Chapter 280 (Patreon)

Chapter 280

Zack was wholly unsurprised that Allie challenged the new Ascenders to a fight. He probably would have done it himself, though he would have at least waited a little longer, and been a bit more polite about it. First impressions, and all that. But at least this way, he would get to fight them right away, thanks to his partner’s proclivities.

It was oft annoying, but useful on occasion.

The moment Allie teleported the room to the canyon they used for sparring he was already flying backward to dodge the falling table, even as the rest of Team Zero flew backwards to clear the area.

Perfect.

He had been waiting years to find out exactly what precisely Quill could do, and the reveal that he was Matthew Moore, one of the first candidates they’d eliminated, was a shock that didn’t help anything. Zack had investigated Matthew at his Tier 10 tournament and found him to be a fairly standard fighter, no more than the normal number of tricks up his sleeves. It was likely that his mana Concept had more depth and power than had been shown, which would go some ways towards explaining Quill’s feats, but reviewing his past assessments, it still didn’t quite line up.

There had to be something more there, and he was assuredly going to get a glimpse in a few moments.

Allie flickered, returning with a very particular chest that used to be at the very bottom of a carefully-organized stack. A few seconds later, he was out of the clothes he was wearing and inside a surprisingly nostalgic robe. It was heavier than he remembered, having since grown accustomed to wearing same-Tier armor, but the spiritual weight the enchantments carried felt like the embrace of an old friend.

He hadn’t worn these clothes in eighty years, longer in subjective time, but in many ways it felt like just yesterday. It was odd to feel sentimental for a suit of armor scavenged from a rift and that needed replacing every half-dozen delves, but there was a certain level of simplicity and satisfaction inherent to the action. And, it would be nice to not fight teams specifically outfitted and trained to shut down all his favorite tricks.

A couple of back-and-forth pings had established general ground rules for the spar, and by and large they’d hold back on any truly last-resort tactics, full Willpower exhaustion, and any generally grevious wounds. They weren’t trying to kill one another, just feel each other out in the way only Ascenders could appreciate.

Quill, Torch, and Scoop were already outfitted, having quickly swapped to what would have been their newest armor. Allie was off convincing Bulwark to oversee them, and while they waited, he recalibrated what he could use for this spar, and coordinated with Allie to ensure that they would be on as even a footing as they could be. Comparatively little in the way of Intent usage, scaled-back skill potency, avoiding use of their higher-tier skills when possible, and certainly no usage of their Power Talents. Meanwhile, the other three were completely unrestricted. It was impossible to truly return to where they’d been nearly half their life ago, when adjusting for time dilation, but they could at least attempt to be fair. While it went unspoken, Zack knew that he and Allie alike would be taking it a bit easy on the newcomers. It wouldn’t do to end the fight before they properly got their measure.

Zack took a moment to inspect Torch and noted that she was using the shield and spear that she used as Torch, but her armor, while outwardly similar, was far darker and infused with blood mana.

So the blood magic was her main combat power. He would potentially need to throw out a number of strategies he had thought of to counter the pyromancer, but hopefully there was something salvageable from them. Blood was an exceedingly uncommon element to fight with, so there wasn’t much in the way of literature he could draw on for reference if she acted as more than an alternative water mage.

Scoop seemed to fight in line with her bloodline, judging by her armor and frozen staff, which limited the scope of what new tricks she might pull out. A number of news stations had attempted to call her out as a false Ascender, but history was not kind to those who doubted the legitimacy of the mantle. No leader in the past hundred thousand years had allowed a charlatan to finish The Path and represent their Great Power as an Ascender; such deceptions never lasted long and universally disgraced all involved beyond measure.

The moment General Darrow was outside of the canyon, the match began.

In less time than it would take most people to even use a skill, Allie teleported mere inches away from all three of their opponents, her daggers flashing in an attempt to eliminate the Ascenders before they could even properly react. The blades, empowered with her Talent and Domain, were sharp enough to cut space, and anything vulnerable to physical trauma fell before their might.

