Chapter Fifty-One (Patreon)

I’d heard a few times that Zachary Dormer was potentially the weakest archmage in a fight. A part of me hadn’t really understood what that meant, though. On top of that, a different part of me had thought that it was a lie, some sort of trick that he was pulling over the other archmages. He was a part of the Ligature, maybe he’d used those connections to help him hide his power. 

As I took in what was happening, I was forced to admit that, no, Zachary Dormer really was the weakest archmage. 

Zachary’s body was covered in cuts and knicks, and several of them were deep enough to be concerning. He was breathing heavily, and a glance at him with my third eye showed his aura was depleted down to a quarter of what it had been at the beginning of the fight, and even the network of roots that he seemed to be using as armor was damaged enough that I thought it would struggle to block normal swords, let alone magical ones. 

Despite this, he was facing off against two of the least dangerous mages in the fight, at least in my opinion. One of them was another of the Roark cousins, who had orbiting balls of flame floating around him, while flame lances hovered in the air behind him, while the other was the elven, House Byron force sorcerer, who was covered in force armor and enhancements, and seemed to be wielding a blade of compressed force magic. That was likely the source of Dormer’s many cuts. 

“Thank goodness,” panted Dormer as I blocked an immolation spell from the Roark, throwing it at the force mage to force her to dodge out of the way. “Can you–” 

He was cut off mid sentence as the force mage exploded towards us like a rocket. I activated my own enhancement spells and dove forward to meet her. I blocked a swipe of her blade with my staff, then tried to break the spell. 

To my surprise, I failed. The simple scans over the spell hadn’t been enough for me to actually add the spell into the memory banks. 

My surprise was enough to let her stab her blade into my chest, but my force armor flared, and my iron cloak spell allowed me to divert the strike. 

I slapped my hand against her own armor and released the water bullets from my spell that I’d stored away when I’d been helping out Gaius. Much like when I’d fired it against the druid, the bullets tore through the woman’s armor, and she activated some sort of strange contingency of her own. 

Bands of force connected the torn apart bits of skin and bone and muscle, and a single massive beam of force struck me in the chest, reminiscent of the massive beam attack that Edward Elide had used. With the warning of my danger sense, I barely managed to flare my ward around me, but I was swept up in the power of the attack, blown backwards. 

I spun through the air, bobbing and tossing like a bubble caught atop river rapids, and when I came to a stop, I’d been thrown against the edge of the house itself. The wards began to flare, and I spotted the flowing power of a lifeline moving towards it. 

I stared at the corpse where Byron’s force mage had been. 

What in the fallen void had THAT been? 

Then, as her aura spark connected into the house, I felt magic flow down into the earth, and I had a terrifying thought. 

Byron had layered wards and other spells into the ground here, and was known for her wide area rituals. When I’d shot her, I’d thought I’d removed all of those from the board, made it so that there was nobody left able to use them. On top of that, with the massive aura crystal that was critical for the powering of the infrastructure and magic that ran wards and other spells like that, there shouldn’t be any way for it to work. 

But if the new Byron force mage had known she was going to die, and used an attack to get me out of the way and used her aura spark as a power source? 

Well.

There was a lot that could be done with an aura spark, especially if you weren’t concerned about burning it out. 

I frantically threw power into trying to block off the power of the ritual, but it was too late. Magic surged out of the ground, and the earth began to rumble. Runes flashed across the entire battlefield, and a hand made of mud exploded out of the ground. 

It grabbed onto Eira, who was mid-flight, battling against Castor, Castor’s daughter in law, and Edward’s wife. 

Another hand exploded upwards and grabbed onto Osheen, who was in the air battling against Trenton Elide and the two sorcerers, earth and water, who had joined him. Travis was nowhere near Osheen, thankfully, caught up in a battle against Draven, who was managing to keep the remaining mages in a stalemate. 

Draven didn’t even seem bothered by the last Roark or last Byron, and there were already a few bodies around him, but Travis’ massive collection of Foci seemed to be giving the ancient archmage trouble. 

Then the earth under my feet began to rumble as a massive body of mud rose up, using a chunk of the house as its head, animated by the power of an aura spark. 

I let out a string of curses. One mage’s aura spark couldn’t power this thing for long, sure, but it didn’t need long, not if it wanted to make an impact. I glanced between Eira and Osheen, and came to the realization that I was forced to make a choice. 

“Sorry Eira, sorry Draven,” I said as I shot towards Osheen. 

Eira was strong. She’d be more than capable of taking care of herself, especially since I knew she had at least one more siege spell set up and ready to call down. Draven was crafty, and while I didn’t have faith he’d actually be able to win, I had faith that he’d be able to escape. 

