Nym waited in terse silence while Rizin lounged lazily. In two hours, Abdun would show up and try to screw with Rizin’s island. It seemed the ascendant knew he couldn’t actually face Rizin in an open battle, but Rizin lacked the ability to sever any meaningful number of anchors, and Abdun made it his goal to avoid the fox for as long as possible while he killed the mortal foxes living there.
Rizin’s prophetic magic wasn’t precise enough to know exactly when Abdun would appear, but Nym didn’t have that problem. He knew down to the second when the other ascendant would show up. The trap had been laid, and Abdun wouldn’t be escaping the island this time.
He went through his checklist again. The wards had been laid. They just needed to be activated and it would become impossible to teleport or step to another layer of reality. If Nym could tag Abdun with the spell, he’d set up a spatial anchor too that would prevent the ascendant from moving more than five hundred feet from the center of the island.
It would be up to him to work to counter any magic Abdun performed, to keep the foxes living on the island safe. He didn’t need to go on the offensive, that being Rizin’s job, but he did need to disrupt any and all spells of any significance. Rizin didn’t want his new home to be reduced to a barren rock jutting out of the sea. Abdun had tried that several times already, especially when he was ready to give up and needed a nice distraction to keep Rizin from pursuing him.
Really, Abdun wasn’t that smart. It was no wonder he’d been stuck at the sixth layer for centuries now. Nym was morbidly curious just what series of events had resulted in the man’s ascendance, and had to assume he’d had a massive amount of help from some other ascendant to get there. It wasn’t an easy mountain to climb, but if someone had guided every step of the journey, he thought it was possible Abdun was just tenacious enough to succeed.
He could just picture whoever had held Abdun’s hand the whole way waiting anxiously to see if he managed to form his new body in the outer layers, and being half-surprised, half-relieved to see that the man had pulled it off. Nym wondered what had caused that mysterious benefactor to stop assisting the ascendant after he’d managed to cross the threshold.
Perhaps Abdun simply lacked the willpower to withstand the seventh layer, even if he knew exactly what he needed to do. Perfect technical knowledge did not translate into ability, after all. At some point, it no longer mattered if he knew the answers unless he had the power to act on them.
Either way, Abdun had a grudge against Nym and was working to actively kill him, so he was the perfect research specimen. They just needed him to show up. It wasn’t like Abdun was late or anything, but Nym was tired of waiting.
“Just skip ahead,” Rizin said.
“I considered it, but I don’t want to have to deal with accidentally setting off any of the traps designed for him. If I triggered something, I wouldn’t be able to get it set back up in time.”
Rizin had been waiting for this for three years. Nym had only been in this time frame for about six hours, but he’d overestimated how long it would take him to set everything up. Or rather, he had underestimated how much Rizin had already built in preparation for Abdun’s next visit. Everything was ready, and they knew the plan. If it all worked like Nym expected it to, he’d be moving directly from executing his first ascendant to his second and third.
He went over his preparations again, not just for capturing Abdun, but for what came next. His biggest concern was casting god killer three times in what would be, for him, less than five minutes. Knowing that he had absolutely no margin for error was stressful, to say the least. Once Abdun was gone, he couldn’t stop, or retreat, or try to rethink his strategy. If any part of the plan failed, he would need to adapt on the fly.
“One hour left,” Rizin announced some time later.
Nym glanced up at him, then went right back to worrying. Over and over again, he played out each step. Over and over again, he considered what might go wrong. Worst case, Myzalik saw him coming and obliterated him before Nym could react. That shouldn’t happen, if for no other reason than that the spell did take some time to put together, and he would have just used it against Niramyn. That didn’t mean the Exarch couldn’t use other magic that was far swifter to cast, though.
Even if he got the spell off and hit Myzalik with it, there was still the possibility that the Exarch would do the same thing Niramyn had done and outrange the spell to break it. Or he might know a counter spell or have some other sort of defense. If that was the case, then there had never been any hope of success, no matter what Nym did. The only way to find out was to proceed.
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Ironically, he was less worried about Niramyn. There was very little room for error there, but if something went wrong, he was more confident in his ability to recover from it. Getting over the hurdle that was Myzalik was what concerned him the most.
“Ten minutes,” Rizin said. “Time to get ready.”
Nym opened his conduits up and filled his soul well with a mix of third, fifth, sixth, and seventh layer arcana, heavily weighted towards seventh. Anything else he could stream practically endlessly, but seventh layer arcana was still hard enough to connect to that he wasn’t so confident about holding an open conduit while he was mid-fight. It was easier to keep a reservoir of it available if and when he needed it, not that he expected to.
