Alsur watched the struggle begin before him and immediately noticed something had gone wrong. When his team had found the stranger, Aktoa had immediately created a ring of fire around the stranger in an attempt to obscure his vision. Of course, it couldn’t do any actual damage thanks to the man’s strange magic, but it obstructed his sigh. They’d done this dance countless times before and had started many fights in this same way.

However, this time the stranger fought as if he’d been possessed by another being, and to say it was strange would be an understatement. When they’d thrown the ring of fire around the stranger, he had simply stopped and stood there, not attacking or being aggressive like usual. Instead, he stood and stared, glaring holes straight through Alsur. They knew very little about this man that continued to challenge the seven of them, partially because the stranger had never won. Even after all these centuries, the outcome of this fight has never been in doubt.

Not one to miss an opportunity, Aktoa rushed in, knowing he would have better vision within his own fires. However, instead of retaliating, the man simply backpedaled, doing the bare minimum to prevent himself from receiving a blow. As Aktoa’s flashy fighting style threw flames across their vision, his partner started manipulating Aktoa’s fire, freezing it so fast that loud bangs rang through the air due to the sudden air vacuums that she kept creating. Despite it all, the strange man didn’t waver, not retaliating a single time as the disorienting lights and sounds cascaded around him.

“Disorient him!” Alsur yelled through the mind link that he shared with the rest of his team. “He can’t hold his defense if he gets overwhelmed!”

Hearing the order, Aktoa stopped the fire show, instead focusing on the temperatures themselves, constantly changing pressure and temperature to overwhelm the stranger's ears and distort his vision. The backline then started their own light show, alternating between pitch blackness and blinding lights at random timing, all centered around the strange man.

“Eoren and Hyatha, give us a trump card!” Alsur yelled. His link between their minds made sure they knew what he meant despite the vagueness of his order.

The two of them started manipulating their environment, slowly creating a massive buildup of earth above their heads the size of a mountain.

As they moved to follow Alsur’s orders, the stranger finally acted. He kicked off the ground with a staggering amount of power, undoubtedly using a large amount of his own magic to do so. The blow launched him forward and created a veritable crater in the ground where he had been moments before.

He flew straight towards Hyatha, who instantly released her hold on the massive mound of earth above their heads to get away. Without hesitation, she flew upwards, as if her gravity had reversed and magnified. During her ascent, she flipped herself upside down and landed with her feet on the base of the flying mountain.

“Hyatha!” yelled Eoren, struggling to hold the mountain up in the air. That had been Hyatha’s job and the strain was clear in Eoren’s voice thanks to the poor matchup of Eoren’s affinity and the actions she was using it for.

The stranger, instead of chasing Hyatha while he had left the others behind, turned on Eoren, who immediately had to backpedal. Despite the team still trying to disorient him with his own personal light show, he pushed through it. He had already experienced it hundreds of times before and had no issue locating Eoren.

Eoren stretched the space between herself and the man, her single step backwards instantly taking her over a mile away.

With Eoren’s focus elsewhere, Hyatha was now busy trying to hold up the mountain that had started crumbling. But the mass of already loose material was starting to overwhelm her.

The fighters that the stranger had left behind in his rush towards Hyatha finally arrived, lunging at the stranger. But Alsur could already see it. Such a drastic change in his opponent’s fighting style had disoriented his whole team, and they were all fighting a little too desperately. All of them were set in their ways, including the stranger. This drastic change made their fight far more uncertain for them than it should have been.

The man once again kicked off the ground, leaving another crater and launching himself straight up towards Hyatha. Alsur couldn’t fathom what the man was doing. If he kept wasting his magic like this, the fight would end incredibly quickly without the stranger killing a single one of them.

Hyatha flung herself to the side right before he reached the earth above them. The stranger slammed into the earth, creating a rocky explosion that launched Hyatha further than she intended while simultaneously sending him to the ground. Eoren reappeared near Alsur, the closer proximity allowing her to manage the mountain that Hyatha had just dropped, which had become the massive problem they had created for themselves.

The strange and sudden movement of the stranger made several of Alsur’s team members unable to track the man, freeing him of their disorientation. They knew from experience that if he wasn’t disoriented, the fight would go very poorly very quickly. In a panic, one of the team member's favorite spells was thrown. It was essentially a sticky bomb that radiated darkness, blocking the victims attempts to see or remove it unless the creator himself removed it.

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Of course, it had been modified since magic didn’t truly work on the man, so the spell had been engraved on a physical object and then thrown. However, the panic muddled the mind link and Frumi, one of the frontliners, was unable to properly understand where he was throwing it. The bomb of darkness thudded into the back of her head as she tried to swing on the stranger who had just landed in front of her.