Her attack cleaved through Torch, bounced off a set of light blue mana armor Quill had summoned, and was blocked by a [Bulwark] the instant before it would have cleaved Scoop in half and she was back at his side before the three had finished reacting.

Had he transferred the durability of his Talent armor to his defensive spells, perhaps? It was difficult to tell how Quill had managed to have such powerful defensive tools, but Allie would certainly tear through them with a few more strikes, even if her probing attack hadn’t finished the fight. Still, at least they’d gotten Torch… Ah, no. The Ascender flickered red for a moment, turning into blood and fixing the infinitely thin cut that Allie had removed her head with.

Then Torch, Quill, and Scoop began to flare with magic as they activated their skills and charged.

Zack cast a pair of spells meant to enhance Allie’s daggers with decay and her body with lightning, his partner appearing just as she was needed for the buffs to actually connect. The next instant, she was gone, and with a sweep of his staff Zack unleashed two dozen [Mana Bolt]s, each a unique aspect to test for weaknesses in their defenses. As they approached the trio, Zack felt a fairly insistent force trying to dispel them and tear his attack apart, but he easily pushed past the effect. Quill cast a [Bulwark] to block the assault, but Zack responded with a force [Laser Blast] to break the shield before it could block the rest of his attacks.

His own spell made a hole through the opposing shield just large enough for his first volley to pass through, before Quill reinforced his shield and the damage closed. The volley splashed without much effect against the blue armor, and from his mana sight, he judged that the sand attack had done marginally more damage than the other spells. None had done much, though. As he swept himself up on a column of air, Zack started summoning clouds of sand to start harassing the opposing team.

Allie was busy jumping between the three of them, forcing them to focus on her and not him. Even then, her attacks weren’t especially firm. After her initial attack, she was simply probing their defenses, wearing them down a bit, rather than trying to finish them off. This was a friendly spar, after all.

Quill was fending her off with excellent sword-play, while Torch and Scoop had each summoned assistance- a clone made of blood from Torch, and a vaguely bipedal mass of ice for Scoop- to keep Allie on the defensive as well.

Zack unleashed his attacks, sandblasting the trio, and Allie made her proper move, teleporting behind Quill and stabbing him in the neck.

Implausibly, she missed. Zack wasn’t entirely sure how that was possible, but she was blocked from an immediate follow-up strike by a sword warding off her probing attacks. He must have had a fairly firm spatial lock in his immediate surroundings, or else Allie would have stabbed the man no matter the distance he was buying for himself.

Quill teleported, and Allie followed immediately behind, a single attack continued uninterrupted from Quill’s attempted escape. The man brought up a forearm to block the strike, but Allie twisted space to still stab Quill directly in the gut.

This time, her attack broke through, but barely. She was immediately forced back by a combination of raw repulsive force and an incredibly large blast of lightning. Zack blunted a lot of the attack with his ongoing sandstorm, the raw power of the assault turning branching streams of sand into slightly muddy glass. He took those shards and exploded them back at Quill but the other Ascender didn’t even seem to notice the shrapnel.

Allie reappeared right in front of Scoop, only lightly singed by Zack’s estimation. Her blades flashed down, but a powerful, icy wind engulfed the area around Scoop, turning Zack’s sandstorm into a blizzard. He reasserted control a moment later, but frowned as Scoop kept contesting him. She must have been expending serious amounts of mana for that.

He’d dealt with worse, and soon the blizzard was a sandstorm once again. Still, it foiled Allie’s attack long enough for Torch and her clone to flank his partner. Allie teleported behind the real Torch, but a coiling tendril of blood manifested from thin air and tried to wrap itself around her arm, forcing her to teleport a few inches to the right and continue her attack.

Suddenly, Quill and Torch had swapped places, but Allie once again followed the teleport and landed a strike on Torch, cutting deep into her shoulder. A geyser of blood lanced out, nearly spraying Allie in the face, but she bent space to make it miss. Then it looped back around, spreading into a blanket that Allie was forced to teleport to dodge.

