The Path of Ascension - Chapter 313

Aiden gave his best feral grin as he crushed the final elite in the army that had been attempting to besiege the fortress below. Enough so that it forced a surrender out of him, which caused a wave of similar surrenders to follow.

They had been ready for him, in that the members of the army immediately pulled back while their elites tried to wound him enough to force a retreat. As much as he wished that such things would be impossible… in truth, he was tired. So, so tired. He was, on average, using more willpower than he recovered in each of his fights. Sure, he was living the life, and while the whispers of terror that preceded him helped… it couldn’t fight all his battles for him. Which meant he needed to pace himself.

It made for a fun challenge, seeing just how little he could do before he had to retreat, but it also got old after a while. Especially when the answer was so often “nothing.” Maya had been taunting him with flamboyant recordings of huge displays of power, but she and Yun Me were on the offensive and outnumbered him, able to strike only when and where they wanted, driving daggers into the heart of the Empire. He, on the other hand, was plodding along, trying to stop a thousand leaks that multiplied every time he blinked.

Really, what was even the point of the armies if they just kept retreating? Blah blah, something something consolidation and losses and overwhelming odds and strategy and whatever. They weren’t winning, and that was up to him and the kids. In fact, he still felt like a kid. Specifically, the time he’d tried to push the ocean back as the tide was coming in with his bare hands. Fun to play in the surf, but it just left you wet, cold, and tired by the end of the day.

Granted, a bout against Maya could actually be bracing at this point. A proper challenge might be just what the medic ordered. Yun Me could do fine too, but she wasn’t as fun. The defenses needed to survive… like a million years had left the Unyielding Anvil basically impossible to kill. Beatable, yes. Killable… less so. Maybe he could manage it, if he really went all out… but maybe not. His desire to win was definitely less than his desire to not lose, and any fight of that level would leave both fighters bloody and broken by the end, no matter who won.

Eh, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to fight him soon, she was too far away. Maya was close enough, but he hoped he could win. He rocked a solid… maybe four out of ten win rate in a straight, fair fight against the older woman. Not that either of them would deign to give a ‘fair fight,’ because strategy, setup, and timing was how the game was played. He just wished he could be the one surfing the tides today, but the ocean gave and the ocean took.

But wishes were like…

Nothing came to mind.

Surrenders rolled in like a wave, and nothing happened. The moment after that, nothing happened. The moment after that, Aiden looked off to the side and blinked. “Are you going to show yourself, or should I come and get you?”

From the other side, he felt someone appear who immediately snarked back, “Wrong side fuck nut.”

Carefully searching, Aiden internally cursed. He had been saying similar challenges for the last while, expecting an ambush. But the time he was right, and there was a hidden attacker, he had picked the wrong side. How embarrassing.

He snorted, “You just waited until after I looked to manifest, didn’t you?”

He spun to face Maya. The blond woman reclined against a pile of pillows on a probably-not-real palanquin, with two definitely-not-real overly muscled men rubbing her exposed thighs. Said thighs, of course, were exposed due to her mini skirt hitched up very nearly to the bottom of her torso, tantalizingly close to being outright indecent, but categorically incapable of showing any more than she wanted it to. Still, the promise of the hidden was incredibly alluring.

Aiden laughed as he felt the ensorcellment try to drag his mind under. Breaking the power, he leaned to the side like he was trying to peek under her skirt while giving his best leer.

Instead of trying to hide anything, Maya sighed as the men vanished and her clothes unveiled their true form.

The tight top that looked as though a stiff breeze might tear it spun, settling into body armor of gold-marbled white. The skirt danced on the edge of Aiden’s perceptions, flaring out then falling to ankle-length, while the shadows on her legs toughened into a glossy obsidian. She swept aside a lock of hair from the left side of her hair, and half of her golden hair blurred first into an almost-crown, before settling into a full-head helmet with a golden plume. She brushed her hands off, revealing dark gray gloves as though her skin was merely makeup over her true body of highly enchanted armor.

Her hair still flowed freely from under her helmet, though. That was the one part of her body that Aiden knew she actually cared about. Everything else was just an illusion, an affectation to normality that hid the monster deep below. Aiden was decently certain she didn’t even truly care about what people thought about her, so long as it was different from her reality. Some people wore a mask, others were the mask, but Maya was the act of wearing itself.

“About time Maya. I’ve been trying to kick your ass for years now. You ran at Temma sixty years ago.”

Maya spat off to the side. “That fight was bullshit Aiden, fuck you. You brought an ocean to a space battle. Who does that? This time, I made sure you couldn’t prepare for me. And don’t pretend that that one victory changes the fact I’m still ahead.”

