The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty-One

I appeared right in front of the gray haired man with the cube, my fist lashing out at his head. At the same time, I cast Fungal Lock, Enhance Forging, and drew on the ninelight morels to amplify them. 

His eyes widened, and there was a flash of magic as a shield appeared around him. My fist slammed into the bubble of force, and if it weren’t for all of the body strengthening that I’d undergone, I would have shattered my wrist with the blow. 

His force bubble might have stopped my spell, but it didn’t stop my Fungal Lock. The spell started layering around him, sucking away his bodily energy, and I teleported back, even as he spun his cube again and unleashed a wave of frost over where I’d been. The frost spun and shot upwards, still following me, but Dusk let out a mocking laugh – quite literally using the chirp of a mockingbird to manage it. 

She cast Enforce Reality, the spell from the world mammoths. At first, I didn’t understand why she’d do that, but the frost attack suddenly stopped bending, and started flowing in a straight line, just like I’d expected it to originally. 

Dusk flew forward and started unleashing shockwaves against the man’s shield, whistling for me to hold up the ants around us, while she and Dawn took care of the man. Dawn began to gather up power in her jaws, while the ants began to turn and fire occasional attacks on me. 

I maintained my Fungal Lock overlaying on the gray haired man, began forming my Fungal Armor over myself with Enhance Forging and the morels, used my Runelight Lens to cast Placid Mind and Impel Senses to protect me as best I could from mental assault, and began to prepare attacks. 

My Fungal Armor had first tested its mettle against desolants, and it was who the majority of its adaptations had been formed against. I’d trimmed it to focus on more general applications, but most of the spells a third gate desolant could use were already a part of the network that was my armor. 

But there were so many desolants here that the attacks started to crunch and press in on my armor, forcing me to constantly repair it. I couldn’t hold them off forever, but I just needed a moment. I had to manipulate so many things, putting them all into place in order to work. 

I materialized Arthur, who let out a bark and drove off several desolants, his dominion of protection mixing with his semi-corporeal state as he bit and ripped through the ants, but they were still pressing on me.

So I manifested my staff. I formed a crown of mushrooms on my head, allowed my nails to turn into sharp blue sapphires, and let the inky blackness spread out of my chest. As I did, my soul mana’s recovery rate fell, but the intensity of its projection raised. I wove it through my entire garden, empowering my defenses, and the attacks. 

I released waves of Pinpoint Boneshard, lashes of Briarthreads, and tossed balls of Foxfire. I hailed down the frostbristle succulent with the yincaps to make spikes of ice, swept out with arcs of blademoss, forged spikes of stonesprout, and spun my frozen pitcher plants to release their acid. I extended my hand and allowed the power of Mantle Dragonfyre to rip from my palm while simultaneously materializing every one of my offensive potions.

I cast Capture Moment, echoing the wave of attacks, then teleported, flaring Reposition Anchor, then cast it again and again. Finally, I cast a mix of Material Echo and Magical Echo. 

Mana drained from my spirit at a rate I’d never come close to matching before as magic exploded out of me in every direction. Desolants fell like wheat before the scythe, even fourth gate ants burnt to a crisp without a second of resistance. I sent my mana through all of my attacks, converting up or down as need be. I drew magic from the plants of Dusk’s realm. I drew from my echo-shrooms, my emperor’s tree, my blood carnations. From my red star tree, my transivy, my spirit lanterns. I even drew from some that weren’t especially potent sources of mana like my dewdrop feverfew, all to keep the magic going for as long as I could.

For one glorious instant, the entire battlefield lit with the power of my overwhelming attacks. 

Then my soul mana, temporal, life, beastgate, and death gates all ran dry. My spatial gate was still relatively full, since I’d really only used it to teleport around and reposition anchors, but it was the only thing I had left in my spirit. 

The explosive glow faded away, and all that was left around us were the fifth gate crystal constructs, the man with the cube, and the Occultist battle. 

“He really does craft monsters,” the man with the cube whispered, so soft that I could barely hear him. 

Then Dusk whistled, punching out with an overcharged spell that cracked the man’s shield, and Dawn unleashed her own breath. Light tore through the area, a spike right through his body and spirit, where it built into an orb of tyrannical, dominating power. 

Now that the battlefield was much less chaotic, I could finally get a good sense for him. He was a false mental Arcanist – dangerous, that. More strangely, his cube held a pair of fourth gate elementals trapped within, with weaves of protective mind magic and sealing spells keeping them obedient to the man’s power. Whenever he spun the cube, he was actually shifting the bindings on the elementals, giving them instructions on what sort of spell they were to use.

