BT IV - Chapter 32

One shout calling for a runner to alert the rest of the army later, and Micah was off.  He abandoned his horse, casting Flight on himself, Leeka, Drekt, Trevor, Esther and Eris and taking to the air.  The spell cost some mana, but it was faster than a horse.  Maybe not on the thick paving stones of the highway they had been taking to the border, but over open sand, the spell’s mobility was unmatched.

Plus, all magic came easier to him now.  It was like merging with his past lives had raised his affinities even further, beyond what should have been his body’s capacity.  Before the ritual, Micah’s mana pools were all over 10,000, making a low level spell like Flight a trivial expenditure, but now?  He had regenerated half of the meager mana used to empower the spell by the time they made it to the battle lines drawn by the first and second battalions.

Pereston had a similar 1000 man formation made up of traditional soldiers in gleaming armor and wielding axes and spears that was engaged in hand to hand combat with the second battalion.  They didn’t concern Micah.  The Sandrovok unit’s higher levels and veteran status would carry them to victory before too long.

The real problem was the eastern flank where the first battalion was struggling with the irregular forgotten soldiers.  Flashes of green light marked firebolts, and the skeletal birds flapped overhead, reaching down with tentacles of magic to pluck the unprotected souls from the soldiers’ bodies.

If it was only that, Micah wouldn’t have been worried.  The soldiers didn’t have a proper defense against the forgotten’s attacks so his presence would have been needed, but at the same time, the actual fight would have been inconsequential.

What worried him was the massive floating crystal that was carving a line through the center of the Sandrovok unit.  It was tall, hovering a pace off the sand and standing almost fifteen paces above that.  The gem couldn’t attack, but it protected a field that simulated the chaotic energies of Elsewhere.  Anything that stepped within range would find its body dissolving as their bones and organs lost cohesion.

More importantly, it was connected by streamers of energy, invisible to the naked eye, to the flock of daemonic birds that were preying on the soldiers.  Each soul ripped from the front line was fed into the construct, empowering the desolation field and causing it to grow marginally larger.

Micah had no idea how many spirits it had already consumed, but by the time he arrived, its aura spread almost 30 paces in either direction, a wake of deformed and half rotted bodies dotting the churning sand.

He launched a Pressure Spear from the air, entirely unsurprised when the anti life field barely rippled in response to his attack.  The mana disappeared almost instantly, leaving behind nothing to control the cylinder of compressed air left by the spell.  By the time it hit the war machine, it was little more than a harmless breeze.

Telivern and Ravi dove into the flock of birds.  The stag chasing and herding the strangely nimble skeletons while Ravi pounced on them, gleefully tearing them apart with her paws before leaping toward the next monster that had been prepared for her by Telivern.  Whenever one of the creatures sought to counter attack, Leeka’s arrows would arrive like a bolt from the blue to disrupt their attacks.

Meanwhile, Drekt, Trevor, Eris and Esther dove into the forgotten’s ranks.  Trevor and Drekt brought up the fore, precise and lighting quick thrusts from Trevor keeping the cultists on their heels while Drekt’s cleaver crashed through their armor of green flames.  In the rear, Eris and Esther didn’t kill nearly as many of the daemon worshippers, but they more than held their own.

Esther fought in a similar fashion to Trevor, quick footwork and constant thrusts warding off the sword armed cultists.  Eris on the other hand was a dervish.  The young woman had truly grown into her own over the months of constant fighting.  Her martial art and water magic made her almost impossible to pinpoint, a haze of shimmering rainbows following in her wake as she used her twin swords to deflect any attack that came anywhere near her or Esther.

Eris lacked the strength to punch through a cultist’s fire veil, but by the same token, even when they began to launch blasts of flame at her, none came anywhere near her, only striking mirages created by her magic and speed.

Micah nodded once.  As tough as the battle was, his friends would be fine for a short while on their own.  He’d already cast Regeneration and Haste on the lot of them on the flight over.  So long as he could remove the centerpiece of the Pereston attack, he would be able to support them and turn the battle’s tide in a matter of minutes.

With a deep breath, he switched spells.  Vacuum was level 5, and one of the few pieces of air magic that Micah still needed to use anything approaching a chant on.  A quick phrase and a swell of magic later, and his mana crashed into the gem’s barrier.

This time there was a contest.  Micah could feel his Arcana skills activating and struggling against the crystal’s barrier.  Trying to force his mana to stay in the proper shape was like pushing a sledge up a mountain.  At first, it barely resisted his attack and Micah plowed through its defenses.  Then, the grade increased.  More and more of Micah’s willpower was being devoted to pressing the attack home.

By the time the spell went off, Micah was sweating and its radius was barely as large as his forearm.  A chunk disappeared from the gem’s outer shell, leaving a webwork of cracks that leaked liquid flame.

As one, every member of the forgotten and the flock of skeletal birds ceased their activity and stared soundlessly at Micah.  That gave his team time to bring a handful of them down and the soldiers to solidify their battle lines, but it wasn’t enough to change the flow of the battle.

