There are two adages among the Fleetborn, when it comes to violence: when it becomes inevitable, to wait before striking is arrogance; and when employing force, to use an insufficient amount of it is cruelty.

Seidr was arrogant enough that in the first few heartbeats of the fight, he waited to see what I would do, and when the answer turns out to be nothing visible, he casts something that’s obviously intended to test my defenses, rather than to put me down permanently. I don’t take the risk of just eating it and soldiering through, obviously; I put a Mote into the way of the slow-moving slash of incoming charge, and the Firmament-aligned Mote grounds out the whole strike.

Buying time, at minimal cost, and the first stage is progressing alright, with my grip on the ambient mana going thus-far uncontested.

The next thing he does is a lot more intelligent, though not especially observant; he hits me with another one of those waves of dispelling power and a couple of shock-orbs at the same time. Three Motes pop, and I intercept the two shockers with orbs that are identically loaded to the Mote that I used in the first exchange.

It’s a risk, but it pays off; the trick he used isn’t good enough, and they ground out again. Five more Motes up, and two orbs, and I can feel that there isn’t enough in the tank for another Mote, not for now. The good news there is that I had enough to put the Motes out that I needed to sustain the pattern.

“I think not.”

The bad news is that the god is more clever than I was hoping.

There’s a twisting wave of magic. It doesn’t exactly dispel my Motes; it displaces them, scattering them with enough force to slam into the walls. What’s interesting is that I can tell there’s something else at play; when I try to get them to stop, to slow down, they don’t obey my commands.

Hijacked.

“Kneel, Magelord. I grant you this, despite your opposition; serve me and you will serve the good of all. I will not permit your so-clever designs to come to fruition.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The pressure is back, but fuck him; it flows through me like it’s a neutrino stream, not interacting with me at all. Another Mote, using my mana manipulation skills to twist the ambient mana into a funnel that fuels the spellform, and another orb.

“Do not think to toy with me.” The Mote goes flying off, but the new orb doesn’t; Seidr’s will grabs for it and just slides off. “I will not warn you again.”

“Okay, so maybe I was trying to do something cute.” I had been, really; a four-dimensional rune, three spatial and one time. What Seidr is doing with the Motes puts paid to that. One plan falls, fall back. “But what if I have more clever things to try? Obviously you can’t expect me to—”

“Enough!” The single word just about flattens me onto the floor; it’s only a hand at my shoulder that keeps me up. “Enough,” he repeats more softly, and then he takes a step forwards, and he’s one step from being close enough to reach me, and then he takes another step forwards.

One step from being close enough to reach me, and he takes a step forwards, face unchanging.

Amber’s voice is a murmur in my ear, something practically subvocal. “What do you need?”

Emotions flood me, and I respond through a dry, momentarily choked throat, struggling to make myself hold my own weight. “He’s locked most of my Skills.” I don’t take my eyes off of Seidr. “I need Interface and my Visor.” I still have Manipulate Mana, and something’s off with my Motes but I’m still making them—and the orbs, which are behaving as they ought—so that’s not fully locked out.

Obviously I have plans that don’t require Interface. I even have one plan that doesn’t require the Visor. They just aren’t good ones, and Amber isn’t asking what I need in order for us all to survive this. She’s asking what she should spend herself on, maybe even what she should expend herself on, in defying a god. The realization hits my stomach, and my mouth opens—

—and my mouth shuts.

Trust, I think to myself, and Amber’s already murmuring, chanting, as Sara’s spell starts to fray.

“—be empowered, be strengthened, be renewed. The vine may wither in winter’s chill, but life remains in the trunk and will in spring’s time grow green anew. Kazir of the festivals, who brings us together in joy. Kazir of the harvest, who is bounty and plenty. Kazir of growth, who gives us the power to stand.” There’s a crystalline, frozen moment of time, and her lips brush my cheek.

Seidr takes a step to the side, drawing a painfully bright runic diagram in the air. It flares, and Sara staggers backwards with a choked-off scream, blood running from her nose.

“[Channel Divinity],” the Chosen of Kazir says softly, and the words ring fit to shatter the world.

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There’s a thud, and a rolling chiming sound, and the feeling of fizz and tiny cuts and the shock of the cold-room when you’re overheated. It’s like taking a stimstick, like swapping out a broken sensor for a working one. My Visor comes up instantly, responsive like a thought, and the pressure that was hammering down on me vanishes so immediately that I almost topple over; but my muscles are solid, strong, like I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life and then some.

My mental muscles, inasmuch as that’s a thing, are likewise, and my grip on the ambient mana firms up. Even as my Visor goes up, the vortex starts to form, and my orbs start flowing in a steady stream, orbiting around me in a dance intended to obfuscate what I’m doing, how many there are, what they’re for.

Futile, except that the god we’re facing is… distracted.

“You dare.” Seidr’s voice rumbles, shakes the room. There’s a complex spell-working forming at his hands, something with so many subtle weaves of what my Visor chooses to display as color that it shines a composite white in the visual representation. “You dare!”

