Something was wrong, but Niramyn couldn’t figure out exactly what. He recognized a timeline deviation when he saw one, but how exactly it had deviated escaped him. The fact of the matter was that Niramyn had been the anchor to the primary timeline for thousands of years, and if things were going to change, they changed to his will, not the other way around.
It stood to reason then that this new ascendant, one he didn’t even recognize, was the result of Myzalik’s meddling. There was something off about the man though, some sort of magic he was only passingly familiar with. It was another annoyance, something he understood as wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out why.
Whatever it was, it had strong elements of misdirection in it, with notes of illusion and darkness. It was magic for hiding, an assassin’s tool for striking from the shadows. Now that the mystery ascendant had blown his opening attack though, Niramyn was confident he could escape defeat. It would be difficult, with that damnable age reversing spell once again robbing him of a portion of his strength. At least he wouldn’t be forced to go to such drastic measures to regain it this time. Though the fact that he’d immediately lost practically all of the work he’d put into the last week or so within moments of stepping back out of his sanctuary was infuriating.
When he figured out how Myzalik had crafted such an impossible spell, he was going to torture the Exarch with it for a thousand years. And he was going to kill every single ascendant who knew it, even if that meant he was the last one left. He was already alone at the peak, a god among immortals, so what difference did it make if he had to wait a few hundred years for new ascendants to start showing up? At least they’d know their place.
Before that though, his pursuer needed to be dealt with.
Niramyn had been regressed far enough to become mortal again, but that was a momentary problem. He still had enough of the body enhancements that idiot Nym had managed to scrape together to reach back to the sixth layer and ascend for what he could scarcely believe was the third time. At least the second one had been nothing like the first. It was more like putting the pieces to a puzzle he’d solved a long time ago back together. It was easy, comforting, familiar. Best of all, it happened outside of mortal time, in the in-between space. His pursuer wouldn’t be able to stop him.
A bolt of solid arcana slammed into Niramyn and hurled him towards the ground. He was so surprised by the attack that it took him a second to dispel the magic, start his divinations to find his assailant, and right himself in the air. Even before the divinations came back, he was casting new spells, both to defend himself and to prepare his counter attack.
It was frustratingly slow to only cast at most three or four spells at once, and even then only if they weren’t terribly complicated. He was used to his mind being an entire legion of mages working in concert, not just a single partner. For all the handicap that represented though, he still found the ascendant who’d attacked him quickly enough and launched his own attack.
Despite the magic hiding the other ascendant’s presence, some sort of mystical fox spell, he now saw, his attack homed in unerringly and struck his pursuer. It was nothing so crude as elemental fire or earth--lightning had already been his preference for that tier of combat anyway--or even solid kinesis like the force bolt he’d been struck with. No, even as limited as he was Niramyn still had all the knowledge and skill of the strongest of all the Exarchs.
He struck the ascendant with a spell designed to fracture a soul well. It was no simple arcana injection, oh no. His spell would actually break away the augmentations the ascendant had made, sever the connections between nodes, and cast them about randomly to fully destabilize the structure of the soul well itself. It would cripple the ascendant for weeks, complete overkill when Niramyn needed only moments to escape.
Satisfied that he’d escaped the age reversal magic and incapacitated the pursuing ascendant, Niramyn turned his attention back to ascending. It would take only a second, and this game would be over. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him now.
* * *
Nym was more surprised that Niramyn had spotted him through the shroud the fox pin had cast over him than he was by the former Exarch’s choice of attacks. A soul well breaker was exactly Niramyn’s style: excessively brutal, guaranteed to incapacitate the target with physical pain while simultaneously crippling his ability to do any sort of magic. Even as an immortal ascendant, he was vulnerable to having his soul well tampered with.
So he was surprised, and also a little insulted.
Nym recognized the spell even as it formed. Admittedly, he couldn’t have formed it that fast himself, not even now, but that didn’t stop him from defending against it. The spell struck him and shattered against his own arcana. Nym barely even acknowledged the successful deflection of the attack though. He was too busy attacking Niramyn himself.
A storm of arcana whipped up in the sky over the prairie they’d ended up teleporting to. Spells sparked in the air and struck at the former Exarch, perfectly timed to hit one after enough and negate his every attempt to craft new magic.
This was no time to underestimate his opponent though. Niramyn was mortal, vulnerable, but still an Exarch in mind if not body. Nym had a hundred different ways to attack his target, and he planned on using all of them. No doubt Niramyn would defend against some, but without the dozens of parallel processes, unlimited stamina, and the practically bottomless soul well a powerful ascendant had that let them cast twenty or thirty spells at the same time, every second, for hours if needed, he would be overwhelmed before he could do anything else.
