The Beginning After The End Chapter 521: Peace In Your Own

Chapter 521: Peace In Your Own

The gray light of the pocket dimension was swallowed by darkness.

Mana oozed through the black, obscuring Realmheart’s senses like a fog, and all signs of Kezess or Agrona vanished.

Wind rushed into my ears. Aether—not my own—settled heavy on my limbs, deadening all physical sensation. For a moment, I was back in the empty, formless waste from my first fall into the Relictombs, almost like I didn’t have a body at all. Only the bitter, acrid smell and taste of corruption remained among all my senses.

Something hit me in the chest, and I flew backwards. It happened so hard and so fast that I was already smashing through distant walls before the sensation of pain traveled from my body to my brain. Stars exploded in my vision on top of the darkness.

I sluggishly activated God Step. The network of connective tissue within the pocket dimension lit up in my vision, and I tumbled backwards through one point just to come spinning from another. Aetheric swords condensed around me in a circle, swinging in every direction. Like antennae, the blades extended my awareness just that much farther, and I felt them strike home. The iron scent of blood tinged the air.

The rushing wind still deafening me sharpened, and I sank to a knee. Even with my flesh numb from the pressing aether, I felt the rush of death cut just over my head, felt the subtle tug of my hair as a few strands were sheared free of my scalp. My own blades whirled like a cyclone around me. Through my hands and the soles of my feet pressed against the floor, I felt the trembling of an approaching great weight. I leaned forward, passing into the aetheric paths again.

The interconnected points revealed by God Step were easy to see and follow, but their relation to the physical space within the pocket dimension was almost meaningless. Still, I could make out the distant edges of the large bubble containing us, and though the relativity of space in a traditional sense was nearly nonexistent inside the pocket dimension, this gave me some small sense of where we were.

I flashed through God Step again, then again, each time to a specific location within the pocket dimension as I bought myself a moment to think.

Agrona and Kezess had both done the math on this fight, they’d just taken longer to get the same answer I’d known for weeks. I was too dangerous to them both now. As Seris had planned long ago, the two god-kings had seen each other as the greater threat, and had pushed themselves to the extreme in order to end this fight quickly.

But the math had shifted. Kezess and Agrona both knew that if they continued to fight each other, in the end I would kill the victor. I had to. There was no choice. I could not save the peoples of Dicathen, Alacrya, and Epheotus if either Agrona or Kezess survived. And so they would destroy me first. Each of them thought they could then defeat the other when I was dead.

Clearly, only one of us three could be right.

God Step brought me to the very center point of the pocket dimension’s sphere. Within the obstructing magic, both the darkness and the smothering mana and aether, there was a weave of magic. As I’d flashed around the chamber, I had also been feeling out the orientation of the spells, searching for their origination point. Kezess, in particular, was not perfectly adept at making himself disappear, and his aetheric manipulation left clear signs within the clouded atmosphere.

Wielding aether like a scalpel, I tried to surgically cut the strings of the spells, canceling them. Agrona’s response was immediate and just as subtle, countering by reallocating the suffocating mana, the spell sliding past my efforts like an incoming wake over the rocks. I shifted again, and his spell changed in response, but the darkness curled visibly with the effort, and for an instant I saw a white-silver dragon bearing down, and felt the wind all around me take on cutting edges.

I God Stepped away, but Regis remained behind. Through our link, I felt him ignite with Destruction. He dodged around the dragon’s claws, not trying to strike back. Instead, he spilled Destruction out over the floor and into the air, a flame in the heart of the spell.

Following the weave of the magic through the aetheric pathways, I cut at the strings of Agrona’s power, dodged the flowering blood iron spikes, torrents of pure mana, and scythes of void wind that chased me, then flashed away again. With each strike, Agrona adjusted, but his hold over the obscuring darkness was slipping. The hurricane roar grew quieter with each God Step, and the blackness became more a gray cloud.