The blood simply returned to Torch’s shoulder and sealed up the wound on its way in. Zack couldn’t tell if there had been any lingering damage, as even the decay effect, strong enough to rot Tier 27 monsters to dust in moments, didn’t seem to have taken hold. Zack had taken advantage of the momentary weakness to force sand through the gaps in Torch’s armor and was currently turning them into miniature whirlwinds, trying to sandblast Torch’s eyes into paste, but the moment he first tried the helmet had filled with blood, and he refocused his efforts to re-open the wound Allie had inflicted but they were closed before he could do any real damage.

Allie had returned to harry Scoop once more, but had been stymied by the Ascender riding around inside her summoned elemental, and Quill’s continual attacks. Though Zack rendered the ice elemental into rubble with just a few moments of focused sand-blasting, that didn’t do much to help his partner. Even attempting to cut open a huge swath of space had been parried by Quill, a move that stumped both of them. Torch’s clone wasn’t making things any easier, displaying enough combat prowess to keep Shadow from staying still for even a second with its reckless charges.

Over to his side, the real Torch had pulled her way out of his sandstorm and was quickly closing in on him. Hundreds, even thousands of blood pellets, like a [Water Bullet] but harder than steel, were already pelting him which forced him to drop his attacks and put up defenses. Just as she was just about to reach him, Zack was suddenly elsewhere, as Allie teleported him to the opposite side of his storm compared to where he had been.

Quill took advantage of Allie’s momentary distraction, and struck at her with his sword. Two copies of said sword, each made of neutral mana, also closed in on his partner, as did a wicked [Ice Spike] and a spear thrust from Torch’s clone. She gracefully backflipped, passing through the space which didn’t exist between all the attacks.

Zack formed a rope of sand and sent it at Quill, trying to tie the man down. As it connected, Quill’s armor, followed almost immediately by his mana swords, transformed into a hardened crystal, and a blast of wind and repulsion pushed the sand away forcefully enough that Zack nearly lost control of it.

Torch re-entered the fight with Allie, stepping in for Quill as the man suddenly lost all weight, and was sent tumbling through the sandstorm. Then, he usurped the sand around him and began riding the wind. His sword shifted subtly, and he thrust it under himself like it was a flying sword. Zack didn’t even have time to react as the unstoppable force was suddenly within feet of him.

Allie was forced to abandon her engagement with Torch and Scoop to pull Zack out of the line of fire, but he left a parting gift for Quill in the form of a targeted joint dispel and mana bomb, each right in Quill’s path. Quill narrowly dodged the trigger by ducking out of the way, but Zack activated it manually, and sent the other Ascender tumbling. Unfortunately, it looked like the armor he was wearing hadn’t so much as flickered, but hopefully he had come out on top in the mana exchange.

All three were burning mana at a truly prodigious rate. He knew that Quill, or rather Matthew, rather publicly had a Concept that boosted his own mana regeneration and that of those around him, but he hadn’t expected it to be so strong. Their Minkalla run had ended with Mind Over Matter, so he could no doubt keep up the effect nigh-infinitely, but that didn’t explain just how the effect was so powerful.

A flash of red caught the corner of his eye. Blood poured out from Quill’s form, a veritable waterfall of the substance cascading into the valley. Torch and her clone waited at the bottom, directing the veritable tidal wave of blood into a cohesive form and sending at him and Allie. The world turned red as the combined attack barreled down on them, and Zack’s panic spiked.

Fuelled by the sudden shock, Zack blasted past Torch’s control over the spell, disrupting it far more easily than her clone had been, and-

And very nearly used his Tier 25 Talent to turn it into an illusion. He mentally cursed Allie for the restriction that only really affected him, and very lightly called upon his Intent to snuff out the entire working. It collapsed in on itself, splashing into a surprisingly large drop of liquid mana. Zack dismissed his Anchor, and then there was no sign of the massive attack.

All three of Torch, Quill, and Scoop froze for a split second in surprise, so quickly most people wouldn’t even notice it, but Zack punished it mercilessly as he whipped his sandstorm back into high gear. Blades of sand raked across Scoop, forcing the mage to raise a potent barrier of wind to deflect it.

