Beside him, Gideon suddenly stiffened, looked at him and cried, "Oliver! Plan B! Go, now!", then started sprinting across the courtyard.

He was firing bullets as he went, Oliver realized, summoning them from his ring and launching them one at a time, fast as thought, a stream of them coming from his hand.

Oliver watched as they seemed to pass through the archmage, watched as the archmage summoned that white-hot beam of death once more, watched as Gideon summoned a plate of pure steel, painstakingly crafted, from his ring as he ran.

The beam was deflected by the plate, began to heat it up. In seconds it was red hot. Gideon cast it aside and summoned a second one from the ring before it had even fallen away.

Oliver triggered his communication spell. "Dragon team, engaged. I repeat, dragon team, engage."

They'd have been circling above, waiting for the signal. That was what Plan B called for. Distract and flee. If possible.

Oliver looked back to see that Galen was crouched in the doorway, waving him on. Neither of them occupied the archmage's attention currently. Oliver attempted to stand, grunting at the pain. The spell had repaired the worst of the damage — including, it seemed, to his spine — but he was by no means recovered.

The archmage looked on, a look of intrigue coming over his perfect features, an eyebrow going up. He raised his second hand and a second lance of pure white shot out of it to join the first.

They had gambled on Alloman not being there, and they had lost. It was over. But he wasn't about to give up.

Time. He needed more time.

Gideon was sacrificing himself to buy them mere seconds, but it wouldn't be enough.

How could he get more time?

There was a brief scuffle in the doorway, and then Galen disappeared into back into the building to the sounds of a struggle. Guards? They had been found out. Of course the archmage would have let the others know. He'd just been waiting to see how they'd snuck in, and see it he had.

Now he was toying with them like a cat with a mouse.

Gideon held the ring with the scientist they so desperately needed. Oliver held the ring with the prisoners and Graves. They needed to get both rings out of the fortress.

Tallahasee was hidden, preparing her own sneak attack or something, Oliver wasn't certain. He'd be ready for it when she struck, though.

There was the sounds of a scuffle and then the side of the wall behind them was blown out, Galen exiting a new hole in the stone wall over the body of the guard that had just been forced through it.

At a glance, Galen took in the scene in the courtyard, met Oliver's eyes and compressed his lips in a glance of resolve. Then he sprinted out into the courtyard towards the archmage, who was hovering some fifteen feet up in the air.

Galen's leap carried him up, and at the apex of his leap his trusty wand was in his hand, the red wave of light flashing through Alloman's body unimpeded to blaze through the courtyard, a crimson wave for an instant brighter than the dawn.

Oliver watched, narrowing his eyes, holding his gut.

His body, his gut instincts, were screaming at him to move and get himself into some kind of cover, but his brain held him frozen, waiting for a moment of opportunity or a plan to prevent itself.

Then Oliver realized Galen hadn't fallen; he was suspended in the air by his head where the archmage was holding him. Physical reinforcement, then? And plenty of mana to fly and cast offensive spells?

Through his horror, he realized that something didn't square here. Physical reinforcement was expensive enough that in all but the most privileged of cases you couldn't learn both spellcasting and physical reinforcement. No, he was too close to see the forest for the trees. There was something else going on here.

Galen dangled limply as the archmage descended still further, holding him out effortlessly as he descended to hover feet from Gideon fearlessly. They were facing the other way, so Oliver couldn't hear what Gideon said. But when the archmage dropped Galen's body to the cobblestones and seized Gideon by the throat instead, Oliver's mind leapt to the inevitable conclusion: Gideon could put him into the ring.

Except, he didn't. He simply stood that way, form perfect, body canted at a slight angle, his cape wasn't hanging to the ground, it was angled to the side.

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That meant something. What did it mean?

There was no room to move without thought; blind luck would not save them. He needed a plan.

Then something he'd seen rang a bell in his mind; the same pattern presented itself, over and over. Oliver's and Gideon's bullets flying through the archmage. Oliver's light not blinding him, the gas not touching him, Galen's assaults passing through him harmlessly.

It was obvious once you saw it.

The archmage wasn't really there.

Alloman said something. Gideon bared his teeth in response, then twitched as the archmage tightened his grip, then threw him to the side motionless. He slowly rotated in the air, then began drifting towards Oliver.

He smiled when he saw Oliver watching him, laying as if still helpless on the ground.

But if the mage wasn't really there, where was his mana coming from? It wasn't traversing space, it was far too expensive to do that, it didn't matter how much mana you had, you'd run out immediately. Was he standing there invisibly?

He raised his hand, ran a scan of Oliver's. With his mana vision Oliver saw the brief pulse of mana lines that flared from the man's eyes, then retracted back into his head.