“Brave words from the woman four Tiers stronger than me.” Aiden grinned as she scowled. “And attacking me right after a battle, too? If you’re going to bring up the ocean, which, come on, that’s my job… I don’t suppose you’ve got a spare, oh I dunno, half-dozen mana potions I could have shoved up your skirts?”

“Nah nah nah, you’re not distracting me with that. First you gotta tell me if you’re at peak 31 yet, ready to Tier up mid-fight and get me that way? I won’t be taken advantage of like that, go use Yun Me for that.”

“You wish. I wish too, but that’s besides the point. And like, the best ambush predators lurk just below the surface. But you mention Yun Me, should we be expecting her? I can do dinner for two if that’s what you want, but it’s rude to spring a friend last-minute.” Aiden was decently certain Yun Me couldn’t have made it to this sector yet, given her last known location, but he did need to know how this fight would go.

Thankfully, Maya was a proper Ascender.

“Na, maybe next time. But right now, little man? It’s just you and me. Just as it should be, you… and me.” Aiden watched as the armor started to turn into mist, revealing flashes of flesh, and Maya pressed a hand to her mouth which failed to cover her smirk. “What would your wife think? Maybe she’d like to join?”

Snorting, Aiden blinked through the mental effect. “Madea would have you on your knees in minutes. You won’t be talking so much shit when your mou—”

The world came into sharp focus, and Aiden was instantly in the depths. The pressure was overwhelming, but most pertinent was the arrow inches from his head. He didn’t bother to move, instead allowing the clone he’d been speaking through to lose its head, then pulled the arrow into the inky blackness. It vanished from the battlefield, then from reality as its illusion unraveled. He was left with a core of lightning, which was rapidly snuffed out. The clone reformed itself, water un-boiling with a cheeky wink.

Aiden laughed as his power started to bubble and boil like an angry tea kettle.

His soreness and exhaustion were swept away with the overwhelming feeling of life.

This was what he lived for.

The fight.

The battle.

The line between life and death that only came when you were fighting the impossible.

His eyes met Maya’s through her helm and he saw the same look reflected from his own.

There was nothing better than finding your match.

He detonated the clone, a sphere of water quickly expanding in every direction and dismantling Maya’s illusionary double as another Aiden emerged from the depths, a droplet of water materializing and morphing into a Duke Waters exactly where the last one had been.

He lost control over a few molecules of water up and to the left of him, so Aiden sent a follow-up attack to the front and right, and to the back and left. The one behind him splashed against something impermeable, so Aiden’s follow-up was to his front and right. As a [Washing A-Wave], it broke Maya’s concealing illusion and revealed a grin every bit as manic as his own.

“Come now Aiden. Let me pay you back for our last spat.”

“You wish!”

Maya twirled a golden staff, slamming it into her other hand with a thump, and the space around them pulsed. “It’s Just You and Me.”

A twang on the fabric of reality rang out, Maya setting a new Rule of engagement. The power swept away her own surrendered countrymen, spiriting them away to ‘outside’ the battle. This would be just him and Maya, and that meant… no more clones, apparently, and Aiden’s second false body fell apart. His true body surfaced from beneath the surface, a splash of water accompanying him as he was dragged into reality. Maya stayed where she was, indicating it was her real body.

Maybe. Probably. She was every bit as affected by blanket rules as everyone else was, but she was the only one who knew the exact limits. She could drop them at any time without him knowing, bluff their activation, or work through loopholes that she herself had put there.

It was like fighting a lawyer, but more fun because you could [Water Bullet] her. Unless she said otherwise, of course.

Maya twirled a wand like a conductor’s baton, and golden threads coalesced into a snake that struck at Aiden, silver venom dripping from its meter-long fangs. It bit down, meeting a bubble around Aiden, and while his Intent’s anchor deformed and bent, it didn’t pop.

Another bubble manifested around the snake, pulling it into a trap before it popped itself into a mass of seafoam. As the primary bubble around him also popped, Aiden pulled the rest of the foamy mass into a mantle and cape… along with a long beard made out of bubbles, plus elaborate white eyebrows. Because he could.

A single “Ha,” popped up in the Ascender group chat, confirming that someone was streaming the fight. Maybe someone was hiding in the shadow of one of the gas giants deeper in the system. There was usually some retiree hanging around any particularly good fights involving an active Ascender, providing a recording for everyone to heckle – and comb over for new tricks they could steal for themselves, of course. It wouldn’t be Sien streaming this one, so maybe it was Max or Lila?.

Aiden bowed and fell a hundred feet, allowing a wall of flame sweep over where he had been, then Aiden summoned his staff to hand and swept himself atop a giant wave, crashing down on Maya. He aimed himself directly on her head, giving the Gladiator the choice between getting hit by his spell and his foot. Given he was a mage, she should obviously take his boot over his spell.

