Chapter 520 : Unflinching

Chapter 520 : Unflinching

All color drained from the pocket dimension. Pale light wrapped around Kezess in the form of a dragon, while dark flames drew in shadows around Agrona. Kezess himself didn't move, but the dragon's jaws opened wide. Agrona, wreathed in flames, split, repeating images of himself appearing rapidly to the left and right, moving as if to encircle us. White fire flashed, momentarily blinding me as it swallowed the space where Agrona had been.

I didn't blink as I poured aether into King's Gambit, pushing the godrune's capabilities past anything I had trained for. My perception sped up, making time and the movements of the two asuran god-kings slow until I could just barely follow along.

The dragon's head turned one way, following the still-growing circle of shadowy, flickering Agronas, pure mana scouring away the air, the stone, and the shadows all at once. Kezess's own eyes followed the ring in the opposite direction, with each image flashing into a combustion of aether as his eyes touched them.

My Realmheart-enhanced senses were drowned in the outpouring of mana. Agrona and Kezess seemed to be anywhere and everywhere at once. The unrestrained clash of their powers was suffocating.

The stone beneath my feet shifted as the dragon's breath devoured the floor. I pushed away from the little atmospheric aether contained inside the pocket dimension, hovering just as the floor gave way, crumbling into a lower section of the castle.

Aether spilled from me to congeal into a small vertical platform at my feet. Even as I planted my soles against it, aether also built up throughout my body, condensing until there was a sudden explosion through my muscles. I shot backwards, leaving behind a shockwave within the mana and aether, a short blade simultaneously forming in my hand. A second sequence of explosions went through my arm and shoulder, propelling the blade into a backwards thrust with so much force that I felt my bones spiderweb with fractures.

The strike slammed into an immovable counter-force, and my momentum stopped, jarring me and conjuring a marrow-deep ache through my whole body. I looked down at a white-gauntleted hand gripping my wrist. My eyes snapped up to meet Agrona's, and he raised a brow slightly. In front of me, there was a thunderous boom as the air of my supersonic passage slammed back together.

Then Kezess's attack swallowed us.

We vanished in a white fire of pure mana.

A black shadow clawed through the white, and I raised my arms to defend myself. The impact sent me flying backwards out of the flames. By the time I caught myself, aether had collected along my wounds, fusing fractured bone and split flesh.

The flames subsided, and for a moment, I was looking at the hollowed- out core of Taegrin Caelum. The floor, and several below it, had caved into a pile of smoking rubble. While the ceiling was still collapsing, the chambers above us twisting and melting at the edges, as if they weren't entirely rendered in this extradimensional space.

Kezess still hadn't moved except to float a few feet into the air. His fine clothes remained unruffled, not even a hair out of place. His eyes, like two bright flashes of violet lightning, swept the rubble, but Agrona was nowhere to be seen.

His white-hot gaze came to rest on me, and the smallest frown pinched his lips.

I felt the mental intrusion an instant later.

'Gah!' Regis exclaimed in surprise. 'Shit!' Then my companion was forcefully ejected from my body, at first pooling on the broken stonework before taking his physical form, hackles up, a low growl deep in his throat as he looked threateningly back at me.

My throat closed, and I suddenly couldn't swallow. "Regardless of your desire to help me, you will do so." The words came from me, but the voice wasn't mine, or at least, not mine alone. Two rich baritones echoed over and across each other, one mine, the other Agrona's.

My hands clenched into fists, trembling. My neck craned uncomfortably, and I stared at Kezess, whose expression had flattened into a complete lack of emotion. "Go on, Kezess. He's trapped us both in here. Pull out his insides, melt the flesh from his weak bones. Free yourself."

Kezess didn't move, didn't speak. His eyes burrowed into mine as if he could see straight through to the struggle between my control and Agrona's.

A sword of aether condensed into my fist. The sword was jagged and dark, dripping corruption like drops of black blood.

Regis shot forward, and I twisted, thrusting the blade at his throat. He became shadow and aether, then flame, and the violet blaze ran down the length of the sword. All of my King's Gambit-enhanced concentration slammed inward at once, scouring my physical form for every shred of essence that was not me, and like a flood through a canal, I pushed that essence along, forcing it into a single place.

