Chapter 521: Peace In Your Own

Chapter 521: Peace In Your Own

The gray light of the pocket dimension was swallowed by darkness.

Mana oozed through the black, obscuring Realmheart’s senses like a fog, and all signs of Kezess or Agrona vanished.

Wind rushed into my ears. Aether—not my own—settled heavy on my limbs, deadening all physical sensation. For a moment, I was back in the empty, formless waste from my first fall into the Relictombs, almost like I didn’t have a body at all. Only the bitter, acrid smell and taste of corruption remained among all my senses.

Something hit me in the chest, and I flew backwards. It happened so hard and so fast that I was already smashing through distant walls before the sensation of pain traveled from my body to my brain. Stars exploded in my vision on top of the darkness.

I sluggishly activated God Step. The network of connective tissue within the pocket dimension lit up in my vision, and I tumbled backwards through one point just to come spinning from another. Aetheric swords condensed around me in a circle, swinging in every direction. Like antennae, the blades extended my awareness just that much farther, and I felt them strike home. The iron scent of blood tinged the air.

The rushing wind still deafening me sharpened, and I sank to a knee. Even with my flesh numb from the pressing aether, I felt the rush of death cut just over my head, felt the subtle tug of my hair as a few strands were sheared free of my scalp. My own blades whirled like a cyclone around me. Through my hands and the soles of my feet pressed against the floor, I felt the trembling of an approaching great weight. I leaned forward, passing into the aetheric paths again.

The interconnected points revealed by God Step were easy to see and follow, but their relation to the physical space within the pocket dimension was almost meaningless. Still, I could make out the distant edges of the large bubble containing us, and though the relativity of space in a traditional sense was nearly nonexistent inside the pocket dimension, this gave me some small sense of where we were.

I flashed through God Step again, then again, each time to a specific location within the pocket dimension as I bought myself a moment to think.

Agrona and Kezess had both done the math on this fight, they’d just taken longer to get the same answer I’d known for weeks. I was too dangerous to them both now. As Seris had planned long ago, the two god-kings had seen each other as the greater threat, and had pushed themselves to the extreme in order to end this fight quickly.

But the math had shifted. Kezess and Agrona both knew that if they continued to fight each other, in the end I would kill the victor. I had to. There was no choice. I could not save the peoples of Dicathen, Alacrya, and Epheotus if either Agrona or Kezess survived. And so they would destroy me first. Each of them thought they could then defeat the other when I was dead.

Clearly, only one of us three could be right.

God Step brought me to the very center point of the pocket dimension’s sphere. Within the obstructing magic, both the darkness and the smothering mana and aether, there was a weave of magic. As I’d flashed around the chamber, I had also been feeling out the orientation of the spells, searching for their origination point. Kezess, in particular, was not perfectly adept at making himself disappear, and his aetheric manipulation left clear signs within the clouded atmosphere.

Wielding aether like a scalpel, I tried to surgically cut the strings of the spells, canceling them. Agrona’s response was immediate and just as subtle, countering by reallocating the suffocating mana, the spell sliding past my efforts like an incoming wake over the rocks. I shifted again, and his spell changed in response, but the darkness curled visibly with the effort, and for an instant I saw a white-silver dragon bearing down, and felt the wind all around me take on cutting edges.

I God Stepped away, but Regis remained behind. Through our link, I felt him ignite with Destruction. He dodged around the dragon’s claws, not trying to strike back. Instead, he spilled Destruction out over the floor and into the air, a flame in the heart of the spell.

Following the weave of the magic through the aetheric pathways, I cut at the strings of Agrona’s power, dodged the flowering blood iron spikes, torrents of pure mana, and scythes of void wind that chased me, then flashed away again. With each strike, Agrona adjusted, but his hold over the obscuring darkness was slipping. The hurricane roar grew quieter with each God Step, and the blackness became more a gray cloud.

“Enough of this darkness!” Kezess roared, and there was a terrible rending noise. The fading gray ripped like a curtain and fluttered to the ground, where it sank between the stones like oily smoke.