Immediately taking advantage of the situation, the stranger threw a fist at the poor woman, his fist glowing with magic. Eoren, immediately seeing the death that would befall Frumi, shifted space so she could pull her to safety. What Eoren hadn’t seen was that the stranger was hoping for exactly that reaction and his fist found Eoren’s face, the enormous amount of magic erupting and immediately removing her head from existence. The rest of Eoren’s body burned a bright green and vanished in a brief moment.

Horror flashed through the mind link before Alsur used a significant amount of his magic to stamp it down, forcing the team to get back on track. Despite his success, his mind wandered slightly. Eoren was never the first to die. Something was truly wrong with this fight. His mind instantly snapped back to the fight however as he noticed Aktoa take advantage of the stranger’s overreaching attack, a powerful blow flying for the stranger’s head.

Alsur could instantly tell that the man wouldn’t avoid it, but would be able to move in a way that would prevent any real damage. Seeing this, Alsur saw his chance to get the fight back on track.

“Stop.” he commanded and everything froze except for Aktoa. The magic may not work on the man, but if the air around him wouldn’t let him pass, then there might as well be no difference. The powerful punch landed and Alsur immediately released control, his command on every atom in the area draining a significant portion of his magic. He saw the man stagger, the combination of using so much magic on Eoren’s death and the powerful blow to his head being a painful combination.

The stranger’s movements became predictable for a brief moment due to the strike, and a concentrated laser was shot at the ground in front of him right before he stepped. The laser burned a hole deep enough that the stranger’s stumble worsened, allowing Aktoa to press the attack even further. The stranger leaned into it however, purposefully falling and expelling another intensely powerful burst of magic, this time strong enough to be almost blinding.

It launched him up and he curved his flight back directly in line with Hyatha, who was too busy deconstructing the mountain that had caused them a strange amount of trouble. Alsur called a warning through the link, but she wasn’t fast enough and a brief second later, she was dead in the same way Eoren had been, her own body burning a bright purple before disappearing.

The man then continued curving his flight and Alsur realized the stranger was heading for him.

“On me!” he called through the mind link. Several team members appeared at his side in an instant. Frumi and Aktoa were now on their way, the orb of darkness now gone. But by the time the man landed, they still hadn’t arrived and Alsur took a combat stance.

The stranger had never fought like this or targeted Hyatha and Eoren. The fact that he had killed them first and was now standing in front of Alsur was deeply troubling. In all their centuries of fighting, this had never happened. Alsur had only ever been killed last, always taking the stranger with him and now he was worried that might change. He didn’t know what the stranger’s plan was, but he was certain that the stranger couldn’t kill all of them. He had burned too much magic.

The stranger grinned as his whole body glowed blindingly bright and Alsur was certain he was using the rest of his magic at once.

“Stop.” Alsur commanded once more, but it was useless. The stranger was using so much magic that it was radiating off the man and rendered Alsur’s magic useless. Zivats, the darkness mage, disappeared into Alsur’s shadow and erupted from the stranger’s, but the process didn’t work right thanks to the stranger’s magic. He came out screaming in pain and only partially corporeal. The stranger swung a lazy backhand and Zivats went flying, nearly colliding with Frumi and Aktoa, who were approaching the man from behind.

The last member of his team charged and Alsur tried to stop him, but he wasn’t fast enough. Ivner was at the man’s side in an instant, throwing a knee at the man’s groin. The man simply took it and grunted in pain as he grabbed Ivner’s leg and twisted it, eliciting a loud pop from Ivner’s hip as it was dislocated. Alsur took a couple steps forward, hoping to engage and distract the man from Aktoa and Frumi behind him, but his plan backfired. The man lunged forward in a… hug?

“We’re going down together,” the stranger spoke for the first time in over a century.

Alsur felt a piercing pain through his back as a sword made of pure foreign magic pierced his back, out his chest and into the chest of the stranger, skewered his own heart in the process. The stranger poured his magic into Alsur, creating a deadly loop. Their magics didn’t mesh, their existences contradicting each other and it felt as if the very universe didn’t know what to do. As his consciousness started to fade, dread flooded his mind. If the man’s plan was what Alsur thought it was, he didn’t know what they could do to stop it now. His consciousness faded and as his body burned, the flames flickered in and out, the magic unable to remain stable. The rest of the team watched their leader burn, something they had felt thousands of times themselves, but rarely Alsur. Unable to do anything else, they simply hoped they could survive the fallout of what was to come.

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Far away, a young mother-to-be looked up at the sky, watching the starfall, hoping it wasn’t a sign for her own unborn children. She worried as she watched, paying attention to what colors the stars were this time. She rubbed her eyes as she stared, perplexed. One of them was gold, the color of the aristocracy. She could only ever remember seeing that once. Now she hoped it was a sign of noble things to come for her children. As she turned back inside, she missed the golden star winking in and out of existence as it fell…