Before the Ascender could raise a barrier more solid than just air, Allie teleported in next to Scoop, but the fox burst into a cloud of snow and flew back towards Quill for cover. Zack stilled the air and called up a hail of fire, forcing Scoop out of the elemental form in a scramble.

She attempted to teleport away, but Allie was already on her, and Zack countered her next half-dozen skills as she tried to save herself. Then Allie’s attacks landed, scoring lines across her back that bubbled with caustic mana. Torch moved in mere moments later, wrestling with Zack’s spell with sublime control, but to no avail. She made an additional clone and sent it towards Zack, while the first charged in and warded off Allie’s follow-up attacks against Scoop. After Allie dodged the first attack, the spear broke into a dozen questing tendrils of blood and forced Allie to teleport out.

As the new Torch clone approached him, Zack was simply moved to the opposite end of the battlefield without so much as a flicker, maintaining his minor sandstorm with ease.

It was then that Quill made his move. Summoning an orb of total darkness to hand, Zack felt reality sharpen and the local gravity increased substantially, disrupting his flight and attack spells alike. As he stumbled in the air, both Quill and Torch launched themselves at him, and Scoop fired a glittering ray of ice that he was able to fairly easily counter, fizzling it into a bit of chilled mist.

Allie appeared in front of him, intercepting each of Quill and Torch’s main attacks with a dagger each, but the ribbons of blood and two additional swords went unblocked, incredibly.

Well, he could take care of that.

But to do so he needed to release his lingering control over the sandstorms, regretfully releasing Scoop from the last of the battering sands. In exchange, he usurped one of the crystalline swords and used it to block the other, then summoned an aura of lightning to lash out at the encroaching tendrils of blood.

The lightning conducted down the tendrils, only to be negated as the blood turned into scarlet flames which he lost control of. That was negated with a mix of earth and ice mana, and he counterattacked with a sun [Laser Blast], covering for a barrage of crystal, ice, and metal [Shard Volley]. The blood warrior simply tanked most of the attack with her shield, cutting the solitary remaining ice shard in half with a flicking tendril of blood and sending it spinning into the distance.

He also unleashed another scouring blast of sand at Quill, beginning to abrade at his armor until Scoop entered the contest with an attempted dispelling. She was partially successful, but Zack maintained enough control over his spells, and usurped a small measure of her own, to change the scorching heat of the initial attack into a frigid assault partially fueled by Scoop herself.

He didn’t escape wholly unscathed, his own armor being rimed with frost. With a flex of his skills and Intent, he shed the clinging ice at an unfortunately high cost of mana before Scoop could grab into it and punish him for his maneuver. It wasn’t enough to fully save him either, as Quill and Torch relentlessly pursued his moment of weakness. Allie intercepted all of Quill’s attacks, the man having re-summoned the sword he’d usurped, and Zack dispelled the spells empowering Torch’s attacks.

He also attempted to dispel the clone attacking him, but it was weirdly resistant to his attempt. The struggle for control still opened up enough room for Allie’s cloak to fly from her shoulders and tie the clone up, leaving only the real spear to nigh-effortlessly pierce through all of his layered defenses and score a deep wound in his torso. Simultaneously, another gash opened on his leg, though Zack couldn’t identify what had caused it.

Inside of him, his blood began to roil as a foreign force sought to claim it, but he flushed out the attempt with a blast of dispelling healing mana. Space fractured around him as Allie punched through the spatial locks they were under, and then they were elsewhere. Instantly, the three enemy Ascenders began to chase them down, but Allie had moved them far enough that they still had a few moments to breathe. Honestly, it was impressive they knew so quickly just what way they’d went.

“Mental effect on Scoop’s ice, seems less threatening than it is. Separate Quill from the others, his Concept has to be what’s keeping them going. Once we take one of them out the others will fall quickly,” Zack said as he patched up his wounds, preventing them from worsening until the dedicated healers could see to them. A punctured gut and severed femoral artery. He had dealt with worse this week.