Destruction was billowing outward from the center of our battleground. Stone, air, mana, and aether were all burning as Regis focused all his strength into pouring Destruction out. Without the darkness to consume, it now rushed in a blaze, reaching for the ceiling and spilling down into the lower levels. Entire portions of the fortress were crumbling.

The edge of the conflagration suddenly went still. Like wind sweeping through grass, the violet fires all flickered back toward me, freezing in a wave aimed at me.

Reaching out with my own aether, I drove my power into his and attempted to break it.

A dark shadow stabbed at my eyes, and spikes of pain stabbed into my head. My thoughts went blank as King’s Gambit, trembling, magnified the sensation over and over again. Like a steel-gauntleted fist, time constricted around me.

My aether was frozen in my channels. I couldn’t react, couldn’t fight back against the aether art that held me.

The scene seemed to jump forward, and my head swam.

Agrona stood directly in front of me, a blood iron dagger embedded in my sternum. I came to just as the tip slid off the hardened surface of my core. Behind Agrona, Destruction raged, violet flames racing to consume the entire pocket dimension, which trembled against my consciousness.

Grabbing his wrist in my conjured left hand, I struck Agrona in the throat, stepped in and drove my elbow into his face, wrapped a leg behind his, and tossed him to the ground, his arm twisting unnaturally in my grip. His fingers spasmed, releasing the blade, which I then ripped out and slammed into the back of his head.

The blood iron melted away before the blow could fall, but his face still rebounded off the ground with a violent crack. I raised the arm again, and an aetheric sword formed in it, short and perfect for thrusting. I drove it down, but a clawed hand of wind and shadow reached out of Agrona’s shoulder and caught my arm.

I twisted the blade to slice along the back of the shadow limb, but the world twisted, and I found myself on my back, looking up at the three-armed Agrona. With one hand pinning my sword arm and a forearm pressed to my throat, his spectral, shadowy limb plunged into the wound in my sternum.

Pain, hot and sudden, burned from within my chest. I responded with a point blank Burst Strike at Agrona’s solar plexus. Power welled up and ruptured between us, and he was tossed off me. I fell backward into God Step, reappearing at the center of the space beside Regis as a sickly, burning pain clutched at my core.

I wasn’t healing, and my core had taken a direct strike.

Sensing my dismay, Regis gave a last push with Destruction, faded into incorporeality, and wisped through my skin to my core.

‘Ugh, gross,’ he bemoaned before igniting inside me, burning away the corruption and allowing my aether to heal my flesh. ‘Core looks fine though.’

There was an ear-splitting crash, and my gaze snapped upward: the fortress was collapsing, unable to sustain itself with so much devoured by Destruction. Black-lined wind pulled at the brickwork, aiming the falling stones toward me.

I pulled the aether close around me as half of Taegrin Caelum came down on my head. The avalanche roar battered my eardrums. Dust filled my lungs and stung my eyes. With my conjured aetheric arm over my head, I opened the floodgates of my core and pushed everything I could into the barrier as tons upon tons of stone struck me from above, waiting, searching—and then God Stepped away, appearing above the last of the toppling ruins.

A sickly vibration ran through me as the earlier waves of Destruction continued to spread, now climbing up the walls of the pocket dimension. For an instant, I thought Destruction might swallow the entire space, consuming Agrona and Kezess as one, but the cold realization of the truth came quickly after: Destruction would crack the very walls between this reality and the outside world, spilling this fight into the real Taegrin Caelum in waves of amethyst fire.

Regis cut off the flow. All around us, the bright violet light of hungry flames died.

The collapse stopped. I found myself standing on solid ground again, although the air was thickly choked with dust. Agrona’s and Kezess’s mana signatures stood out like beacons in the absence of Destruction.

The dust whipped around, disturbed by silver-white wings. I had an instant to recognize that the fortress had yet again reformed around me before I stepped into the aetheric pathways. I appeared behind Kezess but vanished again immediately, reappearing in front of him even as he twisted, a long golden sword in his hand.