“You want to go over the plan again?” Nym asked.
“Not really, no. Would it calm your nerves if we did it anyway?”
“No,” Nym admitted.
“Then no. Spend your time casting pre-battle spells instead of confirming what you already know.”
Nym did just that, not that he expected to need them. He layered spell effects on himself, one on top of another. By the time he was done, he was all but immune to any spell cast using mortal arcana. He couldn’t be drowned or suffocated, not even if he was hurled up past the sky to where the air vanished. He couldn’t be burned, shocked, frozen, crushed, or cut apart. His mind was fully shielded from all sorts of tampering. Nym could drop into the middle of a battlefield and stand there for days while both sides tried uselessly to break through his barriers. He even had a layer of extra-realness just to reinforce his own personal reality and make it harder for Abdun to change him.
He had to admit, he was still afraid it wouldn’t be enough. He’d only won the first confrontation with the other ascendant by taking advantage of being underestimated and through the use of seventh layer arcana like a sledge. It didn’t seem likely that Abdun would make that same mistake again.
This time, he had Rizin to help, and that should be enough to make the difference, but he knew that Abdun would know the powerful fox was there.
“Stop worrying so much. It’s getting annoying,” Rizin said. “Besides, it’s time.”
Nym nodded once, took a breath, then teleported into the open air above the island. All of the foxes below were safely holed up in various sanctuaries Rizin had set up for them, magical shelters that should keep them safe from stray spells and incidental damage. It was actually kind of touching how protective he was of those foxes, especially that one blue one who sometimes visited. Nym had eventually learned her name, Sohu.
Reality popped and Abdun appeared in front of him, right where Nym had predicted. Before the ascendant could say so much as a word, the first spell hit him. Nym had been holding it, primed and ready, and he successfully tagged Abdun with the spatial lock. The other ascendant appeared surprised, but then he laughed.
“To hold me here? Why, so I can’t chase you when you run away?”
Nym shot a flurry of weaker spells at him, his opening salvo designed to distract his opponent. Abdun responded immediately, and arcana flowed out into the world between the two of them. Nym’s advantage was soon overturned when Abdun showed his centuries of experience and began systematically cutting Nym’s spells away before they were even fully formed.
The longer the fight went on, the harder Abdun pushed Nym back. He laughed the entire time too while sixth layer arcana built up around him. “What’s wrong?” he taunted. “No seventh layer arcana this time? I know you’ve got it; I can feel it. Was that all you could hold? Too hard to get it on your own? Have to beg for scraps from other ascendants?”
Nym wasn’t sure exactly what he was talking about there. He hadn’t realized it was possible to take arcana he was unable to gather on his own from a donor source. If he’d known that, maybe he’d have gone about things differently, but it was too late now either way.
They traded more spells, some of them detonating with explosive results, but usually they would manage to crack open a spell form before it could be completed, or sheer off an important section that rendered the whole thing useless. Nym almost felt like some sort of giant squid grappling with another one deep underwater, their arcana flowing out of them like tentacles that thrashed around and broke apart anything they came in contact with.
Now that the fight was on, time seemed to stand still for him. He was painfully aware of each passing second, but somehow it took ten times longer than it should have. In the brief minute they sparred with each other, they covered the entire length of the spatial lock a dozen times and cast hundreds of spells.
Enough power erupted out of them to level mountains, wipe cities off the map, and boil seas. For the most part, it didn’t look that impressive. Anyone unable to see arcana would have thought they were just dancing around each other in the air. Nym played it that way on purpose, to give Rizin the time he needed to spring his big trap while minimizing damage to the island.
And then the fox’s teeth closed around Abdun. Arcana, previously invisible, lashed out of nowhere and snared the ascendant. Abdun fought back, his own magic surging through him to break the spell, but Rizin had built it right, and he’d done it using eighth layer arcana. It was too dense for Abdun to shatter, and it dragged the ascendant down to the dirt.
Nym landed nearby and added his own bindings, ones designed to prevent Abdun from snapping back to his outer layer body. They were redundant spells, hopefully unnecessary with the wards that Rizin had stealthily activated one at a time once Abdun had arrived. Given the stakes they were playing for though, Nym was fine with a bit of redundancy.
The other ascendant’s face was slack and his eyes were fogged over. Rizin appeared, at full size for once, and loomed over the apparently comatose ascendant. “Yes, good. He’s been trapped in the illusion. This should hold his mind and allow us time to work the magic. Come, let’s get him behind the wards and confirm that your spell works.”
“Yeah, and then…”
“And then, the rest of this business.”
“One way or another, live or die, it’s going to end today,” Nym said.