> “And the Demiurge said: ‘To you six, I bestow the duties of leading and teaching the many peoples of this new world. Show them what they can be, and in time, they will surpass even you.’”

* Excerpt from the heretical Ushorin religious text Words of the Sky and Earth

An ancient man stepped through a tear in the air-- and snapped awake, in his actual body. He stood amidst a whirlwind of wind and thunder, in the Spirit Realm, with a great being, a thousand feet tall, stretching above him. The being had great dark wounds cut into its flesh, from which void-black pus dripped down and crusted.

“You had one job, Kandrev. It is Kandrev, isn’t it? The Guileful One, that’s your main title. A much older, much more esoteric one comes to mind: the Unhealing. But anyway, you had one job: to keep me distracted and locked up. And now, look at me, three levels higher and with a thousand times more information to go off of. You know, it’s not a lack of raw power that is your greatest flaw, but, I think, laziness. You have no investment in actually trying, in pushing yourself, in putting real effort into your projects. If you’d done it right, I would’ve been completely undone by madness, my mind ruined and my body warped by your magic. But instead you rely on old tricks, old games, and you don’t even execute them well.”

Silence from above.

“What? Cat got your tongue?” Bim scoffed.

“I am level 90 . I have lived for more centuries than you can even count. The greatest member of your species has attained only a tenth of my power. Be unmade, worm.”

Kandrev made to snuff out the puny human’s life, and-- in an instant-- Bim stepped forward, placed his hand on the creature, and said, calmly: “.”

The Archon was frozen, as pure silver sparks of magic made their way from Bim’s fingertips to his eternal wounds, sinking into them. The tiniest, most insubstantial modicum of flesh began to regrow-- before becoming undone and replaced by the void once again. The sparks sputtered, and vanished, spent.

Level 26 earned!

“Ha! You think you can escape your doom by attempting to heal me? Some of my greatest servants were with more than 30 levels! Your meager abilities will not seal wounds so great!”

“Yeah, yeah, big talk, big speech, it’s a whole thing, I’m puny, I get the picture. Thing is, I’ve lived a thousand lives. Experienced so very much. What I don’t really get is why you think you have the upper hand. It’s the Spirit Realm. One of the things a taught me is that in this realm, willpower is first, and levels are second. And aren’t levels and Talents just the expression of moments of triumph and stress, crystallized into power? Aren’t spells just shards of the power of subverting creation, the power that you were born with?

If there’s one thing that’s clear about you and your siblings, it’s that you’re all bluster and no substance. When’s the last time you were actually challenged?”

“How dare you--”

“You want to be entertained, you want to be worshiped, you want to trick yourself into thinking you’re actually a genius, actually the greatest, but you’re just a glorified brute. You have little skill or finesse, you go on and on. You’re nothing. A big husk, made of an elaborate illusion. Here-- .”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

One of Kandrev’s wounds vanished entirely, whole again.

“H-how-”

“You’re more illusion than material, here and now. I don’t know what you started out as, but now you’re just a fraud. Rules, bounds, restrictions, codes of conduct-- you have practically none of it, and flout what little you obey in the first place on a whim. Spend a little time in your own illusion, you lying fool, and learn a thing or two.”

Bim gave the suddenly shrunken being a light shove, and a tear opened in the air behind it, swallowing the Archon whole.

Level 29 earned!

ERROR

Incompat--

earned!

✶

Bim reappeared, hale and hearty, mere feet away from where Greg was desperately trying to tend to a spasming Helena. He stared at her for a moment in shock, before quickly running over and placing a hand on her forehead. “. I should be able to do that just once more today, if necessary.”

The spasming stopped, and Helena was still. Panicked, Greg checked her pulse, but relaxed somewhat when he saw that she was breathing okay and her heartbeat was steady.

He turned to Bim and said, still breathless from the intensity of events: “What the hell just happened? You can open portals now? And what was that Talent?”

Bim answered his questions one at a time. “Firstly, a lot of things just happened. I was trapped in an ethereal illusory sub-dimension where time passed at an accelerated, but unmoored, rate, allowing me to experience hundreds of lives both simultaneously in a recursive and linear state. The end result is that I’ve kicked one Archon into what is functionally Damnation, and he shouldn’t be bothering us any time soon.

Along the way, I met some very impressive people, possibly ghosts or living memories, though one of them was definitely physically real, who taught me a lot of new tricks, one of which was a pair of simple, if largely forgotten, healing spells. Secondly, I used one of those healing spells to cure Helena of her Loss Spasms, a condition caused by the rare circumstance of downgrading a Class, which has all sorts of bad side effects.

Lastly, yes, I can now make portals. Tears, to be clear, in reality. I can make new ones from within the Spirit Realm, but at great cost. As it stands, I can access most naturally occurring Tears across all of Esun, though I can only transport myself… I think.” He said that last bit with less certainty.

Greg was silent, wide-eyed, processing everything Bim had just thrown at him.

“Oh, and the world is a broken lie held together by spit and brute force magic. The system that governs the very cosmos is coming undone, and those in charge of upkeeping it are a bunch of egomaniacal glorified hopped up on their own stale propaganda. And we might have only days to topple them, lest the world as we know it crumbles into an infinite abyss and becomes one with nothingness for all eternity. Stop me if this is too much all at once.”

“I-- I-- the Demon King is one thing, but the entire world? Bim--” Greg spluttered and blinked, trying to wrap his brain around the onslaught of new information about the underpinnings of his world.

“I need you with me on this, Greg. Now, I’m going to show you something, and I need you to focus on expanding your mind. Try to see the big picture.”

“Hold on a s--”

Bim grabbed his forearm. “.

And Greg was elsewhere.

“-ec-cond.” Greg stuttered over finishing his sentence, seeing not Helena lying before him or Bim kneeling on the ground across from him, not cobblestone streets or pools of dark blood, but a hazy, gaseous purple-pink space all around him, in which he was now standing/floating. He looked out upon cracked and straining, on a system so old it was barely able to function. He reached out, a pure abyss hanging beneath him, and laid two fingers on a shifting gear as tall as a mountain. The gear came loose, tumbling toward him, and--

Level 24 earned!

earned!