“The clone is sturdy, more than it has any right to be. Scoop has more summons up her sleeves, it’s not just the basic ice one, or from a normal skill. Don’t get caught by her slows, they’re a tad chilly.” As she spoke, the violet cloak that entangled Torch’s clone dematerialized and then reappeared around Allie’s shoulders, no worse for wear. “Hey, this is fun, right? So much better than just telling each other what we can do.”

As he looked to their opponents, Scoop had reverted to her fox form, staff held in her mouth, tiara stopped from falling off by one ear, and sporting a number of cuts along her flanks that Torch patched up with blood magic-based healing. They each had some form of crystalline armor ability, Torch with golden crystals that radiated blood mana, Scoop having frozen her fur into what looked like ablative ice armor, and Quill used… Now that he had a chance to study it, it wasn’t just summoned crystals from crystal magic, but mana crystals, not that it made any sense. His floating swords registered the same.

Did they coordinate their defensive abilities for aesthetic purposes?

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Zack smiled as he prepared another spell.

They needed to take out one of the trio at least, and between Quill’s general nature as a frontliner and Torch’s status as a phoenix, they’d be the hardest to eliminate. Granted, their ground rules had included Torch tapping out if she would otherwise trigger a resurrection, but it would be foolish to assume that was all she’d have as a healing ability.

Allie swept through, separating the trio and pulling Torch and Quill off to the side and into a functionally-inescapable spatial dome, leaving Scoop for Zack to focus on.

He withdrew Codex, and after a moment of communing with his growth spellbook, settled on a plan of attack. He fired three lava-aspected [Cutting Halo]s, dedicating the rings of molten stone to ruthlessly hunting down Scoop. Just as the attacks reached her, she skillfully dispelled the magic sustaining the rings with [Dispelling Wind], then froze them solid with a surge of frost.

Zack immediately sent a pulse of earth magic at the now obsidian rings, and violently shattered them before they could hit the ground. Scoop shielded herself, naturally, but even as Allie was fending off two Ascenders and two clones, she used her spatial control to turn the expanding cloud of shrapnel back on itself and curve around Scoop’s shield, shredding through much of her armor and puncturing her skin and muscle. Scoop stayed upright and summoned a pair of elementals to sweep her away, but Zack usurped the spell from her and redoubled his efforts. Sound rattled her bones, shards of glass lacerated her face and limbs before melting and encasing her in a crystalline cocoon, and lightning left her limbs spasming.

She fought back, and Zack very nearly lost control over the spells he was using to keep her immobilized, but he held firm. He kept pushing inwards, looking to sever her limbs, but she managed to literally freeze him out. Still, a moment later, he received a ping that she was too spent to continue.

Zack released his hold, and Scoop dropped to the ground. She shattered the glass encasing her, then limped off to the sidelines. There, Bulwark was already working on patching her together as she watched the rest of her team face off against Allie.

His partner was still doing an admirable job keeping Quill and Torch contained, but Zack could tell that she was stretching herself to do so. Still, she could hold them long enough for him to charge up something really impressive. A dark mass grew before him, empowering a potent yet constrained stormcloud with the spare mana left in his growth staff.  Two hundred thousand mana ready to destroy anything it encountered. Once it was ready he unleashed it, the cloud nearly as solid as stone without even a flicker of lightning to indicate its true nature.

Allie teleported back next to Zack, grinning madly even as she bled from a dozen wounds, just as Zack’s stormcloud reached Quill and Torch. Allie had done her job and prevented them from escaping, stopping any attempts at mounting a defense.

Quill leaped in front of the storm-orb, but instead of having his armor blasted off and knocking him out of the fight altogether, his blue crystalline armor turned black for the briefest of moments. Quill extended a hand, and a beam of black nothingness shot out and intercepted the stormcloud, cutting through it and lancing towards Zack.

With a resounding boom, the jet black beam cut through the roiling storm, detonating the spell structure and causing the entire thing to erupt in a massive explosion of lightning, deafening thunder, and winds strong enough to strip a mortal to the bone. Curiously, the beam turned to a more normal blue-white six feet away from Quill.

