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The Gamer Chapter 1560 – Father of Arcane [Nia POV]
🕑 Added 2023-11-11 23:14:54 +0000 UTCNia could feel the terror in the air. On one side of the teleporter, it was the fear of those that did not know what would come to be. On the other side of the teleporter, it was the uncertain shivers of those that had come to view the match directly. The whole leadership of the Divided Gates, including her darling, were present, enveloped in a multi-layered barrier. Their presence was necessary, for this was going to be the final fight and the various means of catching the combat, magical and physical, were not going to survive it.
Most of all, Nia felt the terror from her opponent. Arkan, Father of Arcane, kept his mechanical features straight, but the plates that covered the core of grains rattled. The visor of hardened, black null-stuff already covered the pariah’s sight and through it she could see the agitated streams of arcane like Lorelei could read the souls of all others.
The being of magic was afraid of her and he had every reason to be. After all, she was the base to his acid. That she had every reason to be as afraid of his deadliness was an argument that entities like him were deaf to. Acid and base neutralized one another, one did not delete the other. However, this was a world filled to the brim with one and she was the rare other. She was the unusual, the alien, the terrifying, the pariah.
Their eyes met and Arkan looked aside. Nia tilted her head, trying to understand what went on behind that robotic visage. Arkan was a burning sun in this asteroid belt. A fire so bright that the little stars of magic inside the individual chunks of stone looked like mere embers. The gravitational enchantments that kept rocks, sometimes a hundred metres wide, suspended above the distant bottom of the simulated environment were naught but window dressing for this fight.
That suited her just fine.
Nia stared tirelessly, her features unmoving, while the asteroid her starting position was on gently turned. Arkan’s, by comparison, was stable. By the time Romulus barked the word, “Begin!” she was upside down.
Then she was before him. Her sleek longsword sliced through the air. The Father of Arcane met the attack with a hurried but slow reaction. Fear dulled his reflexes and that served her just fine. The blade met the particle skin covering the entity and came to an abrupt halt. To the untrained eye, it looked like the material itself had stopped her weapon. The occasional spark of re-sealing arcane spellwork belied this and Nia herself could see it plain as day: the sheen of defensive energy flowing towards her weapon like water towards a hot object. Where arcane met the surface, it boiled away into nothingness.
Arkan pointed a palm at her. The arc lance began to form, only for Nia to grab the shaping arcane in her fingers and smother it. “I am your opposite,” Nia stated, plain, factual, and with every intent to terrify. An intimidated opponent was an easy opponent.
A flurry of raw power followed immediately. The air around them shimmered with various arcane conjurations, all of them silver to maximize the speed of their delivery. Nia weighed her options. To dodge via teleportation was a cheap endeavour, but only until reality disagreed with her repeated requests. To undo all these spells would have been costly to her presence. However, there was one spell she could annihilate cheaply.
Nia’s attention shifted, a wave that eliminated the colour of deep purple from the world ripped out. The asteroid they stood on suddenly plunged, its anti-gravity enchantment unravelled with the same ease a loose string was pulled from a piece of cloth.
The swarm of projectiles flew overhead. Exhausting his usual lifelines, Arkan went for a straightforward swing. That immediately forced her to dodge. Arkan let out something like a sound of relief and surprise.
Nia disappeared from where she stood and so did Arkan. Individual teleportations removed them from the asteroid, moments before it could slam against one of its lesser kin. Crash impact for crash impact, the rock descended, leaving shattered remains of stones still possessing the enchantments on its path to the bottom.
Simultaneously, the pariah appeared upside down on another one of the floating rocks. No time was lost locking onto her target, visible through all obstructions. The Maiden of Null cranked up her aura as far as she could, making herself obvious as she gave chase.
Arkan turned to face her direction long before she caught up with him. A comet of azure and purple, the mechanical being manoeuvred through the field rapidly. Distance was a sound plan for a mage under normal circumstances. Under the current circumstances, Nia had to say she found it inadvisable.
‘Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.’ One of her mentor’s core lessons echoed in her mind.
Nia caught up to the Father of Arcane. Her weapon was met by a mana blade. The two weapons ate into each other, but a weapon of the Nirvana was a bottomless pit, while the sands flowing into his armament were finite, albeit vast. Nia renegotiated her position in reality, then jumped off her new position to deliver another strike at her hovering enemy.