Maya, alas, knew what his boots did and chose the wave. One day, he’d get her again.

She swept forward, and Aiden kept the momentum going by expanding the wave into an ocean and bringing it down on her. She was swept away by the millions of tons of water, at least until she set forth a gargled law that she couldn’t be moved.

He immediately flooded the water with mana, turning it into a host of skills and spells that slammed into Maya’s body.

Her arm broke into golden motes, and Aiden quickly reoriented to find her true location. If he understood her extant rule correctly – and it was still in effect, as he found [Summon Mana Monster] didn’t want to work – that meant her duplicate still needed to be ‘her’ in some way. He guessed it was some amount of mana, reserved and now dispersed under his attack.

Before she could revoke her immovability rule, he flooded the battlefield with mist and sent out three different forms of detection pulse – sonar, proprioceptive, and flash-boiling. That returned an area where his proprioception returned something that his sonar and temperature-change feedback disagreed with, and Aiden swept that area with an enormous torrent of water.

She changed it into a breeze. It was still a lot of air, so she didn’t get the visual of her hair gently blowing in the breeze she was obviously hoping for. Instead she looked like she stuck her head outside of a moving train, but it still parted around her harmlessly. That breeze then hardened into strips of golden fabric, which whipped around, hardened into spears, and struck like lightning.

Aiden’s seafoam cape sprang into action, blunting the attack enough that a more traditional [Abyssal Ablation] could protect him the rest of the way. It still chunked his already-low mana, so Aiden manifested a small glass of ocean and chugged it.

When the steam cleared in the wake of the lightning-ocean clash, Aiden was reclined in midair, then raised a toast to his coworker. Maya returned the gesture with a martini glass, then flicked the olive from her drink with a wink. Instantly, it vanished from where she was and appeared directly above Aiden’s head, only now it was easily three times as big as he was.

He responded by launching a [Tsunami] at the oversized vegetable, pushing it to the side, where it splashed into the water Aiden suddenly found himself floating in. Maya had taken his [Tsunami] into her martini glass, and now appeared to be thousands of feet tall, with Aiden swimming around in her drink.

“That’s a new one,” Aiden commented. “Are you copying me?”

“Ah you know,” her titanic voice thundered. “Sometimes you just need to look at something a bit differently.”

“Fair enough,” Aiden summoned a pontoon boat, cast [Guiding Star] and [Justified Winds], and picked up speed rapidly. He skipped across the waves of Maya’s drink while she loomed before him like some massive titan, raising the glass to her lips. Giant waves crested across the martini glass, and with one particularly sharp wave, Aiden used [Starsail] and broke free to surf among the skies.

Maya, meanwhile, took a solid ton of wood and canvas to the face, and she jolted backwards from the impact. Her armor kept her neck from snapping back, but it still knocked her out of her rhythm for a moment, which Aiden mercilessly capitalized on.

****

Maya Embers was deep in the depths, a golden, faceless sentinel shining where there was nothing to shine against. The water was pitch-black, for no light could exist this far down, here in this deepest part of the ocean. Depth may not have even been the right word, for depth implied she was some distance from the surface, and she wasn’t sure that such a thing even existed within Duke Water’s domain.

The pressure around her was unimaginable, threatening to overwhelm her if her resolve crumbled for so much as a moment, but it was forced to press against her own domain, and that was just as absolute. Around her, the inky water asserted that she was in the depths, she should drown. All things must breathe, she must breathe, she was a thing, all things must die.

All the world is my home, she countered, and the pressure lessened. How could it be overwhelming, crushing and drowning her, if the law said she was at home? She was comfortable at home, home brought her life, not death.

Of course, it was hardly an absolute, because attempting to directly counter Duke Waters’ domain with force was a losing prospect. Something lurking in the depths, some great terror, hovered just out of sight, a vague impression of teeth and tentacles and scales for whom it was a mercy that the light didn’t reveal its form, struck her.

This is not your home, it is mine.

I am a guest in your home,she revoked her prior Law and established a new one. The terror hesitated. Guest rights were an oddity, one it was unused to, yet she was clearly no guest, for her clothing was improper for this setting and she was obviously a being of earth and light, not one of water and darkness. She conceded, and her form changed. She took inspiration from various aquatic beasts who wished to only half commit to being human. It was a popular style in the Collective, from what she’d seen.

Half her normal body was back, her golden sentinel replaced with something that was half fish, half beautiful woman. Silver scales and golden hair, but a creature of the depths nonetheless. She had every bit as much inherent right to be in this eternal mire of shadows and water as the terror did, and the pressure resided. The creature hesitated, coiling and thinking just beyond the bounds of perception, and then Maya was back in her own body.

