Universe's End

Chapter 226: A Bane Realized Pt. 1

“Stronger,” The Bane cackled.

“That’s right, asshole,” Rory said, glaring and grinning at the same time.

“Keep up,” The Bane cackled once more before flickering away, resisting Rory’s attempt at shutting down the teleport.

Scowling Rory pursued, teleporting once as the Bane took advantage of the moment’s reprieve to outright slash through space and step through, a longer range and more stable teleport than its regular flicker.

Without even thinking twice, Rory chased through the rift, appearing in an upside-down red dune, ignoring everything to chase through another rift.

Stepping out of the rift, Rory’s mind reacted even before he consciously understood what was happening, a ‘spear’ narrowly missing his head. It was a lance composed of both spatial void energies and the bane’s regular corrosive energies.

Glaring, Rory saw the Bane wave before stepping through another rift, clearly content to play a game of tag.

Fucker.

This time, as Rory stepped out of the next rift, he was instantly battered by a spray of luminescent liquid, similar to water if not for the fact that it was, of course, luminescent as well as being a strange mix of clear, light pink, and dark blue.

Whatever the liquid was, it didn’t really matter as Rory didn’t sense any inherently hostile concepts within.

That and he was already soaked through and wasn’t melting, so it must have been harmless.

As for where the liquid was coming from, his answer came as Rory looked around. It was almost like he was in a naturally formed vertical mineshaft, with tunnels spraying the liquid out like horizontal waterfalls that collided within the center of the mineshaft before falling below like a regular waterfall. Dotting the side of the mineshift were outcroppings of rock with silver and rust-colored moss that occasionally exploded.

Any other observations would have to wait, as from the tunnel nearest to him that was currently spraying him, a dark figure lunged out, holding a wickedly curved scimitar.

“Predictable!” Rory snarled as he reacted. The moment he’d seen the spraying tunnels, he’d figured the Bane was waiting within one of them. Hefting his arm, a red crystal shield instantly materialized as the scimitar slashed against it. The crystal shattered; even a reinforced projection wasn’t going to hold up against real weapons wielded by his Bane of all things.

What it did do was buy enough time as Rory swung his other arm out, suddenly holding a rather strange-looking weapon. It was almost like a double-headed hand sickle, parallel with a several-inch divide between each. Dual-heads folded backward, the momentum of his swinging arm snapped them forward, like the fangs of a serpent that struck the Bane’s side as it howled in pain and-

Pleasure? What the actual fuck is wrong with this thing?

Corrosive orange blood spewed from the wound as the bane flickered, appearing higher up the naturally formed mineshaft. Copying his bane, Rory flickered after it a moment later. Swinging the Viper Fang Blade, name still pending, his bane slammed its palms together, catching the flat of each blade and snapping them inward, breaking the weapon before striking a palm into Rory’s gut.

The strike hurt like hell, and more than that, Rory could feel a foreign energy shoved inside him, burning like hell and apparently able to invade areas at random.

A roundhouse kick came whipping toward his head a moment after, a one-two combo taking advantage of the step Rory had staggered back from the palm strike, but Rory wasn’t some green novice. The pain already compartmentalized, Rory blocked the kick from connecting with his head by catching the blow on his raised forearm; the force of the strike was so powerful that, even though his vambrace absorbed it, it reverberated through his arms, his bones creaking.

Attempting a counterattack, Rory met empty air as the Bane flickered up once more to the next outcropping. Eyes flicking to his feet for a moment, Rory followed suit as the moss beneath them exploded, not a moment too soon in escaping the blast.

As Rory appeared, the scimitar had appeared once more, swinging low toward his knee, meant to cleave straight through.

Stomping hard, Rory flared his innermost aura outward, the aura that represented his inner self. While flaring one’s ‘normal’ aura was easy, ‘self-aura,' the aura encompassing one’s very sense of self, was exponentially harder to extend even past a few inches of one’s body.

But that was exactly what Rory did, stomping down hard as he did. With his self-aura extended, it momentarily overrode his bane’s adaptation, which granted it innate earth-elemental suppression.

All of that came together, so that before the scimitar could reach his knee, it clanged off a stone spear that shot forward fast as a bullet, with his bane being the one injured after everything was said and done, the stone spear having stabbed an inch into its shoulder as the monstrous entity flickered away, once more higher up.

