Ends of Magic

Stella slid down the slope, coming to a stop between Nathan and Brox with a furious expression on her face. She snarled at the Questor, but then her eyes went to the conflagration growing in front of the Fortress of the Face. “Dragon’s breath, that's a lot of fire mana. It's coming straight towards us.”

The Questor rolled his eyes before pointing towards the dungeon. “A true and verified fire elemental. That’s an exciting prophecy of death.”

Nathan looked from the bundle of clothes he was holding to the flame speeding across the bare ground. He estimated speeds and sighed. Then he tossed the clothes back to Aarl. “We can’t escape. If this thing is made of magic, I can probably take it. Stella’s got outer shields, Khachi on inner. Brox, you got anything?”

The handsome man shrugged with an ambiguous grin. “I would hold that source of solace as a final measure.”

“Ok. Please protect the Heirs.” Nathan said distractedly. “Let’s see if I can handle this myself. Dealing with weird magic bullshit is kind of my thing.”

His Rage intensified, filling his muscles with strength and boosting his antimagic. Nathan was momentarily distracted by a faint shimmer in the air high above, but it faded into the swirling heat-haze rising from the wall of roiling flame bearing down on them. A moment later, he was sure it was just a figment of his imagination.

Brox and the Heirs clustered around Khachi. The wolfman started chanting under his breath, assembling a thick shield of divine mana that shone like a beacon in the night. Stella quickly threw up three domes of blue magical force over the top.

I’d worry about that giving us away. But I’m pretty sure the giant self-aware firestorm is going to do that anyway. But this thing is enormous. it’s like fighting a natural disaster, and it would be damned stupid to die because we didn't take it seriously.

The flame reached them a moment later, having crossed the width of the pass as fast as a speeding car. It grew from a distant blazing cloud to a hungry inferno that engulfed the entire area. Nathan’s aura tightened around him protectively, absorbing the devouring magic of the elemental.

The body of the elemental wasn't simply magical fire. There was intent and purpose in the magic that blazed around Nathan, and it took affront at his continued survival. The magical heat intensified once, then twice as the stones underfoot cracked from the sudden temperature change.

The Stamina overload jitters started, and Nathan closed his eyes and took deep breaths of hot air. He balanced between focus and Rage while his magical senses probed the magic raging around him. It had intent and purpose like divine mana, but the structure was deep and complex, more like the magical computers he’d run across in the crystalline book and the dungeon control center.

The primary difference was that while those structures had logic flowing through rigid and discrete channels, this was a continuously shifting knotwork of power. It didn’t feel like something somebody would design, but instead something that had grown and evolved into intelligence and power.

Magical Intuition 6 achieved!

Nathan's aura spread out tentatively, absorbing more and more of the swirling inferno that surrounded him. He carefully gauged how far he could stretch his aura without letting the magical heat burn through. The elemental didn’t like the increased drain at all, and the fire suddenly retracted from Nathan, swirling around him in a tornado of ruby flame.

A pressure grew on Nathan’s chest, and it didn't take long to figure out why. His breaths were drawing in scorching hot air that was devoid of any oxygen. Intentionally or not, the firestorm was suffocating him. He focused on the burn in his chest and used Stamina to convert the carbon dioxide in his blood back to oxygen with [Perfected Body]. The visualization took a second to snap into place, the pressure on his chest eased as his blood reoxygenated. It cost a lot of Stamina, but Nathan was still way over his cap from the initial blast of magic.

Now that his immediate concerns were addressed, Nathan stood in the eye of the storm. The raging flames spun around him at insane speeds, rippling with enough power to appear solid. But with his magical senses, he could sense the other things the elemental was occupied with while it contained him.

Just a bit behind Nathan, the fire magic pressed greedily against Stella’s shield. The intensity of the inferno around his friends was slowly increasing, but the shield held. It was clear that it couldn’t hold forever.

Their air won’t last forever either.

That wasn’t the only thing the elemental was doing. It devoured the lingering fire mana from the spells that had been thrown around in the recent battle. The mana bore down on the area where the elites had been immolated and siphoned the remaining fire mana into itself, gaining a barely perceptible increase in clarity and definition.

