“Do I know you?” Nym said. “Sorry, but I’m still new. Haven’t met everyone in the club yet.”
The ascendant snorted. “I watched your struggle against that giant ice worm. It was pathetic. Hard to believe you clawed your way so high from there. I think it’s more likely that someone dragged you past the finish line. Niramyn? One of his lieutenants like that bastard, Ferro? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter. He won’t be helping you ever again.”
Nym did not appreciate the nasty little snicker at the end of that little rant. Myzalik had probably done him an unintentional favor by interfering and killing Ferro when he did, but Nym wasn’t giving him credit for any altruistic motives. And anyone who thought it was funny was all kinds of messed up.
“Who are you?”
“You may call me Abdun.”
Ah, that explained a lot. “You were one of Myalik’s bootlickers,” Nym said. “Spent a year and some change trying and failing to find me. And then Ferro sucker punched you at the end and cost you a few years of time. That Abdun?”
Abdun’s face contorted into a snarl and arcana flared up around him. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”
Nym wasn’t exactly feeling confident about this fight, but of all the ascendants who could have confronted him, Abdun was pretty much the best. He was notorious for having been stuck in the sixth layer as an Initiate for a long, long, long time, like an unreasonably long time, and with no breakthrough in sight. That meant he had an edge with raw experience, but that Nym overpowered him in terms of what arcana he could summon up.
Whatever spell Abdun was casting, it wasn’t harmful. Nym was tempted to reach out and try to break it, but he was curious what exactly the other ascendant was doing. Curiosity was overwhelmed by self-preservation though. Abdun was obviously hostile, and whatever he was doing wouldn’t be in Nym’s best interest.
He lashed out with raw arcana of his own, trying to break the spell apart before it was completed. Abdun showed his experience there and swept Nym’s attempted sabotage aside like a fencer parrying an opponent’s blade. It wasn’t exactly an unexpected response, but Nym had never fought another ascendant and only had his own hypothetical scenarios to draw on.
He came in at Abdun again from four different angles at the same time, but the other ascendant easily blocked each attack while still forming his spell. “That’s all you can do? I’m not even fighting back. You really are pathetic.”
Then the spell finished forming, and both of them were pulled out of the swirling black and purple void into the core reality. They appeared next to the needle, Abdun hovering perfectly still in the darkness and Nym taking a fraction of a second to stabilize himself. He cast a quick perfect vision spell and floated back up to face the other ascendant.
“Maybe you were wondering what took me so long to come fetch you,” Abdun said. “Or maybe you just thought the lab’s defenses were keeping me out. I can assure you, that wasn’t the case. I just know better than to break expensive toys my Exarch wants left intact. So I had to lock this place down, just to make sure you wouldn’t get away, before I went and dragged you out.”
Nym didn’t need to test that to know Abdun wasn’t bluffing. He could feel it woven into reality around him, the same way it was inside the lab. He just hadn’t quite recognized what that feeling was amidst all the other differences between lab space and reality space. Now that he was away from the lab, he could clearly pick the teleportation and layer stepping wards out of the background ambience. It seemed Abdun wasn’t taking any chances with him getting away. By the time Nym picked his way through those wards, he’d have given the other ascendant a hundred chances to take him out.
Losing a fight here would result in him blowing out at least one anchor, possibly more, and this wasn’t the best time to lose access to a chunk of the primary timeline. Worse, it could mean capture and delivery to Myzalik, who Nym did not want to see again except on his own terms. Preferably, that would be at the end of an ambush that resulted in him smiting the Exarch with his own spell and ending the threat permanently, all while making sure no one else witnessed it.
Abdun’s body flared with arcana and he began casting a dozen different spells. Nym recognized all of them at a glance, spells to paralyze and blind him, spells to break his own spells, spells to blast him with fire and lightning and ice, spells to attack his soul well. Those were mild inconveniences at best, mortal magic that would handicap him so that Abdun could hit him with the real spell.
Hidden behind all of it was a sixth layer spell, but not one Nym knew. If he’d had a few seconds to study it in relative peace and without the screen of other spells being generated on top of it, he could have figured it out. Failing that, he was forced to react immediately. Nym attacked again, this time in an effort to break through the screen of weak spells and disable the reality-warping spell Abdun was weaving together.
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His inexperience showed again, and he realized moments too late that despite being aware of the danger that sixth layer spell presented, he’d allowed his opponent to direct his response by giving him a target and forcing him to focus on it. Most of Nym’s attacks failed, and the ones that succeeded only did so because Abdun didn’t contest the dispelling arcana. He didn’t need to.