My own aetheric blade thrust for his exposed ribs, but the lord of the asuras was fast. His sword thrust into the space I had just vacated, but his empty hand spun backwards, driving through my own weapon.

The sword dissolved as my control over it was wrenched away from me. I stumbled in surprise, and the golden blade shifted from his right hand to his left with an aetheric crackle. I caught the ensuing strike on the back of my left arm, but another blade struck my hip, this one from behind, Agrona’s killing intent suddenly looming at my back.

A new sword condensed into my right hand, extending back in a reverse grip. I swept it backwards at Agrona as Regis imbued it again, the blade rolling with flames of Destruction.

The weapon swept through empty air.

My conjured left fist was wrapped around Kezess’s golden blade, but as he twisted it, the arm shattered just as my weapon had done. He brought the sword back in a blade-dancer’s stance, and as he thrust forward again, the draconic manifestation reared around him and pounced, its enormous claws descending on me.

I reached for God Step. Kezess squeezed time and space, attempting to hold me there. Expecting it this time, I ripped through with a growl and vanished into the aetheric pathways, appearing on the opposite side of the pocket dimension wreathed in aetheric lightning.

I was on the defensive. Kezess’s raw power was expected, but this ability to disrupt my aetheric formations was not. As long as I wasn’t caught off guard by his time manipulation, I could withhold his most potent ability, and neither Kezess nor Agrona had an insurmountable answer for Destruction. So long as Regis didn’t rely too much on his own physical form—and thus his own reservoir—but stayed within me or my sword, he shouldn’t exhaust his aether, which was much more limited than mine.

It also became clear the pair of god-kings suffered from an inability to work together. Whether outright refusal, a natural incompatibility, or a failure of strategic effort, I knew this might be my saving grace in the end. It was only a matter of keeping King’s Gambit trained on their attacks and looking for a way to turn this self-sabotage against them.

As I stepped back out into the battlefield, my hip flared with pain. There was a gash in the armor there, and a shallow wound beneath. Black flames burned within the wound. I reached for it with a newly conjured arm, but there was no time to address the soulfire.

The silver-white dragon manifestation was waiting for me, and a gout of pure mana sprayed down over me. I leaned into the attack aggressively, reversing Kezess’s tricks. He was able to dispel my aetheric magic to some degree, but I could do the same to his mana. Within the heart of the blaze, there was the formation of a spell, mana formed into intent. Wielding aether like a pair of gloves, I ripped the root out of his spell and reshaped it.

Atmospheric mana bled into the reconstituted pure mana, and four swords took shape, hovering around me: one each of wind, fire, earth, and lightning.

When I sensed Decay-type mana forming beneath me, I projected aether into it and did the same, breaking the bond between the native Decay of Agrona’s influence and the mana itself. Instead of black spikes shooting up from the ground, a wall of stone rose to protect my back.

I slashed behind me, around the wall, with the burning blade. The wispy, curved edge of wind hacked at Kezess’s hip, while the gleaming obsidian longsword thrust where I expected his throat to be as he dodged. The crackling yellow lightning blade exploded, echoes of it burning into my retinas even though I’d closed my eyes.

Kezess sidestepped the first attack, and his golden blade came up to shatter my earthen one. The sword of fire came back around, having found no target behind me, and fell like a guillotine toward Kezess’s neck. When he parried it, the fire was swallowed into his golden weapon.

The dragon, its breath turned against Kezess, melted into light and flashed back to him. He reabsorbed it, his signature becoming suddenly stronger, more concentrated.

The wall of stone shattered, and I turned my back on Kezess to catch Agrona’s wrist as he repeated the same maneuver that had wounded me previously. His dagger was a few inches from my side. Aether wrapped around my fist, and I struck out, but he twisted away, slipping from my grip as if he were covered in oil. He dodged left and right simultaneously, again displaying echoing copies of himself at each step.

I could sense Kezess’s physical form strengthening as mana and aether were focused into his muscles, a sign he was conserving his remaining strength. A physical battle like a sword fight would require less energy than continuing to throw around magic that could topple all of Taegrin Caelum.

