The Ancients

by Adam-Clay Webb

  As the thick dark cloud of residual magic cleared away slowly, the sage, enclothed in white flames, was revealed to be crouching in the crater Ohm’s attack had freshly carved.

  “I’ll admit, old man, you’re not as weak I thought. But you see, now that you have destroyed your own playthings, you will--”

  Ohm laughed hysterically to interrupt the sage. “I have more playthings than there were ever people in this world, son of Kizer. I’ll enjoy this for a moment more, and then I’ll get serious!” With that, he summoned blades of purest arcane blackness in his hands, and the wind dragon, with mental command, darted off at the sage, twisting the wind as it flew.

  Aragan dodged, then dodged another quick approach, sending fiery attacks at Ohm, but the wind dragon was too fast to be hit. Ohm laughed when he saw the creasing lines of annoyance on the sage’s face.

  “I hear it takes an astonishing degree of black magic to affect sages even a little. My previous attack, for one, was only useful in destroying my summonings.”

  “Such is right, old fool,” Aragan said in an arrogance that was his constant tone.

  “I do have spells up my sleeves that are ‘astonishing’, if I may be less than humble,” he said. “But in honesty, if I resort to them, I won’t have the magic required to call forth the summoning that will crush you.”

  “I let you land a single useless attack, and now you actually think that you can win.” Aragan hissed in derision. “Burning Iceland to nothing has admittedly used up quite a lot of my substance for now. Owing only to that is the life within any great or small creature within ten thousand miles of me.”

  “You best not be saying you’re too tired to fight,” Ohm said. “As the final summoning you will face is a warrior whose power eclipses that of sages.”

  Aragan laughed. “You are senile! What do you know of the power of sages?”

  “What do you know of an Ionide who would put Argros to shame?” Ohm asked back. “Elite Summoning! As Ohm clasped his hands, a golden flare caused Aragan to flinch and cover his face. Still, he remained quite alert for any surprise attack that the cunning old man might have been scheming. “Legend of the Ionide Race! Amorphous! Come forth!” The brightness cleared to reveal before Aragan a man already coated in the armour of legends, a perfect warrior clad with a perfect silver armour whose mind was replaced by the will of Ohm. His eyes wore a dull hollowness, a soullessness and absence of private thoughts.

  “An Ionide?” Aragan asked scoffingly.

  “The Ionide,” Ohm corrected. “Tear him apart,” Ohm commanded Amorphous. In a movement fast nearly as time itself, the Ionide, leaving not even a blur to be half-traced, silently reached up to the sage of fire, fist drawn back with devastating potential. There was no time to react. Even the highest of magic would have been to slow. As Amorphous’ fist – so solid that it made steel as plastic – struck the man shrouded in fire, he felt a force he had never before experienced. His body shot of over miles, parting air particles at slightly above sound’s speed. What seemed like instantly after, there was distant impact.

  Ohm’s eyes widened. A string of fire trailed the path to where Aragan’s body had slammed deep into a mountain, quaking it and sending might cracks into it. The old man laughed wildly, musing at the calm Ionide, whose fist was vibrating almost unnoticeably.

  “You really do have a thing for making mountains into graves, don’t you?”

  Ohm’s smirk slouched like melting pudding as he saw a distant body of fire speed up to the sky. This enemy, the old summoner accepted, was not Lukia who wore the title ‘sage’ as a proud honorific, but instead, one who would, in might, closely define the title. Apparently unscathed by his plunging into a solid mount, the sage ascended and approached Ohm and the legendary Ionide with great vigour. But the ball of fire stopped before quite reaching up to them. Remaining effortlessly afloat by his mystical fire that powered flight more ably than angelic wings, he stilled himself when he was the height of four or five towers.

  “After getting a hit like that, he knows better than to fight where Amorphous can reach him,” Ohm considered.

  The sage held both hands down toward where Ohm stood.

  “At that height, he can easily cast a widespread attack. I suppose he’s trying to force me to shift far out, abandoning my summoning, weakening or even losing control of it.”

  In a flare of blinding whiteness, the sage ascended further, until to Ohm, he was just an ominous glare too high up to reach.