She blinked stars out of her eyes and found Aiden’s hand pressed right up against her face. Between his fingers, they locked eyes as she sensed he was still trying to drag her back into the depths… and then the pressure subsided, for no host would harm their guest. Of course, no guest would harm their host, so she quickly dropped that particular law and then projected an image of herself off to the side. Then, that became reality, and Duke Waters’ hand passed through the space where Maya herself had been a moment before. She quickly went invisible and made that reality, deciding to figure out where she existed later.

She attempted to trap him within an illusory prison, but Aiden was so impossibly hard to properly grasp, it was almost futile. Attacking him was like trying to squish a specific molecule of air while blinded. Even if you managed to somehow find the tiny thing, the simple act of grabbing it would make it move, and then if you hit it, that still wouldn’t actually break it. But then, he could be a giant when he wanted to be.

She was supposed to be the one who did fun stuff with perception, damnit.

Wanting to change the battlefield a little, Maya decided she was actually directly above where Waters was, and unleashed a massive thunderbolt that passed through his defenses as though it were an illusion- which it obviously was- and slammed into Waters’ chest and sent him sprawling.

Waters reoriented and swung his wand like a conductor’s baton to spawn a riptide, which she twisted to make it tear itself in half, then followed up with a hail of gravel concealing her return [Fireball]. He dispelled the illusion around most of the gravel, but in so doing set off the [Fireball]. The detonation rippled out, setting the magic around him ablaze and forcing him to bring a small ocean down on his own head just to put it out.

That ocean then drained into itself, coalescing into a glimmering blue-and-white knife seemingly made out of pure energy, and giving off faint wisps of bubbles like it was smoke.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Maya scowled. “Have you been talking to Max?”

Waters just grinned, telling her everything she needed to know. Two enormous stone pillars, each made out of glimmering crystal, shimmered into being on either side of Waters and slammed shut with him in the middle. Then they separated, revealing Waters was still grinning in the same place, so she slammed them shut a few more times for good measure, just to vent her frustration.

Waters’ blade flashed out and cut her spell in half, then flew towards her like it was drawn on an invisible tether, streaming bubbles in its wake. She made herself an illusion, then clenched her magic together to ensure that the reality of the illusion was such that it didn’t take damage from Waters’ willpower construct. If she allowed that reality to override her own, she was in serious trouble, but she rejected his reality and the knife ended up lodged in her torso, but without affecting her otherwise.

She projected her body elsewhere, and the knife didn’t come with her, so she started existing again and made an illusion of her casting a few hundred fireballs. Waters made a shield, and she shifted one of the fireballs to be real to confirm that she was attacking him. Then, she kept up the illusion of an endless barrage while she prepared something a bit more grandiose.

***

Aiden took the opportunity for reprieve when it was offered. Maya wasn’t bombarding him constantly with her overpowered silver flames, instead simply allowing for the illusion of constant attacks, and he steadied his ragged breathing by closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.

It smelled good. Like the ocean right after a storm. A bit of salt, a lot of freedom, and immense amounts of power. He took a sip of water, then dismissed the glass again. It had been long enough.

A wave of power erupted from his bubble, disrupting and deflecting the remaining real attacks and vanishing the false ones. Then a lance of pain struck him as a Law decreed he needed punishment. He’d ventured into the hidden garden, and he needed to be careful. Winding pathways led in every direction, twisting behind bushes, shrubs, and flowers. His feet were planted firmly on the ground, for no flying could happen in the garden, as all of the incredibly vivid foliage must be properly enjoyed from the paths only. Similarly, one had to experience the garden with their own eyes, so his spiritual sense was restricted to what he could physically see.

Stay on the path, don’t hurt the flowers, and keep your eyes open. There were probably more rules involved, but he could figure those out in time.

His boots pounded on the cobblestone path as he raced down one of the winding turns. A flash of gold caught his eye, but a second glance confirmed it was merely a glittery rose. A faint whistling caught his ear, and Aiden spun to confirm the presence of a silver arrow hurtling towards his back. The instant after that, he’d summoned eight water tentacles to smack the five invisible arrows out of their flight path. The visible arrow was an illusion, but he sidestepped it and allowed it to thud into the picture-perfect bark of a tree behind him.

The arrow vanished a moment later, as did the invisible ones in his tentacles, but now Aiden had a direction, and he continued his run, turning at the next of the many intersections and jetting down the miles-long pathways so fast that the world nearly blurred around him. He closed in on Maya quickly enough, as she skipped down the path ostensibly unaware of the massive tidal wave of power Aiden was bringing along with him. In practice, she probably had to act a certain way to maintain this garden of hyperreality, but he wasn’t about to let her just get away with that. So, he skidded to a stop, allowing the mass of water he’d been building up to surge forward.

