MAGUS INFINITE

I was bigger and stronger, and I had never been hit with so much force in my life. The power to shatter essence was not the problem for me; I was more than just essence, but it was the laws that this beam carried that tore me apart.

I should have expected this; no good mage enters a battle without a plan, and here there was nothing but great mages. They had watched me harvest the souls of the dead, and they had prepared the right countermeasure to take me down, even if it meant placing a hold on their war.

First, the beam carried a weird Force Resonance that pinned me against space, and even if I wanted, I could not use Stormsteps to quickly escape from this block. So, I hung there like a sacrificial lamb.

Then there was rot, and unmaking, and a hundred occult laws that were going to tear through my body, folded space blades that opened wounds in the air itself, and a hundred elemental Laws I had no resonance against, and they came through whatever defenses my scarlet robes could give me and impacted against my flesh.

My domain shattered, the Stillness of the Storm cracking under a weight of massed Law it had never been built to hold, fifteen feet of held space blown apart in an instant, and with it gone the strikes reached my body, and my body, even seventy feet of titan, was not enough.

I came apart, and that was the only way I could describe what was happening to me.

A massive folded space blade from a mass of towers that should belong to the Academy took my left arm off at the shoulder, and even with mortal shell, I could not save it as the limb was ground into dust inside the collapsing space beside me, and the only thing left behind were my channels, glinting like diamonds, and flailing around like whips, before they were drawn into my body, not even this space blade could erase my channels.

Rot and corruption went into the wound and up my channels faster than the Marrow could burn it, and my entire body shuddered, unable to move through the force that held me in place. An unmaking lance took me through the chest, through the place a heart would be, if mine had not already stopped, before all the laws compacted around me and exploded with a terrifying boom that should be heard from all corners of the continent.

And then I was a titan falling out of a broken sky with a hole through me and millions of screaming souls being dragged down with me, and I felt... distant and clear, regaining a bit of the clarity I had lost since I became a Death Titan.

’This can kill me... This is killing me.’

∞

I fell from the sky, toward the skull-fields, and the wall of Arcanists did not stand there watching me fall; they began to pour all the spells they had on my falling body, volley after volley, not letting up, because they were not stupid... Ah, why can’t mages be stupid?

They had hurt me, and they knew you do not stop hurting a thing like me until it is ash; this was the smart choice, this was how they had killed the gods, and I was experiencing it firsthand. Everything the two continents had to offer was poured down upon me, even before I had the chance to touch the ground.

Through the pain and the chaos, my eyes remained bright as I was paying attention... to everything.

∞

Here is what I saw as I was being taken apart. I saw a rhythm to the spells. How space was folded to pin me, then cut me, how all the laws that should cancel themselves out were being manipulated in a manner where they aided the growth of each other and didn’t cancel out.

I saw that until I was ash, the volley of spells would not stop, as the rhythm of the assault was happening in a cyclic pattern that ensured that I would never get a breather. First the beam of unmaking that constantly pinned my falling body to space so I could not teleport, followed by the spells, then a half-second, while thousands of Arcanists drew the next breath of Anima and the fortress cannons cycled.

I counted the towers, and the fortresses and the other machines of war, and the understanding of it rushed into my mind, as the overall shape of this assault clicked itself into place.

It was important to note that I had entered this battle wrong; I had been fighting them wrong, and this action had been deliberate for me to know how much knowledge I was missing.

My actions did not scare me; even if I died, I was just going home, but a chance to acquire knowledge like this did not come often.

I had been fighting them as a titan, and this meant that my grip was too large for subtlety; this sort of size was good against smaller opponents, but when I was dwarfed in firepower, it became a disadvantage.

However, I was not planning to get smaller, because that would mean I would be crushed by the weight of the souls I carry. Still, there was one thing that I knew, and that was that death does not care about size; it is a damned fact.

It was at this moment that I slammed into the field of screaming skulls like a meteor surrounded by the light of ten thousand spells, and I was sure that the impact devastated the continent for hundreds of miles.

My body sank into the earth, as an intense wave of cold vitality flooded into my broken body, and I began to heal; however, all of these changes were being hidden from sight by the massive mushroom cloud that had erupted from the point of impact.

As much as I wanted to learn more from the act of battle and spellcraft from them, it was time to start fighting like the mage that I was, and not as a storm. The storm was brute weather, and they had proven they could fight weather.

I used the things I actually knew, which were the spells I had carried since I was a boy who was good at Threadwork, the disciplines of a Master Engraver, and an Arcanist who had entered the path through lightning.

But I used them the way I was now... through Death.