Chapter 528 - The Rising Moon IV

  Jules thumped his fist against his chest as he proceeded through the gladiator gate. The announcer had already called his name. Just ten more steps, and he’d emerge before the crowd. His opponent was already waiting. He was too busy waving to the crowd to pay Jules any attention, but somehow, the Vel’khanese fighter felt an uncomfortable glare upon him regardless.

  He was at least a little hung over and more than nervous enough to soil his non-existent pants. He regretted drinking as much as he did, but it was far too late to make any changes. He could only pray that the medicine he’d taken in the morning would do as prescribed and kick in by the time the battle began.

  Clenching his fists, he steeled his nerves and stepped out into the ring. Millions of eyes fell on him in tandem. His back nearly gave beneath the weight of their scrutiny and expectations. Krail’s speech hadn’t exactly helped either. If anything, it had only further raised the bar.

  Jules wished that he was anywhere else, but he continued towards the center of the ring, his back arched in a visible slouch.

  He frowned as his status popped into the sky. He wasn’t quite as annoyed as Krail, but he didn’t like how they so readily revealed his bag of tricks.

  Jules

  Health: 1670320 (100%)

  Mana: 6698743 (100%)

  Racial Class: Razorshell Depthcaller Water Elemental - Level 922

  Primary Class: Langgbjern Sovereign Synergist - Level 3964

  Secondary Class: Awakened Prismatic Elementalist - Level 5111

  Tertiary Class: Infinity Veil Archmage - Level 2697

  Quaternary Class: Twisted Langgbjern Chronomancer - Level 1025

  Notable Equipment: Evernight Moonstone Emblem α (Quality:12711), Evernight Moonstone Emblem β (Quality:12706), Evernight Moonstone Emblem γ (Quality:12639), Pendant of Unperceivable Time (Quality: 5012), Elderbird’s Bone Wand (Quality: 3477), Spellbreak Orniferin Cloak (Quality: 2101)

  His stats were out on display as well, but that was less important. His distribution wasn’t too different from that of the average mage of his level. The only real thing to call out was his strength, which was just a little higher than average. He liked occasionally settling things with his fists, and he didn’t mind wasting the points. His class modifiers had always earned him a few more than average, and he’d only dumped maybe a third of the extra into the application of raw violence.

  At the very least, it hadn’t proven too problematic when he was still a big fish in a small pond. Seeing the Cadrian warlord standing in front of him, however, immediately led him to regret his choices.

  Groaning, he shifted his gaze and examined Ephesus’ stats. The Marquis’ spread immediately identified him as a dexterity-based battlemage specced for maximum flexibility—he was fast, good with his hands, and capable of flipping back and forth between might and magic. If not for his absolutely horrid personality, he would have been exactly the type of heroic figure that Jules had admired in his youth.

  Stygius Ephesus

  Health: 3983721 (100%)

  Mana: 3749135 (100%)

  Racial Class: Aspect of Faceless Faith - Level 1000

  Primary Class: Royal Cadrian Surging Fist Grandmaster - Level 2518

  Secondary Class: Lord of Fleeting Shadows - Level 3911

  Tertiary Class: All-Seeing Puppetmaster - Level 1498

  Quaternary Class: Arcane Hellfist Apocalypse - Level 2008

  Quinary Class: Poet - Level 14

  Notable Equipment: Langgbjern Wolf-Eared Bracers (Quality: 6102), Metalicized Vlasch Armour (Quality: 3992), Fallen Goddess' Ring of Computation (Quality: 1822), Corrupted Caprine Flesh Suit (Quality: 1209)

  Jules groaned. Their equipment was far closer in quality than he would have liked; his one real advantage had gone out the window before he'd so much as stepped in the ring. Looking at the man, it should have been obvious from the start. The silken bandages that covered his fists glowed in an ethereal light, and his armour was made of a familiar material capable of easily withstanding his spells. It was almost a full suit; the only thing he didn’t have was a helmet.

  "Do either of you have anything to say to the crowd or your opponents?" asked the announcer.

