Book 4 Chapter 48: The Highest Level

++The more a magician’s powers expand, the more tricks he has up his sleeve, the harder it is to incorporate any kind of advanced strategy. Every possible plan is forced to compete with a thousand possible countermeasures that the enemy may or may not have. Committing to a long-term scheme is all too likely to simply prove a waste of mana. As such, paradoxically, it is the most sophisticated magicians who engage in the most primitive battles.++

- A quote on the nuances of high magical combat, by Orginack Voret, Archmage and second Grandmaster of the Winzorth Institute.

The liches first announced their presence with fire of a sort the world had not known in aeons. A primordial blaze that simply refused to coexist naturally with organic life, harbored now only by the very depths of the planet where its heart burned most fiercely. Sun-hot, it bathed my shield like a wave breaking on cliffs.

Even I felt the temperature, it was such that the added layer of vacuum my new shield amulet’s protection automatically included did little to insulate me. Most of this heat was radiative, not convective, and it did not care about a little detail like having no medium by which to transmit itself.

I was moving before impact, which is what saved me from being driven into the jagged crater left where I had just been standing. The air was rattled with debris and flying chunks of stone. I whirled to the point of impact in time to see something flit up out of it, skeletal hands going high, fingers splaying as mana congealed into light. Then something fast and fanged was tearing at me, biting down on my shield.

A snake.

But not like any snake I had ever encountered in nature. This one seemed half-ethereal, like it existed here and elsewhere all at once. It hovered in the air and moved like a ribbon in the wind. Traveling faster than a bullet, even my transhuman reflexes could scarcely keep up as it thrashed its head around and sent me flying into a far wall hard enough to actually crack it. I even felt a noticeable drain in my shield’s energy reserve. Barely.

The thing seemed alive, whatever else it was, so I experimentally reached out and grabbed one of its fangs, trying to tug the lifeforce from it. It did not work, and the serpent twisted to send me smashing up into the ceiling, even harder this time. I was growing annoyed by now, so I decided to try something I had only seen Sethira attempt— pooling mana in-between my hands within its own shield until it reached critical mass with the very substance of the air itself. I teleported to the other side of the room just before the sun-hot mass could expand to engulf the snake’s head for long milliseconds. By the time it faded, the head no longer existed and half the body seemed burned black.

By then, more snakes were coming. Each as big as the first. Great lengths of sinew and scales lashing for me whipcrack-fast, longer than train cars and no less heavy. I teleported before they impacted me, waving a hand and hurling mana into the corpse of the first.

It had not been alive enough for me to draw energy from, but death was death. Necromantic energies brought the headless thing back and sent it wrapping around its fellows with a manic strength. These ones I slew more carefully, a magic missile through each of their brains.

I needed their jaws and teeth intact to make full use of the corpses.

More teleportation, and now I realised I was doing it alongside my enemy lich, both of us flitting around after the other. That was what a battle between high level magicians came down to, as often as not. Positional warfare. He who saw the other first would likely win.

Well, excepting for cases in which Lord Dread was involved, at least.

I had several advantages here, chief among them was that I could follow and predict my enemy’s teleportations by the magical residue left over behind each one. That, and I had been leaving illusory doubles of myself with every jump to throw off their own tracking.

It took only a few moments for me to follow the trajectory of missed magical attacks and trace them back to my enemy, then a few more to note down the pattern of their teleportations. One advantage mere mortals have over liches, one that gets larger as the lich grows older, is spontaneity. Truly random decision-making does not exist in humans, but my kind struggles with it far more than the living.

So it was no difficulty at all to aim a magic missile for where my enemy would be rather than where they were. Doctor Brown’s magician-killer scaled up to the yield of several million vis, cutting right through my target’s shield and tearing the arm right off them as they went spinning back through the air.

I spared a glance over at Shuo Meg to see that she was currently ensnared in battle with her own opponent, neither one seeming to have an advantage over the other. This was quite fine by me; anything less than Shuo Meg’s imminent defeat threatening me with the prospects of a two-on-one was of no concern at all.

I pursued my fallen enemy as they teleported across the room again. They were limiting themselves to slower, short-range jumps to conserve mana, and of course a lich’s reserve was orders of magnitude greater than the average magician, but even still they were exhausting themselves. Such evasion would not be taken at a whim, clearly they thought it was their only chance of victory.

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That they risked so much mana on luring me into a false sense of security did not occur to me, until it was too late.

A panel opened in the ceiling and I was struck by a coiling mass of energy that passed clean through my defences to wrestle my magic directly. I felt the teleportation spell at work just before it could finish displacing me, tearing apart the half-formed matrix around myself to keep from being properly flung through space.

I ended up…floating.

I looked around, and was shocked by my sudden weightlessness. Craning my neck and moving my limbs only let me look so far, with my field of view mostly being constrained by my body’s own natural turns through the air. I felt like a fly suspended in water.