“Enough of this darkness!” Kezess roared, and there was a terrible rending noise. The fading gray ripped like a curtain and fluttered to the ground, where it sank between the stones like oily smoke.

Destruction was billowing outward from the center of our battleground. Stone, air, mana, and aether were all burning as Regis focused all his strength into pouring Destruction out. Without the darkness to consume, it now rushed in a blaze, reaching for the ceiling and spilling down into the lower levels. Entire portions of the fortress were crumbling.

The edge of the conflagration suddenly went still. Like wind sweeping through grass, the violet fires all flickered back toward me, freezing in a wave aimed at me.

Reaching out with my own aether, I drove my power into his and attempted to break it.

A dark shadow stabbed at my eyes, and spikes of pain stabbed into my head. My thoughts went blank as King’s Gambit, trembling, magnified the sensation over and over again. Like a steel-gauntleted fist, time constricted around me.

My aether was frozen in my channels. I couldn’t react, couldn’t fight back against the aether art that held me.

The scene seemed to jump forward, and my head swam.

Agrona stood directly in front of me, a blood iron dagger embedded in my sternum. I came to just as the tip slid off the hardened surface of my core. Behind Agrona, Destruction raged, violet flames racing to consume the entire pocket dimension, which trembled against my consciousness.

Grabbing his wrist in my conjured left hand, I struck Agrona in the throat, stepped in and drove my elbow into his face, wrapped a leg behind his, and tossed him to the ground, his arm twisting unnaturally in my grip. His fingers spasmed, releasing the blade, which I then ripped out and slammed into the back of his head.

The blood iron melted away before the blow could fall, but his face still rebounded off the ground with a violent crack. I raised the arm again, and an aetheric sword formed in it, short and perfect for thrusting. I drove it down, but a clawed hand of wind and shadow reached out of Agrona’s shoulder and caught my arm.

I twisted the blade to slice along the back of the shadow limb, but the world twisted, and I found myself on my back, looking up at the three-armed Agrona. With one hand pinning my sword arm and a forearm pressed to my throat, his spectral, shadowy limb plunged into the wound in my sternum.

Pain, hot and sudden, burned from within my chest. I responded with a point blank Burst Strike at Agrona’s solar plexus. Power welled up and ruptured between us, and he was tossed off me. I fell backward into God Step, reappearing at the center of the space beside Regis as a sickly, burning pain clutched at my core.

I wasn’t healing, and my core had taken a direct strike.

Sensing my dismay, Regis gave a last push with Destruction, faded into incorporeality, and wisped through my skin to my core.

‘Ugh, gross,’ he bemoaned before igniting inside me, burning away the corruption and allowing my aether to heal my flesh. ‘Core looks fine though.’

There was an ear-splitting crash, and my gaze snapped upward: the fortress was collapsing, unable to sustain itself with so much devoured by Destruction. Black-lined wind pulled at the brickwork, aiming the falling stones toward me.

I pulled the aether close around me as half of Taegrin Caelum came down on my head. The avalanche roar battered my eardrums. Dust filled my lungs and stung my eyes. With my conjured aetheric arm over my head, I opened the floodgates of my core and pushed everything I could into the barrier as tons upon tons of stone struck me from above, waiting, searching—and then God Stepped away, appearing above the last of the toppling ruins.

A sickly vibration ran through me as the earlier waves of Destruction continued to spread, now climbing up the walls of the pocket dimension. For an instant, I thought Destruction might swallow the entire space, consuming Agrona and Kezess as one, but the cold realization of the truth came quickly after: Destruction would crack the very walls between this reality and the outside world, spilling this fight into the real Taegrin Caelum in waves of amethyst fire.

Regis cut off the flow. All around us, the bright violet light of hungry flames died.

The collapse stopped. I found myself standing on solid ground again, although the air was thickly choked with dust. Agrona’s and Kezess’s mana signatures stood out like beacons in the absence of Destruction.

