The Beginning After The End - Chapter 443

Chapter 441: Horns of Exeges

ARTHUR LEYWIN

The night was dark, the stars hidden behind thin clouds blowing down from the Basilisk Fang Mountains in the distance.

We’d hurried through the city of Nirmala in silence. Four guards had been posted at the descension portal when we arrived; their deaths had been quick, but the fight had interrupted a conversation I’d been having with Sylvie. Now, as we crept up the side of a tall tower that overlooked Sovereign Exeges’s palace, with my nerves growing more taut by the second, I focused on what she’d been saying to keep my mind from spiraling into unhelpful scenarios regarding the battle to come.

“Who do you think the voice was, then, when you were in the aetherial in-between place?”

Still clad in the relic armor, Sylvie was climbing about four feet below me to my right. It would have been easier for her and Chul to fly, but they needed to suppress their mana signatures as much as possible.

“I’m still not sure,” she said quietly. “You’ve seen my memories. The physical aspect of it shifted…”

“But you think it could have been…your mother?”

Sylvie was quiet, her thoughts muddied.

We crested the top, pulling ourselves over the short wall surrounding the flat roof of the sandstone tower.

“I don’t know.” She knelt at the opposite edge of the roof, looking down on the Sovereign’s palace with deep frown lines etched into her face. “The shape was obviously a construct of my own mind, so it might not have anything to do with the voice at all.”

Her tale of drowning and being saved by an amorphous entity had fought for space within my thoughts for the entire journey from the Relictombs’ second level. I had hoped I would gain some insight from her story, but it only resulted in more confusion. The fact that her aetheric aptitude had changed from vivum to aevum was strange, but in a way, it made sense. Her being allowed into the Relictombs, however, made less sense to either of us. But it had been difficult to focus with the prospect of fighting a full-blooded basilisk looming on the horizon.

I had elected to bring only Sylvie and Chul with me, leaving Caera and Ellie behind to recover from their injuries—and to keep them out of harm’s way. Regis was, of course, continuing to keep the protective shields running in the second level of the Relictombs, and I was already second-guessing my choice to do this without the Destruction godrune. Although I didn’t want it anywhere near Tessia’s body, I couldn’t pretend that facing Exeges wouldn’t have been a less concerning prospect if I had the power of Destruction in my back pocket.

In truth, Sylvie’d had precious little time to practice her new abilities, and Chul was largely untested. The half-phoenix had grown more quiet and focused as we approached Nirmala and our target. Sylvie and I had kept our steady stream of conversation out loud so as not to exclude him, but he’d largely ignored us, his thoughts turned inward and forward.

I knew how he must have felt; this would be his first true test outside the safety of the Hearth. He’d trained against full-blooded asuras his entire life, but he’d never fought one to the death before. In all, it left me less confident in the outcome than I’d have liked.

And then, if we are successful, we will have to face Cecilia as well—the Legacy, and all her unknown power.

Shaking off the thought, I took in the scene before us.

Even in the dark, the palace was an impressive structure, all graceful curves, golden domes, and jade arches. The sprawling palace wasn’t surrounded by a wall, but rather a mote of water gardens that caught the occasional star and moonlight peaking through the clouds and reflected it like a many-faceted gemstone. The city of Nirmala sprawled around the palace, with the Basilisk Fang Mountains carving purple silhouettes in the distance.

“Arthur…”

I focused on the palace, bringing myself back into the moment. I realized immediately what Sylvie had sensed. “There are no mana signatures. None at all.”

Chul’s big hands gripped the top of the short wall that ran around the roof. When he spoke, there was a razor’s edge in his voice. “Perhaps this basilisk is not present. Or he hides his signature. Basilisks are all paranoid, or so I’ve been told.”

Although I couldn’t entirely discount Chul’s thoughts, it didn’t make sense to me that Exeges, Sovereign of this dominion, would keep his mana signature suppressed inside his own palace. My ability to passively detect mana was only recently returned, and so I couldn’t be sure if a powerful basilisk would be strong enough to completely shield himself from Realmheart or not. Thoughts and fears began to stampede through my mind as I tried to consider all the many possibilities.