The Destruction blade swept up at the joint of my left shoulder even as the aetheric armor folded out, exposing my skin. The blade's passage through skin, muscle, and bone was effortless, almost painless. The corrupted flesh tumbled to the ground, burning with Destruction, and the resistance, that punishing force from within-Agrona, fighting for control of my body-vanished.

My armor grew down over the hole in my left side. Dark smoke and fire were rising from the arm that had been attached there only a second before. I pulled back my blade, which straightened and brightened as I reasserted my control, then thrust at the core of where Agrona was reforming.

Destruction danced within the heart of the cloud, reaching for something to consume. The smoke and fire retracted, splitting into two separate clouds, then again into four, then eight. Each cloud carried within it a tiny spark of Destruction, but that was enough to begin consuming them from within. The clouds split again and again as if a hurricane wind was blowing them away, until the spark of Destruction they carried was diffused down to nothing at all.

I swept my blade sideways, God Step opening up a dozen points of connectivity, each one allowing a small piece of the Destruction blade to pass through, each one striking one of Agrona's manifestations. In an instant, a dozen of his cloud forms ignited with the amethyst flames of Destruction, burning away to nothing, but all the others slammed back together, constituting into an uninjured Agrona.

At the same time, the ethereal silver-white dragon around Kezess slammed one claw down into the ground, shaking this other-worldly echo of Taegrin Caelum.

I felt the hardening of time around me, like the dragon's claw was pinning me to the ground. For an instant, I hesitated. I was unwilling to be trapped by Kezess's power, but I didn't want to break the spell entirely and give Agrona some way to escape. Through the interwoven branches of my widely spread thoughts, held within the matrix formed by King's Gambit, I lightly touched on the truth of this conflict. Self- preservation won out.

Pushing back against Kezess's aetheric art as I had done before, I shed his aetheric time stop.

Agrona hitched, suddenly still. There was a ripping within the fabric of time, then he was moving-had moved-and then was still again. Agrona was fighting back against the spell, too. But it wasn't only time that was hardening; air and space were condensing into something heavy and tangible. The atmosphere crystallized around him, a slightly pearlescent shell of clear diamond encasing his stuttering form like a sarcophagus. His eyes snapped back into normal motion just as the sarcophagus completely surrounded him.

Seeing him trapped, I went to one knee. My right hand pressed against the clean cut where I'd taken my left arm. It would heal, but it would take time.

As Kezess finally deigned to move, stepping lightly across ground that reformed beneath his feet toward the entrapped Agrona, I channeled and shaped aether out of my core. The sealed armor over my left shoulder opened again, and aether pooled from it, not forming fresh flesh but elongating outward into a purple, lightly glowing facsimile of an arm. I stood and flexed the appendage, working the fingers and rotating the joints. In my head, I could feel it as if it were my own.

It would do until the real thing could grow back.

I stood, carefully watching Agrona and Kezess. The basilisk stared at the dragon from within the crystalline prison. The dragon glowered back.

"For my daughter," Kezess said, his voice quiet but hard as steel. He raised his hand and closed it into a fist.

The crystalline sarcophagus crushed inward like a tin can. The clear, pearlescent rock went crimson in an instant, Agrona's body demolished, his blood and viscera entrapped within.

At the same time, Kezess grunted in pain as a black spike jammed into his ribs, punching through his mana and aether.

He spun, his glower settling on the only thing he could see: me. I could see the calculation running behind his eyes as he determined whether or not I'd been the one to attack him.

Clenching my fist around the handle of the Destruction blade, I shook my head and opened my mouth to answer his unspoken question.

Behind him, the crystal shattered, melting like ice. The blood and gore was gone as if it had never been there, and a dark, amused laugh rang out throughout the pocket dimension.

I suddenly recognized the probing tentacles of void wind and sound mana in my head and realized it was an illusion. I sheared the threads from my mind, then felt along their lengths back to the source. Using the principles of mana cancellation, I agitated the mana with my aether, breaking the spell apart.

