Up to this point, we’d mostly been testing each other and buying time. At first, I’d thought that Ammun was just stalling to give his worker golems more time to build his control silo, but as soon as I’d applied any cursory amount of critical thinking to that idea, it fell apart. It didn’t matter if the silo was finished while I was here. It wasn’t like Ammun could use it on me when I was right next to him. The best he could hope for was to threaten to destroy some place he thought was important to me.

So, he had some other reason for stalling, and I imagined it was similar to mine. He had minions of some sort setting something up, or he was calling up reinforcements that had yet to arrive – something like that. It was probably more golems, if only because that was the least creative thing I could think of that I suspected he could pull off.

The golems he already had guarding the area were all landbound, and thus weren’t much of a threat. They had the capability to emit mana as an attack, but I was intimately familiar with how their targeting systems worked. It would be trivial to dodge them. For that matter, it would be trivial to deactivate them if I was willing to touch them, but I was saving that for the ‘surprise’ reinforcements.

That was assuming, of course, that there weren’t literal thousands of them all trying to kill me at the same time like I’d dealt with beneath Ammun’s tower. There was only so much an archmage could do in a situation like that, but thirty or forty wouldn’t be too big of a problem to deal with. I was already subtly testing the golems present on the battlefield while I flew around dodging big, flashy conjurations to confirm the specifications of the golem cores. The last thing I needed was to get grabbed by one that I couldn’t deactivate with a thought.

At the same time, Ammun and his shadow were circling around me and launching a volley of lightning bolts, explosive fire blasts, waves of telekinetic force, and even a few phantasmal blades. I dodged what I could, but some spells were impossible to avoid without teleporting. Those that I couldn’t slip past, I did my best to deflect in an attempt to spare my mana pool. I was nowhere close to empty, but I was going to need everything I could scrounge up for the final round. If I exhausted myself now, I wouldn’t make it that far.

“Fight back,” Ammun called with a cackle. “You did better the first time we fought above my tower.”

In response, I cast out a wall of force to block a splitting blade made of sharpened air that could have overwhelmed my shield ward, which was still recovering from absorbing half a dozen mind spikes his shadow had thrown at me. When neither attack managed to land, Ammun teleported again. I was already dodging, this time straight up, when he reappeared in front of me, his hand outstretched and crackling with red lightning.

There was no time to dispel the magic, nor could I build a lightning rod if he was planning on physically touching me. My shield ward was all but drained, a fact he was well aware of. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have chosen a touch-range attack. The only thing I could do was take the hit and make him pay dearly for it.

Normally, my shield ward would prevent anyone from touching me without my express permission. In this case, all it took was a push from him to rip through it. His skeletal fingers clamped down on my leg and lightning arced up to wreath my entire body. Being stage nine helped blunt the damage, but it wasn’t a perfect defense. Ammun was also throwing around heavy mana.

If this spell had hit my sister, there would have been nothing left but a scorched corpse with smoke rising out of the empty sockets where her eyes had been a moment before. Against someone like Querit, taking the full brunt of it would have scrambled his higher reasoning functions and probably caused an enormous spike in mana consumption in an attempt to repair it. It might even have forced a complete shutdown.

Against me, wearing the enchanted battle robes, it left a line of scorch marks as it jumped from spot to spot. It stung a bit. I’d probably spend a bit of mana healing the injury once the fight was over rather than suffer the discomfort for however many days it took to heal on its own. Mostly, I was just annoyed that my brand-new robes were going to have some burn marks on them.

I wasn’t good at sewing clothes. These had taken a lot of effort to put together, and even though I knew they’d get roughed up when I finally met Ammun face-to-face, I was still put out that the metallic threads were already scorched.

I was willing to bet Ammun was even less pleased about my retaliatory strike, however.

At the same time lightning arced between my limbs, I reached down and planted a hand firmly on his skull. He probably wasn’t expecting me to be able to move—lightning being notable for its ability to cause muscles to seize up involuntarily—else he’d have made some effort to defend himself. Instead, he got a point-blank injection of blindingly white fire directly into his skull.

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Not much could truly hurt an undead. They could lose limbs and feel nothing more than annoyance at the fact. Without nerves to feel, they were left cold and empty. The smarter ones manifested their senses through magic and could indeed feel things, but they never included pain.

My cleansing fire didn’t care about such petty concerns. While it was real fire and burned hot enough to melt steel, it also caught mana on fire. For an undead lich, having their mana ignited was intolerable agony.