“Perhaps it is too much for his Alacryan guards, or even the people of the city?” Sylvie suggested. “Aldir and Windsom have always kept the full force of their auras withdrawn when in lesser lands.”

“But I sense no guards, no servants. He wouldn’t only keep unadorned soldiers around him, unless…” A basilisk such as Exeges had little to fear from his people. Did he really need guards? Still, this wasn’t what I had expected, and I was sharply on edge.

Chul went down on one knee, his bright orange eye shining in the dark. “You suspect a trap?” His fists crunched through the sandstone barrier, making all three of us flinch. “We should not have entrusted so many Alacryans with our plan,” he added in a stage whisper.

We watched in silence for several more minutes, tension slowly mounting between us, but the streets were quiet and there was no activity from the palace or surrounding buildings. Finally, I accepted that there was only one way to get a better understanding of what we were facing. “Let’s go.”

Leaping off the roof, I plunged toward the ground below. By reinforcing my body with aether, my legs absorbed the shock of the landing noiselessly.

Sylvie and Chul drifted down behind me, whisper-quiet and leaking only a hint of mana.

We darted across the road and along the wall of a single-story building, then into the water gardens. Bounding from rock to rock, we avoided the natural paths through the water garden, which were all lit with softly glowing lighting artifacts. I could tell where several guard posts were naturally integrated within the sprawling pools, tall grasses, banks of hedges, and carefully placed river stones. But, as I’d seen from the rooftop, the gardens were empty.

An eerie feeling crawled across my skin, but I kept my course until we stood beneath the outer wall of the palace, near the main entrance.

Peaking around the corner, I confirmed that there were no guards outside.

Before moving out into the open, my eyes swept the gardens and the city beyond for anything I could see or sense that might hint at an onlooker. The densest concentration of mana was in a rectangular two-story complex nearby. Judging from the simplicity of the building and the density of mages within it, I could only assume it was some kind of barracks. Most of the very few people we’d seen moving in the streets were mages as well, almost all guards patrolling the city.

Once sure that we weren’t being observed, I slipped around the shadowy corner and darted to the brightly lit main doors. The towering doors, painted dark green and inlaid with gold, silver, and jade, opened with a light push, noiseless on their well-maintained hinges.

The entrance beyond was brightly lit, revealing a mosaic floor broken by two rows of pillars. Carefully maintained plants draped from the ceiling and grew along the walls. No guards were present.

I could sense Sylvie’s unease leaking through our connection. Maybe it really is empty, I sent.

‘Could Agrona have withdrawn his Sovereigns, fearing something like this might happen?’ Sylvie asked as she and Chul followed me into the palace. ‘Maybe Chul was right, and some part of our plan was leaked.’

I pushed the door shut behind us, my mind cluttered with competing ideas, each one less likely than the last. There were too many questions, but the only way to get more answers was to delve further inside.

We crossed the entrance hall to a series of smaller doors that opened into a wide hallway that ran down the center of the palace. According to Seris, we would find Sovereign Exeges’s throne room directly ahead.

After taking a moment to sense for mana signatures beyond the row of closed doors, I eased one open. A weight pushed from the other side, forcing it open more quickly than I’d expected. I stepped back, an aether blade in hand and aimed at the door.

A figure slumped through, their armored head hitting the tile floor with a noise like a bell. The ringing resounded through the silent palace for what felt like the length of a song.

Chul, his huge weapon held ready in one hand, stepped cautiously forward until he was standing over the armored man. Frowning, he met my eye. “Dead.” With his other hand, he opened the door wider, revealing a dozen more bodies on the other side.

I leaned down next to Chul and pressed my fingers against the guard’s neck. Not only was there no pulse, but the flesh was as cold as the steel covering his body. His skin was pale, and there was a haunted gauntness to what I could see of his face. A quick inspection revealed no marks of battle on either the steel or flesh, though. Wanting to be thorough, I rolled the body onto its side, but there were no wounds on the back either.