I had faith in Osheen, too. I had faith he’d be able to escape and use his phoenix magic to heal himself, if I chose to help someone else. But…

It was different. 

Osheen was my fiance, my soon to be husband. Even if he could live, I wasn’t sure I could accept the risk, or the injuries he’d take. 

Fair? No. 

But it was honest. 

I released a blast of lightning from my staff at Trenton as he built a spell to attack Osheen. The power smashed against the force dome, and for a moment, they lay in equilibrium, Trenton’s raw power enough to hold off the attack. 

Then the water bullets tore into the dome, and a crack appeared. 

I released a second bolt, and the dome exploded. 

“Back off!” I shouted, even as Osheen barely managed to slip out of the hand of the giant construct. 

“Thanks babe,” Osheen said, taking a deep breath and releasing an arc of flame at Trenton, but the earth and water mages spun a spell up together, and the hand of the construct started moving several times faster. It smacked into me, and only a brief flare of my ward stopped it from hurting me, but I was still thrown downwards. Mere moments later, it backhanded Osheen, before the fingers bent backwards and re-encased Osheen. 

I slammed my overcharge orb onto my staff and blasted the water mage with lightning, but Trenton waved his hand, and over a dozen planes of force appeared in the way. My spell punched through eleven of them, but fizzled out, then the bullets tore the defense apart, but it didn’t matter. Osheen’s magic was spiraling out of him, reinforcing his force armor and his body to resist the squeezing of the giant construct, but before I was even halfway there, the air filled with waves of razor thin force knives from Trenton’s hand. 

Each one of the force knives sent my danger sense exploding, and I stared in disbelief. 

Each and every one of the spells was independently cast and controlled. 

Maybe he’d used the contingency arch-star to build the spells in an instant, like Osheen had set his up to conjure a bunch of flame lances at a snap, but each of the knives was moving in a mathematically-precise pattern. There was no way that Elide should be able to do something like that!

Behind him, Osheen exploded out of the hand and released a pair of immolation spells at the earth and water mage, but with the massive mud monster fighting them, they were able to block the attacks. 

I didn’t have much time to pay attention to that, however, as I was forced to fly backwards in order to avoid the force knives. I broke as many of them as I could, but there were so many, and each time I broke one, another filled its place in the pattern a moment later. 

The knives’ pattern was quick, though, and it started to enclose around me. I flared my ward around me as they closed in. 

Unlike when Justin had tried a similar trick with his feathers and lightning, I was actually struggling here, and I could feel the power reserves of my cloak starting to dip as the knives continued to hammer against the ward. 

I dropped the ward and thrust one of my knives out, using the earth-shove spell. Mud tore from the golem and broke the force knives, and I accelerated my time stream again, diving out of the pattern of attacks. 

For all that I didn’t like him, Trenton Elide wasn’t a fool. The moment I’d escaped his cage, he stopped wasting aura on powering it, and instead released a pair of force beams. I managed to reflect them back at him, but he waved his hand and they smoothed into nothingness, melting into his dome and strengthening it. 

He started to float upwards, the platform of force under his wheelchair glowing faintly gray as he did. 

“You should never have made an enemy of me,” he said, but he wasn’t just monologing. As he spoke, he was building spells around me, a set of dozens of force bolts began to build themselves together in the air around me, ready to smash me to pulp from every direction. 

I’d seen the king do something similar, but far less elegantly, blanketing an entire area in a rain of force. Trenton’s was better, but I could still employ a similar solution. 

I flickered my hand out and a circle of silver runes bloomed around them, spinning the orientation of the bolts. I wasn’t actually sure I’d have been able to do that with my cloak, since I didn’t have the ability to push things around, but with the silver power of change, it was doable. 

Trenton’s eyes widened as the first volley of bolts began to fire at him, and he hurriedly cut off his spell, then flew upwards and released a massive beam of force down at me. 

I dove to the side, and the beam suddenly transformed into a thin plane of force, like the edge of a sword that was hundreds of feet long. It swept at me, and I felt pain move across my body as I activated my temporal haste to dive out of the way. 

The attack should have cut me in half at the torso, but instead, it cut off my left hand, and I watched as my staff fell to the ground . As the strange colored blood began to flow from my stump, my mouth hung open for a second. 

The blade swept at me again in the second that I was thrown off guard, and I was certain I was going to die. I wasn’t ready to die yet, we hadn’t won, but… I supposed I could accept this. 

Then a tiny brown form plummeted down from the clouds, and Trenton’s spell exploded.