Lazy Salvation

Braun's roar tore across the battlefield.

"DIE! DIE! DIE!"

His axe came down in savage arcs, each swing a scream of its own.

"COME ON! COME ON!"

"THAT ALL YOU'VE GOT?"

"DIE, YOU FILTHY MONSTERS!"

He swung like a madman, blood and mud spraying from every impact as the Narkals swarmed him from all sides. A claw raked across his shoulder. Another bit into his arm. Yet for every wound he took, three of them went down with him, split apart beneath the crushing weight of his wrath.

He did not slow; he did not yield.

"GET OUT OF MY WAY!"

His voice grew rougher with every breath, and each cry dragged through a throat already filling with blood. The words started coming out more muffled, but still he kept shouting, even as the red in his mouth stole the force from his lungs.

"DIE…! DIE…!"

"COME ON…!"

"COME… AT ME…!"

Just when it threatened to consume him totally, the pressure around him suddenly eased.

Braun's eyes narrowed.

He did not feel relief because that could only mean one thing. A breach.

Somewhere, the line had been broken, and the Narkals had scattered to exploit it. His grip tightened on his axe, knuckles white beneath the blood.

"…Is this the end?"

His voice was barely more than a rasp now.

"I'm sorry, friend… I'm too weak to live up to my title…"

He coughed, blood splattering onto the battlefield.

"But at least… I shall stand until my last breath."

As if his words acted as a summoning, the world changed.

A crushing pressure descended upon the battlefield, so heavy it seemed to force even the frenzy to freeze for a moment.

Braun looked up.

A gigantic magic circle had appeared overhead, vast enough to engulf the sky itself, and from within it, black spears began to fall, one after another. It was a rain of death.

The Narkals were pierced, crushed, and torn apart in an instant, their bodies disappearing beneath the relentless storm of shadow.

Right after, a gentle breeze passed by Braun and every soldier defending the wall, mending their injuries and blowing enough energy into them to stand back up.

The battlefield, moments ago a frenzy of blood and steel, was swallowed by silence.

***

Thud—

Ashen fell to his back, hitting the ground, but before he could even process it, he was engulfed in a hug.

"Ash!!! It's bad, there's a bunch of Narkals attacking! Like millions!!!"

"What?!"

That made him discard whatever nostalgic feelings he was about to immerse himself in and jump up in surprise with Seraphine in tow.

"Let's go!"

He positioned one hand to hold her, and she cooperated by latching onto his neck. When his other hand extended, a certain mischievous spear flew toward it immediately and vibrated twice, as if welcoming him back.

Ashen's grip tightened in return as a greeting, but he did not linger, jumping straight out of the window. He flew through the air before summoning platforms to break his fall and launch himself anew.

In a couple of seconds, he was high enough to see all of the region. He poured mana into his eyes to see what was happening, and what he saw made him involuntarily narrow them.

The demihumans were defending, his lovers were defending, the human army was defending, Sabrina was raining carnage on the monsters from the opposite side, but it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the end of the region named Solmara.

…but that was just a possibility that only existed with his absence. Now that he was here… no land of his was falling.

He raised his hand, and a magic circle materialized on his palm. Seraphine, who was in his embrace, moved in tandem, snaking her lithe fingers across his arm until they interlocked with his open hand, and just as their fingers had, she interlocked their mana and intent.

Ashen's lips moved to summon the most destructive spell he could with his current mana under these conditions.

"

And We rained upon them a rain…and evil was the rain of those who were warned.

So rain upon them, O sky—as it was rained before.

Cast terror into their hearts…strike above their necks… strike every limb.

Let it fall.And there fell from the heavens great stones—

heavy, unyielding—and they cursed the rain that crushed them.So let it descend again.

A rain decreed.A rain remembered.A rain… of death.

"

Intent of destruction and healing melted into each other without conflict under their shared affinity; two opposites linked like lovers despite their contradicting natures, then rained down on the region, each fulfilling its intended purpose.

As he watched the rain of black stone spears deal extinction to the foes that dared encroach upon his territory, Ashen decided it was time to get personally involved.

"I'll go east and support Alice, and you go west with Sabrina, alright?"

"Okay." Seraphine nodded, appearing to agree with the sentiment.

When their feet hit the ground, the couple dashed in opposite directions.

*

The moment his boots found earth on the eastern stretch, he inhaled. Mana filled his lungs alongside the air.

And it did not hurt.

That alone should have been unremarkable. But for a man who had spent the better part of his life feeling that familiar ache deep in his circuits every time mana moved through them, like a dull, grinding friction, like blood forced through wounds that never fully healed… its absence was nothing short of staggering.

He breathed again, deeper this time, confirming the change, and the mana simply… flowed.

'Ahhhh… I'm alive~'

The channels it moved through… he could feel them now in a way he never had before. What he remembered as narrow, grudging pathways had been remade into something else entirely.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Before, his circuits had resembled the tributaries of a dying river, branching, yes, but shallow, their banks worn and cracked from overuse and abuse, always threatening to overflow or run dry depending on what he demanded of them.

