Arc 2 Final: Begin Of A New Order (3/4)

  As Luken, one with Gravor, and Reyn, the Lord of Shadow and Storm, crossed their mana, more than the surface of reality collided. It was not merely the encounter of two of the mightiest mortals Tirros had ever produced. It transcended the battle of a Chosen One who channeled the golden flame of a deity against a Paladin whose soul had merged with the unstable will of a demon.

  What collided in the depth of the rivals, beneath the foundation of this northern facility, were echoes. The remnants, the almost forgotten signatures, of two forces beyond mortal understanding. Two identities whose time lay millennia in the past. They had slumbered and been trapped in the cosmic planes of the Lower Realms until they were awakened by the passionate wrath of one and the cool desire for total order of the other.

  Reyn, in his arrogance, knew slightly more about this deeper layer of existence than the Paladin. He perhaps even felt justified in his endeavor, for he acted in the spirit of a principle that sought to correct the architecture itself. Yet, even his belief barely scratched the surface of what was truly at stake here. The true scope of the powers he directed was only partially known to him. He considered himself the conductor, but was merely a particularly pure channel.

  Luken likewise had no idea of the full truth of his new partner. He felt Gravor's tremendous, untamed power and emotional honesty, seeing him as a friend and an indispensable ally. But he did not know that the essence now pulsating through his veins was the natural, unstoppable response to Reyn's unrelenting principle. The fusion was an act of necessity, forced by the cosmic mechanisms themselves.

  Their confrontation was thus an inevitable collision of primal forces, projected into the bodies of two mortals.

  -

  As I, one with Gravor, and Reyn, the Lord of Shadow and Storm, clashed their mana, an inferno briefly erupted. It was a discharge that dwarfed every conventional spell. It was the storm of form against the fury of change. Our forces caused a shockwave of unprecedented magnitude, which was not only audible but physically devastating. The entire Tharnite facility groaned and moaned under the strain, and almost all remaining fighters staggered—even though not much was left of the rebels and Reyn’s army of shadow creatures.

  The gigantic platform we were standing on splintered at the edges, and even the extremely hard Tharnite stone of the floor developed deep, jagged cracks that spread across the surface like spiderwebs. Yet, these damages, however dramatic, apparently caused no significant harm to Reyn's dark ritual. The immense, gathered energy continued to flow unstoppably into the central crystal, where the luminous, eerie figure continued to take shape in the womb of the stone. The urgency almost ripped my chest open. I had to end this fight as quickly as possible!

  Gravor's new, glowing eye on my armor focused on Reyn, but my mind was dominated by raw rage and a panicked necessity. I charged at Reyn without any caution or tactical refinement, wildly striking at him with my long, black, gleaming claws. It was an attack carried by the pure force of the fusion, but devoid of any sword art.

  Reyn, whose golden eyes already knew the movement before my muscles executed it, dodged every blow effortlessly. It was an elegant choreography of absence. Admittedly, I had no real plan in my attack; it was a primitive, brute discharge of frustration. Instead, he countered with his Thunder Blade—the sword of pure, crackling electricity. The slash was fast and mercilessly aimed at my neck, and I only barely avoided it. The electrical heat hissed on my skin, the smell of burnt ozone hung in the air.

  I didn't rest for a single second, using the dynamic of my escape to activate my demonic wings, shooting forward again and ramming him in the side with my elbow. It was a blow that would have ripped an ordinary man in half. Unfortunately, it barely made Reyn stagger. The Golden Essence around him absorbed most of the kinetic energy, and he reacted with cold-blooded composure.

  He attacked again with Shadow Hands. Hundreds of pitch-black silhouettes shot out from the shadowed corners of the chamber and hissed toward me. The distraction was minor but deadly effective.

  I made my demonic sword appear in my right arm and cut through all the charging hands effortlessly. The shadows dissolved like smoke before the power of change. This brief moment of equilibrium and defensive silence gave me time to cast a quick, searching glance at the other battles taking place in the distance. Thanks to Gravor's heightened perception, I saw things with an unsettling clarity.

  Maira and Vin... they were definitely no longer having any problems.

