The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 515

Chapter 515: Crystalline Curtain

ARTHUR LEYWIN

I clenched my fists as I focused on my new god rune.

Thirty feet in front of us, at the same point demarcated by the opposing Alacryan army’s previously conjured shields, space hardened.

A thousand spells—sickly green jets of acid, dark motes of void wind, winged summons of blue fire—struck the impassible space and ruptured, a chaotic entanglement of combusting magic like a badly timed firework display. Light oozed through the hardened space in a slow trickle, so that the sound of the impacts reached us before the visual cues.

The loyalist Alacryan army appeared frozen on the other side, stunned.

“Arthur, focus on Taegrin Caelum!” Seris shouted. “We will take care of the army.” With two fingers, she gestured forward, and a volley of spells fired in return, though far fewer in number.

I released the condensed plane of manipulated space, knowing that, on the other side, it would seem as if time leaped forward as a hundred spells manifested out of nowhere.

A wall of shields appeared just before the loyalist front line—wheels of fire, translucent panels of mana, rectangular blocks of stone like tower shields, among dozens of other unique implementations of their Shields’ runes.

I activated King’s Gambit and Realmheart, summoned my armor, which feathered across my body in an instant, then flew up toward the barrier wrapped around the entire fortress.

As Realmheart took effect, a shimmering bubble of pure mana particles, invisible to the naked eye, came into view. It emanated from the ground just beyond the loyalist encampment. I could sense that it carved its way underground as well, enclosing all of Taegrin Caelum in an egg-shaped field. Dark motes clung to the pure mana—basilisk Decay-type magic, hidden within the barrier. One could walk right through it without realizing, only to end up dead a few seconds later.

King’s Gambit began to unfold the various options at my disposal even as I kept an eye on the battle progressing below.

Tendrils of dark mana flew with our army’s initial volley, and wherever they touched the loyalists’ defensive barricade, the shields collapsed. Dozens of our spells slipped through, landing among the defenseless loyalists with screams of pain and shouted orders.

Strikers from both sides were surging forward, but although our forces were vastly outnumbered, Chul and Regis led the charge.

Flames wrapped around Chul, and he leapt in a spinning maneuver that sent flames out from himself in a wide arc. Shields flickered around the charging Strikers but shattered just as quickly, and in an instant, dozens of warriors were immolated, collapsing the loyalists’ front line.

They barely had time to acknowledge this crushing blow to their numbers before Regis set upon them. In his shadow wolf form, Regis suddenly became ethereal, his entire body taking on the texture and transparency of the smokey flames of his mane. His incorporeal body divided, separating first into two, then four, then eight identical copies of himself. Each copy erupted in Destruction as it passed into the lines of Strikers, running through conjured shields and into the oncoming bodies.

Each mage touched by Regis’s Destructive form was devoured by the amethyst flames. A dozen men fell, then two, and within seconds, a hundred or more loyalists had been unmade by Destruction.

The disparate, smokey forms of Regis wavered before all snapping back together into one, but the damage was done. The Strikers broke, their lines shattered, and hundreds of soldiers turned to run away individually instead of continuing forward as a cohesive unit. Their supporting Shields and Casters struggled to cover their retreat as more spells followed from our forces, our own Strikers rushing to catch up.

While one part of my mind tracked the action below, the bulk of my consciousness was bent on understanding and dissecting Agrona’s barrier. The most immediate possibility was to simply God Step beyond it, right to the front doors of Taegrin Caelum, but as I looked deeper into the occluded space beyond the barrier, I realized the deadly aura was not simply a shell, but the same motes of Decay-type magic clung to all the atmospheric mana inside as well. I could, perhaps, push through it undeterred, but I wouldn’t risk any of my companions without knowing more about it.

Next, I considered my new godrune. Over the last few days, I had come to understand and think about it only as the “Spatium godrune.” I envisioned tunneling through the barrier, creating a safe space for my companions and I to travel through. But, though the Spatium godrune itself represented manifested insight, I hadn’t had time to experiment with it extensively, and I couldn’t be certain Agrona’s spell would be affected by a manipulation of the space itself, nor that I could control an extradimensional space that would allow my companions to pass through.

Perhaps I could make a pocket dimension and move it around us as we passed through this…death field.

Directly below me, a fleeing Striker passed beyond the barrier. He travelled only two steps before his body stiffened, his eyes rolled up toward the sky, and he slammed to the ground, dead.

“Reform ranks!” the one-horned Vritra-blood was shouting. A rain of spells from the Casters was falling down on our own Strikers and Casters, while the limited number of our Shields attempted to block them.

Spiralling dark voids and expansive panels of ice supplemented these shields, however, as Seris and Varay focused on defending our soldiers. Lightning and stones crashed among the loyalist army’s back lines from where Mica and Bairon had moved around the mountainside, flanking the encampment.

A small core of loyalist battle groups, seemingly more organized and synergizing better than many of the others, moved forward to meet the ten exoforms. A wall of translucent panels sprang up, flickering rapidly to allow spells from their Casters to fly through. Claire led the charge, her blazing, fire salt edged blade sparking and hissing as it impacted the overlapping shields. They collapsed, and she burst through, falling on two surprised Strikers.

