Hiral launched straight up into the air, his sensory domain ballooning out to take in everything that’d happened since he’d begun his work. While he’d focused on the runic equations, he’d had to rein in his domain, and what he saw now as he unleashed it… hurt. His friends had fought, bled, and gone beyond their limits.

  Even now, many of them continued to battle, while literal tears in reality—Right had punched a Raze into another dimension—glowed like suns in an otherwise dark sky. Whatever Yan had done, it still disrupted the Raid Interface, though the dome of destructive energy was finally starting to shrink. That was two of the crystal giants Hiral didn’t need to worry about for the moment. A third and fourth, Nivian and Romin grappled on the ground, while a fifth—the one that’d hurt Loan—lay pinned by the hundreds of thick roots entangling it.

  That just left one more Raze. The one with two of its hands pressed together like it’d just crushed something. Energy surged around Hiral as he stared at that construct, and it returned his glare. If he wanted a fight, it would happily give it to him. Its power continued to increase, and soon enough, neither it nor its allies would be threatened by the raid group.

  Spreading its arms and opening its empty hands, it practically invited Hiral to come and try his luck against it. If he dared.

  He had something else to do first, and vanished from where he’d been standing to appear in front of Seena.

  Black flames ran up from her chest, across her shoulders, and all the way down the back of her arm to her wrists. Her flaming hair, too, had black mixed in with the red, while her Mantle of the Phoenix had almost completely changed color.

  “Let it go,” he told her.

  “There’s a backlash,” Seena said. “Once I cancel the ability, my fight is done.”

  “Let it go,” he said again.

  “Mistress,” Ur’Thul said, the power around him frayed and beating irregularly from how he’d exerted himself. “Listen to my would-be-apprentice. If you go even a minute longer… there will be no later. It will kill you.”

  So that’s the trade off for how much power she was throwing around. Oddly, Hiral didn’t panic at the realization. Ur was right, she was close to the line, but she hadn’t crossed it yet. As long as she cancelled the ability, she could recover, even if it might take a while.

  “I’ll handle things from here,” Hiral promised her, reaching out to take one of her hands. “You’ve done your part.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” Seena hissed. “Yully. Dole. Wule. They’re…”

  “Wule’s fine,” Hiral said. “His Aspect is intangible, remember?”

  The shock on Seena’s face—and in her body—was enough for her grip on the dangerous ability to loosen. A momentary lapse that Hiral took full advantage of.

  “Seeyela,” he said at the same time he reached out with a sequence of Separation, Attraction, Absorption, Energy, and Restoration, then followed up by activating Empower+.

  Empower+: The strength of your allies is your own. Borrow an energy type from one of your allies to infuse into your own attacks or abilities to inflict bonus damage.

  Note: Damage and duration of Empower+ based on Atn.

  Note (2): Energy types borrowed through Empower+ have a chance to ignore resistances. This effect can be increased further.

  As soon as the runes touched Seena, they cut off her connection to the ability—only possible because she allowed it—and pulled the deadly black flames from her body. From there, through more runic shenanigans, Hiral infused those same flames into his Seeker’s Unmaking, while leaving a thick dose of Restoration in their place.

  “He’s really okay?” Seeyela said, appearing out of thin air to catch her sister as weakness overtook Seena.

  “He’s really okay,” Hiral confirmed, one small thing he could feel relief about. “Let Nivian know.”

  “Hiral,” Seena said, leaning on her older sister’s shoulder, while Ur shrunk back down to his Li’l Ur form. “What if you need my help…?”

  Hiral pointed to the black flames wreathing his sword. “I’ve already got it. And I’m going to use it to make them pay before we go.”

  “How long do we have?” Seeyela said, a tremor running through her body.

  “Minutes, at most,” Hiral said. “I sped it all up. Excuse me,” he added, turning to backhand a pair of blasts from the Raze that’d taunted him sailing over the horizon of the city. “Sorry. As I was saying, it’s sped up. Seeyela, are you ready?”

  She tensed at the words, then seemed to breathe out in acceptance. “Didn’t find a way, huh?”

