The City of Mages
The City of Mages
The wind blew.
Not an ordinary wind, but a gale that carried certain death.
Aslan braced his jaw against it and let out a long breath.
Blood slicked the corners of his eyes, smearing the world into a pale blur.
Nothing felt real.
Neither did the danger.
That was the terror of the Veil.
Unreal death.
An assault that exploited the dulled vigilance born of every human's self-deception — the conviction that death would never come for them.
Aslan moved against it blindly. He pulled his arm against the mangled shoulder socket and pivoted.
The attack concealed within the rotation was a horizontal slash tracing an immense arc. He aimed not at the enemy, but at space itself.
White light carved across emptiness, shoving the wind aside.
A hideous shriek of tearing force.
The wind-laden halo split apart. Aslan kept moving without pausing to wipe the blood from his blurred eyes.
The world around him was frozen solid, yet his frost-rimed hair whipped black and white alike.
Shrieking, clashing.
Howling cold lashed his hair, froze the plaza stones solid, then cracked them open. Aslan held steady in the gaps.
At the end of his rotation, Aslan's sword touched a slender woman in gossamer garments. The blade that should have bitten her skin was driven back before it could sink half a finger's depth.
It had hewn the cold, deceived the eye, and reached her flesh—but could not penetrate.
Aslan knew exactly why.
Ice was growing across her body.
Before the deflected sword could leave his hand, Aslan shifted his shoulder and adjusted his grip on the hilt. The blade, driven sideways, halted in midair, then rose and plunged straight down. The wind wailed and scattered before the descending strike, and the woman merely rolled her eyes to track it before extending a hand.
Then impact.
Not flesh against steel, but the shriek of metal against metal, white sparks erupting violently around them. Aslan's relentless barrage and Ash's precise defense filled the space with roaring concussions.
A brutal, ringing chain of clashes.
Ice thrust the descending blade aside; a palm deflected the follow-up thrust of Purity. As Aslan's sword was knocked wide, he dropped his body low and forced an upward cut, only for Ash to smother the attack with a kick.
Aslan was hurled back in the direction of the leg Ash had already severed. He tumbled, and what rushed at his falling body was a kick from the leg still intact.
Acceleration too fast for the eye to follow, and the shockwave it bore. Without needing to predict the incoming kick, Aslan lifted the flat of his blade.
'Thunder Call.'
A deafening peal of thunder.
A ringing clang.
The moment the kick aimed at Aslan's heart smashed into the flat of the sword, thunder roared and the woman's body shot backward. The halo whirling behind her head went with her, and the space and buildings caught in its wake were savagely torn open, spilling their innards.
Across the frozen plaza, a hellscape unfurled — bricks stretched and shredded into impossible shapes, the mute evidence of ferocious resistance.
'Left eye... can barely see.'
Even light attacks, feints, and counterattacks drove him to the brink of annihilation. He'd had no choice but to overuse his precognition.
And the price of that overuse was reaching its limit — he could no longer draw upon it, and simultaneously, his left eye was losing its sight.
Now the left eye could only distinguish blurred afterimages and colors. Aslan smiled bitterly at his failing vision.
Equalization probably couldn't restore this. Aslan closed his left eye, then opened it again as he settled into his stance.
Beating a high priest without sacrifice was impossible. Surviving one was impossible.
So Aslan himself would be the first sacrifice.
Even blind in the left eye, he could fight.
The real problem was that precognition was spent.
His remaining fighting spirit was barely two. He had to hoard every use.
The instant Aslan steadied his stance, the woman who had been flung away rushed at him.
Her opening attack was a kick. Unlike Angie's raw, instinctive kicks or Aslan's orthodox ones, this kick was peculiar.
Her toes shot forward from a precise, almost balletic posture, wielding penetrative force that would make most spears look laughable.
As luck flared hot and vanished through his mind, Aslan narrowed his focus to a single point, aiming to evade an attack he couldn't even see.
He twisted his body and thrust his sword toward the woman. The extended edge was a god-sword that could cut through anything.
She knew this — she had lost an arm and a spear to it — and she respected the blade. Her aim dropped low. Aslan, anticipating this, withdrew the thrust and pulled the sword close to his body.
The woman's wariness and Aslan's gambit combined, and the result was this.
A hard clang.
Her leg scraped along the flat of Aslan's blade, deflected. As the extended white limb carved a gash into itself, Aslan spat out the blood flooding his mouth and twisted his body.
His target was her throat. Riding the impact that hurled him forward, he rotated, drew a counterforce from his hips, and swung the sword horizontally.
The woman responded by pulling her leg back — and then snapping it out again.
Her leg, flying like a honed spear, met Aslan's Purity. The moment they both reached — one for the throat, one for the heart.
A wet crack.