  "I do," said the marquis. He spread his arms, raised his voice, and bellowed to the crowd. "My fellow countrymen, there is something that I must confess. The truth of the matter is that I have been closely following the Tornatus incident from the moment the sky fell upon the Pollux march. I know exactly how strong all of Vel'khan's combatants are, and I've long memorized every last one of their abilities. Likewise, I'm aware of the person responsible for Tornatus' destruction and would be happy to reveal their identity, but unfortunately, that would be rather boring if simply performed unilaterally. To that end, I would like to propose a wager." He turned to Jules as he flashed a twisted, conniving grin. "I will maintain my silence only if I lose. What do you think, Jules?"

  "I think I fucking hate you," said the clam, with a grumble. The man had only furthered the already unbearable pressure; Claire was sure to lynch him if he lost the bet.

  "I could just say it aloud immediately if you'd prefer," offered the marquis.

  "Fuck you." Jules lifted his wand. "Choke on a dick and die, asshole."

  "I'll take that as a yes," said Ephesus, with a cackle.

  "What stakes! How entertaining!" Octavia interrupted the pair with a smile. "Unfortunately, I will have to ask the two of you to hold off for just a little bit longer before you go at each other's throats. We've yet to set the stage." She stepped away as she spoke, making room for the world to change around them. "Before we do, I'll need to give you a little bit of background. As some of you may have already learned, my dear cousin and our nation's crown princess, the honourable Lady Claire Augustus, has recently forayed into the world of high art." Rubia's paintings appeared in the sky, their images projected upon the heavenly canvas. "She has demonstrated incredible mastery in recreating people and creatures alike, but her skills shine brightest in the painting of landscapes."

  The colosseum widened as the outer walls rose all around them. Grasses and flowers sprouted from the dirt floor, transforming it into a verdant carpet. And at the very center, a calm, cerulean lake. It was not just flora that populated the world, but curious fauna as well. Large, lizard-like creatures roamed the animated painting, shaking the ring with every heavy stomp.

  "This realm is one of her creations, an ancient land roamed by the very same creatures from which the goddess Olethra was once derived. It is the realm of giants, the world long lost to the furthest reaches of time, and an era where Pria and Vaughan were one."

  Not all of them were situated within the arena itself. Some of the largest and most fierce-looking individuals were off in the distance, far beyond the ring or even Valencia's bounds. The mechanism that the terraformer employed was the same one often abused by dungeons; nothing in the background was real—not that anything created by a terraformer was real in the first place—it was just there for added flavour.

  "Welcome to the Spring of Sparkling Solace!” The lake began to bubble as she spoke. The fizzing grew more and more violent with every passing second before the whole reservoir was turned into a geyser. It shot hundreds of meters into the air, completely eclipsing the stadium and its spectators and even dousing the VIP containment. “As we have reached this war’s halfway point, all of the stages, from this point forward, will have additional features that the fighters will have to work around. The Spring of Sparkling Solace has just one.” A dozen different creatures appeared on the display. They were shaped loosely like the ancient lizards that had once wandered the world, but their faces were distorted. Instead of eyes, noses, and mouths, they simply had giant gaping holes. “These towering behemoths are effectively immune to damage and will absorb any attacks that land upon them. They will still be affected by impulses, however, and can be easily displaced.” She smiled as she scanned the crowd. “I can’t wait to see how our fighters will adapt and use them.”

  Jules groaned. He almost wanted to scream that the contest was rigged. His opponent was the only one who would benefit from the way that the stage was set.

  “Fighters, take your stances!”

  The clam begrudgingly raised his wand while his enemy lowered his center of gravity.

  “Let the battle begin!”

  Ephesus kicked off the ground. Digging his feet into the grass, he launched himself with enough force to break the sound barrier three times over.

  But Jules was the one who made the first move.

  He started with yellow magic, casting it on himself and his opponent in tandem. As both were given a strong positive charge, Jules was sent flying away before Ephesus’ fists so much as came within a meter of his body.

