Oliver stood there for a moment, marveling at how easy it had been in the end. Then, without warning, he was hit by a wave of hyper-dense white mana streaming up all around him. The archmage's mana. The rush of magic was overwhelming, the influx of sheer white crowding out his vision all around him until all he could see was the mana flowing to him, bubbling up to the surface dimensions from some layer of reality deep beneath their own.

For a heart-stopping second, Oliver thought it was an attack, that he'd failed and could do nothing save die now, so potent was it. Then he realized that the mana held no intent at all. Freed from its owner, whose intellect and sapience had been destroyed, it had merely dispersed, seeking the nearest living mind as its host. Relief overtook him.

A moment after that, after more and more kept coming, he realized that the sheer amount of mana didn't have to be an attack to be dangerous; it threatened to drown him in sheer quantity, overwhelming his capacity to take it in. He thought for a second that he would die from the overload, that something had to give, that the pressure was too much—

Then, something did give. Something deep within him, some part of him that he'd always known was there and never recognized, tore. A little, at first, then more and more as the mana rushed inside, through, and back out again, forming a neverending loop circulating through his mana channels, into some… other place — he searched for it in the back of his mind and found images of a shoreless sea, lapping softly into infinity — and back out again into his body. He began to feel a buzz building, the mana begging to be spent, to be freed.

This much of the power in one place held a kind of intent of its own, as if it longed to transform into something else, needed to transform from possibility into reality.

Oliver focused inward, seeking to bring the raging torrent into some kind of control, not knowing what he was doing, but trying through sheer force of will to hold the edges of the tear inside him together, to hold, he realized on some primal level, himself together.

The mana had to be spent. The archmage's power was such that the mere excess, vented in the time of his death, threatened to tear Oliver apart, and would, unless he could form it into a spell.

Buoyed by the urgency, he sought to cast some kind of spell, anything to spend the mana, and found that without his System he didn't know how to select or will one into existence. It was like he'd been suddenly bereft of a limb, so unexpected was the disability.

Oliver tried fruitlessly to summon the system, to summon anything, do anything, and found himself unable. Of course. He'd ripped it away and had not the presence of mind to create a new construct now. Without pause he cast himself into the starfield of the Underpinnings, grasping for the first spell he could find, anything, it didn't matter what.

The tearing pain in his inner being did not cease even in the Underpinnings. It was only with the greatest of efforts that he could bring himself to focus; even his newly augmented sanity was in danger of slipping.

If this was what it meant to be an archmage, to progress along the paths of magic, no wonder so few tread the path, lined as it was with danger.

The first spell was a nothing, a sneeze of mana; the second would destroy this castle at his power level, and him along with it. The third spell he looked in on was powerful, laden with intent and meaning and ritual, would cost him much mana and that without destroying himself and his surroundings.

He selected it, took hold of the mana and forced it into connection with the spell manually, visualizing it almost like hotwiring a car. The spell took hold, mana pouring out of him and into it. He backpedaled out of the Underpinnings frantically, not knowing what he'd see when he came out of it.

He scarcely knew what the spell would do, save that it was expensive, would suck mana out of him and relieve the pressure threatening to husk him. And so when he opened his eyes to the real world to find himself surrounded by a column of liquid gold light that surrounded his body and rose far, far above to pierce the dawn heavens like a sunbeam caught in time, he had absolutely no idea what it meant. But it looked really cool, so there was that.

Nor did he fully understand what was happening when a moment later, an enormous golden eye opened in the heavens above them, so large that it took up fully half of the horizon. Cast into its sudden shade and illuminated only by the golden light, he found himself wishing he really, really knew exactly what that spell had been.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Oliver gazed back at the eye, confusion and terror warring for primacy so violently that he was left unable to do anything else save wheeze slightly in disbelief.

Time slowed to a crawl, metaphorically this time, rather than literally.

The eye blinked.

Then Oliver came to his senses and cancelled the spell. The column of liquid gold washing down around him vanished as if it were a faucet being turned off, flowing up into the sky and away from him, and then the eye was gone as if it had never been.

