There was something strange about his opponent. The attacker had thrown out a few of those lances of flames just like Monterey did, but the ones they conjured didn't seem nearly as threatening as the one Monterey had cast himself. They were far too weak and were snuffed out the moment the nothingness conjured by the nihil made contact with them.

  For some reason he could barely sense his opponent. They had to be quite adept at hiding the magic surging within them because tracking them was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. The only time he could even sense them was when they were casting that spell of theirs.

  "Fuck!"

  He ducked into the underbrush just as another arc of flame passed over his head. They had to be close, but he could never catch a glimpse of them. He had attempted to dispel any possible concealment magic with the nihil, but it had been a wasted effort. The only thing obscuring them had been the dense woodland all along.

  A branch snapped somewhere nearby causing him to react immediately. He raised his hand in the direction of the sound and let the power flow.

  "Nihilate!"

  There was a loud bang followed by a splat with a scream of agony echoing out shortly after. He got up and moved towards the sound. After only a few moments they came into view. They were on the ground feebly clutching their now ruined leg. Their blood was draining out of them fast, which meant their lifespan could now be measured in minutes.

  "Why aren't you healing yourself?" he said as he put his foot down on their neck and pushed them further down into the moss.

  "I'm not done with you yet so fix your leg and learn what it means to suffer!" he screamed as tears began forming in their eyes.

  He could sense magic in them, but it was incredibly faint. They were by far the weakest mage he had encountered so far, but he couldn't take any real risks. The nihil was ready to destroy any magic they might attempt to throw at him, yet they did nothing. Not even so much as an attempt to heal their leg was made.

  "Fuck! Why didn't I see it coming!?" he exclaimed as he twisted his foot until he heard the crack from their neck as it gave out.

  They had been a distraction all along, and they had performed their job magnificently. He had been chasing them for minutes, which would have been plenty of time for his real opponent to set whatever plans they had into motion.

  Trees blurred past him as he followed the compass in his heart guiding him towards Jane. The bond's guiding function had been infallible so far, and if it failed him now he would never let that go.

  Eventually he made it out of the woodland and stepped onto the road that cut through the forest. He could sense Jane and Jennifer's presence, but he couldn't see a sign of them.

  "Took you long enough, warlock, or should I refer to you as the Winters' familiar?"

  The woman standing on the road before him was tall and had bronzed skin. Her curly dark hair and deep brown eyes made her stand out from all the other Autumn witches he had encountered so far. She was dressed in all black and her high heels made her already prodigious height seem even more imposing.

  "Nihilate!" he shouted as he whipped his hand towards her direction and let the spell fly.

  A bright flash of light appeared before him as the spell struck some barrier between him and the target. For a short moment he could make out a glasslike dome around her, which faded from sight only seconds later.

  "That's no way to talk to a woman, familiar!" she jeered while wagging her finger at him.

  It was strange. While he could sense Jane's presence she had yet to send anything across the bond. She was maintaining complete radio silence, which meant she was either unable to communicate with him through the bond or that there was a good reason not to do so. He would have to bait his adversary into giving him workable information.

  "You don't even know where she is do you?" he said as he stepped onto the road and began to inching towards her.

  "Looks like you caught me! Too bad she isn't the one that I'm hunting, familiar."

  "So you're after me then? No that can't be, but I'm getting close aren't I?"

  If Jane had managed to avoid her attention it could only mean that this woman needed him in order to find her. She was trying to make him reveal Jane's location somehow, but luckily he didn't actually know where she was exactly.

  "Mind telling me your name or are you afraid I'll use it to my advantage somehow?" he asked her while throwing her a leering grin.

  "It's Mahogany, but you'll hardly have much time to use it."

  Oh she definitely was an Autumn alright, which meant she probably had a spirit or two with her. He hadn't sensed any spirits, but it could be that they were laying in wait just ready to strike at a moments notice. Legbiter had been near undetectable until it had decided to strike so he couldn't afford to assume she was alone.

  "Are you stalling or poking me for information? Because if I was you I wouldn't waste all that precious time," she said.

  There it was! She had slipped up and said something he could work with. Something odd was happening, but he couldn't quite figure out what it was. He turned his head to look at the signage next to the road and his eyes went wide. It wasn't Avalonian signage. In fact it looked american. On second thought there shouldn't even have been a road there.

  "Fuck!" he exclaimed as he was knocked off his feet by multiple strange ripples of motion passing through the ground beneath him.

  The road was rippling like the waves on the ocean as it stretched towards infinity. The forest retreated leaving him stranded on an endless stretch of asphalt that cut through an empty and unfamiliar cityscape. He had already sprung her trap the moment he set foot on the road.