Nathan felt a more complex working at the edge of his perception, and stretched his senses to get more detail. With the amount of magic it was like trying to pick out details on a plane flying in front of the sun, but Focus helped him sort through the sensory overload for the signal among the noise.

Magical Perception 8 achieved!

Nathan walked across the ground towards where the Giantsrest mages had died. His bare feet stuck slightly to the partially melted sand, and it took a constant stream of Stamina to deal with the mundane heat from the ground below. The eye of the firestorm moved with him, though it tried to push him diagonally away from his target, as if to subtly guide him away from the deceased mages.

Now I’m definitely investigating.

Nathan had grown used to sensing the mana pools of the mages around him, and he’d noticed how their mana pools took a little while to diffuse after death. But he hadn’t been able to figure out how to interact with them. The mana seemed to exist on a different layer of reality, one where his antimagic didn’t reach.

He'd done a bit of brainstorming about how to breach that barrier, punch a hole in order to temporarily or permanently drain a mage’s mana pool. It was something he'd never seriously attempted.

This elemental knew the trick. A complex swirling vortex of magic surrounded the location of each mage’s corpse, even if ash and charred bone was all that remained of their corpses. The magical firestorm had drilled through some kind of barrier and was siphoning away what remained of their mana pools. It was a slow process. Each of these mages had commanded a large amount of mana, though the war mages’ resource pools were several times larger than their peers’.

The swirling mana refused to retreat, and the firestorm bore down on Nathan once more as he approached. The flame formed a wall of searing heat in front of him, snapping and popping with plasma. Nathan just tightened his aura down, walking through the elemental barrier and into the center of the grouped corpses.

He didn’t immediately disrupt the siphons, instead taking some time to understand exactly what was going on. Nathan spent Focus to help him map the mana flows with his magical senses. He closed his eyes once more, mapping out the complex constructs that slowly sucked out the otherwise inaccessible power. It was nothing like any of the codified spells he’d had so much practice disrupting, and the mana siphon felt more organic. More a thorn than a needle, but he could understand the effect.

Magical Intuition 7 achieved!

The elemental calmed down when Nathan didn’t immediately interrupt its harvest. Even standing near the swirling vortexes of fire mana would have incinerated an unprotected person in seconds, but it wasn’t focusing enough power to kill a siegeboar every second onto him anymore.

I almost wonder if we could be friends. It just wants its mana. But it’s still trying to kill the Heirs, probably for all the juicy mana Stella has.

He reached out and shredded the siphon constructs, destroying their stability. The vortices destabilized and Nathan spread his aura wide to absorb the resulting surge of undirected mana. A furnace-crackling roar sounded across the pass, loud enough to burst eardrums.

Didn’t like that, did you?

The firestorm above him went wild, bearing down on Nathan like a ravening beast. He pulled his aura in tight, and boosted his antimagic by leaning into the thrill of the contest. It was a rush to defy a calamitous power like this, and the life-and-death reality of the firestorm around him amplified his Rage and made Nathan’s lips peel back in a snarl.

The saliva on his teeth evaporated. Nathan avoided taking a breath and stood still as the air around him flashed to plasma again. He was struck by waves of force and light, but all of the energy was magical. Only a tiny percentage of the flame around him was converted to ‘true’ nonmagical heat, but it was still enough to start burning at Nathan’s skin. He spent Stamina to keep himself oxygenated, to heal himself and even to cool himself down. It cost nearly a thousand Stamina every five seconds. Enough energy to sprint miles, gone in moments.

But in the same interval he absorbed that much mana and more. The incredible concentration of magic and light and pressure blinded Nathan’s senses, and he used [Battle Meditation] to prevent panic from rising in the pandemonium. He was immersed in the sun, falling into an endless abyss of heat and fire.

This is sustainable. I’m making more Stamina than I’m spending. Eventually this spell-creature will burn itself out against me. It’s spending thousands of mana a second against me. How much can it have?

The one point of reference was Nathan’s feet standing atop the burning rock. When that surface started to soften Nathan extended antimagic down past his feet and into the rock to keep it from melting to lava.

