“That is a tough nut to crack,” Rizin said after Nym finished explaining what he was trying to do. “And also, you’re an idiot.”
“Hey…”
“No, seriously. You’re having trouble figuring out how to even reach this Exarch, and you think you’re going to take a swing at him once you do manage to get in his face.”
“I mean, it’s more compli-”
“Which, even if you do connect, so what? He’s going to hit you back so much harder, probably make your life miserable for decades, maybe centuries if he’s the vindictive type. He is, by the way. I don’t know a lot about specific ascendants, but Myzalik’s got a reputation.”
“I know all that. I have a plan,” Nym said.
“And, just by helping you,” Rizin continued, completely ignoring Nym, “that puts my projects at risk. I don’t need a vengeful Exarch mucking with my life. My advice to you is to let this go. You are a long, long, long way off from having the strength to stand up to someone on this level. You have bitten off more than you can chew, and it is time to spit it back out before you choke on it.”
“Stop,” Nym said. “There’s more I haven’t told you about. If I can make contact with him, I can beat him.”
“There is no way you can beat him,” Rizin said. “The idea is laughable. You can’t beat me, and I can’t beat him.”
“I just want you to know how much I appreciate your faith in me,” Nym told him.
“It’s not about faith. You’re smarter than this. You know you can’t- wait a second. You are smarter than this. What are you not telling me?”
“I… would rather not say.”
“Then I would rather not help you.”
“Damn it. Fine. You know what Myzalik did to Niramyn about a century ago?”
“The act that created you, yes. And he’s done it many, many times in the intervening years to other ascendants, with markedly more permanent results. Why do… no. You didn’t.”
Nym grimaced, but kept silent. Rizin stared at him for a moment, a slow grin widening across his face. “You did, didn’t you?” the fox squealed. “You figured out how he did it.”
“Saw him use the spell,” Nym admitted. “He didn’t know I was there. Your hiding spells really are top-notch, by the way.”
Rizin started cackling madly. “Oh, that changes things! You think that if you can make contact, you can hit him with his own spell. And it only has to work once, right?”
“Yeah. I would appreciate it if you don’t go spreading around that I know this spell.”
Rizin nodded along with Nym’s words. “Of course, because you’d be their next target if the rest of the ascendants found out. And you’re much easier to take care of.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Nym hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, but he needed Rizin’s help. Part of getting that help involved convincing the fox that his plan actually had a chance of working, and if there was anyone he could trust with that information, it was ironically an ally prone to lies, deception, and stealth. The mere fact that the god-killer spell was designed to work against only ascendants automatically made it a non-threat to Rizin.
It occurred to Nym that he probably ought to explain how it worked so that Rizin knew that. The last thing he needed was a powerful and immortal fox deciding that Nym needed to be handled to ensure his own personal safety. He doubted Rizin could do anything permanent to him, but he could severely inconvenience Nym and make it that much more difficult to take any actions in the core reality. Worse, he could tip off other ascendants and let them handle the problem for him.
“The spell works a lot like the standard age reversal spell, except that it doesn’t sort through alternate timelines to mix and match until it gets what it wants. It just turns back the clock, which breaks down connections and can actually split the target back into multiple discrete entities on separate layers of reality,” Nym said. “It could turn an ascendant mortal, like what it did to Niramyn, or just completely erase them from existence if it’s used long enough.”
“How long is long enough?” Rizin asked. “There’s a big difference between five seconds and a minute.”
“For someone whose physical body is around thirty, maybe ten to fifteen seconds of exposure to completely wipe someone out of existence. Less to just turn them mortal and kill them the old-fashioned way. If it worked on someone like you, it would take a long time. You’d get progressively weaker as you were de-aged, but since all your time is linear and builds on itself, you’d be far less susceptible to the effect.”
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Rizin started laughing about halfway through Nym’s explanation. “I appreciate you taking the time to reassure me, but I’m not concerned about you turning your ‘god killer’ spell on me. Although, let’s talk about payment. There has been a pesky ascendant who’s harassed me repeatedly over the last century. Capturing him and using this spell on him would be both a good test to make sure it works and a convenience for me.”
The thought of casually executing someone because Rizin found them annoying didn’t sit well with Nym. He could acknowledge the practical benefits of a test run of the god killer spell before he had to use it on Myzalik, but at the same time, he ran the risk of alerting Myzalik that someone else had figured out the spell. Every other ascendant might just assume Myzalik had been the executioner, but he would know it wasn’t him.
If they were going to do that, and that was a big ‘if’ in Nym’s mind, it would have to be done almost immediately preceding a strike at Myzalik himself. Otherwise, the risk of him noticing the missing ascendant and tightening his own defenses was too high. The only way Nym was going to pull this off was with the element of surprise. He had to come out of nowhere so fast that Myzalik never even saw what hit him.