  “Flame River!” the sage called out, and waves of white fire quickly expanded from his palms, widening at such a rate that what Ohm saw coming down on the earth was a white river or extreme heat. Ohm saw the attack as clearly as is if it were moving slowly. His high arcane mind was trained with the ability to perceive and read through attacks of almost any quickness. Shifting miles away from the sage and not even looking back in his direction was the obvious answers, but Ohm could not bear to lose his grip on the Ionide for even a moment. This would mean the permanent vanishing of the summoning, and a waste too grave to be considered.

  Had it been almost any other summoning, Ohm would have, without thinking much, just shifted with him out of the reach of such an attack, but this summoning was peculiar. For some reason, no magic would have any effect on him, not even to shift him out of harm’s way. And the fire that was coming down on them was not the more survivable fire that the Ionides had deduced their fireproofness from. At the end of a long chain of thought that was pressed into generation in well under half a second, Ohm thought that his best move would have been to summon the strongest arcane shield he could conjure, and stretch it around himself and his precious summoning. He layered his regular shield with two others, his hands clasped desperately.

  His vision vanished into a spectacular whiteness, like a blind man’s first miraculous sight being an accidental stare into the sun’s core. He could feel by the immense pressure of the fire that ate at his layered shields that the sage’s attack had already spread over many miles of Notherland. The white fire, being near infinitely times hungrier and madder than earthy fires, ravaged through earth and ground and flesh and wind and water at the speed of death, and with the white fury of the sage’s inborn and cultivated malevolence. The white fire that spread with nothing enough to be a barrier was far more than an attack at Ohm and Amorphous. It was a continental attack. The storming fire already raged with flames with height of men.

  The pressure that pushed against Ohm’s shield, he felt, multiplied over seconds.

  “What the hell--” Ohm clenched his teeth, his exhilaration quickly turned to a rapid panic. This fire was far more powerful than even he had imagined, and Ohm had a big imagination. The sage’s attack was of such pressure that Ohm felt his mana being melted, or drained with a devastating rapidity. Not just that, but he felt a frightening sureness that he was suddenly unable to shift. What is this attack? Ohm contemplated in what appeared to be a timeless moment just before sublimation into a death that would burn the very soul to nothing but a vacuum. His shields were now too badly damaged to offer even the slightest consolation. In all his years, he had never had to erect a triple-layer arcane shield, and this one time he had to, it seemed insufficient.

  No… This cannot be… Ohm no longer cared about Amorphous. He just needed to survive so he could play the rest of his cards. But he could not shift, and his shield was at its limit. Shit. Burning shit, his thoughts said. This is… disgraceful. I am an Elder, am I not? Old and ragged and crazy, but an Elder still. I shouldn’t need to pull my biggest cards to defeat a single sage. He had somehow manged to convinced himself, even in this trial, that he could, if he really wanted, call forth another summoning. My peers are a man with the mind of God, a man with the power to negate all magic, an immortal man with unending mana, and a woman who can kill most anyone in a second’s fraction by peering into their soul… I… I, Ohm will not be defeated, or even pushed to unleash my greatest weapons against anything beneath Kizer and Oga themselves
…

  “Don’t underestimate me, you shit from hell!” Ohm’s voice tore through the unquenchable flames. He dug into a reserve of mana he had reserved for something quite special, special enough that even unto this precipice of death, he refused to employ it. Instead, he dug up an old spell that he had never prior been pushed to use. “Elder Art! Quark Collapse!” the Elder commanded mightily. On that, a fourth black shield, stronger than the others beyond comparison, covered Ohm, not stretching to guard the Ionide as well. By this, the previous shield was completely destroyed by Aragan’s fire. Ohm was certain that this attack would, if nothing else, spell the end of his Ionide summoning. Hundreds of tiny spheres dotted the arcane shield, each of them housing high amounts of a super-compressed, volatile mana. Each of the near-thousand spheres held enough power within them to cast a decent spell – of course, not a spell decent enough to have any use in a fight like this.

