A large majority of their efforts had gone towards making sure Abdun couldn’t escape. Those might have been redundant, considering that the actual fight itself was mostly just them breaking apart spells as quickly as the other could form them. Nym wasn’t sure that Abdun had ever even tried to flee, and if he had, Nym had broken the spellform without realizing what it was.

He’d found it was faster to break a spell than to try to figure out what it was and decide if it was worth the effort. By the time he’d determined that, he could have just broken it anyway. With so many spells flying back and forth, with dozens forming every second between the two of them, and especially with him spending most of his efforts on neutralizing Abdun’s magic instead of going on the offensive, he’d opted to just treat every spell as necessary to defuse.

The strategy had worked, but only because Rizin was there to take advantage of Nym’s tactics. If and when he got into a fight with another ascendant, he’d need a completely different strategy. With luck, that was many decades or even centuries away. Without luck, he might be fighting an unwinnable battle against an unbeatable opponent in the next few minutes.

Abdun was still conscious, but bound by Rizin’s traps, he was unable to do anything. He was sunk up to his neck in a cube that looked like glass but was hard as stone that they’d conjured up for the express purpose of holding him. Arcana flickered and sputtered around his head as he tried to shift it to produce a spell effect, or to bend reality to the shape he desired. His lack of ability to use seventh or eighth layer arcana really hurt him there, but neither Nym or Rizin had any sympathy for him.

“Ready?” the fox asked, after Nym had taken half an hour to recover from the fight. He was going to need to be in top form for what came next.

“Maybe we should knock him out, just in case.”

“I hardly think it will matter in a few minutes.”

“It will if it doesn’t work right,” Nym argued. Abdun watched them both, his eyes narrowed and calculating.

“Just do the spell behind him. As I understand it, your ability to see arcana is strictly limited to what you can actually see.”

That was a surprisingly simple solution, but Nym couldn’t actually think of a rebuttal to it. Shrugging, he walked around behind the cube, took a breath, and started. It was just like practicing with the butterflies. The spell formed, all twenty-some pieces of it emerging out of raw arcana simultaneously over the next few minutes, connections linking each piece together and regulating how it functioned, all of it just waiting for a target to be pointed at.

Nym knew from experimenting that once he reached this point, he had about fifteen seconds before the whole thing started to destabilize. He could extend that another five seconds if he actively worked to hold it together, but past that point, the spell either failed completely or it went off but didn’t work properly. The results of an improper cast were… unpleasant, even when it happened to an insect.

The spell didn’t require him to touch Abdun, thankfully. He had a range of about fifty feet from the source, which could be him, or a theoretical copy if he could have spared a process to pilot it. In this case, he wanted the spell to be cast through a visage, a kind of projection connected back to him. It was thankfully much less intensive to cast than making a copy.

Nym didn’t need it here, but he would for Myzalik, so he cast the spell to project a visage off to the side. Immediately, his perception shifted to the visage and the god killing spell jumped across that connection. Though he was completely insubstantial, he could still direct his own magic, and he did.

The spell leaped from him to Abdun in a flash of light, and his victim let out a brief, strangled cry. In the first second, he went from looking like a grown man in his thirties to a younger, more slender man in his early twenties. In the next second, he reverted to a teenaged body, similar to Nym’s own age. The connections anchoring him to the timeline started to unravel, not snapped, but simply vanishing into nothingness.

In the third second, Abdun’s existence flattened out. He no longer had a presence in the outer layers and his physical form was that of a boy. Nym guessed this was the point in the spell where Niramyn had finally escaped its effects, as it was similar to how Nym had started his own life. Abdun was mortal again.

Even if the spell ended there, he could be snuffed out by any of a thousand spells designed to kill. Had he not been disabled, Abdun would have been able to fight back, perhaps as a weaker version of an archmage with all the required skills but lacking a full-sized soul well. In that sense, with all his memories intact, he was still stronger than Nym had been when he’d first opened his eyes.

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But the spell didn’t end there. Abdun tried to flail about, to drag in arcana to defend himself with, to do anything at all, anything to escape the fate he’d recognized the moment the spell hit him. Rizin’s trap prevented all of that, prevented him from even moving. The glass cube constricted around the former ascendant as his body physically shrunk.

By the end of the fourth second, Abdun was a baby, no longer capable of even using magic. Nym could have let the magic go there and then. Part of him thought that he should, but he was well past the point of no return. Just because Abdun wasn’t a threat now didn’t mean he wouldn’t grow back into one. How exactly his brain handled all the knowledge he had wasn’t something Nym had fully considered, and he wasn’t keen to find out.