A massive arrow hurtled into the gap and buried itself there.
Though it shattered into icy fragments the moment it struck, the arrow succeeded in shoving the woman's leg aside.
The point of impact shifted. Not the heart she'd aimed for, but the flank.
Aslan gritted his teeth and wrenched his body further. The woman's leg slammed past his ribs.
A slicing hiss.
Blood surged into his mouth from the impact, but Aslan's sword carved clean through her throat. Her severed head lifted into the air and fell. Dozens of the woman's severed heads rolled across the stone.
Curtain's Envoy, Ash, was not human.
True to that proposition, she had no heart.
No brain.
She was simply filled with the divinity of a transcendent being called the Veil of Compassion — filled with cosmic death.
Aslan raised his sword to block the follow-up strike. Ash's spinning kick hammered into the blade pressed tight from his flank to his head.
A deafening, ringing peal.
Aslan's body was launched, tumbling pathetically until it stopped. As he came to rest, another figure closed in on the headless woman.
A silhouette forcing its way through the gap Aslan had cut in the halo, swinging an axe. A figure with womanly curves and white hair billowing in the cold — Ereta.
Gripping the axe in both hands, Ereta rotated her entire body and swung upward.
A sickening thud.
The axe severed an arm. The headless Ash pivoted and lashed out with her leg — a kick so fast it produced no air-splitting sound. Even for Ereta, who had slain many priests and fully charged the Valor of the Flying Bird, this kick could split her in half.
Before the kick could land, Angie revealed herself.
"Hraaaagh!"
A hard impact.
Howling a bizarre battle-cry, Angie charged and drove her own leg into Ash's body. Ash flew like a cannonball. In the opening her departure created, Ereta caught her breath, and Aslan rose from the stones to approach.
"Fuck, when does this thing die...."
Most of the party was here.
Their weapons, equipment, and physical condition had all been optimal.
It wasn't as though they had dropped their guard or grown careless.
Everyone had fought with everything they had to survive and achieve victory.
Yet despite every attempt and preparation, Ash would not die.
When Ash rose from the distant rubble of the shattered fountain, her head and arm had already regenerated.
From Angie and Ereta, who let out sighs of despair, to Tiyamal, who drew his next arrow with trembling, exhausted arms — their companions' bodies were in terrible shape.
The worst off were Angie and Aslan.
Aslan's entire arm had been torn away, exposing the shoulder bone, and one eye was clogged crimson with streaming blood.
Angie's mouth was painted red from the blood of blows she'd taken, and one arm was bent at an unnatural angle.
Even Tiyamal and Ereta, less visibly injured, were far from fine.
Ereta's plate cuirass, purchased in Belus Alpen, was hideously torn open. Her ragged breathing betrayed an exhaustion she hadn't felt once since gaining the Valor of the Flying Bird.
Tiyamal was visibly spent.
Only two arrows remained in his quiver, and his arm muscles twitched with spasms. With his body shivering faintly from the cold, no one needed to point out that he was running on empty.
And what of Ash?
Aslan lifted his gaze, closed his ruined left eye, and studied her with only his right.
Ash's expression was bland, bored.
As though she was doing something she had no choice but to do, yet found so tedious she wished she didn't have to.
Aslan felt no impulse to call that boredom arrogance.
If anything, he was almost proud that his own side had held out this long.
He knew the primary cause.
That halo.
Already restored even where Purity had cut it, the violently spinning halo encroached on everything around it, scattering stark white cold.
With that halo at her back, Ash walked slowly toward Aslan's position.
A mere walk, yet the plaza bricks that had frozen solid upon contact with the halo shattered into fine powder, as though ground in a mill.
The reverberation of frozen space-time being forcibly dragged along.
There were limited means of resisting that time-freezing force.
Only Angie with her ancient-god power, or Aslan who could cut the halo with Purity.
The fact that Tiyamal and Ereta were still alive was victory enough.
Because in game terms, this situation could never have occurred.
In the game Eternal Dominion, the hidden boss Curtain's Envoy was made nearly impossible by that very halo.
A halo that froze the space-time of any being lacking the power of the ancient gods, leaving them dead on their feet.
In the game, the Curtain's Envoy boss battle was a brutal one-on-one affair, and all ranged attacks were completely sealed.
The only option was to take up a weapon and fight it head-on.
And now that Geladrion had become Aslan's reality, he saw that the halo's savagery was no different.
Tiyamal's arrows couldn't land effectively. They could reach her after Aslan cut the halo, but even then they never counted as decisive hits.
Ereta was in a similar situation. She couldn't even approach unless Aslan had neutralized the halo in that direction.
Perhaps due to stacking the Valor of the Flying Bird, her attacks packed considerable force, but they never felt like they were truly landing.
