For a moment, Irwyn thought they might have made it in time. The barrier had held a Concept but not more than one or two. The odds were feasible and they had whittled it down. Whichever between the undead skull and the man was responsible, they almost had them as Elizabeth had cut through the last layers of defense. Even inflicted a wound of some kind.

  Then the constant beacon of power that had guided them to that very place erupted, turning into a volcano of unmitigated and foul necromantic magic. Elizabeth managed to finish her swing, scoring a deep cut on the skull but then had to retreat, slipping through the Void and back onto Irwyn’s platform high overhead.

  “That will be a problem,” she immediately said, a bit winded from her assault on the barrier. Offense might usually be less expensive than equal defense but the original barrier had clearly been set up in advance, giving it an edge.

  “What are we even dealing with?” Irwyn asked.

  “I am not sure yet,” she shook her head. “Back away a bit.”

  Irwyn did so while continuing to rain down Starfire on the whirlpool of Soul magic. He had doubts his attacks were doing anything despite full nine intentions being imbued into the spell. Yet it was clearly not safe for Elizabeth to approach, leaving her to just stare helplessly at the emerging danger - all her enchantments had been cast on the way so she had little left to do. It took three more seconds before the danger finally made itself apparent. The storming raw magic shifted into white-adjacent flames with a slight hint of red within them – distinctly different from the previous blueish-white. Almost like pure flames, except paler. And still rotted trough and trough. Then they began to outline a figure.

  “What are we facing?” Irwyn asked. His senses still struggled to pierce through the rampaging energies, sensations blurring together.

  “Draugr, clearly,” Elizabeth frowned. “But incomplete, I think. Power but no finesse to wield it.”

  Irwyn could feel how she came to that conclusion when he focused on it. He could perceive the Concepts there… just not as he usually did. He felt something vaguely alike which lacked the usual detail to the point he had wholly missed them at first. Like stumbling onto the bed of a familiar dried-out lake: The terrain was still there and perhaps there might even be some of the water left but no one would be going fishing there. But with the storm receding he could tell more by the second.

  “Flame, probably Death… and something else I cannot parse. Three Concepts. Can you defeat it?” Irwyn asked, stretching his senses best he could. He had hoped to figure out ‘why are the flames no longer blue at all’ or ‘why do they feel so different’ but it was not the time for that.

  “We will see,” she shrugged. “Watch out for the skull, I don’t know how badly it’s hurt. Also try to prepare something large while I probe it.”

  Then she jumped down just as the rampant magic finally calmed down enough to approach, fully absorbed into a tall figure. There was some resemblance to the man Irwyn had seen through the barrier, though only slight. The undead creature’s body had been malformed, twisted and then half melted. Pale red flames were visibly coursing beneath the skin which was burned in places and sometimes they ruptured the flesh enough to surge out. The limbs were also deeply misshapen to the point it was difficult to call it humanoid despite that clearly being the original form.

  “I don’t think it’s particularly stable,” Irwyn frowned. Massive amounts of power were still leaking from it. Perhaps they had disrupted the ritual and the creature would break down on its own? Like the other burning undead. Or at least would get weaker if they stalled it.

  Elizabeth by then had reached the ground and begun striking the figure with limited success. There was no barrier guarding it but the moment her magic touched skin, the unstable magic within burst out like a tide in retaliation. And those were Concept-empowered flames, rotten as they may be. Elizabeth could not afford to just weather that, forcing her to retreat far far away before her attack could cause much damage.

  The draugr abomination – that was a good name for the undead – also started retaliating after just a few such cuts. But it seemed confused as to its own abilities. Rather than using magic, it tried to physically tackle Elizabeth. That made it move at such speed Irwyn heard the boom of the sound barrier being broken from all the way up. Not only was it unusual for powerful mages to not take precautions against that, it became immediately clear the abomination had imperfect control of its body. For while it had rushed roughly in Elizabeth’s direction, it was way off course without even considering her evasion. It had flown a few degrees to the side… as if not accounting for the malformed limbs.

