Chương 135: Chapter 121 - The Master

++My power is sublime. It is divine in a more true and pure way than any self-proclaimed God could possibly hope to match. Kneel. Bow. Venerate and hail. Serve me and learn from me and dedicate your life to emulating me. If the whole of humanity works collectively to follow my example, perhaps you may almost come close to matching my greatness. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E.

Nu'chista must have grown far stronger indeed, because rather than kill him, my spell only stripped the outer layer of skin from his body and exposed the wet meat glistening below. He seemed to have healed some of his damage suffered against Sakhent before I even engaged him. Now, with one attack, he was back to worse condition than he had been when Agrian fled from him. And I still had plenty of mana to spare.

The Demigod roared and gathered lightning, but anger had dulled his senses and the attack was clumsy and telegraphed. I guarded easily with a few layered aether shields, using the same trick I had in the past—trapping a vacuum at the centre of each one to prevent any electrical conduction—that had once staved off the power of Nglaru himself. Nu'chista was a strong Demigod, but a Demigod was scarcely closer to a true God than was a rat.

His magic would not have even required me to get tricky with the vacuum, fizzling out as it breached the aether and stopping short of me. My own retaliation struck him directly; a volley of magic missiles, each bearing a different element and running on micron-thin aether rails to strike him from all directions. Fire, frost, acid, steam and countless other forms of death momentarily obscured him from sight. When the maelstrom ended, he was falling.

He twisted in the air, managing to place his feet below him and land in a squat, then exploded the street with a jump that sent him shooting my way with inhuman speed. He collided with a barrier that may, in fact, have been composed of the most durable aether humanity has ever produced, and he rebound from it leaving only a single, deep crack running right down its middle. By then, I had already teleported to bring myself right behind him and seized his neck with both hands.

Lifeforce flows through Demigods like heat does through molten steel, and I drained it from him to fall into the bottomless core of my lich's Vessel. He screamed, writhing and jerking free of my grip—the physical strength disparity between us had to be a thousandfold—before turning with a mace swing that would have taken my head clean off were it not for my shield. It was my turn to twist and spin in the air, wind whirling around me.

I mentally timed the moments before Nu'chista was on me, though I could not see him, and teleported right before his blow seemed most likely to fall. I guessed right, and was on the other side of the street as he overbalanced himself with the swing. Another disintegration spell came flying for him and narrowly missed as he jerked to the side, obliterating a swathe of street and leaving a trench large enough to fit a freight train inside it.

Flames shot up beside us, obfuscating me as I released a burst of mana strong enough to be a teleportation spell, then dropped myself down a few feet in the air instead. The Demigod turned as the fire cleared and was promptly caught in the back by another disintegration spell, this time searing a patch of flesh free from half his torso. The silvery blood was raining down like the start of a great storm.

"You…you can't do this!" Nu'chista roared. Except now it was less of a lion's roar and more of a mewling kitten, of a blubbering child. I ignored him and threw out another row of magic missiles, experimenting a moment as I infused each with a disintegration spell matrix timed to last for a slightly different duration. Two were perfect to strike the Demigod before eating away at themselves, scouring yet more of his flesh away.

"STOP IT!" he screamed as the blood dribbled out and he trembled backwards, lashing at me with more tongues of lightning. These ones I simply teleported away from, retaliating with more disintegration missiles. I missed, and watched as houses puffed up into clouds of dissipating smoke. By now my mana reserves actually were starting to slip away, I had maybe two thirds of them remaining. The power of Lord Dread was vast, but not infinite. Not yet.

I had gotten over-excited to be wielding it again after so many multitudes of years. Best to be more conservative for the rest of this fight.

"YOU CAN'T DO THIS!" Nu'chista was flying at me again, apparently having decided melee was his best option.

"YOU'RE JUST A HUMAN! A HUMAN!" I let myself float back from his mace swing, teleporting a mere foot to leave him missing by a hair's breadth before casting disintegrate into a patch of exposed viscera. I saw bone flash white for a moment before he reeled back in agony.

"YOU CANNOT FATHOM WHAT A HUMAN IS CAPABLE OF." I informed him. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. He screamed again, and I took the chance to hurl a magic missile into his open mouth. I must have disintegrated something important because he began gagging and wheezing as silvery foam oozed from the corners of his mouth.

More disintegration missiles pelted him, and by now the Demigod rather resembled a corpse someone had exhumed months after its burial. My mana really was dwindling. I had kept an eye on Sakhent's fight and saw her utilizing a far wider variety of spells than I was now, but it seemed to me like I would only be wasting effort if I did the same. What mattered was wounding and weakening my enemy, and if I could achieve that faster, at the cost of more mana, then it would be easier to land subsequent hits.