I slammed down my will through the spatium rune, hardening space into a dividing barrier that intersected Agrona’s path and briefly cut us off from Kezess. There was a crash, space twisted, and for an instant there were two Agrona’s, one to my left, one to my right, both reeling. I channeled God Step and prepared to thrust the Destruction blade through both images of Agrona, but the wound at my hip gave a jolt of burning agony as the soulfire pushed deeper into my system. Regis instinctively retracted from the blade, flowing down into my body to fight off Agrona’s soulfire.

I thrust the blade of my aetheric sword into the interconnected network of spatial nodes, and two lengths of it plunged out of the Agronas as they lurched back together. Agrona was instantly standing back where he’d started, as if reality had snapped back into place. A smooth cut marred his armor at his left side and right shoulder, blood flowing freely from within.

Grimacing, he opened his mouth. No sound came out, but my vision blurred and disorienting pain stabbed into my eardrums. My throat constricted. Trembling knees threatened to drop me to the ground.

Even as my eyes rolled back into my head, I found the waves of mana emanating from them and pulled out the Decay, like ripping up a weed by its root. The air lit with jagged fissures of yellow lightning. As the wall of condensed space cracked and gave way to Kezess’s blade behind me, I flung the lightning over my head to crash down all around him.

The tether connecting Agrona to his soulfire snapped as Regis burned the consuming flames from my body with his own waves of Destruction. Black fire was also burning through Agrona’s wounds, sealing them.

Kezess did not rush, but approached slowly. Giving me time to further weaken the isolated Agrona, I theorized. Agrona himself paced side to side like a caged animal, expression almost bestial, as he waited for his wounds to heal.

I let the moment linger as I considered the problem of my aetheric weapons.

Kezess had shown himself more than capable of dismissing my conjured weapons at exactly the wrong moments. I couldn’t fight with a weapon I did not entirely control. Though I’d not had a reason to utilize the principles of mana manipulation in combat since forming my aether core, the lessons of my life before the Relictombs—from my mother and father, Virion, the professors at Xyrus Academy, the Lances, Elders Hester, Bund, and Camus, and so many others—jumped easily to my mind. By breaking down the spells thrown at me by Kezess and Agrona, I could supplement and distract from the problem of my aether blade and the fact I couldn’t go all out with Destruction.

Still, I needed a weapon.

The spatium godrune activated, forming a shard of condensed space in my fist. Jet black and impenetrable, the “weapon” was weightless in my grip. In fact, I used my hand only to help guide my mind in its shape, like a mage mumbling a chant. The shape was held and moved through my will and the godrune alone.

Agrona’s wrists twisted, and a jagged dagger of blood iron formed in each fist. With a whoosh of concentrated mana, he lunged forward, nothing but a shadowy streak. Gripping my weapon with both hands, I caught one of his blades, stepped back, parried the second blade, cut at his throat with a short punching swipe, sidestepped two more strikes, then blocked a thrust from Kezess and diverted the attack toward Agrona, interrupting a slash of a dagger.

But my concentration slipped as holding and maneuvering the blade proved difficult. The spatium unraveled in my hands. Agrona flicked out with two black daggers, which flew through the air in a curving motion. I unleashed an aetheric blast, shattering both weapons, then pulled free the mana, molded bullets of granite, and flung them in an arc around me.

Weaponless, I lunged forward as if to follow up this attack with my bare hands, but God Stepped just to the other side of my opponents, appearing with a newly conjured spatium sword swinging down on Kezess’s shoulder. He tossed up a gleaming white shield of mana, but the spatium blade sliced through as if the shield were made of tissue. Kezess dodged at the last second, his grace momentarily leaving him as a flicker of fear passed over his features.

The blade came apart again, and my mind began to race.

The spatium blade was too high-concept, too untethered from reality. Perhaps with time, I would learn to hold the shape, but time was something I didn’t have.