“It’s the same for the rest,” Sylvie said softly as she moved from corpse to corpse. “And look at how they’re lying. It’s as if…”

“They just collapsed,” I finished.

Each body was crumpled like a puppet with cut strings. Their weapons weren’t even out of their sheaths. Stranger, though, was the fact that they were devoid of purified mana, with only traces of water and earth-attribute mana lingering around them.

Chul clutched his weapon in both hands, staring up and down the hallway as if expecting to be attacked at any moment. “It…it’s as though the candle of their lifeforce has simply been snuffed out.”

“Come on.” I moved cautiously, following the thick red carpet that ran down the center of the hallway. There were more than a dozen doors to the left and right, providing a perfect kill chamber for an ambush. I kept my senses trained on them, waiting for the scratch of boots on tile or the moan of hinges turning, but the only noise was what we made.  “We have to know if Exeges is here or not, then we can get the hell out of here.”

“The sooner the better,” Sylvie said under her breath. “Something is very wrong here.”

A huge arched, gilded set of doors blocked the end of the hallway. Holding my breath and infusing my senses with aether, I listened at the door. All was quiet beyond.

I gave a nod to Chul, but as we reached for the door, the lighting artifacts at the far end of the hall flickered. I whirled, an aether blade in my hand.

No one was there, and I sensed no mana either.

“May the ancients guide us and shield us from wraiths in the quiet night…” Chul mumbled under his breath like a prayer. When it became clear that we were still alone, he cleared his throat and turned back to the door, looking at me questioningly.

Together, we pushed, and the massive doors swung open.

‘What in the world…’ Sylvie thought, her wide-eyed gaze slowly tracking across the space beyond.

We had reached the throne room, a cavernous space capable of holding a fully grown, transformed—or basilisk, I thought. Black iron arches swept from floor to ceiling in graceful architectural designs, stark against the golden dome of the roof and the reds and golds of the tile floor, carpets, and rugs. The walls were covered in stained glass and woven tapestries, but I only took note of them in a vague way, as I couldn’t focus on much else beyond the dozens of bodies splayed throughout the room.

My attention caught on one body in particular.

Near the far end of the chamber, an ornate throne of black iron sat on a golden plinth. A man was draped over the throne.

I took a step toward the throne, then flinched and spun at a heavy ringing crack from behind.

The head of Chul’s weapon was partially embedded in the shattered tiles at his feet. His face had flushed a deep red. “Who could have beaten us to the Sovereign?”

“And how did they manage to do…all this?” Sylvie asked, moving carefully between the corpses.

Like before, these people all seemed to have simply dropped dead wherever they sat or stood.

I crossed the throne room to the throne itself, where Sovereign Exeges’s remains rested. His skin was ashen and had a taut, sunken appearance as if it were pulled too tight over the bones beneath. His open eyes stared blindly, the irises colorless. He looked as if someone had drained all the blood and life from his body, but there was no wound anywhere, except…

To each side of his head, a slightly bloodied hole remained where someone had ripped the horns from his skull.

“This must have happened recently.” Sylvie had moved up to stand beside me. One hand covered her mouth as she stared at the ghastly remains of the Sovereign. “Surely the palace would be swarming with Agrona’s soldiers and mages if anyone else had discovered this yet.”

“What does this mean for your plan?” Chul asked, half lifting one of the many bodies to examine it, then letting the limp form fall unceremoniously back to the floor.

It means perhaps there is still time before I’ll have to face Cecilia, I thought, careful to keep my relief from bleeding over to Sylvie. Out loud, I said only, “I’m not sure yet. It’s possible we have some as-yet-unknown ally, but before we can figure out who killed these people, we need to know how they died.”

“It doesn’t look like the work of dragons…” Sylvie thought out loud, kneeling next to a body. “Although, perhaps some powerful aether technique…?”

Chul, now standing next to me, took hold of Exeges’s face in one overlarge hand, turning the head this way and that. “Pah. This death should have been mine.” His hand moved down to the dead basilisk’s throat, but I caught his wrist.

