“Do you know how many true archmages there have been among the race of humanity?”
“A few hundred, probably.”
“One. If you include me.”
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The golden light of Temporal Reversion snatched him away from death as Jair dropped into timefall.
The spectral cliffside of his soulspell offered nothing for several days, only minor bumps that crumbled as soon as he touched them.
It was over a week previous that he finally managed to pull himself out.
Jair walked beside Qahrvirna through the wood at night.
This didn’t narrow it down much, since that was what they did every night for weeks on end.
He narrowed his eyes at the surroundings, but in the darkness the Oriad looked much alike from one section to another without any major landmarks.
A skittering crunch from the side drew his attention. The two octide revenants he'd first collected were still present. So this was before they disappeared. He could keep an eye on them this time, be sure he caught exactly what happened.
So he’d lost closer to three weeks than one. That was fine. He could continue testing Darkflame regardless of their point in the timeline.
Even if it was starting to feel like they’d been walking every night for months, he wasn’t out of things to verify yet. If this was his life for a few years, performing experiments with Qahrvirna on their way to her tower, there were worse ways to spend the time. He still had some of his slightly-damaged movement and attack constructs stored that he could work on repairing if he ran out of other things to do while traveling.
He thought back to the moments immediately prior to his most recent demise. Against the bulbix alpha, Darkflame had only scorched it, not slowed or stopped the charging creature. And that one moment had been enough for it to throw him to his death.
It demonstrated a glaring flaw in his current fighting style; he’d started to rely on Darkflame to open up space rather than evading. Darkflame may be an acceptable replacement for his spells in the moment, but not something he should integrate into his long term plans until he was more familiar with its limitations.
Had the venix’s fire ever burned Jair, or only Qahrvirna and itself? He couldn’t recall anything specific. If it tried, he’d missed it.
So Darkflame wasn't an automatic instant victory against absolutely everything. Which made sense, otherwise the venix would have used it a lot more often.
If it could only be used against weaker creatures, that would severely reduce its viability. He could already defeat weaker creatures without much difficulty. Darkflame gave him an easy way to keep bodies from piling up, perhaps, and the potential of the weird revenant things, but if it couldn’t even handle a jumbo cow its utility grew increasingly questionable.
At least he knew it would be effective against anything vulnerable to fire.
Unfortunately, Ryenzo wasn’t one of those things.
Jair’s next question was whether he could force Maelstrom to overcharge an ability, or if it would only ever draw enough mana for the one activation at a time.
Ordinarily, attempting to shove mana into an already-ascended sword was something like trying to change the course of a river by pouring a cup of water into it. No matter how big your cup was, or how many times you tried, any changes would be washed away.
He'd tried adding mana to his sword in previous futures without success, when his ascension had been performed to a lower quality level. Those efforts never succeeded. The ascension or reforging process was the only time a soulsword accepted mana into itself.
But he’d also never tried with a weapon missing so much of its integrity. His pre-Maelstrom ascensions had stayed perfectly fine right up until the moment he tried to revert with them, at which point they’d skipped past mere integrity damage to violently explode instead. Never fun, having something explode inside your soul.
He was breaking new ground here, so he couldn’t preemptively rule out things that would be traditionally wasteful or pointless.
Jair activated Darkflame and tried to encourage Maelstrom to take more than the base amount of mana it drew out for the ability. It charged a tiny bit faster to full, after which it abruptly cut off the power draw.
He incinerated a few trees to exhaust Maelstrom's darkflame coating, then activated the ability again. He tried to push the power draw faster, but the change wasn't even noticeable.
Qahrvirna eyed the growing clearing. "Are you planning to build a house here or something?"
"Just testing my sword's ability."
It took about half a second to reactivate Darkflame after it was expended, which was a half second longer than he’d prefer. If he couldn’t kill the alpha bulbix with the first activation, he’d need to plan around that. Keep himself from getting pinned down. Stay mobile, stay out of reach. Dart in, hit and run.
“You know anything about alpha bulbix?”
“They’re delicious.”
“Anything else? Any powers or abilities I should know about?”
