Book 3, Chapter 79 (Patreon)

I didn’t hesitate to send out a dozen more phantasmal swords from my cloak. They wouldn’t be very effective against a mage’s shadow, but they would do something. If it didn’t dodge out of the way, it’d be taking damage. If it did, it’d give me the time I needed.

Unsurprisingly, an insubstantial body not possessing things such as bones or joints was extremely flexible. The swords pin-cushioned the wall around Ammun’s shadow, but it deftly twisted itself around to avoid each strike. Limbs flattened and elongated. Its torso twisted into a sinuous S-shape as it slithered between two swords that should have taken it through the heart and kidney. The shadow wove through the attacks easily, barely even slowing down, but the blades chased after it and kept trying, forcing it to constantly deal with the distraction.

All of that happened over the span of two seconds at most, but that gave me the time I needed. Ammun’s own attempts to stop me were absorbed by my shield wards, mostly force and fire, though he also tried to pepper my brain with mind spikes.

I fought through all of that, finished the last segment of the spell I was constructing, and, with an evil grin, unleashed it on the lich.

Golden light enveloped him for a second before sinking into his skin. He looked back at me in confusion when nothing else happened, and I wondered if he thought that I’d botched the spell somehow. If so, he was in for a surprise.

The spell was called body link, and what it did was replicate all spells cast on me to the recipient. That included offensive and defensive spells, so if he hit me with something, he’d also be attacking himself. More importantly, though, any spells I cast on myself would affect him as well.

Ammun might not have known exactly what spell I’d used—his apprenticeship with me had ended long before he’d gotten to the point where he was learning master-tier spells—but he knew better than to let an unknown magical effect linger. Already, he was working to dispel the enchantment while putting distance between us and letting his shadow attack me as a distraction.

I ignored both of them and focused on my belt buckle. That piece had been ruinously expensive to create, requiring more mana than everything else I’d made combined, but I’d wanted it as my ultimate insurance in case things went sideways. What it did was cast a modified teleportation spell at six times the cost and one-tenth the maximum distance, but it did it instantly instead of taking five minutes.

I felt myself get ripped through space and appeared in the air a hundred and fifty miles east of the tower. At the same time, Ammun appeared nearby. His shadow was left in the tower and would need some time to rejoin the battle. By the time it could make it here, I intended the fight to be over.

There was still mana in the air, but it was nothing compared to what we’d been fighting in. It certainly wouldn’t be near enough for Ammun to hold his constructed body together, which meant that every passing second cost him some of his reserves.

Unfortunately, we weren’t nearly far enough away that I could just abandon the lich and let him die of mana starvation. All I’d done was limit him to what he’d already absorbed into his core, which might still be more mana than I had left after being forced to use that chronoslip spell earlier.

“Clever,” the lich congratulated me, “but not good enough.”

Without the interference of the mana streaming past us in enormous quantities, we were free to fight at range now, a fact we both took immediate advantage of. Ammun summoned a ball of liquid fire into existence and cast it up into the sky, where it rained down glowing drops that would melt my flesh if they made contact. A thousand individual attacks impacted my shield ward in the bare second it took me to fly out of the radius of the spell.

At the same time, I unleashed the rest of my phantasmal swords to attack Ammun directly while targeting myself with a slowing invocation. As counterintuitive as it seemed, there were plenty of invocations that were detrimental, either by design or because they were miscast. Since my flight spell was what was moving me, I didn’t need reflexes or extreme speed. If he wanted to dodge my attack without wasting mana on expensive barriers, Ammun did.

The first sword skimmed across his arm, leaving a shallow gash in the fabric of his robe and slicing off a section of the excess fabric making up the sleeve. The next two missed completely, but they swung right back around for another attempt. The remaining ten or so hacked into his body in various locations, one even severing a leg.

Ammun felt no pain, of course. That was one of the great advantages of lichdom – to have a body that was naturally stronger and faster, that never got tired and never hurt, that even if it were utterly destroyed, the lich would simply reform in a new one. I wasn’t fighting to kill Ammun here. I was fighting to gain control of his phylactery before he could hide it away.

Our duel continued for another thirty seconds, over which time we utterly annihilated the landscape below us. Ammun’s liquid fire rain set a swath of the forest ablaze while I conjured up several hundred tons of solid rock to crash down on him and the ground below. Chilling beams of pure cold scoured the ground as I darted around to avoid them, and fields of reversed gravity that we both scattered through the sky sometimes clipped the tops of trees below, ripping them up and drawing them into the air to serve as visual barriers.

I was burning through mana at a fantastic rate, almost every single one of my spells master-tier and unable to benefit from lossless casting, but so was Ammun. As it so often did for mages at our level of skill, it looked like it was going to come down to who ran out of mana first. Luckily for me, even though my mana crystal was getting low, I still had ten enormous storage crystals in my phantom space to use as backup.