“Stop. We need the corpse intact. Taking out your anger on it won’t help anything.”

Chul gritted his teeth. “You are right. But how do you intend to discover who is responsible for—”

Mana blazed into motion everywhere at once, condensing into a solid barrier that encompassed the entire palace grounds. The ceiling quaked, collapsing a huge chunk of gold-plated stone. A gale of freezing wind whipped through the opening, coiling into three smaller vortexes that wrapped around Sylvie, Chul, and me.

Aether erupted from me, deflecting the wind, and my gaze lay locked onto the figure floating down through the broken ceiling, her gunmetal hair billowing.

Tessia. Cecilia.

My jaws clenched as I held her gaze, staring deep into those turquoise eyes for any signs of the girl I had loved.

Cecilia’s focus slipped away from me to the corpse on the throne, her lips pursing into a contemptuous pout. “What sort of trick did you use to kill Sovereign Exeges without even a scratch on you?”

“What?” I stared, taking a moment to comprehend the meaning of her words. “We didn’t—”

Chul let out a cacophonous battle cry as he ripped through Cecilia’s spell and charged, his weapon leaving behind a trail of orange phoenix fire.

Cecilia raised her hand, the wind-attribute mana sparking as she transformed it into its lightning deviant. The vortexes burst with white light as dozens of lightning bolts ripped through me all at once.

The glass cage of inaction around me shattered.

Reaching for the aether interwoven throughout the twin vortexes buffeting Sylvie and me, I ripped at the fabric of the spell. It resisted. I pushed harder, forcing out more of my own aether, and as Cecilia’s attention turned to Chul, her hold over the mana weakened. The spell dissolved, and the cyclones melted away.

As Cecilia gathered a spell to counter Chul’s charge, I experienced a flash of cold realization: in her sternum, where her core had once been, now there was a void. The mana that reacted to her did so from all throughout her body, and even the atmosphere around her.

She had no core.

“Chul, no!”

A barrage of glowing missiles streaked through the air between Cecilia and Chul, lifting him up off his feet and hurling him backwards through the air.

The shadows coalesced above where he fell, and an inky black blade slashed at his throat.

Conjuring an aether blade in the air above him, I deflected the blow. Chul jumped to his feet, spinning as he did so in order to backhand his attacker, a shadowy figure who looked like she’d been dipped in ink. She flew backwards, crashing through the wall and vanishing in a cloud of dust and rubble.

Cecilia bared her teeth, snarling, and the mana all around us began to pull back. Chul stumbled, and Sylvie let out a surprised gasp.

If I hadn’t been ready for this kind of attack, having seen her attempt the same thing at the Victoriad, the fight might have ended before it even began.

Expelling two concentrated bursts of aether from my core, I sheathed Sylvie and Chul in violet energy. My aether clamped down on the mana around them both, holding it in against the violent draw of Cecilia’s power.

“Cecilia, wait!” I shouted, holding my hands up, most of my focus on my companions.

The ground liquified, the stone tiles running like water. I plunged in up to my waist, the mana-affected stone sucking me down like quicksand. Aether flowed out of me to counter the mana, rending the spell and shattering the floor as it was blasted away by the opposing forces. All that energy spilled back along the traces left behind by Cecilia’s mana manipulation, but before it reached her, she rested control of the mana away from me again, and the combined aether and mana dissipated.

In that instant she was distracted, I activated God Step and vanished into the aetheric pathways, appearing wreathed in amethyst electricity just behind her.

Her arm whipped around, a concentrated blaze of lightning and fire gathering in her fist. I twisted the mana and aether between us. The spell fired from her fingers as a solid beam, but distorted as I pulled it apart mid-cast. A hundred smaller rays seared past me in every direction to demolish the wall behind me.

Batting away her arm, my fingers closed around her throat. Her eyes went wide and she collapsed backwards, slamming into the ground with my knee pressed firmly against her sternum.