“They’re big.” Qahrvirna’s expression turned predatory. “Is that what you’re planning to keep here? I think you’ll need a bit more space than this.”
Jair regarded her flatly. “Just. Testing.”
Qahrvirna considered a moment. "You know, you mentioned wanting a dragoncube? Alpha bulbix horns are a rather ideal material to make them out of. If you’re planning to go hunting, bring back a horn and I can have one commissioned for you. And if you happen to have some of the meat and blood with you, I’ll pay for that as well. Though they don’t keep nearly as long."
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"Is that why you never got me one last time, no materials?" Jair mused.
Qahrvirna gave him a funny look. “Last time?”
Jair ignored her. "So, carve off the horns before darkflame. Noted."
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Darkflame came so close to solving Maelstrom's previous reach problem, but if it only ever worked on things small and relatively weak, he wasn't sure if it would help where it mattered. And he still hadn't solved the issue of it being slow to reactivate. Half a second was an eternity in a fight.
He spent some time with the smaller herds they encountered, practicing shearing off their horns, jumping out of the way of their charges, and accumulating as many nicks against their sides with Maelstrom as possible without being trampled.
Qahrvirna watched, taking notes and collecting samples.
Being without his spells or physical strength complicated matters, but having Darkflame to rely on saved his life more than a few times. Or perhaps it only enabled him to engage in much riskier fights.
Either way, aside from the specific focus on hunting bulbixes, the weeks passed much as they had the previous times. Jair gradually reclaimed his physical capabilities, and spent the time not fighting bulbixes tinkering with his construct pieces.
He couldn’t make anything too extreme without a full workshop at his disposal, but he could reconfigure what he had into a few amplifiers to provide a minor movement boost. He’d need every edge he could get against something this big.
By the time they reached the territory of the larger herd with its alpha, Jair was ready for it. As long as he assumed that Darkflame would fail, he could stay out of its way and focus on eliminating the herd around it.
Which also meant he’d be running with the herd’s movement, making the entire fight take place at an amplified sprint.
The biggest problem with having a moving battle, aside from Jair’s body potentially wearing out before the herd of cattle, would be that he’d leave behind any revenants from the fight. But he didn’t have any specific desire for spectral bulbixes following him around, so it would be no great loss.
His initial approach was stealthy.
He found the herd grazing on a nice hillside full of low and well-nibbled bramble and fringed with tall trees whose trunks were bare anywhere within reach of a bulbix’s mouth. They were large, meaty creatures, and required a substantial amount of grazing to maintain that bulk.
Jair crept up behind the furthest bulbix cow—lacking horns—and stabbed it with a quick flash of darkflame.
This alerted the herd, which began looking around and snorting uneasily. The alpha, ever watchful, trotted over in Jair’s direction.
Jair slipped in among the rest of the herd. On the way, he sheared off a horn from one of the subservient males on the way and dropped it into his soulspace.
The bulbix reared and bellowed in pain. The herd shifted uneasily. Cows snorted and the alpha growled.
Jair took off running before the injured bulbix could gore him, but that only bought him a second. Then it was after him.
He stabbed backwards as it reached him, disintegrating it in a flash of darkflame, but didn’t stop running.
As he raced through the herd, he clipped a second horn from another bulbix. This one rushed him immediately, and the whole herd followed.
Already on edge, they needed only the slightest push to turn into a stampede.
Exactly as planned. The alpha, stuck on the opposite side from Jair, would have to get through the entire group to catch him.
The creatures bumped into one another as they ran, grasses trampled and smaller trees crushed and thrown aside. Birds screeched and took flight before them; octides clicked and scurried out of the way.
And Jair ran in the middle of it all. He danced and weaved his way between thundering hooves without any margin for error.
All was chaos.
Maelstrom slashed out here for a horn, there to immolate a bulbix that was getting too close.
After a minute of nonstop running and fighting, he’d collected eleven horns and left at least two revenants behind that he knew of. Thankfully, the whole rolling fight had gotten him safely past them before they could decide Jair was an aggressor.