A purple pulse rippled through the space, collapsing the illusion, but there was no time to see the result. Erupting from the nova of my pulse, a tornado of black spikes the length of my hand filled the pocket dimension. I ducked my face behind the crook of my aetheric arm, which expanded out like a shield around me, cracking and reforming a hundred times a second as I was pummeled from every direction.

Kezess's mana signature flared, and white light spread across the pocket dimension like paint from a brush. The air stilled. When the light dimmed, the fortress seemed unharmed, all the damage of our battle suddenly undone. The smell of fresh rain and fertile soil lingered, somehow calming. The whirling spikes had faded, and Agrona was standing where he'd been before the fight began.

I honed in all my senses-King's Gambit and Realmheart, my core's sense of aether, and my own eyes, ears, and intuition-on Agrona. It was him; his illusion had been broken.

Agrona was slightly pale and sweating. Opposite him, Kezess was bleeding from the wound in his side. A faint aetheric spell clung to him, suppressing the effects of whatever weakening corruption seeped through his veins.

There was a lull. Agrona, ever unable to stop himself from talking, spoke into the quiet. "Kezess. Kezzy. I've spent centuries preparing for this moment. You don't think I planned on extinguishing the entire dragon race without learning to protect myself against your greatest weapon, do you? Especially after the revelation of Arthur's abilities..." His placid expression darkened, and his focus shifted to me. "As for you, Arthur. You're holding back. Retaining your strength. How long do you think you can keep this up for? It was unwise of you to come in with us. The smart thing would have been to send me in and close the door behind me, leaving us both to fight it out."

Agrona's expression shifted into a wily grin. "You just can't let go, though, can you? Of that hero complex. Had to be here yourself, make sure I was really finished. Do it yourself, if you can." His brows rose. "Well? Can you?"

I answered with a concentrated aether blast from the palm of my transparent, purple hand. There was a low whoosh, then a roar as the cone of violet energy exploded toward him. He flashed back out of its range, then reversed course, flying directly for me, a black blade appearing in his hand.

Behind me, Kezess was concentrating on a building attack. The white- hot pressure of it was so great that I almost missed the small pin-pricks of mana condensing beneath me from my own shadow. Instead of preparing to fend off Agrona's strike, I God Stepped back twenty feet, leaving behind a row of scales from my armor where several needle-thin spikes had thrust up at me. I stepped again, and again, spikes manifesting everywhere I tried to be, gnawing like teeth.

If not for King's Gambit, I never would have avoided them all. Agrona's attacks came too fast for sight or mana-sense alone to detect. My thoughts, my attention, were spread out around me, King's Gambit allowing me to focus on a hundred specific points of minutiae at once.

The silver-white dragon had stepped forward, its wings wrapped around Kezess to ward off any of the spikes that targeted him. He was still standing in the same spot, but his eyes were closed. As I flashed across the space again and again, pushed hard by Agrona's spikes growing from the ground, my own shadow, the very air, Kezess seemed blissfully ignorant.

But no, that wasn't quite right. Pulses of time, speeding up and slowing down rapidly, pushing and pulling at me and Agrona, saved me more than once.

And still, I wasn't quite fast enough.

I had barely appeared, aetheric lightning racing down the exterior of my armor, when a spike pierced the bottom of my foot and punched out the top of my knee. The wound went from agonizing to numb in an instant, my vision swam, and my hold over my godrunes started to slip. Sharp pain blossomed from my hip, chest, and neck. I looked down to find myself run through in several places by thin spikes oozing black ichor.

'Destruction!' Regis bellowed inside of me. 'Burn it out-'

My fuzzy brain's focus drifted to a beam of hot white light that shot up from the center of the wide chamber. Kezess had finished channeling his spell and now reached up toward the ceiling, the beam issuing from his hand. The stonework above and below him was collapsing in a ripple that ran outward. His eyes snapped open, locked on Agrona, and narrowed. His hand came down.

The beam split the fortress in half, like a sword that stretched from the roots of the world into the sky above and blazed with the light and heat of the sun. Even through my catatonia, I felt it scorching my skin. My eyes watered, but I couldn't close them; my face had gone numb. The floor gave way beneath me. I started to fall.