Maya produced a staff out of thin air and gave it a sweep, turning much of the water into iridescent seafoam-blue butterflies. But while hundreds of the insects fluttered into the garden, there was a lot more water than that. The Gladiator took thousands of gallons to the face and was swept away along the path. He was very careful to allow none of the saltwater to harm the plants, and instead directed an iota of mana to ensuring his water cleaned the path, rather than dirty it.

Alas, the garden didn’t vanish like he’d been hoping, and it took four more exchanges before he finally managed to get a wave under her and fling her into the sky.

Instantly, the garden vanished and Aiden’s limitations were lifted. Now, they were just both hanging in the void, surrounded by nothing… so he created an ocean and dropped it on both of them.

The water sent Maya tumbling until she raised a golden shield, and it shone with light bright enough to shelter her inside. Aiden, meanwhile, called on ocean currents and swept her away. She responded by altering the direction of the ocean and breaking out of the side as though it were the surface. Aiden just sped up and burst out of the water in a fantastic, dolphin-like jump, reorienting in the blink of an eye and summoning a half-dozen glowing, razor-sharp discs of water. He substituted his wand for a staff and dove onto Maya, his discs slicing through the intervening space like glass.

She was forced down, closer to the ocean, and Aiden had his summoned leviathan breach the surface and drag her back down into the depths. At some point, she’d modified her Law that forbade clones in a way which enabled summoned monsters, and while she thought he hadn’t noticed what the butterflies meant… he had.

As soon as she was under the waves, Aiden reversed the direction of the ocean again, putting her at the very bottom. From there, he applied pressure, and cracks spiderwebbed across her light-shield.

Just as the shield broke, she contested his sense of up and down, this time eking out enough of a win to breach the surface once more. His leviathan still managed to keep its grip on her lower half though, and she was forced to render part of herself into an illusion to escape. She emerged from the ocean dripping with water and contempt, missing the lower third of her legs.

She shook herself like a dog, albeit a scowling one missing the lower half of its legs. “Come on, man. Do you know how long it’s going to take my legs to feel right after that?”

Her skirt flared out, obscuring Aiden’s view of her lower half, but when it settled, her feet were once again intact, steel boots and all. Aiden was never entirely certain how Maya’s reality manipulation translated to real healing, but he was fairly certain it was, at minimum, costly.

Rotating her feet, Maya said, “My turn.”

A flick of her wrist conjured a massive, glowing silver sword that swung through the air like it weighed nothing. Which was both because it didn’t weigh anything, and because it didn’t move at all. Instead, everything around the blade moved relative to it. Reality pushed and pulled and finally gave up.

All Aiden knew was that he’d lost half of his water-discs and had a tremendous gash running down his side. If it had been slightly more to the right, he’d have lost an arm. The injury resisted his standard healing, too, so he had to settle for freezing the wound closed. Probably something to do with the wound itself never properly happening, so he couldn’t heal what was theoretically healthy flesh.

He retrieved his wand, and with a dramatic flourish and series of flicks, sent his remaining water-discs tearing through space, spinning and leaving little droplets of water in their wake. Or as he liked to think of them, inverse bubbles. In other matchups, they served as perfect conduits to switch places with, but the trick didn’t work with Maya for many reasons, most notably her Laws.

He could overpower her, because he was far more geared to overwhelming displays of force than her Domain was readily able to answer, but doing so would be… inadvisable. His overall stamina was already waning, and he’d mostly resigned himself to going out with a splash, but huge and inefficient shows of force weren’t the way to make the biggest impact.

He also couldn’t go entirely all out. Emptying your willpower reserves cut off pretty much all Domain abilities until you had completely recovered, and for his particular fighting style, that would leave him entirely defenseless and out of the war altogether. And from the sounds of it, he’d need every bit of willpower he could scavenge in the coming years. Maya probably hadn’t been entirely joking about her teaming up with Yun Me ‘next time,’ and that would be a battle to remember.

Still, he was glad that he could fight Maya now, rather than Yun Me. The other woman had impressive abilities, all well-refined and masterful displays of magical and martial might honed over hundreds of thousands of years. It was honed to perfection, and while the Sects had enough pizzazz with their optimized skills as to still be interesting, there was a certain level of roteness with the other woman’s fighting style.

It was dull and boring.

But even if Aiden won here, he needed to be in a condition where he could fight in the next dozen battles if he was to stem the tide of this newest incursion into Empire space.

The first disk of water was spun onto Maya’s finger as a silk handkerchief, which she tossed into the air and dramatically swept through space, deflecting the second disk into it, where it vanished without a trace. She tried to repeat the trick with the third, but Aiden sped it up at the last second and it took her hand off at the wrist instead.

Then, in its wake, the water bubbles arrived.

