What We Do to Survive

I always thought I knew what power looked like. I’m young, barely an adult by human standards, much less those of longer-lived races like dwarves and elves, but I’ve seen and experienced more in the past two decades than most people do in a lifetime.

When I first fled Xethis, a juvenile sea-wurm attacked the convoy of ships I was on, having managed to get hired on as a cabin-boy by a too-kind captain. The monster was ‘only’ seventy meters long and had sunk nearly a dozen ships before one of the mages traveling with us managed to scare it off with a lucky bolt of lightning.

I had spent the entire horrifying encounter cowering under a pile of ropes silently crying and praying for salvation. I’d only learned after the attack that real sea-wurms are at least three times larger and rarely leave the deep oceans where they make their homes. You needed an archmage to deal with one of those, not the sort of mage a middling trading-house could afford to hire. The experience had left me terrified of deep water for nearly five years and had been the lead cause of me running away from Captain Alvin’s ship despite his kindness and offer of a job.

Years later, a caravan I was traveling with was attacked by a number of trolls looking for an easy meal. Not young ones like what Erna had sacrificed at the start of the semester, but adults ranging from the size of horses to a titanic specimen that wouldn’t have fit in my room at Avalon even if I cut it in half. The caravan guards had fought and died to a man. It turns out that the saying ‘You don’t have to be faster than a troll, just faster than the slowest person running with you’ was completely true.

I’ve seen the aftermath of monster attacks and bandit ambushes, watched mages years my senior fight to the death, and experienced first-hand the magic of archmages and elder dragons alike. Never like this though. Not even close.

Professor Williams’s first blow contained more mana than I could generate in a week. A furious thunderclap boomed through the air, shattering windows all up and down the street and momentarily leaving me deafened despite the defensive circle she had set up around me beforehand.

A column of force as wide as a barn slammed down on the massive outsider like the fist of a wrathful god, hammering the squirming mass of eyes and tendrils into the ground. Moments later a dozen identical hammer blows descended upon it, each one shaking the earth and wrenching a horrible, brain-melting scream out of the creature. White pus squirted from the ends of torn and battered tentacles, soaking the ground for dozens of meters in every direction.

For a moment I thought that was going to be the end of it. Professor Williams’s sudden attack felt like it would have turned a mountain to dust, much less a living creature, no matter how powerful it may be. Of course that would have been far too easy.

A titanic wave of whatever sickening yellow energy the Outsider seemed to use rolled through its body and before my eyes wounds closed and the entire creature’s form shifted. A dozen spider-like legs grew out of the central mass like they were tearing their way out of a gigantic warped egg. Each was wider than I was tall and they honestly looked more fit as columns on a temple than legs.

The legs were followed by yet more limbs, each just as titanic in scale and taken from all manner of mundane creatures. Human hands flexed beside rat-like paws and beetle pincers that looked like they could slice a whale in half. Hundreds of faces, some human most not, growled and screamed. A rat head that looked like it could swallow me whole barred pearly-white teeth at me, its red eyes glowing with madness.

At the center of it all was a barely-reduced writhing mass of those same white tendrils as before. Hundreds of mouths opened at once and screamed, their voices drowning each other out until all that remained was a single unearthly chorus of horror that somehow resembled words. “You. Will. Become. One. In. MIIRA!” it cried out, the last word coming as a nearly sibilant hiss as hundreds of red and green scaled garden snakes emerged from the central core. “All. Life. Is. MIIRA!”

With a start I realized that I recognized one of the human faces staring up at where Professor Williams was floating silently far above the ground. It was the apparent Archmage Blightcleanser, who’s manor the creature had just destroyed. Cayla had presumably been right, though I wasn’t sure how the royal mage of Xethis got involved with something like this.

“Funny,” Professor Williams called out, her voice magnified by some manner of spell, “it's usually me doing the whole absorbing others shtick. And I do believe I’m better at it than you’ll ever be.”

The creature, Miira? Why did that name sound so familiar? The continuing ache in my skull and the ridiculous quantities of power being thrown around were making it hard to focus.

