The Lone Wanderer

A purple comet left a smooth trail of scorching plasma as it flew over the hills and grasslands, entangled with zigzagging lines of grey silk.

The Lone Wanderer’s scythes carved crisscrossing scars on the ground, while Machaon’s blasts melted everything indiscriminately. A hellish ocean of magma stretched for several kilometres, forming whirlpools and waterfalls as it flowed into the ravines.

Percy and Micky knew that receiving a single hit could prove deadly, though they struggled to put the same amount of pressure on their opponent. More than once, the edges of their weapons found their mark, only to melt and crumble away under the extreme heat without so much as putting a scratch on Machaon.

‘Not sharp enough… not cold enough… not fast enough…!’

Percy’s muscles tore and his joints made popping sounds as he strained his body beyond its limits. He was closing in on the third set of trollsfury vials, and the end of the battle was nowhere in sight.

Pouring as much mana as they could muster into the amplification and sharpness runes, he and his fellow aspect had to envelop the cracking constructs with their willpower to keep them from falling apart.

Their mana was of a lower grade than Machaon’s, but it didn’t matter. At its core, sharpness was the concentration of force at a narrower region, allowing even a mundane person’s soft hands to cut into wood and stone with the right tools.

Embodying the very idea of sharpness, the Lone Wanderer sliced through everything in his path, his weapons whizzing closer and closer to the patriarch’s skin.

He didn’t stop there. Pumping soul-freezing ice into the heating enchantments, he caused the temperature in the entire battlefield to plummet. Ripping into the ocean of magma, the grey crescents released by his swings froze the liquid in their path, changing the landscape once more.

Machaon flew even faster, probably judging that the enchanted weapons were now capable of threatening him. Unfortunately for him, his movements only grew clearer in the Lone Wanderer’s eyes as the Sage’s Pond adapted to his fighting style.

A second pair of sleeved arms formed on Percy’s cloaked body, grabbing just as many additional scythes. One attack flowed into the next as Micky’s fighting instincts rose to the forefront of their shared mind, performing the savage dance of his ancestors.

The tip of a scythe nearly stabbed into the White’s left eye, though he dodged it at the last second, countering with a straight punch shrouded in plasma. His fist tore into the grey cloak, splitting it in two, yet found no flesh inside either half.

The burning fabric twisted into a pair of short-lived phantoms that barely managed to swing at Machaon once before getting incinerated. It was enough to force him backwards, just as another invisible scythe appeared around his neck, about to behead him.

Ducking beneath the insidious crescent, the patriarch tried to elbow Percy’s chest, though the latter deflected the attack with the three shafts that weren’t mid-swing. The impact shattered the constructs, leaving the Lone Wanderer with a single usable weapon.

A familiar structure appeared on the horizon as the pair of Seventh Circle mages chased each other: the Oracle Mountain where Percy had once undergone the evaluation to identify his affinity and fuel his second core with mind mana. A veil of red mist shrouded the region as always, an elegant temple with hundreds of divine statues on its roof standing at the foot of the mountain.

Percy and Micky tried to steer the battle away, to avoid getting innocent bystanders involved.

Machaon clearly had other ideas. A sinister glint formed in his eyes as he realized that he had a new source of targets to distract his opponent with. Stretching his arm toward the temple, he began gathering mana in his palm.

Percy struggled to believe the patriarch’s audacity. Was he willing to defile even Phoebe’s temple if it meant getting the edge on him? To slaughter hundreds of people that had nothing to do with any of this just to land a single blow on his opponent?

Shocking as it was, it was obvious that this wasn’t a bluff. Percy and Micky gritted their teeth as a horrific vision of the temple: and all the little children queuing up with their parents outside: burning to ashes manifested before their eyes.

“Enough already!” they yelled, a burst of mana and willpower propelling them forward as they tried to prevent that future from coming to pass.

Machaon shifted just enough to avoid getting split in half, though the scythe sliced through his extended limb, cutting through plasma, muscle and bone alike. The White winced as his arm got severed at the elbow, but that was just the start of his suffering.

The flesh near the stump blackened and grew brittle, as did his soul. His very existence flaked away as the destruction encroached along the remainder of the limb, though his willpower was able to stop the decay before it touched his shoulder.

Despite his injury, he didn’t give up. Purple mana spilled out of the wound, accumulating where his hand used to be. A bolt of plasma rapidly expanded, a blink away from obliterating the temple.

Carried forward by their angular momentum, Percy and Micky found it difficult to swing their scythe again in a timely manner. Instead, they kept spinning, delivering a brutal roundhouse kick on the patriarch’s face. Percy’s foot exploded into pieces of scorched meat and splinters of bone as the flames consumed the rest of his right leg in an instant, only slowing down enough for him to put them out halfway up his thigh.

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Ignoring the pain, he grinned as he saw the White crash into the ground with enough force to form a crater nearly three metres deep and several times as wide. The last thing that Percy had felt with his destroyed limb had been the patriarch’s jaw cracking under his heel, so he considered this a worthwhile trade.

Unfortunately, the overall situation wasn’t in his and Micky’s favour. In theory, their fusion should allow them to produce a temporary replacement for his leg, but they didn’t have enough mana to spare, so they had to spend every mote wisely. Even the second pair of arms had been discarded at some point, not worth its maintenance.

Both they and Machaon had consumed most of their reserves, yet Percy and Micky were closer to their own limit, due to the restrictions imposed by their artificial advancements. To make matters worse, they were largely physical fighters, so the loss of Percy’s leg would affect them a lot more than the patriarch’s missing arm.