Kezess’s golden blade leapt into the gap, and it was my turn to dodge out of the way. There was a burst of mana from the end, but a quick slash of aether disrupted the spell. I quickly reformed it into a fine spray of water that misted around him before flash freezing against his skin.

Expecting Agrona’s sneak attack, I was already moving, stealing some of his momentum as he shot toward me, his blades swiping through empty air. I let off an aetheric blast of aether into his face, but he took it head on and kept coming, flipping a dagger around and driving it at the side of my neck. I reached for God Step, but there was a cascading ripple of aether from where Kezess had broken free of the ice, and I lost a step. Jerking aside, I took the dagger in the shoulder instead. Soulfire blazed in the wound, racing inward through my channels only for Regis to burn it away.

Victory blazed in Agrona’s eyes as he brought a second dagger up under my chin. His vindictive, grimacing smile melted into rage and pain an instant later as my leg snapped out in a Burst Strike, exploding into the side of his knee with the full force of dozens of aetheric discharges through my own legs and hips.

He collapsed to a knee, and I raised my hands, not using the spatium rune but instead channeling aether, which flowed into the shape of a sword that instantly ignited with Destruction. If I couldn’t hold my concentration on the spatium blade, perhaps at least the Destruction would ward off Kezess’s ability to disrupt my aetheric sword. With it, I swung at the back of Agrona’s neck. Immediately, the rending force of Kezess’s aetheric cancelation struck. Regis tightened his hold over the shape as the blade arced through the air, a jagged fag of Destruction flickering behind it.

Regis, coiled so tightly within the shape of the Destruction sword, sent up a flash of panic as his hold over the aether in which he was imbued gave way.

Gouts of violet flame splashed across my face and arms as I was thrown away from Agrona. White-hot pain engulfed me, and the psychic backlash of Regis’s existential terror was like knives in my brain. He had been sundered into a thousand disconnected pieces, his living spirit burning within the little pockets of flame all over the battlefield.

Time seemed frozen as my King’s Gambit-fractured mind tried to focus on a hundred details at once. From where I had been thrown by the explosion, I could just make out Agrona, fifty feet away, writhing on the ground. Kezess stood farther back, untouched by the nova of Destruction. I knew for certain the bastard had planned for that, weaponizing my own abilities to deliver a potentially fatal blow to both me and Agrona at the same time.

I hardly cared in that instant, however, as I tried to steer my focus to Regis—or rather, the bits of him that I could still sense.

Echoes of his pain and fear were coming to me from every direction, but most strongly from the Destruction consuming my flesh and armor even as I lay there. Without him, though, I couldn’t use the Destruction rune, couldn’t—

Hope beat in my chest along with my racing heart. Regis had, what seemed like a lifetime ago, taken the godrune in order to save me from burning myself out with it. If he was still here, then the godrune was too.

Aether oozed out of me and into the fire clinging to my body. I plunged it into the flames, experiencing a flash of Regis’s awareness before the energy was unmade. That awareness clawed back at me in answer, pushing something. Desperate, I took it, and the aether retracted, pulling inside me, bringing the bounty back within my physical form.

And I felt it. The godrune, a symbol of insight, first mine, then Regis’s, then shared between us. It was housed within a fractured piece of my companion, less than a wisp of self-directed aether.

Making an educated guess, I absorbed the aether. The Destruction godrune came with it.

Time rushed forward. I barely threw up my conjured arm to catch the descending golden blade. There was a crack like thunder, my aether trembled, and then the arm collapsed. The sword drove through my armor and in between my ribs. I felt its point strike the stone beneath me. Light radiated from the blade, brightening me from within, Kezess’s mana steaming out through my skin.

I fought back, taking the mana, unbinding it and remaking it into something else through the intermediary of my own aether. It spilled through my pores as steam that clung to his skin, superheating in a flash before blowing away, expelled by his greater control.

But it was only a distraction. Internally, I was clawing for the Destruction godrune, reaching for that control. My body ached as the rune burned against my back, like some part of it was still trying to pull me apart. Suddenly, all the Destruction still consuming the pocket dimension was clear in my mind. I could feed it, fanning the flames, or I could freeze it, pushing it toward my enemies.

