Nym could feel something twisting in reality, something he couldn’t quite place. It was familiar, but at the same time, strange. It didn’t originate from him, was in fact hanging off of Niramyn, but it worried him. It was a variable, a powerful one, and it could alter the entire course of the battle. Considering that Nym was still confident in total victory, he didn’t need unknowns affecting the outcome. At best, they’d help him do what he could accomplish on his own. At worst, they’d give Niramyn some new edge and allow him to snatch victory from Nym.

Whatever was happening, it had distracted the Exarch sufficiently that he didn’t even react when Nym doubled down on his spatial and dimensional locks. He built a cube out of solid arcana, a thousand feet to a side, just to prevent anyone else from interfering by means of physical locomotion or Niramyn from flying away to get out of the range of the lock spells. Then, preparations complete, he attacked again.

Now that Niramyn had regained his immortality, Nym needed to subdue him the same way they’d taken out Abdun. However, without Rizin to help, without a prepared battlefield littered with traps, and against an opponent who might be technically the same rank as Abdun, but significantly smarter and more experienced, he didn’t have a lot of hopes of the same strategy working.

He would be going with a more brute force approach.

Nym ignored the Exarch’s barbed words. Either they were an attempt to stall and buy himself more time, or they were the arrogant rantings of a twisted psychopath. Whichever was the case, Nym wasn’t interested in banter.

He was wary of getting too close, but it seemed whatever was twisting reality up into a knot was working against Niramyn after all. He barely parried the first few spells Nym threw at him, and when Niramyn tried to assert his will against reality to break Nym’s magic, it was easy for Nym to counter him.

It seemed the fight was going to be even easier to win than he’d initially thought, but something about the twisted knot of reality surrounding Niramyn still worried him. It shouldn’t be happening, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was going to blow up in his face.

His eyes widened as he realized what was going on. The paradox of Nym’s existence had wracked Niramyn’s body. Nym only vaguely remembered the end result, when Niramyn had realized what had happened and been forced to form a new body for Nym to occupy, to separate them into two different people.

It was happening again now, and as soon as Niramyn figured out what was wrong and splintered off a new Nym, one of them was going to be forced out of the core reality. Considering that the Nym Niramyn would be forced to create was mortal, it seemed to him that reality would force him out. All of the sudden, he was on a clock with an unknown length of time. He had however long it took Niramyn to figure out why reality was attacking him and correct it to finish this fight.

Subduing Niramyn was no longer an option. He needed to be destroyed while Nym still had the ability to do so. If a new Nym entered the timeline now, it would block Nym from reaching Niramyn for more than enough time for the Exarch to get back up to full strength again.

Nym immediately devoted the bulk of his mind to casting god killer. Doing it in front of Niramyn was a terrible idea, but the fox pin still had some arcana left in it, and he used it all to shield himself while spinning off a copy to engage Niramyn directly. With only a single process to run it, he doubted it would be all that effective, but he didn’t have enough left over to add a second copy.

Two minutes was all he needed. Surely his copy could hold out that long. All of the locks were already in place. Niramyn wasn’t leaving. Nym just needed to keep him busy and distracted until god killer was finished.

* * *

Two minutes was an eternity for the copy of Nym. Niramyn would have overwhelmed him in seconds if not for the fact that reality itself was trying to push him into the outer layers. That helped Nym now, but if reality broke through the dimensional lock, Niramyn would escape. If Niramyn figured out what he needed to do to appease reality, Nym would end up banished.

Two minutes.

Nym flew forward, bolts of lightning thundering around him as he fired them off, one after another. Niramyn didn’t even bother dispelling them, opting instead to create a lightning catcher something like the ones Nym himself used, though far more advanced and made of fifth layer arcana.

If lightning wasn’t going to do it, there were plenty of other elements to tap into, and no reason to limit himself to low level spells. Nym pulled in his own fifth layer arcana and shaped it into a destructive beam of liquid sun, bright enough to sear the vision from his eyes and hot enough that the temperature inside the cube immediately spiked to the point that he needed magic to protect himself.

Niramyn didn’t try to dodge. He just let himself fall while casting his own spell. The beam of liquid sun tracked him, only to be swallowed by a whirling black circle of gravity so strong that not only did it eat Nym’s spell, but it pulled him towards it.

He lashed out with raw arcana, unaffected by the gravity of the black circle, and tore open the spellform supporting it. It flickered, then cracked and vanished just before Nym reached it. He couldn’t celebrate though, not with a hundred lances of some sort of shimmering green light thrumming through the air to skewer him.

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One minute, fifty-five seconds remaining.

Nym teleported, just a short hop that he barely managed to cast despite Niramyn’s interference. Six of the lances struck him anyway, three in his back, two in one arm, and one in his leg. His arm was sliced off cleanly, and pain surged through the stump of his shoulder. Nym bit off a sharp cry, spun out more arcana, and killed his sensation of pain. It would do him no good as a copy with a lifespan that could be measured in seconds.

At the same time, he attacked the elemental air magic Niramyn had woven to keep himself from splattering against the ground below. The fall itself wouldn’t kill him, not now that he was immortal, but everything Nym did was just a distraction. Each spell was calculated not to do the most damage, but to buy the most time.

One minute, forty-five seconds remaining.

