Healer vs. Mage

Subject: Terilynn Veranos | Classif.: Barzakh

Though the name implied a connection, Ancient Magic had almost nothing to do with the modern form taught on The Surface. A forgotten craft, one that Lynn held a primitive understanding of.

Most citizens of the kingdom didn’t even know that their immortality was a form of Ancient Magic. The Council actively censored and suppressed any knowledge related to the practice. Safety, they told her. For the good of the people. After all, since their immortality was engineered through Ancient Magic, who was to say it couldn’t be reverse-engineered in the same vein?

All Lynn knew about the archaic art was that it took the form of spells and rituals. Unlike Acritae, which can be activated on the fly via synesthesia, the requirements for casting Ancient Magic were far stricter. Incantations. Crest-Weaving. Visual calculus. The mere act of replicating her Geokinesis as a Mage needed supercomputer-levels of mental arithmetics and problem-solving.

There was a reason the term “Mage” was reserved for practitioners of the ancient art, and not Acritae. Intelligence was the hard barrier that made it nigh impossible for modern humans to learn it.

It took months for her to learn how to invoke the Noble Crest of her house. Even then, her invocation was purely cosmetic in function. One could only imagine the ungodly length of time it took for the founder of House Veranos to create the crest in the first place. The exact dimensions that linked the holder’s life to the king. The mental focus needed to will an imagined pattern into magical existence. Codifying all these processes to be passed down for generations.

Ancient Magic was no different from creating miracles. The sheer skill and effort needed to cast it were nothing short of miracles themselves.

So for the Mage in front of them to cast a reality-ending spell—just what kind of unspeakable computations were going through her mind?

Her soul was cracked. Stitched together by some arcane force that refused to let it fall apart. Rather than an orb of light, the Mage’s soul was like a diseased seed. Partially germinated, mostly infected. The growths sprouting between the stitched cracks of the seed were nauseating to look at. Lynn had never seen anything like it. As if an eldritch parasite had taken over the seed. But no matter how much the princess tried to deny it, she knew what she was looking at was human. Barely, but not an Aberration.

Even after deactivating Soulsight, she didn’t need enhanced vision to sense the suffocating malice emanating from Weissilde. The crest beneath the Mage’s floating feet was pure black. Lines and drawings that formed an image most vile. If a picture was worth a thousand words, then every single one of them were profanities. Blasphemy that cursed all of creation. The geometric madness that expanded beyond the walls of the cavern didn’t just seek to unmake existence; it wanted to violate the very concept of it.

Lynn clicked her tongue. She swallowed the expletive in her throat as she held onto Tim’s amputated hand that he so graciously offered. Her palm wrapped around his, careful not to get the blood leaking from his exposed stump. She didn’t like it one bit.

But she didn’t like the world ending even more.

“We just need to interrupt her cast—”

He didn’t even get to finish before Lynn slammed her free hand into the ground. This wasn’t just a simple stone pillar or volley of spikes anymore; her arm pulsed with a golden hue. The moment she touched the floor, the entire ceiling of the cavern fell. Metric tons of soil, rock, and earth were brought down, as if Mother Nature herself stomped on Weissilde.

But the moment the Mage looked up, the cave-in was stopped. Suspended in midair. That freak bends gravity, too?! Floating in midair was a hint, but Lynn didn’t expect the enemy to prevent the entire structural collapse of the cavern by simply looking up.

The secret behind this inexplicable phenomenon was quickly revealed. Tim fired his revolver at Weissilde’s head. The deafening shot vibrated through Lynn’s ears. She thought it would just bounce off the freak’s smooth, featureless metallic face, but it didn’t. It exploded. Several bone-white magic circles appeared overhead, supporting the weight of the crumbling ceiling as she recoiled in apparent pain.

Having dipped the cylinder of his revolver into the gaping hole of his severed wrist, the Blackblood-infused rounds detonated at Tim’s command. The princess couldn’t tell which was worse: the fact that the Weissidle could cast multiple spells at the same time or that an explosion in the face didn’t interrupt any of them.

“Back me up.” Holstering his revolver, Tim broke into a sprint towards the Mage. Seeing the man running at full speed was uncanny. He always seemed slow and measured. This unexpected change was a grim reminder of how desperate he was, even if he didn’t show it.

The fate of the entire world rested in his single, unamputated hand.

Weissilde’s own detached limbs vanished into the ether as two elongated arms shot out from underneath her shoulders once more. Whips, blades, flails—it was difficult to tell what they had morphed into as the Mage unleashed a flurry of attacks. A storm of strikes and slashes expanded around her like an offensive shield, scarring more and more of the cavern’s floor and structures by the millisecond. The speed at which the new limbs moved was absurd. Not even Mia, with all her litheness and agility, could possibly escape unharmed.

Lynn’s eyes danced in their sockets, moving frantically just to barely keep track of the Mage’s arms-turned-weapons. Sweat evaporated from her brows and lashes through the intensity of it all. Tim could survive the onslaught, but it would be meaningless if he couldn’t get close. Just how in the world could he make it past the blurry vortex of steel?

The answer came in the form of a pulse. His disembodied hand squeezed the princess’s palm. Magic flowed into her. A message written in Acritae.

Without hesitation, Lynn did a forward lunge with her right leg. Knee bent. Rear leg outstretched. A moving earthen wall was conjured beneath Tim’s feet.

