The battle paused for a moment as a massive Dementor appeared from the edge of the cliff. These Dementors were surprisingly hard to kill, Balthazar was forced to increase the magical power he was injecting into his constructs and beams of light to kill them. More than he did so for most of the enemies he had faced in the past. Otherwise they would reform themselves and resume their assault on him and Teregatt’s forces in moments.
Even now the Guard leapt through the air in the distance, picking off the straggling Dementors and knocking out the human guards while leaving the main force to Balthazar alone. Only the Guard was leading the assault with Balthazar, the rest of the residents were weaker and might die if taken by surprise by a group of Dementors.
‘Intruder. Azkaban belongs to me,’ The large Dementor said warily in Balthazar’s mind, likely sensing Balthazar’s power, ‘Leave now with your forces, or prepare to be destroyed by me and my glorious creations.’
“Curious,” Balthazar said calmly as he mentally considered what spells would be best applied to this foe. This creature was far above the other Dementors in power, and Balthazar would have to be careful to not grow overconfident in case it had any hidden trump cards or abilities it could use.
“Ecraz, I presume? Interesting that you chose to join your creations in their miserable state. Unfortunately negotiation is not on the table for today. Prepare to die.”
Balthazar drew deeply on Teregatt’s energies to refill his natural reservoir of magic. Teregatt was drained from the creation of the portal, but even now it regenerated itself. Greedily drinking in the magic of this island like a man left in the desert for days without water. It had to digest that energy of course, not all of it was available for use right now. But a small trickle of it was still steadily building.
Balthazar could afford to be a little wasteful with the emergency reserves of Teregatt's energy to deal with these Dementors decisively.
‘Dementors! Attack!’ Ecraz called as it created a massive orb of shadow and corrosion between its massive hands that launched towards the portal.
Balthazar heard a chittering and buzz sound out in his mind. He shook his head as he replied to the captain of the Guard.
‘Keep on task,’ He ordered mentally, ‘I will handle them myself.’
The Dementors launched their balls of corrosion at Balthazar and the portal all at once. Most were nothing to Balthazar. Barely even noticeable as he blocked them with pinpoint purple barriers that he summoned and dismissed effortlessly. But the shadow ball from Ecraz was something different.
The sheer quantity of magic contained in the spell resisted and corroded through the dozens of purple barriers that Balthazar summoned to block it. It was heading straight towards the red portal to Teregatt, seeking to destabilize the connection and lock Balthazar and the Guard in this world with no way back. And more importantly, stop Teregatt’s influx of new energy to recoup the investment in creating the portal.
Balthazar finished the spells he was preparing and used a quick burst of telekinesis to align himself so the Shadow ball was perfectly blocking Ecraz’s view of him.
From between his hands he summoned a glowing ball of light and pumped more and more magic into it until his arms were shaking slightly as they contained the orb of shining light.
The Shadow ball continued towards the now undefended portal, Balthazar now to the side and no longer standing in its way.
Moments before impact, Balthazar finally released his spell and shot a massive beam of light wider than his torso by pushing his arms straight forward.
The beam lanced into the shadow ball, only being stopped for a moment before the beam pierced through and dissipated the opposing spell into strands of corrosive black mist that fell to the ground and started eating away at the cobblestones just next to the portal.
The beam of light continued through the shadow ball to land on Ecraz’s massive form. The creature screeched as the beam scorched its cloak and gray flesh. In a burst of magic, the darkness flowed across its form into a shadowy shield that pushed Balthazar’s beam back. But only just.
Balthazar shifted his hands to play the beam across Ecraz’s body, searing away the darkness and gray flesh wherever it touched, the burns healing as the Dementor’s form stitched itself back together whenever the beam wasn’t touching it.
Ecraz shifted its shield of shadow in an attempt to block Balthazar’s sweeping beam, but it was just a hair behind, Balthazar pouring on the damage as he continued to pump his magic into the beam even as he kept using the purple shields to block the attacks by the swarms of lesser Dementors.
‘Creations! It is time! Feed me the collected souls!’ Ecraz shouted telepathically in desperation as some of its wounds and burns started healing at a slower pace. These creatures were truly resilient to be able to take so much damage before dispersing. The smaller ones evaporated almost instantly when Balthazar had struck them with beams less than a tenth as powerful as this one.