  Hiral smiled at the woman. “Of course I did. You’re still the key, though.”

  “Huh?”

  “What are you two talking about?” Seena said.

  “Your sister is the key to saving us all,” Hiral said. “Get everybody together who isn’t fighting anymore. Keep them close. And be ready to get the rest of us when it starts.”

  “How will I know?” Seeyela said.

  “Oh, you’ll know,” Hiral promised, then turned from the two women, the Raze demanding his attention. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Hiral,” Seena started.

  “Let him go,” Seeyela said. “Look at him. He’s got this.”

  Without another word, Hiral stepped down to appear a hundred feet in front of the Raze. Compared to its towering height, he looked outright tiny, the sword in his hand even smaller. The crystal monster’s power swelled like an ocean behind it, hanging heavy across the landscape. Much like when Hiral had faced Vorinal before, this opponent had so much raw energy at its command, it had unshakable confidence in its victory.

  Unlike when Hiral had fought Vorinal, he had grown. A lot.

  It was time to show the Raze they weren’t going to win this.

  Solar energy flooded out of Hiral as he released the limiter he’d held onto to keep himself from getting spotted by the Raze earlier, then activated his buffing abilities. Double Trouble+ and Eloquently Enraged+ exploded off him, followed by Domain of the Sun+, Delicate Balance, and Resonance of Heroes. Last, but certainly not least, the Rune of Eclipse formed across body, while high, high above, a shadow began passing across the final sun.

  This would also be the final eclipse… for the Raze.

  It moved first, taking the initiative to burst forward. It hardly had to go a few steps before Hiral was within reach of it, long arms sweeping out and across to claw him into little pieces. If he stayed in one place, that was.

  As fast as the claws were, Hiral was never where they passed, like he was blinking between different positions hovering in front of the Raze. Even when it used all four arms—then its shoulder-cannons—to try and hit him, it wasn’t enough. Three, four, five seconds he dodged like this, watching, studying, learning about the flow of energy moving through the crystal construct.

  After the sixth second, he dodged another claw-strike, then appeared within the thing’s guard. Appeared, and swung. Up, over, and down, the Seeker’s Unmaking came, dragging oblivion behind it, to hurl a scar-in-reality against the Raze’s chest. Crystal fractured and cracked, before the whole giant got thrown back by the sheer weight of the swing.

  Its heels dug divots in the ground as it flew, before something solid caught its foot, and it went flipping head over heels. Thumps and crashes trailed the Raze’s path, carving a furrow in the ground before the crystal monstrosity got its feet in position to slow its momentum. Its four hands joined it a second later—claws digging more gouges to slow it—while the shoulder cannons came up to rapid-fire powerful blasts at Hiral.

  Seeker’s Unmaking a blur of motion, Hiral whipped the blade around in front of him without taking a step in either direction. Surrounded with just a touch extra of Rejection, each motion of his sword perfectly deflected the house-sized projectiles to soar past him. In the distance, domes of destructive energy consumed whole city-blocks—what was left of them—where they landed like the drumbeat of giants. Solar energy spooled around Hiral the whole time, the Raze just using the barrage to buy itself time to get back to its feet. As soon as it saw the tactic wasn’t even an annoyance to Hiral, it stopped to charge again in his direction.

  Too late.

  Dozens of clones burst off Hiral, then hundreds, as they bolted across the sky to surround the Raze. Pausing at the tactic, the construct spread its four arms, preparing to take attacks from any direction. Except, as each of the clones exploded into a complex runic equation that summoned three glowing circles, one in front of the other, to hang in the air, it wasn’t prepared to take attacks from every direction.

  With hundreds of Piercing Shots set up, balls of black or white appeared behind each. Yanily’s Dragonflight Breath had given Hiral some inspiration, and he’d put his own spin on it.

  Like stars in the night sky, the Raze stood surrounded on all sides, and its eyes turned to Hiral for an instant before the death-beam-barrage was unleashed. Hundreds of scars of energy came from all sides, driving into the Raze while it tried to block or dodge. Arms came up to protect its face, which only left its chest and legs vulnerable, dozens of blasts stabbing into it.