He switched from focusing on the smaller bulbixes as the alpha caught up to him and started slicing at the alpha’s flanks with Maelstrom’s darkflame-empowered edge, prioritizing evasion over attack.
Each slash to connect drained the effect and left a scorch mark on the beast’s side. If it had any other effect, Jair didn’t see it.
The angry oversized creature was trying to kill him either way. He wasn’t sure additional rage would change anything.
Jair tried to push Maelstrom to accept more mana, to charge the ability faster or overcharge it, but his efforts were clearly insufficient. Perhaps he wasn’t doing it correctly. He’d never used a soulsword with innate abilities before. Eythron never let him borrow his sword, and the old mageblade was the only one Jair knew with a weapon even remotely close to Maelstrom’s level.
And all the time he was running and ducking and slashing. Another bulbix made the mistake of coming within reach and got itself darkflame immolated for its trouble, leaving behind nothing but a puff of ash.
The alpha kept trying to shift the stampede’s path to curve around and let it crush Jair underfoot, and Jair kept avoiding it. Barely.
His body ached and his cobbled-together constructs were barely enough to keep him ahead of the angry monster bent on his destruction. The strain on his manabody would set him back days if not weeks of imprinting progress, to undo the warping this much construct use would cause, but that hardly mattered.
He knew Darkflame had to be capable of more. It was the final power of the mythical Venix. If it couldn’t even handle an oversized bulbix, why was he giving it precious space in Maelstrom’s soul?
Reactivate faster. Take more power. Whatever it takes.
He slashed the creature’s side as he ran, discharging the darkflame into its body.
Body, mind, magic, soul, all were strained to their limits as he tried to force what was not to become.
His body was running out of strength. He couldn’t keep running much longer.
It felt not unlike his run up Mount Sanctum, in an odd way. Less extreme, scaled down from maximum to minimum, but the building pressure of sheer desperation within him was the same.
If he could use the darkflame on Ryenzo, then this could all finally be over with. He could step forward into a future that didn’t have to be doomed, make decisions that would matter and progress that wouldn’t be reverted every few months.
If only Darkflame would accept more power.
He took one last jump and stabbed Maelstrom deep into the alpha bulbix’s side. This wasn’t about the monster in front of him, it was about every monster that would ever stand in his way. Every unstoppable foe that he’d been forced to run away from or trick or trap or deceive to survive.
He released his constructs and screamed wordlessly.
Maelstrom’s whole purpose was to break the limitations of his timeline. Taking scraps and remnants wasn’t enough. He needed power that couldn’t be denied, couldn’t be stolen or blocked.
He needed more.
Something shifted, strained, then snapped. He wasn’t sure what or how.
Jair felt the crack all the way to his soul.
Darkflame burst out as his manabody collapsed in on itself. The bulbix alpha disappeared in a burst of white fire that left behind a green-black afterimage.
Jair died.
It was so abrupt he almost didn’t notice. He drifted in still silence, the entire stampeding herd frozen in tableau. Maelstrom hovered in midair where it had fallen from his hand. The bulbix alpha’s ashes drifted in a cloud in front of him, obscuring the trees beyond.
He shifted his perception in all directions. Something was draining him, even now. Who? Where?
Nothing. No one.
It was such a peaceful drain, so calm and right, he almost didn’t remember to revert. His ‘vision’ started to fade, as his dying soul began to come apart at the edges.
A faint shift in the frozen world. Maelstrom flared up its silver light, tinged with hints of gold, and Jair remembered.
He was dead. Temporal Inversion. He was running out of time.
Jair turned his attention inward. His soulspell burned, the golden threads alight with darkflame, and it seared his soul as he dove into it.
He fell backwards through time and instinctively grabbed at the nearest available crevice.
The spectral golden cliffside burned away every time he reached out to it, his touch turning it to ash. One handhold after another disintegrated the moment he tried to use them.
He fell.
Then he saw Maelstrom, within the timefall, driven point-first into the cliffside.
Instinct took over and he grabbed at the sword. It held steady, the only solid thing in a burning world, and he pulled himself forward and out into reality.
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