landed to disrupt the echo’s next spell. “So what’s the deal?” Nym asked. “I win, you become part of the collective being that is Nym. You win, and… what?”
“You become part of my being instead,” the echo said.
Nym blinked. “Can you even do that?”
“I can do anything you can do,” the echo snapped. “Anything.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“That’s because you cheated! You’re not supposed to be this strong.”
Nym gave his echo a serene smile and said, “Someone told me once that when you’re in a fight, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough. We have a deal?”
“Deal,” the echo said. Then he smirked and triggered the spell it had been building behind Nym. A massive flash of light eclipsed them both.
