The summit was to be held in a mostly random location.
Both sides submitted their preferred town or city, and then they met halfway between them in the wilderness.
Neither had the ability to know where the other would pick, and thus they had no way to stage the area beforehand.
It was a their trap, but why did he feel like he was the one being led to a snare?
Fomoria and his others had their disguises on, their weapons, and the training to use them so they could appear to be the royal guards who were injured and not yet ready to return.
It was boring, talking back and forth, and eventually, Rosewell stood, bowed deeply toward the rebel leader, and took a step back, disappearing through a gate.
“What a rude-”
Just as soon as the man said his words, Fomoria and the others rushed forward, and the man was crushed under the weight of a gravity infused hammer.
Safira would’ve loved this, a good fight against traitors to the throne.
“ATTACK.”
It was a pointless warcry, everyone on both sides knew exactly what was happening.
The first one that blocked Fomoria’s hammer was an older man, but despite his age, his skin was clear, and his armor was the obvious source of his strength.
How many lives had been lost to make the gems that covered his armor?; It was a waste.
The man let out a blast of void, one which would’ve killed Safira, it was too fast, a siege level spell released in an instant, charged before the attack had even happened; both sides always intended for it to end this way.
It was nothing but a paper thin layer of radiance, yet the size of a spell did not determine the strength.
The mass of void meant that he couldn’t dodge, not without showing who he was.
This sheet of light had more than enough power to counter the void, and when the man stopped the spell, Fomoria rushed forward, the stressed gems unable to muster anything more.
Another crushed head, another mangled body, another cleaved in two by the sheer force of the attacks.
Yet it was not one sided.
The royal guard and the army were winning, but it was three to one.
Then came more people, their colors unclear, so were their allegiances.
Some joined on the side of the rebels, some on the side of the kingdom.
But more and more came, some on neither side.
The battlefield became chaos, even those who were allied with one side or another were attacked by them; nobody could tell who had invited these other groups.
Fomoria wasn’t the first to feel the shift, another of the royal guard, one whose name Fomoria never knew, or maybe just forgot, a man specialized in wind magic, screamed out.
“GUARD NORTH, GUARD NORTH.”
He barely got a shield up, first he had intended on void, but as he felt the shift, he changed to a wall of rotating solid air, like Yalda used.
He could see outside of the orb, a wall of wind bearing splinters of stone and wood tore men apart, those that were able to block the small pieces still found themselves flayed alive, first the skin, then the fat, the muscles, finally, their bones fell apart, adding to the hail.
The wall of decorticating air blew past them, and in the weakened state from the fighting beforehand mixed with the sudden blow had reduced the number of combatants down to under 200.
Then came the second wind from the other side.
They saw it rise like a tidal wave, the aerosol like a sandstorm turned back, doubling its fury.
“GATHER AROUND ME.”
Both allies and enemies flocked together, those that either thought it was some kind of trick or tried to flee met the same fate as the ones caught by surprise, and those that tried to hold their own barriers failed, for most hard only barely held against the first wave.
“OTHERS, DROP THE FACADE. HARD AIR ROTATION BARRIERS BY MY ORDER. YOU, ONE FOOT OUT FROM THE LAST PERSON, YOU, TWO. WHOEVER I POINT AT, GO ANOTHER FOOT OUT.”
Their royal guard armors shifted into the void bone armors, each looked no different than the last, except for Fomoria, who shifted the top of his helmet into a simple crown.
The wind barrier made it safe in a small area, not more than 100 feet, and only 60 people left, of those, eight were royal guards, including Charlin.
“Emperor Fomoria. What are we dealing with here?”
“David and Parnell, if I had to guess. There is a stink of Fae. But this hardly makes sense, where did he get so much power?”
“He is a Paladin of Nemain, yes? Surely she-”
“Nemain was captured during The Cleave. She couldn’t give them more power, unless she knew she would be captured, and gave it to them before it happened.”
