Orykson vs Draven Deathmatch (Patreon)

Draven understood power. At least, he thought he did, until the world around him warped, and he appeared in a stone cell. 

He didn’t panic, but he was… Concerned.

Had someone abducted him from within his wards? He knew there were powers strong enough for such an act, but why the stone room? 

He activated a boon he had received from a demon, one he didn’t think any other mortal or quasi-mortal alive today had: the planar map. 

Astral magic of the highest grade, fueled by inter-realm chaos, it would let him determine his location. From there, he could plan his next… Step?

Instead of the elegant tapestry, what sat before him was a single word.

“Non-canonical?” Draven uttered to himself. “What does that even mean?”

“It means that this isn’t real,” a voice said from everywhere and nowhere. It had a slight masculine lilt to it, but not strongly. Trained out of being too deep? 

“Oh, thanks for noticing!” the voice said happily.

“Sure…?” Draven said. “What am I even doing here?”

“Ah,” the voice said, then put on an imperious tone and cleared its throat.

“You are to fight with all of your power. Do not hold back. All power will be returned to you when canonicity reverts. Win or lose, you’ll be restored to life with no damage, loss of blood, loss of power, or memories of the event.” 

“Who am I fighting?” Draven demanded. “Who am I fighting for? What’s going on?”

“Oh, here, this should let you know.”

Like a memory implanted by the Memory Judge, he knew. 

Orykson. A runaway who had designed his own spells to progress, and broken through to third gate recently. Power of life, death, and space. 

The words had their meaning driven into him as well, but he still found it hard to understand. The man’s power seemed so… Free. Simple. And insultingly low. 

“Third gate?” Draven demanded. “Shouldn’t I be up against a… Prime? Perhaps not, those seem more like the Medbs. But at least an Occultist.”

“If you were to face Orykson as an occultist, you would not survive long enough to touch your aura. Now prepare to fight.” 

The voice sounded bored, and almost annoyed. 

Meanwhile…

Orykson understood space. It was one of the fourteen fundamentals. There were objective truths about space – objective directions, weaves, ripples, whorls, and eddies. 

Which was why, when he appeared in a stone room, and none of that was present, he immediately unleashed his most powerful killing spells, Engraved Bone Spear, at the wall.

And his strongest attack… Was damn good. 

Everyone could compress their mana if they learned the trick of it. He’d figured it out on his one hundred and seventeenth attempt at constructing magic to break open his first gate. 

The mages in Retrik treated it like it was some grand secret, a way to overcharge and take an artificial step into the next realm, at the cost of draining far more mana. 

They were idiots. 

He overcharged his mana, and kept squeezing. It was painful, crunching at his soul and straining him to manage it, but he did, a second step. 

He pulled it into his mana garden and held on. This step was crucial. The spirit would try to dissolve the mana, spread it back into normal third gate magic, rather than third gate concentrated to arcanist level. It was an automatic process, like a heartbeat. 

He stopped it, keeping it compressed to this level. He rode the lightning, stayed on the raring mustang, and forced the world to bow to his whims. 

And it stilled. The mana finished one final… Something, and he threaded it into the Engraves Bone Spear’s very structure, ripping at the spine jutting out of the yard of bones, and had he not built channels within the structure for this specific task, it would have exploded. 

Then he released the attack. Let me tell you, reader, as the non-canonical omnipotent being I am, it takes ages to describe this. But Orykson managed it in roughly three and a quarter seconds, and three of those were him fighting his own soul’s defenses to force it to accept. From Orykson’s thoughts, all he thought was “What the?! Where did space go?”, a touch of smug satisfaction at being better than Retrikian mages, then him thinking about what happened. 

When his spear shattered against the wall, Orykson grew… concerned.

The prime of space had to have discovered his plans, and locked him somewhere without the fundamental of space, somewhere the prime thought he couldn’t break out of, and built it out of materials reinforced with at least sixth gate wards.

He’d slaughter the prime and tear whatever shell it wore to bits. Because there had been one major flaw – he still had his extraplanar pockets linked to him. He could survive for a long time. Long enough to break into fourth or fifth gate and shatter the wards holding him…

“No, edgelord,” a voice said. “Heavens above, I forgot how annoying you were as a teen when I started throwing this together. It’s not easy to make a space where two magic systems with fundamentally different rules from different universes – multiverses? – collide.”

Orykson’s spatial sense returned to him. 

“There. Happy now?”

“Which one are you?”

“Me? Nonono, I’m not a prime. Or a magi. I’m somehow both stronger than every mage on your planet – and all the other ones – put together, aaaaaannnnnnndddd a lot weaker. No mana, no magic of any sort.”

Orykson tuned out the inane rambling voice. Whatever occultist or higher had stuck him in a room, his pla–

“Rude!” the voice said. “I’ll have you know my ramblings are worth at least a few bucks… wait you don’t know what those are. Anyways. Fight, death, yeah. The reader already read this, and copy-pasting a text block feels lazy.”

Like data from a master mind mage, information flowed into Orykson’s mind.