No, the flashbang would have blinded him. He couldn't be standing there in person.

"Like I was saying, who are you?" Alloman continued his previous sentence casually.

Oliver coughed, feeling the blood leaking out between his fingers. It was below the lungs. The damage wouldn't be fatal, not immediately.

His thoughts accelerated, bolstered by a calm certainty that they could not, would not fail, not in this moment. Not when everything that they'd, that he'd fought for, so near at hand.

"I'm—" he began, then when the flexing of his diaphragm caused by speaking aggravated his abdomen he broke off.

The archmage drifted closer, hovering above the ground, raised a casual eyebrow.

Almost as an afterthought he batted away a bullet that Oliver had fired at him, the mana-reinforced clay shattering like so much pottery on coming into contact with his hand.

But Oliver saw it. There had been a flare of mana at the spot. But… why would that be, if he was simply using his physically reinforced body to deflect the bullet? It should have been an action that required no mana to manifest.

If he wasn't there, why not allow the bullets to pass through harmlessly? Why trouble with maintaining the illusion?

"I'm—" he began again, then caught the faintest whisper on the edge of his perception. "In position." It was Tallahassee, via the supersonic communication spell. He broke off, allowing his failing voice to fall into a gasp.

"Yes?" asked the man, drifting yet closer, a frown on his perfect features.

Why keep up the pretense of being behind the spell if you weren't actually where your body appeared to be? You'd maintain the illusion if you were still there, only smaller. Not as big as you looked. You still had to be physically there for your mana to go to work, that was one rule of magic that you couldn't violate no matter how powerful you were.

"I'm the distraction," he managed, then spit in the man's face.

There was a pulse of mana from Tallahassee's hands so bright as to be nearly blinding; the mana required to generate the magnetic charge was absolutely enormous. Nearly 45 megajoules of power, by their best calculations. It was one of the most efficient means of converting mana into pure energy that they'd found. It would have cost Tallahassee a full third of her mana reserve, some four hundred mana in one hyper-efficient spell.

There was an incredibly loud crack, a shockwave that washed over them all, a brief tearing sound, and then the next thing Oliver knew the side of the castle past the archmage from Tallahassee's perspective was just… gone.

The disorientation was instant and total. Dust billowed out from the wall, blanketing the scene immediately.

He fell back to his elbows, dazed by the amount of power, then surfed the wave of adrenaline to bounce to his feet despite the gut wound and start backing away.

A moment later a pulse of wind flared and the dust was literally crushed directly to the ground all over the entire castle all at once, as if each individual grain had been forced down to earth at once.

A moment later, the mage came back into view, revealed by the sinking of the dust, which now formed a fine layer on the floor of the castle courtyard.

He turned in place, a look of abstract curiosity on his face.

"Fascinating, most fascinating," he said.

Oliver's stomach fell out through his feet. That had been their single most realistic chance at killing him; although they'd suspected it might not work, given his reputation, Oliver had dared allow himself to hope—

A brick levitated itself off the ground in front of the archmage, aligning itself with his gaze before his face, his mana wrapping around it so potent as to be pure white.

Oliver followed where he was looking to see Tallahassee reaching out, withdrawing the second tungsten canister. She was going to try a second attack.

Two things happened at once; she tried to fire the spell again, and Oliver felt a surge of admiration despite the futility of the gesture; and the archmage fired off an almost identical pulse; he'd copied the spell nearly by seeing it done once.

But the difference was that when the magnetic pulse was fired his stone simply dropped to the ground unpowered, the stone simply not reacting to the magnetic fields surrounding it.

As Tallahassee's second railgun spell went off, the mage narrowed his eyes and reached out his hand; the same blinding burst of mana came from her, the same crack and tear and burst of wind, yet no dust. No disorientation.

It took Oliver a moment to realize it, but when he saw where the canister was his jaw dropped open despite the danger of the situation.

It was hovering in front of Alloman, wrapped in his mana, its incomprehensibly potent destructive kinetic energy totally neutralized. As they watched, the soda-can sized hunk of pure tungsten rotated 180 degrees in midair, slowly, threateningly.

The mage cast a glance to Oliver out of the corner of his eye, the very casualness of it a threat.

Then he fired the spell again. Supersonic boom. That short tearing sound. And the stairs that Tallahassee had been scrambling down in an effort to escape, stealth forgotten — and the wall they'd been attached to — simply disappeared in a second cloud of dust some fifty paces away. Oliver nearly cried out. There was no way she could have survived that spell.

Then a dragon fell from the sky, and Oliver had his opportunity.