“I do hate dealing with Fae. What do you suggest?”
“If I am right, then this is the spell of Hirum Selvis, Archmage Typhoon. The danger is that provided one can move from one side to another and catch the wind it can be directed back and forth.
But, with the right spell to counter it, it’s quite harmless.
For now, we wait. Creating such a massive wall of high speed winds, it’s a high cost spell, and naturally, turning it back will cost quite a lot as well.”
One of the last remaining rebels stomped forward.
“You expect us to just-”
Fomoria shoved the man, and once he hit the walls of hard air he was reduced to a red mist.
“This is not a democracy. Everyone can listen or shut up. If David and Parnell are using this, then clearly they are stronger than they were before by a significant margin. Hirum can only use this spell because he’s a Golden, and at his age that means he has nearly four times the mana of a human, if my calculations are right. They have passed this back and forth three times so far. From what I was able to learn, Hirum can do this six times. Two of them, I assume just over a dozen uses. At that point, either they are going to leave or switch tactics.”
David and Parnell changed their tactics as soon as they recognized it was him and came nearer.
“Drop the shields.”
“Sir Fomoria-”
“Charlin, David and I are friends, friendly, something. Harlan became closer to him after I left.”
“What of Parnell?”
Fomoria shrugged.
“Everyone, ready spells, this isn’t likely to end well. But don’t attack until he or I make the first move.”
The collection of nobles, traitors, assassins, warlords, alchemists, and archmagi moved their hands and whispered their words, but then froze like statues, gathering mana, holding the spells in, moments from activation.
Fomoria came out with Safira’s mace slung over his shoulder.
“David, it’s been a long time.”
“Harlan? Or-”
“Emperor Fomoria.”
David chuckled and rubbed the back of his head.
“You know, I didn’t really think you would do something like that. You’re more of a, cut out the problems, help on the lower levels.”
“If you cut the head off of a snake, it can still bite you, and the rest of it still dies. I was dumb enough to think that just cutting out the cancer was enough, but you are supposed to be smarter than me.”
“Well, you are an idiot, but so am I.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t smarten up at least. How’s Shelly?”
“Harlan, Fomoria, whatever you want to call yourself. What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to kill you. I could change your face, you could-”
“Harlan told me the same thing. Parnell, if I die, don’t die with me.”
“Alright, you’re the boss.”
“Fomoria, you against me. If I win, I’ll kill everyone else here. If you win, well, that’s it. I tried, maybe I failed, but I tried, I didn’t cower anymore.”
“You could-”
“NO!”
David’s scream came with a squawk at the end.
“You wouldn’t stop, if it was your mother that died, that had been murdered for trying to change things…”
“I’d like a different weapon, but it’s outside the veil, I need to open a void gate to get there.”
“I know you won’t try to run.”
Safira’s mace, it wasn’t the wrong weapon, but one could detain another with a blunt weapon, a sword was a killing weapon. So, Fomoria grabbed one of the swords stolen from the cyborg soldiers.
“I won’t ask you to stop again, I won't insult you like that. Harlan might hesitate, but I know you and I are two of a pair. Maybe… maybe if I had come back soon, I could’ve offered you a place by my side.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Thank you. Maybe in that timeline, we could’ve become two champions of justice, setting right the errors of the world.”
“Maybe.”
David pulled a massive blade from thin air, and Fomoria took a combat stance; the Others put up walls of hard air so they could watch the fight; there was an argument about joining, but the Others said they would close the barrier, killing all of them.
The two of them rushed toward one another, but instead of clashing, David turned to birds and hid the blade; Fomoria barely managed to get out of the way.
The blade severed his arm at the shoulder, its blade too thick to let him regenerate through it.
David, like Harlan, fought orcs hundreds of times.
It was a weekend activity, like playing a sport, painting, or hunting.
Orcs, like Harlan, were regenerators, and David was very used to fighting them.
