The ruined husk of a man landed still burning in the crater. Nothing even vaguely human could have survived those injuries; nothing even vaguely human had. Skin burned almost to the bone but healing visibly, pulsating waves travelling across its face. Ruined lips peeled back in a snarl of hate as it flicked itself easily to its feet, supine in its terrible grace as it shot up into the air only to be batted down by its opponent up above’s next shot. And the next.

If another such glutton for punishment had ever existed then their sheer masochism had made them short for this life.

A bolt of living lightning, too bright to look at directly for all that Xia was shielding her eyes, flashed down onto the smoking ruin of the man. As the glare faded she got a brief look at his eyes, rage, and not helpless rage, there was something terribly cruel in there, and even more terribly calculating.

“Right then.” There’s no way the words should have been so clear, not when she could actually see his windpipe. Fingers flicked in a practiced gesture and the next actinic blast grounded itself feet from him.

Xia cried out, forced to her knees as the current shot up as far as her thighs. Just how much energy was he putting into those shots that she could feel it when it had grounded that far away?

The next deflection was firmer, more sure of itself, practically sending it up past its owner’s ear. It was rare that Xia would call a man beautiful, but the one floating overhead was, and handsome, and any other adjective designed to express sheer joy at another person’s appearance. A perfect ideal that models and makeup artists would weep in their attempts to imitate.

His smile was pure radiance as he discarded his quiver of living lightning, arms spread wide to welcome his foe’s retort. There was no hate here, just confidence and surety of victory. A single word echoed across the barren wasteland that had been a thriving forest mere minutes ago.

“Come.”

The monster did. Rising up into the sky to meet him, an octet of rubble pieces going with him, a wordless gesture and the whipcrack of objects breaking the sound barrier only for what had practically been boulders to shatter upon the man’s will meters from him.

But the monster was not finished, one arm circling his head as if throwing a lasso, which he was, a lash of fire, so hot as to burn white flicked out over the distance.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The young man’s hands began the familiar gesture of a dispelling but was too slow, the whip wrapping around his wrist with the crackle and hiss of burning flesh as the monster pulled hard, aborting the counter and bringing his foe within arm’s reach for the first time since the fight began.

The punch was… just that, a punch, there was no inhuman power behind it, no magic to sunder reality itself. Just a punch. It was the first thing to draw a cry of pain from the handsome cultivator. For it was the first time he was within the monster’s aura, and it didn’t just lay bare his defences, it tore them apart. It was a mortal’s blow, but what he was hitting was, in this moment, just a man.

“You should have stayed away.” The words were dripping with hate from its lips, “I would have let you.” A moment’s inhalation and then a spoken spell, another first for the fight, a single word, spoken with even cadence. “Rend.”

The lower half of the young man was torn away as the upper half stayed in the monster’s grasp. Well less a monster now, given those vital seconds to heal he was just a man again, but for the inhumanity in his eyes.

The cultivator coughed up blood but managed to speak past it, “I have… practiced too long and too hard, to die to you here and now.”

“You should have practiced longer.” It sneered, “Did you truly think you alone would have grown with time?”

The young man smiled, blood coating his chin, “No. I didn’t.”

The shockwave threw Xia from her feet, tumbling through the air and across the ground at speeds that would be fatal for an unenhanced human. It still hurt and by the time she’d gotten to her feet the cultivator was fine again, floating about a hundred feet from the monster.

Get her out of here. I cannot stall like this forever. The words flashed in her head, telepathy, unrestrained.

“No!” She yelled, even as familiar crimson arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Yes, you are the last, come child.”

“We have to help him!” She protested, trying to fight against that inexorable strength.

The reply was quiet but hurried. “We are helping him, he can’t truly cut loose with you so close. He doesn’t want you on his conscience, and they’re about to escalate.”

Escalate. The thought was laughable, boulders the size of trees thrown around like playthings, half a forest reduced to dust by an entropy spell and lightning bolts to power a planet for a century. Escalate. But she knew it was true.

Her last sight of the two was of them facing off, fingers twitching like gunfighters in an old movie, and then they went for it. The same spell, almost, palms together as if in prayer before one hand rose and the other fell, parting the heavens.

“Eternity beckons.” “Silence follows.”

For the moments before the teleport pulled her between worlds Xia Moran saw the truth of their two souls, of their visions of the future.

Behind the cultivator, a bright sky and a sun, and a golden city, and just seeing it she knew it would be perfect, no hunger, no thirst, no need unaddressed, where all who had talent, regardless of source or creed would be nurtured to their fullest potential.

Behind the monster, it wasn’t a night sky, there were no stars for one thing, no moon either, just a blackness that never ended, an empty night with nothing that was, is, or would ever be again, except him. Always just him.

And they were gone. In the space between worlds she turned to look directly at the dreamer, “Please help him.”

*

Xia woke up in a cold sweat, the same dream, every night for the last year. Not always the same fight, but always the same fighters, and always at the end that same desperate request.

A year ago she would have put it down to an overactive imagination and too much coffee before bed. Now though, she lived at the Citadel of Eternity. Now she knew the monsters were all too real.