He “rode” the rock like a surfboard on a breaking wave.

With the added elevation and speed, he weaved between the initial slashes. Shockwaves still nicked him. Lacerations appeared all over his body, but they were all superficial; his regeneration outhealed the damage. As long as he avoided the mortal strikes and the ones that stopped him in his tracks, he should be able to reach the eye of the storm. No, he had to reach Weissilde.

As if by telepathy, Lynn shifted her position and weight. Sliding her legs, she channeled her emotions into the ground, directing the earthen wave in complete coordination with Tim. His severed hand told her everything she needed to know.

Signals. Synergy. Synesthesia.

She could feel exactly what Tim was feeling. Which attacks to dodge. Which ones to power through. His fears. His resolve. But like any form of effective communication, it was a two-way street. Lynn relayed her perspective to him. How much damage the earthen wave had taken. How much more it could take.

She had no words to describe this controlled chaos. No words were needed. Never had she seen or heard Acritae being used in this way until now. It became clear to her how The Silence earned his nickname. A field medic and commander who remained cognizant of the entire battlefield at all times. If every soldier under him had a piece of his flesh, he’d be borderline omniscient. No wonder he had a zero percent casualty rate.

Refusing to be outdone, she poured in even more of her being into her Gift. Walls were conjured to redirect unavoidable blows. Spikes intercepted devastating slashes, slowing them down. Tall stone poles turned into temporary footholds as she replaced one damaged wave with another.

In this cavern of shifting earth, she had become the ocean. Weissilde, the storm. And in the apex of it all was the Lord of Death himself, surfing on stone against a hail of silver.

Inch by inch, he forced his battered body to slide and shift towards his former companion. The dark magic circle grew in size and hate. The floating ceiling shuddered in fear. The entire cavern distorted and devolved into an unrecognizable space. A painting of abstract expressionism, one inked through a clash of Acritae and Ancient Magic.

Almost there.

Lynn was nearing her limit. The closer he got, the smaller the whirlwind of silver became, and the faster the Mage’s attacks grew. Constantly altering the entire landscape while keeping him intact was taking a physical and emotional toll on her. Stress leaked out of her as sweat. Her breathing bordered on that of a panic attack. Never in her life did she push her Geokinesis to this degree of precision, speed, and improvisation. She was bending the earth beyond what most elementalists could even dream of, as if she were a goddess reshaping the environment at a whim.

But she was only human. Those two were the gods.

“C’mon!”

She psyched herself up. Just a little more. The constant movements and channeling of magic had now taken her past her breaking point. With each agonizing breath, each forced, regulated beat of her heart, her vision darkened. Her muscles felt like they were being ripped apart. And yet, she kept moving. She kept pumping more and more of her emotions and exhaustion into one final move.

Jump!

Every fiber of her being was poured into a single message delivered into the severed hand. It was now or never. Tim had to cross the last few feet in one long, desperate jump.

The earth crumbled. Lynn almost collapsed from fatigue, but she kept herself standing. Her fading vision remained clear enough to watch the final stretch of the fight play out. And for the first time since setting out on this journey, she rooted for Tim from the bottom of her heart.

The traitor leaped towards Weissilde, right arm primed and ready for one massive punch. It was incredible how he kept that arm relatively uninjured. His left, already missing a hand from the start, dangled like a half-eaten link of sausages. His entire body was bathed in red, a scene straight out of a horror movie.

But when it turned black, that was when the climax truly began.

“Calm. The Hell. Down!”

A killer haymaker was fired into Weissilde’s chest, the sound louder than any gunshot Lynn has heard. But at the same exact moment, the Mage’s arms pierced through Tim, impaling his abdomen and left shoulder. Both Siraths were frozen in midair, the metallic being unbudged but stained in Blackblood, while the disfigured body of the Exiled was skewered and suspended. It was as if time itself froze, uncertain of who to crown the victor.

“Aaargghhhh!”

It only resumed when Weissilde roared in agony. The black magic circle blinked in and out of existence as the white magic circles that held up the ceiling vanished. Lynn slammed the ground with her hand one more time, both to keep herself from falling and to prevent the imminent cave-in. With the crisis averted, the structural integrity of the cavern was restored. The environment returned to what it once was. Mostly.

The Mage recoiled in pain as Blackblood devoured her metal flesh. Her hellish screams shook the mountain to its core. It was like she was set on fire or eaten alive by acid. In truth, it was both. She swiped and pawed at herself, trying to rid herself of the blazing black fluid, only to spread it even further.

But as her torture commenced, Tim’s butchered body vanished into dust. Lynn could not believe her eyes as he watched his existence fade, only for him to regrow himself out of the stump of his hand that she was holding. As if struck by lightning, she let go out of shock.

“Thanks for the back—” he said without even breaking a sweat. In contrast, she felt like she had just run through the entire length of the kingdom and back. But at the last moment, his face twisted in horror.

Lynn couldn’t ask why. She didn’t have the chance to catch her breath.

The dark magic circle willed itself back into existence. It has already expanded beyond the entire circumference of the Spire.

“EWANTREE!!!!”

Flesh melting like liquid mercury and with hellfire consuming her, the Mage of Ruin cast the spell at the very last second.

The world was ending. Beginning from the cavern, everything was turning to salt.