Ends of Magic

Khachi’s power had broken the Grave Tangle’s onslaught of death magic, but it had also drawn the attention of the undead army. Every undead on the field pivoted towards the Heirs, and Nathan caught sight of one of the tallest statues, carved to look like a wise old man, gesturing towards them with a staff made from a snake skeleton a hundred yards long.

Then Nathan hurriedly retracted his aura to avoid interfering with Stella’s attack. She’d taken the time he’d provided to charge a lightning capacitor and now fired a small laser into the center of the army.

It impacted the chest of one of the closer statues, doing nothing but blackening the stone on the sixty-foot statue of a cobra with hood flared. The lightning that followed close behind did more than that, shattering the top third of the statue in an explosion of dark magic. But the lightning didn’t end there, instead scything through every undead near the initial target zone as the raging electricity sought ground.

Farther down Aarl lashed out with giant swings of multiple weapons, cleaving through the press of undead as Khachi got back to his feet and began moving forward once more. The wolfman was glowing so brightly he was hard to look at, every piece of exposed fur standing on end and shining like fiber-optic.

Nathan accelerated forwards once more. He re-acquired the leftmost Grave Tangle as his target and beelined straight towards it. His aura billowed out as he used it to absorb the death magic from the undead below him. Many of them were humanoid and collapsed like puppets with cut strings, but some were monsters and put up more of a resistance. A herd of undead Nindine leapt at him, using the absurd jumps they’d had in life to attack instead of flee. He dodged the swarm of deer-like creatures and used his aura to swat them from the air.

My real role here is tank. I can take the hits better than my allies, and every moment they’re defending themselves is one they’re not killing the undead.

He burned Focus and used his skills to draw the attention of the entire battlefield, slowing his forward progress to get the enemies to stare at him and the circle of unmoving bodies below him. The statue of the old man shifted their staff to point directly at Nathan.

Visibility Control 4 achieved!

Nice. It helps that I’m flying, close and clearing a void in this cloud of dark magic.

The nearest Grave Tangle drew back a fleshy appendage, and that’s all the warning Nathan had before a whip of undead flesh cracked towards him faster than the speed of sound. The instant was enough to dodge that strike, along with the next two.

Effortless Dodge 10 achieved!

An explosive bullet struck one of the smaller statues in the chest and blew its torso apart as a second torrent of lightning surged past to ground itself in another part of the army. The first lightning bolt was still going, playing around the battlefield like a scribbling finger and leaving blackened corpses in its wake.

Magical attacks flew at Nathan from the statues and he ignored them almost contemptuously. He was focused on watching for more strikes from the Grave Tangles. He would survive a hit, but it would probably fling him into the distance long enough for the enemies to focus on his teammates. For now he focused on tagging each strike with his antimagic, seeking to weaken the death magic that held the rubbery flesh together as it cracked past at supersonic speeds. The problem was he wasn’t making much progress. The strikes were forcing him to dodge back and forth and preventing him from moving forward. Khachi and Aarl were significantly ahead of him now, closing on the cluster of statues that seemed to be commanding the undead horde.

Nathan’s split attention cost him. One of the whip attacks clipped him, tearing off his left leg and sending him crashing into the ground. He bounced like a stone, splattering through ranks of zombies before coming to a stop with a groan. His Focus meant he wasn’t disoriented, and he leapt upwards with his remaining leg before the undead around him could bury him under their weight. Broken bones snapped back into place all across his body as he looked back over the battlefield.

The giant statues had deployed some kind of shield against Stella’s attack, but it didn’t protect the rest of the army - or reach all the way to the ground. Aarl and Khachi were battling their way underneath the magical barrier. It looked like they were fighting some kind of honor guard, snake-people dressed head to tail in bronze armor and armed with long pikes that shimmered with deadly magic. The disciplined formation swept forward to stop Aarl and Khachi’s advance. Three of the honor guard fell to headshots in the time it took to take a breath and Aarl swept into the gap in the lines, greatswords sweeping out on both sides to bisect six more.

Then Nathan’s attention was drawn back to the Grave Tangles. One had just unleashed a torrent of greenish liquid towards Stella, and she’d summoned a gale-force wind to blow it back towards the undead army. The liquid hissed where it landed, dissolving flesh and smoking against the soil. Two lightning-capacitors hovered in the sky above her, eye-searing electricity arcing across the plain to ravage through the undead ranks.