Ammun started screaming, and he didn’t stop. The fire poured through his eye sockets and his jaw, cascaded down his rib cage and into his pelvis, and the whole time, he flailed about in wild, raw, existential anguish. I didn’t have it in me to feel bad for him, especially since as soon as he took a moment to think, he’d know how to defeat the attack.

Really, it was a stroke of good luck for me. My shadow had just broken the second ward stone, and Ammun was too busy screaming his metaphorical lungs out to pay attention to it. I was sure he’d realize in a moment, but that gave me time to act.

We were already touching, and I’d been preparing for this fight for a long time. I produced a cube of black fire glass from my phantom space and channeled enough mana into it to activate it. Unlike my normal emergency escape pendants, this one had been made with the assumption that my travel companion wouldn’t be willing. Since he was also a stage nine archmage, that meant I’d have to overcome a great deal of resistance to bring him with me.

Or set his mana on fire to distract him. That worked, too.

I pulled us both through the cube’s magic, unfortunately bringing his shadow with us and leaving mine behind. The only way it was getting back into this fight with me was if it teleported itself—possibly a waste of mana—or if the battle lasted the hour or so it would need to fly over here. That did leave me outnumbered two-to-one, but on the other hand, that had been how things had been since the beginning.

More importantly, I now had Ammun inside the radius of my own preparations. His precious silo was safe, and after I destroyed him permanently, I’d go investigate that. It would probably end up destroyed, but I’d had a thought about moon connections I was eager to explore once time permitted. No doubt I’d be building off Ammun’s work, but it gave me a place to start.

‘Keiran,’ the gestalt’s voice echoed in my head.

‘Little busy right now,’ I thought back as I sent out mental commands to the devices I’d placed all around us in a mile-wide circle.

‘A sizable force of golems is on the move. Ammun sent them through a portal, which we were able to trace to a warded location. We are not certain, but this may be the sanctuary you built for your family. Unless the wards go down, we can only confirm the rough coordinates the portal connects to.’

I froze in place. Shit. There was no way… Ammun couldn’t possibly have known. I’d picked a remote island far off the coast, some place I’d found while specifically scrying for a good location. I’d never physically traveled there prior to the teleportation I used within the safe confines of my demesne.

‘An island?’ I asked. ‘Five hundred miles southeast of your location? Big mountain on the north side with two arms coming around to cradle it? Connected by a beach about four miles long on the south coast?’

‘That is correct.’

Ammun gave a great jerk and slapped his hand into his chest. With a grunt of supreme effort, he pulled it back away, and my cleansing fire came with it. Hurling the offending flames away, he turned to me with a screech of pure rage and flung himself through the air in my direction. I dodged out of the way by dint of letting my flight spell lapse, but that just put me in the path of his shadow.

My shield ward was still down. Black claws infused with mana ripped across my battle robe, tearing long rents in the metallic weave and scoring the flesh beneath. The only thing that prevented Ammun’s shadow from tearing out an organ or two was the force wave I detonated right between us. I was thrown backwards and fell toward the ground, and the shadow went spiraling away into the sky, unharmed.

“Before, I just needed to kill you because you were in the way. It was a sign of respect, really. Who else could threaten my plans but you?” Ammun ranted. “Now, now it’s going to be a pleasure. I’ll trap your soul so I can torture you for eternity. You can rot away in there waiting for the next time I bring you out to torment you. And when I’m done killing you, I am going to wipe out that entire island you call a home. There won’t be a single thing left alive from one end to the other.”

If he’d been smart, he wouldn’t have wasted time talking. I was in a freefall, still recovering from the unexpected hit and smacking myself with a massive force wave just to get some distance. I barely even paid attention to what he was saying; it wasn’t like it was anything I hadn’t heard from previous rivals in the past.

By the time he was done with his threats, he’d finished channeling mana into his next attack and I’d recovered from my fall. Perhaps three hundred feet separated us now, with him in the air and me close to the ground. His shadow hadn’t fared as well in the force wave explosion and was out of the fight for at least a few seconds while it reoriented itself.

‘Keiran, we need to know what you want us to do. Our resources are limited, but we may still be able to help your family.’

It was hard to focus on the gestalt’s thoughts, and not just because of the pain. This wasn’t part of the plan. My family was supposed to be safe. Now, even if I defeated Ammun right here, there was every chance that his mindless automatons would kill everyone on the extremely short list of people I cared about.

Fortunately, I could be in two places at once. ‘I’ve got it under control,’ I sent back as the answer came to me.

Miles away, my shadow sped through the intricate casting of a teleportation spell. I could only pray it was fast enough to save everyone.