I felt a thrum of small, vindictive pleasure at watching the nine non-mages, led by a young woman whose core had been destroyed, disassemble the well-organized battle groups in a moment. Spells rolled off the mana shrouding the exoform, and once its griffon-like form was through the front lines, there was little the Casters or Shields could do to slow it.

Spell cancelation was the next avenue I considered for removing the shroud of death that hung around Taegrin Caelum. Tendrils of purified aether released from my core and out my channels, tentatively probing Agrona’s barrier. The Decay-type field pressed back against the aether, condensing around it. I sought out where the black motes were bound to the purified mana, wedging aether between them like a prybar.

The spell fought back, the Decay clinging to the mana as it rolled like oil around my efforts to separate it. I pressed with a second, then third tendril, attacking it from multiple directions, simultaneously wedging, prying, and pulling, even as I realized that, if it took this much effort to unbind a single particle, it would be a pointless effort even if I succeeded. As if giving way in recognition of my understanding, the Decay-type mote of mana slipped free of the bond. The particle of pure mana was spit out of the barrer, but a bright green mote of wind-attribute atmospheric mana flowed in to fill the void, and the unseated piece of Decay grabbed ahold of it like a virus.

I frowned, following the many competing and entwined threads of King’s Gambit toward my next attempt to undo the spell.

Below me, the battle was well in hand. Despite being outnumbered ten to one, there was little the Alacryan forces could do against the combined efforts of Chul, Sylvie, Seris, Cylrit, and the Lances. The Alacryans simply did not have the force necessary to combat such power, and it was only a matter of time before they gave up or died to a man.

Even as this thought flickered across a disengaged corner of my mind, a horrible crack split the air like a thunderbolt.

The cliff faces to both sides rippled with mana, and the solid stone began to disintegrate, moving like sand as it collapsed. Suddenly the bulk of our army was in the path of twin landslides cascading down into the valley. I instinctively finched in that direction, but an instant later, Varay and Mica were already casting their own spells.

On one side of the valley, the stone hardened, fusing back into the side of the mountain, its momentum seizing suddenly. An unnatural, flowing shelf of rock was left behind.

Opposite of it, great buttresses of ice rushed to meet the avalanche, catching and pressing it back against the mountainside as a new iceberg was formed, freezing tumbling rocks and sloughing sheets of stone together into a single, motionless, gleaming tableau.

In the hollow spaces left behind by the rockslides, two twin, opaque portals gleamed with menace, like two thunderous eyes glaring down from the cliffs. I had only enough time to acknowledge their existence before creatures began to stumble out of them. _{frёeweɓηovel.coɱ}

A handful of twisted, fused-together monstrosities of exposed sinew, mummified flesh, and grafted weapons chittered out torn-throat, gurgling noises as they flinched away from the sun, their misshapen faces panning jumpily. Within a couple of seconds, they spotted the armies below them. The reaction was immediate. A hateful bellow issued from one and was answered by the rest, then the chimeras—the very same from the first Relictombs zone I had ever discovered—were sprinting down the mountainside with wild abandon.

I hesitated, my striated consciousness momentarily slipping back into alignment as all of my disparate thoughts focused on those two portals. Had they been there all the time, or was this some new trap prepared by Agrona for our arrival? Did they enter directly into the Relictombs, or had Agrona been recreating the creatures outside of the Relictombs? I acknowledged the importance of this distinction with a certain amount of dread.

My hesitation continued as Cylrit flashed into the middle of the chimeras, his blade perfectly bypassing their meager defenses to flay grotesque flesh and bone. They tumbled lifelessly past him down the mountainside, their broken bodies shattering to pieces. And yet, above, more were already clawing their way from the portal.

Across the valley, dark shapes emerged from the twin portal at the same time. These winged forms had thin legs and bulbous bodies, long necks, and spear-like beaks. Unlike the chimeras’ mindless bellows, a dozen Spear Beaks immediately leaped into the air, whirled around, and lobbed poisoned weapons down upon our army.

In a single motion, I conjured my blade and swept it from right to left through a dozen individual points revealed by God Step. The blade reappeared to carve through each of the attackers, and all twelve of them cried out and plummeted from the sky.

Our forces were now facing enemies on three sides, and there was no way to be sure how many or for how long enemies could pour from the twin portals. Seris was already recalling the forward Strikers as she and Varay focused on protecting the fighting force. Chul continued to wade through the loyalist army with Regis, while Cylrit and Bairon each took a portal, hacking through the monsters that continued to appear.

I looked back at Taegrin Caelum, teeth gritted in frustration. If I got bogged down fighting here…

Sylvie, who should have been supporting the others, was floating slowly toward me. A few stray spells targeted her, but she batted them away effortlessly. There was something strange in the cadence of her progression, as if she’d forgotten where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.

Sylv…? I sent, projecting her name questioningly.

