Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

Slowly but surely, I let more and more Astral Power flow into the ritual circle around me. For once, I had forgone the throne I had commonly used for rituals on Mundus, simply because I had something else in mind. When I first used ritual magic on Mundus, I had enjoyed bringing a dynamic component into it, letting the magic guide my movements, as my movements guided the magic. A dance, to direct immense amounts of power, to shape them according to my purpose and command them to do my bidding. Now, I was doing the same, the dynamic nature of the ritual adding to the dynamic nature of the magic I was performing. Dancing with the wind, dancing up a storm, bringing down a storm of Ice and Snow upon my foe. Even if it was early summer, the Withered would feel winter's wrath. My wrath.

Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

My breathing was going in deep and slow, steady breaths, the focused, conscious action of breathing helping me to focus my magic. Magic was flowing into me from the Astral River as I breathed in, was shaped as I held my breath for a few heartbeats, before flowing back out of me, into the ritual circle, as I breathed out. Slowly, but surely, the ritual and the air around me were suffused with immense amounts of power. When I first started, right after nightfall, there was only a faint shimmer coming from the runes but as the first hour, the time I had decided to infuse the ritual, was slowly passing by, the shimmer started to brighten, a mix of azure and silver lighting up the night around me.

Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

Feeling that the time was right, I started to move, slowly at first, and as I moved, the magic in the ritual circle started to move as well. A soft breeze started to whirl around me, cold air was seeping out of the circle and chilled the night around me. My breathing remained steady, despite the initial dance I was performing, only now, my warm breath was creating small, misty clouds in the cold air around me. With each step I took, more power was directed into the swirling winds around me, with each breath I took, more power was flowing back into the ritual from the Astral.

Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

There was a faint noise in the distance, half heard as sound, half heard as psychic noise, the Withered must have noticed the build-up of power and were investigating. Or maybe they already considered the build-up a threat and were attacking, I didn’t know and couldn’t spare the mental capacity to think about it, let alone investigate. No, I had a ritual to perform and had to keep my efforts concentrated and yet contained. The sheer amount of power I was surrounded by was more than enough to shred my body and kill everyone around me, I needed to remain in control and direct the power where I wanted it to go. There was havoc to be wrought, but the hounds of war would obey my command.

Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

A trickle of power was flowing into me from outside, just a small bit of help, and yet, even that small bit of support was an immense relief. Not just from the actual magic I gained thanks to Luna’s aid, but because it gave me a deep certainty that I wasn’t alone. Intellectual, I knew that my companions were guarding my back, were making sure that no Withered or other nasty could get to me. Now, I could feel Luna’s support, like a tiny hand that was placed on my back, reminding me that I wasn’t alone. That my daughter, my family, was with me, and they were all helping me.

Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

The wind around me swirled into a storm, freezing air spiralling into the night, some low-hanging clouds getting caught up in the winds and twisting along, pushed towards the small park the Withered were existing in. The mundane clouds of water-vapor were infused with my power, even as more clouds formed around them, there purely born from my Astral Power. And all those clouds were drifting with the wind I had conjured, racing across the sky to bring devastation to my foes. Attacking a distant foe was quite easy if you knew where to strike. You merely had to set a direction, a speed and a time, and once that was done, all you had to do was wait. Wait, and add more and more power to the attack.

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Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out…

Now, the ritual was no longer about concentrating power into the circle or directing it out of the circle, instead, I had to keep track of the vast amounts of Astral Power I had channelled into the air above. And it was a huge amount, I had been constantly channelling power for almost three hours at this point, constantly breathing in power from the Astral River, before breathing it back out into the ritual. It took me about ten minutes to fully regenerate my Astral Power if I was using my Astral Meditation, as I was doing now. Amusingly, that number didn’t change much whether I was under the influence of Titanic Ambition, as I was now, simply because both my maximum capacity and my regeneration were increased. Now that I had constantly channelled power into the ritual for this long, the circle held almost twenty times my already vast capacity, the magically infused blood mostly acting as a catalyst to keep things together so the circle didn’t burn out.

And all that power had formed into clouds, clouds that I still partially controlled and that filled the air above the park the Withered had infected. Waiting, ready to hail down on them like a blizzard.

Breathe in… Hold…

Breathe out…

My movements, after almost two hours of fluidly dancing, stopped, my eyes flying open, glowing with a silvery light as Overflow was active. I needed every bit of power within myself, every bit of power in the circle to create the effect I wanted to achieve. Runes all around me flared with light, the air was freezing with power and the wind was whipped into a frenzy as my sudden stop completed the ritual. Now, all that was left was an incredible amount of power, power I was still connected to.

With an effort of supreme will, I controlled all that power, triggered the effect I had imbued into it during the ritual. Despite the distance between us and the park I was targeting, I could easily feel the effect, feel the sky crashing down on the Withered. High in the sky above them, countless hail stones, icicles and snowflakes were forming, the wind turning into a sudden downburst, carrying tons of Ice with it.

A storm raced the ice to the ground, a localised blizzard of titanic ferocity, strong enough to push over trees, the icicles easily fast enough to pierce metal and hard enough to crush stone, all crashing down on my target. I could feel my Astral Power intrude into a miasma of power, vile, rotting power that would likely infect any living thing it came into contact with. But there was no life coming into their den, there was nothing moving, nothing to infect. Nothing, but a frozen grave.

I could hear the psychic screams, despite the distance and now that my mind wasn’t utterly focused on the ritual, I could hear the screams all around us, as countless Withered, all connected by their strange fungoid hivemind were screaming at the death of their collective. The sheer amount of noise these countless beings put out was enough to stagger me, the physic noise echoing in my mind as the connection they all needed was brutally severed. No longer were they bound by a common will, no longer were they united in a common goal. Only instinct remained and the instinct wasn’t kind. It was to slaughter.

In the distance, only the freezing, silent stillness of a frozen grave remained, the air filled with enough of my lingering Astral Power to give me a faint idea of what was happening there. On a whim, I tried pushing a little, using the Astral Power that was out there and twisted it together with the energies unleashed by the countless beings that had died there. I could feel some fait change, though I wasn’t sure what exactly was happening, the connection I held to my power was fading, either due to distance or because it wasn’t just my power any longer, because I was mixing it with the energies of Death. As long as I held the power, I tried to push it into the unravelling strands of psychic communication that still originated from the park. I had no idea if what I had tried to do worked out, but soon, I couldn’t feel the Astral Power I had used to destroy the park any longer.

With that, my ritual was done and I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding. My tension, concentration and adrenaline were fading and the world started to fade with them.