I shook myself. Focus. How often did one get the chance to really see an archmage of her caliber cut loose? Not very, I assumed. I had to get the most out of this opportunity.

Miira roared again, this time a simple wordless cry of fury that still made my ears ring but didn’t seem to carry any more sinister weight behind it. Then dozens of tiny, pearly-white balls of light formed between barred teeth and clutched in paws and hands.

Before I could even begin to comprehend the suddenly visible array of impossible geometries written in yellow fog, lances of that same translucent white energy filled the sky, most of them targeted at my teacher but others going wide and gouging effortlessly through trees, houses, wards, and even the already cracked granite road.

She juked effortlessly out of the way, then continued to zig zag through the air as more and more beams filled the sky, batting what few attacks got near her back towards their source with a hand covered in gleaming crystals.

A spell matrix more complex than I’d ever seen in my life appeared beside her, mana twisting and shifting out of phase as she rapidly wove together a spell using all nine possible dimensions that mana could mimic. A mere few seconds later she was finished and I felt it all snap into place as the spell did its work.

From there, she became nothing more than a blur. I didn’t lose consciousness or anything. My eyes and senses simply couldn’t keep up with her movements and spellcasting as whatever spell she’d used boosted her to levels I could scarcely imagine. I remembered what she’d told me about stacking different forms of boosts and her own propensity for time manipulation. Was that what I was seeing? Had she accelerated the passage of time for herself compared to the rest of the world, or was this some other esoteric effect I didn’t even have a basis to understand?

Whatever the case may be, it was undoubtedly effective. Miira raged and fought, but even after just a few minutes it was clear that the Outsider was outmatched. Arms and tentacles flailed through the air, but Professor Williams flittered past them like a hummingbird, sometimes dodging by less than a centimeter but avoiding the massive blows nonetheless. Beams of light, waves of acid, hails of quills and spines, and so much more blackened the sky, but each and every attack was dodged, shielded, or simply ignored.

Through it all, Professor Williams did not remain a passive defender either. She did not counterattack often, but each time she did it was far more devastating than anything the monster was able to achieve. A column of black fire burned away nearly a fifth of the entire creature. Golden lightning fell from the clear sky and left blackened scars all across its core. A gentle wave of sparkly mist filled with what looked like translucent music notes nearly succeeded in disabling it entirely, leaving Miira completely motionless for ten whole seconds before it broke out of the effect.

And yet, I wasn’t really sure if the battle was going well or not. Each time one of her spells proved to be particularly effective, the creature adapted in seconds, rendering further attacks of that kind completely ineffective. After the first barrage of force spells, gleaming black plates of chitten covered the creature’s body and completely shrugged off her second attempt at the same spell. After her particularly effective use of fire, oily white foam began to drip down its sides leaving it all but immune burning.

Professor Williams must be going through mana as though it was water, spending vast reserves every second. Her flight spell, the temporal acceleration, the occasional shields, and all those terrifying combat spells had to be ruinously expensive to cast.

From what little of her spells that I could follow from so far away and with so little time to unravel everything looked both monstrously complicated and equally mana-hungry. How long could she keep this up? More importantly, how long could Miira keep going? From what I’d seen, its levels of that strange not-mana hadn’t changed at all, though my sense for it was so underdeveloped that I really couldn’t say for sure.

I had absolutely no doubt that if Professor Williams failed here I was dead meat. Despite starting out several hundred meters away from the center of the fighting and Professor Williams intentionally leading the outsider away from where she’d left me, I didn’t think I’d be able to escape once the shield around me failed.

Miira seemed to be both incredibly hungry and have some form of sixth-sense for any and all life around it, particularly mages. In just a few minutes several only partially-abandoned buildings had been completely demolished and each time the outsider relentlessly went after every living creature it could get its tendrils on.

Even as it fought back against Professor Williams’s onslaught, it dragged dozens of people––mostly servants and children––hundreds of animals, and even some particularly magical plants into its many mouths where their mana signatures vanished in moments.