  Elizabeth was also switching strategy quickly. Rather than going in close for her attacks, she began throwing projectiles, switching between spears, spheres, and other, more innovative, shapes. While she was focusing on enhancing her body as a Conception mage, she did not actually have any Concept other than the Void so her projectiles were not any less effective over a conjured blade yet. They were even far more destructive in this fight since instead of being forced to withdraw they could leave wounds before being burned away by the bursting flames.

  “Deathbane Falling Star”

  Irwyn also contributed for what it was worth. They were very far up by then, so him dropping down very fast, 9 intention-imbued projectiles of Starfire did actually look a lot like the name he chose - which would empower the spell. He would send them down whenever the abomination charged as the endpoint would be the easiest moment to hit.

  There, the distance actually played against him. The spell had no physical component so he lost much power and precision before actually reaching the target because of Finity. That also made his attempts to disrupt the Flames composing the abomination less effective. It was still orders of magnitude more damage than an imbuement mage had any right to inflict on something with three Concepts… but also far less than he would have been doing from closer. But that wasn’t worth the danger of being within leaping range.

  It was somewhere around the fifteenth charge - which was really not more than 30 seconds into the fight - that the abomination first used magic. While charging a tendril of its pale-red flames tried to extend out of its hand and reached towards the dodging Elizabeth. She still barely needed to adjust course to evade it easily. Irwyn then hit it with another ‘falling star’ right after, which Elizabeth used as an opportunity to step through the Void. She appeared about two-thirds of the way to them from the ground - at the spot where the platform used to be - and Alice instantly snatched her up in a teleport.

  “We have to kill it quickly,” she immediately said.

  “Won’t it collapse with time?” Irwyn asked.

  “It’s learning. Maybe it will also realize how to hold itself together,” she shook her head. “The third Concept is something to do with berserking.”

  As if to underline her point the abomination seemed to finally lock onto its prior opponent and tried to jump all the way up to them. With the incredible height it was not enough, though that attempt did almost make it halfway. Irwyn rewarded the feat with another falling Star sent to hit it at the top of its arch. While at that highest point though, the undead tried to send a very primitive bolt of its flame towards them. It dissipated in moments but the development was still worrying.

  “I have something that can kill it in mind,” Elizabeth said. “But I need it distracted for at around two full seconds. Can you manage that?”

  “I think so,” Irwyn nodded. He had been thinking about something that would affect it throughout and had a good idea. “Bait it into overextending again.”

  Elizabeth nodded in confirmation. “Alice, keep looking out for the skull,” then she jumped back down, accelerating unnaturally fast as Void magic covered her body.

  “Let’s see what I can do,” he took a deep breath and descended after her. He would need to be closer for what had in mind to work, though not too much. Close enough to pack a better punch without breaking the symbolism. He quickly muttered his Empyrean blood incantation to help with what he was about to do – his hair catching aflame – but kept it at ‘merely’ five intentions as the spell had severe diminishing returns because of how it worked. Still, it would let him draw more mana faster and that was exactly what he would need.

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  Then he spoke. Some of the words he had long held in his mind. Much he had developed in the downtime while fighting the hordes in the city. The exact form finally clicked into his head just moments prior. But it felt right:

  “

  By the Great Crusade,

  and all its Names

  who fought what we forbade

  in hand with flames

  starlit as Light’s mane

  through Realm and Plane

  sounds always the call:

  On the Rot, the skies shall fall

  “

  What was the most power Irwyn could evoke? His reserves were relatively ludicrous, even if a bit less so after that Fae had allowed them to skip through two intentions. The limit had always been how much he could control at once, not the supply like with most mages. The solution to that was not unfamiliar to what he had come up with in the past. His old spell, Stars scourge all, had a simple idea behind it: Maximize power by putting multiple attacks into one larger spell. Yes, the magic grew more difficult to maintain the larger it became in scale but that was still far less than if he had created such spells individually. What he was doing with the new spell was merely bringing that to a far greater extreme.

