. Streaming stars and flowing galaxies filled the sky. The armillary sphere turned silently, immense walls of brass rotating without noise. A towering blade of shining white light tinged with gold rested with its tip embedded in the ground. The earth shifted, burnt patches and shallow trenches smoothing themselves over.

  Erina's ears pulsed with the sound of her own blood. She leaned on her spear for support as green sparks jumped at her fingertips. A tiny spell circle flickered and then vanished.

  "What do you intend to achieve here?" said Eve. "What do you hope to gain in your defiance?"

  Erina had no chance of defeating Eve under her own power. That much was clear. Everything in this conjured world belonged to her. Erina only stood because Eve hadn't decided to crush her completely. That wasn't the point.

  Even then, this was a shade—an echo of the living Eve that lingered on in the abyss. It could only incarnate here in a reality beyond reality, where cause and effect slipped to the wayside and the laws of existence were tenuous at best. Erina shuddered at the idea that the true Eve might be even greater and more terrible than this nightmare before her.

  At the same time, an ember of hope smoldered in Erina's chest. That was right. This wasn't Eve. This was an impossible being that shouldn't exist. Something had to underpin it—hold its fragile being together.

  "You are nothing but flesh meant for me to inhabit," said Eve. "And still, you think your importance greater than mine? Your might beyond my own?" Then, with a quiet scoff, she planted her sheathed blade before herself, both hands resting on the pommel as the cold winds blew around her. "Your spirit is not yet broken. By all means, explore every avenue you see. They will only prove my point—the pointlessness of your actions."

  Erina felt her teeth grind against each other. It was infuriating. Eve didn't take her seriously. She was a one-woman comedy show to her. A petulant little child flailing her fists.

  Erina was not powerless. She refused to think she was powerless. She would not give in to this thing wearing her own face as its mask.

  A spell circle formed at her outstretched hand and blinked away. For the first time, Erina took proper stock of her surroundings and of her enemy.

  Scan complete.

  There was no Eve.

  Confusion slipped into Erina's expression. Eve didn't register as an individual. She had no signature of her own and emitted no mana of her own. She shared her signature with Erina. That much wasn't all too surprising. Rather than possessing any mana reserve, she blended in with the ambient air as if she wasn't there at all.

  And the air was not merely air. It was fire and water and earth and metal. It was concrete and plaster. It was magma and circuitry. It was space itself. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of conflicting materials returned in the scan. The void was not empty. Everything lost to it had been collected here, transfigured, and imposed on a tenuous reality.

  "Sublimation through primordial conversion…?" murmured Erina under her breath.

  Her head wasn't spinning so fast anymore. The throbbing in her muscles eased enough for her to move them. Green eyes focused and roved the sights that greeted them.

  The gemstones weren't cosmetic. They were mediums for storing and channeling mana at magnitudes fit to power cities. The armillary sphere was an upscaled fixture of astral sorcery for not only calculating, but capturing and redirecting flows.

  Erina took in the starscape for what it really was. Eve's bounded field of temporal reversion was, in reality—or the closest approximation to reality—a couple hundred meters across. At the same time, it was a true new genesis on the inside, containing its own star system. Every individual light was a fusion reactor comparable to the sun.

  Generators, batteries, and invisible wires. Strip away all of the complexities, all the centuries of research it took to reach this point and all the conversions and calculations attached, and what remained was disturbingly familiar. Nothing here was cosmetic.

  This breathtaking reality was the stillbirth of a new world that never was. Its corpse was wired together to form an unspeakably immense magic circuit. It was a shameless claim on a magecraft fit for a god. A term from Erina's studies rose to the front of her mind. It was the most advanced example of an Attuned Realm she had ever seen—a space conceptually integrated with a person's Affinity, allowing them to draw mana from their surroundings as easily as from themselves. At this scale, Eve's mana was, for all intents and purposes, infinite.

  Erina pulled her spear out of the ground and stood on her own two feet. The wind blew through her hair as she raised a hand to her chest and took a deep, slow breath. An array of interlaid spell circles formed at her feet, one increasingly large seal after another filling with runes and slowly rotating opposite to each other.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "The same signature," she breathed. "The same person."

  The magic seals activated and vanished in a burst of light.

  Erina lifted her head, green eyes ablaze, and threw an accelerated spear with all the power of a battleship's main cannon—

  "Spear." Eve conjured a weapon of her own, and threw in return.

  An explosion of light flared midway between them, glowing branches exploding in either direction. A forest of lightning lanced into being around Eve, blasting holes into the earth and filling the air with brilliant shining white-green lines. Erina's hair whipped wildly in the shockwave, deep red branches of energy carving into the floor and propagating through space all around her like blood vessels of the world.

  As fast as they formed, Erina's myriad branches were gone, but the red branches remained. They cooled and hardened into red steel, crystallized webs of blood filling the battlefield. The spin of Erina's spell circles slowed as they faded. Smoke rose from Eve's gloved hand.

