Cole charged towards the Gate, stretching his red tinged, gold threaded hands out. If his theory was correct, he should be able to destabilise it with his Hallowed magic abilities. During his time as the Magus Supreme of the Vestria Online VRMMO, he’d cemented his position at the top through effective use of the Instant Portal technique, which allowed him to deliver force to and from wherever he wanted. He could maintain these portals, also called ‘Gates’, almost indefinitely, as long as he had enough mana. But they weren’t infallible. They could be disrupted.
Early in his career, while he’d still been learning how to use the Instant Portal technique properly, Cole had been in a solo battle against a Titan level (as they had been called in the MMO) monster, called the Magelord. It was a huge, hooded humanoid, about twenty five metres tall, that could use almost every type of magic available in the game’s world. Many adventuring parties had fallen to its wrath due to not being able to counteract every type of magic. Even if they could somehow survive the immense amount of magical damage, which basically only the strongest mages of the game could do. The monster’s immense physical strength could then easily crush whoever remained. It was essentially an unbeatable foe, deadly effective against all the different types of classes in the world of Vestria Online.
While he’d been fighting against this formidable foe, Cole had been making use of his Instant Portal technique, as he always did, using it to move himself out of the way of attacks, and funnel magic bursts that would have obliterated him back at the attacking monster, when something strange had happened. The Gates created by the Instant Portal technique were formed with spatial type magic, which the developers had designed to allow mages that used it to have control over things like gravity and fabric of space. The Magelord’s AI had thrown a before then unseen spell made out of that same spatial magic at him, a boulder ripped out of the ground by earth magic that was then condensed to a incredibly tiny point by the compressive force of spatial magic. Cole could feel the attack pulling him towards it, bending space in such a way that it had its own gravitational field.
Nevertheless, he had employed his usual tactic, throwing up a vast Gate in front of himself that would redirect the attack to strike at the monster’s back. But as he pushed it forward to meet the black hole like projectile, something… broke. The edges of the Gate began to stretch out, the glowing light ringing its edges getting sucked towards the dense ball. The two magical constructs accelerated, speeding towards one another, across the vast plain that was the battlefield inhabited by the Magelord. The seemingly huge distance between Cole and the monster was made naught by the sheer speed that the two spells were travelling at. A few seconds later, they had collided.
At first, nothing had happened. In that moment, just a few spare seconds, he’d thought the game’s physics engine had broken, the two spells merely cancelling each other out. He’d been so wrong.
He felt it before he saw it, enhanced magical sense skills levelled up during his career as a mage in the VR world alerting him to a huge surge of magical energy in the area. Next came the shockwave. From the point of impact, a huge blast of energy spread out, a deadly cutting force that would be sure to kill him on contact. So Cole did the only thing he could think of. He opened a Gate, and hurriedly leapt through, just before the blast reached him.
He'd exited the Gate, and his stomach had dropped as he began to fall. Cole had teleported himself straight above the battlefield, safely out of the way of the destructive magical explosion. Now he was plummeting towards the ground, with no spells in his roster that would help slow him down. The only thing that was remotely in that vein was a simple Windburst cantrip he’d learned while being a lowly [Mage], but it had nowhere near enough power to slow his fall by any significant amount. Of course, this had all taken place in a game, so he wasn’t in any real danger, but dying would mean he’d lose all his progress towards his next level up, as well a large amount of the gold in his inventory, so he couldn’t allow that to happen.
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The answer to his problem, was of course, another Gate, and so he’d fallen into another tear of space time, one that pointed straight into the sky, and had the incredibly odd sensation of falling up. As his velocity equalled out, reaching the height of his parabolic arc he took the moment to view the battlefield, as the spatial magic explosion had now faded. A huge crater now marred the landscape, but there was no debris field. It was like some bored deity had deleted a sphere from the world.
Also, the Magelord was gone.
Not gone in the slain sense, there was no corpse to be seen. Instead, it was like it had never been there. Cole had frantically looked around, but it was nowhere to be seen, no matter how hard he searched. Because of his rapid searching, he’d forgotten to recast his Instant Portal technique, and had ended up slamming into the ground, player death screen overtaking his vision. At the time, he’d been so shocked he couldn’t think properly, trying to understand why it had happened, but as Cole had been unable to find any answers, and had taken on different quests and duties in the VR world of Vestria Online, he’d filed the incident away into the back of his head. After all, while it was worrying that there seemed to be a hard counter to his Instant Portal technique, nothing like that had ever happened again, and so he’d almost forgotten it.
But now he was here. It wasn’t a game anymore. He was standing in front of a real, Infernal Gate. The lives of thousands of people rested on his shoulders, their freedom only able to be secured through his efforts.
While Cole didn’t have access to his spatial magic anymore, as a result of no longer being a [Mage], let alone a [Spatial Mage], he still had a plan. The interaction of two different types of spatial spells, different in their application, but of the same cloth, had created a rapid release of energy, that had displaced everything in the area. But what if the clash of magic was with polar opposites? Say, Infernal and Hallowed? If he was right, it would destablise the portal, causing it to fold in on itself. In fact, he was almost certain that that was how Surgebreaker units operated, introducing opposing mana types to shut down a runaway Gate.
And he couldn’t afford to be wrong.
Of course it wasn’t as simple as just blasting the Gate with Hallowed magic. He had to grasp hold of the boundaries between the two dimensions. It was something that would absolutely take years of training. But that was training he’d had, throwing up countless Gates over the many years in his time in the VR world.
Cole stood in front of the Gate, a tiny insect when compared to the huge tear in space, and reached his hands in, shot through with golden Hallowed energy.
He could feel the Infernal energy of the Gate hissing at his incursion. He hadn’t even activated any spells, but he was already feeling a visceral reaction to his passive Hallowed Scale ability. Cole wondered what would happen if he activated his Hallowed Blast while immersed within the mixed spatial and Infernal mana of the Gate.
So he did.
His hands traced out the golden runes, releasing hallowed energy directly into the Infernal portal. It roiled as he did so, a flash of light scouring away the hungry red energy of the Gate. He could see the Gate fading, ever so slightly, but he needed more power.
Cole entered his soul, viewing the various cords that were attached to his different runes. A few were still attached to the mysterious Rise rune, one to the Hallowed Scale Rune and the rest to his Hallowed Blast. He gathered all of the spare cords, only leaving one in both the Rise and Hallowed Scale, before slamming them all into Hallowed Blast.
The pain was at a heightened level, but he was prepared for it, the familiar strain of increasing the power of his rune just something else he needed to live with. As he came back into the real world, nothing felt too different. Until he started to trace out another Hallowed Blast.
Cole’s arms shook with the sheer power that was coursing through them. The golden threads of his Hallowed Scale were almost blazing, shining light flowing down to his hands where they spilled out of his shaking fingertips. The forming Rune was almost too bright to look at, and as it neared completion, he could feel it coalescing into the world, a divine weight that was eroding the Infernal even before it was activated.
There was a final stroke of his hand, and the Rune was complete.
The Gate was washed with Hallowed Light.