Several more times they exchanged blows, soaked through by the luminescent liquid, and several more times the bane flickered away, each of them collecting a menagerie of injuries in the process.

Near the top, Rory finally managed a solid counter hit, some of his blood spraying into the bane’s eyes and distracting it. For tier eights, sight was far from necessary to remain battle-ready.

But it wasn’t just a temporary blinding; it was Rory’s blood that had been splashed onto its eyes, the blood exploding as the bane staggered back, and Rory suddenly held a projected spear, lancing it forward and skewering his dark clone.

Taking advantage of having skewered his opponent, Rory snapped his leg forward and kicked with all his might; the bane launched off the rock outcropping, plummeting far below.

In a movie, it would have been the climactic end to their fight, except it wasn’t a movie, and they were tier eights; even a solid skewering wasn’t much worse than a rather painful, albeit manageable, wound.

Tearing open space, the bane never found out what was far below, as it instead fell through a rift.

“Right, of course,” Rory grunted as he took a step back before launching himself off the side and diving into the rift below.

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Whereas the last location had been a strange sort of fusion of sewers, natural tunnels, and weird horizontal waterfalls, this time Rory found himself in a white void with oversized crystal clusters floating through the white void, each one a different color and at least the size of a small house, with the largest being at least the size of a small island.

And to think this is STILL inside the third floor of the Maw.

His appearance was welcomed by a space-severing slash that Rory opted not to catch this time, instead flickering out of the way.

Only for his flicker to suddenly be yanked off course, another force wrestling control for a split second as Rory twisted his body the moment he sensed the override.

And good thing he did, as the glance downward showed a blade stabbing through the left side of his stomach; had he managed another two inches of turn, he would have dodged it outright.

“Even,” His bane roared with raucous laughter.

“Dumbass,” Rory grunted, not having anything cleverer to say as he suddenly flicked his wrist toward them.

I mean, why wouldn’t he call the bane a dumbass? He’d just finished dropping Rory right into the middle of a literal field of crystals. And while Lattice-affinity wasn’t the same as Crystal-affinity, it didn’t really matter, because what was crystal but a derivative of Lattice?

Nearby, a cluster of blue crystals in the shape of a snowflake shot toward his bane, which seemed taken aback that its earth element suppression had absolutely no effect on Rory’s ability to manipulate the crystals.

Slamming into his bane, the snowflake-shaped crystal managed to bite an inch into its chitinous black skin, tendrils of frost radiating outward as the bane howled in pain and flickered away to safety.

But there was no safety, not within the crystal-void. Harnessing his crystal affinity to its max and his own skill as freeform manipulation, the crystals homed in on his bane like heat-seeking missiles, crashing and shattering and turning the white void into a tapestry of colored explosions.

Having had enough, the bane slashed its scimitar down, intending to slice through space and escape the easy way.

Rory wasn’t intending to make it that easy, though. The moment it attempted to escape, a crystal slammed into its wrist with enough force that the scimitar was dislodged, threads of pneuma shooting from Rory and snagging the weapon and yanking it toward him. Grabbing the handle, it vanished into his inventory.

Man, am I glad my inventory is based on a master-grade void diamond.

With a lesser inventory, there was a chance that dropping the weapon attached to the bane into his inventory would give the bane a direct route to access his inventory. But inside a barrier of master-grade material? Fat chance of that.

Scowling in Rory’s direction, the bane instead slashed its clawed hand downward, severing space the old-fashioned way, expending excess pneuma compared to if it were using a catalyst to ‘represent’ the act of cutting.

Hell, the only reason Rory wasn’t burning through more pneuma with his own flickers was that he was basically following through where the bane passed, like drafting behind another car.

Following the bane, Rory suddenly found himself standing atop a massive tower that overlooked a massive gulch that spewed light blue and dark red fae lights.

As curious as Rory was, he wasn’t here to sightsee, which he was aptly reminded of when a column of black light surrounded him, leaving Rory feeling as if he were in the vacuum of space. Pressing his hands outward, a thin layer of red crystal surrounded him, and just in time, as the black light exploded orange, concentrated corrosive energy pressed upon him.

Rory was truthfully shocked that the bane had laid out a trap like this with zero preparation, or that it even could in the first place.

But it was his bane, so should he really be surprised it excelled in spontaneity?

Grimacing, Rory pushed back, the thin barrier he’d erected around him constantly being burnt away as Rory was forced to reinforce and replenish it constantly.