The first bolt of lightning struck against Quill’s pitch-black armor without so much as a ripple, but the armor returned to its white-blue crystalline form in time for the second, third, and a dozen other forms of attack to crack and break away the crystalline armor.

Finally.

The armor reformed nearly as quickly as it was breaking, but Allie was merciless in punishing the few gaps it did open up. Zack directed the flailing explosion as best as he could, trying to coordinate lightning, thunder, and winds to strike at weakened points for his partner to exploit. It was challenging, as Quill’s counterattack had dispersed most of the attack, but he still made it work, and Quill took enough direct hits from Allie that he was surprised the man hadn’t tapped out.

But instead, he simply maintained that inexorable, overwhelming beam of mana. Codex had spun up a multi-layered shield, but it was breaking under the concerted assault. Zack tried to usurp the spell, but it slipped between his metaphorical fingers faster than he could properly grip it.

One shield fell, then two, and three, and finally, Zack returned Codex to his spirit before they might get hurt. Instead, Zack reached out with his considerable mana control and a trickle of his Intent to pull on the structure of this spell, and take it for himself.

He formed a small force field around his staff to disperse the beam, but the cost even for this small deflection was draining him. Fortunately, his staff was absorbing the waste mana of the spell at a tremendous rate, but not enough to make up for his own expenditure.

Waste Not.

Want Not.

His Domain was all about efficiency, and he knew he could outlast any mage in a battle of control and attrition, let alone a melee fighter.

Instead of fighting for control over the wasteful spell, he simply created a weak point in the spell and let the mana ribbon and feed his shield. It still did tremendous damage, but it was well within his control limits to deflect and block. The longer he battled the spell, the more he realized how much more of it there was, how much mana was being spent on this single ability. It was sloppy, too. The mana was controlled well enough considering how much of it there was, but it was the kind of control that Zack would have expected to see from an experienced delver, not a veteran soldier.

Not from an Ascender.

It didn’t make sense.

Just as he felt he was about to burn out his mana channels to keep up with the battle, he messaged Allie to help him, and instantly, a dozen knives lodged into Quill’s armor, forcing him to end the struggle. Only a scant few had managed to actually strike flesh, but it was enough of a threat that he couldn’t afford to stand there and attempt to overpower Zack.

Her attacks of opportunity still left Allie open to counterattacks from Torch, who was ferociously attacking with four clones. His partner had done an excellent job avoiding what was, by all accounts, five exceptionally good spear-fighters working in perfect harmony, but even she hadn’t gone unscathed. She was a lot better off than Torch, though. Allie was perhaps the best dagger-wielder in the Empire, even before her command over space was utilized, and she’d torn the golden crystal armor to shreds, even cutting off several pieces of armor underneath. Torch wasn’t bleeding despite several gashes on her body, and while her clones were made of blood, their lack of armor meant they had taken far more attacks, and bands of decay were spreading across them like ink in a glass of water.

Allie dodged the first spear, teleported around the second, flipped over the third, sliced at Quill from ten feet away to bait out the fourth, and landed an actual attack that broke through the blue crystal armor as the fifth attack grazed her side.

Zack was impressed. Normally, when someone tried to stab Allie in the head, they missed by a few feet. It didn’t make it past Allie’s armor, but it did force his partner to turn her attention back to the squad of Torch instead of pressuring Quill.

Quill, for his part, froze in place as Allie’s [Paralyzing Strike] took hold, and his movements were somewhat jerky. Despite that he managed to start moving sooner than Zack expected and he knew they needed to step it up.

Feeling ragged but determined to win, Zack infused his steps with lightning to rush toward Quill, with a plan in mind to end this fight for good. He withdrew Codex and called to hand a carefully-constructed [Piercing Shot] infused [Mana Slash] formed from light, plasma, and metal. He’d used the combo often in the past to pierce even the most potent of armors, and this would be no different. He empowered it further with his staff, its mana reserves, and even a non-trivial amount of his own willpower. Quill attempted to dodge, but the spell was not so easily avoided. It connected, and sliced through the crystalline armor, tore a gouge into the armor beneath, and nearly severed Quill’s leg at the thigh.

