Chương 207: Act 3, Chapter 57: Four men and one date / the first man

Day in the story: 23rd January (Friday) Alexandra May"Are you sure about it?" Dam's voice rumbled off the walls of his training hall as he cracked his knuckles.

"With that damage of yours, it might not be the best idea."

"I am sure, Damien. I think that you would not even be able to land a single punch on me," I replied, inciting him to take up the challenge.

"I do, however, want to warn you that I'll use everything at my disposal to beat you. Are you ready for that?"

"Oh, Alexa—You know how to speak to the old man to make my body tingle with excitement."

"I need to check how I fare against the threats that were impossible to beat before, with all of my new powers and tools." After splitting myself apart once more two days ago to create Miriam and dispatch her on an espionage mission, I found myself craving something more grounded. I hoped a melee would scratch that itch.

"I understand that, but I don't want to hurt you if you freeze mid-fight."

"Just don't kill me and I think I'll be able to survive."

"I will try my best." He replied, smiling widely, ear to ear.

"We fight till one party decides that enough is enough and calls it?" I asked.

"No," Nick's voice boomed through the speakers installed at every corner of the hall. He himself sat by the table in the safe room and looked at us from behind the reinforced glass pane. He was looking better today, almost as well as he used to in his best days.

"I will be the judge. I will tell you when to stop, and you will do it immediately. Understood?"

"Look who's the boss now," I whispered to Dam.

"Understood, son!" he rumbled, turning and starting to walk toward one end of the hall. I followed, moving toward mine.

"Ready?" the speakers carried his voice again. I flared with my shadowlight, raising a thumb up, while Damien stripped down to his boxers—which he fortunately left on. His upper body swelled, covering itself in some kind of rocky, but slimy growth, while his arms elongated by a good three feet each. Then the legs did the same.

"That kind of ready?" I said, but Nick already shouted for us to start the fight. In that moment, my spellbook and my mind were my primary weapons. Multiple strands of thought branched in parallel, each reaching for a different task, working in concert to level the field between me and the monster before me. To my left, Alex appeared, the Sword of the Rose sheathed at his side and two singing blades already drawn. To my right, I summoned four swarms of minions.

Each served a distinct purpose, yet all were conceived as cohesive creations, anchored in my spellbook. The first were the art crafters—forty in number, like the rest—already skittering toward the walls to begin their work, guided by several of my thought threads. The second were the wasps, a new breed forged for combat: larger than the spiders, more aggressive by design, capable of flight and armed with a paralyzing sting.

The third were the web-slingers—smaller spiders optimized for weaving dense nets with speed and efficiency. The fourth were the spy-ders, smaller still, built for concealment and observation when my own senses fell short. I wore simple, unarmored clothing—the spellbook at my belt and my Waterflow robe the only concessions to battle. The first of Alex's blades struck the ground at the center of the arena the moment he appeared, buying me a few steps as Dam advanced.

As the knife embedded itself, it flared with shadowlight; the speaker etched into its surface began to play a time-slowing melody. The effect was orchestrated by Catansi, safe in my apartment, selecting the appropriate track for each speaker. Through my Identity Authority, every one of them remained linked, functioning as extensions of my laptop. Dam crossed into the dome of slowed time before he understood what had happened.

At that same instant, the wasps—like meteors burning through the atmosphere—pierced the shimmering sphere. Each flared briefly as the temporal field took hold. The web-slingers were already at work, spinning nets across the battlefield, while the spy-ders vanished into every crack and shadow they could find. Alex advanced a few paces, flinging another singing blade behind him before drawing the Sword of the Rose and leaping into the dome. And through those few fleeting seconds, I made a single move.

Alex Weatherlight I saw both confusion and fury in Dam's eyes as I joined him in the small dome. Inside, I was largely on my own when it came to connecting with other versions of myself; anything they said or thought would be warped by time before it reached me. My sword snapped up as shadowlight enveloped my body and the blade. It caught the blow from Damien's enormous arm, and with a quick pivot I let the strike glance off, skidding along the edge as I released the weapon.

