In hindsight, I’d overestimated my ability to fight in such a hostile environment. Ammun was far better suited to exist here than I was, even with his magic severely handicapped. Now I was pinned down and suffocating, with a hostile archmage watching for the slightest mana fluctuations so he could counter any attempt I made at saving myself. It wasn't a good position to be in.
“Ah, yes, the weaknesses of the flesh,” Ammun said with a dry chuckle. “Sustenance. Sleep. Air. Your method of attempting immortality was novel, I’ll give you that, but you’d have been better off transitioning to lichdom instead.”
It was hard to argue, given my current predicament. Then again, I’d have likely been starved of mana a thousand years ago if I’d gone that route. Besides, a life lived as a lich wasn’t really a life worth living. The creature I was calling Ammun now had the memories of my former apprentice, but he wasn’t really him. He was an artificial construct, a caricature of a person that was powered by the real Ammun’s soul, itself trapped in some bauble somewhere. Ammun’s soul hung in a state of perpetual agony while a puppet pretending to be him roamed the world.
I had no doubt that the real Ammun, that soul entity, had regretted his decision to transform himself into a lich every single second for the last thousand years or more. It was a fate far worse than death to be trapped as a severed soul, and only an absolute fool would consider it an acceptable road to power.
Death would be my fate, however, if I didn’t come up with something clever in the next few seconds. Once I blacked out from lack of air, that would be the end for me. I’d be completely at Ammun’s mercy, and I didn’t have any illusions about how that would play out.
I released a burst of mana in a huge, unstructured cloud. It was nothing more than a screen to keep Ammun from targeting my next spell to counter it, a fact that he knew. A wave of dispelling magic rolled across me, dissipating the mana cloud into a fine mist that quickly faded into nothingness. But right after that dispelling wave hit, there was a single moment where I could act unimpeded.
I activated the recall bracelet on my wrist and the instant teleportation magic took hold.
I was gone before Ammun could react, but even so, I could almost hear the shriek of rage no doubt pouring out of his mouth.
Something went wrong in the spell. It twisted and stretched, almost to the point of breaking, then it snapped back into place, and the stone slope I was pressed into disappeared. It was replaced by smooth tile instead, and I immediately sucked in a ragged gasp of air. It was a good thing I’d had the foresight to update my recall contingency to the moon base. If I’d left its destination as my sanctuary down on Manoch, the spell would have failed.
It was only as I was taking my second deep breath that I realized the problem. Somehow, against my own will, I’d brought a passenger with me. Ergl was still wrapped around me, doing its best to squeeze the life out of my body and being held at bay only by the flickering remnants of my shield ward. Even as my eyes snapped open to take in the danger, I felt mana building up in that brilliant emerald orb in the center of its head.
A mana beam shot out, just like the one that had pierced my shield ward earlier. It would do the same now, doing painful but superficial damage as my body absorbed the mana. What it would also do was finally allow Ergl’s limbs to crush me. I wondered briefly if the golem was intelligent enough to understand that, or if it was just blindly attacking me with every way it possibly could at the same time.
Either way, things were not going to plan. I cursed myself for even including the option to teleport with a passenger in the design. Somehow, the golem had gotten carried along with that, possibly because it wasn’t alive in any meaningful way and the spell had gotten confused about whether it was equipment to be carried along. Since it had the mana capacity, it had used it.
This was why it was better to cast complicated spells manually. Errors like this couldn’t happen if I was in full control of the magic. It was too bad teleportation had such a lengthy cast time. Once I’d allowed myself to be pinned, there’d been no good options left. Ammun’s golem had outmaneuvered me, and I’d failed to adapt to the environment quickly enough.
That having been said, separating the golem from the lich was the best possible outcome I could have hoped for. I just needed to survive the next few minutes. My mana was low from venting out a whole cloud, but it wasn’t gone.
I started with grand telekinesis to grab the golem’s head and pull it to one side. The mana beam still flashed out of its eye, but it struck the floor next to me instead of my face. I was still tangled up in its legs, so when my spell sent it careening off balance, I went along for the ride. That only worked in my favor as I flooded more mana into my shield ward and started creating bars of force to wedge between my body and Ergl’s legs.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
It was a tenacious foe, however, one that was unwilling to give up any advantages. Every time I pried myself free from one leg, another one snaked around to grab hold of me again. Finally, I accepted that I wouldn’t be freeing myself by physically repelling Ergl. It just had too many limbs and too much strength.