  How difficult was a nine-intention spell? Difficult to describe… 362 880 times harder than those with just one. Normally, Irwyn would be able to maintain close to three such spells with his willpower - in big part thanks to the latest vision, no doubt - but that would not be enough. Even one normal large spell wouldn’t suffice. Therefore, he stripped away everything that was not strictly required.

  Rough spheres began to manifest around him, then quickly spreading around. The shape was imprecise because there was no point in it being perfectly geometrical, a waste to cut out. The distances between them were inexact because no capacity was put into spacing the lot of them out evenly. The glow of them was uncontained, shining as bright as little suns, for they radiated power he would not bother restraining. Every second, the spheres leaked perhaps a third of the magic within them, engulfing the surroundings in unbearable heat and blinding brightness. A ludicrous flaw in any spell that would render it unusable for all mages… except Irwyn who merely supplied the stupid quantities of magic right back.

  First a dozen, then two… three. Alice teleported away at some point, unable to bear even the ambient magic though Irwyn barely registered it. Irwyn did not burn. He pushed and pushed and pushed. As far as his will could go. Until he barely remembered to breathe. For the first time since his first stay in Abonisle, he felt the signs of his mana dropping as the spell hemorrhaged obscene amounts of magic every moment. Until he touched his true limit. It was 41.

  He almost lost control of the spell as he tried to aim it. The abomination was just finishing a charge and Elizabeth put in extra effort to suppress the undead fo a moment. Irwyn beckoned down, and the skies fell.

  It took the individual ‘stars’ a mere split second to hit the ground. Irwyn had imbued them with Speed and Haste for that purpose. They also did not strike at once - any level of exact coordination would have been detrimental to both his focus and the effect - instead, the attack was a bit staggered. And it was not over.

  More stars kept falling as soon as their predecessors exploded on and around the abomination. They were not replenishing fast enough to maintain the full 41 ‘stars’ constantly but after the initial stronger barrage, at least 20 such ‘stars’ were perpetually falling down on the undead who was hunkering against it.

  Three Concepts or not, it had still not made a barrier. And while its body was undeniably resilient, it could not just completely ignore the attack with just flesh – especially because Irwyn was leveraging his affinity to diminish its Flames with every hit. It seemingly took a full second before the creature realized it could doge at all. Irwyn instantly redirected the spell which was fast enough to keep up with the abomination… for a moment. Irwyn had no delusions about the gap between intention and Concept. He could not aim faster than the creature moved once it stopped bumbling around.

  For almost a second, he kept attacking the sporadic repositioning before the undead realized that if it just didn’t stop running Irwyn would not be able to keep up with its movement. He still managed to stall it further by predicting its well-telegraphed motions and approximate speed but in less than half a second more the undead began zig-zagging in increasingly random patterns, rendering the spell barely a distraction anymore.

  Irwyn felt Alice’s Time mana spread through his body and intently did not resist, letting go of his spell. He was teleported a few dozen meters away and then consecutively teleported seven more times as fast as his companion could manage. It was all too disorienting for him to see anything but he felt the platform he had just been standing on had been destroyed by potent magic. The skull had tried to ambush him but Alice had done her part.

  “Thank you,” he said, still disoriented but erecting a new platform to stand on. Alice had brought them high into the air, likely out of reach. Hopefully.

  “Holy shit,” Alice just stared at him, then her eyes were dragged down to the ground. He wasn’t sure what exactly that was referring to with at least three good candidates, so he shrugged and also looked beneath. Elizabeth had not been idle.

  In fact, she had begun chanting a split second after Irwyn’s assault had begun. Magic was swirling around her unlike anything Irwyn had ever seen her use. Likely magnitudes more than even he could bring to bear. Irwyn was uniquely powerful for someone even in the peak of imbuement… but Elizabeth had never been far behind even before her last leap. So, she showed what she could do with a Concept.

