A band of force girdled my stomach, serving as a tourniquet to put pressure on a wound I couldn’t really feel. It was serious enough that had I still had a normal human body, it might have been the end of me, but as things currently stood, it was more of an annoying distraction that happened to put a timer on this battle than anything else. I’d heal from it, but not while I was in the middle of a fight. If I couldn’t finish Ammun off in time, I’d have to retreat.

And that was unacceptable. I’d put far too much work into preparing for this moment to let things go wrong.

“Ah, the fragilities of mortal flesh,” Ammun crowed as he faced me, the platinum disc still in his hands. The mana he’d been channeling through it had tapered off, and for the moment, it was nothing more than a pretty piece of wall décor. It would take him a few seconds to activate it again, and now that I wasn’t being blinded by a temporary illusion, he wouldn’t get that much time. “Yet another weakness I shed. That trick never could have worked on me.”

I studied him carefully and remained silent. It didn’t seem like he’d noticed the second field I’d activated at all, which, while expected, was the most concerning part of the plan. This field expanded all the way out to the ring of ward stones I’d scattered to circle the battlefield, and would be far harder to escape than the simple mana denial field he was ignoring.

That had served its purpose as a screen to keep him from realizing the second field had gone up, and now all that was left to do was break apart his body and spring the third field. Ammun was about to find out what kind of trap was closing in around him.

For the past fifteen minutes or so, I’d been fighting defensively, conserving my mana by mostly blocking his magic and throwing out occasional attacks to distract or disrupt him as needed. Ammun had burned through a few of his tools, and I’d used my prepared cube to pull him into my trap. I didn’t for a second think either of us were doing our best to kill each other.

That was over now.

My previous master-tier spells had been comparatively low-cost and mixed heavily with advanced-tier magic that I could fully reclaim my mana from. I raised my hand and poured out more heavy mana than I’d used for any single spell before, creating a brilliant pulse of light that scoured the air in front of me for hundreds of feet in a cone of disintegrating magic. Everything inside it broke down into nothingness, even the infinitesimally small creatures that caused people to get sick.

The only thing to survive was Ammun himself, and even then, only because he instantly countered with a shield of crackling, black necrotic energy that completely engulfed his body. That lasted all of two seconds before it started to break down under the sterilizing light of my magic. By the time my magic faded away, the shield had cracks running all throughout its length.

Ammun dismissed his defensive spell, revealing a figure crossed with blackened burn lines with smoke curling off them. His robes were actually on fire, though the flames were already suffocating under the weight of the cloth’s enchantments. Laughably, a single line of scorched bone ran down the center of his skull, like a scar that threatened to split him in two.

Notably, his shadow was gone. It hadn’t managed to survive being bathed in scouring light, not even for a second. That was a minor victory at best, as Ammun could simply spend some of his unlimited budget to build a new one, but if he did that, I’d have a few seconds uninterrupted to take shots at him. That alone made it worth the massive expenditure of nearly a tenth of my remaining mana reserves.

“Do you even have anything left after that little display?” he sneered at me. “Here, let me show you how to really pour some mana into a spell like that.”

In a mirror to my own gesture, his hand came up and pointed at me. Boney fingers splayed out, and black lightning crackled between them. An instant later, the whole world went dark as his spell engulfed us both. Only my divinations watching the battlefield from hundreds of feet away showed me the truth: we were trapped in an orb of absolute darkness so huge that all three of Ammun’s dragons could have hidden inside it.

For an undead lich, this wasn’t harmful. If anything, this was more of the same energy that held Ammun’s frame together, just on a far grander scale. For things like me that had flesh and blood, however, it was instant death to let it invade my body. I could see the logic behind his choice of attack as a response to mine. It was a different route to the same result, with the twist being that instead of destroying everything, including undead, it only destroyed every living thing.

There was no dispelling it, not with the amount of mana Ammun was channeling through the spell. Even for him, I doubted he could keep this spell up for more than a minute, but that was a minute longer than he needed to destroy me.

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If ever there was a good time to use a combat teleportation to escape, this was it. Thankfully, he hadn’t tried this back when I was still in his spatial denial field, probably due to him not wanting to damage his moon control station or his golems. This spell would eat even mana, and anything caught in the area would be drained to uselessness.