  Against a pure melee fighter, it would have been checkmate. The electromagnetic charges ensured that their bodies would never touch and that Jules would never suffer the full brunt of any physical attacks. But Ephesus was hardly so limited. Scoffing, he opened his palm, channeled his mana through his circuits, and unleashed a giant, earth-rending beam.

  Jules warded it off with a light flick of the wand and redirected the blast into one of the two-legged dinosaurs nearby. Surely enough, the damage was nulled; despite taking the attack head-on, the lizard nonchalantly raised its head, looked around, and returned to grazing on a bush unharmed.

  In the meantime, Jules crafted a dozen crimson spheres in the space around his opponent and detonated them all at once. There was no escape. It was a perfect cage with the individual pieces evenly spaced around him. No matter where and how he moved, he would be hit by the full power of at least three different explosions.

  Jules didn’t wait for the spell to confirm before shifting into his next. Connecting nine of the magical nodes hardwired into his brain, he activated a once-capstone skill, Cry of the Cardinal Chain, and swallowed his opponent in a giant red sphere. The accompanying detonation evaporated the lake and left a giant crater that spanned almost half the arena. But he wasn’t even close to done.

  Raising his wand overhead, he leveraged two of the elements on which his coloured magics were based and drowned his opponent in a torrent of electrified water—a cube that measured fifty meters in every direction. For a Cadrian warrior, it wasn’t even a deterrent. Neither the electric or liquid currents sufficed to dampen his movements. But of course it didn’t. For it was no cage nor wall. Only a medium that was thicker than air.

  Thousands of glowing, crimson spheres appeared all around them. Suddenly accelerating, they converged on Ephesus’ location and unleashed the full brunt of their magical might. It was a larger scale version of the spell that he just cast, but beneath the waves, the explosions were far more concentrated. Whereas the first barrage had left the warrior mostly unscathed, the second tore chunks from his flesh. The aftereffects were just as deadly. Jets of superheated gas flooded the water, boiling Ephesus’ blood and cooking his brain to mush.

  Perhaps, if he was truly a centaur, he might have fallen to the attack.

  But his brain was no more important to him than any other part of his body. It took only a second to fully reform.

  The supposed goat exited the cube a moment later. Deploying his feathered wings, he launched into the air and crashed down on Jules from up above. It wasn’t just a body slam. He was using the clam’s own magic against him and pushing his body into the ground below. Each flap was another attempt at squishing him, a test to see if his body could hold.

  Perhaps, against a different yellow mage, it might have been the perfect solution.

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  But Jules was a clam.

  He simply closed his shell and brushed off the crushing force. Spread across the surface of his body, it could do him no harm.

  The defensive stance robbed him of his ability to see and forced him to rely on the rest of his senses. But he knew where Ephesus was. He didn’t even have to aim.

  Channeling his magic, the Vel’khanese representative addressed the many beads of water that still coated the marquis’ body. The spell remnants readily responded. Heeding his call, they became enhanced with his blue magic and gained the ability to wither all that they touched. They eroded Ephesus’ flesh, eating at it like a swarm of locusts.

  Jules smirked as he spun his shell out of the marquis’ path and opened it to observe his handiwork.

  Contrary to his expectations, his magic was working.

  Ephesus wasn’t healing.

  Or more accurately, he wasn’t healing fast enough to outpace the erosion spell; his flesh was slowly but surely being eaten away.

  Jules had found a way to negate the Cadrians’ greatest strength.

  He almost wanted to throw back his head and cackle, but he didn’t have the time. A surge of arcane mana descended from the sky. It was stronger than Ephesus’ first spell, just a little too powerful to block or parry. But waving his wand just once, the mage intercepted the attack with an explosion and erased it outright.

  A cleaving spell—the one that Sophia had used to kill Ace—followed in the first strike’s shadow, but Jules caught that one as well. In fact, he caught all hundred instances that his opponent threw his way with a wall of crimson detonations.

