Chapter: 767 - Zenith (3) (Patreon)

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Rane headbutted one of the Leshkin, the melon-like head detonating from the force of the hit, along with the imparted magic. It was a shame that even such a blow wasn’t lethal.

Force swept around him, deflecting incoming roots and other manifested weaponry, even as Talons and Archons danced and wove around him.

They were nearly sixty fighters clashing with six, and they were barely holding their own.

Rane was the rock in the center of the churning melee, acting to shelter and defend his allies as much as assaulting the foes before them.

It was frustrating, as it meant he couldn’t truly take down any of the foes, but as he couldn’t have fought six on his own, he was grateful for the others at his side.

He counted his blessings as he could somehow feel the hollowness behind these peak Leshkin in their every attack.

It was as if they were ready to receive a power that simply wasn’t there to back them up, and even the shell was terrible to defy.

While they didn’t speak, the intelligence in their eyes was unmistakable, and the strategy in their tactics was beyond question.

They worked as smoothly as a single entity, and hard work from the Talons and Rane’s Reforged resilience and reflexes had kept those clashing with the Leshkin from having already lost quite a few of their number.

Even so, they were cycling through Talons at an alarming rate, the powerful warriors taking wounds that would have outright slain the less physical Archons they were fighting alongside.

So, in truth, I am just one among those on the defensive, and not even the most magically powerful.

He did find it funnily ironic that all the Talons were more advanced than he, now. I’ll ascend when the time is right.

Force chopped down before rolling into a slash across Rane’s body, leaving his other hand free to punch out and deflect another shard of black metal.

Several roots cut toward his face, and his magic flattened him down to the ground, the roots still razors over head.

Then, he felt it, roots coming from underneath.

Six—one from each of the powerful Leshkin—and absolutely packed with power, purpose, and metaphysical weight.

He willed himself into the sanctum, but he was blocked by the united will of the Leshkin. They couldn’t have kept him out for long, but they didn’t need long.

His defensive magics triggered, but the barriers and myriad vectors of attack meant he couldn’t avoid them all.

As a last ditch plan, he checked the dimensions of magic—a vector he was still not great at considering—and found that thorns and fibrous blades waited even there.

Rane snarled, feeding power into his armor in preparation to take the hit.

This was going to hurt, but he would endure. He had to. His allies needed him.

The roots spiked upward, but a wave of void washed across the ground, momentarily breaking the momentum of the attacks before a lupine body slammed into Rane’s side, triggering his defensive magics even as it imparted greater force than he could have quickly managed.

Two bodies hit the ground and rolled.

Rane popped to his feet, wiping something hot and sticky from his eyes.

The sireling whimpered, twitching slightly, but otherwise not accomplishing much.

His back legs and tail were gone, his less advanced body torn raggedly asunder by the attack that had been meant for Rane.

Rane roared, lunging forward, obliterating a storm of roots and projectiles as they sought to finish the young wolf off.

“Archon healing, your pack, or a quick death.” Rane’s voice came from his power as much as his throat. Even though there was a question in it, the tone conveyed the lack of ambiguity in the options before the sireling.

There was no hesitation from the frothing, lupine jaws. “Death.”

“Thank you.” Rane didn’t wait for a response. He spun and beheaded the sireling, continuing the strike through the ground to bring his blade up and intercept another attack.

The Leshkin knew he was a keystone for their forces, despite not being among the most power-filled of their number.

He’d been careless, and someone else had been forced to drag him from danger. He could feel the wolf’s spirit already flying northeast, back toward Vidarra.

Rane’s gaze hardened, and his soul burned.

Even so, he didn’t let unthinking rage take him. This battlefield would not be aided by such a combatant.

Instead, he let his anger crystalize, turning cold within him. He would not be taken off guard again.

Rane’s gaze swept the battlefield even as he interposed himself to protect a Defender hurtling blades of glass at the Leshkin. Master Limmestare grunted even though the attacks tore chunks out of Rane’s armor. “Thank you, Master Rane.”

