***** PoV: The Full Chosen One *****

It was time to move, the horde was approaching, uncaring about my minor existential crisis. Now that I have a clearer view of everything that I/we can do, I have a much better plan than a dragonfire moat. At least Arthur had the time to spin up the reactor and charge the spellcraft capacitor, but left the primary railgun capacitors uncharged as this fight is way too short-ranged for that gun.

I jumped over the crenelations, doing half of a forward roll and bouncing off of an energy shield I’d projected for exactly this purpose, pushing myself towards the road faster than gravity alone would account for. On the way, I pulled out my/Arthur’s casting sword, landed on another energy shield mere inches above the road so I didn’t break it, and immediately swung the sword, launching a sword beam made of necrosbane fire down the road. As it flew towards the horde, it grew to fill the entire valley, following the topography as it flew.

If they are truly the gobins that they appear to be, a fair chunk of the horde will be smart enough to duck. Gobins may not be the sharpest, but they do at least have some basic survival instincts, such as desiring not to be punched in the face. Lower leveled undead, like generic zombies and skeletons, don’t have that.

As expected, none of the horde ducked, and the sword beam cut all of them in half at the waist, leaving smoldering piles of halved undead behind. With the immediate crisis over, and the stage being set for stage two of the fire, I/we reverted back to being Half Chosen once again.

***** PoV: Victrina Vitafino *****

[What just happened? That was different than when we first got shoved together.]

{Oh. I didn’t think that was even possible for at least another month or two, and I didn’t actually expect it to happen in the first place. I had hoped, but I had not expected to ever get to this point. It is an intermittent, sliding-scale gestalt that is a benefit of a draconic - dang it!}

[What?]

{There is a price to be paid in mana once we formally acknowledge what is going on between us, but it is scaled for draconic mana pool and regen. While your mana pool is really good for a non-mage, it is barely even a rounding error for a dragon. We are territory-based mana gatherers, our regen is based on our territory, and our ability to expand and improve it. More on that later, I have figure out what I can tell you without making you pay that price too soon.}

[Ok, but what was that spell? I’ve never seen a sword beam do anything like that before!]

{Speaking of that spell, dang girl, you good! I’ve seen people who claim to be professional spell casters who have less mastery of their spells. That was your sword beam spell, but with my manna pool giving it a lot more power, and the first stage of my necrosbane spell modifier tacked on.}

[Wait, what do you mean that was my spell?]

{The gestalt cannot do anything that we cannot do unless it is possible with a combination of our abilities. In this case, I’ve never used a sword beam before, so it was mostly your experience and skill with the spell keeping it stable despite all of the changes. Admittedly, the fact that I’m used to applying those modifiers to pretty much everything does make it easier, but every spell responds to those changes in different ways, and you know your spell well enough that together, we had little trouble with the gestalt at full power.}

[Oh. Well ok, thank you. What does the sliding scale part of the gestalt mean?]

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{Most of the time, it is barely active and functions more like a party feature, making us aware of where each other are and how we are doing, and allowing us to communicate over short to medium distances, up to a couple hundred miles. On the other hand, in times of crisis, it will activate fully and both of us will act as if we are one. I think there will eventually be a way to let us act as one but focus on two different things, but I’m not sure how effective that will be while we’re stuck in the same body.}

[Fair enough, I suppose. What do you mean by the first stage necrosbane?]

{I don’t often have time to do this anymore as the necromancers back home know who I am and what I do, so as soon as they see me hit their hordes, they start letting go of their undead. Fortunately, whoever is commanding this horde doesn’t know, so I can turn his entire horde into charcoal without cutting the connections. Once that is complete, I can use the charcoal to launch a firestorm down the spells they use to control their undead, which will let me light the necromancer on fire from within. From there, I can send the firestorm down the magic that the senior necromancers use to bind their juniors to their service, as well as any other undead or necromancers under their command.}

[Wait, so you’re saying that if you can hit enough of the undead and light them on fire, you can then use their own spellcraft to light the rest of the… whatever you call a group of necromancers and their pets on fire?]

{Precisely! Also, a group of necromancers is a necromany. If it is necromancers and their pets, its a necromosh. On top of that, once they started putting in automatic disconnects and waterwalls and other things to try and keep me from doing exactly that, I figured out how to get the fire to jump to other nearby networks, bypass their waterwalls, and reconnect connections that are freshly cut.}

[Oh. So that’s why they call you Necrosbane, eh? Somehow, I doubt these guys will know what hit them!]

{Lord willing! Oh look, the horde is completely charcoal. Time for phase two fire!}

Then he did something with his armor that dumped a truly massive amount of mana into the pile of charcoal that used to be the horde in the blink of an eye.

Unsurprisingly, the entire thing exploded into flames.

***** PoV: Coverion System *****

Well, this has been a more frustrating and fascinating day than usual when my Prophetic subsystem takes action. I hate that it takes control away from me with almost no warning, even if it does so gently, but it is always fascinating to see what it does.

At least now I know it locked me out of the final faction selection because it was waiting for Arthur and his allies. Boy am I glad that my Prophetic subsystem caught them, who know what would have happened if they had actually hit me in the face like they were going to had they continued on that trajectory.

But what is it waiting for? Sure, it gave me some new toys to play with, and a fascinating new Chosen One with a rather unique physiology, and finally unlocked the final faction specific timeline, so it should be letting me have control of this stuff now, yeah?

Of course, no sooner had I asked that question when the temporal barriers that divided the world of Calador into discrete Quest areas started retreating, letting the wave of fire spread across the world through one of the necromancer’s networks.

Never before have I seen someone do so much damage to even one of the necromancer clans, let alone the largest one. Sadly, it appears to be slowing down as it approached the patriarch of the clan, and was briefly slowed down by some sort of makeshift defense he’d applied to himself, presumably to buy time to get something better put together or even figure out what the heck was going on.

Mere moments later, somehow the fire was past his defenses and everything he was went up in flames even faster than the charcoal pile, and the rest of the clan fell in seconds, with none of the other clans yet realizing there was a problem.

Well, that was well worth the inconvenience, too bad it was only the one cla-

Ohhhh? How did it manage to jump to a completely different network? Huh. Oh, I see. Their networks overlap a little bit at the edges where they’re sending minions to similar areas, so it jumped across the gap to the next clan over, and it’s burning through their network even faster.

Aaaannnnd… all of the other clans have even smaller gaps between them.

Welp, it’s not every day that you get to sit back and watch an entire catastrophe burn to the ground!