Suspended by my will, it continued pressing against him while I pulled two blades from the Domain—one of them Ghostflame—and drove them toward his exposed, armored abdomen. I wasn't the only one trying to pierce him. The air thrummed with the ticking cadence of the song and the furious buzzing of dozens of wasps, swarming to blind him and sting through the thick skin he had forged. They clung to him like locusts, intent on stripping him bare.

The first blade pierced the exposed surface but failed to breach his protective shell. Ghostflame, however—glowing with its ghastly green light—cut clean through, striking the muscle beneath the black, rock-like hide. I discarded the useless blade with a flick; it struck the ground and embedded itself an instant before I used it as a teleport anchor to evade his counterattack. His other arm carved a wide arc through the air, but I was already on the ground, one arm outstretched, gripping the knife.

I rolled as the floating sword wheeled behind the monstrous figure and drove itself toward his thigh. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. It struck, but failed to bite deep enough to hold. Flames erupted across Damien's body, incinerating the swarm of wasps. Using the momentum, he ignored me—now upright at his flank—and broke free of the slowed-time zone. I didn't pursue. Instead, I withdrew Authority from the song, returning us to the normal flow of time.

As the shimmering film of air dissolved, I saw him falter, ensnared in a wide lattice of spider silk—its threads reinforced by Alexa's resonance, far stronger than any natural web. He ignited again, burning through it, his head snapping from side to side as he searched for Alexandra, who was nowhere to be seen. That was when he noticed the storm clouds embedded in the walls of his hall, shining with stored electric energy behind the labyrinth of webs hastily woven by the web-slingers.

Before he could reorient himself toward me, a blade I had dropped prior to entering the dome began to play the Thunder song as well. The surrounding area erupted into a storm, unleashing successive bursts of thunder. It was too dangerous to remain there, so I took the cue and teleported to one of the spy-ders at the arena's edge. I arrived just in time to witness the mural awaken—granted form by Alexandra—and join my storm, bombarding everything with lightning.

The erratic discharges quickly found purpose as the flying sword surged after Dam, drawing the electricity toward itself. It became a web layered upon a web. The sword struck him, and the lightning followed, hurling him aside with overwhelming force. In response, his skin shifted—turning slick, pitch-black, and rubber-like—to absorb the impact. He then morphed into a squid-like form, sprouting numerous tentacles, and seized the blade. The instant he did, Alexandra stripped Authority from the lightning arts.

I teleported to the sword's edge, knives in hand, and sprinted along his rubbery body. As he faltered in confusion, I vaulted over him and drove both blades into what I took to be his back as I descended. They sank deep. The wounds were long and severe. He writhed in pain but retaliated with a flurry of lashing tentacles. I was already gone—now perched atop the webbed bridge above him, having shifted to one of the spiders there.

I balanced on the silken strands as if on a tightrope while the daggers embedded in his back erupted into a wild techno rhythm, beginning with a massive bass drop—one I shaped into a concussive wave. The force slammed Dam forward into the far wall of his Domain. Meanwhile, the sp-eye-ders along my neck tilted their gaze upward. The art crafters were nearly finished painting the ceiling. The massive man rebounded off the wall, using his tentacles like hooks as his body hardened with glistening metallic fragments.

He launched himself toward me—his only viable target—but the flying sword struck the ground hard enough to embed its tip. I teleported to it and seized the hilt. In that instant of displacement, the painted field of grass and flowers above—painted by the art crafters—glowed with settling shadowlight, becoming the new floor of the chamber. Midair, Dam twisted as gravity shifted, dragging him toward what had once been the ceiling.

He tumbled, struggling to reorient, his tentacles lashing out in search of purchase—only to snag in the dense web of reinforced silk. Forced to act, he engulfed himself in flames, igniting the webbing. The charred remnants, along with the spiders weaving there, fell upward with him as his body began to change once more. His face surfaced briefly, then stretched and sharpened into a drake's snout. His chest swelled, followed by his pelvis, limbs, and spine, which extended into a tail.

His shoulder blades unfurled into vast draconic wings, and his body armored itself in gleaming red scales. He beat those immense, leathered wings once to halt his fall, again to gather momentum, and a third time to surge toward me, still suspended from the hook of my sword. As he rose toward the chamber's old floor, gravity flipped again. The art crafters dropped onto the drake's disoriented form from what had once more become the ceiling.