“Listen to me,” I pleaded. “I want to help you, Cecilia—to save you and Tessia both—I just need—”

A barrage of different elements bombarded me from above, knocking me back.

A handful of figures flew down through the hole in the ceiling.

I recognized the Scythes Viessa and Melzri immediately. The third figure to enter, who dropped down heavily instead of flying, caught me off guard, the garish, grinning mask sending me wheeling into flashbacks of years before. The masked man who led the attack against Xyrus Academy—Draneeve—had fled with Elijah before I arrived, but I’d heard the stories and descriptions in the years after.

I was even more surprised when the twisted but familiar visage of Nico followed Draneeve.

Nico had aged since I’d last seen him; he had dark bags under his eyes, standing out against his pale flesh, and his hair was windblown, his clothes loose over his thin frame. His core was no longer true white but stained by the wound I’d given him. I couldn’t immediately guess how it had been healed but assumed either Cecilia or Agrona were responsible.

From Caera’s message, I knew he was alive. But I hadn’t expected to meet him in battle again, not after the Victoriad.

He clutched a staff that radiated a tremendous amount of mana that cycled between the four crystals inset in its head, each one glowing in the color of a specific elemental attribute: green, red, yellow, and blue.

Elijah. Nico. My oldest friend in either world.

I saw this all in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and then my focus was drawn back to Cecilia.

Mana had condensed around her body in a thick barrier, a radiant silhouette. An arm of transparent mana, sprouting from just beneath her own, reached for my throat. I flashed backwards as more spells rained down on me from above and Cecilia floated up off the ground, wreathed in this halo of mana that made it look as if she had six arms.

“Well done bringing this incursion to our attention, Mawar,” Viessa said, her voice like black ice. “You and Melzri, handle the dragon. Draneeve, with me. Let the reincarnates handle their own.”

‘Focus on Tessia,’ Sylvie thought from across the room as she prepared to defend herself. ‘Chul and I can handle ourselves against the others.’

Nico was staring at me with such intensity that I hesitated. Mana was building in his staff, the green and red gems flaring, but the desperation shining in his eyes was just as bright.

Cecilia’s mana-formed limbs all thrust forward simultaneously. The world seemed to come undone around me as the air turned to fire, wind to blades, and stone to lava.

The aether sheathing my skin trembled against the onslaught, but I couldn’t exert my will on the mana, couldn’t break the spell or even distort it. Her focus was too great, her control too precise. As my skin began to crack and blister beneath the fading aether, I God Stepped away, blindly following the paths into the air to appear between Cecilia and Nico.

The first thing I saw from my new perspective were Nico’s dark eyes. He was staring straight into mine. “Don’t fight us, Grey,” he said instantly, the worlds bursting out of him in a rush. “If you come peacefully we’ll let your bond and the phoenix go.”

A hand formed of mana wrapped around my ankle and dragged me downward. Spinning, I unleashed an aether-clad kick against Cecilia’s side. The impact of aether and mana sent a shockwave through the throne room, tumbling the black iron arches and bringing parts of the ceiling down on us from above.

Gritting my teeth, I God Stepped again, blinking behind Cecilia as she struggled to right herself in the air.

Instantly, a barrage of frozen fire slammed into me from behind as Nico launched the spell he’d been charging. Most of the bolts burst against my defense, but a few pierced my weakened barrier, where they shattered inside my skin, sending shrapnel of burning ice spraying through my muscles.

Pain clawed through my body.

I raised my arm, an aetheric blast ripping out of my palm and at Nico. Conjured wind and earth sprang up as a barrier between us, but it gave me time to disrupt his spell and break down the shards burrowing into my muscles. Even with the aid of his staff, his control over mana was simplistic next to the Legacy’s.

Aether rushed to the wounds and began healing me instantly.

The air suddenly thickened like porridge in my lungs. It coalesced over my eyes, making the whole world go blurry. When I tried to rend the spell with aether, it resisted again, Cecilia’s control pushing back against my own.

Closing my eyes, I stepped into the aetheric pathways again, appearing in the center of the throne room and sucking in a deep breath.