Like a rainstorm from a nightmare, the droplets landed like bullets. Each one struck her armor with a tink, leaving dents at worst and breaking through entirely at best. She tried to do something, maybe turn them into raindrops and pull out an umbrella, but didn’t manage before the barrage finished off. Some of the bullets had flown past her, and they struck the planetary shield behind her with such force, it turned opaque.

She was pretty obviously trying to bait him into spending some of his energy breaking down the Empire’s own defenses, but it didn’t really matter. He’d already passed on an evacuation advisement to the fortress’ commander the moment Maya had revealed herself. He was expecting a notice that the planet had been evacuated any moment now, and at that point, the planet’s shields didn’t matter.

Like so many other times in this war, the point wasn’t to win, but to survive for the next battle.

Maya had finished taking the barrage of water, and Aiden caught the briefest flash of a black eye. She ran her hands down her body semi-alluringly, as though she were smoothing out a rumpled shirt, and then her armor was whole again.

Her skirt flared as she set herself before launching herself forward, even as Aiden strained to the side.

A dozen illusionary swords sprang into existence around him and began their best blender impression. He completed the impression by turning into water and feeding into a whirlpool, accelerating faster than the swords as they flickered between properly and only kind-of existing. Six swords shattered under his force, then a seventh swept in with a particularly dangerous air that he blocked with [Puddle Mirror]. The eighth through tenth passed through his watery form without any particular notes, but the final two cut into his very spirit, forcing him back to human and leaving an additional pair of gashes, before he shattered them with his Intent. Seafoam filled his wound and the swords erupted into clouds of bubbles.

That left him just enough time to dodge a metal disk to the face, but forced him to move into a flash of silvery light. He called on his Domain, and the silvery light dispersed like such an inconsequential set of sparkles on the surface of the ocean.

Maya refused to relent, and a unicorn with a sword for a horn dashed in, point leveled at his right eye.

Unable to conserve willpower, Aiden flared his Intent and vanished into the water, letting the attack flow through him.

“Water flows like cloth.”

Maya’s new Law turned the water into silk, but an ocean of silk was still an ocean, and Aiden’s control over the water persisted, translated through her Law just as surely as the last time she tried this trick, with fire.

Swirls of cloth engulfed him, twisting and pulling in every direction as he rose upon a column of silk, massive sheets of silk raising up like he was an actor in a play. Tidal waves of fabric rushed forward, wrapping Maya in a cocoon that she struggled to burst free from.

A mile-long strip of cloth sprang up and attached itself to Aiden’s shoulders, giving him the most magnificent cape he’d ever worn for a brief second, before Maya reverted her Law and it became water once more.

He’d been waiting for that, though, and an iceberg crashed into her. It shattered mere feet from her body, but Aiden kept enough control over it that it smashed into her face. Her armor flickered and glitched oddly for a moment, and then she was fine.

Maya glared at him and snapped her fingers, then Aiden’s temporary wound-patches vanished, letting blood pour out into the space around him once more. The blood coalesced into a massive monster, looming over him with some indistinct shape, then Aiden broke free of the illusion.

During the time he’d been unaware, he’d managed to lose his face, but he didn’t really need any of the organs which had suddenly stopped existing. The front of his head was just smooth, like he was a drawing in which the artist had stopped working after they got the body and hair down. The real downside was that he couldn’t stick his tongue out at Maya, which in all honesty was the biggest blow either of them had taken thus far.

“My face was that irresistible?” he asked. “You had to have it for yourself?”

Talking exclusively through the Domain, with no mouth to subconsciously channel the words through was tricky, but Aiden was nothing if not a master of ‘weird tricks you can do with your Domain.’

Perhaps he should write an EmpireNet article.

“But of course. Not often do I get this expression. Don’t you agree?” Maya spun the mask-like representation that was Aiden’s face, frozen with eyes wide and enough of a gap in his mouth to gasp.

She brightened, “I know! I can put it on the face of one of my helpers. It’ll do my mood wonders, having you as a footstool, having you kneeling at my feet, having you give me massages, maybe I’ll.”

She cut herself off, launching immediately into a new set of golden threads arcing delicately through the void. Simultaneously, a blade sprouted from Aiden’s chest, punching through from the inside of his armor and tearing through the enchanted metal weave like it was barely there. Then the sword went in two different directions, tearing his armor from him and leaving him bare-chested.

Aiden reasserted the reality that he hadn’t been stabbed. It didn’t save his armor, which he needed to snag and stash away in storage, but it did mean he didn’t have to fight with two swords stuck in his chest.

“If you wanted me shirtless,” he quipped while diving between Maya’s arcing strands of reality-altering. “All you had to do was ask!”

A second wand was pulled out of storage, and he overlapped the depths of the ocean with the depths of space, and the empty space around them was water, just like it always had been and always would be. Within his spirit, the construct of essence and willpower inched ever-closer to proper completion, but the pseudoskill didn’t coalesce into full reality quite yet. Maybe next time.