There was a moment when I could see the two halves of the fortress looming over me, divided evenly and slowly separating from one another. Sunlight filtered in from far above through the murky grayness of the pocket dimension's outer barrier. Then the two halves of the castle crashed together like giant stone hands, and the light cut out.

My body spun in the air, and I saw down through hundreds of floors, divided as if the fault lines had shifted and the earth had broken open, leaving behind a dark void. I was falling into that emptiness, no longer able to control my body or my magic.

Shadows wrapped around me, and my descent slowed. It was dark except for a flickering purple light. The light grew stronger, and I was aware of flames spreading across me. Between one halting breath and the next, the numbness was burned away and replaced with pain.

I screamed.

Destruction. Violet fire was in my blood. I was being consumed from the inside out.

The pain receded, and I sucked in a gasping, choked breath as aether rushed to heal my ruined circulatory system. My vision was distorted, my thoughts sluggish and confused.

"Easy, princess, take it easy," a familiar voice was muttering from above me.

I bobbed up and down in the darkness as my senses returned.

Crashing and explosions came from above, and more rubble tumbled past us.

I felt Regis's mind probe mine, trying to determine if I was going to be okay. In the absence of King's Gambit, which had fallen away like most of my other channeled godrunes, it was easier for him to be in my head.

I immediately flailed mentally, grabbing hold of thoughts I couldn't be thinking and pushing them down into darkness.

"Whoa, easy there, princess, it's just me," he said warily, pulling back slightly. It was an awkward motion, considering he was holding me up.

I cleared my throat, wiped blood from my eyes, and took over my own flight, pulling out of his grip. He had taken on his Destruction form, and his thick wings were beating swiftly to keep him hovering. Dark rock surrounded us on all four sides and above us. The void extended below. Every couple of seconds, the walls and ceiling shook.

"I had to burn Agrona's poison out of you," Regis explained as my brain healed and my thoughts rushed to catch up. "The ceiling grew back in over us."

Pushing aether into Realmheart, I searched for Kezess and Agrona, expecting to feel their battle high above.

Instead, I felt nothing. Even without King's Gambit active, I could guess that Agrona had pushed us off into a corner of the pocket dimension and folded it in around us.

I could also guess it was some kind of trap. Slowly, testing my capabilities after having Destruction moving through my veins-those for blood and mana both-I sent fresh aether down into King's Gambit as well. My mind ignited with thought and possibility as the crown glowed from my brow. "He wants me to punch a hole back into the rest of the isolated space. The pocket dimension will rip, and he'll use that to escape and try to trap Kezzess and me back inside."

"Would that work?" Regis asked, Destruction flickering between his teeth.

I could only shrug, causing my body to bob up and down in the void. "If I'd have known for sure I could have trapped them both in here until they rotted, I'd have done it. But this is Agrona's creation. He understands it better than I do."

Besides, I thought to myself, separately from my connection to Regis, if my visions from the last keystone unfold as I had them, I wouldn't be able to hold the pocket dimension closed much longer anyway.

Briefly, I prodded the boundaries of the pocket dimension with my new spatium godrune. Then aether pushed into Aroa's Requiem. A gentle golden light splashed through the angry violet light of Regis's flames, and the godrune's particles flowed along my arm and out into empty space, congregating along the walls and ceiling. It took some time.

The stone seemed to crumble, as if the motes were ten thousand insects eating away at it. The crashing and impact of battle grew louder, the walls quaking more violently. Broken, half-formed floors rippled down the walls, and the ceiling broke open, sealed over, and broke again rapidly. Although we weren't moving, it suddenly looked as if we were shooting up through the ruined roots of Taegrin Caelum.

The walls and ceiling melted away, and I was again standing on the cracked but whole floor of the reliquary chamber where the battle had started. No sign remained of Kezess's catastrophic attack, the Worldeater-like technique that had demolished the entirety of this false fortress. Instead, huge black spikes stabbed from floor to ceiling like angled pillars, and a corner of the chamber had dissolved into what looked like black lava. Glowing white beads filled the air like pollen, and the instant I appeared, those closest pulled quickly away.