The dust whipped around, disturbed by silver-white wings. I had an instant to recognize that the fortress had yet again reformed around me before I stepped into the aetheric pathways. I appeared behind Kezess but vanished again immediately, reappearing in front of him even as he twisted, a long golden sword in his hand.

My own aetheric blade thrust for his exposed ribs, but the lord of the asuras was fast. His sword thrust into the space I had just vacated, but his empty hand spun backwards, driving through my own weapon.

The sword dissolved as my control over it was wrenched away from me. I stumbled in surprise, and the golden blade shifted from his right hand to his left with an aetheric crackle. I caught the ensuing strike on the back of my left arm, but another blade struck my hip, this one from behind, Agrona’s killing intent suddenly looming at my back.

A new sword condensed into my right hand, extending back in a reverse grip. I swept it backwards at Agrona as Regis imbued it again, the blade rolling with flames of Destruction.

The weapon swept through empty air.

My conjured left fist was wrapped around Kezess’s golden blade, but as he twisted it, the arm shattered just as my weapon had done. He brought the sword back in a blade-dancer’s stance, and as he thrust forward again, the draconic manifestation reared around him and pounced, its enormous claws descending on me.

I reached for God Step. Kezess squeezed time and space, attempting to hold me there. Expecting it this time, I ripped through with a growl and vanished into the aetheric pathways, appearing on the opposite side of the pocket dimension wreathed in aetheric lightning.

I was on the defensive. Kezess’s raw power was expected, but this ability to disrupt my aetheric formations was not. As long as I wasn’t caught off guard by his time manipulation, I could withhold his most potent ability, and neither Kezess nor Agrona had an insurmountable answer for Destruction. So long as Regis didn’t rely too much on his own physical form—and thus his own reservoir—but stayed within me or my sword, he shouldn’t exhaust his aether, which was much more limited than mine.

It also became clear the pair of god-kings suffered from an inability to work together. Whether outright refusal, a natural incompatibility, or a failure of strategic effort, I knew this might be my saving grace in the end. It was only a matter of keeping King’s Gambit trained on their attacks and looking for a way to turn this self-sabotage against them.

As I stepped back out into the battlefield, my hip flared with pain. There was a gash in the armor there, and a shallow wound beneath. Black flames burned within the wound. I reached for it with a newly conjured arm, but there was no time to address the soulfire.

The silver-white dragon manifestation was waiting for me, and a gout of pure mana sprayed down over me. I leaned into the attack aggressively, reversing Kezess’s tricks. He was able to dispel my aetheric magic to some degree, but I could do the same to his mana. Within the heart of the blaze, there was the formation of a spell, mana formed into intent. Wielding aether like a pair of gloves, I ripped the root out of his spell and reshaped it.

Atmospheric mana bled into the reconstituted pure mana, and four swords took shape, hovering around me: one each of wind, fire, earth, and lightning.

When I sensed Decay-type mana forming beneath me, I projected aether into it and did the same, breaking the bond between the native Decay of Agrona’s influence and the mana itself. Instead of black spikes shooting up from the ground, a wall of stone rose to protect my back.

I slashed behind me, around the wall, with the burning blade. The wispy, curved edge of wind hacked at Kezess’s hip, while the gleaming obsidian longsword thrust where I expected his throat to be as he dodged. The crackling yellow lightning blade exploded, echoes of it burning into my retinas even though I’d closed my eyes.

Kezess sidestepped the first attack, and his golden blade came up to shatter my earthen one. The sword of fire came back around, having found no target behind me, and fell like a guillotine toward Kezess’s neck. When he parried it, the fire was swallowed into his golden weapon.

The dragon, its breath turned against Kezess, melted into light and flashed back to him. He reabsorbed it, his signature becoming suddenly stronger, more concentrated.

The wall of stone shattered, and I turned my back on Kezess to catch Agrona’s wrist as he repeated the same maneuver that had wounded me previously. His dagger was a few inches from my side. Aether wrapped around my fist, and I struck out, but he twisted away, slipping from my grip as if he were covered in oil. He dodged left and right simultaneously, again displaying echoing copies of himself at each step.