The flame pulled back slightly, no longer spending itself so aggressively against Nathan and his antimagic. The elementalhissed in the sky above, its frustration making the rock outside of his aura bubble and hiss.

Glad I’m not breathing, the gas from that is pretty toxic.

Nathan stood at the center of a blast furnace, but it was no longer the sun. While he’d been enmeshed the siphons of mana had been reestablished. The elemental seemed to care a lot about draining away the dead mage’s mana. Nathan extended his antimagic towards the siphons once more and the mass of fire mana above him lowered threateningly, stopping right overhead.

Is it offering a truce? Don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you?

Nathan turned his attention towards the Heirs. The fire had smashed through one of Stella’s shields and hungrily licked at the second, causing it to crack and splinter. Inside that barrier was Khachi’s shield, but Nathan wasn’t comfortable with only a single layer protecting his friends. This inferno would kill them in seconds if they were unprotected.

He frowned up at the intelligent firestorm, trying to figure out how to communicate with it, or at least let it know that his friends were off-limits. He tried yelling. “Leave us all alone, and you can have the mana!” The breath in afterwards burned his lungs with both heat and toxic gas that was quickly neutralized by his Talent.

There was no indication the elemental heard him, and the fire continued to assault Stella’s shield.

I’m worried it’ll figure out it has leverage on me with Stella and folks. It wants to consume mana from dead mages, and Stella’s gotta smell like a king’s feast with her enormous mana pool. Time to decide. Do I attempt to parley with a questionably-intelligent elemental made of mana, or do I try to kill it?

So far most of its reasoning was pretty animalistic. The firestorm wanted mana, and it was trying to take it. He wasn’t sure if it could even understand that Nathan wanted to trade safety for mana, but if it could, then it would understand it could pressure him by threatening the Heirs. And every moment he wasted trying to communicate was another moment that the Heirs' defenses grew weaker.

Could we use it against Giantsrest? Maybe we can lure it out and set the elemental loose on the army, especially if they come up this pass. But Gemore has been dealing with dungeons for hundreds of years. They taught me that anything coming from a dungeon cannot be reasoned with, will try to kill me and will attempt to destroy any civilization it finds. I’ve seen nothing to contradict that, and I don’t think I’m smarter than hundreds of years of Adventurers. Maybe if I had some special communication Talent, but I don’t. And I'm on a timeline.

With that thought in mind, Nathan scythed his aura through the siphons, once more shattering the swirling magical effects. As the full fury of the storm descended once more he leapt for the largest remaining mana pool, which had belonged to the war mage Sarah had shot out of the sky.

He crouched over the physical location of the immaterial resource, denying the mana-creature access. Then he spun his antimagic in a spiral, trying to recreate the feel of the spell the elemental used to pierce through whatever barrier blocked off the power. He focused on the same exact spot the elemental's drill had been, hoping to take advantage of the work it had already done.

I need to deny it a reason to stay here, then make it too expensive to stick around. Hopefully it leaves if there's no more easy mana to claim and I'm draining it. If not, I can try to kill it by draining all of the mana. But it’s so huge, I'm barely scratching the bulk of this thing.

Nathan could tell the moment when the elemental realized what he was doing. Another roar sounded across the night, though this time it was tinged with desperation.

He blocked out the pain of burns from the superheated environment and the sensation of furious mana surging around him, focusing entirely on the slowly dissipating mana pool he stood right on top of. His antimagic bored fruitlessly at the immaterial mana pool for a second before gaining traction. The new source of Stamina flooded into Nathan as he broke through the barrier. He rushed to siphon out every bit of the mana. It was like sucking down an entire cup of tea through a boba straw. His aura was naturally tuned to absorb mana and it only took seconds for him to drain the dead war mage's mana pool dry.

Aura of Antimagic 7 achieved!

The elemental flailed at him desperately, and Nathan became aware his entire body was covered in second-degree burns, and toxins from the burns and the toxic gas around him were spreading through his blood. It had taken a while, but the ridiculous amount of magical fire had finally succeeded in heating the air enough that Nathan was burning from purely mundane heat transfer. His healing was keeping up for now, but it was costing a bucketload of Stamina to do it. The problem was that the rate of damage was just going to keep ratcheting up as the air got hotter and hotter. He was fighting a losing race.

