75 – Ishrin’s full power

Lisette and Melina both stared down at the three towering automata walking towards them with slow, deliberate steps as if to mock them for being too weak. The two girls were standing together, side by side, their bodies coiled up springs ready to discharge all the energy they had even if they knew it was futile. Their enemies were terrifying hulking machines, powered by heat and steam, seemingly unbeatable. Covered in disjointed plates of metal that were sometimes sleek and shiny, sometimes rusty and coarse, there was no way to reach the vital components inside.

A deep laugh, sinister and guttural, emerged from behind the machines.

The automata stilled. They turned their heads around, spinning on their necks without moving their bodies and their red glowing orbs fixated on the source of the sound.

The laugh continued, and it sent chills up the girls’ spines. It was coming… from the crater?

“Well, well, well. It seems that I have gotten quite rusty, after a couple millennia spent being a nigh-omnipotent god. Thank you for the pointers. But now it’s my turn.”

From the crater crawled out Ishrin, and his body was surrounded by a radiant halo, in the shape of a set of heavy armor that surrounded him a few centimeters away from his body. It was cracked, and crumbling, but even in its cracks shone the golden energy of protection, and the cracks seemed to be mending, the crumbling pieces returning to the armor and being reabsorbed.

“Sorry girls. I almost got flattened there. Call this a low-probability event, it won’t happen again.”

His voice was strange, different, and the way he stood was a like mockery of his own natural way of bearing himself. It was as if someone had taken control of his body, like a puppet being played with by unseen forces. His aura was terrifying, towering over their own more powerful one even though it was two tiers below them.

Melina and Lisette paused at the same time. Ishrin’s aura had a distinct quality to it now, different than it was before.

Tier 4. They both knew that in order to reach Tier 4, a cultivator had to saturate their body with mana and carve meridians in their flesh. It was a painful process when done slowly, meticulously, but Ishrin had not done it the regular way. They knew that he had not yet even started carving the meridians, hoping to make them all at once in a controlled environment, powered and enhanced by a ritual.

Instead, he was coming out of the hole with a full set of meridians. It was known that the way someone made their meridians shaped their whole cultivation going forward. Substandard meridians would cripple a cultivator later in the Tiers, creating hurdles and making the bottleneck deadlier than they already were.

There were cases where cultivators created meridians all at once, seemingly without knowing what they were doing. It had been the case for Lisette, overtaken by inspiration thanks to her talent and a particular set of circumstances. They only hoped it had been the same for Ishrin. They certainly knew that, of them all, he was the most familiar with cultivation. Not only because he had done it all already up to the highest tier before ascension, but also thanks to his age and knowledge.

They also knew that if he was still at Tier, it meant that he was waiting on his Tier up for a reason.

He had been forces to Tier up in the heat of battle in order to save himself. It did not seem like he had sacrificed much for it, though. Already, his now enormous mana regeneration was mending his shield, which had taken the brunt of the impact not from the hammer, but from the floor disintegrating around Ishrin’s body when he was flattened to the ground.

There were other differences to his aura, qualitative differences as well as quantitative. There was just so much mana now, that his previous already anomalous presence felt quite normal compared to this. And the taste of his mana was that of something capable of doing anything its master decided it needed to do, something that neither of the girls had ever seen or felt before.

If this was what had come out of a rushed Tier up, they shivered to think of what could have been, had the power-up not been forced upon him by a powerful enemy. His sinister smile, however, was worrying. They didn’t know, but there had been corruption inside Ishrin’s core and aura that had yet to be expunged, coming from his absorption of Lucius’ power in Obscuria. It had been one of the core reasons why he was waiting before Tiering up, beyond the simple desire to maximise his power gains. He would not have waited otherwise, not when there were powerful enemies like Syrma waiting to capitalize on his weakness.

“Ishrin!” Came a yell, and Melina’s mind took some time to realize that the yell had come from her. “Are you okay?”

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“I am now.” Came his voice, cold and heavy and angry. But the anger seemed to have taken residence within it, like it did in his aura, rather than being a part of him. “How about we try again, huh? I’ll show you some real battle. Now that I can cast it, it’s time to show you the real power of Tier 6 magic. Watch closely, girls, and learn why Tier 6 is the watershed tier. Time to show you the power of some real spells. Continuous effect. Magnify effect. Area effect. Brief Stop Time.”

Time slowed around him, and the effect of the Tier 6 spells he cast was quickly evident. Somehow, Melina and Lisette had been included in the effect, probably thanks to the Area Effect modification of the spell, and they quickly realized just how powerful the modifications had made an already powerful spell such as Brief Stop Time. This was the closest they had ever seen time to being frozen still, giving them plenty of local time to prepare. Ishrin was going all out, it seemed.