That same trait made it incredibly difficult to defend against, which is why I spent the two seconds I had before my own mana shield dissolved teleporting to safety three hundred feet straight up. It was only after I escaped and could see myself that I realized I’d lost part of my feet to the magic, necessitating another set of tourniquets to keep me from bleeding out even faster than I already was.

I produced a misshapen lump of what could be mistaken for steel from my phantom space. As soon as my mana started coursing through it, it ignited into a vibrant, scintillating rainbow hue and shed hundreds of tiny sparks into the air. Those sparks shot off and grew in size until there were a thousand of them all bigger than my head circling the orb of darkness, waiting for the chance to lunge at the lich still inside.

I had some brief concern that Ammun would teleport out and flee the battle, but if he did, his massive antilife orb would immediately dissolve. And while I knew he could produce the mana to support the spell indefinitely, keeping it from encroaching on his own mana would also get progressively harder. That was his soft limit there, one he was going to reach soon enough.

And then, as abruptly as the darkness had bloomed in the sky, it vanished. Ammun stood on the empty air, his arms swinging in wide circles going the opposite direction, fire spilling from his hands to form interlocking rings that spread out to make room for more and more of them.

Before he could finish setting up the spell, I activated my own. The starlight sparks my chunk of meteor metal had been the focus for all descended on Ammun like a swarm of oversized, angry hornets, and they weren’t content to merely fly past him as he dodged. Every one of them was imbued with the ability to change direction and seek out their target.

Explosions of fire rocked him, disrupting his own spell and setting his robes alight again. Within seconds, he’d lost control of his flight spell, and the only thing keeping him off the ground was the kinetic energy of the sparks as they detonated against him. I saw the exact moment the wards woven into his robes broke and he took the full force of one of those sparks. It hurled him a thousand feet into the air in a bloom of blinding light so great that even my divinations temporarily lost track of his position.

The massive chain of fire he’d been working on twisted through the air, snaking its way toward me, but without Ammun to properly guide and defend it, a simple wave of dispelling magic snapped the links apart. The whole spell lost cohesion in moments, and I turned my attention back to the sky above me.

I didn’t expect this particular magic to be the one that broke the lich. It was all heat and kinetic energy, a series of explosions that could leave a whole city covered in craters, but bricks and wood weren’t nearly as strong as Ammun’s bones. No, he’d survive. There was no question of that. His robes, on the other hand, were likely destroyed.

My prediction proved true. When the last starlight spark had detonated and Ammun finally regained control of his flight, he was nothing but a skeleton draped in deep purple bands of necrotic energy. They wrapped tightly around his bones, forming a moving suit of magic that twitched in response to his will.

I’d moved past the point where I was interested in a battle with my former apprentice. What I was doing now was an execution, and my only goal was to finish it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Everything was in place; I just needed to break the vessel currently connected to his soul tether.

Ammun’s defenses were gone. I’d broken his shield ward at the beginning of the fight. His robes had gone up in flames, shredded and incinerated while he was still wearing them. His phantom space was still connected to him, but he’d apparently only stocked that with ways to maim me, not expecting me to be able to hit hard enough to actually damage him.

In all fairness, other than a few scorch marks on those bones, I hadn’t actually hurt him all that badly. He was far, far stronger than he’d been during our first match after he’d woken up in his tower, using a body that he’d meticulously crafted to perfection now. I’d barely been able to withstand heavy mana back then, let alone wield it effectively, and I’d crushed him.

Now, at stage nine and in possession of my full range of powers, I’d already used ten times as much mana just to peel back all the barriers protecting him. And unlike me, he wasn’t hindered by the ‘injuries’ he’d received. I had blood leaking out of four different places, with only my magic holding me together.

Neither of us bothered with words. At this point, there was nothing left to say, no reason to hurl taunts or throw barbs. Stalling accomplished nothing for me, and if he let me, I’d start healing the wounds he’d already dealt. The only thing left that either of us could do was try to finish it.

I wondered what was going through Ammun’s mind. He knew I wasn’t stupid, that if I was here fighting, and still pushing even after he’d crippled me, that I thought I could win more than just a simple victory over a disposable vessel. Was he examining me even now, hoping to find some clue about my plan? Or was he too blinded by his own rage and hatred to care?

Lines of jagged black lightning raced through the air between us – his creation. I met them with conjured buffers that soaked up the electrical component, and deflected the cloud of death left behind once the lightning destabilized. At the same time, I flew low to get around the visual obstruction we’d created between us.

For what was sure to be the last time, we started trying to kill each other again.