They clung to him, painting black holes across his body wherever they landed. Seizing the moment, I released the sword and sent it flying toward the beast. With a flick of will, the singing blades snapped back into my hands, their descent toward the former ground arrested. I cloaked them in shadowlight and hurled them at the drake, testing whether the energy would hold. It didn't—but the blades still streaked toward him. He wheeled around and roared, exhaling a torrent of fire vast enough to engulf half the hall.

At the same time, jagged salt crystals erupted from his massive back, impaling the spiders working there as they burst outward. A moment later, he fired the shards in all directions, striking nearly every minion still within the hall. I teleported aside just in time to avoid those spikes and the flames. I blinked toward the storm-cloud mural on the far wall, my Authority on the verge of depletion. I knew that I wouldn't be able to escape like that again.

Even with the crystal heart—beating metaphorically in my chest and granting me a far greater reserve of Authority than my other selves—I was nearing collapse from the relentless pace of my moves. But Alexa was in perfect control—right on Dam's skin. A precise teleport placed her where she needed to be, her hand brushing against the crafters' painted voids exposed again, after the crystals' eruption.

They flared with dark light as they accepted her Authority, severing Dam's spine and opening a path into his transformed body. Deprived of control, his form crashed to the ground with a heavy thud. A moment later, she stood beside me, gripping my shoulder tightly, while the flying sword struck into exposed muscles.

"Enough!" Nick's voice rang through the speakers after his father laid motionless for several seconds. With Alexa's support, I reached out and withdrew Authority from everything that still lingered across the battlefield.

"No!" Dam's voice echoed off the walls as his body shifted back into human form. Modest enough, he remained partially covered by scale-like armor.

"No, son! I wasn't finished. That move didn't incapacitate me—I was buying time!" he shouted at Nickolas, who had just entered the training hall, his gaze sweeping over the damage and the lingering, surreal remnants of the battle.

"I couldn't be sure, Dad."

"Fine." Dam exhaled through his nose, folding his arms.

"Where the hell were you during that fight?" he asked, turning to Alexandra, who stood beside me. She hid it well, but the left side of her body, up to the waist, was paralyzed.

"Let that remain a secret, old man," she replied, flashing a wide, unbothered grin.

"I saw you right up until that slowing music spell caught me. And then this guy"—he pointed at me—"came at me with a sword. Who are you, anyway?"

"Alex Weatherlight. Nice to meet you in person," I said.

"He is me, and I am him, just a bit more endowed," she added, prompting Nickolas to burst into laughter. Dam's expression shifted into deeper confusion.

"What does that even mean?"

"Let's just say that, thanks to my… creative mind, I can be more than one person at once. You'll get used to it."

"So if I got to him"—he pointed at me again—"you'd all feel it?"

"Another secret, old man. I can't reveal all my tricks." He furrowed his brow, irritation flashing across his face—then, slowly, he smiled.

"Good. I like that. Let's have a rematch. This time, I won't hold back."

"I already asked you to take this fight seriously," she replied.

"I couldn't risk hurting you, could I?"

"Oh, Dam. Now you're just making excuses. Besides, I can't do a rematch, I'm spent. Alex is too. We need rest. Still… it was good training."

"I remember when all you've wanted was to cast a fireball," he said with a short laugh.

"And now? I couldn't follow half of what was happening out there."

"I've learned it's better to pull the strings from a safe distance than to stand in front of said fireball. No offense, Alex." She turned to me with a smile.

"None taken. I know my role."

"How much more did you have left?" Dam asked.

"In terms of tricks? Plenty. In terms of Authority—not much. Alex was nearly drained too. That's why I pushed to finish it."

"You didn't. I could've kept going."

"I didn't use my most lethal abilities either, old man—same as you. But I did everything I could to beat you without killing you. I didn't hold back on that."

"Likewise, girl. You've become a force of nature."

"For a few minutes at a time," she said with a laugh. She stepped forward and extended her hand, her body fully responsive again. He clasped it firmly.

"Sometimes, that's enough. So, what now? You up for a good breakfast""I've got plans to meet four more men today," she replied, glancing at Nickolas.

"Starting with your son. We have a lot to discuss."

"We do," Nick said.