MAGUS INFINITE

Vrakth was faster than me, not by much, but enough that every blink I make, he’s already turning toward where I’ll land. He hits me with an open palm, not even bothering to add a demonic spell, just his hand, and I fold around it and skip across the crater like a stone thrown flat across a pond, eight bounces, and I stop on my back looking up at the red sky with most of my ribs broken and the taste of metal flooding my mouth.

For a moment, I just lay there and felt the pain filling my body.

”You are fighting carelessly,” the Hollow Avatar said, but I ignored it. What did it know about the happiness I was feeling in this moment, staring at the sky... the knowledge that nine loops ago, I would not have endured even a second of what I had just taken from Vrakth.

To the Hollow Avatar, the demons could as well be slabs of meat that needed to be crushed, but that was its mindset, and I was beginning to discover myself in the crucible of battle.

Few things in life could strip away the distractions in the thoughts quite like death. I knew that I loved to fight. Maybe when I was an average Acolyte who knew they would never exceed the Adept grade their entire life, I convinced myself that I was going to live a life of mediocrity, but after everything I had experienced in this loop, I knew that in the core of me, what I wanted was something more... I craved battle like this.

I don’t know what was in my future; perhaps I would have to stay inside the pyramid forever, holding the final barrier active, and I may never get to fight like this again, so I wanted to enjoy this to my heart’s content.

The demon was coming. I can feel the ground shake under his weight, closer, closer. I have one arm and a thinning reservoir and a body that doesn’t want to get up, the old voice in me, the patient one that thought I would be nothing but an average mage, the one that’s done this nine times, says let it happen, dying is just the next lesson, you’ll wake in the tent and you’ll know him better.

And I think, ”No.”

I have ten thousand channels to fill, I am tired of learning by dying, I want to win, and it did not matter how hard it was to win... I will still win.

I roll over and get up.

∞

Vrakth was mid-stride toward me, and he was in the midst of gathering another corruption orb that would blast me to pieces... the ground around me was rippling from the growing wave of death that was about to shred me to atoms, and I did the thing that I had been holding back all of these while.

I smiled at the oncoming demon, and I said, ”Ah, this hurts; well, my turn.”

Looking into my body, I saw that all my channels were swollen with power. All the time that Vrakth had been bashing me, I had been pouring Anima into my channels and packing them tight; all 7,900 of my channels were now filled to the brim with Anima.

I stop fighting like a man who has never had enough power, and the air around me for hundreds of feet shivered as if something was about to be born, and Vrakth hesitated a moment before the Loom comes off every finger at once, all of it that I could bear, thousands of threads unspooling into the air around me until I’m standing inside a moving storm of silver, and it draws on the lightning essence thick in the surroundings so it feeds itself faster than I bleed it out of me.

When his blast of corruption came for me, the threads revolving around me pushed it to the side, and the blast swerved past me and tore into the earth behind me, wiping out thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lesser demons.

Vrakth’s eyes narrowed, and he rushed towards me, coating his limbs with darkness, and we hit each other in the middle of the crater, sending a shockwave that tore through the earth, and everything descended into chaos.

I’m everywhere in my storm at once, blinking through my own threads, and the demon endured as his crown of shadows tore through my storm to get to me.

We trade deaths faster than I can name them. He throws a geyser; I’m not standing there. I put three small bolts into the Abyssal Shield over his ribs, exposing his flesh, and the seam stays open. Vrakth floods the whole plate with shadow to deny me the seam, and I find a new one at the joint of his shoulder and drive a lightning bolt so deep the arm slows half a beat, and it stays slow.

He burns my storm thin at the edges, and a quick flash of lightning burned two of his eyes to ash. He breaks two more of my ribs with a backhand I see coming and cannot get out of the path of. I crack his shield in another three places.

Black blood runs down his maroon hide and floats up into the red, mixing with my silver, and somewhere in the chaos of battle, the warmth bleeds out of his voice, and the beast underneath comes up that was just hunger, the language stripped down to the appetite it was always wearing.

I knew that when Vrakth was pushed to the limits, he begins to lose his rationality, and I wish he did not. Sure, he got more powerful as a result, but his fighting patterns became more readable, and the challenge became different, as it would no longer be a battle of skill, just attributes.

He’s an ocean, and I’m a deep well, and a well runs dry first.

My storm dims, and my one arm shakes. The threads come slower off my fingers, and the demon feels me thinning, and he gathers shadow and corruption, the biggest tide yet, and instead of throwing it, he steps inside it, and he becomes a creature of shadow and corruption.

Not fearing the power of my threads, he steps into my domain, too close to blink, and brings both vast hands up toward my head to crush it.

So close to me, this creature of shadow and corruption whispered, ”You are the strongest Adept I have fought on this world.” His hands begin to close. ”In a hundred thousand years, little star, I will be sorry not to remember you.”