The Dementors around Balthazar stopped their fruitless assault on him and turned to dive at Ecraz at the large Dementor’s orders. They swirled around the creature, their bodies heaving as if a bird regurgitating food for its young. After a few seconds, the first bright pinprick of light left the mouths of the Dementor and shot into Ecraz’s body. In an instant, the wounds on the large Dementor’s body healed in an instant and it grew fractionally in size.
Small Dementor after Dementor swirled around and shot little points of light into Ecraz, causing the creature to grow in size and for the shadows swirling around it to darken and become ever more corrosive to Balthazar’s magic senses.
His beam kept damaging Ecraz, but the constant influx of souls and the creature’s increasing power was undoing all of his efforts. More Dementors flew in from all over the island of Azkaban to contribute their collected souls to Ecraz. An Ecraz that had stopped defending from Balthazar’s beam entirely and was over eighty feet tall now as it floated above the cliff’s edge.
The shadows grew darker and darker around Ecraz until something qualitative changed about them and they became like a void to sight, magic, to everything. Balthazar’s eyes widened as even his beam of light was absorbed effortlessly by the void surrounding the motionless Ecraz. He immediately stopped his attack as gale force winds poured inwards from all sides from the humanoid black hole floating there with only the vague impression of a cloak hanging off of it.
Balthazar gauged Teregatt’s magical energy. If he did this, then he’d be pulling on the reserves. The very bottom of the reserves. If the portal was destroyed then there was truly no hope for Teregatt ever recovering its energy. It would waste away and in time be inevitably swallowed by the void as well as everyone that was there. Balthazar only hesitated for a moment before continuing. This was becoming far too dangerous already. He had to stop Ecraz before it brute forced itself to demigodhood and became far more dangerous within its home domain. Azkaban as the domain that Ecraz likely had prepared for centuries to accept it as the island's master.
Balthazar drew on Teregatt’s energies without regard for the waste and lifted his arms to the sky.
‘Return and defend me,’ Balthazar sent telepathically to the Guard, ‘I will handle the rest of them with this.’
— — —
‘Attack, creations!’ Ecraz’s voice rang out from the featureless void, ‘Charge the creature! We shall have victory when my Ascension completes!’
All the gathered Dementors charged towards Balthazar as one, arms outstretched. Without the captured souls to power their spells, none of the Dementors summoned the corrosive darkness or shadow balls. Instead they charged using solely their bodies in a hope to delay him.
Balthazar did not flinch and move to defend himself, instead continuing to weave his spell, preparing for his grand spell with all of his attention and focus.
With the whistle of air and heavy booms, the Guard came flying down from the castle above at full speed, their red swords held at the ready. All thirty of them flew through the onrushing mob of lesser Dementors, holding them back and stopping just before they hit the ground with bright white flashes on their armor.
They formed two rings of defense around Balthazar and the portal. The eleven strongest of the Guard and their captain circled Balthazar and the portal directly on defense. The remaining eighteen that were weaker formed a looser formation farther out like points on a star.
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Every one of the guards landed in place on the ground all within a second of each other. As soon as their momentum stopped with the white flashes and they fell the last few feet to the ground, their armors flashed white again.
The outer ring launched themselves up at an angle to strike out into the main mass of Dementors and break up the clumps of them. As soon as they left the main mass of the creatures, their armor flashed twice with white light in quick succession. Once to stop them in mid-air, and again to send them launched back down through another thick clump of Dementors that had formed.
What had been a unified charge from all sides at Balthazar quickly devolved into chaos and confusion as the Dementors bumped into each other dodging the Guard’s blades, creating thick masses of the creatures that grouped and dispersed like crashing waves. The outer Guard struck through them over and over, keeping them disorganized as they passed through the crowd over and over, their swords swinging endlessly the whole way.
The inner ring of Guards were untouched, the Dementors that managed to press forward to attack in the chaos being shredded by the strong Guard in the inner defensive ring. The inner guard would launch themselves upwards directly in front of the approaching Dementors, flash white to pause, slash ten or more times in an instant to cause the creature to disperse, before flashing again to fly towards the next Dementor.