  Narla, even from a distance, looked quite finished. Her movements were inhibited, her aggressiveness seemed overlaid with agony. I could clearly see that a part of her left cheek was missing—the red scales had given way to an ugly, open wound where Maira's infection had eaten away the tissue. Narla was fighting desperately with her greatsword, but Maira danced around her, her staff now glowing with an ominous green of advanced rot. Maira seemed to have no major injuries, her dark clothing was intact, her posture was that of a huntress slowly encircling her prey.

  Vin looked a bit more battered. I could clearly see through Gravor's enhanced perception that she was bleeding heavily from one arm. It was a deep, gaping wound, likely caused by Corven's blade. However, she didn't show it in the fight against Corven, because…

  Wait? What abilities was she using there?

  Dozens of small, nimble plant goblins were distracting the knight. They were green, stocky imps made of tangled vines and moss, barely knee-high, but of surprising speed. They leaped up Corven's armor, clogging his viewing slits, scratching at the joints, and tugging at his weapons. They were pure, chaotic manifestations of life that paralyzed Corven's mechanical precision. The knight seemed stunned; he had to use his blades and the cannon against these annoying, organic pests.

  While the goblins held him at bay, Vin's fingers elongated into razor-sharp thorny vines. She thrust them like spears into Corven's unprotected joint areas, forcing him into a permanent defensive posture.

  Yep, she definitely had no problems. She seemed to ignore the bleeding, her concentration cold and focused. Though I wondered when she had become so strong and innovative.

  These observations, this brief astonishment at the strength of my friends, which distracted me for a moment too long, instantly proved to be my undoing.

  Suddenly, I was ripped out of my observation. An impulse of cosmic mana, concentrated, silent, and devastating, hit me unrestrainedly right in the chest. It was not the golden fury or the blue electricity—it was the violet of pure kinetic force that Reyn had drawn from the ritual flow without any major gesture.

  The blow inevitably and brutally threw me down from the platform. I crashed onto the gigantic staircase, whose steps were already heavily damaged by the fight between Vin and Corven. My body slid over the stone and the cracks with a metallic groan of the armor before I came to a halt just a few meters away from Vin's fight. I landed not far from Vin, who had just seen the largest of her plant goblins bisected by Corven's sword.

  The impact shook me through, knocking the breath out of me. Reyn had shown me that seconds of inattention in this fight were paid for with total annihilation. I looked up at the platform where Reyn stood motionless, the electric sword lowered slightly, his eyes glowing gold, without a trace of triumph.

  He had simply removed me from the path.

  That bastard.

  I scrambled up, feeling the burning of the impact and the deep anger at my own foolishness. I was now in the midst of the others' skirmish, on the destroyed terrain of Vin's and Corven's battle. The urgency was now physical and immediate.

  The plant goblins around Vin let out a high, plant-like hiss as I landed, looking at me with their tiny green eyes before immediately refocusing on Corven.

  “Good thing you're here, Luken!” Vin cried breathlessly, without looking at me, as she delivered another thorny vine strike. “Now we have him!”

  I nodded, even though I didn't know exactly whom she meant. But the shockwave that hit me had woken me up. The plan, if there ever was one, was now clear. Reyn had removed me from the main stage. I had to fight my way back up—or finish what he had started here. I looked at the still-forming crystal embryo and gave my full attention to the fight.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  My anger and shame over the distraction were instantly converted into power. I allowed Gravor to deepen his control further. His presence grew stronger, pushing the pain of the impact aside. The scales on my armor became denser, now feeling like obsidian-like plates. My joints were filled with his animalistic agility; every movement was now more intuitive, faster. The sight from the demonic eye on my chest was even sharper, focused on the energy signatures of the battle.

  I didn't know what Vin had already done to Corven in the minutes of their one-on-one fight—the poisonous pollen and the plant goblins had likely driven his mechanical efficiency to ruin. But the guy completely lost it when he saw me, the new, complete fusion of Paladin and demon, before him.

  “I... I... you...” he stammered, horrified, his voice a metallic croak, distorted by the armor and the pollen. I saw both fear and naked fury in his eyes—the fury of the perfectionist whose system had collapsed.

  Then, in the middle of the heated battle, he surprised me profoundly.

  “I'm out,” he said resignedly. It was not a threat, but a cold, military assessment of the situation: He had become ineffective, his primary task had failed. He pulled a small, glowing crystal from a pouch on his armor. The next moment, without any after-effect or spell gesture, he was gone. A fleeting glimmer of silver, and the weapons knight Corven had teleported away, leaving the combat zone.