  The many tiny spheres of dense power all exploded at exactly the same time, creating an outward release of arcane power that hardly another arcane spell could hope to achieve. The mighty black pulse pushed out a wave of energy over tens of miles in a mere second or so. Aragan lost all vision in the sudden blackness, and he felt his body fly off through what felt like a void, where there was no matter, space or time. Finally, he felt a sudden terrible force, and what felt like a body of cold over him. As his consciousness flickered back to life, he stopped himself from breathing. He was plunged hard into a distant ocean some miles off the coast of Notherland. The force of his plummet had raged up a small tsunami that almost reached Notherland’s eastern coastal battlefront, where Ohm’s men and powerful sorcerers were fending off the enemies to a near-victory.

  Ohm slouched over and panted, a grin stretching the corners of his mouth across his wrinkled jawlines. He then uttered a laugh, finally standing upright. From where he was, none of the persistent flames were in sight. Ohm’s forceful attack had vanquished them with ease. Only tiny, desperate flickers of dead fire remained on the ground that was just before the floor of a small hell. Ohm’s attack had turned several miles around into a total wasteland, where there was nothing but black earth.

  But of everything, what thrilled Ohm the most was the Ionide who stood there in place, unaffected even by such a drastic spell, arms folded. But the laughing quelled when Ohm saw a ball of fire rising up out of the distance.

  The old man hissed. “So damn persistent, aren’t you…”

  Argros sped his way through a fiery flight over many miles, until he landed and stood before Ohm and Amorphous. This time, he was holding two white swords in his hands. But there was no look of composure in his eyes. His body was shaking all over.

  “So you have decided to face my summoning head on,” Ohm said daringly.

  “I will melt the Ionide, and then evaporate your flesh, old sorcerer,” Aragan said. But at this, Ohm laughed. He felt no threat at all in the sage’s words.

  “Don’t mock me!” the sage thundered, then stepped toward the irritably relaxed-looking Ionide.

  “Amorphous, do it,” Ohm said.

  Aragan swung madly at Amorphous with his swords of white fire. After two perfect dodges, the Ionide sent a heavy kick at Aragan, flinging him back roughly over a few meters. Amorphous clenched his fists purposefully, calling upon himself the power of the Legend State. In what seemed to be a single step, he reached up to the sage and sunk down into a potent crouch, rising to deliver an uppercut that cast Aragan’s breath from his lungs. The sage’s body flew upward as if it were virtually weightless. He released his white swords, which then vanished into dispersing heat. His consciousness fled and returned while he was still in the air, and he sped down at the Ionide, trailed by white fire. But his fiery fists had no use against Amorphous. Yet, each punch Amorphous delivered cracked the sage’s consciousness, and sent painful surges of force through his body.

  Amorphous’ attack became, by the moment, a more rapid combo of inescapable blows. The blows were not only getting swifter, but stronger also. A punch would send him hurling fast, but not too fast for the Ionide to reach up to him to give him another before the thought of the first could even be registered.

  Aragan staggered back as Amorphous flickered his consciousness with another hard slam. The Ionide just stood and looked at the finished sage almost as if in pity. There was no white fire about him. His strength was all used up.

  “Screw this,” Aragan muttered to himself, feeling death coming to him. His body was mangled by the Ionide’s attacks, and still the Ionide showed no sign of tiredness or injury. As soon as his decision to flee was finalized, he uttered a screech as he felt a sharp pain. He looked down at the black sword of arcane power plunged through his back.

  “How easily you can get so caught up in the summoning, that you forget the summoner,” Ohm said from behind him. “I will give the Ionide the final attack. He has earned it… Elder Art! Final Paralysis!” Ohm commanded, and his black sword morphed and melted into a black inky form that crawled upon the sage’s body from the hole it had made though him. With this, Argros lost the ability to move altogether. This spell was deliberately created to be an overkill, as it required the enemy first being bored with an arcane sword, already enough to kill almost any enemy.

  Ohm vanished in a black cloud and appeared behind the Ionide. “Now,” he said.

  Amorphous’ fist glowed the power to crush mountains.

  Aragan’s eyes were wide and pitiful. He knew with certainty that this was his end. He was outmatched by an old madman and his summoning.

  “Ion Blast!”