She didn’t answer until she was close enough to speak. “Hello, Arthur.” Her eyes flashed ruby red.

I let out a bitter, huffing scoff. “Agrona.”

“Lovely day for a battle, isn’t it?” The words, though they came from Sylvie’s lips, sounded nothing like her. The wry quirk of her lips, the awkward way in which she hung in the air, all spoke to the truth: she was no longer piloting her own physical body. “I’m glad to see my little barrier has proven an interesting challenge for you. Ji-ae and I have had ever so much fun considering ways to counter your various abilities.”

Sylvie-Agrona chuckled. “She thinks very highly of you, Ji-ae. And I suppose her esteem isn’t without reason. You’ve proven to be far more competent and interesting than I’d originally expected. I wonder what might have happened had I accepted your surrender back then, as the war came crashing down around you. Hubris, Arthur. It is inevitably a painful downfall of my kind. Thankfully, each time I begin succumbing to it, someone like you comes along to remind me of my own fallibility.”

“What do you want, Agrona?” I asked, my mind racing as I considered ways to break Sylvie free of his control. I’d been so certain that her resurrection had removed his ability to take over her body from a distance.

Sylvie-Agrona laughed, a cruel sound that I found disorienting coming from my bond. “To talk, obviously. I felt as if this form would be better suited to the task. In person, it seems you would be likely to ‘shoot first and ask questions later,’ as I believe the expression goes.”

My eyes skated past Sylvie’s form to the battlefield below, but Sylvie-Agrona dipped down, face bright and manic. “Oho, no getting distracted.” She rotated around me, putting her back right up to the deadly barrier. “Let your friends do what you brought them to do: fight, die, be the fodder you see them as.”

“I don’t—” I cut myself off, refusing to be manipulated by his taunts. With Realmheart and King’s Gambit active, I followed the progress of the battle below with my other senses, even though I was forced to turn my back to the battlefield.

“The crown looks good on you, Art my boy,” Sylvie-Agrona continued, as if in recognition of my own thoughts. “You just can’t escape it, can you? That urge to be in control? To be…king?” She laughed again. “You carry it from life to life in the same way the Legacy carried her potential. That was quite the trick, by the way, severing Cecilia from the Legacy.” Sylvie-Agrona’s eyes darkened. “How’d you manage that?”

Agrona’s words stirred a thought inside me. I let myself relax and my eyes go unfocused as I looked for the golden threads that I knew connected Sylvie to all those whose lives entwined with her own, including Agrona. But the connection to Fate wasn’t there. Instead, I sent a quick command to Regis.

“I’m glad you asked. Your continued ignorance is more than I had dared hope for,” I answered firmly. “No matter what you do, the power of the Legacy is beyond your reach.”

Sylvie-Agrona looked up at the wound, brows raised in a question. “Maybe, but you should not speak so confidently when you’ve still seen so little. The universe is very large, Arthur Leywin, and there are oh so many ways to skin a cat.”

A scream punctuated the battlefield as I sensed the chimeras, numerous enough that Cylrit’s blade couldn’t find them all, crash into our Alacryan forces. I started to look, and Sylvie-Agrona drifted backwards, breaking the plane of the Decay-field.

My fist snapped out, grabbing Sylvie by the front of her black-scaled armor and yanking her back out of the barrier. My face twisted into a wrathful grimace. “Enough, Agrona. Your daughter is not a bargaining chip, or an experiment, or—”

A grotesque grin spread across Sylvie-Agrona’s face. “My daughter. You said the key words yourself, Arty. I think, between the two of us, what Sylvie is or isn’t will be up to me to decide. But I owe you my thanks for keeping her well fed and cared for up until now. And, of course, for bringing her so close.”

My eyes widened as a pulse of aether rippled out from her. My own aether crashed back against it, attempting to hold her aevum abilities in check, but in the moment in between, Sylvie-Agrona wrenched free of my grip and threw herself into the Decay-field, her arms flailing and legs kicking as if she were swimming through the air toward Taegrin Caelum.

The time-stop shattered, and Regis, already rushing toward Sylvie at my earlier command, shot past me, through the barrier, and into the Decay-field behind her. God Step flared, and I plunged into the aetheric pathways, appearing next to Sylvie. Black liquid was already leaking from her nose and eyes as she grinned. I grabbed her just as Regis shot into her body.

“G-gotcha,” Sylvie-Agrona croaked, spitting up black bile over pale lips.

Tens of thousands of dark motes struck me simultaneously from every direction. My core burned as it pumped aether to my skin, reinforcing the layer that always clad my body against the impact. My concentration slipped, and all my godrunes went dark. Sylvie-Agrona’s fingers clenched around my throat as she laughed.

I struggled to find God Step, to pull us both beyond the edges of the spell, but I couldn’t grasp it. My skin was aflame, the black motes burrowing into every inch of me, Sylvie-Agrona’s laughter like a saw blade behind my eyes.

‘Hold…on…princess…’ Regis’s voice fought through the pain and disorientation. I realized the world had gone dark, and I could feel it spinning, spinning, spinning—