Without Ammun here to stop me, I revisited my idea of shutting down its core. It wouldn’t immediately stop Ergl, but it would guarantee an eventual victory in a few minutes. I put together the spell, then reached out to slap one of the golem’s metal legs. Mana arced from my hand into its body, and the shell of magic defending its core buckled under the pressure.
For its part, Ergl was smart enough to recognize what I’d done. It abandoned all restraint—not that it had much to begin with—and started firing off mana beams more or less at random while increasing the pressure of its constricting grasp to the point where my shield ward couldn’t hope to keep up with it.
Small force walls bloomed around me, curved and stretched to contour to a human body instead of being flat, square planes. Even those didn’t last long, but I could recycle the mana I used to chain them endlessly, and I had plenty of ambient mana to draw on as well. Ergl’s damaged core only added to my reserves as I siphoned that away, too.
Something in the golem’s logic structure finally reached the inevitable conclusion: it was doomed. Even killing me now wouldn’t save it. I could only guess as the cascade of reasoning that led it to the point it reached, but it quickly became apparent that the golem had decided to turn itself into a mana bomb.
As confident as I was in my body’s ability to withstand the beams it had been shooting at me, I suspected surviving this attack would be a different story. I needed to get away, and I needed to do it now. Attempts to escape the grapple physically had all failed, but I was now at the point where I couldn’t worry about how little mana I’d have left to fight with after. It was time to get drastic.
I initiated a short-range teleport, this time under my full control and excluding the golem latched onto me. It took almost all of my remaining mana, but that was better than being obliterated in the next ten seconds.
Only, when I reappeared a few rooms away from my starting point, the golem was somehow still clinging to me. Now that I was clearheaded, I saw the problem immediately. It had stabbed barbs of its own mana into the structure of the spell – not enough to disrupt it, but they had allowed Ergl to hitch a ride along with me.
Far from escaping to safety, I’d brought the impending explosion with me and run myself practically dry of mana in the process. Was I really about to die, my corpse reduced to dust, on the surface of a moon a hundred thousand miles away from home? It certainly seemed that way. I was out of ideas and out of resources.
No. There was no way I was letting this happen. I might not have enough mana left in me for a master-tier spell, but that still left me with thousands of weaker spells that I could use. There had to be one that would get me out of this situation.
Escaping the blast was no longer an option. Now that I knew what the golem had done, I could block it on future teleports. But it was too late for that. I didn’t have nearly enough mana left, nor did I have the time to recover it. I needed to focus on mitigating the damage. My shield ward couldn’t help; Ergl had already proven it was capable of punching through with pure mana attacks, and the wards were fully stressed just preventing the golem from physically crushing me.
A phantasmal shell might work, but it would only block the mana from hitting me directly. The rest of the room would still be blown to pieces, and the shrapnel would almost certainly kill me. I needed a multi-layered defense, something that could protect me when my shield ward inevitably failed.
I sucked in mana as quickly as I could, knowing I had only seconds left. The golem’s core was fully destabilized, teetering on the brink of starting a cascading failure that would result in all of its mana detonating at the same time. Worse, it was still actively pushing to make it happen.
The phantasmal shell appeared around me, shaped more as a cloak clinging to my body than a sphere I stood in the center of. That was a harder shape to maintain, but it was necessary in order to exclude any parts of Ergl from being physically inside it. It would do me no good to let the mana detonation go off inside its arm if that limb wasn’t on the outside of the shell.
And then I did the tricky part. The whole time I’d been building my phantasmal shell, I was busy casting another spell, one that I’d never expected to use on myself. Force crush created a sphere of force around the target that constricted, tightening until it crushed them to death. It would be my all-around physical defense even as it tried to kill me.
The spell sprang to life, already small enough to fit inside my shield ward, and only my expert control over its parameters prevented it from immediately tightening around me. Even with my dual-layered defense, I wasn’t confident this would be enough. It was too bad I didn’t have more mana or time, but I was out of options.
The last thing I did was put up a series of thin force walls between myself and Ergl’s torso, where its golem core was located. Then I felt its mana reach the tipping point and spiral out of control. An instant later, the panes of force started shattering under the pressure of an expanding mana reaction, and everything went white. I lost track of where I was as the force of the explosion threw me around the room, bouncing me off walls, the ceiling, the floor, and chunks of golem repeatedly.
My defenses were battered, broken, and reformed as quickly as possible. Raw mana seeped through the cracks in my phantasmal shell, then jetted in as I failed to hold the spell together under the onslaught. More mana than I could process bombarded me, scorching my body in the process and leaving me ragged and worn out.
But then I could see again, and I was still alive. That was more than I could say for Ergl.