Instead, I drew it in, summoning all that Destruction to me. Regis was still alive in the fire, and I needed to—

Kezess’s sword twisted, and aether and mana expanded between my unprotected skin and the relic armor, which burst apart and flew in every different direction. A gasp was wrenched from my throat. My vision fogged, and my core seemed to constrict in my sternum.

I expected bitter or cutting words. I expected a victory speech. Time, anything that would give me time. But Kezess was coldly efficient, and he refused to give me the one thing I needed. Instead, the golden blade was wrenched out of my body, his grip on it adjusted smoothly, and then it was driving back down toward the hollow of my throat.

I reached for God Step, for my blade, for my armor, for my connection to Regis—I reached for it all at once, every branch of King’s Gambit competing for the limited capacity of my physical body. It was like I was falling and grasping for a hand that was too far away. My power slipped through my fingers, and the blade slammed home, passing through me and deep into the floor.

There was no pain…

Kezess, breathing hard, was wide-eyed, his knuckles white around the hilt he was leaning on. A bead of sweat hung from his nose for a second before dropping. I watched as it fell, landing on my shoulder. Or rather, passing through my shoulder to splash on the floor beneath me.

I was slightly shadowy and vaguely incorporeal.

‘Gah!’

Regis’s voice was like a sonic rupture in the meat behind my left eye, and I jerked, curling into a ball, my body moving around and away from the sword as if it weren’t there. Or as if I weren’t.

Violet fire clung to my incorporeal form, wreathing me in Destruction as I stood. I felt Regis not as a small, wispy form hiding within my core, but as a thousand motes spread throughout my body, joining with me, a part of me. The earlier explosion had ripped him apart, and in the desperate aftermath, as I had pulled him together, he had fully melded with me, not only sharing thoughts or even aether, or a godrune, but becoming a singular being.

He had saved me. At the last second, he had transformed me. Now, through the Destruction godrune, I concentrated on holding him in place, keeping the disparate parts within me until he could reconstitute properly.

At the same time, I examined my left hand, which now existed not as a conjured aetheric limb, but a form of pure Destruction.

Kezess took advantage of what he mistook as a distraction to lunge forward, his blade again going for my throat. My hand snapped up and caught it in the middle of its length. Destruction devoured the blade, breaking it in half. The tip continued to burn on the ground between us as Kezess flung the handle away.

Behind him, Agrona was struggling to his feet. The basilisk was badly wounded, his armor burned through in many spots, the flesh beneath not scorched but carved away. Dark fire was flickering at the edges of his wounds, struggling to heal them. One of his horns was missing half of its prongs.

Can you hold this form? I asked Regis, pressing into his mind, worried about how scattered and incomplete he felt.

‘Three shakes,’ he gasped into my mind, his voice a maddening echo. ‘Any more and you’re just…playing with it.’

I took a step toward Kezess. He pushed out with pure mana buttressed with aether, forming a shield between us. When I stepped again, it was into the aetheric passages, appearing instead in front of Agrona. He spit out a curse, and the floor beneath me erupted with black spikes that passed through my incorporeal body and burned away in Destruction.

My hand reached out casually. Destruction-formed fingers parted armor and flesh, then wrapped around his core. His eyes went wide, his pale, blood-flecked lips moving senselessly. I held the core gently as it dissolved, unmade by Destruction. He was dead before his body slumped off my arm.

His body struck broken stones with an air of finality. Lifeless eyes stared up at me accusingly, as if he thought this end somehow unfair.

I turned around to find Kezess, disarmed and at the end of his strength, staring down at Agrona’s body. “So. At long last, Agrona Vritra is dead.” His words were heavy. The first uttered in some time. He shook his head ruefully. “And yet his machinations still threaten an end to everything I have worked for. I thought I would find some peace in his death.”

“Perhaps you will find peace in your own,” I said, my voice distorted by Destruction.