The air ignited into flames around Niramyn and shards of stone materialized out of nothingness next to him, already moving forward to drive themselves into his mortal body. Arcana assaulted his body, trying to lock his muscles in place, trying to smother his senses, to still his heart or rupture his organs. Creatures made of pure ephemeral darkness phased into existence, blackening the skies around Niramyn and sending questing tendrils of arcana into his mind.
It was too much for any mortal to defend against, and that was only the ones meant to actively harm Niramyn. Nym devoted a considerable portion of his mind to keeping Niramyn from running again, everything from spatial locks for denying teleports to dispels that attacked the flight magic holding Niramyn aloft. There was no single strategy for victory, no clever combinations that would slip past Niramyn’s defenses.
Nym was stronger, if not more skilled, and he intended to leverage that and bury Niramyn in so much arcana that the sheer weight of it would collapse the now-mortal Exarch’s defenses and snuff him out. He couldn’t even see his target through all of the spells currently active. That didn’t stop him, of course. He had several scrying spells feeding him information and two processes currently devoted to nothing but parsing that. There was no way he was losing Niramyn now.
But just to be safe, he started reinforcing the various denial spells he was already laying down. He wanted there to be no way Niramyn escaped that cloud of death, no split-second teleport out of the way, no stepping into another layer, no summoning anything and swapping places with it.
He knew something was wrong immediately when his scrying spells reported that Niramyn was still alive somehow, and he knew exactly what it was that was wrong an instant later when he felt reality flex inside the storm of deadly arcana covering the sky. Either some other ascendant had come to Niramyn’s rescue, or he’d managed to ascend back to the sixth layer immediately after being knocked back down to mortal status.
Nym didn’t see another ascendant anywhere, and his area denial spells were still functioning at full strength. Somehow, Niramyn had ignored them and managed to ascend, again. Nym hadn’t realized he could do it so quickly, in barely an instant. He’d already been too late to stop Niramyn the moment he’d deflected the soul well breaker, well before he’d woven together his first attack.
Nym had to admit, that wasn’t ideal for him. It meant he needed to use the god killer spell to end this now, which would tie up so much of his spell casting ability that he’d be hard pressed to keep up with Niramyn even before he’d ascended again. Now that his opponent had regained his access to sixth layer arcana, Nym’s new top priority was keeping him anchored in the core reality.
This was the only place god killer was going to work, and even with everything that had gone wrong, this was still his best chance to kill Niramyn. Maybe if Nym somehow managed to stretch his own anchors back far enough, he could eventually visit the time period that Niramyn had ascended from, but he doubted it. No one else knew when Niramyn had ascended. He’d just always been there, a fixture of reality for as long as time had existed.
It really was now or never.
* * *
Niramyn had been reasonably sure he could re-ascend despite the various locking fields the other ascendant had layered across the area. If it had been his first time, he might have been in trouble, but in this case, it was much closer to opening a conduit than trying to step through to the sixth layer.
That still left him stranded here, of course, and at a severe disadvantage in terms of absolute strength. But whoever this mysterious ascendant was, he wasn’t a match for an Exarch. Already, Niramyn could think of a few different ways to break the locks and escape, though they unfortunately relied on him waiting for an opening to execute his plan.
The battlefield wasn’t the place to make changes to his mind, but he needed those parallel processes up and running. Being limited to a few spells at a time was no way to win a fight of this caliber. To that end, Niramyn’s first order of business was to stall and distract.
“You’ve missed your shot,” he said, his voice carried by his magic to the other ascendant. Even if the man was physically deaf, he’d still hear Niramyn clearly. “Not that I’m surprised, an amateur like you. But tell me, even if you’d succeeded, then what? You know that Myzalik isn’t going to leave you alive with knowledge of his spell, don’t you? You were dead the moment you learned how to cast that.”
It wasn’t that he expected to gain any useful information from the ascendant. It was just that Niramyn needed about twenty seconds uninterrupted by having to defend himself to increase the number of processes he could run up to six. That was still far too few, but it was better than what he was currently working with. Once he got those up, he could devote half to defending himself and the other half to continuing to modify his mind.
Tricky, but possible. It was about as far from ideal circumstances as it was possible to get, but Niramyn needed to learn the identity of this ascendant, and he needed to escape this fight in one piece. Anything else was a bonus.
Once he’d regained his power, again, he was going to find his assailant, torture the bastard until he revealed how to cast the age reversal spell, and then kill him with his own weapon.
Then something twisted inside him. Reality itself fought against Niramyn, tried to push him to the outer layers. That wasn’t possible while he was caught inside the area denial fields the other ascendant had put up, but reality didn’t care. It just kept pushing, grinding against him. Niramyn needed to break the denial field, or else he’d be torn apart.