  Much like the shots from his RHCs, the shots weren’t enough to individually hurt something at the level of the Raze, but Hiral more than made up for it with quantity. And it was only the opening act, energy bursting off him as he shot ahead into the maelstrom.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  To the Raze’s credit, it sensed him coming, a clawed hand stabbing out to impale him as he rushed it. Sensing and catching were two very different things, though, and Hiral blinked up above the deadly claws. Attraction brought his feet down atop the back of the hand, and his greatsword flashed as he sprinted up the arm.

  Scars of black burned in his wake, where the sword chopped into the crystal, and it was barely a heartbeat before he reached the shoulder. Feet leaving the crystal, Hiral leapt and spun, bringing the Seeker’s Unmaking around in a powerful, two-handed slash aimed directly at the giant’s neck. Something it had clearly anticipated, a hand snapping up to cover its neck just before the blade carved into it.

  Still, against the utter, destructive potential of the Seeker’s Unmaking, the back of the hand wasn’t nearly enough protection. Crystal fingers sheared off, the full length of the blade cleaving through them, the palm, and a solid-foot-deep into the neck itself, before the weapon tore free to finish the arc of the slash. Then, even with the weight of the blade—and the swing—carrying Hiral’s right hand further out to the side in his spin, his left hand trailed behind.

  His left fist, to be more accurate. Runes of Impact, Breaking, Expansion, and Increase surrounded his fist like a huge gauntlet. One that slammed into the side of the Raze’s face with a sound like the sky cracking open.

  Feet tearing free from the ground, the Raze shot to the side and went gouging through the ruined crystal surface at the same time more clones leapt free from Hiral. Once again, almost immediately, the crystal construct was back on its feet, like nothing could truly shake or injure it. More cannon-fire shot from its shoulders, though these blasts were different.

  Spiraling as they went, their speed increased with every foot they travelled, and Hiral had to step into them to bat them aside with his sword. Even then, powerful vibrations ran up his arm with each impact, the blasts having a new weight to them that hadn’t been there before.

  Sparks of black and yellow flashed in front of him as shots filled his vision—and his sensory domain—for a second before he realized the true purpose of the shots. They’d blinded him. Before he had a chance to adapt, beyond swatting aside another shot, a closed fist crashed into him from the side.

  Rejection, Impact, and Decrease lessened the blow, but it still pummeled him out of the air like a falling meteor to crash into the earth. Dirt, rock, and crystal erupted like a geyser from his landing, and the Raze was already nearly on top of him, two of its hands raised and then coming down in an apocalyptic double-axe-handle blow.

  While the Raze didn’t seem to have a lot of variety or versatility to their abilities—beyond some control over crystal—they more than made up for it with raw, physical power. Injuries that would cripple lesser foes, they brushed off. On the other hand, each of their attacks came with a sense of finality, like every single one had the potential to be a finishing blow in the vein of something like Yanily’s Skyfall.

  The clasped hands coming down in Hiral’s direction were beyond even that, a destructive energy surrounding them that scoured the air as it passed. It wasn’t something Hiral could block or even deflect.

  So, he Exchanged instead, vanishing to leave a clone in his place to get summarily squashed. While Hiral couldn’t counter the Raze on physical strength, he could…

  A tail literally came out of nowhere to crash into him, again slapping him back down to crash into the ground.

  The Raze didn’t exactly reset like they did before, but it did return to its original position without moving. They still have some of that power? Maybe from being connected with it for so long.

  There wasn’t an answer to the query, and frankly, Hiral didn’t care. If that was all the Raze had—dangerous as it was—it wasn’t enough. He was gone again before the next blow came crashing down, and this time, when the Raze blinked out of existence to reappear in a position it had earlier, he was ready for it. The punch whiffed over his head, missing by inches, though Hiral’s scarves reached out and latched on.

  Combined with Attraction, Hiral landed just above the wrist, turned, and then hacked down. As big as the construct’s arm was, the Seeker’s Unmaking chopped through half of it with the first attack. A second, in record time, took the rest of the hand from the Raze’s body. That seemed to get its attention, and three other hands came barreling at him, keen to crush him into paste.

