Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 245 (B3: 72): Vaunted Power

Of course, using Entropy’s inherent deterioration powers on water would create an explosive mixture. I was, in essence, creating rocket fuel the energy needed to spark that fuel into the kind of reaction that threw out planet-escaping levels of force. Little wonder that the entire vent erupted like the volcano had awoken with wrath.

I thought I had layered enough defences to safeguard myself fully. Reverence Everlife with its endless auric armour, Absorption to take in the heat, and Intake because why not, and I even tried sending out tendrils of Sacrifice to offer up the explosion’s extreme energy as tribute.

The thumping blast threw all that out of the window. My golden shield cracked and half-shattered as my body went sailing into the air.

I wasn’t knocked unconscious, despite feeling like I had been stuck thirty thousand feet under the ocean. My skull pounded, my nose was fountaining blood, and half my vision was red. But with the mental acuity I still retained through the blistering explosion, I managed to channel Gravity and Siphon to ensure that the downward portion of my flight ended quickly.

It wouldn’t do to fall into the pit of magma underneath us.

Now that I was somewhat free, I turned my attention to my injured arm. The throbbing pain had lessened, despite the fact that I hadn’t gotten time to use Pain Sense Control. That was because Reverence Everlife was already working on it even before I could actually focus on my terrible wound.

The golden shield had transformed into an almost solid aura, one that was wrapping around my listless limb almost like a cast of sorts. The weirdest thing was that it was automatically my arm back into position to reaffix it into the shoulder socket.

Wild. I’d had a feeling that I hadn’t scratched the surface of what Reverence Everlife was capable of. Now, I was finally seeing a more advanced side of it.

It seemed it could heal severe injuries.

I wondered how far it could go. This was just a dislocation. I had thought that I’d physically need to wrench my arm back into place, which would have been terrible because I had zero experience doing anything like that. But no. My wondrous Augmentation was taking care of it completely. Would it do the same for deep cuts and gashes? What if the limb was severed entirely?

Something I’d need to figure out—and possibly test—later. Right now, I had a battle I needed to finish.

Beyond me, the dust and debris were slowly clearing up from the site of the explosion. The blast had been so powerful, even my Framework had been obliterated. Well, so much for entropy deleting the Vaunted out of existence.

She was rising out of the dusty murk too, floating in the air on those icy wings I had noted earlier. I grinned. My last attack had wiped the smirk off her face.

Half her body was burned and blistered. Her armour had bent in places, broken in others, and melted to various degrees at several points. I had even managed to burn off half her hair.

“You go to great length to stop what you don’t understand,” she yelled across the crater. For all that she was wounded, she clearly wasn’t beaten yet.

“What’s there to not understand?” I asked. “You’re doing some kind of crazy ritual that I need to stop before it goes off. That I stopped, going by how I don’t see any living signs of either of your friends.”

“Why?” she asked back. “Why do you need to stop it?”

“Because you’re going to ruin Ring Four, possibly the entirety of Zairgon, while you go about bringing down a god or whatever other madness you’ve got planned.”

“And there you show your ignorance.” Her power was flaring around her, water revolving her while baring those sharp shards, steam hissing from her back like the exhaust of jet packs. “You know nothing of what’s truly going on. You know of what’s truly at stake, of how much time and effort and persistence all this has cost us.”

I thought about asking for clarification about the bullshit she was spouting, but she didn’t give me the chance to do so. Her spears shone to life.

They didn’t fire in the same way they had before. Instead, glinting rays emerged from the finger she was pointing at me, like a laser sight. The ice spear manifested right in front of said finger before immediately shooting at me like a missile.

It was good that Drain had reduced her Agility while improving mine. A quick burst of Flare to my side let me evade pretty easily. I had to do it a few more times in quick succession as she fired multiple of the spears, each one leaving behind a trail of glinting frost.

Then she was attacking herself. She shot through the air like a blue meteor, crashing towards me with her spear pointed straight at my heart.

Reflexive Mana took me out of the path at just the right time. I kept dodging, evading, while also trying to land a counterblow with my mace. Honestly, it was a small miracle I still had a hand on it. But we both kept missing each other, both of us moving too fast for our hits to land.

Except for the fact that she hadn’t been to hit me, as it turned out.