  As the impact was made, the earth was further cracked all about and a great wind was stirred.

  Ohm took a victorious breath to utter his laughter of triumph. But before a sound could escape his mouth, it was silenced by the sight ahead.

  A man slightly taller than Amorphous, clad in the same legendary armour, stood between Ohm’s summoning and Ohm’s victim, a legendary fist caught in his palm’s grip.

  “Now you know never to compare yourself to me ever again, brother,” Argros said, a proud smirk on his face as he stared into the emptiness that was Amorphous’ eyes.

  Chapter 33: Final Summoning

  “Azar, the Metal Sage is now also on Ohm’s position!” Ruben alerted.

  Azar made the movement on the large map immediately. “Dammit. Even with Amorphous, he will still need some support. The way things are, I have no-one to spare,” Azar contemplated.

  “Fret not about Ohm,” Vis said. His eyes were still closed.

  “Fret not? Strong as he is, he cannot fight two sages.”

  “Ohm will manage,” Vis assured. “More importantly, I have a location on Lex Leo.”

  ***

  Argros, still gripping Amorphous’ fist sturdily, bullied to move not even an inch by the Ion Blast, touched Aragan’s chest with his free hand. A grey fluid flowed from out of Argros’ hand and seeped into the deadly wound that Ohm had inflicted upon the Fire Sage. Aragan clenched his teeth as iodium worked rapidly inside him, undoing undoable damage, and sealing off the gaping wound, leaving behind a patch of greyness.

  “Amorphous!” Ohm blasted, seeing this. Amorphous sent a left-handed slam at Argros, but again, his fist was caught easily. A heavy kick sent Amorphous hurling backward, that he almost knocked Ohm down.

  “Aragan, you focus on the summoner. I’ll take care of my child, here,” Argros said. Aragan nodded.

  “My spells won’t affect Argros, so the enemy’s plan is ours as well,” Ohm said.

  Amorphous sped off toward Argros again.

  “Summoning!” Ohm readied, but the fiery sage reached up to him with a renewed speed that forced him to shift. Of course, Ohm had to reappear close by, as shifting too far away from a summoning like Amorphous would have been troublesome.

  Ohm found himself with no time to cast even a quick spell. Aragan, seemingly made faster by Argros’ appearance (or by the iodium injected into him), pressured Ohm into constant shifts. But even h
e, the Fire Sage, had to pause and shift his attention as there was a vicious wind made by a wave of force, along with a deafening metallic bang. Ohm watched as Amorphous’ body landed and rolled, and as bits of the legendary armour scattered on the ground.

  Seriously?! Ohm could not believe what he was seeing. In a swift approach, Argros reached up to the floored Amorphous, propelling himself upward to slam down with a heavily-spiked fist. The earth shook as the spikes on Argros’ fists bored through the Ionide, sending blood and bits of liquid iodium pooling under him rapidly. He’s been beat out of the Legend State.

  Ohm’s distraction would have cost him as well. A thick wave of fire grabbed on to him. He shifted off, his painful screech following him as he reappeared a few meters off, using a rapid spell to cast the white flames from his body. Ohm jerked back as a thick spike rummaged through his chest. He landed on his back, gasping in panicky breaths, eyes wide. Argros’ attack was too swift to be seen coming. The Metal Sage, who had spun the tables of the battle, stood with the broken Amorphous’ chest under his right foot. Ohm grabbed on to his chest, spending all of his remaining mana to partially heal the wound that would have otherwise killed him. He then stood limply.

  “These are really the enemies that overcame you, brother?” Argros asked mockingly. Even though he appeared to be making no effort at all to secure Amorphous under his foot, the Ionide was rendered motionless by the Metal Sage’s strength. Argros readied three massive spikes to jut out from amongst his knuckles to finish Amorphous.

  Ohm struggled to maintain a limp stance, still gripping tightly to the half-healed wound. His mana was not enough to finish the healing, and certainly not enough to make any more summonings. No… His direness came not from losing, or even dying, but from being unable to call forth his greatest summonings. Aragan held out his arm toward Ohm, who could not even spaceshift. Healing the deadly wound had totalled his mana.