  They still weren’t fast enough, as Hiral sprinted along the limbs, cutting and slicing the entire way. Gouges flickering with black flames were left in his wake as he ran along the giant like it was a particularly aggressive obstacle course. Most importantly, it kept all the Raze’s attention firmly on Hiral, and not on what was happening in the sky above it.

  Which should be just about done… now!

  With a massive pulse of solar energy, Hiral activated the Edicts of Gravity, Attraction, and Increase on the area around the Raze. Against something of its power, the effect wouldn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. All the setup was complete.

  High above the Raze, nestled in among the still-swirling clouds from whatever Left and Yanily had done, sat a column of cascading, runic rings, lined up with the single, remaining sun hidden behind the eclipse. Utilizing aspects of what he’d done to gather energy during the ritual in Trevallen, components of his Piercing Shot, and the things he’d learned from his more recent death-beam-barrage, this was on a whole different level.

  And, as the Raze’s knees buckled, dropping it to the ground, the complex series of equations activated. Hauling on the pure solar energy, rife with the meaning and concept that could only be found emanating from the last sun, the series of rings activated one after the other. In the sky, clouds blasted away from the rings, then immediately got sucked right back in, the heat generated creating its own weather system around the working.

  Arcs of dry electricity flashed across the sky, while ball-lightning swirled and ducked around each ring as it lit up. Colored lights danced though the dark sky in a dazzling display. Thunder peeled with a building intensity, like a timer ticking down to doomsday.

  On the ground, the Raze pushed against the force hauling it down, locking it in place. It had strength in spades. Power to end civilizations. Too bad it was up against one of the primal rules of the universe. A rule that had a particular hatred for what the Raze had done to one of its brethren, the Avatar of Time.

  It wasn’t letting go.

  Hiral flashed away from it—being close to ground zero seemed like a bad idea—then threw his own solar energy up to join the working high above. Power from his Rune of Eclipse merged with the Edict of Eclipse he’d placed in front of the sun, and then joined through him as the Avatar of Eclipse, completing the channel. With it, like a key turning in a lock, the other Avatars circled the satellite of rings he’d created, imprinting their power on it, much like they’d done with the Domain of the Sun.

  The whole process only took a second, the Raze barely getting one foot under itself as it struggled to escape. Then, as if it realized its efforts were in vain—the attack above fully initialized with a powerful concussion of energy that blew black the storm around it—the Raze paused to look up.

  Like a beam directly from the sun, Hiral’s Solar Flare came down on the section of the city in a flash that lit the world up. Unlike Hiral’s death beams, there was no explosion. No roar of destruction or expanding dome of annihilation. There was “just” an intense wave of heat, a warp of the air, and the bubbling of stone and crystal in all directions.

  From ruined city-scape to something like a volcanic wasteland within the blink of an eye, red rivers of molten stone ran through the scorched terrain.

  That… would’ve been a little unpleasant without Seena increasing our heat tolerance.

  Unpleasant probably wasn’t the word the Raze was using at that moment. Though the thing still lived, it looked like its body was made of melted wax. The arms on its right side had fused together, while it’s upper-left arm was missing entirely. The lower-left, on the other hand, looked permanently bent, connected by hardened streamers of crystal. One leg no longer had a knee—the whole thing was just a log of crystal—though the other looked practically pristine, short of being melted in places.

  The long tail lay connected to the ground, and the head and torso now stood as one, the neck completely gone.

  Not that Hiral had waited to see his attack hadn’t killed the Raze—the thing was too strong to die that easily—Hiral reached out with his Edicts. All around him, the city shook, an earthquake rattling the ground, before huge chunks of molten stone and crystal rose into the air. Across the miles of the ravaged landscape, gravity flipped around in concentrated areas, and the sky began to fill with slabs of stone bigger than the towering structures that’d filled Visionary.

  He'd hit it with the sun, before, now it was time to hit it with something else.