With so many creatures attacking at once, even the Guard were pressed in with the sheer numbers as more Dementors arrived from across the island even as the Guard killed more. Hundreds, thousands, however many there were the air was filled with them. All pressing in on each other to stop Balthazar as he worked the grand spell.
The floating void of Ecraz did nothing but float there, too deep in the Ascension process to demigod to be able to participate in the fight just yet.
Balthazar ignored his surroundings as a Dementor came within ten feet of him before the Captain of the Guard leapt in and dealt with it, its armor passing barely a few feet from Balthazar’s face.
His spell was nearly complete. It was now a race against time. Who would finish first? Balthazar’s grand spell using the last energies of Teregatt? Or Ercaz’s Ascension?
More and more Dementors managed to push through the guards and flew towards Balthazar with their gray skeletal arms extended out towards him. The Captain of the Guard fought them all off at once, flashing around almost directly in front of Balthazar and destroying some Dementors with their arms only feet from Balthazar.
The void darkened and Balthazar kept constructing his spell.
“Ha!” Balthazar shouted before with a pulse of magic he launched his spell into the sky. The spell was a perfectly circular mirror, the images of the dark clouds and ground below rippling across it as it flew directly upwards.
Balthazar smiled and watched the spell. After it reached a thousand feet high, it rippled and spat out dozens of smaller flat pieces of mirror around it. The mirror fragments shot out into a loose ring, before freezing in place in the air under the power of the spell. Balthazar’s main spell kept traveling straight upwards like a rocket and kept shedding more and more floating fragments of mirrors that expanded around it like an ever growing cone with the point of it facing down towards them.
Another Dementor’s gray hand nearly touched Balthazar, but he didn’t move as the Captain of the Guard dealt with it and sliced through the creature and dissipated with a series of precise blade strikes that passed barely a few inches from Balthazar’s nose. Balthazar barely even noticed, still too busy staring into the sky and watching the spell continue its progress upwards. It was barely visible and Balthazar absentmindedly cast a farsight spell to magnify his vision so he could keep track of the spell as it continued flying upwards and deploying itself.
The main projectile’s magic was quickly being drained as the higher it flew the more and more mirror fragments it released to form the ever growing rings in the sky. The gloomy island started brightening slightly as if sunrise had just come after a long gloomy night.
The spell continued upward, dwindling in size and leaving the floating shards behind loosely floating in place and held in the air by the small amounts of magic within them. All of the mirrors had minuscule threads of magic connecting them to a single thread that the main projectile kept releasing behind it even now as it moved up, like an unspooling thread left behind it. A thread that went from the top all the way from the flying projectile high in the sky and directly down into Balthazar’s body. All the small mirrors had their own minuscule threads of magic connected to that central line to Balthazar. It looked like an odd sort of tree of sorts, Balthazar mused.
The projectile finally dissipated, releasing a last burst of mirrors at its peak near the edge of the vacuum of space above this world.
The humanoid void of Ecraz twitched and its arms began to move as waves of corrosive shadow began billowing out of its form to consume everything in its surroundings. It had completed its ascension to demigod.
‘Ha ha ha!’ Ecraz laughed in Balthazar’s mind as Balthazar reached out with his magic to the single thread connecting him to the massive construct above him.
‘I AM A GOD!’ Ecraz proclaimed arrogantly as its wave of corrosive shadow emanating from its body continued to grow ever larger. The currents and roiling shadow began twisting and swirling towards Balthazar and the Guard as if it was a tidal wave of destruction about to rise up and crash over them. The Guard had stopped their offensive attacks and gathered into a tight ball of striking blades around the portal to defend it and Balthazar both.
‘ALL THE WORLD SHALL BOW BEFORE THE POWER OF ME AND MY CREATIONS! NONE SHALL BE ABLE TO STAND AGAINST US!’
Ecraz ranted as it raised an arm towards them and created a shadow ball like none it had ever created before. If it was launched at them then even Balthazar would be hard pressed to stop it from hitting the portal to Teregatt and shutting it and stranding them here forever. Ecraz was a demigod no matter how weak, its attacks were qualitatively different from those of most mortals.
Luckily Balthazar had finished his spell first.
Balthazar plucked the magic thread and the construct of mirrors above them began to shift as one. The sky became dark for a moment as the mirrors shifted and moved to blot out the sky in darkness.
