Chapter 16

“This broader dispersal also renders it much more resilient than the Dominion system, where a single point of failure can disrupt communication from one end of a galaxy to the other. For the Empyrean communications network to be rendered non-functional, or to even have its full functionality curbed, would require an obscene expenditure of resources by whatever enemy was attempting to do so. Multiple relays in each sector of space would have to be deactivated simultaneously to have any sort of disruptive effect, and it isn’t as though enemies are just going to randomly appear on every single planet, is it?”

—Safe Hands: The Infrastructure of the Empyrean, Part Two, Jatzmara Nive

They burst across the fields so fast that they levelled everything in their path. The corn lay down on both sides of their path like it was fainting. There were slopes and mild inclines all across the world, undulations of the earth that Sylvas now lifted them up and over as they flew, closing the distance to the relay, where it lay toppled atop the closest thing this planet had to a hill worth climbing.

They encountered eidolons as they went, and a few were big enough that the force of Sylvas’ advance wasn’t enough to knock them from their feet, but even they could not withstand a swing of Kaya’s now-massive iron fists or the sweep of Malachai’s scythe. They touched down a few feet before the crest of the hill, letting momentum carry them on in a slide until they reached the base of the relay: a graven metal pillar lying crooked atop what had to be the only untilled soil on the whole planet. It had a bend in it from where some huge eidolon had collided with it and bloodstains that were already old enough to look like rust.

“Alright”—Sylvas strode over to the relay, pushing it back upright as best he could—“we’ll make this as quick as we can.”

Hector was already aglow with magic, staring out across the cornfields, which already swayed with the waves of approaching eidolons. “Better make ‘as quick as you can’ really quick.”

Meanwhile, Malachai had strolled over to position himself facing the other hemisphere of the planet, and its half of the eidolons. He glanced back. “Take your time; we shall have no trouble here.”

Hector let out a strangled laugh. “Loving the confidence.”

Sylvas turned to Kaya and saw exactly what he did not want to see. She looked terrified; he dropped into a crouch beside her. “You can do this.”

“I’ve never done this before. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never even written my own spell before, let alone… What if it doesn’t work? What if it breaks everything worse than it’s already broken? What if—”

“Kaya,” Sylvas interrupted her. “If I didn’t know you could do this, we wouldn’t be here. You aren’t going to be able to talk me out of believing in you.”

“Aye, but what if you’re wrong, too, stanzbuhr?” He could see the whites of her eyes. “Wouldn’t be the first time you trusted somebody you shouldn’t.”

He smiled at her, even though they really didn’t have the time for any of this. Even though this whole plan hinged on her being able to pull off something that had been impossible before today. “I’ve never been wrong to trust you.”

“Culgh,” she muttered, mostly to herself. “Can’t let you down after that, can I?”

She turned to the crooked relay and began to cast. She had only just gotten enough control over her eidolon to use it to form some of the shapes of mana required, and so she still had to speak the words and shape most of the mana by hand. With the eidolon within her, she now had a massive well of mana to tap into, but what this spell was meant to do would require far more than even that bountiful wellspring. Sylvas stepped forward to do his part. Just like he had right back at the start of their journey together, he laid a hand on her back and pushed his mana into her.

The first wave of eidolons arrived, and without hesitation, Malachai and Hector sprang into action. In a strange way, the two men with their opposing affinities complemented each other perfectly. Those eidolons resistant to Malachai’s death magic were easily undone by Hector’s, and those that bloomed and blossomed to greater strength under the bright green bombardment of Hector’s magic were torn apart by a casual flick of Malachai’s scythe. They had no real struggle yet, because the more dangerous of the eidolons on this world were also the slower to mobilize.

The world soul inside Sylvas drew in mana, connected to the planet beneath them, and from there out throughout all of the cosmos, to every other world soul, all part of one vast, all-encompassing network of magic. An entire universe, feeding power to him. He served as a filter to that massive source of power and siphoned off the mana with Kaya’s steel affinity, pouring it through the point where they touched.

Feeling the power flooding her, Kaya moved faster, spoke faster, cast more and more of the complex spell that she had been quietly working on since the moment that the great incursion began and the communications network went down. It was as if feeling all that mana at her disposal made her realize that she was actually capable of the massive undertaking. Or maybe there was just so much mana flooding into her that if she didn’t use it up, she might explode.

She was still in that early stage of constructing her spell when the first of the truly dangerous eidolons made its appearance. The ones that had been so casually dispatched before had been no match for Malachai and Hector, with their combined talents for violence, but those that arrived now were bigger, stronger, and stranger.

One of Malachai’s blazing sickle blades lashed out, only to be intercepted by another sickle of a different sort, shattering the spell apart as the vast green beast lumbered forward on its scuttling legs. It looked like nothing more or less than a colossal praying mantis, but for the fact that its head was an explosion of blades rather than having anything so normal as eyes or mandibles. Where its claws swept, the magic radiating off of them all was cut. The spells Malachai flung at it came apart before they could make contact. Its movement was all jerks and twitches, a lashing claw here, a scuttle forward there, and it closed in on him while the other eidolons around it fell to the fragmented death that he was still unleashing.

Hector was still fighting his half of the world’s evil to a standstill but seemed to at least be aware of the mantis eidolon approaching from the rear. He sent out a few spinning disks of magic to spin around and intercept it, only for the mantis’s lashing arms to deflect them apart into shrapnel, too. Neither side was having much luck handling it, but Sylvas had no option other than to trust them. He could not withdraw his magic from Kaya now to help them fend it off. They were stuck together, bound together, until her great work was completed.