  "You lost the moment Road caught you," she scoffed.

  The spirit hadn't been hiding, it had been the very road itself. He had never thought to question the presence of a road in his life and that had been his greatest mistake.

  "Road swallows all travelers in due time and no one can ever truly escape it once they've stepped onto it."

  The silence around them was deafening. Every window on every building around them was entirely devoid of life. All the signs on the supposed storefronts around them were entirely incomprehensible. It was like the cityscape he had found himself in was some strange interpretation of a city that could only be found within the head of something utterly unknowable and alien.

  "You say that, but you're clearly attempting to mislead me since this would have been a suicide attack if you were speaking the truth."

  "Well as its summoner I have certain privileges, but I really shouldn't be wasting my time explain this to you," she said before she ran through the door of a nearby storefront.

  He chased after her, but was stopped by the unending abyss waiting for him on the other side of the door. There was no escape in sight. Only an endless stretch of road or the featureless void hiding inside the buildings around him.

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  He ran towards the end of the street and turned at the corner only to see the road stretching further and further before his very eyes. This was bad. He would die of dehydration within mere days and that was if he didn't go crazy from the isolation and offed himself.

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" he screamed as he slammed his fist into the brick wall next to him.

  How had he been so stupid? He had assumed she would attack him herself or send spirits to hound him, but this was something else entirely. To be trapped on an endless stretch of asphalt and concrete until he died of deprivation terrified him.

  "If you can hear me, Mahogany, I will inflict untold agonies on you once I get out of here!"

  "You will wish I would settle for killing you!"

  "All that will remain is a soulless husk of a being unable to even make the choice to stop breathing!"

  "Your pain and your despair will be as unending as this stupid fucking road!"

  He breathed out slowly as he collected himself after his outburst. Rationally speaking there had to be some way to escape his current situation. No matter how irrational this place was there still had to be some rules that it followed. Even magic had to come from somewhere so the place couldn't be truly infinite.

  As he walked the streets seemed to go on forever. No two places looked the same, yet it was all so eerily uncanny. It was like the cityscape was something akin to a suggestion or strange interpretation conjured up by some alien psychology. The entire place was geometrically absurd. None of the buildings around him had the right proportions. Windows and doorways looked like they had been doled out randomly by a being that couldn't even comprehend the idea of a house.

  The signage around the road was no different. Random coloration, no standardization when it came to shape, and no grammatical syntax to be seen. It was like it couldn't even decide which alphabet to use. The only reason his brain had interpreted the signs he had seen before as being american was because his brain needed patterns even if there weren't any to be found.

  Every time he looked away the layout would change. If he rounded a corner and then turned back the entire cityscape behind him would change. Nothing stayed the same unless he was actively observing it, which seemed to indicate it was either forgetting the very cityscape it had constructed or that it could only shuffle an area when he wasn't looking.

  He sat down with his back against a nearby wall as waves of exhaustion overcame him. Both his body and mind felt drained, but only mere minutes had passed by his estimation.

  If he was caught within some space created by the spirit or perhaps within the spirit itself then why hadn't it made its move yet? Was it waiting for him to weaken himself or was it just content to watch him die slowly?

  "Is that all?" he sighed.

  It was already attacking him, but not in a way someone would be able to easily notice. Most likely it was draining his very life from him one drop at a time. That would have been the most likely cause behind his sudden exhaustion. The only real question left in his head was the how of it all.

  "I bet you don't even understand what I'm saying," he muttered to hismelf.

  The thing clearly had no concept of written language and most likely couldn't comprehend verbal communication either. It was a being so different from any other thing that he was most likely just as alien to it as it was to him.

  Another wave rippled through the road knocking him over as it passed him. He gritted his teeth and stood back up through sheer force of will. Mahogany had said it was inescapable, which implied that others had tried to run from it, but trying to outrun it was foolish. No matter the distance one crossed there would be no end to be found.

  "It seems I've got you now," he chuckled to himself.

  It was a paradox. Just like Achilles and the tortoise. By the time Achilles reaches the last position of the tortoise it would have already moved a bit further ahead. This would continue until the distance between the two was infinitesimal, but the distance would never become zero.

  "You had me there for a while, but you can't outsmart me when all you'll ever be is a manmade feature of the surrounding landscape!"

  When he had fought Garuda he had erased the space between himself and his opponent. Without separation there was no distance. All he needed to do was recreate that magic as a proper spell.

  He formed the shape within him based on his own guesswork and the shapes of his two other spells. A spell was really only a key that translated his power into a specific repeatable effect. Some keys could be used to open multiple doors like the nihil and some could only open a few like the nihilation. While some parameters could be changed the inherent nature of the spell would always be the same.

