The barrier around the Hub was shrinking at the pace of a fast walk. The enemies surrounding the dome redoubled their efforts to get in, taking the movement as a sign of the magic weakening. None seemed to notice that they were now up to their chests in water, lost in an orgy of their own bloodlust.

Tilly continued to struggle forward under the weight of a god's fury which the barrier could do nothing to stop. Each step felt like lifting a mountain and the shockingly light elderly couple that he had thrown on his shoulders initially continued to grow heavier the closer he got to the platform. It was almost as if the Serpent's metaphysical desire was actively opposing the escape of its prey.

The increasing weight drove home just how exhausted Tilly was. With lingering injuries, deeply fatigued muscles, and a soul that felt stretched to its limit at the breadth of things it had witnessed in the last twenty-four hours... it was all too much.

With a scowl of effort, Tilly straightened his slumped shoulders and looked around to see how everyone else was coping. His lips quirked up into a snarling smile as he saw Threstus and Gorock leading the group of thirty or so Bastions just behind the exhausted honu casters and refugee militia. Their path moved perpendicular to Tilly’s and as they grew closer he saw that many of them were picking up stragglers of their own.

As Tilly watched, Gorock ducked down for a few moments and emerged towering over the group with five gnomes clinging to him as his huge legs continued to pump indomitably toward the portal. That whole group of tough bastards was going to make it and so would he.. as long as he didn't quit.

The thought of quitting caused his trembling legs to wobble and he almost missed his next step. His foot dragged along the ground, getting under him just in time to stop from falling, as the weight kept shoving him down into the stone pavers mercilessly. The whole time, Tilly kept his eyes on the stoic Bastions.

If they could keep going, so could he.

He shifted the weight of the two, now unconscious, elderly satyrs and continued to march forward as the last of the refugees in front of him made it through the portal.

“Enough!” came the reverberating hiss, thrumming through Tilly's chest. The sound of water crashing against the snake’s body suddenly ceased.

Tilly struggled to look up with both bodies on his shoulders sandwiching his head, but finally, by awkwardly bending backward, he was able to glimpse the shocking sight of the divine snake free of the water braid. In a movement that was too fast for Tilly to track, the Divine Snake somehow turned momentarily insubstantial to the water’s attack and shot the gap between it and the top of the dome barrier, striking at it viciously as its form returned to its full physical state, including its twenty-foot long fangs.

They dug into the flashing runic circle spewing red and green poison into the magic just above where Tilly stood. The snake followed up this attack by flexing its jaw closed while Kihei tried and failed to redirect the huge jet of water at point-blank range. Then with a final groan of effort, Kihei's voice whispered out through the sound of crashing waves,

“Time… Is… Up.”

The dome began to flex under the pressure of the serpent’s closing jaws and Tilly grasped desperately at his empty reserves. He had reached the steps, but they might as well have been twenty feet tall for all the effort it took him to raise his knee high enough to plant his foot on the first rise. He kept his eyes fixed on the sight of the others stumbling and diving through the flickering portal. The Bastions followed up the last of the refugees, all of them helping or carrying one or two as they grimly continued to fight forward, not giving an inch to the divine opposition.

At this point, almost all of them were through, and those bringing up the rear were pushing forward for all they were worth. Tilly gritted his teeth in effort until he thought they might shatter, pushing his body above the first step with his trembling right leg. He leaned forward and immediately lifted and swung his opposite leg to take another rise, capitalizing on his momentum as much as possible.

Watching the others push on with no regard for the impossibility of their task pulled on something deep within Tilly. He wasn’t the only one being asked to pay a price far beyond what should be possible. Yet without complaint, or even a flicker of doubt in their minds, each remaining Bastion moved through the portal, carrying far more than their fair share of the burden.

The fire in his chest which had dwindled down to a candle’s smoldering wick, roared back to life. The change had nothing to do with his Mana Well or his abused Pathways and everything to do with the broken, scarred soul that radiated a deep desire for significance. He wanted to be better this time... He had to be.

That wounded place in his psyche that insisted he was entitled to a better life wailed in fear as something Savage rose up from an unknown depth. Suddenly the animal skins that covered his body felt comfortable, like they described some part of his nature he was only beginning to discover. The brutal stone-headed hatchets that hung on his hips were suddenly right in a way he couldn't explain. At that moment, fighting to climb the steps with the weight of the world pushing him back down, something snapped into place.

He had whined, cried, and complained in his past life. None of it had made a difference. With every step that wailing coward’s voice was ground into greater insignificance, as Tilly stomped him into the ground with the force of an angry god’s wrath.

His Will hardened to flint, and his shaking legs pushed him up another step.

This world had thrown brutality and horror at him, day after day. The soft man he had been was dying, and something new stood in his place.

He was going to fucking make it.

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There were no other options.

Finally, he reached the top of the stairs and looked up from his legs, gaining a clear view of what Kihei had become. His whole body was lost in a glare of deep, blue, pulsating mana, thrumming to the cadence of the crashing waves. Each of the streams of water feeding into the spell at the top of the dome began to shudder and lose their shape, before constricting in on themselves as all the space within the dome of the spell shuddered and then-

Popped.

Tilly stumbled onward, hoping to collide with the flickering portal in one last push. But the entire surrounding environment changed at the sound rejecting physics as he knew it. The crashing sound of waves ceased along with the pulsating light and gravity had shifted, all the weight of the god’s aura fading.