Something was wrong, but Niramyn couldn’t figure out exactly what. He recognized a timeline deviation when he saw one, but how exactly it had deviated escaped him. The fact of the matter was that Niramyn had been the anchor to the primary timeline for thousands of years, and if things were going to change, they changed to his will, not the other way around.
It stood to reason then that this new ascendant, one he didn’t even recognize, was the result of Myzalik’s meddling. There was something off about the man though, some sort of magic he was only passingly familiar with. It was another annoyance, something he understood as wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out why.
Whatever it was, it had strong elements of misdirection in it, with notes of illusion and darkness. It was magic for hiding, an assassin’s tool for striking from the shadows. Now that the mystery ascendant had blown his opening attack though, Niramyn was confident he could escape defeat. It would be difficult, with that damnable age reversing spell once again robbing him of a portion of his strength. At least he wouldn’t be forced to go to such drastic measures to regain it this time. Though the fact that he’d immediately lost practically all of the work he’d put into the last week or so within moments of stepping back out of his sanctuary was infuriating.
When he figured out how Myzalik had crafted such an impossible spell, he was going to torture the Exarch with it for a thousand years. And he was going to kill every single ascendant who knew it, even if that meant he was the last one left. He was already alone at the peak, a god among immortals, so what difference did it make if he had to wait a few hundred years for new ascendants to start showing up? At least they’d know their place.
Before that though, his pursuer needed to be dealt with.
Niramyn had been regressed far enough to become mortal again, but that was a momentary problem. He still had enough of the body enhancements that idiot Nym had managed to scrape together to reach back to the sixth layer and ascend for what he could scarcely believe was the third time. At least the second one had been nothing like the first. It was more like putting the pieces to a puzzle he’d solved a long time ago back together. It was easy, comforting, familiar. Best of all, it happened outside of mortal time, in the in-between space. His pursuer wouldn’t be able to stop him.
A bolt of solid arcana slammed into Niramyn and hurled him towards the ground. He was so surprised by the attack that it took him a second to dispel the magic, start his divinations to find his assailant, and right himself in the air. Even before the divinations came back, he was casting new spells, both to defend himself and to prepare his counter attack.
It was frustratingly slow to only cast at most three or four spells at once, and even then only if they weren’t terribly complicated. He was used to his mind being an entire legion of mages working in concert, not just a single partner. For all the handicap that represented though, he still found the ascendant who’d attacked him quickly enough and launched his own attack.
Despite the magic hiding the other ascendant’s presence, some sort of mystical fox spell, he now saw, his attack homed in unerringly and struck his pursuer. It was nothing so crude as elemental fire or earth--lightning had already been his preference for that tier of combat anyway--or even solid kinesis like the force bolt he’d been struck with. No, even as limited as he was Niramyn still had all the knowledge and skill of the strongest of all the Exarchs.
He struck the ascendant with a spell designed to fracture a soul well. It was no simple arcana injection, oh no. His spell would actually break away the augmentations the ascendant had made, sever the connections between nodes, and cast them about randomly to fully destabilize the structure of the soul well itself. It would cripple the ascendant for weeks, complete overkill when Niramyn needed only moments to escape.
Satisfied that he’d escaped the age reversal magic and incapacitated the pursuing ascendant, Niramyn turned his attention back to ascending. It would take only a second, and this game would be over. There was nothing anyone could do to stop him now.
* * *
Nym was more surprised that Niramyn had spotted him through the shroud the fox pin had cast over him than he was by the former Exarch’s choice of attacks. A soul well breaker was exactly Niramyn’s style: excessively brutal, guaranteed to incapacitate the target with physical pain while simultaneously crippling his ability to do any sort of magic. Even as an immortal ascendant, he was vulnerable to having his soul well tampered with.
So he was surprised, and also a little insulted.
Nym recognized the spell even as it formed. Admittedly, he couldn’t have formed it that fast himself, not even now, but that didn’t stop him from defending against it. The spell struck him and shattered against his own arcana. Nym barely even acknowledged the successful deflection of the attack though. He was too busy attacking Niramyn himself.
A storm of arcana whipped up in the sky over the prairie they’d ended up teleporting to. Spells sparked in the air and struck at the former Exarch, perfectly timed to hit one after enough and negate his every attempt to craft new magic.
This was no time to underestimate his opponent though. Niramyn was mortal, vulnerable, but still an Exarch in mind if not body. Nym had a hundred different ways to attack his target, and he planned on using all of them. No doubt Niramyn would defend against some, but without the dozens of parallel processes, unlimited stamina, and the practically bottomless soul well a powerful ascendant had that let them cast twenty or thirty spells at the same time, every second, for hours if needed, he would be overwhelmed before he could do anything else.