  Reyn, in the meantime, had stepped down from the platform onto the stairs—just a few steps below the main platform. He witnessed his champion's departure. He grimaced briefly, angrily, shattering his perfect facade for a fraction of a second.

  “Coward,” he whispered, the anger real, personal.

  But then he sighed briefly, smoothed the folds of his cloak, and immediately put on the perfect expression of absolute control again. A cold, composed smile returned.

  “Then I suppose I'll have to take on both of you,” he said calmly, as if the loss of his best fighter was nothing big at all. He looked at us, Vin and me, with a mix of weary contempt and unshakeable conviction.

  Yet, before he could do anything, before he could raise his Thunder Blade or launch another cosmic attack, Vin reacted with the ferocity of insulted nature. She hissed and pressed her glowing hands onto the destroyed Tharnite floor. A dull, unsettling rumble coursed through the staircase. Dozens of vines, thicker than tree trunks, shot up from the ground around Reyn instantly and loudly. They were not restraints in the true sense, but a massive, organic barricade that immediately wrapped around him like an eggshell. The tangle compacted into a solid, green cocoon of thorns and hardened bark.

  I knew that Reyn's power would distract this organic restraint for at most a minute—maybe less. But it was enough time. Enough time to finally get an unobstructed look at the crystal and understand exactly how we needed to prevent what. For myself, I already knew the answer: pure force.

  -

  After a search that felt like years, I, Arik, found a gap in the prisons between the Realms.

  The cell of Arcane Chalk and Golem Steel was designed to suppress any magical and physical interaction with the void space. But even the most perfect architecture has its flaws, especially when constructed by a Primordial whose focus was already on the next phase. Reyn had removed me to ignore me, but in that arrogance lay his weakness.

  I utilized the unique instability of my Ashblood essence. I couldn't teleport or liquefy through the massive structure, but I could internally attune myself to the dark energy of the void space itself. The essence of cosmic mana surrounding the cell was not perfectly inert; it was merely inaccessible.

  With inhuman patience and concentration—the ash of my body trembling from the effort—I found it: a tear in space. It was not a visible gap, but a minimal, energetic flaw in the very weave structure of reality, where Reyn's energy briefly hesitated when creating the prison. It was a flaw the Lord of Order had tried to patch when creating the cell, but which still existed.

  This tiny tear, however, was also something else: a gate to Tirros. To my friends. It was a direct channel through the cosmic isolation, a silent scream in the vacuum.

  I had to abandon my solid body. I had to transform my entire physical form into that fleeting cloud of ash that I only rarely used and only in extreme situations—the pure, unbound Ashblood state. To penetrate the cell, I had to dissolve my form down to the atomic level and then squeeze myself through the tear, which was narrower than a hair on a common map. The danger was total: if I failed, my molecules would be scattered and reordered—I would be erased.

  It required only one thing: an unimaginable quantum of sheer willpower. The determination to hold my existence in a secondary form and steer it through a cosmic needle eye, while the laws of space tried to tear me apart.

  And I had a hell of a lot of willpower.

  I didn't concentrate on the danger, but on the faces of my friends: Luken's furious determination, Maira's cold logic, Vin's unshakeable loyalty. I was not an unimportant factor; I was the unforeseen variable. I was the Ashblood who refused to exist in a pre-calculated system.

  With one last, internal shout of defiance, I dissolved my form. The ash no longer trickled off me; my entire body exploded into a gray, fine dust that was immediately caught by the suction force of the tear. The world around me became a stretching, tormented tunnel of light and darkness. The pain of dissociation was unbearable, yet I forced the ash to maintain form. I was nothing but a will crawling through a flaw in creation.

  And then, with a dry, unspectacular hiss at the edge of audibility, I was through. The walls of the cell were behind me.

  I materialized again. Not instantly, but in a painful, slow process—the ash condensed, bones formed, muscles contracted. I now stood in a completely different, rune-covered chamber of the facility. Something like a meditation room. I took a deep breath, feeling the adrenaline and the exhaustion.

  I was back. And Reyn would pay for taking me out of the game.

  -

  While Maira had possessed the tactical advantage against Narla from the start—Plague Magic was the perfect weapon against the Dragonborn's physical defenses—she hadn't emerged from the duel unscathed. A severe second-degree burn, stretching from her hand to her right shoulder, attested to Narla's merciless heat, which she couldn't entirely evade despite all her speed.