As he pushed forward to the portal a few feet ahead of him the effort sent him upward instead of forward, floating into the air as if he had fallen into the deep end of a pool and was kicking up to the surface.

The constricted flows of water feeding into the spell from the other platforms continued to compress, until they formed a sort of root-like network, feeding directly into the light where Kihei had once been.

Above them, the giant serpent had stopped trying to rupture the dome. It had sensed something at the sound of the pop. The whole spell changing into something new and far more dangerous, and was now trying to disengage its fangs, shaking its head back and forth in an attempt to yank its body free. Tilly looked around in confusion, finding himself floating alone in the Hub with the portal just out of reach. He was shocked to see the enemy army gone, as only the tops of the tallest buildings now showed through the torrent of still-rising water.

Tilly tried to kick forward toward the portal, but despite the water-like feel of the air, it did not offer enough resistance to allow him to swim.

'He was so close!'

In a flash decision, he lifted the weightless bodies from his shoulders, careful not to let them float off, and gently pushed them toward the opening. They floated the last foot of space between Tilly and the wildly flickering portal and disappeared in a final coughing flicker of power from the teleport spell that had held on this long by a thread. Then Tilly watched in numb acceptance as the portal disappeared, leaving behind a discolored haze in the air where it had blazed for over an hour.

The world around him seemed to be moving incredibly slowly as he floated. He looked up and saw the place where the serpent had inserted itself into the spell spark and flash in distress as the flow of runes started to collapse. This did not stop the spinning of the circle, or the slow shrinkage of the dome, rather, it caused the movement of the Mana to become erratic.

With its army gone, some part of the summoning must have begun to fail as well and the serpent’s form was growing insubstantial. It continued to struggle weakly to free itself, but Tilly could now see the disrupted energies of the spell entering into the serpent and pulling forth its red and green energy to power whatever the spell’s climax was designed to be.

He twisted around and looked back to find that even the Defiler, who had successfully burrowed partially through the barrier had been caught up in the flow of the unfettered spell. It screeched in defiance, bleeding inky darkness into the deep blue flow of seemingly endless mana.

There wasn’t even a hint of Kihei left. The center of the circle, was nothing more than a blazing blue vortex of power as water continued to blast forth from the apex of the dome, drowning even the memory of the city in its azure torrent.

He floated there alone, next to the faint haze that was once a portal as the barrier closed in around him, now only 20 feet away. There had to be a way out. He had come too far to believe it was all over. Not when he was so close.

His mind raced through everything he knew about magic in this world, and how he could interact with it. He doubted he could blast his way through the hazy scar left by the portal, those two kinds of magic seemed to have nothing to do with each other... Then it hit him. He had just developed a new Ability that seemed much closer to the Time and Space nature of the magic he needed.

Tilly flung his will into the new space that hosted the Spirit Walk Skill and activated it. This sort of magic had nothing to do with his Mana Pathways, and he felt it pulling on an entirely different source of energy. One that both moved through time with him and connected to the vastness found outside the bounds of the fourth dimension. His “spirit” pulled away from his physical form with little effort, like the shedding of a winter coat once you got inside.

Hostile magics assaulted his ethereal form the moment he pulled free. The Interior of the dome was a riot of conflicting energies. Each one screaming at him, through him, as he struggled to maintain the integrity of his form, reinforcing the boundaries of himself by sheer force of will. He pulled deeply on knowledge the Skill imparted to fortify his being against the powerful flows of mana around him. He emerged a few feet in front of his body and was able to reach out and touch the place where the portal had been minutes before. The now calcified statues of the four elder casters who had poured their entire being into the spell stood at the four corners of the platform, silent monuments to the heroic defiance of the city's defenders.

He could feel that the Space there had been forcefully knit together with another location using brute magical force as much as anything else. This caused the composition of reality to be more elastic than it should be. The pattern of space-time was slowly rebounding to its immutable form of rigid structure, but the flux of mana within the dome was slowing the process considerably.

Having found his target, he focused his entire Will on his ethereal hand reaching to touch the scar in Space. Then moving more by instinct than any sort of logic, he reached back and thrust his other hand into the chest of his physical form.

The hazy space he was touching felt like it was right in front of him… and yet, there was also the faintest sense that he was reaching through a hole toward something that he couldn’t see. He focused harder on his outstretched hand, and slowly felt it double as if it was both out in front of him and incomprehensibly distant. Reality pushed against this unnatural doubling and he shoved right back.

He focused... becoming dead certain that there was still a hole in space right in front of him, and it hadn’t completely closed.

A harsh ripping sound tore the air as the recently repaired fabric of reality was forced open again and the sensation of doubling in Tilly's hand suddenly resolved. He turned his frayed will back to his body and attempted to drag it forward somehow, just as the barrier touched the outside shoulder of his physical form.

He desperately activated the portion of his Skill that rejoined his spirit to his body while clinging to the space beyond the tear. The azure energy of the spell screamed into his system as his spirit became a conduit for the tear in space. The energies clashed in his body and a thunderclap sounded from the center of his being.

The out-of-control energies of the wild spell flooded into the memory of the teleport spell form still lightly etched into reality by the sacrifice of the four honu casters. Then just for a fraction of a second, the entire spell flickered back to life, launching Tilly’s body and spirit through space-time in a confluence of probabilities that should have never been possible.

In that moment, beyond space and outside of time, Tilly touched on something greater than either, and it pulled him into itself.