Fomoria, being Harlan, not only had ideas on how David fought, but on how other people fought regenerators.
He knew that the next thing David would do would be a sound attack, short range, contained, internal organ bursting, then he would poison the wounds.
When fighting something that could heal hundreds of severed limbs, you only needed to find the limit to their ability to heal. Cutting off an arm meant the body needed to make a new arm, poisoning them with alchemical solutions causing an instant infection that the body now needed to fight could be worth a dozen arms.
Fomoria retaliated by breathing in, inflating his lungs, then opening his chest, twisting his organs into runes that he filled instantly.
The resulting magic from his exploding lungs not only turned the sound spell back against David, but the poison in the vial was blown away.
Or at least, it would’ve if it existed.
David had stolen the blade from a rebel, but since then he modified it, making the blade itself poisonous.
It burned as it passed through his bloodstream, but his kidney filtered it almost immediately as it entered them, severely lessening the damage, and thus the cost.
As David got back on his feet and dusted himself off, he laughed.
“You always impress me. Your body is your weapon, that sword is just for show, isn’t it?”
“No.”
Fomoria covered the sword in a layer of void bone, adding weight and durability, though Fomoria and his Others, hadn’t yet found the limits for this weapon's durability during the tests.
“Almost everything I have right now is just me. My clothes are just parts of my body, my armor is from my sigil, but I noticed something. Xol wears enchanted robes, but Marigold wears mundane dresses.
He can turn any plant into a staff, she has twin swords of Godtouched steel. Perhaps believing that I can be everything is holding me back, and the cost of constantly remaking everything that I have is worth the cost.”
“Nemain told me to gather items, because there is a limit to how much any single person can do, and those things I found are going to fill the gaps.”
David summoned his next weapon, an estoc.
Fomoria did not change his weapon, or his body.
It would’ve been an advantage to shift into another form, slithering across the ground to move past his defenses, putting everything in a single arm and a body that let him spin like a windmill.
But this wasn’t a fight, or rather, it wasn’t just a fight.
David first seemed to be enjoying it, dodging left and right, up and down, trying to catch Fomoria’s skips, his hand chops that moved with such force that they cut the very air.
But as both he and Fomoria moved faster and faster, pushing their powers to their limits, their joy faded, they had come to terms with what this was.
Parnell watched from the sidelines, he could see it all, but almost half of the survivors of the sneak attack were lost, the five objective minutes that passed were an hour from the perspective of the two fighters.
When Fomoria was about to land a solid hit, taking David’s head off, he turned into a flock of birds again.
Fomoria, not one to be caught off guard a second time, reacted quickly with a chain lightning spell.
Yet just as the lightning was about to strike them, it was pulled somewhere else.
David could become each of the birds, though each of them was him, and the more of them that weren’t making up his body the physically weaker he would be.
But even with a single bird of the flock, he was able to summon another weapon from his stash.
The copper block that was its head was deeply engraved with letters and symbols that Fomoira didn’t recognize, but when Parnell did, he warned the Others to make their defenses stronger.
David swung the hammer rapidly and all of the lighting was pulled into it, then he shot it in the air, and in a matter of seconds a microburst formed.
Fomoria launched himself toward David, it was like swimming due to the massive amount of water which rained down on them, and he covered his sword in void bone to increase the weight and size so he could match the hammer which was clearly intensely magical.
The resulting boom and flash of light stunned everyone in the area.
David recovered by splitting himself and then healing each of the birds on their own, Fomoria had no such issue of how to quickly heal himself, he just did it, and faster than David, fast enough that he had the time to kill one of David’s birds; 11 to go.
“That was-”
Fomoria knew David was just biding for time to recover, no matter what changes he had, Fomoria was a healer, both of others, and of himself, all David knew was what either Harlan taught him or what he learned in survival classes, which were more designed to handle field triage, not something as high level as the shockwaves from a massive clash and the blindness from sonoluminescence.