What Nym should have done was to completely ignore the weaker spells, take the hits if he needed, and go straight for the throat. He’d known it was too dangerous to ignore, but he’d stupidly torn apart the spells in front of him in an effort to figure out the best way to attack the spell that was important. If he’d just wielded his stronger seventh layer arcana like a sledge hammer and broken everything instead of relying on finesse, he might have won the fight right there.
Instead, Abdun finished the spell and Nym found himself being crushed under the weight of a reality that no longer recognized his presence. It was trying to force him out, but he was still caught in the dimensional lock. Magic ground him between the two and tore at his physical body, threatening to break him if he didn’t do something soon.
For all Abdun’s experience, he’d made a mistake. Nym was new as an ascendant, and that made his opponent underestimate him. Once he thought he’d snared Nym in his spell, he stopped to gloat again. “As I said, pathetic. I can’t believe I lost so many years hunting you down. You’re barely even an ascendant.”
To be fair, the fight had lasted all of two seconds before Nym had been caught, from Abdun’s perspective. It took another second for Nym to establish a connection to the seventh layer, and then one more for him to break Abdun’s magic. His body unfolded back into its normal shape, no worse off than he’d been when the spell started trying to push him out of reality.
Nym didn’t waste a moment trading snarky quips. He just poured seventh layer arcana into reality and told it that Abdun was being thrown all the way to the ground, and that he’d be stuck there. Instantly, the ascendant was jerked sideways, then straight down. He broke free of the spell just as he was skimming across the rock, barely in time to avoid crashing.
Nym chased him down, already forming his own screen of spells and hurling them in a barrage to keep Abdun on the back foot. Even if all he managed was to destroy a mortal shell, that was enough for him to break the dimensional lock and escape. But Nym wanted more. He wanted to break an anchor loose and prevent Abdun from even coming back for months, maybe years if he was lucky.
So while he was tying Abdun up with lesser spells, he was preparing his own real attack. And since he wasn’t aiming to capture, it was actually far easier. Abdun’s gloating smirk had turned into a hate-filled snarl, and arcana blasted out in waves of pure force, breaking through every spell Nym threw his way. Most of them didn’t even have time to fully form before they disintegrated under a wave of magical force.
The thing about an anchor severing spell was that it was remarkably similar to one part of the god-killer spell. Breaking the safety nets ascendants used to maintain their immortality was one of the major steps in the process of erasing them from existence, after all. But while the god killer spell had so much more going on, breaking an anchor was significantly simpler.
It was so simple, in fact, that Nym could do it five or six times at once. More specifically, five or six Nym copies could do it all at once. Abdun’s eyes widened as multiple Nyms descended on him, blipping short distances through the air as they fought against the teleportation lock.
He blasted the first Nym with another reality crushing spell. There was no resistance there, that Nym having existed as nothing more than a delivery method for the spell that would boot Abdun out of reality prime. But his attacks on the other Nyms fell short, too predictable or too slow.
Spell after spell smacked into Abdun, each one individually weak, but also enough to rock his mind and shatter his concentration. Abdun howled in fury and unleashed a wave of pure arcana that blew the crowd of Nym’s backwards, but not quick enough. Four of them had already delivered their payloads, and with them serving as an optical barrier and distraction, Abdun had just enough time to see the spell slam into him through the copies.
Nym watched with fascination as Abdun was jerked through reality. He could actually see the tethers connecting Abdun to his temporal anchors flex against the spell, then snap. One, two, and then a third all popped loose, and Abdun tore through the dimensional lock as reality spat him out of the timeline, leaving Nym alone once more.
It was a good thing Nym had that seventh layer shot of arcana ready to go. Without that, Abdun’s opening salvo would have caught him and the fight would have ended without him ever getting a chance to defend himself. He couldn’t rely on that again, especially since the number of ascendants still stuck in the sixth layer was vanishingly small. Abdun was very much an anomaly, from what Nym understood.
He approached the needle and let it pull him back into the lab. For the first time ever, the entry hall was completely empty, which once he thought about it, didn’t really surprise him. Nym glided through the halls on fast currents of air, eager to reach the back and get this job done with. If he was lucky, he’d finish it before any other ascendants got the bright idea to come after him.
He’d only kicked Abdun out of the mortal timeline for at best a year or two, maybe not even that long. Nym was no expert on judging how much damage he’d done. He was confident he had enough time to finish this favor for Pyoka though. What he wasn’t confident about was how Abdun had known to find him. Pyoka might be a dead end, and he’d have to consider that carefully, but for now, he’d already done almost everything he’d promised to, so he might as well finish it instead of burning that bridge before he determined who exactly was to blame for that little ambush.
Nym got back to work charging the batteries, this time without Naera staring at him. He almost found he missed her presence. Almost, but not quite.