It was a clever spell, one designed to take advantage of the unique terrain of the fifth layer of reality. The light was blinding, and it seared Nym’s body, but the true twist was the mirrored surface below them. The light flashed downward, there and gone in an instant, only to reflect back up and bathe the whole area in brilliant, burning heat.
That was nothing outside of Nym’s capabilities to handle. He could compensate for being blinded with scrying magic, and the heat wouldn’t last long enough to do any real damage through the defensive spells he’d slapped in place the moment his echo had attacked. It would be uncomfortable for a few moments, and then it would be spent. It was only as he started to weave together his first scrying spell that he realized the light was also blocking his ability to see arcana.
Then his echo sprang the second part of his trap. Something struck Nym, something bigger than he was and moving at high speeds. It carried him across the sky and upwards into the strange patchwork landscape. Whatever it was his echo had struck him with didn’t want to let him stop moving, but he dispersed it with a wave of dispelling arcana. Since he couldn’t see what was in it, he couldn’t precisely target it to break the spell, so the quick and dirty solution was to just hammer it.
By the time Nym broke the spell pushing him upwards, gravity was twisting around him strangely. He had to shift the way he was flying to both hold him up and down at the same time just to keep from falling one way or another, at about half strength in each direction. He was just getting a feel for the equilibrium of it when his lateral momentum carried him into a different patchwork square of the sky and everything changed.
Nym shot up instantly, propelled both by his own magic and the suddenly many times stronger reverse gravity. He quickly reconfigured his magic to hold him steady, then strengthened it to start bringing him back down towards the mirrored ground. All the while, he searched for his echo, who had disappeared with the initial burst of light.
Using the strange and unfamiliar laws of the world against Nym was a great strategy. It forced him to split his attention, to handle the threat of the environment itself while fighting against his own echo. Even with all the advantages his time spent in Niramyn’s sanctuary granted him, he couldn’t really say that he was winning this fight.
In a weird way, he was proud of his echo. He was turning out to be a hell of an opponent, with the echo systematically driving Nym into a corner, forcing him to waste time and resources dealing with obstacles and distractions. Though the echo didn’t have the breadth of options Nym did, he was still powerful. Every spell it had thrown at him was a pinnacle spell, and that blinding light spell had even washed out his ability to see arcana. That was new.
For all of that though, Nym was confident he would win. The echo wasn’t throwing anything his way that he couldn’t deal with. It felt like he was just using the attacks as a stall while he built up to something big. No doubt, whatever that was, it would take advantage of the physics of the world in an unexpected way.
The win condition was simple then. Nym just had to locate his echo and defeat him before he could pull off whatever he was doing. And with his scrying spells able to see arcana, it was not hard to spot the echo. Or at least, it wasn’t hard to spot the echo’s arcana, which had popped up in no less than six different places.
“More distractions,” Nym said as he sorted through them. One of them was the real one, or possibly none of them were. But if that was the case, then the echo was doing nothing, or he knew some way to hide his arcana that Nym wasn’t familiar with. Neither of those seemed likely to him.
He sent his scrying anchors out in various directions to check on the sources of arcana and, as expected, found temporary arcana batteries there inside illusions of himself. That was an odd touch. He and his echo weren’t identical, and it would have made more sense for the illusions to match the echo instead.
“Unless they’re not distractions,” Nym said. “Maybe… bait?”
There was no sign of the echo, meaning he was either well and truly hidden, or he did have some way to hide his own arcana use. Nym didn’t think that was the case, otherwise the echo would have used such an ability to far greater effect earlier in their match. Being able to read the spells in the echo’s aura made it much, much easier to defend against them.
He’d broken three of the illusions when something rippled across the mirror below. Nym looked down and saw what looked like a massive fish swimming inside the ground, heading straight towards one of the illusions. Its jaws practically unhinged and it took the illusion in one bite. Even though the fish only existed inside the mirror, the illusion it had consumed ceased to exist in reality as well.
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Nym understood the trick now. More of the fish were appearing, excitedly darting through mirror space to consume the remaining illusions. Nym was saved more because there were so many that they got in each other’s way than because of his own quick reactions. He chained together several defenses with an emphasis on physical alterations that would reflect into the mirror world, then waited inside a bladed sphere of ultra-dense crystal to see if the mirror fish would be able to batter down the walls of force and earth he’d erected.
A great crash shook the wall when the first fish rammed into it. Its teeth scraped against the wall, but its jaw couldn’t open wide enough to take it in one bite. The fish was stymied only for a second before arcana swirled around it and washed out in an explosive blast that sent cracks running through the barriers.