  “

  Dark is the night,

  yet I fear it not,

  for I’m her knight,

  in a mail of naught,

  and her witch.

  The Mother’s scholar,

  dressed in pitch,

  from heart to collar

  a black rose,

  Tenebrous

  “

  There was a hole in front of her that Elizabeth had cut during the chant. Blacker than the color itself, almost making Irwyn instinctively flinch. An entrance into the Void itself, sloppily cut into their reality. That was clearly not the point though as the instant Elizabeth’s chant ended, the darkness spread from it so fast Irwyn had literally not been able to perceive it. In a moment there stood a black dome, both Elizabeth and the abomination disappearing within.

  “Can you… tell what is happening within?” Irwyn asked. “I know there is no Light so it would be impossible to see with normal eyes but not much else. Trying to feel the heat, I know there is some of it and moving but not where or what shape. Or whose.”

  “Time and Space are incredibly erratic down there,” Alice described what she felt with a frown. “Looser… like…”

  “The Void itself,” Irwyn finished for her, coming to a realization. “I think she actually manifested its environment here.”

  “Fuck me,” Alice muttered and kept staring down at the dome while the obvious occurred to them:

  How in the world does one fight a Void mage with Elizabeth’s sheer affinity within the Void. Even if the environment merely resembled the conditions… He thought it would be a bit like trying to fight him inside an active volcano, except not even that would be a tenth as advantageous as what Elizabeth had created. Like land mammals forced to fight fish in the bare ocean. If the spell wasn’t debilitatingly expensive to maintain she would be basically untouchable within for anyone even near her level of power.

  The fight lasted a whole minute longer before there was a change to the sphere. Irwyn saw some soldiers finally approaching them by then - it hadn’t been actually that long since the fight had started given the speeds involved. They were still late. Thankfully that also meant late enough that they were not caught in the strange explosion that followed.

  It was a detonation of those rotten pale-red flames, escaping across all sides from within Elizabeth’s spell, except it was strangely staggered. A bit of it exploded from one side, then the next one from the other, angles and elevation seemingly random. The sound also did not properly match up with the explosions, and there was no light to speak of whatsoever traveling ahead of it. Even the surface areas of the detonating flames appeared irregularly. It looked almost like pieces of the explosions had been randomly shuffled around with teleportation.

  Or traveling through significantly divergent Time and Space after the initial detonation, Irwyn realized. Since Elizabeth had brought the Void or at least something close enough, directions and passage of time there could be radically different from the synchrony and chronology he was used to in - well – normal reality. The dome of Void magic had been visibly damaged by it, ruptures opening across the whole surface. That did not seem to matter though as rather than mend them, the spell began to quickly dissolve. There was a slight surge of wind as Elizabeth’s figure appeared right next to the center of a jagged crater-ish.

  Irwyn quickly began to descend, still warry about another ambush. Yet none came by the time they reached Elizabeth. The damage to the ground was, much like the explosion itself, irregular. There were places where the explosion had dug several meters deeps while in a few select spots the paving was literally untouched. Elizabeth was standing on one such island as they approached.

  “Are you fine?” Irwyn asked. She looked visibly tired, pale in the face with apparent sweat on the brow.

  “It tried a suicide attack at the end,” she nodded. “But areal explosions like that are not too hard to dodge in the Void.”

  “I think the skull is gone,” Irwyn noted. He flew down to be on level with her and offered his hand out of politeness.

  “It’s hopefully fleeing but stay on guard,” she nodded, taking his hand. Not that he actually had the chance to help her move before she dexterously stepped on the platforms.

  “So, what do we do now?” Irwyn asked.

  “Take a break,” she sighed but there was a satisfied grin on her face. “They can defend their own city. I am too tired to risk an ambush by another Draugr.”

  “They will also probably want to talk with us but that can wait,” Irwyn pointed towards the gathering military while nodding. “Is there anywhere safe?”

  “Well…” Elizabeth said thoughtfully. “We are very close to a certain statue, aren’t we?”

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