I felt instinctively that I should not touch the beads, which radiated Kezess's killing intent.

"Oh Arthur, so consistently do you manage to simultaneously disappoint and impress," Agrona said from my right. His arms were crossed, his face slashed through with a wry sneer. But his entire left half was blackened as if badly burned, both his skin and the once-white armor.

Kezess stood on my left. He still stood casually, the air around him humming. But the silvery white aspect of the dragon seemed more distant, less distinct, and he had two more small wounds that seemed to have bled quite badly. Faded black veins snaked up his neck and across his cheek, and his skin had a tinge of sickly green coloration around the veins' edges.

It was easier to sense their respective mana signatures now. It must have taken me longer to get back than I'd realized, as both asuras felt depleted, as if their fight had raged on for days. But then, as another branch of my thoughts noted, there was little mana or aether for either to draw from within the pocket dimension. The prison itself was starving them, speeding their growing weakness. For all Agrona's bravado about this being his domain, he didn't appear to be faring any better than Kezess.

I rolled my aching, severed shoulder, concentrating on reforming the aetheric arm. My own reservoir, contained within the four-layer core, was significant but not infinite. Still, the asuras' focus on each other meant I was holding my own, as I had intended.

Regis moved between me and Agrona, his flames snapping in a jagged, unnatural way.

"Do you plan for us to keep up this fight for all time, Agrona?" Kezess asked, his voice breathy and cut through with an edge of pain. "Two immortals locked inside a pocket dimension, battling for the rest of eternity?"

Agrona chuckled, shaking his head at Kezess. "You may be older than the dirt that forms Epheotus, but you're no immortal. In fact, you're quite capable of dying!"

He raised his arms suddenly. Jagged black lines formed a wall between him and us, evaporating the white spots wherever they touched. The same jagged energy jumped from the wall to one of the pillars, which branched off to two more, each of which continued to others. The white motes flew to the jagged black lines, hissing and popping as the two forces collided.

I reached for God Step, but the pathways cut off wherever they would pass one of the lines. Seeing it like that, though, I realized the dark energy, jumping from pillar to pillar, wasn't random, but formed the shape of a rune.

My eyes widened, and I stepped into the aetheric pathways, but I did not step back out immediately.

The pressure was incredible, crushing, impossible. I was being condensed into my essence, and with a flash, I knew that if I stayed any longer, I would share Bairon's fate, my aetheric essence squeezed from my body and drawn back into the void.

Reaching, falling, climbing, flying for the nearest connective point, I stumbled back into the room, sweat pouring down my face.

The blood iron pillars had shattered, the white motes vanished, and Agrona was now standing in front of Kezess, who had fallen to one knee. Agrona placed a hand on the top of Kezess's head, then turned to look as he felt me reappear. "Interesting to note that this pocket dimension bleeds into the aetheric realm, although I suppose the importance of that little discovery won't matter much for very long. Still, if killing you doesn't release me, maybe I can slip out that way."

I ignored him, focusing on Kezess as I shook off the hangover of my near-death. A brand stood out dark and bloody on the side of Kezess's neck in the shape of the rune that had been drawn between the pillars. I didn't fully understand the magic Agrona had just used, but I could read the rune's power well enough. Although more complex, it was clearly similar to the runes used on mana suppression cuffs.

Kezess's eyes met mine. Despite the magic trapping his power inside him and his subservient pose, they were full of command.

"Now, Arthur," Agrona began, patting Kezess on the top of the head like a child or a pet. "You can do this the easy way and release me, or I can gut you and splash around in your entrails until your spell wears off. What's it going to-"

God Step brought me between Kezess and Agrona. I pressed my good hand against Kezess's neck and raised the aetheric arm toward Agrona's face, unleashing another blast of aether. Agrona's hand clamped down on my own, twisting it away so the blast only rolled off his already burned side. His other hand flashed up a dagger that bisected my wrist, reversed, and drove down toward my neck.