  The crowd broke into a roaring cheer when he emerged from the barrage, completely unscathed. He was proving Krail’s claim, showing the world that Vel’khan’s final five fighters were truly among the continent’s most powerful.

  But his display, of course, was only on the surface.

  Jules knew that the biggest hurdle was still yet to come.

  There was a moment where the tides could still turn.

  And, from seeing the irritation in Ephesus’ eyes, he knew that the moment would soon be upon them.

  But not yet.

  He still had other cards in play.

  Thirty-seven different fighters suddenly sprouted from the shadows and charged Jules all at once. They were the pieces that had broken off of Ephesus—the soldiers that he called the numbers. Every single one unleashed an arcane spell in tandem.

  One fired a beam that turned the sky red.

  One cleaved the arena in two with a massive magical scythe.

  One unleashed a full mage’s worth of mana and concentrated it into a single deadly bolt.

  Though more magically inclined, Jules couldn’t have possibly defended against all the spells at once. Or at least, not before he’d mastered his yellow magic.

  A wave of the wand was all it took to assign positive charges to all the spells. That alone would have negated the fake goat’s efforts, but Jules took it a step further and flipped the sign on his opponent. As the only strongly negative entity within the arena’s bounds, Ephesus became a magnet for all the attacks that he and his so-called children had launched.

  The many arcane magics combined into a mass of pure energy, a sky-breaking laser that rattled all of Valencia.

  Eyes wide, Ephesus ran as quickly as he could. He desperately pumped his wings and dived behind the nearest dinosaur, but not even that was enough to keep him out of harm’s way. Though it couldn’t quite pierce the invincible hallucination, it flooded all around it, hit the barrier’s outer walls, and looped back to take the marquis in its embrace.

  His clones attacked in the meantime. They swarmed the clam from every which direction. They punched, kicked, kneed, and elbowed. But none of their physical attacks landed, and none dared to throw any more spells.

  They even tried to close in and squish him when he positively charged them all, only to be blown to bits by his explosions.

  The various scattered pieces did not heal. They flowed back to Ephesus instead, merging with his wounded body and mending his broken flesh. Each reabsorption amplified his regeneration, eventually allowing him to overpower the eroding curse slowly losing him the battle of attrition.

  The marquis groaned, cracked his neck, and paced back into the arena. The absorption had consolidated his power. But still, it wasn’t enough. Yellow magic was purpose built to counter fighters like him. It was impossible to overcome it without an ability that allowed him to circumvent the standard means.

  Coincidentally, Ephesus had just that in his back pocket.

  He wasn’t too keen on pulling it out. He neither wished to fully expose himself in public or accept that he was being pushed back by someone of a lower level, but he knew better than to allow his shame to cloud his judgement.

  Frowning, the marquis smashed his fists together and filled the resulting gaps with mana. It was not the bright red arcane magic that made up the rest of his repertoire, but a sickly mix of purples and greens. It spun and crackled, whirring to life as it enshrouded his form.

  Jules was not so foolish as to await the spell's completion. He fired a uniquely constructed beam that would detonate anything it touched. It was a counterspell that used its target's own mana as fuel and could easily destroy most forms of sorcery. But Ephesus' blob was unaffected. It ignored the beam, completely negating it as it tightened its grip on the marquis’ body. Eventually, it formed into a full set of armour, a suit that not only masked his internals but completely changed his form.

  The goat-like flesh that he once held had vanished in favour of a bipedal base. That, in and of itself, was hardly out of the ordinary. Some centaurs, especially the goat-based variants, would converge with satyrs and fauns as they ascended. But the matter of fact was that Ephesus was none of those things.

  He was a parasite. A faker. A doppelganger that would steal the shapes and bodies of others.

  And it just so happened that the arena was filled with bodies.

  It wouldn't have mattered either way. He had already prepared a number of Langgbjern beasts. But the dinosaurs saved him the effort of pulling from his library.