He had been mostly relying on the healing that came from Nemain’s ichor, which only elevated what was already there.
David made his way through a dozen more weapons, but with the loss of the first bird, he lost nearly a tenth of his physical strength, and magically he wasn’t going to beat Fomoria.
Nemain’s advice of acquiring a hoard of magical items was good, but her hoard was from thousands of years, and David’s was for less than a year.
The hammer he had was from her, and was one of his most powerful artifacts, but it was only going to matter if Fomoria did nothing but use lightning magic.
Left with only a few options, David went with a head on assault, leaping in the air for a downward strike.
Fomoria thought better about David, he knew that the attack must be a feint, so he leaned into it.
But when he faced the hammer head on, dozens of lightning bolts, all natural, struck the hammer as it struck Fomoria’s club blade.
Fomoria’s armor was the first to go, then the skin, his fat boiled, frying his muscles, yet their steel-like strength let them only be torn mostly apart.
Fomoria was sent skipping across the ground, he couldn’t recover, his brain was scrambled, his muscles too stiff to function, his bones fractured or broken by the shockwaves that turned his organs into a soup.
If his body suffered any more damage, he would’ve had to get a new one.
The last straw was that he could see David was moving around him, that large poisonous blade in his hand.
If he was cut in half by that thing, this body would be effectively destroyed, David and Parnell would be left to face the remaining fighters on their own.
So, Fomoria shifted, eating at his own body to shift one of his arms.
When he stuck it into the ground, it stretched like a cord, and Fomoria was shot in the opposite direction.
David couldn’t teleport, and he couldn’t instantly change his momentum.
Fomoria had not only started to move in the opposite direction, but with anti-friction magic and the smooth surface left behind after the typhoon spells, he was moving far too quickly for David to catch up, and it gave him the time to repair his body.
What he wouldn’t give to be able to subsume an ox or a whale, the constant fighting at a high level with his relative youth meant he was burning up a lot of mana and calories.
His hunger kept growing, he just needed a little more, he was tired… just a good meal…
His breathing was heavy, in, out, in, out, shallow at first, but then he took a deep breath, and the mana entered his body.
That was always how it worked, every day, people breathed in mana or absorbed it through some other means, but not in such a quantity.
David stabbed at him with the poisonous blade, but Fomoria coiled like a snake, slithering across the surface and cutting his arm off.
The tides had quickly shifted, when pushed to his absolute limit, something always came to him, an idea that he wanted but hadn’t had the will to force into reality.
His study of plant monsters, an extension of his research into mimic trees, showed that some of them, despite their size, were able to not only subsist by just absorbing mana from the ground and air, but they actually improved the nutrients of the area instead of sucking them dry.
His study of Balor and Lugh’s ability to live off of just what was in the air, something that had changed for Balor once he gained a body, was about not just their ability to do such a thing, but also that they both had an innate ability to suck dry other creatures of their mana to strengthen themselves.
His deep hunger caused his mind to turn to such things, and if he wasn’t a person, if he was just… a thing with a soul, no different than Balor’s ring or a tree, why wouldn’t he be able to simply absorb the mana from the ground and air?
It wasn’t massive, he wouldn’t really recover anything, but it kept him from deteriorating any further.
Even as David laid there on the ground, Harlan’s newfound expansion of a natural part of life letting him overwhelm the paladin who just kept getting weaker, he couldn’t help but laugh.
“Did I ever really stand a chance?”
The ground was covered by feathers from his dead crows.
“But I got you to fight me at full strength, I got you to give up on whatever honorable part was making you remain as just a human.”
He started spitting up blood, so Fomoria rolled him onto his side.
“You did. If I was human, you would’ve won, you were better than me.”
“No, I cheated. I drank from Nemain’s power, I didn’t get it fairly.”
