Something immediately looked back up at me. I wasn’t Detecting for a creature, even anything living, just Isotopes, and it STILL looked right back up at me.

  I couldn’t look away from it, my gaze and the spell locked onto it and held tight by magic that was definitely Empyrean-tier in power, if not in feel or style. Fire and Shadow and… Virindi?

  I tried to pull away, I really did, focusing as colossal amounts of mana rose to grab at me, despite my Caster Level, despite my Concentration…

  Something smacked me in the face, totally Spellcutting the Detect. I felt my nose flatten, then my face was smashed down on a Disk, and we were in motion as magic rose up. The Veil went screwball crazy as something really, really nasty started coming up from below, and it was dragging a whole lot worse stuff with it!

  I couldn’t fucking think, trying to unscramble the lock on my perceptions and thoughts that had swarmed in on me, precisely as if waiting for something to come looking at it. I could perceive and input, but I couldn’t actually think to do anything, with any of my thoughtstreams.

  I did notice the Markspace was totally down right now, a level of overwhelming psychic interference making sure no telepathic warnings were getting out.

  The ground was flying by underneath me as Kris ran like she’d never run before. The hardened lava was starting to split and reveal the magma beneath, even flumes of it spraying into the air like heavy walls Kris just crashed right through while ignoring the heat. A geyser of white-hot stone with far too much dancing darkness in it was pushing up behind us, and something was coming out of it.

  Something with way too many jagged arms, no legs, a long armored coat of slick black stuff that might have been Shadow Diamond, and a frowning mask-like face set into a hood that was more like a steely helm.

  A virindi, a good three times the size of any virindi I’d ever seen, and with a lot more arms, all of them sparking with lightning and fire.

  It came out of that column of molten rock, the center of the caldera liquefying rapidly, revolved its whole body since it didn’t have a neck to survey the area, and caught sight of our rapidly retreating forms.

  “Fuck!” Kris said, glancing back, pushing me off to the side and in front of her with a yank as Stand came back, and she juked.

  Three of the Rays of raging black fire and lightning went wide, missing as she dodged them. The fourth one bounced off of Stand, leaving a half-molten scar across the adamantine boss of the Shield, and I could see it carve a path into the wall of the crater fifty yards long and a yard deep as it did so.

  Concentrate, Concentrate!

  My mind was psychically scrambled, but pure and utter focus was coming down on all my scattered thoughtstreams, welding them back together. I’d been hit with something with a DC of like 100 or something, losing 1 per round or minute or something, and I had to reach that level to get my own thoughts back.

  Slow, except I was a goddamn Sage of Focus, I’d taken all the Feats and Masteries and finished them up when I reached Ten during our training period on Vissidal, and I had a fucking Concentration modifier of +82 right now, take 10, and Diamond Heart of the Sun gave me +1 per minute to that check until I was taking 20.

  Arranging-sliding-forcing-teasing, the residual magic eroding even as my Concentration sharpened with greater need and focus, utterly unable to think as Kris just fucking booked it…

  The slope up the pass out exposed her, but it didn’t slow her down in the slightest as Hotfoot didn’t slow down when going uphill, and the raging heat coming from below blew her skywards.

  Those Rays reached out again. I noted they were slightly staggered… the thing was moving, and moving quickly!

  Too long!

  Expend Arcane Focus for Take 15 on Concentration Check! Assign Soul Essence to Skilled Soul for +4 bonus to Concentration!

  My thoughts snapped together with a terrifying rush of clarity, as having to push my Concentration that high was fully and waaaay past into superhuman, totally inhuman levels of focus and thought.

  I sat up and Cast Arcane Fusion VI: Run II on Princess Kristie and Fire Bane V on Stand.

  The fourth Ray bounced off Stand again, chewing through a narrow, deep chunk of the wall of the pass we just so happened to be running sideways on at the moment.

  The adamantine was only a little blackened this time, inky shadow energies playing at the edge of the superheated spot on it.

  The crack of the landslide coming down above and behind us, no doubt helped by the way the world and the ground was shaking, only seemed par for the course.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “Fuck!” was all Kris said as her pace picked up, driving down below the lip of the slope to get us out of line of sight. That didn’t actually save us, as the Rays blew past and over us, taking clear inspiration from the avalanche coming down behind us and aiming to cut us off ahead.

  Thankfully, we were indeed traveling really fast, and the falling stone had to crack and get into motion as Kris grit her teeth and sprinted really, really hard, while Primus bent the air around us to take away any resistance and actually blow behind us, helping us along.

  I flipped up the Fastcast Ward Wall V atop us as bouncing chunks of canyon wall came down, the force screen clearly fracturing at the impacts of the head and chest-sized chunks of stone.

  We exploded out of the pass as both an avalanche of stone came out behind us, and the pyroclasm roaring out from the volcano chased us like a hurricane of heat. Kris veered off to the side with no change in momentum or pace, and the molten red-hot wind blew past us, expanding as it did, while she went up the side of the hill there as boiling, blazing heavy gasses and ash chased after us.