“Of course. Good to have you with us.”

The Pack was taking a slight edge in the clash up above. On the ground, the gated and Talons were at least holding their own against the powerful Leshkin.

All too near at hand though… He growled again. The arcane lines were bending under the powerful assault of commander automata, and they likely wouldn’t be able to hold without support.

The fact that he couldn’t see the Black Legion leader made him nervous, especially since he was sure he’d have felt the thing’s death.

Rane wasn’t free. The Talons were switching out so often to keep this front secure that he didn’t think that they’d be able to go to help yet.

His wife caught his eyes, and he made his choice, sending a pulse of sensation through their bond along with a message through Enar.

She should be able to interfere there.

His leg jerked sideways as his magics moved him out of the way, and he growled again, refocusing on keeping those with him alive.

*

Terry flickered around the battlefield, ensuring he wasn’t in any lines of attack from his little hatchling as she continued to bias this hunting ground toward the outnumbered predators.

She was just picking up a good amount of momentum when she suddenly stopped in clear surprise before she vanished, clearly called somewhere else.

Terry sighed, chirping in mild irritation, but he supposed she’d done enough.

It was his turn again.

He spotted the once-more-quadrupedal porcine elk-kin and felt himself salivate.

This was to tip the battle. The fact that he got a meal out of it was incidental.

Terry flickered in, his talons lashing out and clashing with the magics of the antlers. The things most inconvenient to his palate.

With a squawk of effort, he put his full weight and power behind the endingedge—the magics now fully available after his rebirth and Tala’s Ascending—and overcame the resistance, shearing off first one, then the other antler.

The second was harder both because he was more spent and because the other members of the herd noticed and moved to reinforce all the antlers present.

They were too slow.

When the first antler was cut away, Terry felt an interesting lessening of the creature. its aura—its power—somehow seeming closer to that of a Paragon now than it had just a moment earlier.

He’d seen other antlers broken off, or removed in one manner or other, and there hadn’t been this diminishing…

He let out a cry to triumph as he cut through the second antler, his endingtalons breaking more than the physical connection.

Even with the oddities, the terror bird didn’t hesitate. As soon as the second magic-saturated weapon was shorn free, Terry expanded, flickering into position and snapping up the arch-pig in a single, glorious chomp.

The higher battle between elk-kin and Pack members seemed almost to freeze in utter surprise. They could all feel the void and reality within Terry working as powerfully as the magic, utterly severing the piglet from its domain even as it was consumed.

Into that momentary hesitation, Walden sprang around sluggish antlers of his current foe and lunged, taking one of his siblings low in the legs and chest before jerking upward and hurtling the larger but weaker elk to arc across much of the clash.

The moment of shock was broken, and battle resumed in earnest.

*

Tala wasn’t ready to drive home her power yet.

She needed the Forest Spirit off the board, and she couldn’t do that herself.

She needed the Leshkin dealt with, but she was relying on others for that as well.

If this was to be a true victory, she needed to do it right. They all did.

Even so, she was able to carve devastation through the ranks of simple Black Legion Commanders.

She grinned within her helmet at that description even as she sent out staccato cracks through the air with flickering portals and projectiles of myriad kinds.

Tungsten spheres blasted through rank upon rank, fracturing the automata and forcing them to waste time and energy affecting repairs.

Siege orbs detonated in blankets of cold and ice, their distribution far more precise, providing that mundane materiality to the Eskau and Pillars best suited to use it.

Iron and reality iron spikes in ballistic form targeted senior commanders—when she could get close without them withdrawing—embedding as pairs to give her and Alat leverage to tear free the soulcores of those higher-order abominations.

She did not drive spikes into the ground, which no one commented on.

The arcanes fighting alongside and around her were using every weapon, technique, and concept at their disposal with a singular, ubiquitous exception.

