Sacrifice Mage

Chapter 250 (B3: 77): Culmination

The air cracked. Space fractured. The power we were generating was about to hammer the final nail in the coffin of this little simulacrum of the Beyond.Constellation was stoking ever-increasing power. Little glowing spheres had popped to life across my body, forming a different kind of pattern. One I recognized easily, having seen it only moments ago. It was the head of the fake-god I had Sacrificed. The skull, the eyes, the golden liquid power, they were all there.

Just as I had expected, Constellation was emulating the strength I was seeking. The power I needed.

And yet, it didn’t make me invincible or anything of the sort.

Despite seeing the energy on offer, despite the sheer power and incredulousness I had experienced over the last hour or two, I wasn’t prepared for just how powerfully the Vaunted would slam into me. She shot in fast enough to make me wonder if she had suddenly learned teleportation or something.

One second, she was laughing and gathering energy yards out from me. The next instant, my arms were instinctively crossing in front of my chest as the Vaunted crashed in a burning punch.

The angle was all wrong too. I thought it would be horizontal, that at worst, I’d be slammed back to the boundary of this weird little realm we were in.

But no. The Vaunted had risen just a foot or two high, then slammed her icy, fiery fists downwards.

I crashed straight to street level. The Vaunted came with me, furiously screaming and burning all the while. Just the punch’s impact shattered Reverence Everlife. My crossed arms were slammed into my chest as I was forced downwards, the godly power of Constellation all that kept my bones from being demolished even worse than my golden shield.

It was just as bad when I hit the ground. I bit down on a scream as my clavicles fractured, Reverence Everlife breaking once again. Pain Sense Control. I desperately needed it to stop the monster that the Vaunted had become.

“This is no mere , you shit-eating mongrel,” she growled. “This is . You will not survive this battle. Whatever else happens, whatever happens to my , are one thing that will not live to see the—”

I fired off Immolation. Its sudden appearance, the sudden thrust of reverse heat crashing against her icy flames, made her stupid words turn into a growl of annoying pain. Then I Sacrificed it, throwing her off. Metaphorically. She was still pinning me painfully to the ground.

The Sacrifice had my body burning with innate heat. But it wasn’t enough.

When I channelled Ignition Charge on Flare yet again, Immolation was hotter and more intense this time. Constellation was absolutely boosting it into an inferno that could melt metal.

Now she screamed for real. Her grip loosened, enough for me to just kick her backwards and finally free myself.

“Keep talking,” I growled. “And I—”

She waved her arm. The world turned to ice. I was, once again, stuck inside an iceberg. This shit was so .

The power of a fake-god bloomed within and without me. Immolation turned crazy hot. Even the little spheres—the pseudo-stars of Constellation—had turned molten. I was vaporizing the icy cage I had been trapped in, the ice cracking and water steaming out and away. But I still wasn’t fast enough.

My enemy moved the ice. If anything, she moved even faster through her summoned iceberg than she had through open air.

I suffered another punch, this one breaking me out of my cold prison to send me flying. And then she was already on me , fist about to crash down with vicious ferocity.

“How does it feel?” she screamed in my face, icy spittle sizzling against my cheek. “To prepare for death?”

Her punch crashed into me again.

And stopped abruptly against my mouth. My grinning mouth.

Vital Mana had fired. Immolation disappeared entirely, a sacrificial offering in exchange for any damage I might have received from the Vaunted. That gave me the opening I needed to swing my mace in hard and fast.

She cried out as she was sent plummeting backwards.

“It feels fucking to kick your ass,” I growled as I took control of my flight with Gravity and Flare.

The Vaunted was righting herself. Her recovery had been fast. Pits, that blow from my mace seemed to have left no effect at all. She was looking at me critically. It made me gulp involuntarily. Just relying on Vital Mana wasn’t going to keep working. Not against her.

Her Aspects manifested in the next instant. I hadn’t been lazy either, Gravity Orbs came to life, combining with Flare and Illumination, ripping apart the ground and the ice that had fallen from my opponent. But she had created a blizzard of glowing, deadly blue energy as well, each of which now shot at me like comets.

Well, that was what I had Orbit for. A spinning storm of my Gravity Orbs and the manifestations of every other Aspect stopped her barrage. The resulting explosion made it difficult to see anything, but I had Highlight to rely on.

A good thing I did because I saw her cloaking herself into a comet, just as she had in our last battle.

Just, unlike last time, I didn’t have Starburst to counter it. And even then, Starburst fully stopped it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been crushed to unconsciousness before.

