Chapter: 575 – Reality Rope

Tala’s baleful focus was locked on the mole-thing, and a portal began to snap open and closed in a staccato rhythm, each one allowing a gravity-shot to tear forth, coming at the magical creature from a wide variety of angles.

Even so, rock-spider-things threw themselves in the way time and again—somehow seeming to anticipate the shots that were far too fast to have been simply reacted to—some creatures even generating specifically to move in the way. To be clear, their fragile bodies didn’t block the attacks, but they were always positioned so as to deflect the projectiles enough to miss their target, and Tala didn’t have sufficient authority and aura mastery to correct the issues or stop the spiders.

The things even tried to block the iron spikes she flung out to pepper the space, as she worked to increase and assert her own authority and dominion over more and more of the clash-site.

The siege orbs that she sent out exploded, giving her battlefield control with the ice, but even they were being kept too far from the mole to truly hamper it immediately.

Thus, the thing had made it a quarter of the way across the cavern already.

-It’s getting away!-

No.

Tala saw the cords of reality that linked the mole to the region as a whole, to this cavern and the zeme within in particular. She seized the primary, the one linking the mole to its place of rebirth, and poured gravity amplification into it.

This was not what she’d done near the old city sites, strengthening the reality threads, themselves, that linked them. Tala simply used the reality thread as a medium and targeting mechanism to increase gravity.

Her head screamed with pain as she threw her magical weight against that of the region… and lost.

Her head jerked back as if she’d been struck, and Terry let out a low hiss, flickering down and away, going after what had so hurt Tala.

He had been respectfully allowing her to seek her own prey, but as soon as she was bloodied all consideration ended. Her safety and the kill were more important.

The mole let out another cry of distress, and this time Tala felt it echo outward along reality threads, reminiscent of—while being quite unlike—the Leshkin.

Surprise built upon surprise as vibrations came back.

Communication via reality thread? It wasn’t a new concept, but it was one she hadn’t truly delved into, and it was hardly the time to do so.

When she pulled her thoughts back together, she found Rane bracing her and Terry harrying the creature.

Rock grew up to protect and spider-things spawned to interfere, and even when Terry did land cutting blows—more often than Tala really should have expected—the mole healed quickly.

As terrified as it seemed, she needed to remember that the mole was in the center of its power, and it was drawing on that seemingly inexhaustible source with abandon.

She needed to end that.

Flow snicked into her hand, before she threaded power through the pathways of change within the knife, allowing it to extend and take on the form of a sword.

Then, she did what she’d tried only once before.

She overlaid the magical pathways within and around Flow with Reality iron—mostly stone- and starward—filling each and every spellform with void-channels, and flooding them with power, pushing the weapon forward.

Flow’s normal magics were essentially just the ability to change between multiple forms and a magically enhanced cutting edge. She needed something more, something that could actually be useful when backed by Magic, Reality, and Void.

One spellform came to mind instantly, one she’d already been using with nearly this combination of power and overlapping pillars: She thought of the dissolution power she used in her artificial lungs.

Just like when she manifested void magic through it and created the void forms of the weapon, something about the weapon changed and bent.

Those spellforms formed easily, slotting into Flow’s magical edge with room to spare. Unfortunately, they began doing exactly what they were created for, obliterating everything around them.

Tala’s soul screamed in agony as her soulbound weapon began to break apart, and in that moment of primal pain, she slammed another spellform into place. That which filled the majority of her body, that which was the antithesis of dissolution.

It wrapped around the dissolution spellform, both thrumming and practically clicking together. They were designed to be used together…

Of course they were.

The only place they occurred in nature was side by side, as a set.

Now, Flow held that balance, but held up and maintained by Reality and Void as well as Magic.

Tala felt her soul shudder as Flow pulled on their bond for strength and to simply endure and continue to support the intensely powerful working.

She felt like only her Paragon level advancement allowed both her and Flow to continue as the weapon continued to shift, trying to settle into its final form.

Where before an almost black, sucking heat-haze had manifested around the void-blade—and Flow’s normal sword-form contained a burning energy—now, there was nothing. The wire thin outline of the blade was still there, but the inside appeared… normal.

It almost seemed as if Flow was simply a shaped wire and nothing more.