Then, all of them began launching attacks at Micah simultaneously.  Wordlessly, he cast Foresight, and as the spell began to click into place he felt… something just out of reach.  His spell form was efficient and it let the caster peer into the future, but somehow Micah knew that it was just a child’s toy compared to the true power of time.

So he pushed.  An hour seemed to pass in an eyeblink.  Micah’s breath came in short, ragged gasps and his face was covered in sweat as he stretched his worn concentration to its breaking point.  Then, he kept going.

Deep in his soul, Dakkora’s analytical mind lent its power to his as Micah unwound the invisible mana channels that formed the runes of the spell and rewrote them in an instant.  The spell was impossibly complex, beyond anything he had ever experienced or even heard about before.  Dakkora’s crown burned on his head as its enchantments struggled to aid him in the impossible task of deciphering and remaking the spell.

Every glyph was made up of smaller symbols which in turn were crafted from a webwork of individual sigils.  Micah felt like each piece of the spellform was a jigsaw puzzle in its own right, all of which he needed to assemble in the second before the army’s attacks landed.

As resilient as he was, hundreds of blasts of green soulfire at once would injure him, and there was no promise that his unusually resilient soul would be enough to stop the entire flock of bird monsters at once.  It would be easier for him to dodge.  With Haste active there was no doubt in Micah’s mind that he could make more than half of the attacks miss, but that would mean abandoning the moment of inspiration that was washing over him.

Instead, he dove deeper, time slowing from a crawl to a standstill as he forced everything he was and more into reworking the spell.  Andres crept out of the shadows, erasing his worry for himself and his friends so that Micah could focus on the magic.  Then Kylie added her will as well.

A warm glow seemed to suffuse Micah.  Tension, exhaustion, strain, and time itself all seemed to fade away, letting him and Dakkora devote themselves but nothing to the calculations.  The boundaries between lives and personalities that had been fading ruptured entirely.

In that one moment, everything stopped.  Micah opened his eyes to a world made of porcelain and glass.  An existence of beautiful shapes that meant nothing.  Underneath it, was the truth.  Time, gravity, electricity, even life itself.  They were all just constructs drawn from the mists of Elsewhere, solidified and given form by the gods’ will and artifice.

He looked up into the sky and caught his breath.  Tremendous glyphs cast from throbbing liquid lightning filled the suddenly dark world.  This was the truth.  The final truth.

Every spell he had cast to date was simply using mana to shape runes, requests that called upon the great primal magics that ruled Karell.  He didn’t bother.  Micah’s hand reached up into the night sky, grasping hold of one of the impossibly complex shapes and demanded that it bend to his will.

There was no request.  No offering of mana and begging that the forces that governed the world gift him some scrap or crumb of power.  Instead Micah saw what he wanted, and took it.

Strings of runes unfurled themselves before him, a map defining the exact scope and terms of the spell.  Micah didn’t even bother to look closely at them.  He didn’t need to.  They were true and correct because they were an aspect of him, an extension of his will.

He blinked and the sun was back in the sky obscuring the primal runes, but he could still feel them.  Hidden and waiting to be called upon by the millions of spellcasters that dotted Karell’s surface.

The spell snapped into place and the world around him rippled.  Micah could see the vectors where the incoming attacks would travel, but that was only the smallest effect of the spell.  Unlike when he slowed time without a spell, he could move at his normal speed.

Micah’s movements were undoubtedly a blur to the rest of the world, but to him, it was as easy for him to avoid the incoming attack as a stroll through the market.  He simply stepped to the side and ducked, casually working his way through the mess of energy blasts and grasping soul chunks.

As he walked, Micah drew Dakkora’s scepter from the sheath he’d had made for it, twirling the weapon once in his hand like a baton before he pointed it at the huge glowing crystal.  A pair of crystal spears, the results of the enchantment ritual beneath Sandrovok’s palace, lifted themselves from his back and hovered in the air in front of him.

The gem was bleeding magic.  His previous attack had damaged it, and now that the birds were focusing on him rather than the imperial soldiers, depriving the item of its steady diet of souls, he could feel its aura slowly retracting.

If he gave the thing an hour or so, the wound he had inflicted on it would likely destroy the diamond on its own without him needing to lift another finger.  That said, the damage that it would deal to the army formation below him in that time would be catastrophic.  Absently, he flew in short quick spirals, dodging the array of attacks flying in his direction.

The two spears zipped forward, powered by the pressure of his will channeled through the scepter rather than anything approaching magic.  He could feel the difference now.  The power of Elsewhere warred with the magic created by the great runes.  It sought to rip and tear at their bindings, to free the mist that the gods had used as paint on the canvas of Karell to create order and magic itself.

But that wasn’t the only power in Micah’s arsenal.  His raw will, grown and honed into a weapon over lifetime after lifetime was exactly the sort of ability that would be just as at home in Elsewhere as it was here on Karell.