I need to convince it to flee, or I'll need to run away myself and hope Brox pulls a deus ex machina. Let’s get rid of the rest of these stray mana pools and see if that does the trick. They'll give me the Stamina to keep going for longer.

He hopped over the ring of lava that marked the elemental's rage, running towards the spot where he’d killed the first war mage and the enslavement mage. He broke the elemental’s siphons, quickly establishing his own. At this point it was a race between Nathan’s ability to drain the mana pools of the dead mages and the elemental killing him with the tiny percentage of its power that translated to radiant heat.

Next was the artisan mage, who’d had the least mana. The elemental's drain was inefficient enough that more than half of his mana pool remained. Nathan was getting faster at the process, barely breaking stride to claw out the resource before sprinting towards the spot where the last mage - the nail - had fallen.

Brox had killed the nail a hundred feet away from where the rest of the Giantsrest party had fallen, and Nathan covered the space at a dead sprint, desperate to deny the elemental its meal so it would leave the rest of them the hell alone. The distance brought him away from the concentrated heart of the elemental, and the environment cooled slightly.

That done, he turned back to the Heirs. They were the only remaining source of mana left. Nathan had absorbed all of the mana left behind by the dead mages, and the Elemental had devoured every scrap of environmental mana and every remaining enchantment left on the battlefield.

The firestorm twisted up and away from Nathan, and he was buffeted by the winds blown up by its passage. The ground around him glowed faintly with heat as the elemental concentrated itself into a towering tornado of flame directly above the Heirs.

Uh oh.

The pillar of fire crashed down onto Stella’s third and final layer of shield, shattering it and impacting Khachi’s dome of golden light. The two self-animated magics battled against each other as the fire elemental tried to crush the shell of divine magic to get to the juicy targets barely visible within.

Nathan arrived on the scene, happy to stand on the relatively cool stone that had been protected by Stella’s shield until a moment ago. He spread his aura out as far as he dared, cutting away at the fire elemental as it battered at Khachi’s shield.

The elemental drew back from him once more, darting back a few times to try and get at Nathan’s friends. He wielded his aura like a gigantic sword, the extra rank-ups to his antimagic Talent giving him extra volume to work with as he cut at the probing tendrils of animated fire.

Khachi’s divine protection remained resolute, replenishing itself slightly in the respite. There was a moment of stillness as the towering firestorm seemed to sit back and take the measure of the battlefield.

Come on. Go home. Nothing for you here. Just me, eager to take bites out of your very essence.

The attitude of the mana shifted in front of Nathan’s eyes. It went from an all-consuming inferno to a spitefully hissing blaze. Then it skittered back across the pass to the fortress that was its home. The massive firestorm looked like a predator returning from a hunt, mildly wounded but satisfied with the hunt.

Implacable Antimage has leveled to227! You have survived confronting a fire elemental!

Nathan just stood there for a moment, watching it go. Then he opened his mouth and sucked in his first breath in several minutes. The air was still scalding and dusty, but at least it contained oxygen. He coughed a few times and then spat up some black phlegm as the dome beside him shimmered and retracted into Khachi’s metal shield, which was braced on the ground.

The piece of metal glowed with heat, and Khachi’s teeth were gritted as smoke rose from burning fur. He cast the shield to the ground before golden light played over his arm, healing the injury.

Brox smiled around, looking at the partially molten landscape. “Now that was a blaze worthy of Quenfi.”

Aarl and Sarah heaved identical sighs of relief. Then they started coiling up a wide hoop of metal they’d been trying to lay out. It was the enormous dimensional container they’d gotten from the nest of ashblood cobras, the one that the matriarch had used as a spawning pool. It had been the reservoir for an entire Sklian town, and contained an entire lake’s worth of water.

Contaminated water now, and probably full of a whole bunch of young ashblood cobras. We have no idea if those are still alive, or how long it’ll take them to starve. Still, opening that portal and jumping through would have been a better idea than getting burned alive by a giant fire elemental.

