There was a hundred feet of space at a steep incline between myself and the golem. I could have jumped down there in a single leap, probably without using any sort of magic to assist my movement. For Ergl to reach me was an entirely different matter. It would have to claw its way up what was essentially the side of a mountain.

I’d expected the golem to have a bit more trouble with that task than it actually did. Not only was it frighteningly fast, but the almost vertical surface didn’t slow it down one bit. Maybe the lowered gravity helped it out, too, but either way, it cleared those hundred feet in less than two seconds. Even throwing myself out into the open air the instant it started moving only barely got me clear of one of its long arms.

And then that long arm extended, the plates protecting it splitting open to give it even more length. I practically willed a force wall into existence since I didn’t have the time to cast the spell properly. It lasted a fraction of a second, just long enough to deflect Ergl’s shovel-like hand from clamping down on my leg.

Then the wall shattered, and the arc of my jump started taking me down. Quick as a flash, the golem reversed direction and skittered back down the slope without any apparent regard for the constraints of gravity. Obviously, this golem was designed for more than just digging.

A chunk of stone sped through the air and struck my shield ward, pushing me closer to Ergl before it bounced away. Ammun picked another one up with telekinesis, this time angling it overhead and firing it off to drive me closer to the ground. I shot it down with a force bolt, which didn’t do nearly the damage it should have, but still had enough momentum to deflect the shot wide.

I pushed myself upward with a burst of flight magic after taking a deep, deep breath. My air scattered as the magic ripped through it, which gave me at most ten minutes before I suffocated, even with invocations helping me get the most out of the lungful I’d gotten. It was that or let Ergl grab hold of me, however, and that made the choice easy.

There was a reason Ammun was using pure force magic to attack me. Yulitar’s atmospheric composition was fundamentally different from Manoch’s, and without doing any experiments, I couldn’t definitively say I knew what would happen if I conjured up an open flame or a lightning bolt. Even transmutation could have unforeseen effects.

Throwing a rock was predictable and easy to do. Sure, it took a bit more effort to make it fly the same speed, and sure, it took a bit of practice to get used to the reduced gravity, but those were trivial problems to overcome, especially with something like telekinesis that ignored those issues to begin with.

That was why I immediately adopted Ammun’s strategy and started snapping up my own rocks to slam into the golem. It staggered when a stone the size of my chest smacked into its head, but its huge emerald eye stayed locked on me the entire time, even when I managed to knock it loose from its perch with a concentrated barrage at its feet.

Defending myself against Ammun was surprisingly easy, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he was holding back. Maybe he was just afraid of exhausting his mana so far away from the tower, but the mana here was thick enough that I didn’t think that particular explanation held water.

I started paying more attention to his mana as he cast a series of weak spells to keep me distracted while his golem leapt through the air to grab me. It didn’t take long to figure out the problem. It wasn’t that Ammun was trying to conserve mana. It was that he physically couldn’t use most of it. It was already tied up with his attempt to bind his phylactery to the moon core. I’d caught him in the middle of the process, and he’d either need to abandon the ritual completely to fight me off or stall me long enough to dig deeper and fully establish the connection.

In the meantime, all of his spells were constructed by skimming ambient mana at an admittedly impressive speed, but which made for a series of weak attacks that he knew wouldn’t do anything more than distract me. I really only needed to destroy the golem to mess everything up.

I set about doing just that. I’d been holding back myself, trying to keep Ammun from getting a good look at lossless casting in action. We were both limiting ourselves to intermediate-tier magic for different reasons, but the bigger handicap was mine. Ammun was a lich. His golem wasn’t living. I was the only one who’d suffocate down here if I didn’t end this fight quickly.

My mana reserves weren’t built up enough to survive a brawl with another archmage without lossless casting, which meant it was time to put an all-or-nothing bet on myself. I needed to reveal what I could do and hope that I’d prepared well enough to stop Ammun once and for all. If I pulled that off, it wouldn’t matter what he saw. He’d be too dead to act on that knowledge.

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Master-tier telekinesis spells didn’t struggle with the weight or velocity limits their lesser brethren did. It was incredibly easy to pick up Ergl and slam it into the ceiling, then hurl it down the slope at Ammun. He deflected the golem away with a casual gesture, and it twisted in the air to land, cat-like with its six legs splayed out beneath its frame, on the wall.

Jaws of stone rose up around it and slammed shut, catching the golem in their teeth. I knew that wouldn’t hold for long, not against a construct designed to tear through the ground, but the spell managed to catch one of its arms and pin it against the golem’s torso. That would help hold it for the duration of the spell.

