Chương 132: Chapter 118 - Desperate Fighting

++A Demigod at war is a fearsome sight. Depending on the Demigod, it is fearsome even for my kind. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Agrian's mission had quite suddenly changed from 'reunite with Isabel' to 'avoid being turned into crushed raspberries by debris'. So far he was managing it. Barely. The city was in ruins around him, buildings being flattened and the air apparently twenty percent flying bricks by volume.

He'd learned right away to keep his shield up the whole time, mana cost be damned, because every other second it was pelted by something big and hard and moving faster than a falcon in the dive. Even defended by magic, Agrian didn't know how safe he was. What if a whole building collapsed on him? If a whole building collapsed on him, Agrian mused, he'd be experiencing one of the less deadly events that was going on at the moment.

He continued stumbling through the streets and risked another glance up into the sky, beholding, once more, the sight of Sakhent and Nu'chista at war. It stung his eyes, even through a hastily modified layer to his shield made to filter out excess light and heat. Nu'chista burned with lightning coiling around every inch of him, while Sakhent seemed obfuscated by a bottomless fog of green power. The two of them were circling like dancers. Or vultures.

Sakhent seemed to halt, hovering and waiting, like they were coaxing Nu'chista into an attack. The Demigod obliged him, shooting through the space between them like a bullet. Green mist hardened and came out as a mass of tendrils. Agrian had seen limbs just like them tear a cloudscraper in half, but against the Demigod they seemed like splashes of water, breaking apart on his body and rocking him but failing to actually do anything substantial.

He tore through them, almost closing in on the lich before a flash of light engulfed Sakhent and snatched him away elsewhere. Teleportation? Agrian could hardly believe it. Teleportation was rare and powerful magic possessed by maybe twenty magicians in the world, and less than a dozen in Garamon. But it wasn't the use of it alone that had him shaken here—liches were superhumanly skilled in magic, it made sense one of the greatest would replicate a top-class human technique.

No, what shook Agrian was seeing it used so seamlessly, mid-fight. How effortless it must have been for the lich to do it in circumstances like this. It was like going from watching a man juggle knives to watching another one juggle twice as many while blindfolded, using one hand and shooting flies out of the air with a handgun wielded in the other.

He was treated to another surprise when the Demigod simply didn't give a shit, twisting around and flying after the lich so fast that Agrian, seeing the whole thing from afar and having plenty of warning, still struggled to track them with his eyes. Again they clapped together, magic meeting might, and this time Agrian actually saw a visible shockwave in the air as a sound like several mine-fulls of dynamite detonating rang out at once.

Sakhent seemed to be on the defensive, trying to ward off the Demigod's strikes with those great tendrils of power. Agrian felt disbelief and horror in equal measures as he watched the limbs fail, time and time again, to do anything more than repel the Demigod for brief moments at a time, all the while Nu'chista's attack continued unrelenting. Agrian felt like an ant trying to interpret a bare-knuckle boxing match.

Watching limbs the size of his landscape flit across the air with impossible force and unimaginable magnitude. The air was screaming and shivering around them, one shockwave following another, then another, all ringing out so fast that they bled into each other, less explosions or cracks and more a prolonged press of moving atmosphere that rattled windows and displaced earth even hundreds of feet below. And I'd been wondering how I'd help with this, trying to decide who to fight alongside.

If Agrian threw everything he had into the fight right now and scored his best shot on one of the combatants in the most ideal way possible, he doubted they'd even notice him. He wasn't a part of this. He was barely even a spectator, because they were fighting so fast and with such esoteric skill that it was beyond him to even properly interpret what was happening. He pulled his eyes away from the sight and got moving again.

No time, there was no time to gawp like a simpleton, and he'd get nothing done by standing around waiting to be killed and wishing really hard that he wouldn't be. He had to get to Isabel. Where was she? Fuck, there was so much mana in the air now that it was hard to even find her. He sifted through it and strained his mind in search of a central point, an origin for the endless wash of magic. Deep down below the city, in those fucking tunnels again. Agrian supposed he shouldn't have been so surprised about that.

He set off at a run. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Sakhent, the greatest lich in history, pioneer of the Depths, master of the undead and parter of the Veil, was losing her fight. She kept her mana calcified around her into those jutting, physical limbs, ethereal matter tinged dark with tortured souls in that way that added mass and solidity beyond what the petty magics of Garamon had yet to achieve. She moved each tendril around like a modern bullet, leaving sound in their wake as they streaked across the air and smashed into her target.