The air ignited into flames around Niramyn and shards of stone materialized out of nothingness next to him, already moving forward to drive themselves into his mortal body. Arcana assaulted his body, trying to lock his muscles in place, trying to smother his senses, to still his heart or rupture his organs. Creatures made of pure ephemeral darkness phased into existence, blackening the skies around Niramyn and sending questing tendrils of arcana into his mind.
It was too much for any mortal to defend against, and that was only the ones meant to actively harm Niramyn. Nym devoted a considerable portion of his mind to keeping Niramyn from running again, everything from spatial locks for denying teleports to dispels that attacked the flight magic holding Niramyn aloft. There was no single strategy for victory, no clever combinations that would slip past Niramyn’s defenses.
Nym was stronger, if not more skilled, and he intended to leverage that and bury Niramyn in so much arcana that the sheer weight of it would collapse the now-mortal Exarch’s defenses and snuff him out. He couldn’t even see his target through all of the spells currently active. That didn’t stop him, of course. He had several scrying spells feeding him information and two processes currently devoted to nothing but parsing that. There was no way he was losing Niramyn now.
But just to be safe, he started reinforcing the various denial spells he was already laying down. He wanted there to be no way Niramyn escaped that cloud of death, no split-second teleport out of the way, no stepping into another layer, no summoning anything and swapping places with it.
He knew something was wrong immediately when his scrying spells reported that Niramyn was still alive somehow, and he knew exactly what it was that was wrong an instant later when he felt reality flex inside the storm of deadly arcana covering the sky. Either some other ascendant had come to Niramyn’s rescue, or he’d managed to ascend back to the sixth layer immediately after being knocked back down to mortal status.
Nym didn’t see another ascendant anywhere, and his area denial spells were still functioning at full strength. Somehow, Niramyn had ignored them and managed to ascend, again. Nym hadn’t realized he could do it so quickly, in barely an instant. He’d already been too late to stop Niramyn the moment he’d deflected the soul well breaker, well before he’d woven together his first attack.
Nym had to admit, that wasn’t ideal for him. It meant he needed to use the god killer spell to end this now, which would tie up so much of his spell casting ability that he’d be hard pressed to keep up with Niramyn even before he’d ascended again. Now that his opponent had regained his access to sixth layer arcana, Nym’s new top priority was keeping him anchored in the core reality.
This was the only place god killer was going to work, and even with everything that had gone wrong, this was still his best chance to kill Niramyn. Maybe if Nym somehow managed to stretch his own anchors back far enough, he could eventually visit the time period that Niramyn had ascended from, but he doubted it. No one else knew when Niramyn had ascended. He’d just always been there, a fixture of reality for as long as time had existed.
It really was now or never.
* * *
Niramyn had been reasonably sure he could re-ascend despite the various locking fields the other ascendant had layered across the area. If it had been his first time, he might have been in trouble, but in this case, it was much closer to opening a conduit than trying to step through to the sixth layer.
That still left him stranded here, of course, and at a severe disadvantage in terms of absolute strength. But whoever this mysterious ascendant was, he wasn’t a match for an Exarch. Already, Niramyn could think of a few different ways to break the locks and escape, though they unfortunately relied on him waiting for an opening to execute his plan.
The battlefield wasn’t the place to make changes to his mind, but he needed those parallel processes up and running. Being limited to a few spells at a time was no way to win a fight of this caliber. To that end, Niramyn’s first order of business was to stall and distract.
“You’ve missed your shot,” he said, his voice carried by his magic to the other ascendant. Even if the man was physically deaf, he’d still hear Niramyn clearly. “Not that I’m surprised, an amateur like you. But tell me, even if you’d succeeded, then what? You know that Myzalik isn’t going to leave you alive with knowledge of his spell, don’t you? You were dead the moment you learned how to cast that.”
It wasn’t that he expected to gain any useful information from the ascendant. It was just that Niramyn needed about twenty seconds uninterrupted by having to defend himself to increase the number of processes he could run up to six. That was still far too few, but it was better than what he was currently working with. Once he got those up, he could devote half to defending himself and the other half to continuing to modify his mind.
Tricky, but possible. It was about as far from ideal circumstances as it was possible to get, but Niramyn needed to learn the identity of this ascendant, and he needed to escape this fight in one piece. Anything else was a bonus.
Once he’d regained his power, again, he was going to find his assailant, torture the bastard until he revealed how to cast the age reversal spell, and then kill him with his own weapon.
Then something twisted inside him. Reality itself fought against Niramyn, tried to push him to the outer layers. That wasn’t possible while he was caught inside the area denial fields the other ascendant had put up, but reality didn’t care. It just kept pushing, grinding against him. Niramyn needed to break the denial field, or else he’d be torn apart.