Metal screeched as stone scraped across it. Even then, the golem’s single eye stayed locked on me while its free arm arced around and slammed down on the jaw-shaped trap. A spark of light erupted from its eye and a beam of pure mana lanced through the air to hit me before I could react. It breached my shield ward in an instant, completely overloading it and leaving me almost defenseless.

Almost, but not quite. My body was akin to living mana crystal now. Even as the beam tore through my shirt, my skin drank it up. Seared flesh aside, I stole most of the mana from the attack and returned it as an orb of crushing force that blinked into existence around the golem the exact moment it broke free and leaped at me.

“No, you don’t,” Ammun snapped. A wedge of his own mana drove into the orb and sent cracks spidering across its surface. The orb held against the first strike, but the wedge was already in, and a second blow of force magic sent it completely through. Both our spells flashed into mana as they unraveled, and Ammun paused for a moment.

He’d noticed the recycling aspect of my magic, and far quicker than I’d been hoping. Before he could focus too much on it, I conjured up metal spikes by the dozens and rained them down the slope. As an attack, it was an utter failure. But as a distraction, it worked well enough to allow me to funnel mana into my shield ward and get it back up.

“You don’t really think this crazy plan of yours is actually going to work, do you?” I asked. “I mean, sure, there’s a lot of mana up here, but the sheer miles between a moon and the planet are prohibitive. Have you actually done the math on this? I know how much you hate the math.”

“Shut up,” Ammun snapped. That was a sore subject for him, I supposed.

Mana wove itself into Ergl, empowering the golem and refilling whatever reserves it had spent. Freshly energized, it bounded up the slope and hurled itself through the air to reach me. As it got close, its arms shot out to triple their usual length. I let my flight spell drop and started to drift out of the way, remembering at the last moment that the moon’s lower gravity was going to drop me slower.

It wasn’t enough to get out of the way. Small squares of force appeared between us, not to stop the multi-ton golem’s momentum, but to try to deflect it up and over my head. The damn thing was too agile for something so big; it just curled at the torso and came right back down toward the back of my skull.

There was no good way to prevent getting tagged, not without expending more mana than I could afford. The golem struck me, but this time, the moon’s lower gravity worked in my favor. We sunk back to the ground at a relatively sedate pace, giving me full seconds to react. My shield ward still had mana in it, which was preventing direct contact. Its limbs were wrapped around me to stop the magic from pushing it away, all of them steadily tightening in an attempt to overpower the ward’s kinetic resistance.

I wasn’t going to outmuscle a golem physically, not even pitting telekinesis against it. Sure, I could pick it up and throw it, but that wouldn’t do me any good if it was wrapped around me like a murderous octopus. I needed to switch strategies to take advantage of our relative positions, and I had a good idea of how to do that.

First, I needed time. I subtly pushed back against our descent, slowing it even further and giving me a few extra seconds. Hopefully, Ergl wasn’t intelligent enough to realize this was anything more than the strange gravity we were fighting under. Then I let my shield ward peel back from the hand I slapped on the golem’s torso.

Finally, I cast a spell similar to rupture core, only designed to work on artificial cores instead of natural ones. Golems didn’t feel pain, so it wouldn’t be writhing around in agony as mana flooded a body that wasn’t designed to withstand it, but it would weaken a construct to the point that it quickly lost the ability to keep moving. I’d rupture the core, then I just needed to find a way to stay alive for the next thirty seconds or so until Ergl wound down to a stop.

The spell took no time at all to weave together. It was as simple as wanting it to happen, and my mana leaped to obey my command. Fully formed, the core breaker surged out through my hand, using my fingertips as a bridge to enter the golem’s body.

Ammun’s magic slammed into the spell, shattering it into motes of unstructured and worthless mana. The destruction was so complete that I couldn’t even claw back the fraction of a master-tier spell I usually recycled with lossless casting, not that I had time to worry about that. At the same time my spell failed, the lich disrupted the flight effect slowing us from hitting the ground.

Even the weak gravity wasn’t enough to save me. We slammed into the stone slope, my body still tangled up in Ergl’s limbs, and my shield ward popped like a soap bubble. Cloth and flesh tore away as we slid down to the base of the cavern, and I dimly saw one of Ergl’s arms raise up.

Then it descended on me and struck me full-force. Everything went black, and what little air I still had left in my lungs after minutes of holding my breath escaped in an explosive gasp of pain.