Each lunge he attempted was countered by another crushing blow, flinging him down to crater the stone of Orapathaqi's streets, or high up to split a cloud before he returned. And he did return, every time, for though Sakhent had the clear advantage in experience with magical combat, versatility, intelligence and just about any other mental category one might consider, the disparity in brute strength was clearly skewed against her favour. Demigods.

She had always been wary of fighting Demigods, and now she'd gotten herself tied up fighting one of the strongest ones she'd ever seen or heard of. You better not have been lying, Sascithius. It was a grimly likely possibility that her fellow lich was lying. Sakhent could feel the magic building still, but that did not mean that Sascithius knew how to push it to its climax, nor that she would choose to do so. She was fairly sure she was a rational actor. Eighty four percent.

Sixteen percent odds of immediate defeat and destruction, though, were… unideal. And that was assuming she held off the force of nature currently attacking her long enough to find out whether she was being betrayed. The Demigod got past one of her magical limbs and tore off a leg. Sakhent hissed, teleporting back down to the streets in the hopes of buying time as he tried to find her. She worked mana into a necrotic blast that caught the Demigod and engulfed him just as he looked down to see her.

That power would have rotted a normal creature's meat into gas, rusted steel into a pile of brown dust, and cooled a volcano into congealed stone. The Demigod was barely even weakened, divine magic concentrated in his body densely enough that even its own anathema did little to diminish it. He burst free of the dark cloud and responded with lightning.

Sakhent threw out shields layered one after another and watched them explode as electrical death rebound and vaporized whole houses, then the Demigod struck the ground she'd been occupying an instant before and exploded the whole street below them. Flying debris hit her shield hard enough to punch through both sides of a human's skull, though did little to even weaken it. The Demigod was not done yet though. Hurry, Isabel Vornholt. Hurry! Nu'chista drew a great mace from nowhere Sakhent could see and swung it.

She responded with her own weapon, the Grimscythe, its edge made from the spine of a great abyssal predator that had once nearly slain her in the shallowest corners of the Depths. Magical metal met magical metal and the divine screamed in disgust as it faced its equal and opposite, plasma-bright sparks flew from the collision, bursting into fireballs as they destabilised in the air. The ground was molten sludge under their feet.

"KILL US!" Sakhent glanced to her side and saw the spirits coiling around them, shaken free of her weapon's edge by the discharge of divine magic.

"FREE US OR KILL US, PLEASE!"

"Shut up," she snapped.

"You're annoying." She re-bound them with an idle thought and swung the scythe once more, this time finding the Demigod was nowhere near her point of targeting. He seemed to melt aside and retaliate even before her blow had finished, and it was all Sakhent could do to put up a wall of soulstuff before being hit. The magic slowed her enemy's attack, but did not halt it. Bones broke and she flew like she was trying to escape orbit.

Houses caught her in the air, exploding into dust with the attempt to stop her momentum. She must have flown through fifty before finally hitting the base of a great sphinx and finding the yards-thick, stolid stone resilient enough to exhaust what remained of her speed. Just about. She still exited through its back to keep tumbling on a few more dozen paces before settling into a rest. Nu'chista was above her before she could stand, swinging downwards with a blow that barely missed thanks to a timely teleportation.

Sakhent appeared one hundred paces from him, and she still stumbled from the force of the shockwave before righting herself, turning and preparing a volley of greyfire bolts that tore out. The Demigod parried some, evaded others, but was caught by two and snarled as even his unbreakable skin blistered and cracked where the dark flames touched it. Then the gap was closed again.

Grimscythe had the reach of his mace and Sakhent managed to send the scythe's edge sliding down the Demigod's torso before his blow caught her shaft and sent the weapon flying free of skeletal fingers. His shoulder struck her next, breaking almost every rib she had and flinging her most of the way across the city. He caught up with her flying form before she could even stop. Sakhent mustered the strongest shield she'd ever produced and watched with some satisfaction as it held against the Demigod's swing.

Then it shattered against the second, driving her through the streets of Orapathaqi and deep into the crypts. Custodians lunged out of the shadows and fell upon the Demigod, scattered with one flex of his body but buying Sakhent enough time to stumble back onto her feet and teleport away. She wasn't even trying to mount a counter-attack now, just keep the space between herself and her enemy as big as it could be and hold off. Every second was a victory, that was the sort of fight this was.

I could be wielding the powers of a God right now, she thought. But that notion was poisonous and distracting. The Demigod was behind her again, on her heels. Hurry up, Isabel Vornholt. Hurry up before my strength runs out.