Quill grunted in pain, but that wasn’t Zack’s goal. With his armor down, and bare flesh exposed, Zack pulled out his favorite trick he had found while on The Path.

[Inspect Reserves] was a minor divination spell, used to analyze the specific structure and characteristics of spells that reserved mana. Few people used it.

When Zack used his Talent to aspect the spell to mist mana, it did rather the opposite: any active reserved spell would cause the reserved mana to dissipate in the spirit, often causing an opposing fighter to lose more than half their mana in an instant. Used later into a fight, it was oftentimes an instant win. Given the mana Quill had expended, he could not possibly have much mana left, and could not regenerate more through his Concept in time for it to matter.

No one could fight without mana, not at this level.

Using a paltry three hundred and twenty-six mana, a small white ball shot out from Zack’s hand and hit Quill in the exposed thigh, doing visually nothing, but accomplishing everything.

Retrieving his rapier from his ring, Zack ran up to stab Quill in the skull. Clean, quick, and there was no way for him to defend against the attack, not with the disparity in what spells they had boosting them.

Quill barely even seemed to notice.

Just before Zack’s blade hit Quill’s skull to end the fight, his left hand came up with impossible speed to grab Zack’s blade, even as the armor reappeared far too quickly. Zack tried to pull his blade away, but the man was too strong. Zack wasn’t the strongest person around by any means, usually just utilizing [Arcane Manipulation] to fake it, but Quill was holding onto the Tier 27 blade Zack had completed the Path of Ascension with, in his bare hand without it leaving so much as a mark.

Still holding on to Zack’s rapier, Quill lifted his own sword and swung it at Zack’s neck, faster than he could possibly dodge. It was only thanks to Allie warping space to her limit that allowed Zack to drop his blade and escape from the clutches of Quill.

Codex, even in his spirit, was throwing out dozens of improbable theorems for how Quill managed to rebuild his armor so quickly, but he didn’t have time to pay attention. Allie teleported him out of the melee where Torch was ready to run him through from behind and they regrouped.

Or no, that was the clone. It only had a spear and shield. It had become proper flesh at some point, instead of a mass of blood, but he couldn’t tell the difference between it and the original.

“Well fuck me sideways and upside down. That combo always works. Did you fuck it up?”

Zack didn’t dignify her surely rhetorical questioning of his abilities, but instead shared what he had learned.

“He's incredibly strong. Stronger than a pure fighter should be. Don’t risk taking one of his attacks head on.”

“Well the blood babe isn’t any easier. I did my dagger trick to the head but she’s still going. Barely even slowed down.”

Zack wanted to frown, but before he could, he felt a massive spell engulfing their surroundings.

Allie reacted the moment he flinched and teleported them miles into the air above the valley.

A valley that was no longer there.

The entire mile-long valley had slammed itself shut like the jaws of an earth elemental.

The display of raw power involved in reshaping a landscape ten Tiers above them so quickly was mind-boggling, but before he could properly adjust, he felt the atmosphere around them fall under Quill’s control as well. The pressure began to rise, and millions of air blades began to form in an area that spanned miles to each side.

A desperate move, but Zack sensed an opportunity to turn a trump card back on its wielder. It had to be a talisman of some kind for that large of a working. Most likely, an attempt to overpower him with raw mana, a move that had failed time and time again.

He always enjoyed when he could snuff out his opponents hopes and spells in a single move.

It was just efficient.

Want Not, he told the world with his Intent, and the world responded, redirecting the spell responsible for the working to him.

Power flowed through him, and Zack struggled to get it under control. As the total mana rapidly blew past five million he expected the flow to stop but the power kept coming, and a struggle turned into a losing battle, then into an uncontainable torrent as the mana blew past what he could control.

The moment that happened there was a massive pop of mana, and then Zack knew only darkness.