Each and every one of them had a nail tucked into their belt, unused and unconsidered, at least by them.

Alat was very focused on them and what they were to be for, but Tala wasn’t involved, not yet.

Flow carved through any that stood before Tala, but she had become a shark among the fish, the entire battle shifting and rolling to keep out of her direct reach, the automata taking minor damage to shift position rather than remain to face her and destruction.

Fighting her wasn’t their task.

Tala’s focus shifted to her perception of Verity, returning to the superficial with ever more rapidity.

His face was as impassive as ever, but the reality field around him roiled against its current deployment in the dimensions of magic.

Tossing him starward had been a gamble, one which had gained her and her side much, but the payment was about to come due.

She wasn’t quite ready yet, but she couldn’t simply delay him further, not without dumping in the unprocessed ingredients before they were ready to catalyze.

They would have to actually fight once he arrived. As such, she wouldn’t let an opportunity go unutilized.

She juked toward a final cluster, allowing the arcanes there to gain the upper hand as the Black Legion tried to shift position to avoid her, despite her now moving the other way.

Then, she blasted back toward the location she’d thrown Verity from, her mouth opening and the searing blast of her ending breath tearing through the world.

She’d made one particular upgrade to this ability even while most aspects had stayed the same.

The breath had always been a thing of dissolution power in all but its purest form.

She added in elements of cohesion as the lance shot forth, bright with inner fire. The proper application of cohesion forced the various reactions to more closely align with her desired outcome and that outcome was utter devastation, contained to a far smaller zone than otherwise would have occurred.

*

Verity was forewarned by his primes, but that still didn’t provide as much as he’d have hoped.

He slammed back into the superficial, landing among a sandblaster of magics that tore at his very being.

They were braided with void and reality danced around the edges. Dissolution magic was aided by powers of the void, and contained and concentrated by reality-backed cohesion.

It was a firestorm as the very makeup of mundane matter was torn apart and recombined in ways that were wholly destructive, breaking them apart once more and rendering the process into a self-propelling grinding horror.

Reality resonated as he appeared in the middle of that, his very presence scrubbing the last remnants of magic from the cavalcade, but he held his disruption back from the encasing sphere. He had no desire to blast this outward onto his allies and enemies alike. Though, that was mainly because he believed his enemies were more likely capable of weathering it than his allies.

His exterior was scoured of the minor imperfections and detritus that he’d picked up over the campaign, his ascension had been one of power and purpose more than a change of physical form… at least in most of the ways that could be easily determined. As such, his form was essentially that which he’d had for centuries. Now, it was cleaned and polished as it had been when he was new.

He looked around in the moments that followed, nodding as he pulled out his sword, the entirety of the conflagration draining into its form, adding to his understanding of the concepts of ending within the scope of reality.

“Thank you, Eskau of War. I had not understood that reality could work in that way. You have given me a gift.” His words cut through the surrounding battle with ease.

“Are you grateful enough to let me repair what is damaged?” She asked such pointless questions.

“Would you allow a friend to suffer if you could take the pain from them in an instant?”

“Yes.”

When his eyebrows rose, she continued.

“If there were good reason to do so, or it would cause the deaths of many others just to give them relief a little quicker? I would absolutely have them wait.”

He shook his head and sighed. “Those who die would keep your friend sick, or make them sick once more, long after you were no longer around to cure them. This is not a debate on how to repair reality. Your allies hurt that which I seek to cure. You are on the wrong side. You could bring our purpose to perfect fulfillment. If all were as you, and they could be, then reality would never be in danger again.”

Her armored shoulder sagged just slightly. “I will not build my family—nor my future—on the ocean of blood you seek to spill.”

Verity nodded, having already known the outcome. “As I suspected. See.”

He reached out with that command, and opened her eyes to the suffering of reality. He sought only to pull away ignorance rather than attack, and as such, he hoped to succeed.

Verity was proved correct as his injunction landed.

In that fractional moment, the woman screamed.

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