  Knowing he wouldn’t be able to do what he needed on his own, Hiral flexed another thread of solar energy—this one typed with Infernal and Entropic energies—and reached out. There. Separation cut a slice between dimensions, then Increase and Unsealing forced it open.

  Destructive energies poured out of the space, an imbalance forming where the two realms met, before Attraction yanked out four forms.

  The first, of course, was a battered and broken Raze. This thing didn’t have an inch of its body that wasn’t cracked, fractured, or outright missing. With only one arm left to its name—no shoulder-cannons, either—and what looked like a peg-leg grown from the crystal on its lower body, the thing was in rough shape.

  As for how that happened to it, the answer was the other three Hiral had pulled out. Cloud-Left towered above and behind Hiral, the power of the Spear of Clouds suffusing the air around him, while the Herald of the Endless Cycle spread its influence. Beside his left foot, Bash stood glaring at the Raze, like he was annoyed it hadn’t let him smash it. Next to the other cloud-foot, Right stood surrounded by an aura or torrential power. Purple energy rose from his head to the clouds above, but something about his body had become leaner, like whatever he was doing was consuming him to feed the power.

  That look in his eyes, though, told Hiral everything he needed to know. Right wasn’t backing down or sitting this one out. The only way to get him to release the ability would be for the fight to end.

  A second later, a third Raze crashed down to join the other two, this one missing its left shoulder and the two arms on that side. Huge chunks had been torn out of its torso, while its entire body looked like thousands of small whips had lashed it endlessly.

  Yanily landing beside Hiral explained who had done that to the Raze. Lightning churned in his eyes, and the obvious power of an additional advanced class wafted of the man.

  “Glad to have you back in the fight,” Yanily said, voice and face serious.

  “You’re… not… the only one!” Nivian added, his own voice full of effort, before a fourth Raze sailed up and over to join the other three. Behind Hiral, Nivian’s Aspect stomped forward, cracks running through the blue-flames armor, where it wasn’t missing entirely. “Did you say something about Wule?” This time, the effort was clearly at holding back his own emotions. The anger and loss. The hope.

  “He doesn’t need to say anything,” Wule said, rising out of the ground in his Aspect form, the three lanterns glowing over his shoulders. “I’m right here. Sorry for worrying you.” With the words, a strong pulse of solar energy cascaded off him, mending the wounds of the gathered group. Not that he was the last one to join, with a charging Onslaught bashing a fifth Raze into the growing pile.

  Stumbling after the maneuver, the giant Romin went to one knee beside the group, then separated into the Bonder and companion halves. Glowing cracks marred the skin of both of them, where the strain of maintaining their larger, combined form had stressed their bodies to the limits.

  “Oh my,” Wule muttered before rushing over to layer healing over the pair. “He’s not in good shape.”

  “I’ll send them to Laseen,” Seeyela said at the same time three portals opened.

  From the first, the sixth and final Raze—this one wrapped in tree-thick-roots—dropped to join the others. From the second, Seeyela and Seena stepped out.

  “I’m sorry. Ilrolik… the wolf… I saw her go down. She wasn’t moving,” Romin said, voice weak and cracked, before he dropped into the third and final portal with Bash.

  “Seena,” Hiral said to his party leader—his friend—where she stood beside her sister without assistance.

  “I’m fine,” Seena said. “I’m seeing this through, just like you.”

  “Don’t argue with her,” Seeyela said. “You won’t win.”

  Hiral nodded. She had every right to be there for this fight, and he wasn’t going to try and make the choice for her.

  “Well, would you look at this,” Wule said, his head turning to take in Hiral, Yanily, Seena, Seeyela, Nivian, Left, and Right. “Got the old gang back together.”

  Nivian—out of his Aspect—put his hand on his brother’s shoulder, like he was afraid the man wasn’t real, before a smile creased his face. A squeeze, that was all they had time for, and the tank stepped in front of the group.

  “What are we doing, Boss?” Nivian said, shield up as the Raze got to their feet.

  “You know exactly what we’re doing,” Seena said. “We’re winning this.”

  Then, she gave Nivian the shoulder tap.

  Two minutes until the end of the world.

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