Need to move faster. Hard to keep dodging without a leg and it's going to take a minute to regrow. Maybe my Stamina can fill the gap, develop [Acceleration].

Nathan envisioned the solid surfaces he pushed off of with his Stamina, and tried to make them push him, to enable something closer to actual flight. He dumped thousands of Stamina into the effort, bracing his arm against the surface. He gritted his teeth and pushed.

Nothing happened.

Then another tendril lashed out and swatted him from the sky once more. This time it was a direct hit. He plowed into the ground once again, his Focus taking a hit as [Mental Vault] kept him conscious. He shook his head and recollected his bearings just in time to see two dozen zombies throw themselves atop him even as they fell limp in his aura. The stronger ones ripped and tore at him, but he ripped and tore right back, flaring [Raging Thrill] to toughen his body and give him the strength to dismember the ancient corpses.

But more and more undead piled on. Nathan’s aura billowed out to drain every locus of death magic in the area, but the pile atop Nathan grew heavier and heavier as larger monsters pushed through his aura to collapse atop the growing mound of flesh. Panic rose and he pushed it back. He would not suffocate. He was buried, but he could dig his way out. He would survive and escape if an entire mountain of undead were piled atop him. He just hoped the Heirs could handle themselves while he was incapacitated.

At least it’ll give me time to regrow my leg and heal from all the broken bones of that last hit.

He tried to dig his way out, but it was hard to make progress with so many broken bones and with only one functional leg. The other one was growing back quickly, but it wasn’t ready yet. Twenty seconds passed as he struggled to burrow his way upwards. He kept his eyes and mouth closed and desperately wished that his aura would let him burrow through undead flesh as it had through the wizardry-conjured stone of the Academy.

Goddamn this is gross. I’m going to need to shower under a firehose after this.

Nathan felt a huge concentration of mana arcing towards his position, and pulled his aura back as quickly as he could. The pile of undead atop him was blasted apart as Stella’s spell landed, a good third of the corpses incinerated as the rest were blasted in all directions. Semi-magical flame and plasma played over him, burning away most of the gunk and the top few layers of his skin.

Maybe not. I’ve never taken a flame bath before.

He leapt up into the open air with his good leg, immediately redirecting himself towards the Grave Tangle. He could feel its influence with his magical senses, pressing against him like a filthy rag against skin. The monster had flowed down the mountain to get closer to Stella and Sarah. They had retreated in turn to stay out of the range of its whip-tentacles. Khachi’s light shone from amidst the giant statues but Nathan couldn’t see either of the guys through the press of monsters.

All three of the monstrosities bellowed again, and Nathan wasn’t in the right spot to interpose himself to block the attack this time. He made a split second decision to trust his team and moved towards the nearest grave tangle, gritting his teeth as the feeling of corruption intensified. He’d just been buried beneath thousands of pounds of decayed flesh and it hadn’t even felt like this.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The hill-sized undead paused in their advance to refocus on him. Nathan's eyes flickered around to plot ways to dodge. His right leg was usable but not yet fully healed, so his mobility would be limited. But the Grave Tangles seemed to be avoiding any strikes that would hit their own army. So Nathan dropped back out of the sky, feeling the wind and deafening crack of another tendril passing overhead.

This part of the army was composed of giant undead snakes. Hundreds of them reared up as Nathan came into striking range. Some of them were recognizably Ashblood Cobras but that was just the start, with dozens of varieties ranging from snakes the size of a normal python all the way up to a black-scaled juggernaut that could have swallowed a train.

Not all of them could hiss, but they all tried. Then they struck. Energized by the death magic rushing out from the Grave Tangles, they were just as fast as they’d been in life. Nathan dodged through a dozen snake-strikes in as many seconds, passing through a forest of scaly trunks. He bounced off the sky, ground and the undead like a high-scoring pinball. The colossal black-scaled snake struck for him but Nathan juked to the side and bounced off the nose of a tree-sized viper that was obliterated a moment later by the larger snake.

Parkour 8 achieved!

Then he was through the far side of the army and closing on the first Grave Tangle, finally able to see the source of the putrid magic. It was lit by the reddish glow of flames but Nathan didn’t look back to see what was casting the light. Instead he reached out with his aura to wrestle with the monster before him. A trio of skeletal snake heads reared up from the top of the monster and sprayed acid in his direction. But he’d been expecting the attack and his aura wrapped around each of the heads, boiling away the acid as it was conjured.