“It’s risky,” Nym said. “Myzalik would know it wasn’t him who killed an ascendant.”
“It’s risky not to make sure the spell works before you try it on an Exarch.”
“Well, I mean… I can always try the spell on myself and just stop it after a second.”
“Now that’s just dumb,” Rizin said.
“I didn’t say I was going to! I just meant that it’s an option.”
They went around in circles about that for a little while, with Nym unwilling to make such a conspicuous move without having first ensured his access to Myzalik was secured, and Rizin unconcerned with the fact that executing an ascendant might provide Myzalik advanced warning. To his way of thinking, if Nym was only getting one shot, seeing what Myzalik’s defenses at their maximum looked like was a good thing. That assumed they could overcome those defenses, and in that regard, the fox was much more confident than Nym was.
“Either way, before we even consider this, we need to figure out how to get to Myzalik. The whole exercise is pointless if it doesn’t result in taking out the Exarch who has more reason than anyone else to want me dead. Preferably, the plan would also include a way to take out Niramyn, and everyone else can just think they killed each other.”
“A second Exarch? You don’t ask for much, do you?” Rizin had hopped off his cushion at some point and was pacing back and forth. He stopped and gave Nym a flat stare when he found out about the second target.
“And it should be at a point where Niramyn doesn’t see what happens to Myzalik, so we can maintain the element of surprise against him too. But also close enough in time that to anyone not there, it looks like they took each other out.”
“I cannot even imagine the magnitude of the favor you’d owe me for this,” the fox said.
“All I’m asking you to do is help me figure out how to crack some wards! I’m the one taking all the risks.”
“You’re still putting me in front of some very powerful, very scary, extremely vengeful immortals that, in the likely event you fail to pull off assassinating one or both of them, might decide to ruin my life.”
“No risk, no reward,” Nym said pitilessly.
“Too true. Well, let’s get started then.”
Nym showed Rizin where Myzalik’s floating palace was in this time period and went over everything he’d learned about the ever-shifting wards. Rizin followed along easily, and several times stopped Nym to ask a few questions clarifying how the wards shifted or interacted with other layers in the ward stacks.
“Okay, let me get my own look at them.”
“I’ve been looking ten years into the future,” Nym said.
“It’s a lot harder for me to do that than it is for you. I’ll be looking at them in the now and giving you my professional opinion. You’ll have to apply that to whatever time you do actually act in.”
Nym was silent for the next hour while Rizin worked, until the blue fox appeared next to him out of nowhere and asked, “How is he doing?”
Once he got his heart rate back down, Nym scowled at the smirking fox and said, “He’s working. It’s a delicate job, so I’m trying not to distract him.”
“I see. Do you know when he’ll be done?”
“Not a clue,” Nym said, glancing at the big red fox. Rizin was sitting upfront, as immobile as a statue except for his tail, which flicked back and forth regularly. If Nym took the effort to look, he could see the faint outlines of other tails waving about in the other layers of reality he had access to. Other than that, Rizin had given no indications that he was alive.
“I have been done for twenty minutes,” the fox said without opening his eyes. “What do you need?”
“The families have assembled, Father.”
“Ah, already? Very well, I’ll be along in a minute.”
The blue fox dipped her head, then disappeared in a burst of unstructured arcana. Nym examined the cloud curiously as it diffused and faded. It was nothing like what he knew teleportation to be, and in fact resembled how he moved using sixth layer arcana, just willing reality to accommodate him.
“Interesting. I could not do that at her level of strength,” he said. “Your magic really is different from mine.”
“In some ways,” Rizin agreed. “One moment while I send an avatar out to attend to this, and then we can go over what I’ve discovered.”
A second Rizin walked out of the first, paced around in a circle once, then disappeared. Unlike the blue fox, there wasn’t a whiff of arcana left behind. As always, Rizin’s abilities in the field of stealth were unparalleled. Still, for there to be no arcana at all, Nym suspected that the second Rizin was fully illusionary.
“Alright, let’s go over this and see how we can adapt it to the time frame you need to use it in,” Rizin said. “First, I want to talk about how the ward stacking rotates. Did you notice the pattern on this? Look how the primary node shifts around here, then here, here, and here. Then it exits the stack and a new ward scheme comes into play over here.”
“Right, but the pattern shifts to a completely different path as soon as that new one comes in.”
“Every twelve wards, yes. But every hundred forty-four wards, it goes back to repeating the first pattern again.”
“Ah,” Nym said, his eyes gleaming as he watched the illusion move. “So if he doesn’t change this up, it’s just a matter of figuring out the weakest points in the ward patterns. That’s going to be difficult to do though, since there’s an outer layer operating on its own pattern and timing, and an inner layer past this one that I wasn’t able to get a good look at.”
“Yes, it’s very complicated. Lucky for you though, I am who I am. Let me show you what I found in the next layer.”