Even so, Tala could feel the difference. The weight of it threatened to tear free of her hand.

She could see it, as reality threads and nodes bent away from the weapon, being preserved and redirected by the outer shell of power, that which protected and contained the dissolution. In that moment, she instinctively knew that she would have to force anything she wished to cut to come into contact with Flow and the dissolution edge as it was now contained and sheltered. Otherwise, anything she struck or touched would naturally be reinforced even as it was moved out of the way.

That was fine with her. She didn’t want to cut free parts of existence without meaning to.

She had a moment of awe in which she regarded the new form, her emotions, her rage momentarily supplanted as she beheld Flow in a form that could only have one name.

The Ending Blade.

But rage and remorse could only be held off by discovery for so long, and a heartbeat later, her focus returned to that which needed to die, that which needed to End.

She asked Rane to drop her, and she fell.

Tala slammed into the cavern floor just beside where the mole had been reborn, pulled the reality-thread binding it to the spot toward herself, and swung.

Existence stuttered.

She was attempting to cut through something forged by Zeme itself, and no mere Paragon could hope to—

No. She denied that. She wasn’t fighting all of Zeme. She was diverting a trickle of water, not holding back the rain.

Zeme didn’t care whether this creature was magical or not.

The world didn’t need this creature to exist. It wasn’t even benefited by its connection to this cave.

In the heart of her established domain and authority—backed by Rane and the entire weight of magic contained with Kit—she knew it was so.

That simply left the creature’s own weight—and that of the local power to which it was bound—fighting against her and hers.

The creature was barely in the tier equivalent to Refined.

It wasn’t trivial, but against Tala, Rane, and a small region’s worth of Paragon level power? The outcome was all but predetermined.

Flow slid inexorably forward, altering Reality as it went.

As the cord was severed, Tala realized two things.

First, her gambit had worked, the mole was suddenly bereft of its source of new power, left with only what it had in reserve before the severing.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Second, magical resonance was not the only thing that could cause a backlash from portions of existence.

The two ends of the reality thread that she had severed—more like a thick rope in size—whipped free.

Tala had only ever severed miniscule, barely formed connections before. She’d denied many such as well. But in all those cases, they’d been so minute as to contain no more power than a breath of wind.

These contained the weight of a powerful confluence of zeme.

The two ends struck her, one in her right hip and one in her left shoulder. She felt like they tried to erase her entirely for her violation, but her layers of defense—likely heavily backed by her reality iron—kept that from happening.

Since she couldn’t be erased, for a brief moment, they tried to link to her, to reconnect to each other with her as a medium. There was a temptation in that. She realized that she could tap into the confluence, bind to it, and thus gain yet another source and type of power. She could do so much good with that power.

She also realized that she could claim the mole-creature and gain utter dominion over it. A dark part of her almost bent to that, the desire to make it suffer for as long as anything had ever suffered welled up within her.

But she utterly rejected both connections, both desires.

Neither was who she was or who she wanted to be.

Still, each rejection took its pound of flesh—quite literally—and her blood painted the cavern.

She tried to contain it with her aura and authority, but her mind and spirit recoiled. The viscera and bone chunks were not hers any longer, and they utterly denied her attempt to reclaim them despite them being entirely within her aura and area of authority.

Even the iron within her spilled blood separated from her without being voided, wholly sundered from her and the magics that governed her flesh.

More than that, her very spirit had been driven back and cut away as her soul—her gate—shuddered in the aftermath of the hits.

Her body refused to heal the wounds. Even her magic, which simply acted on her body’s patterns and natural state, was powerless to do anything about it.

Thankfully, the blood that was pouring forth even as she fell did listen to her, and she was able to seal off the wide gashes with tightly controlled blood.

She hit the ground regardless, Flow clattering away in knife form.

Terry quickly slew the mole now that it was bereft of its power source, and Rane landed beside her, concern obvious on his face.

Tala vaguely noticed reality threads that had linked to the confluence through the mole were whipping about, trying to reconnect with the cavern without the failed intermediary, but she didn’t have the ability to notice more than that.

Inside Tala’s head, Alat screamed in agony, the thought-sound louder and more all encompassing than anything Tala had ever experienced.

The alternate interface was far more closely connected to Tala’s spirit, and thus more attuned to injuries to it.