“And maybe lead by example,” he finished, utilizing the uncertain nature of [The Depths] to appear right behind Maya and drive a spike made of impossibly compressed water into her shoulder. Fractures grew across the Gladiator’s armor, and the stone crumbled and fell away, crushed by the immense pressure of the forever-deep water.

Underneath she was still wearing a suit of underarmor, but that quickly turned first into a swimsuit then vanished altogether as Maya kicked her feet, forming them into a silver tail while her upper half showed off bare skin. Naturally, her drifting golden hair still obscured everything, but Maya’s shapeshifting adapted her to the ocean biome well… but not well enough.

A tentacle of water, invisible against the pitch-black imposed reality of the deep ocean, yanked her tail and began to crush bones with its implacable grip. Then, a golden pair of scissors manifested and snipped the tentacle in half, before turning on Aiden himself like a chomping shark.

A current picked Aiden and moved him swiftly out of the way of the scissors, as well as carrying a school of tiny but ravenous flesh-eating shark monsters within striking distance of Maya. A giant kraken loomed in the darkness next to Aiden, and he crushed it mercilessly. [The Depths] were under nobody’s control, least of all his own, and it was dangerous down here. Admittedly, that was just the way he liked it. But that still meant all he could do was to be the scariest thing around, leaving the rest for everyone else to deal with.

Right on cue, the razor-sharp fin of one of the depth’s fishy flesh-eaters grazed Maya’s tail, drawing blood even as it spontaneously transformed into a roll of sushi the next instant. But now, fresh blood was in the water, and a cloud of finger-sized creatures descended upon Maya. Red began to fill the waters, then clouded it utterly, and then the red was a crackling fire, and they were back in space.

Maya picked up the blood-red flame in her palm, studying it with curious intent. “Such a fascinating little toy there, Aiden. I’m flattered. But don’t act like it’s going to be enough to work against me. I can tell even from here that it’s missing something, and I think you know that too. Now, are you going to drop it or will I have to break it?”

Aiden winced as Maya started picking at [The Depths], contained in a way that they should have never been.

Still, that didn’t mean he would give up. If she wanted to break his toy, he’d fight her every step of the way.

Red flames flickered blue-black, and smaller critters began to dart out, trying to savage Maya’s hands until she flicked them back into the flame, then contained that flame in a birdcage. That birdcage began to shrink, and Aiden pushed back with his Concept and Intent. A bubble appeared around the flame, but that was only shrunk by the inexorable cage of reality which Maya was weaving. The cage itself kept getting more solid as well, the gap between its wiry bars shrinking and the bars themselves multiplying while [The Depths] were severed more and more from the reality it was made to connect to.

His senses blurred, and he would have grit his teeth if he’d had any. He wanted to throw caution to the wind, commit to the fight utterly. Pour every last bit of himself onto the fire, unleash every last shred of power he could and show the entire realm the true terror of the deeps, but there was only one force stronger than his desire to never give up.

Timing.

And it wasn’t time yet.

The thrill of the fight called to him, telling him to commit his spirit to the pyre, but a fire blazed brightest when against the darkest night.

Still, it was tempting.

Oh so tempting.

He kept up the outermost layers of the skill, but pulled himself back from the core. If he let Maya crush the semi-skill now, he’d undergo full backlash from failing to make the new skill. And that wouldn’t do at all. But the flame was snuffed out nonetheless, and Aiden staggered back as though he’d taken the full force of its collapse.

Maya took a moment as she panted. “Fuck you! Really? Trying to play with reality with me around? That’s fucking insulting. Can you imagine if I had been beaten by that? I’d never live it down.”

“Yeah, because you’d be dead. Duh.”

“The audacity! When I kill you I’m going to turn your skull into a pot to piss in, water boy.”

Maya conducted the fabric of reality, and spears in every color sprang into existence, launching themselves at him in a coordinated symphony of destruction. Aiden’s spirit was genuinely sore, but he still followed his purest and finest-honed instinct. Illusionary spears struck his chest, real spears grazed his arms, and plenty of each didn’t come anywhere close.

Going with the flow of battle, Aiden counted as he waited for his moment.

A [Tidal Freeze] paired with a [Bubble Shield] locked the defensive shield down with Maya half inside, halting her momentum like she hit a wall. She immediately started creating a reality where she wasn’t locked down, but Aiden cast [Water Jet] right at her neck. The finger wide stream of water punched right through her already weakened and missing armor, impacting her spine and causing her body to go slack for an instant, before she corrected.

Aiden tried to capitalize on that brief moment, but Maya’s shield unraveled into strips of silver reality. He managed to impress on them to act like water enough that he could run down their length, weaving his own counterattack as he cast a net of high-pressure water at her.