I could sense Kezess’s physical form strengthening as mana and aether were focused into his muscles, a sign he was conserving his remaining strength. A physical battle like a sword fight would require less energy than continuing to throw around magic that could topple all of Taegrin Caelum.

I slammed down my will through the spatium rune, hardening space into a dividing barrier that intersected Agrona’s path and briefly cut us off from Kezess. There was a crash, space twisted, and for an instant there were two Agrona’s, one to my left, one to my right, both reeling. I channeled God Step and prepared to thrust the Destruction blade through both images of Agrona, but the wound at my hip gave a jolt of burning agony as the soulfire pushed deeper into my system. Regis instinctively retracted from the blade, flowing down into my body to fight off Agrona’s soulfire.

I thrust the blade of my aetheric sword into the interconnected network of spatial nodes, and two lengths of it plunged out of the Agronas as they lurched back together. Agrona was instantly standing back where he’d started, as if reality had snapped back into place. A smooth cut marred his armor at his left side and right shoulder, blood flowing freely from within.

Grimacing, he opened his mouth. No sound came out, but my vision blurred and disorienting pain stabbed into my eardrums. My throat constricted. Trembling knees threatened to drop me to the ground.

Even as my eyes rolled back into my head, I found the waves of mana emanating from them and pulled out the Decay, like ripping up a weed by its root. The air lit with jagged fissures of yellow lightning. As the wall of condensed space cracked and gave way to Kezess’s blade behind me, I flung the lightning over my head to crash down all around him.

The tether connecting Agrona to his soulfire snapped as Regis burned the consuming flames from my body with his own waves of Destruction. Black fire was also burning through Agrona’s wounds, sealing them.

Kezess did not rush, but approached slowly. Giving me time to further weaken the isolated Agrona, I theorized. Agrona himself paced side to side like a caged animal, expression almost bestial, as he waited for his wounds to heal.

I let the moment linger as I considered the problem of my aetheric weapons.

Kezess had shown himself more than capable of dismissing my conjured weapons at exactly the wrong moments. I couldn’t fight with a weapon I did not entirely control. Though I’d not had a reason to utilize the principles of mana manipulation in combat since forming my aether core, the lessons of my life before the Relictombs—from my mother and father, Virion, the professors at Xyrus Academy, the Lances, Elders Hester, Bund, and Camus, and so many others—jumped easily to my mind. By breaking down the spells thrown at me by Kezess and Agrona, I could supplement and distract from the problem of my aether blade and the fact I couldn’t go all out with Destruction.

Still, I needed a weapon.

The spatium godrune activated, forming a shard of condensed space in my fist. Jet black and impenetrable, the “weapon” was weightless in my grip. In fact, I used my hand only to help guide my mind in its shape, like a mage mumbling a chant. The shape was held and moved through my will and the godrune alone.

Agrona’s wrists twisted, and a jagged dagger of blood iron formed in each fist. With a whoosh of concentrated mana, he lunged forward, nothing but a shadowy streak. Gripping my weapon with both hands, I caught one of his blades, stepped back, parried the second blade, cut at his throat with a short punching swipe, sidestepped two more strikes, then blocked a thrust from Kezess and diverted the attack toward Agrona, interrupting a slash of a dagger.

But my concentration slipped as holding and maneuvering the blade proved difficult. The spatium unraveled in my hands. Agrona flicked out with two black daggers, which flew through the air in a curving motion. I unleashed an aetheric blast, shattering both weapons, then pulled free the mana, molded bullets of granite, and flung them in an arc around me.

Weaponless, I lunged forward as if to follow up this attack with my bare hands, but God Stepped just to the other side of my opponents, appearing with a newly conjured spatium sword swinging down on Kezess’s shoulder. He tossed up a gleaming white shield of mana, but the spatium blade sliced through as if the shield were made of tissue. Kezess dodged at the last second, his grace momentarily leaving him as a flicker of fear passed over hi