But I didn’t God Step to him as I had Agrona. I could feel Regis’s struggle, the draining of his last strength. To hold the Destruction form any longer would be to take everything from him. To burn him like kindling for a few seconds of more power. And yet, even with the cold logic of King’s Gambit driving me, I did not consider it. He was not just a weapon to swing until it broke.

I pushed the pieces of him out.

In the jumping distortions of my many shadows, a small wolf puppy pooled up from the darkness. I released the Destruction rune, and the flames faded away as I condensed again into flesh and bone. The pain of my physical body returned, my severed left arm gushing blood anew. Aether poured into the wound—and all the others—to begin the work of healing me.

Kezess cocked his head to the side, his gaze lingering on Regis for a moment before searching for his sword. My eyes followed, finding a small, dull piece of hilt, all that remained of the beautiful golden weapon.

I nodded. “You’re still Sylvia’s father and my bond’s grandfather. Arm yourself.”

Snorting in a way that seemed starkly out of character for him, Kezess bent and reclaimed his broken handle. There was a twist of aether, and gold seemed to run from his palm up the hilt to the broken blade, then out into the sword’s original shape. In moments, the weapon was fully repaired. He gazed down at it for a moment before, with a flourish, gesturing with the point toward my own empty hands.

I considered them as well. How many times had I been in this position? Standing opposite the leader of another great nation, the fate of millions resting on the edge of our crossed blades. As a king, I’d fought with a dozen different blades over the years. None of them stood out as special. Here, in this life, though, I’d only ever truly wielded a single blade. Dawn’s Ballad, the pieces of which rested in a fine box inside my extradimensional storage.

Before I’d even had the thought, the various threads of my mind had put the puzzle together. I should have thought of it sooner, but maybe some grace was due. I’d been fighting for my life. Still, it was so obvious now.

My own core was the key.

My storage rune opened at a thought, and the box appeared beside me, held up by condensed aether. The lid opened, and the pieces floated out, circling the box before moving to hover end to end in roughly their natural shape. The spatium godrune shed golden light as I shaped the shard of hardened space around Dawn’s Ballad, using it to concentrate the shape of the blade just as I’d built my aether core around the pieces of my broken mana core.

Kezess’s expression was unreadable. He brought his weapon up in a kind of salute. “May one last death open the way to a better future,” he said somberly.

I gently took hold of Dawn’s Ballad. The gray light caught on the pieces, shedding teal beams through the blade and giving it a translucent glow. I replicated his salute. “My thoughts exactly.”

We moved at the same time. He flashed forward, swinging the longsword like a rapier, the blade a golden blur. I brought Dawn’s Ballad up to catch his blade. Golden sparks flew, and then we’d passed each other. I turned, readying my next strike.

A thin trail of blood ran down the spatium-infused Dawn’s Ballad.

Kezess turned to look at me, again holding only the hilt of a sword. It took a moment before the dense mana and aether released where flesh had already parted. He sagged to the ground, divided cleanly through the center of his core.

I thought of the djinn remnants who had trained me, of Ji-ae. I thought of Haneul and Lady Sae-Areum. And Chul’s father. And then I thought of all those other civilizations Kezess had destroyed. I didn’t think any of them would have wished for his death to be so quick. But to me, his death wasn’t punishment. Like splitting the Legacy away from Cecilia, it had simply been the next necessary step.

The spatium blade unraveled, and the remnants of Dawn’s Ballad floated back into their box before vanishing into my dimensional storage. Then, finally, I released the godrune fully, letting the condensed space around the pocket dimension expand back to normal. The effect within the pocket was immediate. The walls began to dissolve as this space broke down, and I could feel myself being shunted back into the physical world.

Regis limped up beside me, and I bent to lift him. He sagged into my arm. My jaw clenched against the discomfort of space collapsing, and I braced myself.

In the last moment before the pocket dimension failed and we were returned to Taegrin Caelum, Regis cocked his head and gave the two bodies one last, exhausted glance. “Looks like you were the better swordsman…”

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