I should have been suspicious of the trails of the icy particles. As it was, while I was doing my best to both evade and strike, I missed the fact that every single shard was growing larger, turning into actual pieces of jagged ice. At one point, the Vaunted just stopped. No more attacking. No more rushing in my direction.

Instead, she offered me a cold smile and then slashed her glaive at a nearby icy shard while floating about twenty feet away from me.

Some instinct fired in warning and I immediately dropped by taking away the effect of Siphon, but I wasn’t fast enough. The swing from the Vaunted was mirrored in one of the shards floating around me, each one emitting the same blue slashing energy in a storm around me. They sliced and cut in with crackling power way too fast.

I cried out as I tried to create some distance. The sheer intensity of the blows had been way too high. One of them had broken through the golden armour of Reverence Everlife and slashed across my right eye, so now I was bleeding tears.

It took some effort not to panic. Half my vision was just . More than annoying, it was .

“What need do you have for eyes?” the Vaunted said from above, gloating in her advantageous position. “When you’re already blind to the true power this world has to offer.”

“Power taken by sacrificing innocents, by ruining the lives of others, by upending everything, isn’t power,” I said. “It’s cowardice.”

“You have no idea what you mean.”

“Oh, yeah?” The right side of my skull was throbbing, even as Mana Heal and Reverence Everlife tried to fix my eye. “Then why did you do all this in secret?”

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She didn’t answer, just looked down on me with growing coldness.

“Why did you betray the trust of Zairgon?” I continued. “Why go out of your way to take advantage of treacherous Great Houses, to create this subterfuge, to steal the Klevacite, to do any of this shit, huh? ”

“Because it’s .”

“ needed? Your stupid, grandiose ideas of calling down a god? What good are gods when you’ve got around you?”

“A mongrel like you would never understand. All you can see is the dirt. All you can taste is mud. This conversation ends here.”

A part of me felt like sighing. For someone who had seemed at least somewhat different from the other Claderovians so far, she had finally resorted to the same old tenet. The same haughty superiority that suggested she refused to see things from any other perspective save her own.

I wasn’t just wasting time trying to talk or understand what in the Pits was going on. Gravity was active. Both through Manifestation to call up multiple Gravity Orbs and through Ignition Charge bringing up Orbit.

My enemy shot at me. She was clearly trying to close the distance and attack physically, to take advantage of the fact that I was blind on one side.

I forced myself to keep moving with Manifestation and Flare sending me retreating backwards with greater and greater speed. Drain was no longer active, but my Aspects were still firing on all cylinders, especially since I tried to Sacrifice casts to boost the next one every second. My motion brought along all Gravity Orbs and magma orbiting with me.

Grumbling under her breath, the Vaunted threw the spear. It didn’t hit me. Instead, it just struck and exploded after hitting a Gravity Orb instead, the explosion quickly fading away to a sprinkle of icy dust and particles.

But I was wary of those now. Which was why I had applied Field Manipulation far below to draw up the magma. The burning liquid joined my Orbit. Bits floated on their own while others coagulated with the Gravity Orbs, gifting me my own ring of superheated satellites. The whole contraption spun faster and faster.

Needless to say, the Vaunted’s ice had been vaporized long ago. She was scowling now, clearly realizing that she’d have to go for a new tactic.

“This is what you’re capable of, isn’t it?” she said.

I grinned. “You’ve hardly scratched the surf—”

“Not, you fool.” She sighed. “I can’t believe I was entertaining the notion I’d be able to make you see reason. It’s just surprising you’ve been a thorn in of our endeavours.”

I didn’t pause the way I was making Orbit whirl all the burning debris around me, but I a little confused by what she meant. “What are you talking about? What endeavours?” Even as I voiced my question, my mind returned to the fact that Glonek was from Claderov. To when I learned from Gushal Uralivanth that Brasvay was moving their finances there too. “Wait…”

“We sent in a Scarseeker, after raising him higher than his worthless soul ever deserved, all so he could take over your pitiful Ring Four.” The Vaunted’s eyes were colder than ever. “We coerced a Great House of Zairgon to buy out your temple, and from there, own the entire region of the city it belonged to. But when you need something done, you need to do it yourself.”

“You…”

“. Don’t tell me you never figured it out? I was keeping track of you, you know. I saw you start to connect the dots with the information you acquired, especially after you visited our fair city. Surely you’ve got no room to be surprised.”