If Ammun had known about their existence, he might have been targeting my own phantom space the same way I’d ripped open his. His divinations were firmly rooted in the here and now, however, and while we hurled conjured spells at each other, we also dueled in the realm of divinations, each attempting to blind the other, or to feed false information on our locations, spells, and actions to each other.

I gained a momentary advantage when I slipped into a phantasmal state, causing Ammun’s divination to lose track of me. Before he could reestablish visual contact, I shadowleaped into the underside of one of the floating rocks that had been caught in a gravity well, then hit him from the back with a barrage of mana punctures.

Even without seeing the attack coming, Ammun blocked all but two of them. That was fine by me; the spells hadn’t cost me anything, and while it would have been fantastic to riddle his mana core with holes, that was nothing Ammun couldn’t repair. The real benefit was that it told him where I was at the time of the attack, which was different than where I was now.

I’d gone invisible and flew a wide loop, dodging an outpouring of random fiery explosions filling the air, until I was in a blind spot I’d made in his divinations by subverting the spell to feed him a false image of an empty sky. If he was clever, he’d realize that it wasn’t showing the explosions he was throwing out, but my one-time apprentice was looking harried now.

I dropped down out of the sky on him like judgment descending from the heavens, a gleaming blade of light held in my hands. Ammun had just enough warning to see the attack coming, but as he started to form a shield between the two of us, I lashed out with a mass of mana tendrils to pry the spell open. It was a losing proposition for me, good for only a split second of stalling before the shield closed.

I passed through in that moment and the blade split Ammun in two, from the crown of his skull to the bottom of his crotch. Each half of the lich was flung in opposite directions, though there was no blood or gore. His body had been made to look human, but inside, he was nothing but a skeleton with fake skin wrapped around conjured padding.

Scouring flames roared out of both my hands, each one pointed at one half of Ammun’s body. They washed over the lich, burning his physical shell away into ashes and leaving behind nothing but the small black cube of his phylactery. It fell a hundred feet and got caught in a gravity well to swirl around with a million shards of wood that had once upon a time been a whole tree before being caught in the crossfire.

The sudden end to the battle was almost alarming. We’d been wearing each other down for the better part of half an hour across three different arenas. I was mentally and physically exhausted, and my mana reserves were so drained that it would take me months to refill what I’d spent if I didn’t have any ambient mana to pull from.

Part of me expected it to be some kind of trick, an illusion Ammun had spun out of nothing while he lurked in the periphery, waiting for the right moment to strike. But no, all of his magic was gone. The divinations had unraveled, the gravity wells were starting to fade as they ran out of mana, and no lances of force, flame, or anything else cut through the sky.

I pulled his phylactery to me with simple telekinesis and let out a laugh of disbelief. Just like that, I’d averted a major hurdle to my plan to restore the world. The tower itself would become uninhabitable over the next few months with the mana flows disrupted, forcing everyone to either flee or die. I hoped they’d choose the former, but whatever they decided, it was coming down. Then it would be years and years of clean up.

I just needed to rip Ammun’s soul out of this phylactery and consign it to oblivion first. Then there’d be no way for him to come back. Except, when I went to do that, I realized something.

The cube was a true phylactery, of that there could be no doubt. I’d checked first thing to make sure it wasn’t a fake before the fight had even begun. In every way, shape, and form, the square chunk of black metal was a soul vessel.

The problem was that it was empty.

This whole time, Ammun had been baiting me into a battle, dangling this phylactery in front of me to force me to fight instead of fleeing. As long as I thought I had something to gain, he knew I’d stay. And it had worked. I’d exhausted myself destroying his physical manifestation to claim an empty phylactery under the assumption that it housed his soul.

From well over a hundred miles away, a roar shook the world. I didn’t need to look to know what it belonged to. My assumptions about that dragon skeleton on the top of the tower had been wrong. It wasn’t the grave of a dragon that had starved to death. It was the home of a skeletal dragon undead, in some ways every bit as powerful as Ammun himself.

Most likely, he was controlling it directly while his true phylactery constructed a new body for him to inhabit. For all my efforts in this battle, even though I’d vanquished his physical form, I’d lost. For the first time in centuries, I’d lost a fight.

There was no way I could take on that skeletal dragon, not in my current condition. I hurried through the motions of a teleportation spell to the brakvaw portal, passed through, and destroyed it behind me. Hopefully I hadn’t stranded any of them near the tower, but there was no way I was leaving access to my backyard right outside Ammun’s demesne.

Brakvaw came on the wing to swarm me when I broke their portal, but Grandfather cut through their screeching with a single command and silenced them. He took one look at me, then turned to his flock and said, “Disperse.”

“Thanks,” I said tiredly as the brakvaw flew away.

“Tell me what happened,” he commanded, his voice grave.