As it closed on him, Malachai leapt aside, not even trying to parry the sweep of claws with his own scythe. His body was surrounded in an instant by a shroud of ghosts, lifting him and carrying him clear of its assault, but he could not do what would be logical and fight it from the air. It had no interest in him, not now that it had a clear view of Sylvas up ahead. It plowed on now with far more haste than before, closing in on him and Kaya where they stood. Its great claws were ready to come crashing down and rip the spellforms she’d devoted so much time and energy to constructing into pieces.

“Get my side!” Hector bellowed as he turned, and Malachai darted down to do just that, unleashing a fresh tirade of sickle blades that turned the encroaching eidolons that Hector had been holding back into so much inert flesh. Hector didn’t even bother to cast at the mantis creature; he just threw back his arms and let his inner beast out.

Cookie erupted from the man, massive crocodilian jaws clamping shut around the mantis’s midsection even as they became solid. The mantis slashed at the eidolon’s back, carving scales and leathery skin apart, but Cookie just went on biting, twisting its body in a death roll to topple the towering bug. With forces being unleashed that could have brought down buildings, the two eidolons hung motionless for a moment, before the mantis’s legs gave out, and the fall began. 

The two slashed and chomped at one another, rolling through the massed eidolons and the blighted corn, turning end over end as Hector, slowed to normal speeds of casting, had to unleash bigger and slower waves of life magic to set the buried roots beneath the soil to work, reaching up and grasping at the eidolons, pinning them in place to be trampled by the ranks rushing in from behind them.

Kaya’s initial framework was complete, and now she added on the second part, based on Dead Ironeye’s lightning transmission spell. The last part would be closing the spell off to make a self-contained loop so that it couldn’t go on spreading forever and ever, draining both her and Sylvas dry. The balance in their connection began to shift. He was no longer pushing mana into her; she was pulling it out of him. They had always trusted one another with their lives, but there could be no more visceral an example of that trust than this moment, when he let her have everything, and she trusted in him enough to take it without worrying about his limits.

With the mantis down and pinned by Cookie, Malachai was able to hit it, finally. A flurry of lethal spells took it out of action permanently, and Cookie was able to retreat back into Hector, returning his ability to instantly cast. He went from being constantly on the back foot to being able to push back against the tide of incoming eidolons again.

The two of them fell back into the same pattern as before, with each of them tending to one side of the battlefield, but they switched more regularly now, neither one staying comfortable for long, and neither flood of eidolons subjected to only one type of magic for the full length of their frantic charge. They still didn’t have the perfect synergy that Sylvas, Kaya, and Malachai had mastered after so long fighting as a single unit—they still had to call back and forth to one another between spells, giving warnings of what they were about to unleash, or requesting assistance with one of the specific foes that their own affinity couldn’t touch—but their back and forth became an almost pleasant background noise that Sylvas could tune out, just like the chittering of the eidolons or the roar of magic unleashed. 

All of it faded into the background, until all that Sylvas knew was the flow of mana. He was dimly aware as Kaya finished her spell and readied to cast it, bracing himself for what he was about to experience as she completed the most mana-intensive casting in all of known history. She glanced back over her shoulder at him, at the already dazed expression on his face, and she waited until he focused enough to meet her gaze and nod before she pulled the trigger.

When she cast, the drain on his mana from before became a fond memory. What had been a gentle pull, draining the mana from his core and world soul, now became something akin to the vacuum of space. This spell was a black hole, sucking everything that he had out of him. In itself, that would not have been so bad. It would have been lethal for anyone else, but with the way that he had adjusted his cycling, his core, and his techniques, he most likely could have made it through the process without harm. 

What caused problems was Kaya. Or more specifically, the fact that she could only take one tiny fraction of the mana that he was drawing in. Her own tiny spectrum of the many affinities that flowed into him could carry on through her and into the spell, but all of the rest, he had to hold back. Both he and Mira worked frantically, shunting out the excess mana and trying to hold it all back with brute force, but even they were not enough. Even with his body frantically regenerating the damage of all the excess mana, it began to eat through him. 

If he let a single drop of mana from another affinity through into Kaya, it would burn her, scorching through her body, rejected as something alien. He had to bear this burden for the spell to work, but the pain was constant. He fractured his mind into smaller pieces, to create more versions of himself to handle the specific tasks: one to direct all the steel affinity mana to Kaya, one to direct the life affinity magic out into his body to repair the damage being done by all the rest, while two fed the usual tri-color mix of mana into his eidolons so that they could go on producing yet more mana to refill his core as it too was drained away along with the flood passing through it. His knees buckled, and the hand on Kaya’s back became not only their point of contact but also the only thing holding him up. Nerves regrew faster than he could dull their sensory output with his paradigms, sending electric agony flaring through him before they burned away all over again. 

One fragment of his mind kept watch, observing as the spell was completed. The communications relay in front of them was the first to be affected, the metals of its construction warping back into their correct shape so that it could function again. Then, through the newly reconstructed antenna, the spell was cast again, launched out through space to the nearest relays, whether functional or broken. On arrival, they either repaired the damage that had been done by the incursion or they bounced on to the next relay, if the infrastructure required was still in place. A simple repair spell, self-replicating and mailing itself forward to the next relay, then the next, spreading out in a ripple from the center of the Empyrean and off out into deep space to seek the most far-flung colonies. Every light that had gone out across the cosmos was being relit. Every connection that had been broken was being repaired. The whole universe was going to speak again.

If Sylvas could just hold out a little longer. If all of them could.