Lord Asclepius had probably realized that too. Holding his loose jaw in place with his willpower, his broken teeth formed a savage, bloody grin as he stood back up. His body was now visible in several spots, since he no longer had enough plasma to protect anything but his vitals. His skin was bare; his clothes having burnt to ashes a long time ago.

He shot toward the Lone Wanderer again, more than happy to resume a contest that he was already winning.

Knowing that they were going to get killed at this rate, Percy and Micky decided to unleash a technique that they’d been holding back since the start of the battle. It could have potentially broken through Machaon’s defences as early as during their first clash above the forest, but it would have left them too drained to face any additional enemies that might be lurking about.

Sadly, they no longer had the luxury of worrying about that.

Countless invisible crows revealed themselves above the two combatants. Percy and Micky had slowly replenished their numbers over the last few minutes, though the constructs had been too weak individually to attack Machaon directly.

Their purpose was a different one.

Flying into one another, the birds shapeshifted and interlocked into rows of intricate symbols, blending into a massive formation. Experienced enough to realize how screwed he was, Machaon aborted his charge and turned around to flee.

Unwilling to waste their only chance, Percy and Micky poured every last drop of mana that they could afford to lose into the enchantments, though they didn’t really have much. The runes were mostly fuelled by ambient mana and their previous accumulation, cannibalizing themselves to unleash the spell.

The world was drained of its colour, forming a black and white sphere a couple of kilometres across, with both combatants still inside. The Lone Wanderer would have rather avoided including himself in the blast, since the formation was more than powerful enough to injure him as well, though he hoped that his resistance to his own affinities and tempered soul would allow him to endure it better than his opponent.

Out of options, Machaon emptied his core and channels, giving up on his boosting art to envelop himself with another purple sun: a relatively small one that was only about fifty percent wider than the man was tall. The magical star was the only object within the grey region that retained its original colour, the potent mana and willpower resisting the influence of the giant formation.

Percy and Micky clenched their fists as the colourless zone slowly froze and gnawed at their soul, though they kept the enchantments running at full power to ensure that they would do their job.

The first of the interlocked symbols shattered a moment later, the grey light of the formation flickering in and out of existence as Machaon’s final layer of protection remained mostly intact.

The Lone Wanderer was forced to improvise. He hadn’t included any flow runes into the enchantments, so he mixed his domain into the blast, causing the freezing mana to spiral around the purple sun, rapidly grinding it down.

With every revolution, he peeled away some of the star’s mass, brightness, and even colour, soon exposing the patriarch’s body again. At first, it was just his feet, the magical blizzard shredding them into powder. As the orb of plasma continued to shrink, Machaon’s left arm suffered the same fate, though he concentrated the rest of his mana around his torso and head to protect his vitals.

Eventually, the formation consumed that as well, the skin on the patriarch’s face flaking off to reveal his skull as even the cartilage of his nose was torn away by the cold.

A single moment longer would have been enough to finish Lord Asclepius off once and for all, but Percy and Micky weren’t that lucky. The rest of their enchantments fell apart, allowing the world to regain its colour.

Machaon’s mutilated body landed on the ground with a muted thud, presumably slowed down by his domain at the last second.

Percy and Micky weren’t doing much better, crashing near their opponent. The mana inside their channels and cores grew unstable, the Blue colour breaking up into strands of Green as the Green mana of the other affinities nearly degraded back to Yellow. The Lone Wanderer’s artificial advancements were hanging by a thin thread. Firing a single spell was guaranteed to undo all of his hard work and leave him vulnerable.

Percy tried to empty the fifth set of trollsfury ink into his veins to keep himself going, but his body violently rejected the foreign substance this time, forcing him to stop once he started coughing blood.

Even his fusion with Micky felt on the verge of giving out. The stars in their mindscape wanted to snap back into a pair of separate constellations, since that was now their default state. Normally, overcoming their pitiful resistance and willing them to mix didn’t take much effort, but even that was currently difficult for the two aspects to maintain.

Supporting himself on both elbows and one knee, the Lone Wanderer lifted his head weakly to examine his opponent’s condition. Machaon couldn’t move, clearly in an even worse state. However, he was still alive and conscious, looking back at the cloaked figure intensely.

Scanning their surroundings for anything that they could use to finish the patriarch off, Percy and Micky spotted a broken blade from one of the scythes a few metres away. Too tired to move, they willed it to fly into their hand, nearly stabbing themselves in the process. Then, they paused for a moment or two to gather up the strength to hurl it at Machaon.

Realizing that he was at the end of the rope, the patriarch tried to speak, though he was only able to spurt out a mouthful of blood. Trying again while presumably animating his jaw and compensating for his missing teeth with his domain, he shouted as loudly as he could:

“Theseus! How much longer are you going to wait?! I’ve already baited out his formation!”

Percy’s features twisted into a grimace as his worst fears proved true. Fully aware that their window to act was shrinking by the second, he and Micky aimed the fragment as well as they could, hurling it at their opponent. They hadn’t put much force behind it, so they doubted that it would be able to harm even a Blue. Thankfully, Machaon wasn’t in any condition to block or avoid it.

Just as the spinning piece of grey mana was about to tear into the bastard’s soul, a hand covered in glowing tattoos pinched it to a halt, crushing it under its fingers.

Percy and Micky hadn’t even noticed the newcomer arrive, their Sage’s Pond having shrunk to a pitiful size due to their exhaustion. Through blurry eyes, they noticed that the mage who had saved their opponent was also a White, and he wasn’t alone. A second landed right beside him, both with Circulation active.