Niramyn was winning the fight, and he had to be wondering why. Or maybe he already knew. It didn’t matter, since the fox pin had enough arcana left in it to hide the original Nym still. At least, he assumed it did since Niramyn was focusing all his efforts on the copy. Even distracted by his fight against reality itself as it tried to expel him despite the dimensional lock, he was still quickly overpowering Nym.

Spells flew through the air, or materialized next to their target. Nym got the worst of it, though Niramyn took a hit or two as well. Part of that was that Nym was far more willing to accept damage in order to dish it out, but most of it was just that Niramyn was a better mage than him. All things equal, Nym with only a single mind to cast spells couldn’t match Niramyn.

One and a half minutes left.

* * *

Niramyn fought against reality with everything he had. If he didn’t, he’d be crushed between it and the area denial that kept him trapped in place. Despite everything, he managed to give himself two extra processes for spell casting. It wasn’t what he’d been going for, but he’d done the best he could with the considerable handicaps he’d labored under.

The enemy ascendant had sent out some sort of copy to distract him while he hid behind a veil of fox magic. Niramyn knew a dozen ways to strip it away, but all of them required immortal arcana, and his was tied up contesting reality’s attempt to eject him. Even if it wasn’t, with his downgrade from ninth layer to sixth, he didn’t have access to more than one or two options.

Once he took care of the pesky simulacrum, he’d be free to hunt down the original. With their arena being so small, it was merely a matter of exerting the effort to find the ascendant, fox magic or not. After the first minute of combat, he reconsidered his plan. Breaking the area denial and retreating might just be the better course, loath as he was to lose track of the ascendant without first learning who he was.

Oh well, there were plenty of other ways to learn the man’s identity once he’d fully recovered. Other than Myzalik himself, who had specialized in time magic to a ridiculous degree, there was nobody who could obscure the timeline well enough to keep him from peering into it.

Niramyn deflected a fifth layer spell from the copy, one that would have boiled the blood inside his body to the point that he started sweating it out of his pores, and frowned. He knew why the copy wasn’t using sixth layer or higher spells. It could damage the area denial and force Niramyn out of the battlefield, but something about the spells he had chosen to use bothered Niramyn.

It was too close to his own preferred spell repertoire. Was the copy deliberately doing that, or was it a coincidence? Before he could chase that line of thought down, another spasm of reality rippled through him and dragged him across the dimensional lock. That was painful in a way that mortals didn’t have words for, an agony of the mind more than the body, but he endured.

He was Niramyn. He was an Exarch. The Exarch. The most powerful of them all. His will wouldn’t be denied by the weak fabric of reality prime, and it certainly wouldn’t be blocked by an ascendant barely into the seventh layer.

* * *

Five seconds left.

Nym’s copy was a sliver of itself at this point. Only the fact that he was actively channeling sixth layer arcana to contest reality’s insistence that he was dead kept him from falling apart. Even that was a precarious connection. But he’d almost done it. One more salvo of spells to distract Niramyn would be enough. Even if he was obliterated in the counter attack, he’d bought the original enough time.

As it turned out, he didn’t even get a chance to do that. Niramyn diverted enough of his own sixth layer arcana to lash out at the copy, broke his hold over his personal reality, and allowed the core reality to overwrite him. Nym’s body turned to raw arcana and unraveled, his existence burnt out before he had a chance to dictate any other possible reality.

* * *

Niramyn’s mouth curved up into a grim smile. Now that he was done with that, he just needed to find… there. The ascendant who’d been hiding didn’t seem to realize that the fox magic had run out. He’d been too distracted by the monstrously complex spell he was putting together.

Niramyn looked at it curiously. He didn’t recognize it, and that almost never happened. There were many, many familiar pieces though, with only a few new ones. His eyes widened. The ascendant was casting the age reversal spell again!

And now that the fox magic had burned away, Niramyn saw him clearly. It was… himself, but not him. Nym. That little mortal existence he’d briefly been forced to-

That was it! That was the problem. His existence was a paradox right now, two discrete entities in one body. He just needed to expel his version of Nym out to stop reality from trying to shove him into the outer layers. It would even banish the ascendant Nym at the same time.

A single spell was all he needed to cast to end this fight. He could have done that a few minutes back. Mentally scolding himself for his own foolishness, Niramyn reconstituted his Nym into reality.

* * *

Nym felt reality pushing against him, that same feeling that told him he was running up against an immovable wall. For all the ways ascendants could twist reality to their desires, existing in two different places at the same time was not one of them. At least, not like this, not as two separate beings.

He had seconds before he was ejected, but the spell was ready.

He released it, watched it arc through empty air to strike Niramyn, watched the shape of a young man coalesce into existence, an empty shell about to be filled with everything left inside the Exarch that was still Nym.

God killer struck.

Nym felt the push of reality vanish, and Niramyn’s body skipped backwards through time again. His mouth open in a scream of rage and denial, Niramyn became mortal again. This time he couldn’t run, physically or magically.

Niramyn looked like a ten-year-old boy, the twin to Nym the day he’d woken up on that beach. And then a bolt of lightning struck him, and he became a seared and smoking corpse falling through the air to crash against the earth below.

Wearily, Nym descended to the ground to examine the body of his fallen foe, to make sure it was really over.