“I’m not surprised. I’m just… you know, at this point, there’s no point in me feeling anything except disdain at the sheer lack of empathy or anything in people like you. So all I’m going to say is that you can shut the fuck up and .”

The Vaunted cursed me out too. “The Pits will dissolve your soul when I’m through with your body, you ingrate of a cur.”

I threw one of the orbs spinning around me. Calling it just Gravity Orb would be inaccurate since there was roiling magma surrounding it now, but I didn’t have time for quibbling. With the amount of momentum I had driven into that orb by spinning it round and round, it shot like a meteor at my enemy.

Who didn’t dodge. Instead, the Vaunted just manifested her own Aspect in front of it. The collision of the burning orb and the wall of ice sent up a thunderous explosion of steam.

“Enough dawdling and waiting,” the Vaunted said, her voice echoing in the crater. “We end this now.”

Good call. In the cover provided by everything spinning with deadly intensity around me, I began preparing Starburst. It was the only thing I could rely on to take down a monster like her.

But the Vaunted was indeed done messing around too. Her Aspects manifested around her in a storm of obliterating power. Missiles of ice formed in every inch of space I could see, driven by overly pressurized steam, firing relentlessly against the wall of burning, orbiting mass around me.

Tendrils and waves of water crashed with hissing, steaming explosions against my defence. Spears of heavy blue power caused explosions that forced me to increase the radius of the orbit so I wasn’t affected.

Her assault was relentless.

I could see what she was going for, though. Wearing down everything I was orbiting around me bit by bit so that her actual attack could land with devastating force was her obvious plan. I could see it in the way she was holding back what felt like an iceberg—no, a —floating high over us both.

But I was maintaining my defence. I was using Manifestation to call up more Gravity Orbs, calling in the heat with Concentration, pulling up more magma with the cast of Field Manipulation that still hadn’t ended. I wasn’t letting her plan succeed.

Threaded Reinforcement had turned into livewires inside my body, every strand and string of mana turning into a buzzing line of pure power.

My mind kept trying to distract me from the immediacy of my circumstances. Right then, I was left wondering just how many people had seen the fireworks of our fight so far.

How many people were aware of the giant glacier floating over the side of Zairgon mountain?

“This ends here!” the Vaunted shouted. “Ross Moreland! The gods might have welcomed you, had you been willing to embrace them. But for me, their arms have spread wide for long enough.”

The glacier didn’t crash down. Instead, the Vaunted flew straight up into it.

Its surface cracked as she shoved inside the enormous icy mass, which immediately began glowing with deadly blue energy. Everything began shaking, the air shivering and the magma bouncing hard. The walls of the vent were cracking even more. What in the world was she doing?

Too late, I realized I should have tried taking her out with Starburst earlier. The issue of missing her entirely was what had stopped me, along with the fact that it wasn’t ready.

But it was now. Power burned so hard in my grasp, I could barely contain the boundless energy threatening to unleash. I was shaking hard along with the rest of the world, my arms trembling and burning away, my very soul feeling like it was being tugged out of my body.

“”

The Vaunted’s voice crashed in from above like the glacier that should have struck down instead.

“I did!” I shouted back. “I—”

She went on as though I hadn’t spoken. My words probably hadn’t even reached her from this far out. “”

The inverse icy mountain cracked with the sound of thunder. Blue magic crackled and jolted through it, compressing into a singular point. It turned so bright that even I had trouble keeping my eyes open, despite using Highlight.

Alright, that was it. I needed to blow that up from a distance. My arm thrust forward, all the energy I had gathered and compressed into—

The Vaunted’s comet slammed straight down, blitzing at me with a crack that felt like space itself was shattering. A violent shockwave spread out from the point she had launched herself from, crashing against Zairgon mountain to start an avalanche while also throwing a rain of icy dust over the rest of the city. Especially the rest of this side of Ring Four.

All of which I noted in the brief instant before our powers collided with another earth-and-sky-shattering impact.

I was slammed down and backwards, sent tumbling down into the magma that had also exploded outwards in the tremendous detonation that followed. Everything was bursting and erasing out of existence itself at our powers’ collision. I caught the lines of the ritual, the ones I had believed to be erased completely at the last explosion, coming to life again for some reason.

, the Vaunted had said.

Reverence Everlife cracked. Broke. Then my world was consumed in obliterating whiteness.