Explosion. Shockwave. Reverberation.

My teeth rattled. The air shook. The ground trembled.

The force of the explosion was enough to knock me off my feet and send me spiraling backwards. My mouth tasted metallic and I spat out a wad of bloody spit on the way back. I could’ve held myself in place, but knew it was vital that I use this opportunity to get as far away as possible.

The lead bullet was surrounded by a bunch of condensed magic spells, making use of the immense amount of energy that I had stored during my journey through the past. The bullet rotated at an insane speed, cutting through the air in a straight line. Air magic further reduced air resistance, and gravitational magic helped the bullet use the planet’s gravitational pull to its advantage.

Explosions resounded behind the bullet intermittently. These were sonic booms and also conventional explosions meant to increase the speed of the bullet even after it had been fired from the railgun. The bullet raced on towards the Simurgh’s one clear weakness, reflecting in the silver moonlight and in Madness’ own eyes as he noticed the bullet hurtling towards his beloved.

Madness’ expression fell from calm laughter to wild rage to hollow despair. He let himself get struck by a talon full of rainbow energy, reaching out towards the bullet as if trying to stop it from hitting the Simurgh.

I still had no idea why he cared about the Simurgh so much. Surely, we could pick up the domains we needed to return to our world after we killed the Simurgh’s physical body. Rather than risk being stabbed in the back by Madness because of something he wasn’t willing to tell me, I decided to take matters into my own hands and get rid of the Simurgh first. I could always deal with Madness later.

But I couldn’t do that if he got himself blown up while trying to take a bullet for the Simurgh. I used magic to quickly nudge Madness away at the last moment. He would have been able to resist if he didn’t have a massive talon in his body and if I hadn’t pulled this trick out of the blue. It was a modified version of my ‘still life’ magic which let me manipulate movement for an instant in exchange for a ton of energy. It was easy to ignore and blow through since it was built on flimsy knowledge, but it was good enough for a moment. And that moment was all I needed to let the bullet sneak right past Madness’ body to strike the Simurgh on its back.

The impact was anticlimactic.

The bullet burrowed itself into the Simurgh’s skin, making feathers fall off nearby and making the whole bird’s body shiver.

The Simurgh was facing away from me, but from what I could see from the corner of its face, was a look of pure disbelief that rapidly turned to pain and then to anger and then back to pain again.

Pain. Signs of pain on the Simurgh? I hadn’t expected that. Somehow, I had thought the Simurgh couldn’t feel pain, that its physical body was little more than an avatar, a lifeless puppet controlled remotely from inside the Nothingness where the Simurgh’s true consciousness remained. But that wasn’t it. This body really existed in the physical world and it could feel pain. It was real. The Simurgh was real.

A raspy shriek. A gurgling sound. The rough kicking up of soil, debris, and dust as the Simurgh’s second talon slipped out from under it and it fell on its back and rolled over on the ground as if that would somehow drive the bullet out of its body.

Madness was pushed aside by the Simurgh’s reaction and he seemed to momentarily forget about me as he began trying to reach for the Simurgh’s rolling body as if wanting to help. He had a worried expression on his face, which I still did not understand.

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The Simurgh somehow bent its knees and leaned on its wings to face towards me. Its expression was unhinged, with bits of slimy muck dripping out from its beak. Globs of acidic liquid leaked from the Simurgh’s eyes, burning the ground and sending noxious fumes into the air. These fumes could not be brushed aside by air magic, and the singe marks made on the ground by the Simurgh’s tears ignored any earth or ground magic that I tried to use. Even covering them up with blown over dirt and soil wasn’t enough.

I felt a strange coldness in the back of my head. No matter how much magic and energy I threw at the tears and their marks, I couldn’t do anything to them. No amount of knowledge and wisdom could touch them. I was afraid. What were the principles behind this? Was there more to come? How was I supposed to defend myself against the Simurgh’s tears if the Immortal somehow managed to weaponize them?

The Simurgh bent low. It was thrashing about in a frenzy, constantly trying to reach for its back with its wings or rocks or the ground itself. It cast strange rainbow fire and shaped that into tangible pillars of flame but even they couldn’t touch the wound on the Simurgh’s back.

The wound was growing. Becoming larger and larger and bringing with it a horrible darkness that contrasted starkly with the Simurgh’s bright body and feathers. The darkness grew with a steady pace, unfazed by the Simurgh’s attempts to control it.

Eventually, Madness managed to cling onto the thrashing Simurgh’s body and brought himself to the hole the bullet had gone into. I couldn’t get through the strange bubble of tears and fumes that the Simurgh had created around itself, and I began to panic.

I began trying to dig underneath the strange invisible force-field. I tried going over it. I even prepared a new bullet of sorts and tried to fire it off, but honestly, I knew that wouldn’t work. The first bullet had been a carefully prepared sneak attack, piling together everything I had learned about magic in this world, and it was the peak of the new magic system that I had devised.

But that wasn’t the most dangerous part. I had used questions and metaphysical inquiries like the ones I had used against the Evil Eye, to strengthen the first bullet. Questions about desire—what it was, what it meant, what was just and unjust in the pursuit of desire, and so on.

Simple questions like whether desire was tied purely to the degree of pleasure and pain that a sentient being experienced, or were there higher, nobler types of desire that stood apart from that utilitarian calculation.

I knew these questions wouldn’t be enough to undermine the Simurgh’s core domain the way I had undermined Evil for the Evil Eye, but I knew it would make this bullet sting. Right now, the Simurgh was in a race against time, struggling to remove the very real physical projectile embedded in its body while also fending off the metaphysical attacks that had come with it. It could not do both at the same time, and yet it had to.

Madness would try to help and I was worried he would figure it out. He was from my world. He could deal with a few questions about Utilitarianism or whatever. In fact, I was still trying to reckon with how someone from my world hadn’t come up with a magic system like mine or challenged the status quo in the world in this way, but I suppose Madness’ actions in taking over domains and in a way, literally starting this world and giving the sentient beings in it a chance to thrive had been a shakeup of the status quo. He had done more to mess up this world than I had.

In fact, the similarities between this world and mine were probably his doing.

Madness reached into the Simurgh’s back. His arm became darkened and his toga became frayed. He clenched his teeth. The veins on his head popped out from under his skin. He was straining his body as much as he could and he was in pain, I could tell.

Why was he going so far?

What did the Simurgh mean to him?

What did Desire mean to him?

The Simurgh screamed. Madness howled. My ears began to ring and I blinked.

Then there was Nothingness.