The barrier did nothing.  The spears were made from a substance resistant to Elsewhere’s corruption, and the power driving them forward was as natural as the primal daemons themselves.

The weapons plunged through the gem, cracking through its exterior like it was a thin layer of ice atop a washbasin on a winter morning.  They traveled through the glowing and pulsing heart of the war machine, a mass of pilfered soul energy that was being stripped of its essence to power a small portal to Elsewhere at the crystals’ heart.

Then, his spear penetrated the portal itself, cutting the hole in space and time.  It fizzled and shorted out, the force keeping it moored to Karell struggling to retain its cohesion after being stabbed by Micah’s will.

He willed his spell to stop, and time returned to its normal flow.  The light deep inside the crystal flickered and guttered out.  It listed to the side, slumping into the sand even as the remaining bird monsters shuddered and crashed down from the sky, like puppets with their tethers cut.

It burst into flame.  The two holes drilled in its sides erupting with blue fire that grew so bright that Micah needed to shield his eyes. Cracks, glowing with their own internal light spread across its surface, growing in size as the leaking soul magic began to melt the ultra hard gemstone that made up the war machine.

Only about half of the cultists were still functional.  All of them were standing, but with the destruction of the diamond, a good portion of them froze, immobile and catatonic even as fatal attacks rained down upon them.

None of them activated their fire veils.  They simply stood still and died as arrows and spells claimed their lives.  In a matter of seconds, the tone of the battle had shifted completely.  There were still some among the forgotten that were fighting back, but they seemed weaker.  Their powers didn’t strike as hard and they had lost their ability to focus.

The battle faded from Micah’s mind as a wave of experience washed over him.  His eyes widened as he struggled to comprehend the enormity of the power flowing into him.  It was leaps and bounds more than any dungeon boss he’d ever defeated.  Even the greater daemons he’d devoured could barely hold a candle to the influx of raw energy.

It was the souls.  Every person that had died at the hands of the cultists or the birds was stored inside the crystal.  It converted them into the energy needed to project the annihilation field, but the system that ran Karell didn’t count those spirits as ‘dead’.  If they were, the great runes would rescue the souls and return them to the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth.

The destruction of the crystal finally released those souls, and the process recognized Micah as their killer.  In one second, he gained experience from over 5000 kills.  Most of those lives were of forgotten or low level blessed, but enough were from imperial soldiers or powerful blessed in Pereston that had tried to resist Baron Hurden’s takeover to drive the total amount into the absurd.

Distantly, Micah was glad that the battle was winding down as he was in no position to fight back.  One second turned to two, and then three.  Finally five agonizing seconds of immobility later, he gasped for breath, fundamentally changed by the experience.

He called up his character sheet.

Age 21 [ERROR] / 35

Class/Level [ERROR] 61

XP 407,270/2,700,000

HP 11,214/11,214

Class Specialty

Chronomancer, Enchanter, Chronomaster [Error]

Attributes

Body 65, Agility 65, Mind 131, Spirit 130

Attunement

Moon 110  Sun 70  Night 130

Mana

Moon 6,200/12,115 Sun 12,035/12,035 Night  10,615/12,125

Affinities

Time [ERROR]

Tier V - Foresight 20, Time Echos 3, Temporal Transfer 3, Haste 16
Tier VI - Temporal Vortex 14, Temporal Stutter 7, Stasis 6
Tier VII - Time Leash 7, Weave of Fate 5,

Tier VIII - Deja Vu 5

Tier IX - Time Slip 1

Wood [ERROR]

Tier I - Refresh 14, Mending 13, Plant Weave 21

Tier II - Augmented Mending 20, Root Spears 14

Tier III - Heal 13, Paralytic Sting 6, Explosive Thicket 13

Tier IV - Regeneration 13, Healing Wave 6, Poison Fog 15

Tier V - Panacea 8, Coma 6, False Life 3

Tier VI - Binding Vines 13, Infest 4

Air 10

Tier I - Gale 11, Air Knife 25, Air Supply 6
Tier II - Wind Shield 11, Sonic Bolt 18

Tier III - Updraft 5, Pressure Spear 16, Sonic Orb 14

Tier IV - Flight 14, Wind Blade 13

Tier V - Vacuum 6

Blessings

Mythic Blessing of Mursa - Blessed Return, Ageless Folio

Skills

Anatomy  10

Arcana   40

Major Arcana 22

[ERROR] [ERROR]

Enchanting  44

Fishing   2
Herbalism  5

Librarian  5

Ritual Magic  46

Spear   41

-Wind Spear 13
-TITS  22

Spellcasting  [ERROR]

It was barely readable.  Whatever he had done tonight and in the ritual with Dakkora, it had broken the entire system that governed growth on Karell.  Whatever he was, it was barely human anymore.  Ultimately, that was what he needed to be if he wanted to have any hope to defeat the Third Prince.

For the first time since his original overwhelming defeat against the daemon lord, he finally felt a glimmer of hope.