With one branch of my consciousness, I pushed aether into Aroa's Requiem. With another, I reinforced my aetheric barrier and armor. With yet another, I reformed the conjured hand that had just been separated, all while calculating the trajectory of Agrona's lightning-fast strike.

I dipped my shoulder and leaned away about an inch. The black blade skated across the surface of the armor, shedding a couple of scales but drawing no blood. Destruction-wreathed jaws closed around Agrona's shoulder, and Regis, his Destruction form towering over Agrona, tried to drag the asura back.

Bright motes from the godrune danced along the brand in Kezess's flesh. There was no room to second guess if I could do it. I knew the only limit to the godrune's capabilities was my own insight. I knew that Agrona had formed and transferred this unnatural mark onto Kezess's neck, and that it hadn't been there only a moment before. I told myself that I knew this was enough to reverse it.

The motes sank into the brand, turning back time itself on the mana that formed it.

Behind me, Agrona seemed to melt into smoke and shadow for an instant, flowing out of Regis's grip. Dark wings spread out behind Agrona. When they flapped, a black wind gusted from them, sending Regis tumbling away like a leaf in a hurricane.

Pure, bright white light spilled out of Kezess, shot through with jagged, angry veins of violet. Where the light touched Agrona, fissures spread across his flesh and armor. The dark wings disintegrated. He held up a hand to cover his eyes.

I conjured an aetheric blade and tried to lunge, but the dark wings exploded back into being, two curved, black shapes against a backdrop of white. The wings stabbed forward, and I was momentarily crushed between the opposing light and darkness.

I felt more than saw the castle shatter around us. We existed in a sphere of emptiness, nothing within but the imperfect balance of light and dark-

Reality crashed back in. I was on my knees, wrapped in a sheath of protective aether. My armor was a tattered shambles. A thousand small cuts wept fine trails of blood all across my body.

Ahead of me, Agrona sagged. Behind me, Kezess swelled.

The incorporeal dragon aspect manifested and lunged, catching one of Agrona's dark wings in its jaws and rending it. Agrona flicked out the wrist still holding the dagger, and it jumped from his fingers and exploded outward into a thousand identical blades.

Reaching for God Step and the spatium rune, I ripped open an aetheric path and simultaneously folded space, redirecting it. The wall of daggers vanished into the space, then rained down on Agrona from above. Wherever they touched him, they melted harmlessly back into his body.

Kezess took a step forward, and the ethereal dragon pounced, huge silver-white claws grabbing Agrona by the shoulders and slamming him to the ground. Kezess took a second step, and the dragon opened its mouth and breathed a beam of pure mana that swallowed Agrona's figure. I raised my conjured hand, looking through it to dim the blinding light.

Within the heart of the blaze, a woman squirmed. She was of middle age, with light blonde hair and golden markings down her face. I'd seen her portrait hanging in Indrath's castle.

Her eyes widened and she screamed, a gut-wrenching noise that made bile rise up in the back of my throat. "Father, please! Enough, Father! You're killing me..."

Kezess's face twisted into a mask of rage, and he leaned forward. The dragon surged downward, its maw closing around the image of Sylvia, shattering the floor yet again and sinking into the crater. Kezess gasped, blinking rapidly, and tried to pull back, reeling in his power, but black chains had wrapped around the dragon and were pulling it down farther and farther into the crater.

Kezess pressed a hand to his chest, his eyes widening with a fear and pain I had never seen in them before. King's Gambit connected several dots for me. Grimacing, I jumped into the crater, following the dragon and Agrona down.

A shadow appeared above me, and Regis dissolved into incorporeality and passed through my skin and into my core. Laughter echoed through the fortress ruins, and we plummeted.

The walls shattered as we fell, the broken pieces turning into spears of burning blood iron and driving into the transparent dragon's body. The manifestation's power was being sapped, draining away the farther we fell and the more wounds it took.

I could see the mana and aether streaming back up to Kezess as he struggled to retract his power. So much of it was contained within this manifestation. Without it, he would be no match for Agrona.

Below me, the dragon fought against the chains, writhing, gnashing, and clawing at the shadow of Agrona beneath it. Its breath sprayed futilely around us.