  "That's right," said Eve. "Look beyond what your eyes see. Force yourself to confront the truth of the world before you. That is your only avenue."

  Erina lowered her arm, panting. Blood oozed from the various shallow cuts across her body.

  The mana resisted her. It felt like a wall of thick rubber damming a flood of water at the bank of the river. An immeasurably powerful tide surged past, endlessly flowing towards its true target. As if prying with her bare nails, Erina had torn one small lone gash into the dam, yet even that was almost too much to control.

  "And don't get ahead of yourself," said Eve. "You and I are worlds apart."

  Erina snapped out of it. A flock of butterflies took flight and a cloud of green light spread overhead as she took off sprinting along the edge of the battlefield.

  Eve remained unfazed. "Grow." The earth split at her feet, thick twin roots sprouting—

  Erina commanded the floating orbs to multiply again and again until her cloud was a full-fledged cumulonimbus—a mass of light filled with countless individual particles that filled the sky. Rays like rain stormed down, bombarding the roots back into the dirt.

  "You must have tasted the difference between us," said Eve. Pillars of emerald broke the surface and arched, sheltering her from the bombardment. "Yet even with that knowledge, you insist on this tantrum. What compels you to continue with such a fruitless endeavor?"

  "If I can resist you," said Erina, "I will. For as long as I can!"

  "How inane." Eve flicked her hand. "Forge."

  In an instant, one ring of the armillary sphere warped and melted into a thin flat sheet that covered the battlefield in its shadow. Erina's cloud hung over it, hammering its top with fresh burn marks. Erina skidded to a halt and flourished her hands, thick branches of emerald growing up around her to form a thorny shelter matching Eve's. The sheet of brass fell with a deafening clang, pounding an impression of their bunkers into itself as it flattened against the earth and covered everything.

  Overwhelming heat surrounded Erina from every direction, the pitch black under her cover filling with the ominous glow of black body radiation. Erina's shelter burst out, soft metal warping and splitting. She leapt high into the air as the brass melted down, razing the earth in a searing bright inferno.

  "You achieve nothing but your own destruction," said Eve, elevated above the flames on a dais of emerald. Erina hovered on an aerial platform seal, matching her gaze. "This is precisely the failings of humans—the wretched concept that is the freedom to stray from the righteous path!"

  "I won't have a part in these ideals of yours!" said Erina.

  "A world for the kind can only be created by showing no kindness to the unkind!" Eve clenched her hand and the ocean of metal turned from glowing white to inert brass in an instant. "Burn!"

  The flames rushed together under Erina and condensed. Erina dived aside and away from the ensuing plume that erupted like dragon's breath, green light trailing her as she whirled. The air cracked, sonic barrier breaking as the spear exploded forth—

  Eve reached out and caught the spear, the energy construct compacting back into a shining ball of light in her fist. Finally, for the first time proper, Eve moved, stepping down from the dais as she lashed her arm out and loosed the blinding forest of lightning right back at Erina.

  White-green lightning flooded the air around Erina as she narrowly twisted into its gaps. Even over the high-pitched whine of firing lasers and the splitting of impacted earth, she could hear Eve's voice. "The freedom to choose evil is itself evil!"

  Erina landed amidst the fading strands, green light sparking at her fingers as Eve neared.

  "You're out of your mind," said Erina.

  She manifested her katana and dug into her memories, retrieving everything she could recall about the techniques of the crimson swordmaster. Her stances, her footwork, the grip on her sword and the exact angle of her strikes—Erina pulled them all to the forefront of her mind and crystallized them as an array of spell circles at her feet.

  The wind howled and then Eve was upon her. Erina drew, a flurry of green arcs to neutralize Eve's before the katana clicked back into its scabbard. One seal vanished.

  A vast emerald slash, sidestepped by her enemy. Another seal vanished.

  The wind roared with every exchange, sharpness itself flying from Eve's sword and striking alongside her. Hexagram barriers popped in and out as fast as Erina could wield them, wincing and flinching with each rapid cut that snuck through her sword and shield.

  A dozen techniques exhausted in seconds—Erina was out! She split off, accelerated across the burnt field as her cloud and butterflies covered her retreat.

  Eve's gaze remained locked onto her. A swipe of Fragarach compelled the wind to slash tens of times, deflecting the barrage past her from every angle.

  "And what will you do?" said Erina. "Against Darius and Julian and the others? You lost to them once. What will make things any different this time?"

  Confidence welled up in her. Yes, this wasn't barren land. Someone had done this before. For all her power, Eve wasn't invincible! Erina drew the array before her and loaded a compressed bolt into her railgun—

  "Forge," ordered Eve.

  Erina's mana shield flared as a hot spike rammed into her back, burst forth from one of the pools of cooled brass littering the scorched arena. Large roots coiled around Eve, blocking the continued bombardment while more and more hot spikes kicked Erina around until she was surrounded and held in place by thin spears of metal from every direction.

  "You should concern yourself," said Eve quietly, "with yourself."