  Now, Narla lay defeated before her, trapped in a sticky, hardening layer that, in texture and color, resembled a mixture of pus and clotted blood—the concentrated, biological essence of Maira's worst curse. The Dragonborn writhed painfully, her corroded scales scraping against the tough secretion. It was over.

  Maira was reluctant to kill her before Reyn was defeated. Not out of mercy, but efficiency; Narla's death was secondary to ending the ritual. So she left the Dragon-Woman lying there, her movements inhibited by the magic.

  The rebels had won this part of the battle, even if hardly anything remained of their original group. Axos was nowhere to be seen after the bridge fight, and Arik was still missing without a trace. Maira lifted her head, took a deep breath of the tainted but silent air, and focused on the main duel.

  And then she heard it.

  A bang. A loud, shattering crack, mixed with the high-pitched sound of breaking, magical glass, which echoed from the center of the platform throughout the entire facility.

  Luken wouldn't possibly...

  Oh no!

  -

  I hammered blindly and forcefully with my clawed fist against the crystal's shield. Reyn was trapped in Vin's vine cocoons—a ticking time bomb that would explode any moment. I had to destroy the final stage of the ritual.

  I had almost breached the shield of pure, reinforced energy; the surface crackled and warped under each of my blows, as Vin strained and said with a gasp, "Hurry! I can't hold him much longer!" The vines around Reyn were already twitching and glowing, the energy of cosmic mana beginning to eat away the organic mass.

  So I struck faster. Harder. I charged my blows with even more of Gravor's raw fury; my demonic fist struck the shield in a rhythmic, relentless thunder. The fiery red eye on my armor pulsed in sync with my heartbeats.

  The shield finally gave way with the loud, high-pitched crack that Maira had heard. The magical remnants of the barrier sprayed into the air like fragile glass and disintegrated. The embryo—the luminous, eerie figure—was now exposed. It was almost fully formed, a silvery-golden entity of human size that pulsed within a capsule of shimmering mana, ready to be born into the world.

  So much for "no chance," I thought with a burst of wild, exhausted triumph.

  I drew back for the final strike, stretching my fist far back, charging it with even more of Gravor's boundless power. My body tensed like a bow. I had to control the secondary rage—this strike had to be pure and perfect. I knew Reyn could break out any second.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, concentrating the essence of destruction.

  "Time to end this," I whispered, my breath hissing, my muscles taut, the fist ready to strike.

  In that fraction of the decision, in the clash between my will and the final destruction, I heard a scream.

  "LUKEN! NO!"

  It was Maira. Her scream was not a warning of an approaching enemy; it was a scream of knowing panic, a scream signaling a different kind of danger. The tone was so urgent, so utterly directed against the destruction of the embryo, that I hesitated.

  Too long.

  In the next moment, Vin's vine shell burst. It was no simple tearing; Reyn's cosmic energy exploded from the cocoon, ripping the organic tissue into thousands of charred, sizzling shreds. Vin was hurled against the back step with a muffled cry.

  Reyn glowed all over his body in an ominous, all-consuming violet. It was the cosmic mana he was now drawing unfiltered from the ritual flow. The violet blazed like a vacuum fire, swallowing shadows, matter, light.

  His eyes no longer just burned golden—they were liquid gold; they radiated like the sun itself, filled with the cruel clarity of the Primordial Principle. He had abandoned control of the ritual to unleash himself. He was now a living, breathing catastrophe.

  I knew I had no more time. Maira's scream had faded, the warning ignored. I had to act.

  So I struck.

  My fist, amplified by the totality of Gravor's fury, raced toward the pulsating mana embryo suspended in its crystal nest.

  But Reyn was faster.

  At the exact moment my fist touched the embryo, Reyn, the radiating titan in violet fire, did not raise his weapon. He raised his hand.

  He unleashed a wave of violet-golden, sheer essence. It was not energy; it was the reversal of matter.

  The impact was silent, a vacuum of sound. The wave struck my fist and my entire body with a power that was not of this world. I felt Gravor's essence scream within me, felt the scales shatter, felt my bones disintegrate. Gravity exploded; my body became nothing more than a distorted, painful fragment.

  The last thought, before the world collapsed, was the hot, horrified realization: I missed him.

  And in the next moment, everything went black.