  There was probably some merit to choosing the biggest or strongest, but Ephesus went for the nearest. Breaking his armour into a thousand pieces, he arranged it all around the brontosaurus he'd used as a shield. The sudden disrobing exposed his body, but not in a way that any reasonable person would have readily understood. Because the only thing that existed beneath the armour was a thick, cloudy mist.

  The substance flowed into the holes in the dinosaur's face as his armour grew to its full size. It flooded its veins, causing the supposedly invincible creature to writhe and bellow in duress. For a moment, the terraformer resisted, fighting back against the fake goat's witchcraft. But it was a tool and he was an aspect. There was only so long that it could struggle before his ultimate overwrote its opposition.

  As the aspect of faceless faith, he was blessed with a powerful ultimate skill that granted him the ability to borrow from his opponents. Memories, abilities, skills, and all. He could copy it all from anyone or anything bathed in his essence. The records would be stored within his mind forever so he could retrieve them on demand.

  The highly invasive procedure had two modes of operation. He could either wipe a full day from his target’s memories, so that they wouldn’t recall the moment he entered within, or he could outright destroy the entity he cloned. With only a few seconds worth of memories to its name, the brontosaurus was inevitably subject to the latter effect.

  There was no fancy display. It neither melted from the inside nor exploded into chunks of flesh. It simply fell over, its data forcibly extracted and bequeathed upon the Cadrian marquis.

  The mist and armour that was Ephesus reformed with its collapse. He took not the false goat form that he had so often sported, but a tower, long-necked shape he’d stolen from the giant lizard. The only difference was the thing that stuck out of its head; he placed his upper body right on the bridge of its nose so as to take the shape of a disproportionate centaur.

  Furrowing his brow, Jules drew a circle with his wand and pelted the newly formed hybrid with a carpet of spells. Some were direct heavy hitters—large explosions that drained his magic by the fistful—but others were more nuanced. There was a carefully crafted blue spell that invaded the target's body through its pores and attacked its internals directly. There was a yellow spell that negatively charged the target's spine and hampered its nervous system's signals. And there was a red spell that dispensed radiation and gutted any attempts at healing.

  But none of it worked, not even the lone nuclear blast that Jules had aimed at Ephesus' humanoid body.

  Because the dinosaur's flesh was invincible. And having copied it, the marquis had inherited the property.

  Kicking off the ground with a smirk, he stomped at Jules with his newfound giant foot. The clam reacted by activating his yellow magic and slipping out of reach. Much to the marquis’ annoyance, his freshly stolen form lacked the immunity he’d hoped for; its properties had degraded in death. Frowning, he gathered the mist in his jaw and prepared to strike the clam directly, but another spell came before he could launch it.

  Having returned his wand to its holster, Jules brushed a hand over the three rings he'd received from the goddess. They pulsed to life, their red, blue, and yellow gems all sparkling in tandem as dozens upon dozens of buffs were heaped upon him. Not all of them were quite based in magic—some bolstered his muscles and enhanced his speed, forging him into something far behind an ordinary caster. There was a downside, of course. The enchantment strained his body, causing it to ache all over. If not pumped full of adrenaline, he surely would have broken into a scream. It didn’t help that half the bonuses were entirely unnecessary. All Jules really cared for was the strength of his magic. Ephesus had already proven that the dinosaurs were far from truly invincible, and he was confident that he had just the thing.

  He was a red mage. His specialty was death by way of explosion. The school’s whole concept was to squeeze every last bit of damage out of each bit point of mana applied.

  Empowered by the goddess, he pointed his open palm straight at his target and cast an ars magna. For the Awakened Prismatic Elementalist class, the title belonged to a spell known as The End of Days. Normally, it was the sort of attack that took hours to conjure, but leveraging his synergist class’ own capstone ability, he was able to reduce the process to a simple shortcut.

  By drawing a cross in the air with his hand, he linked all but one of the hundred and twenty eight magical nodes in the back of his mind and forced the spell to manifest.

  It started as a burst of colour.