Unacceptable of course, with a brief moment of thought I re-engaged my flight spell and…nothing. What?

Everything made sense as my body naturally turned back to face the world below me. Or rather, the planet below me, far below. Far enough that I could see the thin skin of its atmosphere hovering around it. When I turned again I saw the sun burning bright in space beyond, glaring far too harshly to look anywhere but its vague vicinity. If I were in Isabel Vornholt’s form right now, with organic eyes they may have been burned out of their sockets. Or not, my living body had become rather sturdy of late.

Either way, just because I was not being burned by cosmic radiation, did not mean I wanted to expose myself to it for any longer than was necessary. My major concern was time rather than actual harm—I doubted anything short of propelling myself directly into the sun would bypass my magical shielding, but Shuo Meg would still be fighting for her life down below, and without me there she would not last long.

It took me a moment to switch back to an old flying spell I had first devised millennia ago, the first time I became curious enough to exit the orbit of my planet. I had been young and impulsive back then, and I found myself making a few tweaks to its structure as I engaged the mana and started flying back down to Asyran.

Then my second obstacle made itself apparent, I did not know the precise location I needed to reach. Hm. No, my enemy had clearly been attempting to put me as far from them as possible—likely to dump me into the very sun itself, and would perhaps have succeeded had I not dismantled their spell matrix halfway through. That sort of energy demand ruled out anything fancy with the teleportation’s trajectory, they could only have gotten so close to success by sending me singularly along a straight line to their destination.

But I had been in the air for a few moments, and the planet had been turning and moving all that time. I did some mental calculations as I flew and adjusted my course by a few degrees to ensure that I did not end up dropping down miles shy of my actual destination. The hardest part was ensuring that I did not pass to close to Garamon territory. Altitude was helping to hide my magic, but Lord Dread would still be easily felt from many hundreds of miles distant. Speed was my ally in remaining unnoticed. By the time I was back down into the lower atmosphere, my shield was staving off the magnesium-bright fireball forming around me through sheer air resistance.

I saw the temple down below me, a distant blot of grey amid an ocean of green. I could have slowed down, circled around, flown through its entrance and navigated the corridors. That would have taken additional time. Instead I directed the bulk of my shield’s mana to cover the front of me and directed the rest to accelerate even more. I was silent as I approached; or, rather, I was outrunning any noise I made and leaving it miles in my wake. I did not even hear anything as I hit the enchanted stone, sound travelled more slowly through dense solids than I was.

The temple exploded open and sent chunks of stone flying in all directions, I continued digging through to erupt down into its bowels amid a stream of blue light and screaming vapour. The interior temperature must have climbed a thousand degrees in moments, and even my shield was taxed by the strain of my entrance. I hastily reworked it to provide omnidirectional protection again as I looked through the structure for my enemies.

Both of them were by Shuo Meg, who was currently embedded in the enchanted stone from attacks already landed before I came. None of the liches were in good condition, but it was clear that Shuo Meg alone was now past fighting. Her opponents both looked functional if nothing else.

They turned to me, and moved as one.

The one who had teleported me could not have had much left of their mana reserves, even an ancient lich of their power would have exhausted perhaps half their total amount in the effort. They still moved and fought with nothing held back.

Apparently, they realised their only chance at victory was to overwhelm me fast and with all their power.

I waved a hand and sent the reanimated snakes coiling for them, then tore open the veil and threw forth a summer faerie knight to deliriously stumble at another. While they were buying precious moments for me, I hovered high and prepared lashing whips of flexible aether bathed in screaming fire, coiling and thrashing them outwards in wide arcs that cut curved gashes along the stone floor and turned rubble to molten sludge.

My enemies responded with shields and water, violent steam explosions and trembling earth. We threw missiles like artillery duels and knocked one another one way and the other. The air was soon so hot that it actually glowed, though our shields filtered out such lethal exposure for us, and every lich present cycled through spells with a speed that no mortal could comprehend.

I lanced them with acid and flying metal, with compressive gravity and bone-eating fungus, with semi-sentient bees made to latch onto moving targets and detonate like breaching mines.

How I wished I had been Isabel Vornholt as I fought them. How I longed to feel everything that was now happening, the thrilling rush of combat at the highest level, of knowing that each parry would have blocked a tsunami and every strike would have levelled a hill. Instead I felt none of it, just regarded the whole thing unfolding before me with the same emptiness I had carried through eternities.

Suddenly, I was eager for this all to just end.

A guard came a moment too late and my magic missile tore through one lich’s shield. A normal projectile might have simply vaporized a section of their ribs out of existence, but this one dispersed and flooded the interior of the shield with energies fell to our kind. Before the first lich had even finished collapsing, I was already turning my power onto the second and compressing them down into a molten crater. I stopped my magic just before it crushed their body out of existence, then, over the crackling and popping of molten stone, I spoke.

“SHUO MEG DID NOT TELL ME WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON HERE,” I declared. “NOW THE TWO OF YOU WILL.”