The spell drew more of the fish. If they were anything like the first one, they were going to quickly tear through the defenses he’d put up. So Nym let them gather up around him, let them weaken the wall, and then when it was about to fall and as many as could possibly fit were next to it, he triggered the spiked crystal cocoon. Lances of razor sharp, arcana-infused crystal exploded in every direction through the empty air. And those lances were reflected in the mirrored ground below.
The fish died by the dozens, each one leaking rainbow blood that obscured everything else in the mirror. Nym couldn’t even see himself anymore, and he still didn’t know where his echo was. His scrying anchors flitted around, searching in every way he could, but the echo was nowhere to be found. He supposed it was possible that the echo had fled when his trap had failed, but that didn’t really fit.
The echoes represented parts of his personality, sharpened and magnified by the nature of the reality they hailed from. The fifth layer echo was proud, and violent. He seemed to loathe the idea that he wasn’t the original core Nym, and wanted to prove he was stronger. It seemed silly to Nym, since really, they were all the same being in the end.
So no, he didn’t believe for even a moment that his echo had run away. Despite that, there was no sign of him. The only Nyms anywhere around were himself and his own reflection a thousand feet below him. Nym glanced down, saw his own feet and his own face looking back up at him, and the aura of arcana from his spells surrounding him.
Except now that he looked closely, those weren’t the spells he was currently holding onto. He laughed to himself. His echo had once again exploited the world of the fifth layer against him and was hiding in his own reflection. Now that Nym had finally spotted him though, the fight was over.
A combination of teleportation to pull his echo out, greater telekinesis to physically lock him down, and a concentrated shock of crushing psychic force was enough to daze Nym’s opponent. He took a moment to slide his own arcana into every single construct the echo still had going and then blasted him with a storm of arcana injections to cripple his soul well’s capacity for the next few minutes.
“I think you can agree that I’ve won,” Nym said when the psychic shock wore off.
The echo didn’t say anything, but the twisted scowl on his face was enough of a sign to Nym. He started the spell that would bind them together, for the fifth and final time.
* * *
Niramyn was frustrated. No matter what he did, it was two steps forward and three steps back. Myzalik had discovered his return far too quickly and was proving remarkably adept at putting obstacles in Niramyn’s way. He’d barely finished clawing his way back up to the tenth layer before he’d been discovered.
Someone had betrayed them, someone who thought they stood to gain more in the rival Exarch’s service than they did in Niramyn’s. He’d been careful about who he’d brought back into his power, both because he’d been wary of this exact scenario and because until he regained access to his full power at the twelfth layer, he was vulnerable to treachery of a more direct sort. The last thing he needed was to find himself pushed out of the timestream for a decade or two, only to come back and find ascendant society fully under Myzalik’s control.
His new home lacked the view his palace on Vislarg had boasted, but the arcana-infused wine was still good. He sipped at it idly while he surveyed the rather dreary looking hall he’d found himself in. It belonged to some petty mortal king of some country or another. Niramyn couldn’t remember what the humans called it.
It would do, for now, but it was seriously lacking in amenities. Unfortunately, one of his former vassals had clued Myzalik in to how Niramyn constructed several of his defenses and how best to go about turning them against their owner, so for the time being, this was what he had.
An ascendant appeared nearby and bowed at the waist. “Master,” she said. She was tall, thin, blonde hair. Valicin, he thought her name was.
“What is it?” he snapped. “Good news on our little project, I hope?”
“Of a sort,” she said. “I… still haven’t found him, but his echoes have disappeared from the fourth and fifth layer.”
It was nice to know that his offspring, for lack of better term, was still moving forward. That was one weapon he still had hidden away while it was being honed. Though if they couldn’t figure out where the boy had gotten off to, it wouldn’t do him much good.
“You need to find him before he begins his ascension. If he transcends the boundary and he’s not firmly under my control and sheltered from other ascendants, everything I’ve invested in him will go to waste. If I lose my investment, I will punish you.”
Valicin knew better than to flinch in front of him, but he could see past her blank expression. She was scared. Good. It would motivate her to correct her error in losing him in the first place.
“Is there anything else?” Niramyn asked, idly sipping at his wine again before releasing the goblet to float in the air next to him.
“No, Exarch. I will continue to look for him.”
“Do so. Report back to me in a week if you haven’t found him by then.”
“Yes, Exarch.”
Then Valicin was gone. If she hadn’t found the missing boy by then, he’d have to attend to it himself. And if he had to do that, she wasn’t going to like it.