Then, in the heartbeat between two gouts of pure mana, I felt the twin stream of mana being pulled down, away from Kezess and into Agrona. He was absorbing Kezess's mana, empowering himself while weakening Kezess.

With my hand of aether, I reached for the tether between Kezess and his manifested draconic aspect. As I'd done with the golden threads previously, I honed the edges of my fingers and snipped the tether. A cry of pain echoed down the crater from above, and the dragon melted away into raw mana that swirled and eddied as it quickly disbursed. Agrona blinked in surprise.

A dozen aether blades formed in the air all around me, each one controlled by a single facet of King's Gambit. The blades spun, sliced, and struck in perfect concert. Spikes of blood iron, shields of condensed void wind, and lashes of soulfire whirled around Agrona, deflecting the blows with equal precision.

In that instant of distraction, I folded space below him.

He hit it at full speed before even recognizing that it was there. The impact shattered the folded space, and the entire pocket dimension quaked as if it might implode. The shattered fortress began to fall along with us, and all became dust.

I wasn't entirely sure when our momentum stopped. We didn't land, we just stopped falling. I swept a hand through the air, warping space so that the dust was no longer in the air around us.

Agrona lay on the ground, his head bleeding. He was propped up on one elbow, glaring at me through bloodshot eyes. Opposite him, Kezess was on one knee, a hand resting on the other, his body trembling slightly. The pocket dimension smelled like ozone from all the power that had been extinguished here.

I stood above the two exhausted god-kings as if they'd been forced to bow down before me. The irony was palpable. I had to bite back the urge to tell them so, to rail against their crimes, to smuggly rub their collective failures in their faces, to point out every place they'd made their mistakes. My thoughts, unfolding in an instant due to King's Gambit, followed the same path as when we'd first entered the pocket dimension.

To my left, Agrona. He'd brought me to this world to anchor Cecilia's eventual reincarnation, prematurely ending my time on Earth. He'd weaponized my home, my family, and my friends against me. His impact on my life was one of constant torment. But he was the reason I had my family, my bond with Sylvie. I'd barely woken up in this world before I knew what it really was: a second chance. One that I had because of Agrona's actions.

To my right, Kezess. He'd twisted this world-my home-for his own cruel intentions, withdrawing his own people-his family-to a safe place while he built up and crushed civilization after civilization on the world he'd left behind. He was constant, safely in power, never truly questioned or challenged. He kept his world in a controlled stasis, a status quo that never changed, an existence so stable that his people couldn't change even if they needed to in order to survive.

Agrona chuckled. The form lying on the ground melted away, revealing him to be standing just a few feet away from the illusion. "Why do you hesitate, boy?" He glanced past me to where Kezess was standing shakily. "Trying to decide which one of us to kill first?" Before I could answer, he pressed on. "That was a clever trick, cutting away so much of Kezess's power. Was that your plan to begin with, or just a fortunate opportunity for you? Clever, but a bit obvious. Let us weaken each other and look for a place and time to cut our legs out from under us. Don't bother denying it. I can see your true thoughts about him clearly in your mind now, Arthur. You've let your control slip, my boy."

I snorted derisively.

"Foolish," Kezess muttered. Frowning, I half turned to glance at him but kept one eye on Agrona. He glared at me. "I always knew your brand of short-sighted altruism would make it unlikely you would ever truly see it my way. When all was over, I expected to have to eliminate you and your family, assuming any of you survived this. Still, you've done a valiant job of hiding your true intentions until now. Perhaps I even carried some small hope that we really could work together in the future. But you never planned to do so, did you?"

My face fell, and I began backing up so as not to be directly between the two asuras. I considered denying it, attempting to salvage my relationship with Kezess just long enough to finish this. But I'd been holding the lie of our alliance for so long, never acknowledging my true intentions even in my own thoughts, that I simply couldn't keep it up any longer. I knew what it would mean, but the sharp smile forming on my face told me I was ready.

"No. I didn't."

Kezess brushed himself off with a sneer, then looked at Agrona. Agrona smirked back at him. Both asuran lords, leaders of their clans and races, perhaps the two most powerful beings in this world, turned on me.

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