All the while, his bane grinned at him, hands pressing inward as if trying to squeeze a basketball flat.

Should I?

There was something he’d been working on for some time now, a bit of a pet project that he’d left whatever mental threads were available to hash out.

No. Not quite.

If he used ‘that’, it would lose the element of surprise, and not like it would do much other than maybe surprise the bane enough that it would lose hold of the trap magic.

Save it then.

He was trapped within a double-layer trap, the black spotlight an isolated space through which the corrosive energy was funneled.

Wait, an isolated space?

Idea blooming, Rory struggled to bring his hands together, copying the same motion his bane was currently holding. Hands finally in position, at the same time, each of his mental threads, which had been racing, unanimously came to the same conclusion.

He could do this.

“See,” Rory grunted, feeling like he was trying to slowly drive the force of the sky off his shoulders. “This is the problem using a channeled magic against someone who shares a related affinity and understands the concepts being harnessed.”

The void-light anchoring him in place existed in a realm somewhere between a bound circle and a bound space, meant to isolate him from the rest of the world and prevent him from interacting inward or outward, unable to harness the external pneuma.

But Rory understood bound circles and bound spaces better than anyone

. While the void-light wanted to be a bound space, it couldn’t be, by nature of also acting as the conduit through which the bane’s corrosive magic energy was channeled, drawn from the bane itself.But if it were drawn from the bane, that meant it could also flow back.

Hijacking magic and skills to a certain extent, while possible, wasn’t exactly easy. It could be done, of course, disruption of concentration or any lapse in focus could leave a ‘hole’ through which a skilled opponent could capitalize, but generally speaking, ‘instant’ magic was the hardest to hijack.

But channeled magic? That was different.

Understanding the principles and concepts at play, and sharing a tangentially related affinity, Rory began to grapple for control of the magic. In such a situation, the smart move would have been for the bane to abandon the magic entirely.

But Rory knew, just as the bane knew, the chance of that was zero.

Throwing itself entirely into the magic, the bane attempted to crush Rory within before Rory could fully hijack the spell, a race of who was more proficient at magic. The bane had more raw attributes, innate skills, and a thirst for violence.

But Rory had decades of knowledge and practice. In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Reversing the flow of the magic, the blacklight trapping Rory was cut off, as the bane was instead caught in it. Except rather than a deluge of orange energy, it was like his bane suddenly inflated, a massive thrump of energy outward from the bane as its own energies backflowed suddenly and unexpectedly. Sure, it had a natural tolerance to its own corrosive energy, but no one had a natural tolerance to their own energy exploding inside as it was suddenly redirected.

“Hah, how’d you like that?” Rory jeered as the bane staggered drunkenly, orange ooze spilling from its lips as it suddenly gagged out a stream of liquified organs.

Oh, gross.

“Not… Bad,” The Bane coughed. “But, I’m not done.”

Slashing its hand backward, the Bane tumbled back, falling through one final rift as Rory shot forward a moment after. Passing through, Rory sensed that the rift was mildly distorted, the bane fucking with the ‘coordinates’ as Rory popped out a second later. Except, it wasn’t just a second later; the ‘time’ coordinates had been fucked with as well, delaying his arrival a few extra seconds.

They were back in the undercity, or what remained. Rory was standing atop the temple, as for the bane-

Oh, oh no, the fuck you don’t.

Rory instantly made sense of the situation. Further away, Zoey was hammering away, trapped in a void field. It was entirely harmless to her and would likely collapse within seconds anyway. The raw pneuma cost used to conjure it seemed idiotic; there was no point to isolating someone if you weren’t actually going to do anything to them.

But then, his bane had clearly given up on winning. All it needed was a few seconds where the sole other tier eight in the vicinity couldn’t get in its way.

Instead, Rory could sense it within the remains of the undercity, its flagging aura still that of a tier eight.

And it was beelining toward Roxy.

Rory attempted to launch forward, only to slam hard into his own void field.

Slamming his hands against it, Rory felt a sense of dread; he wouldn’t be able to get there in time, he wouldn’t be able to-

Only to force it down.

Because Roxy wasn’t alone, standing with her were the three strongest of Ehkorrus –Apostolos was excluded.

“Edward, Violet, Marcie,” Rory said, half pleading, half praying. “Now or never, time to earn those stripes.”

They didn’t need to win.

Ten seconds.

They just had to hold for ten seconds.