The first was an abnegation elemental, and the second was a desolation spirit. That was likely why the newly fourth gate Dusk had been able to drain and shatter his shield, as well as snap the dominion that was causing the frost attack to chase me. 

The light from Dawn’s jaws faded, and the gray haired man staggered back, collapsing to his knees. His spirit felt strained and damaged, but the cube that he was holding…

A pair of elementals erupted from the magical device, no longer bound by the magic keeping them within, the bonds wiped clean by the spiritually destructive magic of Dawn’s breath. The desolation elemental resembled a bull, oddly, made of darkness, with multicolored elemental magic in its eyes. The abnegation spirit had a wolflike form, but was made of gray flecks instead of flesh, with runes swirling inside its pupils

“No no no no,” the man hissed, scrambling back and looking us over. “Not possible!”

The elementals began to advance on him, he raised his hand and just… vanished. I frowned, glancing around. I might be out of mana, but my senses were still working just fine. He had to have teleported away, but there was no disturbance in the spatial weave. I’d seen Orykson pull off feats like that, but I’d never seen anyone else do it. 

Had the gray haired stranger had an artifact made by a true, titled occultist? 

That was a question for later. For right now…

I looked at the elementals. 

“Are you all sapient?” 

They turned, seemingly equally confused, until the bull shaped one spotted ants. A handful of desolants were starting to work their way down the side of the tunnel, working down toward us. They were slow, and very cautious after the display of power I’d put on, but clearly coming down. 

The elementals charged up the walls, climbing them with seemingly little to no effort, and met the ants in a charge. The ants started pulling back, while a handful of the constructs that had been left to guard Idyll’s connective node turned and began shooting arcing rays up into the desolants. 

I turned to watch the Occultist battle. If the man returned, then there would be nothing I could do to stop him, and until that point, the best thing I could do was recover my mana. 

Edgar and Idyll battled against the queen, joined by the power of the arcanist-grade constructs. The constructs circled the battle, waiting for openings to release their imitation breath weapons. I had to give Elio credit for their impeccable design as they continued to follow tactics at a textbook perfect level. 

Edgar had manifested his multicolored blades in full and was slashing through the air with them, while spraying Deep Sea Drake’s Breath from his mouth, and tanking waves of attacks on his shell, which had clearly been reinforced with some sort of spell that strangely made me think of elephants. When the ant queen blasted out with one of her more dangerous attacks, he would seemingly fold and sink into both the earth and his own shadow, warping space, time, physical, telluric and lunar energy around himself, then would emerge, his spells damaged and shell cracked, but still alive. 

Idyll continued to rely on her shockwaves and the power of the jewel blade, sending swiping slashes out, but they were no longer infused with her dominion or authority, and as such, they seemed to carry less weight than they had before, the desolant queen’s spell ripping tearing them apart in mere moments. Most of her power was clearly focused on the crystalline orb of knotted silvery magic, frantically reforming the connections that held her in this world, and tied her to the land. 

Even with her clear weakness, with Edgar’s arrival, the scale of the battle had begun to shift. Instead of Idyll’s inevitable but slow defeat, they were slowly wracking up strikes on the ant queen, pushing her further onto the back foot. 

That was when I felt something in the air start to change. There was a trembling, my staff jittering oddly as the air hummed. The entire world seemed to draw in and focus on the ant queen. She unleashed an arc of utterly destructive silver magic at the pair in a wave that was twice the size of any of her previous attacks, and I could feel resonance rushing through the attack. 

The humming in the air grew louder as something sparked to life, deep within the ant queen: soul mana.

It was vastly different to my own, a source of magic that went to create her destructive powers as opposed to my eclectic blend of random magic. Even as I thought that, it seemed to grow deeper, sharper, more destructive. 

The ant queen was destruction, she commanded it, broke it to her whim. Power seemed to rush out of her, filling the space all around us with an intense feeling of ungated mana that was tinged with soul mana, shaped in a perfect form.

The Lady of Destruction was born in that instant, and her silvery power grew many times more intense. The air itself began to burn and dissolve, the earth evaporated, all under the obliterating power of the Lady of Destruction’s presence. I could barely sense the scope of the powers involved, but even I could tell that this final attack would tear Edgar, Idyll, and a significant portion of the earth around them to shreds. 

I wanted to shut my eyes, to look away, to retreat into Dusk, but I couldn’t. All of the change in the world had happened in the time it took for the Lady of Destruction’s spell to move a mere fraction of an inch, and that was a very, very fast spell. I couldn’t have blinked, let alone looked away. 

The wave of silver continued to bear down on Idyll and Edgar. 

And then the power of the Terminarch rose up to meet it.