From the corner of my eye, I watched as Chul’s weapon shattered a wide stretch of tile floor, Draneeve only just darting out of the way. Viessa was flying high above, near the collapsing roof, a constant stream of black missiles spilling from the shadows around her and striking Chul from every direction.

Even as I considered moving to help him, he spun with surprising speed and drove the butt of his weapon into Draneeve’s face. The grotesque mask shattered, and blood burst from the nose, mouth, and eyes of the plain-featured face beneath as Draneeve crashed to the ground.

Behind the throne, Sylvie was dodging between the combined assault from Melzri and her retainer—Mawar, Viessa had called her. The two Alacryans were a whirl of blades and spells, but Sylvie seemed to move faster than should be possible, her body skipping and jerking through space with strobelike flashes of aether. With each aveum-oriented lurch of her physical body, a bolt of pure mana appeared, jerking just as unnaturally toward her opponents.

Mezlri dashed one aside with her soul flame-wreathed blade and spun around another. Mawar seemed to melt into the shadows, no clear beginning or end of her body, as two bolts seemed to pass right through her. A third struck home, and I could make out a choked gasp of pain, but my attention was forced back to Cecilia before I was able to confirm the retainer’s state.

The Legacy’s command over mana was incredible—far beyond anything I’d seen before. She could manipulate and combine atmospheric mana with a thought, using it in a way I could have only dreamed when I was a quadra-elemental mage. I couldn’t keep up with her in that way; it was foolish to waste energy trying to overpower her control of mana.

In both lives, though, she’d been reliant on the unusual amount of power granted by her nature as the Legacy. Her technique was sloppy, and her mana manipulation lacked creativity. These were weaknesses I could take advantage of.

Aether condensed in my muscles and joints, and Burst Step, powered by hundreds of precisely timed explosions of aether, carried me back across the room in a near-instant blink. Aether burst along my shoulders, biceps, elbow, forearm, and wrist, and shrouded my fist protectively, delivering an impossibly fast and powerful blow at the end of my step.

The blow landed against Cecilia’s chest even as her eyes stayed focused on where I had been a moment before.

As if time had slowed down, I watched cracks spread across her mana shroud, white-hot lightning bolts over her physical form. Like a dark mirror, the same cracks raced over the aetheric barrier around my arm, from my knuckles up to my elbow.

Her body twisted to the side, and my Burst Strike skated off the surface of her protective spell, my momentum carrying me past her. In my left hand, I conjured an aether blade, sweeping it behind me. One of her arms came up to ward off the blow, and once again aether shivered against mana, the two opposing forces struggling for superiority.

This time, my concentration won out. The blade sheared through her transparent mana arm and jammed into her side, only just breaking the skin.

An enraged shout came from above, my eyes flicking up to it automatically: Nico was breathing hard, his face red with anger. Clenching his fist, he jerked it upward, and I felt the mana condensing below me. Leaping into the air, I avoided a dozen black iron spikes that ripped through the floor.

Placing one foot on the side of a spike, I launched myself higher, taking aim at Nico.

As I flew toward him, I remembered his message. You owe her a life. He didn’t know. Even after all this time, he didn’t know why Cecilia had really died. And yet he had still reached out to me, sent me Sylvia’s core as an offering of peace. But here, he’d attacked me, made no effort to stop this fight from happening.

In the end, it came down to just one thing: if he wanted anything from me, he had to earn it.

My blade drove at Nico’s throat. The wind gusting around him turned, pulling him up and away, but too slow. Flesh parted as the shaped aether opened the side of his neck—

I jerked to a halt as something wrapped around my arm.

Looking down, I was caught off guard by an emerald green vine, thick as my waist, sprouting from Cecilia’s hand. Her mana form was gone, and in that moment, it was like the last couple years just faded away. I was seeing Tessia as she had been: radiant and desperate, protective and frightened, beautiful…

Then a nova of mana boiled out from her, hurling me away. Corpses were tossed like dolls across the room, the iron supports twisted and ripped from their moorings, walls blew outward, parts of the ceiling collapsed heavily all around us.

