Ends of Magic

Nathan dropped his gory trophy and whirled around, checking on the Heirs again. He’d fought Kamus for less than thirty seconds, but that was an eternity in high-level combat. He’d also had to retract his aura, leaving the Heirs unprotected against magical attacks from this direction.

He was just in time to catch a gigantic flash of light as Khachi raised his golden hammer to the heavens and blasted the entire battlefield with divine mana. The effect didn’t blind Nathan, but it burned away several patches of darkness that lurked in the air around them. Stella had blown the dust back at some point, and the air was clear for several miles around them.

The visibility let Nathan see that their battle wasn’t the only one. More sparks of battle flashed for miles in both directions, as well as on the ground. More Aleph Questors had survived the battle than Nathan had expected, though a quick survey had them massively outnumbered by the Ashen Accord and its allied Questors.

In the nearer distance, Aarl closed in for the kill on the same Questor who'd sliced Nathan into pieces. The man’s adamantium blade was chipped and dented, the wizardry present in Aarl’s still-intact weapon making the weapon superior to the nonmagical version. The Questor still blocked every blow in the rapid exchange, but on the twelfth blow in three seconds, Aarl’s black blade sheared straight through the adamant and then through the Questor’s exposed head. Aarl confirmed the kill quickly, slicing the man to pieces and then storing them in separate dimensional bags.

The other Heirs were just as busy. Khachi hunted Amoh with spears of light and flashes of divine power, but the man jumped around the battlefield in flashes of shadow, never staying in one place and leaving behind clouds of darkness wherever he went. The shadow-themed Questor tried to jump in close a few times to attack, only to be forced away by Khachi’s quick reactions and smaller-scale bursts of golden light.

Sarah was firing continuously at a woman who darted through the air with a series of short-range teleports. She was dressed in tight-fitting robes and seemed to phase out of existence for brief moments to dodge Sarah’s bullets. But the ability wasn’t perfect - as attested by a bleeding wound on her side. She was circling around and probing inwards, trying to dive in when Sarah paused to reload, only to be forced back when Sarah drew a revolver and emptied it toward the woman.

Meanwhile, Stella dueled a pair of people made of pure mana. One had integrated themselves into the wind and could make themselves into a blade of air powerful enough to slice through shields of force. The other was an arc of lightning that dashed around the battlefield as fast as thought and tossed powerful bolts towards the Heirs. Stella had responded by summoning a miniature storm of air and magnetism around the Heirs under her own control, using it to rebuff the powerful elemental opponents.

The other two of the elemental trio, I assume.

The Questors farther afield seemed to be engaged in their own battles. A few members of the Ashen Accord could have come to the Heirs’ assistance, but they were instead angling for other conflicts. It looked like Sarya and her grid were fighting a gigantic golem of dirt and stone a few miles away. The massive statue tried to slap Brox and Ushia in vain while Sarya and Garna planted some kind of magical breaching charge on its chest.

After his quick survey of the battlefield, Nathan chose to intervene in Stella’s battle. He lanced his aura out towards the animate wind while it prowled around the Heirs, looking for an opening in Stella’s defense. If they were anything like the previous elemental Questor, then simply touching Nathan’s aura would be enough to kill them. Besides, Nathan was low on resources, and absorbing the amount of mana tied up in that Questor would go a long way towards restoring his buffer.

But his aura was sluggish in comparison to its earlier speed. Nathan’s Focus was only starting to tick back up from empty, and he didn’t want to spend it to enhance his aura like he normally did. He was keenly aware that he was eminently killable at the moment, if somebody else managed to destroy his brain. This was the first time he’d ever really run out of the resource, and he wanted to save it until he had enough to survive another lethal blow.

The wind Questor was wary of Nathan’s aura and seemed able to detect it by how the air fell out of their control around them. They fled from him as only the wind could, giving up on attacking the Heirs to speed off across the battlefield, keeping just close enough to be able to dart back in if Nathan stopped chasing them.

That was acceptable. Aarl joined his sister in engaging the teleporting woman, giving her yet another thing to dodge as he hurled the invisible throwing axe before stabbing towards her with a suddenly expanding rapier and a whip that cracked with thunder. The Questor stopped probing and started retreating, drawing Aarl out and away from the other Heirs.

With a pop of shadow, Amoh manifested behind Aarl, driving daggers towards Aarl’s armored back while the Questor himself trailed protective shadow. Nathan felt a flash of worry and almost diverted, but he wouldn’t be able to make it in time. Aarl’s armor and protective gear were some of the best they’d ever found, and his build boosted it to further heights. But Amoh had founded a school of assassins. If anybody knew how to penetrate through that kind of defense, it was him.

But Khachi had been waiting for Amoh to commit to his reappearance. He levelled his hammer at the Questor, the action drawing every eye by some trick of divine significance. He spoke, and the proclamation warped the aether. “By my word, you die.”

Divine mana and divinity beset Amoh from all angles, called from the Aether by Khachi’s demand. The Questor tried to jump through the shadows and escape, but the burning golden light banished every shadow before it could form. He snarled and tore at the encroaching light with his blades, but the weapons themselves dissolved on contact with the holy light. Then the noose closed, and the Questor died in a puff of divine satisfaction.

No longer distracted by two elemental Questors, Stella was free to focus on just the one she was perfectly suited to counter. The lightning Questor seemed able to seize control of any lightning mana in the area. But Stella wasn’t using lightning mana. After a moment of preparation, she cast out filaments of magnetism and lassoed him like somebody plucking a fish from a river with a net. The interaction of living lightning with an impromptu Faraday cage was bizarre and nonintuitive, but Stella seemed to have no trouble in keeping the Questor constrained.

Meanwhile, Aarl and Sarah were working in concert to hem in the teleporter. She blipped around constantly, sometimes not even reappearing until the danger had passed, and only staying in one place long enough to strike at Aarl with bare hands and feet that struck hard enough to generate shockwaves. She used Aarl as cover, interposing him between her and Sarah. But then Aarl juked out of the way of Sarah’s shot, which cleared him by inches and struck the Questor in the forehead. She spun away limply, a healing charm activating. But Aarl followed up with a series of quick blows to ensure the kill and once more stored the Questor's body in a dimensional bag.

Nathan’s quarry was the only prominent threat on the field, and the windbodied Questor had waited too long to make their move. Nathan might not have been able to move his aura as quickly as he had before, but he still had a lot of it, and he’d spooled it out wide to surround the Questor without tipping them off. They only noticed when the encirclement closed, and by that time, it was far too late. Nathan contracted his antimagic, compressing them in until they made a mad dash to drive their wind through his antimagic.