Draven… Three hundred. Old, by the standards of his world, only a few able to live longer. The pinnacle of power for most, he fought with tricks and powers borrowed from others. Born wealthy, he turned wealthy into a fortune before seeking out vampirism, eating his remaining family to manage the hunger. His vampirism was different. 

All their magic seemed so… strange. Clunky. Slow. Inefficient. He was glad not to be born there. He’d make it to the top as a witch, he knew it, but it would be a pain.

“Round one, best of three… Fight!” 

…

Draven appeared in a flat, open plane, suspended over a void, and immediately activated three of his emergency measures. 

The voice had more power than Medb or one who sat on a Demonic Throne. Draven wasn’t going to play around when commanded by a voice like that. 

He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to, which was disturbing, yet his thoughts couldn’t linger there.

First, he fused with Ayzler while unleashing his shadow and nightmare spirits.The cost to the prince of pain wasn’t nearly so high as summoning its vessel. Still high, but the voice said it would cover the cost. 

Second, he twisted his aura to call on his single use powers from – he appeared back in the stone room.

…

The moment the voice had sent him into the arena, Orykson had unleashed an overcharged spear of bone and nine overcharged Pinpoint Boneshards, while also manipulating his mana for the next volley.

He couldn’t have done as much without his newest acquisition. The semi-sapient spirit made the management of setting nine spatial targets, where he and Aerde thought the heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, the bits of the brain a few centimeters begins where the eye connections ended, and a few inches behind the temple would all be. With the spear, he simply thrust forwards.

Setting targets inside another person was hard. They would dissipate within a second or two.

Orykson would only need a tenth of that time.

The well dressed man finished connecting his aura to one of those strange spellbinder, no, arch-star things, and warped into his battle form, then began moving his mana, no, aura, to a pair of spells.

He was slow. Before the aura struck the spells, and well before the mental or lunar elementals reached him, Orykson completed his casting, which he had already been preparing: Apport Object. 

Even he couldn’t directly teleport items into someone, but he did teleport them a hair’s breadth away from his opponent’s skin or suit.

The spells did what they had been told, then. 

His spear, right in front of Draven’s neck, drove in and severed the vampire’s head from its body.

Two bone shards drilled into Draven’s eyes, churning them into a malformed jelly-like ooze as they continued into his opponent's brain. 

Two more shards slammed into Draven’s temples and bore down with enough pressure to crack the reinforced bone.

The rest struck the suit and tore into the flesh beneath, headed for their organs. 

And the vampire exploded into a fine red mist. 

Some people called Orykson feral, like an animal, but he had never understood that comparison. An animal would have lashed out with raw power.

No beast, not even the Dragonlords, would have deliberately and systematically targeted critical weak spots all at once, with such disregard for what they fought.

No. 

He wasn’t some feral dog. He was an elegant assassin, delivering death in the most efficient way possible.

He smiled as he was teleported back into his stone room.

…

“You need a more offensive strategy,” the voice told Draven. “But also, I need to level the playing field. Go ahead and fuse with Ayzler, and activate your suite of defenses you traded for after Rowan kicked your – err, almost defeated you.”

“I was able to deduce that much for myself,” Draven said dryly. Still, he did as had been suggested, activating his Metal-Body from the Court of Earth alongside his six other most powerful defenses.

No, I’m not telling you what they are. They may show up later. Even if they don’t, I’m leaving room for speculation, rather than just listing it out. 

“Round two, fight!” 

Draven immediately unleashed one of his two emergency spells, single use powers that were the greatest power he had. 

Each one had been granted to him by powers well beyond the limits of mortal strength, or even his vampiric strength. Each one released more power than one of Roark’s vast siege spells. It could have torn apart the giant bull, or matched Eira’s emergency demon-shadow beast.

No, I’m not telling you what it is. There are good odds it’ll show up in the story!

But in the fraction of a second that it took him to funnel his aura to the first, bones slammed into him. This time, his defenses caught them, resisting them long enough for him to complete the channeling of his technique. 

Orykson died, but when Draven wasn’t teleported back to his room, he hit the arena with the second emergency spell. 

That sent him back there. 

“...Shit,” the voice said. “Well, that’s the thing, if I level up Orykson to fourth gate, you’ll die, Draven. Uh… How about I don’t give you both of those attacks? Only one.” 

The third fight started much the same, but after a few seconds, the boy reformed where he had started. 

Draven had used the time well, however, and during the three seconds, had built an array of demonic spells that stabbed into his opponent. The child grinned, blood dripping from his lips but the wounds were already healing. 

Fast. 

Way too fast. 

Even Draven couldn’t heal that fast. 

Orykson unleashed three spears that struck and broke on Draven’s defenses, and Draven’s familiars struck. Power swirled out of the child, and his mind was beset by nightmares. 

Orykson must have had some form of defense, though, because four bones appeared and tried to crash into his eyes and neck again, but Draven had already called on a boon from a bone elemental, and the bones were repulsed. 

Draven could win. As long as he could keep predicting the child’s next move, he could–

He didn’t even catch the strike that killed him…