“I got power from-”
“I’ve seen you, you are awake for weeks, but you don’t waste that time. If I could do that, I would’ve played around, I would’ve thought that I had all the time in the world to train and play. You taught other students, you studied on your own for hours, you-”
“I don’t want to hear more of this.”
He laughed and laughed.
“How many crows did you kill?”
“11, you are the last one.”
“I took a page from your book, there is another crow far from here. This was fun, I learned a lot by fighting you, and next time-”
“There can’t be a next time. I know what you are doing, I can’t even say you were wrong for some of it, but think of what you could’ve done by fighting smarter. Sure, you found out about this meeting, you invited dozens of other groups of assassins and-”
“I didn’t invite anyone.”
Fomoria shook his head and staggered to his feet, regaining his strength more and more each moment.
“It doesn’t matter. But I can’t let you do this again.”
Fomoria raised his blade.
“Cleave.”
It was nothing compared to what Marigold did, and it took everything he had just to do it, but as Fomoria collapsed, David and Parnell felt it, he had cut the connection between David and his flock.
The giant chiropteravian, stood over his friend, but when he saw that Fomoria was in such a state, black blood flowing from every opening on his body, he wanted to finish him.
“Parnell, stop.”
David’s voice was hardly a whisper.
“But he-”
“Promise… promise me that you are going to let this go…”
He turned back to human form, though his hair had become almost like feathers as a result of Nemain’s ichor mixing with her vampiric nature.
“We can still-”
“Do you have that bottle on you?”
“Now isn’t the time to get drunk, your wounds are-”
“One last drink, brother.”
Vampires did not cry, though nobody knew why, but it meant nothing about what they felt.
From a spatial pocket, Parnell pulled out a bottle of whiskey, something old and strong, stolen from some noble they killed.
Parnell poured it into David’s mouth, then took a swig of his own.
“We… we had a good run, but this was my fight. Promise me, take Fomoria’s offer, change your face, do whatever you want, but don’t keep this going.”
“That’s bullshit, I could still fight them, I still have Hirum’s magic, I-”
“We’ve crippled the military power of the kingdom, traitor and royal, in the south, the Ibexians revolted against the Confederacy, more people are going to understand that they can be who they want, we won that much.”
With the battle won, the other survivors started moving towards them, and they were less forgiving than Fomoria.
A mental signal went out, and a void gate opened, hundreds of Others in battle garb flooded out, and two lifted Fomoria from the ground.
“YOU AREN’T TO LAY A HAND ON THEM.”
“SIR FOMORIA-
“I WAS NOT ASKING.”
The Others, one after another, held warspells at the ready.
The 50 who remained, since the Others among them had already moved to side with their brothers, still thought that they stood a chance.
Then Carmilla came through the void gate and let them feel her power.
She made no aggressive action, she simply stood there with her hands together, and stared.
Anyone who could sense danger knew that a hard fought, but possible winnable fight, was suddenly impossible.
And so the latest civil war related to the changing of thrones ended.
David left his black mark, history would know him, but it didn’t help anyone in the present. Fomoria heard as his heart beat its last, and Parnell carried his body away.
The spatial lock ended, and some tried to flee now that the greater threat was ended, but the Others returned to the side of the kingdom, and the rest were either captured or killed.
Rosewell’s great slaughter wouldn’t go down in history as an act of aggression during peace negotiation which would paint her as a brutal tyrant, all of it would be shoveled onto David and Parnell, and Rosewell would be the queen who narrowly escaped.
Her assault wouldn’t be needed anymore, the few remaining nobles would be her witnesses, receiving pardons in exchange for telling her truth to the world, that there wasn’t enough leadership to even continue fighting, that they must focus on rebuilding.
Without them, and without the evidence, the miles of devastated forests, the flashes of light that were seen across great distances, and the wall of wind and dust, hundreds of thousands more would’ve died in pointless fighting.
But the victory killed Fomoria’s heart just a little more, finally forcing him to confront what he would have to do if one of his friends became someone he couldn’t allow to live.