Turning with the speed of stress towards her, Arkan met her presence instantly in the same manner. A pattern that repeated several times. He, remaining frozen in position and reacting to her repeated assaults from different reactions, was always tipped off by her unnerving aura. “What are you?!” Arkan voiced a question, curious and deeply distraught. “Mengele said that blanks existed but… is that all you are?”
“No. I am the Blue Maiden,” Nia answered and dragged her hand through the air.
A wave of the Nirvana’s influence ebbed through a colourless, depthless gash in the barrier of the world. A cascade of noises her human brain could not begin to interpret, but her empty soul resonated with to its core. Arkan made the mistake of glancing to the side, for a flash, meeting the form of the Nevr’est. What was normal to her was torture to him.
Arkan reared back, clawing at his eyes and skull. Nia dropped down, leaving the screaming Father of Arcane with the terrible headache. Naked feet pounded stone as she leapt away. A cataclysmic explosion behind her threw enough arcane energy at the tear to seal it shut again. Through her visor, Nia kept her eyes on the Father of Arcane through the cover of tumbling stones, drifting away thanks to the shockwave of the violent spell. She could see him rearing his head, shaking it to get rid of the pounding, looking for her, searching for her aura.
And not finding it.
The excess she had fuelled was inverted, smothering her presence as much as she could. Overexposed senses failed to notice her. Nia put her feet apart, took a deep breath, and raised her never-blade above her head. Its black depths reflected the light of simulated stars dully, the smooth surface polished, abrasive, and neither of those things. Her will demanded the undoing of what her violence met.
“[Obliteration].”
“Thousands of years, awaiting. Synapses melding in the sand, wisdom unified. And now I am here. I am Father of the Arcane.”
Incantation and a word scratched into the surface thoughts of all those that heard it. The enormous energy unleashed in a flash of arcane energy met the razor-thin line of anti-magic. Forces neutralized one another. The asteroids between them fell, revealing the four-armed form of the Father of Arcane, directing his eyes on her.
The fear was fading.
Nia immediately went on the offensive, pressing her advantage while she had it. Leaping, her blade cut a colourless arc through the air. The meowing, cawing, croaking of the neverborn echoed in the air, causing grains to chill behind the cover of the artfully crafted shapes of silvery white and azure blue.
Arkan’s left arms clicked into each other, forming a chalice of ten fingers at the end. A powerful arcane armament appeared, meeting Nia’s downwards swing. The arcane was of such condensed might that her weapon was pushed back, the energy flowing back quicker than it could be neutralized.
Two palms were pointed at her. Twisting in a total disregard of physics, Nia put her own palm on top of one and the sole of her left foot on the other. Anti-magic surged through her limbs, sending thin paths of silver through her pale skin, like an exposed neural network. It neutralized the arcane flow through one hand, but not fully through the other. An arcana ray cut into her palm.
Nia immediately let herself fall. Grumbling, reality accepted her request to emerge somewhere else. The wound in her palm closed in the same moment.
“You do bleed,” Arkan observed, looking at the red drops stuck to his hand. He clenched a fist and then directed all of his attention to her. “You can be undone.”
Fear made room for conviction, a heroic spirit that was the last thing Nia wanted to see right now. Arkan squared his shoulders and raised all four of his arms. Large purple orbs shaped up beyond his reach, sent flying the moment he moved his limbs forwards.
For the first time in the entire fight, Nia was on the defensive. The bright comets came her way, leaving long streaks in their wake. Their trajectory remained connected to Arkan, who kept them moving after Nia after she started running.
Chased by arcane stars, the pariah ran through the asteroid field. She leapt, letting the magical gravity of one rock grip her and turn her upside down. Burning and crackling, the purple followed. The weapon in her hands consolidated into a black sphere, which then rippled out as a widespread shockwave, just as she went for another leap.
The asteroid plunged like others had before, coming into contact with one of the comets on its descent. It exploded with a terrifying harshness. The asteroid looked like a scoop had been taken out of it, a perfectly spherical cut-out engraved in it in a split second. The edges glowed purple from the magical overcharge.
Three more followed the pariah, as she fell, untouched by any artificial gravity or lack thereof. They adjusted their path, their master following at a distance to keep sight of the pariah. ‘Weakness in perspective,’ Nia thought and allowed herself to be gripped by the gravity of another asteroid.