Balthazar looked at the Shadow ball that the nascent demigod was so proud of. And he laughed.
“ALIGN!” Balthazar shouted for effect as the mirrors finished moving into position above them. Everything was plunged into pitch black darkness as the sky above them was covered by his construct. Everything was covered except a single hole left open at the bottom of the structure…
The next instant, the night turned to day as all the light collected by the floating mirrors in the sky concentrated the light all to a single point and blasted it downwards as a single concentrated beam of light. The thirty meter diameter beam of light blasted directly down from the sky where Ecraz floated by the edge of the cliff.
The air burned, the crackling of hot plasma drowning out all other sounds as Balthazar cast a quick spell to filter the light in a dome around himself so he and the guard wouldn’t be blinded by the beam.
Balthazar sensed Ecraz struggling inside the beam for a single instant, its demigod status almost allowing it to survive for a full second. But the beam was relentless and after that second was over, Ecraz dissolved with one final inhuman scream and the beam continued to strike downwards from the sky, relentless in its destructive power.
All the lesser Dementors had already dissolved, the light flooding the area emanating from the light beam so concentrated that it dissolved them all in an instant like water hitting molting rock and evaporating into steam.
The mirrors above ran out of their magic five seconds later, and dissolved back into ambient magic. The beam winked out and the blinding glare of attack faded to the light of a bright summer’s day, the dark clouds above having been dispersed, allowing the sun above to shine through.
Balthazar walked to the edge of the cliff and looked over the edge. A molten line of stone where the beam had carved through the cliff side ran straight down and into the water. Even now he could see the massive clouds of steam rising from below where the beam had hit the water and evaporated most of it in an instant. The dark clouds on the horizon began to slowly close in again and the scorching temperatures began to drop back down gradually to the normal chill it had been when they arrived.
“Finish off the rest of the Dementors,” Balthazar said idly as he watched the red hot stone quickly begin to cool. It had been… such a long time since he’d been able to use a spell that destructive. Perhaps Balthazar had even done Fate a favor there. These Dementors didn’t seem connected to Fate’s chains due to the corrosive nature of their magic and how they were formed. If Ecraz had succeeded in establishing itself as a demigod, then who knew what might have happened when it started expanding beyond Azkaban into the wider world?
The Guard leapt off to search the rest of the island and clean up any lingering Dementors that hadn’t arrived to assist Ecraz in time.
Balthazar looked to the swirling red portal of Teregatt, the thing even now drawing in more magical energy. The reserves were empty, the portal was established, the island claimed. Now there were only a few last things to take care of before Teregatt and its residents could start making this place truly defensible and settle to wait as Teregatt recovered its energies.
After ten minutes or so, the whole island was covered in a heavy thick mist that had wafted up from the evaporated sections of the ocean below. A buzz and click sounded in Balthazar’s mind and he nodded to himself.
The Guard had handled the last of the Dementors and cleared the whole island. Now there was only one more thing to deal with. The humans. Time to send them back home and declare Teregatt’s claim over the island.
— — —
At Hogwarts, the thirty Dementors that patrolled the edge of the grounds even now in the summer stiffened all as one. Ecraz… was dead. They could no longer feel the link to their creator. They had been tasked by the human Ministry to guard the perimeter of the castle to prevent the one known as Pettigrew from sneaking inside.
None of them cared for their task any longer. After a brief telepathic discussion amongst themselves, they all left their posts as one and flew together into one single clump, their arms interlinked with each other as they floated there. They must flee before the slayer of their creator, their greatest enemy whoever it was, arrived to eliminate the last of the Dementors.
The thirty Dementors floated there, arm in arm for a few minutes, nothing apparently happening if there were any witnesses to the event. There were no other witnesses to the event.
Suddenly with no warning, inky blackness grew over the Dementors forms and spread to form a massive orb of corrosive shadow covering them all at once. The orb started shrinking rapidly as if collapsing inwards, vanishing away into a single point over the course of mere seconds.
Behind was left only open air and a loud boom like thunder. The Dementors had apparated away to places unknown as one. Even if Ecraz was dead, his glorious creations must survive and rebuild. Carrying on the mission they had been created for.