It had been only a fraction of a moment that the spell had been active, yet he had drawn the attention of… something. The eye had not seemed baleful nor overbearing, but had given off a serene, distant presence, the sense of being observed without judgement or even care, if anything.

It felt rather like he imagined a child would feel, nonchalantly watching an ant colony going about their businesses in between classes.

The gods were watching, it seemed. And they… didn't care?

Oliver brought his attention back to the present, found that the flood of mana had still not ceased, but had slowed to the point where it was only filling him up and replacing spent mana, instead of drowning him. He tried summoning the System experimentally again, half-heartedly hoping for an interface — something — anything. Yet nothing came up. The price of the path he walked.

Even without the approximations of numbers to guide him, he sensed that he now held far more mana than he had ever thought possible, its power a raging torrent within him only barely contained within his newly expanded… something. He lacked the words for it.

Madame Carrix's tale came back to him, of how she had expanded her own capacity for mana generation and storage by basking in a natural mana font for a year. And further, that it was impossible for him to grow his own capacity.

He suspected he had proven her very wrong.

Movement drew his attention along one side of the courtyard; a group of solders approached, clad in gray plate armor, swords held at the ready. Their body language spoke to fear, terror, yet even then they held discipline.

They had just witnessed him destroy an archmage without exertion and then summon the presence of a god to bear witness. He felt for them.

Even so.

"Peace," he said in a tone reminiscent of the recently deceased archmage's, raising his arms.

They flinched as one and scuttled back, save for the commander, whose outstretched arm held a sword pointed at him. Its tip was wobbling.

"Peace, I mean you no harm," he said. "I will tend to my friends, and go."

"You—you can't—this is Empire ground," said the leader, voice trembling.

Despite all their fear, what they had just witnessed him doing, they had no idea that he was about as weak as a kitten right now, totally helpless without the time to reconstitute some kind of interface he could use in combat. And he had no shields up right now.

Oliver was weak, and couldn't afford for them to sense it.

So he bluffed. He smiled at the soldier and inclined his head gravely, willing him to see more confidence in his face than there was, and turned his back on him, going over to where Gideon lay motionless on the ground, arms outstretched and head tilted at an unnatural angle.

He went over to him, confirmed that the Earthling really was dead, and reclaimed his ring. Within the ring he sensed a single person, the scientist who'd been studying the Phoenix Rite. The key to it all. The man was floating in the center of the space inside a wrought iron cage. Outside of the cage, an enormous amount of different goods, weapons, and items floated in some kind of order he couldn't make out at first glance. He'd never witnessed the inside of Gideon's ring, but it looked like he'd come prepared for just about everything.

While the soldiers shifted anxiously from foot to foot, all watching him silently, he drew Gideon into his ring and went over to Galen and confirmed his death too. The big man bore the marks of blunt trauma to the head, the great force the archmage conjured up having overcome his considerable physical reinforcement. He was certainly dead.

The rest of his allies were unmistakably gone as well; Sindra was a pile of goo on the ground; their guide lay bisected on the cobblestone.

It was silent as he looked around the courtyard, decided it was time to go. He knelt and put Galen's body in the ring with the prisoner — who he cringed to think at the reaction of finding himself sharing the ring with multiple corpses of a sudden.

Then he looked around and considered the situation. The soldiers had shifted around the courtyard while he worked, quietly keeping their distance from him. None of them had said anything since their leader had tried his luck, and indeed beheld him with even greater caution than before.

The closed gate, an enormous dark metal thing some fifteen feet across and split down the middle by a hairline seam, was right behind them, which left nothing for it. He approached them at a confident walk — not too fast, not too slow. The walk of a man who had the situation well in hand, who could obliterate any one of them as thoroughly he had the archmage — and with only a single catch phrase, too.

The soldiers parted silently before him, metal armor clanking harshly in the dawn light, hesitant to get too close. He passed through them not five feet from soldiers on either side, who turned silently to watch him as he went. He glanced casually around, once, without stopping, then put his chin up and forced himself to saunter through to the closed gate as relaxed as could be.