“Remote effect. Fire Pillar.”

An enormous wave of mana washed out of him. But it was not all. His teeth glinted, skin pulled taut over his mouth by a manic grin as the fire from the last spell built up in slow-motion, about to explode. More and more power, in the form of spells, built up around him.

“Astral shield. Elemental infusion. Shockwave attacks.”

With an outstretch hand, now covered in shimmering defensive formations in addition to his shield, he pointed at three looming automata just before the barrage of spells could detonate.

“Magical Flexibility. Master Unlock.”

For the briefest of moments every joint, every seam, every moving piece of the automata was seen by the Master Unlock spell as a thing to be unlocked. It was thanks to the Magical Flexibility spell, a spell that took most of Ishrin’s impressive mana to be cast, and only for a moment. But it was enough.

The fiery explosion robbed them of their sight. The heat singed their skin. Then two of the automata exploded into shrapnel, shot at extreme speed. The pieces embedded themselves into the walls and floor, the ceiling became littered with glowing shards of metal as the pillar of flame reached its apex and the fire licked at the metal, superheating it. Ishrin’s Astral Shield was in two places at the same time and protected both them and him, redirecting the shrapnel and working in concert with his telekinesis to keep them safe.

Then the smoke settled to the rhythmic sound of hulking steps. The last automaton was still in one piece, missing a leg and one of its many arms. It had repurposed another arm to work as a leg, propelling the red-hot moving metal forward with a limp.

Ishrin’s face fell. The overbearing aura disappeared, and with it the taste of foulness within him vanished. There was barely a pause as the quiet atmosphere of Brief Stop Time was shattered by a crystal-tipped hammer, then a yell: “run!”

Ishrin dashed backwards, sliding underneath the automaton’s legs and using one of them as a trampoline to launch himself in the air, and closed the gap between him and the rest of his team. Then they ran together towards the back of the room, and he pulled with his mind at a heap of scrap metal that had landed close to the entrance and freed the way. The automaton was in hot pursuit, but the adventurers were close. They jumped, through the narrow passage that was the door leading back into the rest of the compound, too small for the automaton’s hulking frame to fit.

They landed and rolled on the ground, Ishrin sealing the door behind them. Finally they could breathe. They watched through the gaps in the scrap metal used to seal the door, with their backs tightly pressed against the lukewarm pipes, the automaton on the other side of the door thrash and struggle against the thick metal of the room, trying to gain entrance to the corridor and failing. For a minute the machine struggled, but the team knew that they were safe now and took their time to regain their bearings, to search for a way out and around the room, to look around and see if there was any trace of the missing other team. Then all went quiet: the automaton was missing, yet its alcoves was empty.

“I guess it gave up.” Ishrin said.

The ceiling exploded.

A giant hand, bigger than any of the appendages they had seen on the automata, reached down. Through the hole they could see a single, gargantuan construct of metal staring down at them from above.

The team scattered. The monster of metal and steam couldn’t see them through the thick metal of the roof of the room. They had better chances if they all went in different directions while they thought about how to handle the situation. Every moment they spent thinking, though, another section of the room exploded, a thick arm piercing through the ceiling and trying to grab them, destroying pipes and rusted machines scattered everywhere, filling the room with gases and warm air. They retreated further back into the compound with each blow, hoping to escape the reach of the monstrous machine, but it kept chasing them, tearing down the support beams that kept the ceiling of the cave above their heads from falling, and causing earthquakes that robbed the ground from under their feet. Giant stones came loose from above, entire sections of the Chasm broken loose by the machine’s violence, but the rocks shattered hopelessly against the automaton’s thick armor, not even slowing it down. More metal plates converged to defend its head, making the stones completely useless, and thrashing Ishrin’s team hopes that the thing would somehow be stopped by its own actions.

“We are getting pushed back all the way to the door!” Melina yelled.

“It’s sealed shut.” Ishrin said. “We won’t get it open in time.”

“We need to fight it!” Melina yelled.

“Indeed.” Lisette said. Her voice was calm even though her face was damp with sweat.

“Got any ideas?” Melina asked.

They came across another room, narrow with pipes and large pods full of thick green fluid everywhere. The robotic arm trashed and smashed the pipes and the pods, filling the room with fluid that sizzled and created toxic fumes. The adventurers were all too strong to suffer damage from the acid and its exhalations, but with enough time it was going to be yet another problem that compounded together with the rest to make their situation truly terrible.

“The next room is the last room before the door.” Lisette said.

“I have a ritual I can do, it’s a last resort one and it will take at least 20 seconds to cast it. Can you hold that thing off long enough?”

Melina and Lisette looked at each other.