Stella was on one knee, taking gasping breaths and clearly overwhelmed by the effort it had taken to hold off the fire elemental for several minutes. She looked up, standing and watching as the living firestorm finished retreating through the orifices of the fortress of the face.

She coughed in the hot and dusty air before summoning up a wide gust of wind to sweep away the cloud of hot dusty air. “That was a prophecy of death. What a trial, and what incredible Insights of fire.” The mage’s grin was a little manic as her eyes shone with an inner flame that shifted slightly to match the red color of the elemental.

“Thanks for the wind.” Nathan sighed, spreading out his arms to catch as much of the breeze as he could. It was definitely nice to not stand around in oven-temperatures anymore. He was still overheated, but his inherent toughness, Rage and healing were keeping him functional as he cooled off.

His voice was cracked. “Can I get some water? I’m a little hot.”

Brox chuckled. “I’ll raise my sword to that.” He whipped out some kind of nozzle from a dimensional pouch and aimed it in Nathan’s direction before twisting a lever. A spray of cold water hit Nathan straight on, with as much pressure as a hose.

He sighed with relief at the temperature, even as the water steamed and sizzled off the rock around them. “Thanks.”

The Questor kept the stream of water going as he laughed. “I’ve fought elementals before, but only with teams of legends and artifacts of Kalis. By Edes I’ve never seen somebody run into one naked as a newborn and come out the other side.” He cut off the stream of water and walked up to clap Nathan on the shoulder.

“I’ll tell that story to this Ending and beyond.” His eyes danced with amusement, and it seemed Nathan had been forgiven.

Then Brox gestured with his chin toward the dungeon. “So, you’ve seen down the dragon’s gullet. Time to conquer this dungeon?”

Nathan took a step away from the Questor and ensured he wasn’t under the effect of Brox’s social skills before he considered the suggestion.

.I know that the danger is, and I have the tools to fight it. Absorbing all of the mana might be easier in an enclosed space like the dungeon but the mundane heat in there is probably incredible. I don’t know if I could deal with that long enough to kill it. Or what it would do in desperation. What if there are multiple elementals, and I chase them out, and they go attack Halsmet?

Nathan stepped away from the Questor, rubbing his hand through his rapidly-regrowing hair. “Maybe. But it would be a risk, one I don’t see why I would take. As it is, the dungeon’s a barrier between Halsmet and Giantsrest. If the army comes this way, we just wake the elemental again.”

“We may have awoken the dungeon for good.” Khachi said, his voice grave. “This must be reported, and we must watch it to see if the elemental is aggressive and decides to roam. If it does, then we may not have a choice.”

Brox gestured to the wolfman, as if his point was proven. “So? Do we await an invitation from the divine, or do we take this course ourselves?”

“From one fight directly into the next?” Sarah’s voice was derisive as she surveyed the plain. “It’s late. Let us rest tonight, surveil the dungeon. Tomorrow we’ll decide what to do.”

The Questor frowned around. “Fine! You’ve triumphed over two mighty foes. Might as well sleep before killing an ancient being of magic.”

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Aura of Antimagic 7

Permanent Talent 2: Perfected Body 8

Talent 3: High-tier Slow Fall 10

Class: Implacable Antimage level227

Deepened Stamina: 7110/7110

Antimage’s Impassivity

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Implacable Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Improved Antimagic

Strenuous Agility

Hand-to-hand Expertise

Class: Assassin of Gemore level80

Regenerative Focus: 193/900

Catastrophic Blows

Stealthy Movement

Infiltration

Forgettable

Unsuspecting Strike

Utility skills:

Battle Meditation 9

Leadership 6

High-tier Sprinting 8

Magical Perception 8

High-tier Notice 10

Magical Intuition 7

High-tier Dodging Footwork 10

Mental Fortress 4

High-tier Lecturing 5

High-tier Tumbling 8

Mid-tier Noticeability 8

Low-tier Quiet Movement 4

Low-tier Disguise 4

Mid-tier Battle Cry 3