  She hit the top of the hill with the raging inferno nipping at her heels, did a roller-coaster spin and was booking away across the top of the hill towards the rim miles in the distance at all speed, half Cloudstepping, half skipping between the terrain for speed and distance, more distance!

  The pryoclasm was moving faster than we were, but it had to either spread out from the passes or come over the top of the crater, so it had a lot more ground to cover and area to spread through. The hilltop gave us height, the far side of it would suck down any of the poisonous inferno coming our way, far too much blackness in it to be healthy, and…

  “Fuck!” I spat.

  Kris looked back as that over-sized virindi rose up over the edge of the hillside as well, completely unharmed, and quickly oriented our way.

  It began to move in our direction like a magnet being drawn after us, even as its tentacles wove and magic gathered to it.

  “Juke right,” I hissed, and the Mirror Image III, thoughtfully up-Cast just to be more goddamn confusing to something over a quarter-mile behind us, rippled around us with a dozen images to shoot at.

  Kris slid right, and four Rays of shadowy lightning and fire blew past us, popping four of those Images and heading off into the distance.

  I noted the range professionally.

  “That’s a Caster Level of 50 and will punch your Null,” I told her, as if she didn’t know. “But you do have speed on the thing. It’s just got a range of over half a mile, maybe a mile if it Reaches the Rays.”

  “Such welcome fucking news!” The hill gradually rising towards the rim and the need to stay fairly level didn’t help, of course, so we couldn’t avoid its line of fire.

  “Tell me about it!” She slid just enough to get a jutting rock between us, an Image crossed us and she juked back.

  That Image and two others winked out as Rays reached out to slice through them, and the interfering rock exploded into oozing black molten goo.

  Five miles from the rim to the crater.

  I blew another V Slot for Triadspell, promptly Casting Mirror Image III again, as well as Exemplar Surge.

  For Ray Reflection.

  When the next volley came, I flashed the spell up, a silvery mirror interposing between an Image four to our left, while another Image right next to us flashed and popped away.

  That Ray bounced off the crystalline pane of force there and zipped right back the way it had come.

  I saw it splatter off the on-charging monolithic virindi, its body in motion but otherwise not moving. Only its barbed and razored tentacles were writhing about as its own magic smashed back into it, and for just a second, checked some of its momentum.

  More distance was good news for us.

  “Incoming from on high, fuck!” I announced, as the spread of lightning-girt, shadow-hearted Fireballs arced up and started plummeting down on us.

  I put my hand on her hand pushing us. The Mark link, strengthened by our bond and physical contact against the interference, snapped up, and she could see them coming in through my eyes.

  I directed the Images to swirl and dance away from the huge spread of the things, too, even as I whipped up a Spellflare for one of them.

  The Silver Magic hit one of the incoming blasts, the three others detonated all around us as Kris and our Images swerved to avoid them. Five more Images popped away as the fires caught them, but that was fine, they were there to be popped. Kris made her Sun Save Action before Thought, Refocused, made it again, and we were out of the area of two of the blasts, skirting inches beyond their reach as we shot onward at speed.

  Something detonated in ocher trombones and a dirge of psychedelic ribbons and the smell of complex higher math problems. The incoming virindi was jolted off course once again, but its Health Qi took the feedback and it kept on coming.

  Kris made the decision to leap the gap through the dividing wall we were running alongside and then shift sideways along the wall, which totally removed us from its line of fire unless it could do the same thing, while we left the Images up top to continue the more traditional retreat.

  I happily blew III Slots to keep the ones up there multiplying as the incensed virindi behind us kept sending up quartets of Fireballs, and they kept detonating and not killing anything real. III’s cost me less than the V’s of a Spellflare, after all.

  It tried one more volley of Rays, I flicked the Reflection into place with Reach Spell over one of the targeted Images, and it bounced back to trace a flaming line across that chest of black diamond, Burning and dancing and doing exactly nothing as Health Qi took care of it.

  It didn’t try that again, as the number of Images now exceeded twenty as more rippled into being and spread out… and we weren’t even in its line of sight at this distance as it coursed across the top of the hill after our Images.

  We were doing 150 mph or so, running sideways along the side of the dividing wall of blackened stone that had once cut the island almost perfectly in half, the rim rising up in front of us.

  Kris could see out my eyes, I could see out hers. There was a slope coming, up towards the rim, which would give the virindi a perfect chance to spread out its fireballs and catch us all flat as we climbed up for altitude.

  “Spreading them out and setting them up,” I told her as we closed on it.

  The Fireballs didn’t come quite yet, not quite, not quite…

  The Images hit the vertical stone, ramped up smoothly, and drove for altitude.

  ============================

  For those who would like to support me and my daily updates, my Patreon Link is at:

  The shameless author reminds that more Patreon = more chapterz... and the First Decade Storyline and others exclusive to them!