Reflexive Mana got me out of the way, a resurgent Reverence Everlife saving me against hailstorm in her comet trail. I quickly created some more distance because I knew she was going to try the same thing again until I faltered. Until she caught me like she had almost done.

As I barely dodged, as my Aspects disappeared to take the damage that was meant for me thanks to Vital Mana, I started getting frustrated.

was this going exactly as last time? Why was I losing to her? Power differences mattered. We had both grown. It was natural that I’d be behind someone who was Onyx-ranked on paper before acquiring some sort of godly buff through the stupid ritual.

We exchanged more blows. More cases where any damage she dealt died alongside my Aspects, leaving me fine enough to fight back, but barely doing any damage to

My Aspects weren’t working anymore either. I obviously didn’t get the time of day to fire off another Compound Aspect, not Starburst at least. She was too fast, kept attacking too relentlessly. And it got worse when she started my Aspects. Multicast allowed me to dish out Flare, Gravity, Illumination, and Entropy at her high above to combine together.

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But the Vaunted just waved her arm once. The bubbling mass of compressed energy just petrified. I couldn’t even feel a connection to it any longer. Highlight revealed that the mana itself had been frozen solid, immobilized in both time and space.

I growled. I’d had .

She clearly had evolved in her own way too, growing far stronger than when I had fought her mere hours ago. The only reason I hadn’t turned into an icicle too was because Immolation was still burning like crazy, though the very flames at the edges were starting to freeze as well, which forced me to keep moving.

I couldn’t even use Vital Mana on the Gravity Orbs and other Aspected Manifestations that my enemy had frozen. It meant I had to keep channelling mana to survive against her onslaught of icy meteors and the slashes mirroring through her shards.

No. . I was dancing to her tune, and that needed to change. I forced myself to stop and reconsider, even as I continuously used my Aspects to just stay alive.

We had evolved. We had grown stronger. Her ritual had succeeded, as had my Sacrifice. But of the two of us, the Vaunted was the only one actively using her newer powers effectively to stop and stymie me. The real reason I was on the back foot was because I kept relying on the old me, on everything that the Vaunted had developed a counter for.

I needed something new. I needed to surprise her. We were locked in a stalemate, where I couldn’t attack her but she couldn’t kill me. But not if I could help it.

With a roar, I charged at her.

“Oh, ho!” She grinned widely at me. “Done with your life? I’ll be happy to end your miserable existence once and for all.”

“I’m done with .”

“.”

Her response to my dash was easily predictable. Another encasing of ice, another enormous glacier forming instantly around me to freeze me in one location, totally eradicating my momentum.

But Constellation flared. Every single starry sphere on my body pulsed and glowed like the hearts of gods. Divine power ran through every nerve, every muscle and tendon, along every strand of Threaded Reinforcement empowering my body. My very cores ignited into sparking bombs sending out explosive shockwaves of mana through me.

Ignition Charge came to life once more, this time focusing on Entropy to create a Framework attached to my body. This had the effect of breaking down the ice into rocket fuel again, but I was containing the explosions this time.

Absorption and Intake were on overdrive, collecting the overwhelming amount of energy and just turning me into an even more obliterating inferno.

“What do you hope to accomplish by finally reaching me?” she asked as I drew close. “You Pits-screwing .”

Her arm flared, fire and ice burning bright enough to force my eyes to squint. When she struck, Immolation and Framework disappeared.

But not all the energy I had gathered with my Affixes.

It was my turn to swing my mace with all the force I could muster. Constellation flared again. Memories of practicing with Gutran, of fighting against the Scarthralls, of taking on all sorts of foes like Glonek, Zoltan, the Greater Brillwyrm, the Bonestrider, and all else, all surfacing to the front of my brain. Memories that turned into radiant lines of gold blitzing through my arm to alight on my mace.

A new Constellation heart materialized on spiky, hammering head of the mace. A beating, pulsing, heart that slammed into the Vaunted.

She screamed as she was flung back. But only for like a dozen feet. Her scream was more of surprised anger than actual hurt, because though I had wounded her, she was already encasing it in ice. It began healing an instant later. Having already seen that ability, I wasn’t taken aback. But I couldn’t help the pang of disappointment at seeing my hard-earned effect just disappear.

The Vaunted didn’t speak. Instead, she just unleashed a blizzard. A storm of ice and glinting blue power threaded through the storm to attack me from every possible direction at once.

I just shook my head. My defence was perfect. Framework and Immolation combined again to take care of almost all the threats, while Highlight made sure I wasn’t blinded either. I even saw her zipping through the chaotic murk to flash at me, her punch meeting my mace.