“I am—” Amber coughs once, twice. Her voice is weak and thready, and a glance to my side shows her sprawled on the ground, which explains the thud. “I serve,” she whispers. “It worked.”

She’s smiling, and her fingers touch my ankle, and the fury I’d been feeling gives way to an odd, detached coldness. “Yeah. It did.”

“You see, my lord?” She’s smiling; I make note of that, in my coldness. It’s a fact, just like many other facts. “I was more than the one thing. Am. Will be.”

“I love you too, Amber.” I squat down, run my hand from her forehead to the back of her neck, stroking her hair. “Get some rest. We’ll finish this.”

She nods, eyes closing, and I stand up and look onto a magical battlefield.

I stop paying attention for a few seconds… I step to the side as a fissure travels down the dungeonstone of the wall. Unnecessarily, as it turns out; it doesn’t shatter, the propagation stopping and then the stone seeming to mend itself. Ahead, there’s a shield covering the entirety of the hallway, seemingly anchored into the stone of the corridors; it’s being pushed back, millimeter by millimeter, which is what’s causing the fracturing.

There’s magical residue everywhere, like a few dozen—or a few hundred, judging by the spell-signatures in the Visor—spells have gone off on the other side of the shield. There’s also a ball of manifold colors, presumably the spell Seidr was putting together after he broke out of Sara’s… Sara’s ridiculousness, and it’s grinding against the shield, exerting a steady and inexorable pressure. Even as I watch, bits are peeling off of the spell and blowing apart or just decohering, and there’s a growing instability in the basic shape of the ball.

Sara hawks suddenly, doubling over with a cough and retching. I glance across, and see something uncomplicated and vicious come across Zidanya’s face; I glance down, and Sara’s spitting a glob of blood held together by mucus onto the floor, and then she’s standing back up and magic starts wreathing her hands again.

I can’t actually track what they’re doing to pull apart the ball of spells. Even they can’t possibly be identifying individual spells in the weave that quickly, putting together a counterspell, and then casting it; and besides, the spells they cast travel around the ball, sliding across the surface, until they mutually-annihilate with a strand. Elemental counters, maybe; throw something designed to take apart a fire spell at the ball, constructed to travel the surface of the ball until it finds its target. Except it’s way more complicated than that, obviously.

Instead of helping them, I reach out for the ambient mana again. I’ve got a lot of orbs up, almost enough for what I want to execute, but that almost is an eternity on my natural regeneration. The vortex settles into me, pouring mana into me like I’m trying to drink an ocean, and it pours right out of me into orbs.

Insight is still broken, I can feel it like… like something that isn’t a broken limb, but is like a broken limb. I can feel it in a way exactly like and yet totally unlike the way that my body just flat-out wouldn’t let me put weight on the broken leg.

Good thing I don’t need it, because I have the Visor, and I have a team buying me time, and I have a plan.

As I’m thinking that, something changes with Seidr’s attack spell. A streamer of shimmering blackness from Sara slips in between a sudden gap between threads, and the whole ball shakes and, after a moment, explodes in a mess of unstructured, flashy magic. The shield it’s been grinding on shatters, and Sara drops like a puppet with her strings cut; Zidanya reaches down, grabbing her shoulder as she falls, and she winds up hitting the ground more gently and with less head-first action than she otherwise would.

Seidr is backed almost up against the membrane. He stands there, eyes closed and face twisted in either concentration or a breathtakingly pure indignant fury, with another orb forming in each hand. There’s a pressure roiling off of them that almost pushes me backwards a step, and I can hear Zidanya growl at the wave of presence, unbowed; but there’s a harsh tension in there I’ve never heard from her before.

Correction, I think to myself. Visor, plan, and very little time.

“Magelord.” Zidanya steps over to me, some sort of absurdly complex, filigree-thin magic starting to build between her fingers.

“Zidanya.” My voice is distracted, probably; I’ve almost got enough orbs, and I’ll be able to let go of the mana-vortex soon, but there’s a building, burning pain in my extremities that’s starting to creep up towards my body, and I still need to be focusing on the runic diagram design.

“Whence comes our victory?”

“Thing I’m doing.” I can’t look at her, can’t look at anything but the way the power flows through the simulation. Part of this I have to do in my head, and that’s slowing me down; I can’t play my hand in advance, for the same reason I can’t just define the outcome I need and have the Visor spit out the glyphwork. “Need time. I’m almost there.”

“Time.” I hear her step forwards, one step, then another. “Knows not how long, belike expects a miracle. Magelords.” I hear her hawk and spit, and then her voice goes hard instead of wry. “Seidr. Desist. Naught which hath passed cannot—”

“I do not fear you, Druid.” The god cuts her off, harsh and echoing. “Nor their shades.”

“Mistake,” Zidanya hisses in three different voices, resonant to the bone. The world shudders as the two figures flanking her take a step forward, and they reach forwards with hands wreathed in power and glory.