MAGUS INFINITE

I glanced at the demon one last time, and then I allowed myself to fall, leaving the prison ship behind. I fell for several seconds, and the bulk of the ship was left behind, but I thought I could feel the eyes of the demon fixed on me, and then suddenly the ship flickered and vanished.

”What the...” I was no longer falling as Lightning Incarnate caught me. If the ship could cloak itself, then there was no telling what else it could do; I needed to move.

My body came apart into current, and my falling speed suddenly accelerated to a blur, but I could not even hold this state for long before I was forced out of it, as the essence in the air was incredibly chaotic, and travelling via Lightning Incarnate was like running through a field of thorns.

I rematerialized, gasping, and immediately felt the wrongness of the air around me. I have moved through a lot of magic, and I know what the ambient stuff of the world feels like.

Even inside that prison, where essence was choked with darkness, I could trust the shape of my spells to hold, but everything around me had become a churned mess, as if the structure of magic itself was being torn and re-knotted faster than I could read it.

I would not be able to use any Inscription here, and even my magic was weakened, but it was not hard for me to know why this was happening; I only had to turn around as I fell through the sky, and look at the broken heavens above, where Sovereigns were waging war.

∞

The Sovereigns were fighting above the cloud; I could not see them, and I was grateful for it.

I mean that. What I got were glimpses of them when the clouds lit up, and I was able to see massive shadows that were moving too quickly for something of their size.

The sort of power and presence I was feeling in the distance felt too excessive, as I could not understand how an Arcanist could cross over to become something like... these beings. Almost as if several steps had been skipped, and I was reminded again that the Hollow Avatar acknowledged that there was something wrong with our power system.

At first I could not see these massive figures, but I could feel them, especially when they clashed and made the heavens above shatter. Each clash sent ripples through the fabric of reality itself, and those ripples were tearing apart the structure of magic in the air.

Lightning essence, fire essence, water, wind, earth- all of it was being churned into a chaotic storm that made me feel like a fly trapped in a tornado.

Suddenly, I heard the voice of the Hollow Avatar in my soul, but it went silent after, leaving these strange words behind,

”So, this is what it would feel like to be a mote of dust caught between the hammer blows of gods.”

I knew I should not, since it may lead to an unnecessary complication, but I took the senses of the Moon Fox and focused on my vision, and this allowed me to pierce through the chaotic disaster above, and I saw them... a part of me wished I didn’t.

I don’t know what was done to Seed inside that prison, but he was a shell of what a Sovereign was, or perhaps that was what happened when you reduced a Sovereign to their lowest.

I saw one far off in the east, and I was unable to tell if they were male or female, not that it would matter anyway, because the shape of the Sovereign was like a burning star, and every time it moved, the cloud beneath it flashed to steam and the air for miles went to a shimmer.

The fact that I could not fly with Lightning Incarnate was because some of the heat from this Sovereign was burning the essence in the air, and there would not be any more essence in the air left if there were not other powerful forces combating the power of this flame.

By all the lights in heaven, in the stories, the gods were supposed to be the ones fighting at the end, when every other option had been taken. Perhaps the three months of imprisonment were the period when every other step had been taken, and now I was at the end of the world.

The fact that this Sovereign controlled flames made me think they might be one of the Sovereigns of my continent and the Academy, but I could not tell, since they were moving too fast and I did not know where the battle lines were drawn.

I was able to glimpse another Sovereign, who seemed to be made of an entire stretch of forest. I may be wrong, but I think that Sovereign picked up an entire mountain range and threw it into the sky.

There were others that I could not fully identify, but I could already see tears of blood rising from my eyes, and I knew that if I kept looking, then I would go blind, and at the end, it did not even matter, because even though they were fighting at the vault of heaven, a part of that fight still reached me.

The Sovereigns never once looked at me, and I was sure they were not even aware of my presence, but that did not mean I was not in danger.

When the Sovereigns strike at each other, the blow does not stay up there. It sends a shock down through the structure of the world, a beam, or a pressure that shifts the very rules of magic itself, and here, I was a fly beneath two colliding storms.

A beam of white fire went past me, perhaps a thousand feet off, a column of power that resembled the stuff of flames and darkness that punched down through the cloud above.

It did not touch me, and yet it nearly killed me anyway, because the air it passed through compressed into metal moving at speeds that I could hardly react to, and in an instant the space beside me became too hot and too dense.

My domain saved my life, as it came up even before I knew what was coming, and the field covered me and was instantly compressed, squeezing me inside of it, crushing my flesh and breaking bones, while accompanied by a ridiculous amount of heat.

I screamed as I was blasted down towards the earth, while I was flung to the side like a disk.