Book 3, Chapter 78 (Patreon)

Our new arena favored Ammun. While I could process the mana here, I couldn’t do it nearly as efficiently as he could. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had an unlimited amount of mana, because even though a lich naturally drew it in, it still took time to trickle into his withered, dead mana core. But for the few minutes he’d been here, actively working on increasing his reserves, I was expecting a mage duel of master-tier spells.

Any spell we threw would have to be castable instantly. If it took even a few seconds to form it, we’d leave ourselves vulnerable to counterspelling. Forming a hidden spell inside our mana cores was all but impossible while actively casting spells. Pulling that off in the middle of a duel wasn’t going to work, not against another archmage.

In a normal fight, I had plenty of time to weigh my options, to consider what piece of my arsenal would best accomplish my goals, and to scrutinize my opponent’s defenses. In this fight, I had no such luxury. Ammun was as close to full strength as I wanted to see him get, and he was no longer going to be throwing weak spells at a slow pace.

The lich spotted me as soon as I arrived, of course. Between his shadow witnessing my departure from the teleportation pad and the many scrying spells he no doubt had running to keep him aware of everything going on around him, there was no real way to sneak up on Ammun here.

It was no surprise to come out of the teleportation and find myself facing down a pair of mana constructs charging through the air at me. I’d expected him to use that moment of disorientation where the world reasserted itself to strike at me, though I was surprised to see that his chosen attack was a duo of stone lions.

Each was ten feet tall and twice as long, with teeth the size of my forearm. They ran through the sky with no apparent regard for gravity, almost shining in the light of the mana pillar we stood inside of. It made it harder to pick out the nodes of the construct spell that formed them, which might have been Ammun’s intent in choosing this particular spell to open with. It could have worked if I hadn’t established the correct divinations prior to my teleportation.

Instead, I merely reached through the mana to break the stone lions into pieces. It took only two tendrils of my own mana tugging the nodes out of place to destabilize the whole spell and cause them to collapse back into nothingness.

At the same time, I sent a dozen spiraling waves of force down at Ammun and wove an enchantment to draw mana toward it, then positioned it away from his body. There was far too much mana in the air for it to completely dry out an area, but every little bit helped. While my opponent was fending off my enhanced force bolts, I sent seven more mana-drawing enchantments out to join the first. They made a cube formation around Ammun, one he immediately attacked.

I actively contested his assault, defending the enchantments liberally while reinforcing them to not only pull harder at the ambient mana, but to convert it into barriers that connected all of the enchantments together and formed a cube with Ammun trapped in the center. Enchanting him directly would fail, but trapping him in an area of effect was possible, as long as I could keep him from tampering with it.

Unable to overpower my control of the enchantments, Ammun let gravity take hold of him and tried to drop out of their range. It was a good plan, there being well over a hundred miles of this pillar just in the habitable portion of the tower alone, never mind what was above and below it. The problem was that when I’d placed the enchantments, I’d used him as the anchor to their locations. Just fleeing out of range wasn’t an option.

I flew after Ammun, still shooting off conjurations of various flavors at him. Force magic worked the best in this environment, mostly because elemental energy tended to get lost in the noise of the background mana, sharply reducing its effectiveness with distance. This was now a running battle where we were both falling as we threw spells at each other, which made distance a factor.

My shield ward remained strong despite the repeated hammering it took, and within a handful of seconds, Ammun switched tactics to mental attacks. Before, he’d been trying to be sneaky. Now, he was bringing a battering ram to bear. It didn’t work, but it did make it harder to cast multiple spells at the same time while holding onto my defenses.

This was how battles at our level always went. It wasn’t one grand gesture that decisively claimed victory, but a thousand cuts that slowly wore away at the enemy until they were too weak to fight back. He was attacking my mind to slow down my casting. I was attacking the ambient mana to slow down his resource gathering. The whole while, we were both hurling force spells, lightning bolts, shards of stone or ice, and enchantments designed to ensnare or distract at each other.

Some spells didn’t work that well. Enchantments were a poor choice of offense against another mage, but that was counterbalanced by the fact that undead were notoriously bad at coping with them as long as they didn’t affect their minds. The ones I was using all went straight for Ammun’s mana core, which was synonymous with his life force, but he wasn’t an archmage for nothing.

“You’re not going to win this!” he howled up at me as we fell. “Look around! I’m surrounded by more mana than either of us could spend in a year. You’ll never drain me dry.”

That mana wouldn’t be here in a year, not if my alterations to the tower stuck. Admittedly, that did nothing to help me in this particular fight, and if I lost it, Ammun would certainly be able to fix what I’d broken. I didn’t respond, just kept up the pressure on him.