Five seconds. The glass cube was empty now. No one had ever been in it. In fact, it had no reason to exist. Nym and Rizin stared at it for a moment, then looked at each other. “Guess it works, and faster than I was expecting,” Nym said.

“I suppose so.” The cube vanished and Rizin paced around it. “Not even a trace of his smell left. He really never did exist. What happens to the timeline now, I wonder. Will we forget about him as it corrects itself? Or will it simply be like he died, his accomplishments and the memory of him remaining, but him no longer able to act. If you travel into the past, would you find him there?”

“The timeline will correct itself as it sees fit, I guess. But no, you won’t find Abdun anywhere in the past. No one will ever see him again; no one ever has seen him.”

“A strange paradox. This spell is… dangerous. It would be best to limit its use.”

“Two more times, and I’m done. Speaking of, I need to move on to the next step before Myzalik has a chance to become suspicious and alter things.”

“Go,” Rizin said. “I’ll… well, not clean up here. There’s nothing to clean. Just go. Good luck, my friend.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to need it.”

Nym disappeared, pulled back into the outer layers so that he could step a hundred years into the past. He arrived four minutes before Myzalik attacked Niramyn, just enough time to prepare himself, cast the spell, and launch his own attack.

He was calibrating his timing based on how many seconds he had until he was forced back out of the core reality, literally counting seconds to start the spell back up. It was harder to cast this time, but not so much that he was afraid he’d botch it. He was just more worn out, more nervous, more afraid.

“You got this,” he muttered to himself. “Two minutes, forty-eight seconds.”

The spell came together again, just like the first time. It was nerve wracking building it, knowing that the slightest mistake would mean complete and utter failure. At best, he’d spend the rest of eternity in hiding. At worst, he’d trip at the very end, alert Myzalik to his presence and his knowledge of the god killer spell, and spend the rest of his life running from an Exarch who would no doubt personally feel the need to track him down and execute him.

So far so good. The spell was forming at speed. As long as he timed this right, Myzalik’s visage would be appearing in twenty-six seconds. He needed twenty-four to finish the spell, plus one additional second to form his own visage after, and then he had a three second window to project the visage to Niramyn’s palace.

Of course, if he mistimed things, he’d either miss the visage completely and lose his window to attack Myzalik, or he’d appear too early and expose himself to Niramyn. This was the part he had to take on faith. Rizin had pulled the time frames for him using spells Nym wasn’t capable of replicating.

The god killer spell finished forming, whole and perfect, just like the last hundred times Nym had used it. He held it steady, and cast the spell to form a visage that he’d project his magic through. The spell started to come together, and god killer flickered. Panicked, Nym immediately devoted more mental processes to keeping it stable, and the spellform for visage started to unravel.

Nym shored it up, but he lost a second. Mentally cursing, he transferred god killer into his visage, then projected it outwards. Despite the setback, he thought he’d make it in time. He hoped he’d make it in time.

“Please let me make it in time,” he whispered.

The visage didn’t cross the physical distance, but it still took longer than he’d expected to reform. He should have practiced casting it out across long distances into warded locations. Even though his destination was a room specifically designed to communicate with the outside world, he hadn’t even thought to test if it might impact the speed at which the visage formed.

The room snapped into focus. Myzalik’s visage was there, looking smug as he watched his rival Exarch succumb to his magic. Niramyn himself looked like a man in his early twenties, and then in a blink, he was gone. Nym blinked away a blurred line where Niramyn had shot past him out into the open sky and focused on the other visage.

Myzalik hadn’t noticed him yet, so that part at least was going to plan. He’d come in just in time. Another few seconds at most and the other Exarch would have dismissed the visage, and Nym wouldn’t be able to use its connection to send his own visage back towards his target. He did still have those seconds though, and he was determined not to waste them.

His visage jumped again, this time following that thin thread of arcana between Myzalik and his visage. When he materialized a second time, the Exarch was standing alone in a room filled with pillars made of marble trimmed in gold, a shallow pool of crystal clear water in front of him. Nym noted a rune sequence etched across the bottom of the pool, just long enough to ensure it wouldn’t interfere with what he was there to do, then shifted his focus.

Myzalik was alone. Good. He was distracted, no doubt trying to track Niramyn’s progress as he fled across the ocean. That was even better. Nym would never get a clearer shot. Before he could second-guess himself, he selected the target for the god killer spell he was holding.

For the second time in less than five minutes, he cast the spell that would end the life of an immortal.