  The shape his spells took was almost indescribable, but the closest thing he could compare them to was a circuit board. All the features on the primary shape seemed to have a specific purpose, but he couldn't be entirely sure of what they did. Which meant the only thing he could do now was trust his gut and hope his magic wouldn't fail him.

  As he filled his new spell with power it almost seemed to hum in anticipation. It had been forged by his desire and intent to reduce the distance between to points to zero by annihilating the space separating them. Its one purpose was to change the number that was distance to nil.

  "I guess that's as good of a name as any," he said as he broke into manic laughter.

  "Am I losing it or is this just fucking hilarious?"

  He needed another semiotic to activate the spell. A word wasn't exactly subtle, but a motion would be far less revealing. For now he would use both a word and a motion to activate it, but in time he would hopefully be able to do it with just the motion. He raised his hand in front of him as he started sprinting down the street and decided then and there to trust himself.

  "Nil!" he shouted as he snapped his finger in front of him.

  The end of the road zoomed towards him in an instant to the sound of a loud clap like thunder. The ground beneath him rippled violently, but he couldn't afford to trip over his own feet now.

  "Nil!" he screamed as he snapped his finger once more.

  The distant views closed in on him in an instant as the spell activated once more. It didn't matter how many times it took because he would keep casting it until he managed to escape or he collapsed from exhaustion. He simply wouldn't let Road beat him no matter what.

  A loud humming echoed throughout the empty streets as he cast the spell over and over. The spirit was taking notice and it was clearly unhappy with his attempts. Everything around him was beginning to lose cohesion as he moved, but he wouldn't no couldn't stop.

  The signage and the buildings weren't even an acceptable interpretation anymore. All the geometry around him was mutating into something beyond any comprehension. It wasn't him that couldn't reach the end of the road anymore. It was the road that couldn't reach him.

  He saw it ahead of him. The half formed landscape ahead simply ended in an empty abyss, but somewhere within that expansive darkness he could see a faint light. The road buckled underneath him, which knocked him right off his feet mid sprint. Gravity beckoned him, but he would never give up until he reached the end. He snapped his finger one final time and activated the spell before he could hit the ground.

  "Nil!"

  The landscape zoomed past him as he crossed the threshold into the abyss. He had done it. The light was expanding before him and he had finally reached the end of the road.

  "You saw through it then," something whispered from the abyss behind him.

  "So you can talk! Are you going to tell me that you're a sore loser or something now?"

  "She could have commanded me to devour you, but she didn't."

  The voice was utterly incomprehensible to his ears, yet the meaning was entirely clear to him. It was as if it communicated its intent to him directly without a need for the very concept of language.

  "Guess she fucked up royally!"

  "The contract is null and void, but I will catch you one day."

  The thing almost seemed to be bored. As if this turn of events made no difference to it in the slightest. It carried no emotion, yet its every word gave off some uncanny sense of dissatisfaction.

  The sound of the wind, the rustling of leaves, and the blinding radiance of the sun hit him all at once. Mahogany was running, but there was no escape. He had made her a promise and he intended to keep it.

  "Nil!"

  The forest landscape zoomed past him in an instant the moment he snapped his finger. Him and his soul spoke through their shell as one as they reached out towards her. The promise could not be broken.

  "Did you miss us?!" they howled as they grabbed her by the arm and threw her into a nearby tree.

  She screamed out in pain before raising her hand towards them. Her magic surged within her, but it would never reach them. They had already begun channeling their power long before she had.

  "Nihil!" they screamed as they drove their foot into her stomach.

  The spell Mahogany had been trying cast failed as the nothingness made contact with it, but they wouldn't allow her to cast any magic at all. So they kept pouring their power and intent into the nihil as they began reaching for her arm. It had only just begun and there was still so much pain left for her to experience.

  "What even are you!" she screamed in both horror and pain as they grabbed her by the wrist and snapped it at the bone.

  "We will show you misery!" they laughed as they moved on to her next arm.

  "I don't wanna die!" she cried as they crushed her tibia with one well placed stomp.

  "You won't!" they cackled as they finished breaking her remaining leg.

  No amount of pain would ever suffice in their mind. Nothing could threaten what belonged to them without suffering the consequences. They wouldn't kill her because death was a mercy, and mercy was something utterly foreign to them.

  Somewhere on the other side of the bond someone was speaking, but they couldn't hear it much less comprehend it in their maddened state. They were far too preoccupied with their work to even bother thinking about it at all.

  "Keep your eyes closed and do not make any sounds," Jane whispered.

  "He hasn't noticed us yet so we just have to wait until he gets bored..."