Furthermore, dozens, maybe hundreds, of other, lesser outsiders swarmed around it and continued to appear through the still-open rift high in the sky. Most of them were instantly intercepted by Professor Williams’s spells––primarily rays of blinding-hot fire that completely obliterated them as they fell though I also noticed a number of stasis and petrification spells directed at choice specimens––but some few managed to escape into the surrounding roads and manors. Sure I’d subdued a similar creature once, but I’d ambushed it while it was asleep and I had been in much better form than I was now. I didn’t fancy my chances against one of them now.

Despite the incredible spectacle before me, I was too worried about my own life and the life of my Cayla, who was still unconscious on the ground nearby, to focus properly. Even as the pain in my head had lessened, the rest of my body was quick to tell me just how much it hurt. I poured as much of my reserves into my healing circulations as I dared, barely noticing how they shifted and optimized for every additional drop of mana. If I did need to run, I needed to be in the best shape I could manage between then and now.

And then, between one heartbeat and the next, it was over; most of my concerns rendered moot in a fraction of a second. Space glitched; I have no idea how else to describe it. One moment, a monstrous creature larger than some of Avalon’s academic buildings stood on twenty legs taken from just as many animals amidst a field or ruined homes and burnt gardens. The next, a perfect sphere of space around it seemed to flicker and then everything within it was reduced to pieces no bigger than my pinkie nail.

Earth, stone, flesh, it didn’t matter. Plants withered into dust even as fresh petals rained down around them. Bits of wooden beams rotted and warped while other parts of the same former whole sprouted with fresh growth. Miira simply fell apart. Yellow not-mana howled and complex structures spun aimlessly as fragments of it seemingly vanished or were suddenly not where they belonged.

Even as I tried to figure out what had just happened, the sphere glitched again, then again, and again. Tiny shards of meat and tile were reduced to fragments, then little more than fine powder blowing in the wind.

“Fuck…” I whispered, my eyes wide with horror and amazement in equal parts. The second and third time it had happened, I had managed to notice bits of time and space aligned mana. I had not the slightest clue how I would go about defending against a spell like that. It was an attack on a scale and axis I had never considered and the very idea of it terrified me.

High in the sky above the creature, Professor Williams raised her arm above her head and the horrible, oily-yellow energy of the outsider flooded out of the field of shredded space and up towards her. It flowed together, squeezing down, down, down until only a single sphere of radiant, otherworldly power remained floating ominously over her upraised palm. Then that too was gone, along with Professor Williams herself.

A hand landed on my shoulder and I just barely managed to control my reaction, turning my head slowly to look at Professor Williams standing behind me, the outsider’s condensed power nowhere insight, instead of jumping or lashing out in surprise.

“Pretty impressive, right?” she gestured towards what was left of the titanic outsider. “You didn’t hear it from me, but people say that I sometimes teach students who choose me as their mentor for their last three years some of my personal tricks. It's just a rumor, mind you,” she winked, a broad smile on her face, “as you know, Professors are not allowed to actively influence the academic choices of their students and I would never do anything that goes against Avalon policy. Oh, funny story! Did you know that I’m teaching a new third- and fourth-year elective in the spring?”

She winked again, then clapped me on the shoulder. A wave of mana rippled over my skin and I felt an incredibly sophisticated illusion of some form replace the frayed remains of my own illusion spells. “Anyway, I have some new samples I need to go pick up. It's so rare that I get to conduct multiple experiments with such rare specimens! I’m so excited!” For a moment she sounded more like a teenage girl than the terrifying archmage I knew her to be. “Barrier will last like, another ten minutes. You probably don’t want to be here when the local authorities show up. I’ll see you in class, Orion.”

Before I could say anything, though what exactly I wanted to say I wasn’t sure, she was gone. The raven necklace that had been burning like a hot coal against my skin for the last half-hour had gone cold and I suddenly realized that Professor Williams was very right. I definitely didn’t want to be here when Xethian mages arrived, and we were barely a stone’s throw away from the capital. If I climbed up to the roof of one of the surviving buildings I could probably still make out the palace in the distance. This day wasn’t over yet.