Now they were something that defied the same comparison entirely.

If the old circuits were tributaries, these were the ocean trenches from which those tributaries were born. They were immense, unhurried channels, fathomless and unbothered by the volume moving through them. Mana didn't flow so much as it existed within them, as natural as a sea in its own bed.

And at the center of it all, his heart was felt now with a clarity that bordered on eerie. Each beat sent mana cascading outward through those new channels, but instead of dispersing, it gathered and stacked upon itself in layers that kept increasing his maximum capacity in real time.

For one vertiginous moment, the reserve felt bottomless, but he knew that it wasn't. He had moved through the Primordial's ocean of mana once and understood the difference between enormous and infinite.

Regardless, he would take this over his previous state any time of the day.

'So this is what it feels like,' he thought to himself. 'To have a body that doesn't fight back.'

The nearest Gorefiend lunged.

Mel was already moving.

*

The spear left his hand without any of his conscious input because that was simply where it was going. It crossed fifteen meters before the Gorefiend had finished committing to its attack and punched through the bridge of its skull with a sound like a tree splitting in a storm.

Crack—

Ashen called it back with a thought. Mel returned without complaint, shaft slapping his palm, and vibrated once in satisfaction.

"Yeah," he murmured, adjusting his grip. "Me too."

They moved into the horde together.

The spells came between the strikes, pulled from the deep archive that three thousand loops had drilled into him. A crushing gravity formation descended on a cluster of Narkals to his left, compressing them into a block of grotesque meat. Overhead, the magic circle trailed behind him like a faithful cloud of death to finish any creature that he had missed.

A concussive burst scattered a charging mass of Beast-types into the soldiers' range, saving their lives. A needle of condensed mana found the eye socket of a Narkal that had slipped through the formation entirely and was halfway to Alice's position before it even registered the threat.

Every spell he cast, he replenished from Hourvault without breaking stride. The vault fed him and his new circuits accepted the mana with a hunger that surprised even him, drinking it down and converting it without waste, and the old familiar sting of channels when they pushed past their tolerance.

He was, he realised distantly, enjoying himself.

It started as a loosening of his expression. He wasn't becoming more reckless per se. A more apt description would be… contempt.

The spells he reached for stopped being the careful constructs of a man managing resources and started resembling the ones from the Primordial era.

Wider and hungrier, they were cast with the easy extravagance of someone who was convinced that limits simply didn't apply to him.

And in his current state, with those boundless channels drinking in everything he offered and asking for more, that conviction didn't feel entirely wrong.

The furrow between his brows smoothed. The set of his jaw unclenched.

By the time the fifth Demon fell, his expression had gone soft at the edges. He was starting to look… pleased.

*

The Catastrophe noticed.

Of course it did. A creature of that rank didn't endure by being slow to recognise threats, and whatever Ashen had become in the last thirty seconds apparently crossed every internal threshold the ifrit used to assess danger.

It moved, not toward him, but with a command. The thousands of Narkals between them received the unspoken order and redirected, a black tide with new purpose pouring toward his position with the unified will of his demise.

The magic circle above him rotated once, lazily, like a wheel, then it came down.

The rain of black spears hit the redirected horde. Narkals vanished by the thousand, pressed into the earth or pierced clean through, and where the circle's edge caught the Demon-class units shepherding the charge, they simply stopped being.

What reached him were the survivors, those things too stubborn or too large to die cleanly.

Mel handled those.

He walked through them like a man who had done this for a very long time, because he had, and the Spear Harmony that had taken him the better part of a century to forge now operated beneath conscious thought entirely. The strikes came from somewhere below intention.

He was still smiling when the ifrit decided it had seen enough.

FWOOOOSH—

The heat arrived before the fire did, a wall of it that made the air ahead of him shimmer and warp. Then the ifrit opened its maw and the world turned orange.

The first stream that poured from its throat blanked his vision. It crossed the distance between them in less than a second and hit the earth where Ashen had been standing with enough force to crater the ground, sending chunks of scorched rock spinning outward and filling the hollow with melted stone that glowed like a second sun.

Ashen had moved before the heat registered.

Blindstep—

The world froze for 0.4 seconds. He reappeared thirty meters to the left, watching the column of flame continue its path into already-cleared land. He tilted his head and considered the ifrit. Thought, his expression that had no business being as casual as it was.

The Catastrophe was titanic in a way that made everything in the world feel smaller. Its body radiated heat in visible waves that bent the surrounding air into distorted shapes; its lower form was lost in a column of churning fire that turned the earth beneath it to glass. When it moved, the ground shook. When it breathed, the temperature spiked twenty degrees in a single inhale.

It raised one colossal hand and compressed the fire in its palm until the orange turned white, then flung it.

