The juvenile dragon came hurtling out of the sky, a vengeful meteor preceded by a wave of mawfire. It was falling at an incredible velocity, an apex predator diving at top speed. Its dread roar shattered the shocked stillness of the morning.

Alloman looked up and made a simple slicing gesture with his arm seconds before the flames enveloped him. A dome of something indescribable sprang into being, a shield of some kind of twisting of reality, of space itself. It was translucent, but set everything off at a slight angle, like the physical effect of refraction caused by looking into water.

The dragon crashed into the force shield perhaps fifty or so feet above the ground like a bug hitting a windshield on the highway, only… bigger. And wetter. Oliver heard the crunch from where he was standing. It died on impact.

Its passengers weren't so lucky. The mage dropped his momentary shield the moment the dragon collided with it, and they screamed as they fell away from the body of the beast. Once the three erstwhile dragon-riders hit the ground, they stopped screaming. None of them had been physical reinforcement practitioners, it seemed.

But it had been the moment that Oliver needed, with the archmage focused elsewhere, to realize where he might be able to squeeze a little more time out of the situation.

Time. He'd kept thinking that he needed more time, because he'd had an idea bouncing around tied to that concept, something on the tip of his tongue. And he hadn't been able to work out why he'd kept having that thought until just now.

Oliver cast Second Wind again on himself, redirecting the spell's mana tendril as it quested down towards the wound in his stomach, channeling it in the same way he'd directed it away to cure Galen's wound. Only this time, he was directing it to his head, where he instructed it to encircle his entire skull.

As before, it seemed to resist at first. It seemed that there was but little damage to be restored in his head. But he pressed on, pouring more mana and will into it and forcing it to apply anyway. Though he could only sense and not properly see the mana channels, originating and ending behind his eyes as they did, he felt it the moment the spell took over and kicked in.

As soon as his mana began to flow it, Alloman whipped around, refocusing on him, the first glimmerings of uncertainty in his eyes and the beginnings of a complicated spell already forming a fine lacework of mana at his fingertips.

But it was too late. The spell had begun its work already. Even as he turned, Oliver watched as the archmage's motions slowed further and further until they were nearly frozen in the air. A moment later, all motion was so slow as to be imperceptible.

For several long moments they were frozen in this moment, Oliver unable to look away or do anything at all besides blink like a fly on a wall. The feeling was painfully reminiscent of how it had felt to have his spine severed and be unable to move his legs moment before. Only this experience encompassed his entire body, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Except wait. And think.

He should have been claustrophobic, panicking (well, he'd already been panicking. But he should've been panicking more), but he wasn't. In a detached sort of way he realized that this was because his head now existed in a bubble of spacetime detached from the rest of his body. Adrenaline might have been surging through the rest of his body, but he wasn't feeling it yet; wouldn't, until his head returned to the normal flow of time.

Time.

He'd first had the idea while watching Second Wind at work for that first time back in the harpy's nest, while faced with a similar life or death situation.

The way the spell worked, it had seemed to accelerate the passage of time in the vicinity of the wound. But if that happened, there would be no way for the needed resources — oxygen, energy — to pass from the rest of the body outside of the accelerated time zone into it. So there had to be some mechanism where the spell was also supplying nutrients directly to the area itself. Magical, time-accelerated life support. He'd had his doubts as to whether that was how it truly worked or not, but the theory had nicely explained why the mana cost of the spell was so high.

Stolen story; please report.

He'd wondered exactly what it would look like to experience the effect from the inside, but had never tried to cast the spell; it was a risky move that called for a desperate situation.

A thought occurred to him, and he attempted to summon his system. It appeared before him promptly, its interface seemingly existing outside of the flow of time. Or perhaps that was simply because it was being projected into his brain by the magic itself, and his brain was moving at a normal pace relative to itself.

In any case, his mana was ticking downwards very slowly but steadily, but by no means anywhere near as fast as he'd perceived the spell to act outside of it.

His theory had been correct. He had his time. He released a mental sigh of relief. The situation was no less dire, but now he had the barest whisper of a chance to act on what he'd learned, and what he'd begun to suspect about the archmage.

Eventually, after several more moments, a strange thing happened. Well, a stranger thing. The color of the world around him began to distort, slowly at first and then surely picking up speed, a faint tinge of red overtaking the whole scene. He realized time had continued to slow down while he was thinking, past the point of his perception.

And now, light itself was beginning to slow down. What he was seeing now would be redshift, the waveform of light actually taking longer to reach his retinas and be processed. Apparently the spell did extend beyond his eyes, but only just. And now he was watching what it would look like for light itself to be stretched out and slowed down.

Idly he wondered how badly this broke physics, as time itself was bent to his need.

New sources of light began to appear in the courtyard, these a dark red, descending down into the courtyard from the sun. It took him a moment to realize he was, perhaps, the first person in history to see X-rays and gamma rays with the naked eye.

He created a new cell in his System spreadsheet, wrote up a quick formula with grade-school math to track the rate at which time was decelerating, using the spell's ongoing mana expense as the variable, which for the sake of his sanity he was forced to assume was a constant irregardless of how slow he was going, an assumption he felt was reasonable enough given that it had continued to slow down even as he slowed down; relatively speaking, of course.

Not long after that, patches of the scene in front of him faded to such a dark red as to be indistinguishable from black as his little bubble of time slowed down past the point where light waves were visible at all, even in their stretched out forms. Perhaps an hour or two later all light had ceased to reach his eyes in a perceivable fashion, and he was still slowing down, and his mana expense was still dropping.

Finally he reached what appeared to be some kind of stasis, the mana expense of the spell no longer decreasing relative to the perceived passage of time, and his clock said it had been some three hours.

Great. He now had an eternity on his hands with which to contemplate his impending demise.

He would have panicked long since had he not felt that he still had the reins of the spell, and known that he could cancel it at any time and snap back into real time immediately to face his death.

So.

Problem one: he was facing an immortal, untouchable archmage more powerful than any being he'd personally seen so far, who'd taken about as damaged from their best attack as he would have from a light sneeze.

Problem one: all his allies were incapacitated or killed. Galen, down. Gideon, down. Tiro and Graves were in the ring, Tallahassee's status was unknown, the dragon team was… down (a bit soon for that one), and their guide, Pembroke had gone to pieces (definitely way too soon for that one).

Problem three: apparently, he had had to go to the bathroom before casting the spell, and now he apparently was stuck needing to pee for the entirety of the spell.

Problem four: he actually had no idea what he could do to escape the archmage. The man's reaction time was insane, faster than a railgun. In point of fact, there was no real reason to suspect he hadn't been using some kind of mental acceleration spell akin to what Oliver was doing now the whole time.

Fortunately, Oliver had science, a still frankly ridiculous amount of mana, and a lot of time to come up with a plan on his hands.

With these luxuries, with having seen the archmage's shield, and having just done the time trick himself, he pondered.

Eventually, the last pieces clicked into place, and he realized what the archmage's secret was.

And so as he dwelt in the absolute and lonely darkness of an eternal moment, he devised a plan to kill the immortal mage and save two worlds, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that he had to pee.