With the angles of approach so restricted, only shallow blows were possible.
If the halo were the only obstacle, they'd have had abundant options to counter it and bring her down.
But the halo wasn't the sole problem.
The sheer diversity of tools available to a hybrid who had lived since the age of the ancient gods was an obstacle in itself.
Freezing space to block, scattering ice to attack, anchoring ice to her body to deflect strikes, and the moment a blow landed, sacrificing the affected body part to minimize damage.
Plus attacks that weaponized the halo's properties to their fullest.
Considering Aslan had lost his right arm to one of those attacks, the woman was stronger than anything the game had presented.
If the Dragon-king felt impossibly durable, Ash felt utterly untouchable.
With physical abilities rivaling the Dragon-king, the woman was an unassailable fortress.
Aslan looked up at the sky with his blurred left eye and his intact right.
The darkening sky proved just how long the party had managed to buy time.
One use of Equalization remained in his tattoos.
Fighting spirit was down to two.
Mana was exhausted.
Options were thinning, and survival was far from guaranteed. Worse yet, precognition was unavailable.
But he had to fight.
If they didn't fight, they would die.
The only way to survive was to hold out for more time.
Aslan put his faith in Fay and lowered his stance.
He pressed Purity close to the ruined shoulder socket, exhaled sharply, and focused his mind. He shut his left eye and aimed with only his right.
Tiyamal drew his bow, Angie released her grip on her injured arm and took her stance, Ereta leveled her axe and pulled in ragged breaths — and Ash halted mid-step.
"Ah."
The first voice they'd heard since the battle began.
The woman who had fought in silence as though stripped of her humanity turned her head, as if sensing something.
Ereta, Angie, and Tiyamal didn't grasp the meaning and each reacted differently, but Aslan understood.
Fay had done it.
The plan had hinged on Fay from the start.
As evidenced by her silence throughout the fight, the woman who had served as the Veil of Compassion's envoy for an immense span of time was practically an avatar of the Veil itself.
Personal feelings, preferences, desires — Ash had none of these.
She merely wore a shell that looked human. She was a monster in borrowed human form.
She moved solely according to the Veil of Compassion's purposes and objectives.
As far as Aslan knew, Ash, who was tethered to a deity of cosmic scale, was not the sort of high priest who would lash out in retaliation or vent frustration when her mission failed.
Meaningless combat and slaughter held no place in her.
She only fought when it benefited the Veil of Compassion.
And right now, Aslan knew that Fay had shattered the Veil's objective.
Anna's daughter — a vessel of immense mana, a rare material ripened over two hundred years as a priest.
The retrieval of that material had just failed.
The envoy's response to that failure was inevitable.
As the light in Purity dimmed and the blade returned to its scabbard, Aslan let his sword arm hang limp and gasped for breath.
Ash gazed blankly in the direction Fay and Anna had fled, then turned her head back to Aslan.
Her eyes, swirling with a clouded light as though they contained the cosmos, held his image — and curved into crescent moons.
A smile forced onto her face.
"A shame."
There was no need to guess what she found regrettable.
When Aslan offered no reply, the woman dipped her head and added,
"And so disappointing."
Then she turned.
She turned her body and began to walk toward the edge of the city.
That leisurely stride carried no trace of tension or resentment.
As the figure receded, Tiyamal raised his bow.
His trembling arms pulled the bowstring taut and leveled the arrow.
The ragged snort of his breath was loud and harsh from exhaustion, but without a flicker of displeasure, Aslan placed a hand on Tiyamal's arm and shook his head.
Tiyamal hesitated for a moment, then lowered his bow and clicked his tongue. His tail swept back and forth against the stone for good measure.
Worn down and battered, they all stared blankly at the path the high priest had taken.
Even as her silhouette dwindled to a dot, their wariness held.
Tiyamal watched the vanishing speck and finally spoke.
"Young one, answer me one thing."
Aslan didn't reply, but Tiyamal continued.
"Did we win?"
Aslan caught his breath before answering.
"Yeah."
Tiyamal let out a hollow laugh, his expression sour.
"This is the first time a victory has felt so foul."
He wasn't alone in that.
Aslan swallowed the words he was about to speak and surveyed their surroundings.
The city was devastated. How many had died, he couldn't guess.
Deaths that weren't Aslan's fault — Ash had come to fulfill her purpose, seemingly unrelated to any quest.
A high priest they hadn't managed to kill, but nothing to regret.
She wasn't a high priest they could hunt right now.
Yet Aslan felt responsibility, and regret.
The victory that slipped through his fingers left him aching.
Even though they'd settled for the lesser evil rather than the worst, he closed his eyes in frustration. Blood from his blurred left eye trickled down his neck.
With that clouded eye shut, Aslan made a vow.
Someday, he would kill her without fail.