BOOM— BOOM— BOOM—

Three consecutive fireballs, each the size of a building, screamed across the distance in a fan pattern, cutting off the obvious angles of retreat. They hit the earth in succession, shockwaves rolling outward and flattening everything within fifty meters of each impact.

Ashen went up instead of sideways.

He caught the shockwave from the first impact and rode it skyward, then twisted and pushed, Blindstep eating the distance between himself and the second fireball so he passed through the space it had occupied a fraction of a second before it arrived. The third, he simply watched arc overhead while he hung in that half-second of frozen time, close enough to see the individual tongues of white flame churning at its core.

Then he landed, twenty meters closer than he'd been before.

The ifrit considered him. Ashen looked back up at it with a teasing smile.

"Is that all you've got, big guy?"

It obliged.

What came next wasn't a breath or a fireball. The ifrit drew its arms inward, and the fire that comprised the lower half of its body responded; contracting, compressing, folding inward with a sound like the world being crumpled, until all of it, every tongue and tendril of flame, had gathered into a single churning mass at its center.

The temperature spiked so suddenly that the air ignited.

FWOOOOM—

It released everything at once without a singular aim.

The sphere of white-orange annihilation that expanded outward from the ifrit's body was akin to a second sun briefly deciding to exist at ground level, consuming everything in its radius with indifference.

Ashen was inside it.

Blindstep—

He skipped time. The fire consumed the space he'd occupied. He reappeared forty meters back, and even there the heat pressed against him like a prison. His skin reddened at the edges, the moisture in his immediate air vaporising into nothing.

He exhaled slowly.

His circuits were already compensating, weaving mana through his surface layers in a barrier that voided what the fire was trying to do to him.

The ifrit loomed, clearly contemptuous now.

Ashen let it have that.

He turned the spear once in his hand, feeling Mel's awareness hum against his palm, ready for what's to come. He checked the Hourvault. Still sufficient. He checked the magic circle, still rotating. He checked himself.

The something that had been slowly rising through him since the start of the fight had very nearly arrived.

He took five steps backward, putting distance between himself and the ifrit, and the creature read it as retreat and leaned forward in anticipation.

Inhale—

He let go of Mel.

The spear rotated once, blade forward, and settled into the grip of his throwing hand.

Exhale—

{Path Skill Activated: Somatic Autonomy}

The muscles that relaxed with the exhale contracted to their limits. Red veins mapped him like rivers finding their courses.

{Path Skill Activated: Hourvault}

The vault opened inward. Mana flooded his circuits in a single tide, and those vast new channels drank it without flinching, converting it efficiently.

Riven State — Rupture.

The dot ignited at his center and began its circuit, dancing between activated muscles, following the form, building the throw incrementally, each group of fibers pushed to its limit in sequence, the power accumulating until…

The tip whitened.

Blindstep—

"Salvation—"

The line that left his hand crossed the distance in a time too small to name. The air along its path ionised into a tunnel of plasma that screamed and then went silent because sound couldn't keep up.

It struck the ifrit at the center of its compressed mass.

For one full second, nothing happened.

Then the Catastrophe came apart.

From the inside, the white mana at the point of impact spread outward through the fire-form like a fracture through glass, until there was no center left to hold the rest.

The sound arrived afterward. A concussive wave that rolled across the battlefield and hit the walls of Solmara hard enough to rattle the stones in their mortar.

Then silence.

Ashen stood in the scorched earth with one arm still extended in the follow-through.

He flexed his will.

The distant Mel, tumbling beyond the dissipating remains of the ifrit, arrested itself and reversed. The spear crossed the distance back in a clean arc and smacked his palm, returning home.

One Pleased vibration met his palm.

"Yeah," he agreed, and turned toward the wall.

***

He walked back through the aftermath of his own magic circle, stepping between scored earth and scattered remains of a horde that no longer existed in any meaningful sense. Somewhere to his left, Seraphine's contingent was finishing off the surviving stragglers. Somewhere to his right, Alice's automatons were conducting cleanup with their usual impeccable efficiency.

He checked all of this like he was checking the weather.

The something that had been rising through him all fight had arrived. And what looked out through Ashen's golden eyes in its wake was not quite Ashen.

He was smiling by the time he reached the wall. The smile was wide, easy, and a little too bright.

He looked around at the gathered soldiers, the survivors, the commanders. Found Braun first, still standing, impossibly, a ruin of blood and resolve held upright by sheer will. Found Lucia next, her threads finally still, her lazuli eyes turned toward him with an expression he couldn't quite read. Found Alice at her elevated position, pen hanging forgotten between her fingers, nine tails half-furled, watching him with the undivided attention.

The Time Magician spread his arms.

"What's up, folks?" His voice carried the easy magnanimity of a man who expected a very warm reception. "Are you so awed by my majesty that you were rendered speechless? It's okay! I understand. No harm done, hehe…"

"..."

"..."