MAGUS INFINITE

”Crush!”

The Scripts on the inner walls flared, and the light gathered at the apex, and fell in a column forty feet wide, like the fist of a god.

The creature looked up at the falling light and screamed a word I did not understand. It did not try to dodge. With the speed of that attack, you could only avoid it before it began, and it knew this, and I watched it raise its four hands, and the claws on those hands caught the light.

I call it light, but this was a trillion tonnes of weight amplified and focused by my Scripts, and this monster just caught it.

When it did, the light bent. It was like watching a river hit a mirror. The column split, and split again, and split again, and suddenly there were hundreds of beams, scattering in every direction, slicing through the floor and the walls and the air itself.

They went through the pyramid like wires through cheese. They cut the floor into sections, opened trenches eighty feet deep, crossed each other, crossed back, and where two of them met the stone simply stopped being there. One came at me at hip height and I went over it flat and felt it take the tips off three fingers of my left hand as I went.

Another went past my head close enough that I felt the heat on my cheek. Another took the ground out from under my feet. I threw myself sideways, and the third and fourth cut through the space where I had been standing and carved lines twenty feet deep into the far wall.

The floor was a lattice of glowing lines. The Scripts on the walls were going dark, one by one, burned out by the light that had been meant for the monster. The weapon I had made was failing, and I doubted I would be able to call on it again.

But the monster did not come out of it clean.

Three claws on the upper left hand were gone at the root, sheared off level with the knuckle, and the stumps were spraying green fire in long arcs that fell across the floor and set the dead alight again. The whole forearm behind them had split from wrist to elbow. On the lower right hand, two more claws hung by threads, and there was a wound across the joined torsos, from the man’s collarbone down through the seam where the two of them met, and out of that wound came fire instead of blood.

The spider body had taken it worst. One of the eight legs was down, cut through above the second joint, and the stump was churning at the floor, and the shell along that whole flank had opened, and the fire under it was pouring out in massive volumes.

Still, despite the injuries, they were standing. The woman’s face, pressed into the man’s, let out a sound like a kettle.

”Well,” I said, through a mouthful of blood. ”If you bleed, you can die.”

At that instant, Eldritch Perception shivered in my consciousness, and I nearly cursed as my perception seemed to return to a second ago, following one of the beams of light that had reflected off the claws of this monster.

That single beam had punched through the pyramid, and my perception followed it, and I was dragged into the mind of... Thurrim?

∞

Why were we coming back again? This was insane. We should not be anywhere near this place.

I glanced at the massive pyramid that touched the clouds in front of us as we rode closer, and the faint rumbling coming out of it, like an earthquake, shook me to the core of my soul.

Then I looked at our chief, and I knew that we would go back for Elric. We leave no one behind, and if we fall... we do that together.

”What is that?” Ines whispered. Her eyes had been getting sharper every day since she gained the bow from the forgemaster, and I did not understand what she meant until something flashed past me and my Drakespawn screamed.

What the... what just happened?

I looked down and saw a thin line stretching across the ground, glowing red with heat. It had come through the warband, missing me and Ogg by a fraction, before it went on and disappeared into the horizon.

Then the ground shifted, and I began to scream as the valley slowly separated.

”Fuck... fuck... this is beyond us! I...”

∞

Damn it. Eldritch Perception always knows when to pick its moment.

It was a good thing I had experienced this before, so I knew how to cut my mind off from the vision quickly, and I barely spent half a second inside it.

Half a second was long enough for the rest of it to arrive. They had come back for me. They were standing in a valley that my own weapon was cutting into pieces, and there was nothing at all I could do about it from inside twelve miles of stone that I had built to keep them out.

The creature in front of me was still reeling from what it had caught, and then it looked at me and screamed, and I was already moving and writing.

∞

I put the pen to the floor and started writing. Not a Script, not yet. Just the shape of one. The first line of something I had not tried before, because I had not had time, not that I was being given any time now.

The monster came at me on seven legs, and it was slower than it had been, but that only meant I could track it with my sight. My body was still too slow to react to its speed.

The floor between us was a ruin of trenches and glass, and it crossed all of it without touching most of it. I put a hill of broken stone between us and it came through the hill like it was made of ash, and then its claws swiped at me.

Inscription after Inscription flew from my pen as I retreated, and I was still being injured. Most of the Inscriptions were only keeping me alive, and in between all of that, in the fractions of seconds when nothing was actually killing me, I was drawing something else. Small marks. Nothing that looked like a Script at all. One in the glass of a trench wall. One on the underside of a slab. One on a small piece of the monster’s own body, which I then kicked off into the dark.

It was a delicate dance, and I could die at any moment, but I kept at it, even as my soul screamed that it could not take any more damage. I just grinned and pushed through the pain.

In the middle of that dance, the Necromancer began to chant.

I had noticed that the second pair of arms had stopped fighting me for a while, and that had eased the burden on me and kept me alive, but it was not for my benefit.

The woman’s face was doing something. Her mouth had opened wider than the fused flesh should have allowed, and her jaw had come down and out, and the sound coming out of her was not a language I had ever heard. It was alien and cold. It was a list. I had heard a great many magical workings in my life, and never anything like this.

The lower pair of arms rose, and the fire came off the claws in long green ribbons, and she wrote on the air with them.

Reality screamed, and massive doors began to tear open behind the fused abomination.