By now, though I was close to having exhausted half of my mana, the Demigod was hurt enough that his movements seemed to drag. I finally let myself get a bit more creative as I tore up into the air and coaxed him after me. Winds were coiling as I infused the sky with mana, weather magic acting over a vast area and giving birth to storm clouds as black as pitch. They hurled javelins of rain at him, and then the rain hardened into hail like cannon shells. Nu'chista evaded all of it easily enough, a sneer on his face.

He did not see the net of invisible mana I draped between several of the icy projectiles to fall down on him like a guillotine blade of razor-sharp aether. Steel would have been sliced apart like butter, and with his skin already burned away in so many places even Nu'chista's body could not resist the carving sharpness. More blood burst free as fresh capillaries opened up. He screamed again.

I took the chance to transmute more of the rain into the strongest acid I could manage, and smiled as I saw it drip onto his exposed viscera. I smiled as he screamed.

Agrian could see the Demigod move now. Not easily, certainly not clearly, but he could damn well see it. Nu'chista was wounded, his limbs dragging like an octogenarian. That, solely, pushed his speed down to just barely occupy the dimension for which a human eye was made. And in that dimension, he could clearly be studied. He was hurt. He was growing desperate, frantic. He writhed with every movement and trembled as each spatter of blood oozed from him.

Steam was hissing up from his skin and black sludge trickling down. Magics that would have killed a hundred men in an instant had battered his full body as unrelentingly as sunlight, and that body was at its limit. And somehow, watching it all, Agrian felt certain that Isabel was involved. He didn't know how, he was too tired to put pieces together in a coherent way, but the timing was too perfect, the lich sparing him too convenient, Isabel's absence too coincidental.

What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Isa? Almost by way of answer, the lich in the sky dropped a pillar of molten flame down to engulf the Demigod and melt another crater into Orapathaqi below.

Sethira had released her true form—her lich's form—for the time being to heal herself. That was the one drawback to existing as she did, with her previous Vessel trapped in the new and the ability to reform an undead body at will. While she was Sakhent, the body that belonged to Sethira was… somewhere else. Perhaps stored in her phylactery all those leagues away. It was beyond her reach. So if she wanted to magically heal her human form, she had to do that healing as Sethira.

But the damage she took as Sakhent transferred back, which meant that healing was long and slow. The wounds inflicted by a Demigod would have resisted being wiped away even by a dozen Sethiras. Would they have resisted Isabel Vornholt? Probably, yes. It was hard to convince herself that was still true, but Sethira had seen what her fellow lich's human form could do. More than her, slightly. But not by that much.

Would they have resisted this new lich, this paragon of magic Sethira would never have believed existed were she not witnessing it in action herself? Would her wounds have resisted Lord Dread? The name echoed in her head. Sethira tried to convince herself this wasn't that, tried to sincerely believe she wasn't witnessing an old legend killing something real. She couldn't.

The tiny little holes in Vornholt's story that the lich had been too useful to make worth investigating, the fact that she was somehow more talented than Sethira, the impossible insight she'd gotten into the ritual even as Sethira deliberately tried to keep her from figuring it out… So many impossibilities. After a while they just added up. After a while they just made everything else pointless to try and rationalize. Maybe the specific name Lord Dread wasn't real, but the entity?

The hypothetical super-lich, able to invent necromancy, to challenge the Gods without any formal magical training at all, to singlehandedly steal fire and inspire it in mankind? Sethira didn't need to believe anymore, she was watching more evidence of it with every spell cast and every building pulverized. The Demigod flew down and hit the hard stone, blasting a wave of air out in all directions.

Sethira took a step back and shielded herself instinctively, hearing the pitter-patter of tiny stones smacking against her barrier like rain on a tin roof. She couldn't see the destruction just yet, with so much airborne debris she couldn't see much of anything, but the ambient mana from the Depths had dispersed enough that she could feel Lord Dread and Nu'chista where they remained in the middle of the devastation. The Demigod remained still, as did Dread.

It was the first time the Demigod had done anything other than charge his enemies head-on. Was he too wounded to move? Of course he is, it's surprising he's even still alive. The dust started to slowly clear up and Sethira stared deeper at its centre, and while she waited for a clearer look at what was happening, she found a single thought repeating in her mind. Isabel Vornholt, Lord Dread. You're a lich now, a stronger lich than I thought possible.

I can feel how mangled your Vessel is and how far short you are of your true potential. This is you fighting with a handicap from circumstances. The certainty led to a natural question. Was Lord Dread, even from the moment they slopped out of their first mother all those millennia ago, ever truly human?