Which was where I made the mistake.

She was too powerful. I shouldn’t have forgotten that. Framework and Immolation both disappeared once more at the next exchange, which left me completely exposed in the storm.

But another Constellation flared brighter. Several burning stars became even hotter. On my shoulder, on my legs, across my back and the clavicles now healed up thanks to Mana Heal and Reverence Everlife.

I was reminded of the moments I had Sacrificed not just for myself, but for everything I believed in. Soul Sight to see into Glonek’s and the Blight Swarm’s past. Essence to take up a Swarmlord’s power and save Ring Four. Emulation to drive into the heart of a monstrous serpent to protect my close friend.

More majestic lines of power burned through me like shots of adrenaline to send my body into overdrive. I was almost on power.

I didn’t freeze. Didn’t even come close. The inherent energy refused to entertain any such notions. Good thing that I had immediately thrown out Sacrifice around myself, Manifestation calling up external mana threads with incredibly rapid pace that I then used Conditionality to target anything seeking to damage me in any way.

With next to no effort, I secured myself where I floated. Of course, my defence was solid.

She punched in again, furious and deadly. Her eyes had narrowed, her body afire with icy flames. “Why won’t you ”

“Dying to the likes of you would be a shame I couldn’t ever live down,” I said as we repeated the exchange.

And then again.

And again.

She couldn’t kill me. I didn’t get much of a chance to fight back, even with Constellation.

But there was a key difference this time. When she came in again, I dropped my mace. It had served me well enough, but now, I needed something even more up close and personal.

So when her flaming fist slammed into me, I simply grabbed it.

“Your fires aren’t going to hurt me in the slightest,” the Vaunted hissed. “Can’t you see, you idiot. the one who’s freezing to death.”

I stayed silent, even though I was internally gloating. She had misjudged my intentions completely. To her doom.

Framework and Immolation both disappeared yet again, but those were Vital Mana sacrifices. Constellation disappeared off my body for a very different reason.

I had Sacrificed it.

Constellation’s effects were weird, lacking any strict definition as I was discovering, but I was adamant I could mould it to do what I needed. Intentionality. . That was what the god had emphasized. To be divine is to be able to exert one’s will above all others.

And so I did. Constellation was going to do exactly as I needed it to do.

Several things within me fired at once as the next cast of Constellation took effect right after I had received my Sacrifice reward.

Constellation came to life again, but not just on me this time. Several beating hearts of Constellation all burned to life within every single one of my Aspects that the Vaunted had frozen over.

Her ice shattered out of them.

She shouldn’t have seen it. Not through the blizzard surrounding us. I was hoping to keep her distracted by the fact that I was freezing over, Reverence Everlife the only meagre defence I had mustered against the onslaught of her defence. Well, that, and Sacrifice with Overclaim, which wasn’t that hard to carry out with Multicast.

But her eyes sharpened. Maybe she could sense that her ice had shattered.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Seeing which of us d-dies,” I said, dragging in a shockingly cold breath. “Your ice or m-my .”

That did it. That was a challenge she couldn’t back down from. It was all I credited for the fact that she didn’t kick me in the nuts and free herself.

Because an instant later, glowing incandescent with all the raging power that my Constellation empowered, every bit of my Aspect that she had frozen now burned bright as the sun. The ice that had them trapped vaporized away instantly. There was only just enough time for her eyebrows to rise before Gravity fired.

Every single concentration of heat, Gravity Orb, and even the Protostar I had called forth earlier far high up all unfroze. Then slammed in straight at me and my locked-down opponent.

She punched. Then punched again. It only tickled as a couple of the manifestations disappeared sacrificially. The scream she unleashed in my face just daubed my face with spittle. All of which I forgot when my Aspects landed.

Constellation fired at the same time. It was the most amorphous, the most malleable of my Aspects, so far. If I needed it to empower me, then it channelled my memories, formed the constellation of a god. When I needed it to empower my Aspects, it burned out of me and reappeared right within every manifestation of my Aspect that I had called forth.

And now, I needed it to protect me. I needed to . The power of the Divinity burgeoned through me, the inherent immortality driving into me with even greater potency than Reverence Everlife or Mana Conversion or anything affected by my Ascension Charges.

And even then, I couldn’t even begin to scream through the blazing, blistering agony of the obliterating cocktail. For a few, brave heartbeats, my spirit tried to resist. Everything in the world had ignited into molten heat, into light that seared that soul, and every single moment was indescribable agony that ripped through my flesh to tear into my soul.

Blacking out was a mercy.