She fell and the comets did not adjust fast enough to catch her when she sailed between them. Her sword appeared in her grip once more. With one swift cut, she severed the control lines between the super-powered seeker and sent it flying out into the vastness of the space. Somewhere, the watchers and the Fateweavers were still within their barrier. She did not have the luxury to account for their position.
The remaining two comets were swift to turn, approaching her from the left and the right. Reality had calmed since her last request and obliged her willingly. The blue queen giggled approvingly from her nest between comprehension and belief when the two comets crashed into each other where she had been.
Nia plunged down on Arkan, her long, sleek blade pointed straight at his face. A flash of fear froze him for long enough for the blade to connect with the particle skin. Nia felt herself drift towards the other side, while she pushed and pushed to increase the width of the bottomless hole. The voices of the inhabitants of the Nirvana sang with renewed, eldritch sweetness.
The particle skin gave.
Arkan screamed a series of robotic and human noises, before grabbing her by the leg and pulling her away. He threw her with all his might. A blunt and effective action. Stone broke where her back slammed into it, knocking the air out of her. Ribs broke, then agreed to never having been broken. A negotiation swift enough that she could get up and meet the arc ray launched from re-fused arms.
The intense arcane met Nia’s outstretched hand. Magic weakened at her demand to the point that the remaining light broke against her skin harmlessly, turning into a purple aurora around her.
“You are the most terrible thing in all of existence,” Arkan declared after cutting off the spell.
Nia stared at him across the divide. She wanted to respond, but what words would even work? To him, she would look that way, strange as she was, lies that had been boldly proclaimed to his face. To argue the point was a waste of breath she needed to keep herself from Fading.
“But \/\/ould [that be so bad], my I_ iTTle butterfly?” the Great Empty One asked, a blanket of truths unspeakable and an eye that looked at it all so gleefully.
Arkan was as struck by the moment as she was. He stared up, because his senses interpreted that it was up. Where the veil was thinned by Nia’s partly faded presence, where the Maiden of Null connected two worlds that were joined at the seams. Arkan stared and stared, the Great Empty One eluded his gaze but not all else that swam in the Nirvana, ever observing the Blue Maiden.
Under fractal wings, the barrier existed. The space beyond, projected by Romulus by means of Fateweavers, flickered and gave room to what truly was there. What truly existed beyond the Illusion Barriers erected by the supreme deity’s might. Gaia was the ruler of this world, the dreamer of all worlds. Mortals and immortals were so quick to forget that they were governed by one that chose to be comprehensible. A god, a true god, taking herself down to their level so that they may not bleed at her mere voice.
The Wyrdwyrm had no such concerns. Its eyeless shape, its hands and wings and symmetrical form were all lies. The Wyrdwyrm was a being that senses were not meant to grasp and so what Arkan saw was only what his own oculars could claw out of his limited understanding. Black and white, a low resolution view of it all.
“The Seventh is here,” Arkan whispered new words of power, in fear of that which lay opposite of him. “I lay claim to my Kingdom and declare this mine, for as long as my true land does not exist.”
Nia’s eyes burned. Her head pounded. All of the feelings of sudden aches, of the senses that others felt, in a flash, she understood. Arkan turned from a sun to something utterly beyond that. An Unleash beyond an Unleash, a light beyond lights, a throbbing in the windings of her brain that made her clench her teeth until it became bearable. The visor on her head retreated, a necessary surrender to the depth of power manifesting before her.
Gone was the metal, remaining only the sands. Swirling in endless bands around a plain humanoid form, featureless, expansive, and all consuming. A being as cosmic as their environment pretended to be. In his chest, among all the sands, pulsed in prismatic glory the ephemeral idea of a hearthstone unforged.
The Father of Arcane swiped at the skies, shutting out the thinned veil and the cuddly creatures lying beyond it. Empty eye sockets on a smooth face turned to her and beheld her with all of the contempt that he could muster. His voice was calm, robotic, and manifold. “I am your opposite,” he declared, “and my tribe is just.”
‘It is I or no one,’ Nia realized. This entity of power could not be stopped by anyone else. Rave stood no chance. Metra would not be able to equalize their power for long enough. Eliana only stood a chance well rested and unhurt.
The Maiden of Null stared at the depth of arcane energy incarnate.
“For Fusion, for my darling.”
Comments
Marko
HOLY FUCK
Phraxius
Nia POV chapters are always delightful; gotta love the cute murder machine.
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