It struck, carving furrows into her flesh, but then wrapped around her body and formed into new armor, blazing with power. Her nose, previously half-severed, glitched and was whole. Then her entire body glitched and suddenly there were five of her.

Each spun a staff, gathering threads of reality around them as they charged forwards. They weren’t clones, her first rule was still at least partially in effect, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous.

He dodged the first, flinched as the second one attacked and brought up an [Abyssal Ablation] to block its strike, then lost half of his left hand to the third.

He countered with a spike of water directed at that Maya, but it passed through while doing nothing. The fourth and fifth were met with a [Water Shield] and an opportunistic [Water Blade] to deflect them out of the way.

Ribbons of reality, strengthened into outright blades, began to fall, and Aiden found himself swiftly retreating as he tried to avoid them, only to bump into a solid wall that hadn’t been there a moment previously.

A blade of nothing sliced into his leg, then snaked its way through the inside of his body as Aiden yanked on it. At the end of the ribbon, an invisible woman was pulled along for the ride and into his elbow, striking with the full might of a [Water Hammer].

Maya’s helmet rang like a gong, and she started backwards before Aiden used [Octopus Assault] to pull her back closer. She got within arm’s reach, he reached out to grab her throat, and cast [Siphon].

The water in her cells started to be ripped from her as his spell battered through her spiritual defenses, but the spell was slow, and Maya struggled with all her might. She tried rendering herself into an illusion, but [Siphon] worked just fine on illusionary water too. She tried making herself into an earth elemental, but [Siphon] just turned hard rock into sand. Illusionary blades manifested and swung at him, but reinforcing his own reality and challenging hers was enough to have them break against his [Water Armor].

Her eyes turned towards where Aiden’s should have been, and a blade swiped close enough to Aiden’s face that he would have lost his nose if he still had one. Rippling silver and gold bands tugged against blue and clear streams of water as their powers clashed, in deadlock until one of them flinched….

Aiden sagged, the wisps of willpower he still had coiling into the depths of his spirit, and then he was blasted backwards, sans two and a half limbs and all of his hair.

He drifted aimlessly through the space for a moment, then pushed through. He shook himself, called his wand to his remaining hand, and set his resolve once more. Now that the momentum had faded, his every movement felt like it was being taken while wearing lead blankets. The thrill of the fight would banish those in an instant, but now he just felt tired.

Maya coughed dryly, then summoned a martini glass of water and took a swig. Aiden made her choke on it. As she recovered, he threw a barrage of [Flotsam] at her, but she turned the driftwood into a wooden chair and the metal debris into a pillow with a wave of her hand. “I win. Sore loser. So what was that anyway? You must have been working on it for a while, and man did that slip past my defenses.”

Aiden didn’t bother to hide anything, as he knew she’d learn as soon as a republic analyst looked at the recording of their fight. Or probably earlier, in the high likelihood someone in the Ascender chat said something.

“A modified [Siphon] meant to work on people. Tricky little move.” Aiden looked at the arm floating near Maya and gestured. “Throw me back my arm. I don’t feel like— You bitch. Daisies, really? You could have at least made it roses.”

“You tried to turn me into a mummy. That comes with consequences. Now fuck off and use your escape move. I don’t feel like chasing you down. I think you broke something in my hip and it’s not right anymore, fucking asshole.”

Maya was definitely roughed up as well, so while she wasn’t fresh, she was still running on mostly primary tactics. He might still be able to go a second round, running entirely on fumes. He had managed it before in their scuffles. The desire to not lose was stronger than the desire to win, but you couldn’t exclusively be on the attack and expect to win every fight. Maybe he could still pull out a win… but not today. The words of the commanders echoed throughout his mind that winning the battle wasn’t worth losing the war. Besides, his only major injuries were physical and his drained willpower. A quick stop by Melinda and a nap would have his sorted right out.

He muted his [AI] and the words stopped echoing.

He could at least have the last laugh. He sent a message to the Empire defenders, then snapped. Perfectly on cue, the shields around the fortress dropped and the defenders shot off, tearing into chaotic space.

Maya’s jaw dropped.

She flailed for a moment, grabbing her jaw and reattaching it. “You sneaky fuck! Fuck it, round two bitch!”

She flew at him, but Aiden just threw a mocking salute and dove under the surface. On the other side of this particular cleave in existence, Maya, her image distorted by the ripples of the water, impotently lashed out with her magic, but he was already gone. He looked up and started swimming, activating his call-home lifeboat. Its magic buoyed him up and back towards the capital. It might be a bit embarrassing to return to Fort Lightfoot with missing limbs, but his pride would survive.

Still, if he could have grinned, he would have.

He loved his job.