  All different shades and tones swirled from the tip of his index finger and wrapped around the marquis’ body. They merged together, constantly blending between the many colours known to magekind. The iridescent glob eventually took the form of a sphere that perfectly encapsulated its target. Ephesus leapt away, moving at a seemingly impossible speed for something so absurdly massive, but the sphere followed him. In fact, it moved with him, perfectly mimicking its movements without so much as a hint of veering off track. The spell was locked onto his core, not his body’s core, but the place that the system designated as being central to his existence.

  The ball expanded. It fired off hundreds of different multicoloured lines outward from its exterior. They were patterned like magic circuits—long straight lines with neatly angled branches that ran in parallel. Each broke into a smaller subset of derived colours as they stretched further and further from their target. They captured everything they touched as they rushed towards the arena’s outer edge. The dinosaurs, the meadow, and even the lake were taken, impaled by the circuit-like structures.

  And then, the tendrils rebounded. They instantly shot back towards the sphere. They didn’t stop or slow as they reached equilibrium and only proceeded to batter the caged target as the sphere imploded into a single point.

  It was only as Jules closed his shell that everything compressed was re-released, turned into fuel for the ensuing explosion. Its nature was, of course, atomic. The captured objects were broken down into their smallest pieces and used to trigger a supercritical chain reaction in the spell’s fissile core. The explosion was concentrated inside the sphere; all of the force was delivered directly to the target without any means of escape.

  The End of Days was Jules’ trump card, the single most reliable attack in his kit.

  And it almost worked.

  Fading with the spell’s completion, the sphere revealed a battered, broken marquis. Ephesus was gasping for air, desperately struggling to stand with his incinerated body. Most of what was left was bone. The few bits of flesh still stuck on his skeleton were charred a deep jet black.

  He tried to engage his healing, but it wasn’t working. The radiation poisoning was still hampering him, preventing him from recovering his tissue.

  Not that he had a need for it in the first place.

  The flesh was just a hallucination.

  Hell, even the armour was a hallucination, a feature of his class that allowed him to deceive his enemies and allies alike. Ephesus’ real body was the dust, the fine mist that existed within his armour. And most of him was still intact.

  He was somewhat annoyed that his dinosaur wasn’t quite as resistant as he’d hoped, but still, he was happy to have added it to his repertoire. He likely wouldn’t have had another chance had he finished his foe immediately, though his next move was made to do just that.

  It was the mist attack again.

  He concentrated the particles that made up his body and launched them from between his skeletal jaws. Twisting and turning, he avoided a thousand different projectiles before filling the area around Jules' body. A wave of yellow magic enchanted him with a repelling effect, but it came far too late. Having already fulfilled all of the skill’s requirements, he invaded Jules' gills and entered into his bloodstream. The extraction process soon followed. And with it, the clam's inevitable destruction.

  Time slowed. Ephesus' perception was accelerated a thousand times over as he began to process the data that was his opponent.

  That was how he recognized the choice that Jules had made.

  Ephesus changed his tune in a heartbeat. He immediately vacated the sea creature and returned to the wind. It was a desperate escape, driven by the fact that, by stealing his most recent thoughts, he'd uncovered his plan.

  But it was already too late. Jules closed his shell and lined its interior with a shimmering blue veil. Ephesus tried to break through, but the pieces of him that touched it were immediately washed away. The marquis tried channeling his magic instead, but without a host to operate upon, he lacked the magic circuits to break past the barrier.

  Jules smirked.

  And then, exploded.

  The clam became a bomb. Burning his own flesh and circuits as fuel, he ignited the wick that was his mana and set off an apocalyptic eruption.

  Suddenly, the whole ring was engulfed in flame. The accompanying roar was of such an absurd volume that the colosseum's safety mechanisms kicked in. They completely muted the sound. It was a necessary precaution, the only way to safeguard the crowd. Else, half of the observers would have lost their hearing while the other half immediately dropped dead.

  When the smoke finally cleared, there was no one left standing, only the blackened bottom half of a clamshell.

  There were no survivors.

  Both parties had succumbed to nuclear annihilation.