My staff was a blur in my vision as I used it to direct force shields to intercept Ammun’s attacks, and the copper armlet I was wearing started to heat up as it overloaded with all the mana flowing through it. I’d designed it to process ambient mana into something usable, specifically to help keep my reserves going while I burned through them with master-tier spells. I’d known when I made it that it wouldn’t survive more than a single fight, and the arena having been moved to here of all places was probably the worst possible outcome for it.

But for the moment, it was taking some of the pressure off my mana crystal, which was itself still more than half full. I was paying no attention at all to how fast I was burning through it, but it had taken over a week to fill it even with all the mana I was processing out of the air, and this fight hadn’t even gone on for ten minutes yet.

We fell past the bottom floor and into the maintenance sublevels, where we encountered a new problem. Mana wraiths, it turned out, were freely passing in and out of the core column. My mind noted that fact distantly and formed a theory that the mana got thinner the higher up it went, which probably served to unintentionally keep them lower down the column where that mana wasn’t needed to keep the habitable floors heated, lit, and full of water.

Whatever the reason, their inclusion added a new dimension to the battle. Suddenly, we were both fighting off mana wraiths as much as each other, and I was having an easier time of it. Ammun’s body drew them to him the same way he pulled in mana, and the enchantment cube I’d saddled him with didn’t slow him down enough for the wraiths to ignore him. They swarmed him, while only a handful seemed to even notice me.

I saw Ammun’s version of my own phantasmal shell pop up around him, though his had jutting blades popping out of it at every conceivable angle. They spun rapidly, ripping through the wraiths around him as fast as they could appear. He must have realized the monsters were getting thicker as we continued to drop, because he halted his descent.

Meanwhile, I let the distance between us increase so that even more of the wraiths would cling to him. It couldn’t last forever, but it gave me time to collect myself and start putting together a big spell. Even with my staff, I needed at least fifteen seconds, which was normally impossible to get in a duel between archmages, but Ammun had been completely blindsided by the horde of wraiths. I even went so far as to throw a handful of divination blockers out to tie up his scrying spells and keep him totally blinded.

The very act of casting that spell drew more mana wraiths to me, but they were a known threat I’d already taken steps to neutralize before showing up here today. Each of the golden bands I’d threaded into the lining of my cloak was a phantasmal blade, capable of operating independently and hunting down any wraiths that got too close to me.

Six swords phased into existence around me and started spinning and slicing, effectively shielding me from the wraiths without any additional effort on my part. They would only last for a minute, but I’d made thirty of the bands, so I had plenty of weapons in reserve.

I was halfway through constructing the spell I hoped would break Ammun’s physical body and allow me to recover his phylactery when an explosion of phantasmal constructs shredded every wraith within a thousand feet of the lich. His eyes snapped up to me immediately, finally clued in to what I was building.

A bone-white beam of energy shot out of his palm, so cold that my breath misted up mid-exhale. I was almost surprised by such a straightforward attack as his response, especially one I recognized as a simple overcharged ice beam. If Ammun hadn’t fired it in an environment so rich in ambient mana, I might not have realized in the split second I had that the beam didn’t just eat heat, it was also eating mana.

Hitting me with it would do damage to my spell construct, possibly enough to cause it to unravel fully. Blocking it was also not an option. That just left dodging, accomplished most readily by dropping straight down out of the way. That clever idea worked for all of half a second, then Ammun swung his palm down to follow my path.

My only options were to disrupt the beam, something I doubted I could pull off in time, or get out of the way, which gravity and flight magic were failing at accomplishing. That left me with one extremely expensive spell, something that cost ten times as much mana as a simple teleportation.

Chronoslip would let me move between moments in time, and its cast time was determined entirely by how fast a mage could pour out the necessary mana to form the extremely simple spell construct. For me, and probably for Ammun as well, that meant it was an instant-cast spell.

Time froze, and mana poured out of me. I dropped and spun to circle behind Ammun, still holding the construct for my other spell steady. I gained precisely three free seconds of uninterrupted action, which would just have to be enough because I’d already chunked a quarter of my remaining mana getting away from that beam spell.

I released the spell and watched the white beam scour the far wall of the core column, eating all the mana it passed through to fuel its own destructive power. My divination blockers were still stubbornly clinging to Ammun’s scrying spells, and he’d yet to throw out new ones or crack the blockers’ hold, which gave me another second of time to build my spell.

Then mana burst from his body, streaking out in every direction to threaten me even without a visual confirmation of my location. I shielded myself against the probing tendrils as best I could, but short of a full-body barrier, that was always a losing proposition. Even the barrier itself could barely slow the tendrils down since they were designed to rip apart magic.

For all of that, my spell was almost complete. Ammun wouldn’t be able to stop me, not in time. Even if this attack didn’t destroy him, I was confident it’d cripple him enough to win me the fight. All I needed was a single second to finish it.

Then his shadow raced up the wall behind me, nothing more than a blur of black moving many times faster than we were.