I landed on my feet across the throne room, leaning forward to stop my backward slide. Cecilia was floating over a giant hole in the floor, which had been blasted down into a crater by her attack. Next to her, Nico had shielded himself with a spherical bubble of multicolored mana.

Most of the throne room was alight with phoenix fire. Uncontrolled bursts of it were leaping from Chul in seemingly random directions as he shouted and swung his weapon wildly; Viessa was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn’t sense her mana either.

“Stop cowering in your shadows and face me like a man!” Chul roared, his eyes blazing and chest heaving with each furious breath.

“Is swinging your club like a beast truly the extent of the Ascelpius clan’s strength?” An icy voice radiated through the air, oozing out of the shadows from every direction at once. “As weak-minded as your mother, it would seem.”

The flames leaking out of Chul turned jagged and frenzied, mirroring his emotions. “How dare—”

Suddenly, Chul’s head snapped to the side as he caught sight of his target. He leaped into the air with a victorious shout as his burning weapon drew a bright orange arc toward Sylvie, Mawar, and Melzri.

The weapon came down, followed by a trail of fire like a comet.

Sylvie gasped as the blow struck her across the side of the head, crumpling.

My stomach dropped and bile rose up as sudden understanding filled me like water in my lungs.

Behind me, I sensed the condensing mana as Cecilia unleashed yet another attack. Before me, Chul lifted his weapon for another strike.

I stepped into the aetheric pathways and appeared standing over my bond. The weapon came down, and I grabbed it by the handle, my arms quaking beneath Chul’s asuran strength.

His eyes bulged. “My brother in vengeance! Why do you protect the enemy?”

“An illusion,” I ground out, hardly able to speak. “Chul, snap out of it, it’s Sylvie, you’re attacking Sylvie—”

A blade wreathed in soul fire sliced across the aether protecting my torso. A black blade of shadow struck against my back.

Swords of aether appeared floating in the air around me, and I slashed out with them wildly, driving the Scythe and retainer back.

Chul wrenched his weapon free and stumbled away, shaking his head, his eyes going in and out of focus. He waved a hand through the air like he was brushing aside cobwebs. “No…no! You’re—”

I was forced to dodge aside as a blast of mana took Chul in the chest, lifting him up and slamming him into the twisted remains of a black iron pillar. Behind me, Sylvie floated up from the ground, her glazed eyes on Chul, her face a stoic mask. Blast after blast of pure mana pummeled Chul, driving him through the iron and then into the wall beyond.

As I prepared to yet again activate God Step again, a force like the hand of a god itself came down on me. The floor beneath my feet ruptured, my body growing so heavy not even solid stone could support me. My back bent and my head bowed. I struggled to move, even to step into the aetheric pathways.

Cecilia fell upon me like a thunderbolt. She was again wreathed in her otherwordly mana form, blasts of wind, ice, fire, earth, and lightning erupting from her mana mana-forged limbs to rain down atop me.

I raised one hand and unleashed an aetheric blast. A cone of vibrant purple force crashed against her mana, and for an instant, I felt a reprieve.

Raking my aether through the air like a hand through cobwebs, I tried to disrupt the illusions affecting my companions, but the air was so thick with the distortion of Cecilia’s mana that it was impossible to isolate and cancel Viessa’s illusions.

A white hot beam of radiant fire-attribute mana enveloped me. I carved through it with the aether blade, splitting the beam in two, the twin shards carving fifty-foot-long trenches in what little remained of the throne room to either side of me. As the blade whirled in the air, I was already activating God Step, the aetheric pathways lighting up before me like so many arcs of amethyst lightning.

The light faded, and my gaze met Cecilia’s.

Her stare, had I seen it on Tessia’s face in any other circumstance, it would have cut right through me. But just for a second, I thought I saw something else too. Regret? Understanding…maybe even a strange, twisted reflection of my own complicated feelings.

My jaw clenched at the choice that had to be made.

The aether blade plunged into the interwoven threads of aether.

A scream rent the air.