Then the heads themselves slumped as Nathan drained the magic animating them. The Grave Tangle opened a huge maw in its bulk, a cavern-sized opening lined with car-sized teeth. It lurched forwards to swallow Nathan - and he let it. Instead of backpedaling he dove deep inside the creature, aiming for the very center of the giant mound of animated flesh and spreading his aura wide.

Let’s find out what makes you tick, and break it.

The jaws snapped shut on Nathan with surprising force given that he was far, far past its teeth. There was no throat, no digestive system, just a solid mass of flesh that made up the monster. Shards of bones and rough cartilage ground against Nathan, and he felt the pressure bend his ribs.

On second thought, maybe this was a bad idea. Oh well, no way out but through!

He kept his aura in tight, rendering the flesh around him immobile and lessening the immediate pressure as he spent Stamina to replace oxygen. Then he scanned around with his magical senses to figure out what was going on with the Grave Tangle. He was already draining an enormous amount of the death magic that made the monster tick, but it kept dumping it into the immediate area in an attempt to drown him with the cloying darkness.

There was nothing critical like he'd been expecting, no core of the monster that he could target. It was just solid flesh and bone from end to end, all of it boiling with tainted magic - and wizardry. The wizardry was more concentrated than outside, seemingly permeating the flesh of the entire monster. It wasn't attacking Nathan in any way, but inside the Grave Tangle the rules of Davrar were different. Death and darkness flowed out of the fabric of Davrar to power the monstrosity, and the Grave Tangle used that magic with abandon to press in on Nathan from all sides as well as hurl attacks at his allies.

I can’t drain it dry. It’s drawing magic out of nowhere, like Khachi does for his rituals. But this isn’t divine mana, it’s the source of that corruption I felt earlier. If the Grave Tangles had their way all of the land would be covered in this… filth.

Nathan spent a moment longer studying the nature of the wizardry all around him. It was different than anything he’d experienced before, but he had the tools to figure it out.

Even if being crushed and suffocated inside a giant undead isn’t the ideal study environment.

It took a moment for everything to snap into place. This wasn’t like a mana pool, a construct of wizardry that let a mage accumulate a pool of power ready to do their bidding. This was more like a permanent version of one of the spells Badud had cast - something that rewrote the rules of reality in an area. In this case, it made it natural for dark magic to seep out of the world and used that power to sustain itself.

Wizard’s Understanding 10 achieved!

Now he knew what was going on, he just had to figure out how to stop it. That was easier said than done. He had half of the solution, but needed the other half. He needed some way to figure out how he could use his antimagic to break this new style of wizardry. He burned Focus and thought hard about different avenues of attack, modeling different attacks and trying them out as quickly as he could.

Spreading out his aura allowed the Grave Tangle to press in on him harder, but he was absorbing so much mana that it was trivial to push back against the pressure with muscle and healing.

He started with a drill-like structure but quickly diversified, trying something closer to a spiral before venturing into more distant space, watching how the wizardry retracted slightly when he poked it with a concentrated spike of antimagic. But it wasn’t being absorbed, merely drawing back from his attack. He didn’t have enough antimagic to blanket even a tenth of the monster with that kind of density.

He poked again and felt the wizardry retract again before it had fully finished recovering from his first poke. Then he poked it somewhere else, and the wizardry withdrew there too, colliding with itself in a turbulent magical cascade. He concentrated on that turbulence, trying to feel how the wizardry reacted to being pressed into such a tight space.

Wizard’s Detection 7 achieved!

Aha. I think I got you. I'm glad I think well under pressure.

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Arcane Nullfield 6

Permanent Talent 2: Immortal Body 5

Permanent Talent 3: Airwalking 7

Class: Void of Magic level 654

Deepened Stamina: 19920/19920

Void of Feeling

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Magic Anathema

Airborne Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Voluminous Aura

Denial of Wizardry

Mana Severance

Class: Spellslayer level 479

Regenerative Focus: 1929/4890

Catastrophic Blows

Battle Stealth

Mage Infiltration

Forgettable

Sneaky Blow

Antimagic Stealth

Magical Manipulation

Lethal Index

Wizard Resistance

Magic Jammer

Controlled Failure

Utility skills:

Wizard’s Meditation 8

Inspiration 8

Acceleration 10

Wizard’s Detection 7

Alertness 10

Wizard’s Understanding 10

Effortless Dodge 10

Mental Vault 5

Tutoring 5

Parkour 8

Visibility Control 4

High-tier Disguise 3

Mid-tier Battle Cry 10

High-tier Aura Manipulation 10