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The duel between AA and Eru had settled into some semblance of a pattern. A few exchange of blows between the tonfa and the gladius was terminated when either AA set off one of his traps or Eru unleashed his mysterious slash. Since AA’s goal was to buy time for Mei Lin to undo the seal on her, he felt that he had the upper hand. However, at the back of his mind, he wondered why his otherwise astute opponent had not been pressing his advantage, however slight it was. It made the veteran legionnaire fear that the human was the one buying time.
Eru stepped back from the melee, putting some distance between him and AA. At first, the Abaddon thought that the human needed to catch his breath, but since he had parried or avoided each attack with minimal effort, or at least, the semblance of it, not a drop of sweat or a raggedness of breath was seen in him.
A second set of columns of purple light lit the sky.
‘Hey, Princess,’ said Eru, ‘if you’re planning anything, you better do it soon. Your side’s running out of time.’
Mei Lin’s eyes widened at his declaration, but she continued chanting, throwing a sharp glance at AA. He received her unspoken signal and asked a question for her.
‘Do you mean the Abaddon? Or the Seraphim?’
‘Does it matter?’ said Eru with a faint smile. ‘The two sides are about to unleash a spell on each other that would probably make their last war look like a children’s quarrel.’
AA looked at the purple columns more carefully. He realised that he had no idea of the principle behind their existence—to the best of his knowledge, neither the Abaddon nor the Seraphim had the means of creating them—but instinctively, he felt a chill creeping down his spine, as if he was looking at a portent of his own death. He had never felt fear like this, not even when he had faced Mei Lin—no, Persephone’s wrath alone.
‘What god of evil did you take that spell from?’ AA’s low whisper was laden with dread; even Mei Lin paled at the sound of his voice.
‘Nii-sama has seen many worlds, but I’m afraid he has not told me much about them.’
AA stared at him blankly. One of his tonfas slipped from his trembling grasp, hitting the ground with a hollow thud.
‘It seems that the sheolim would claim its first victim in an unlikely fashion,’ Eru said in an almost resigned tone as he raised his gladius.
He brought down his arm in a slashing motion.
A burst of something flew towards the dumbstruck Abaddon.
‘Sigil of the Great Mother—Axieros.’
Like waves from a stone dropped in a pond, an overwhelming force surged, centred on Mei Lin. Eru’s attack sizzled into nothing upon contact with it.
‘Sorry to keep y’all waiting,’ said Mei Lin. ‘Navigating a loophole in AA’s seal was a pain.’ She walked over to her partner. ‘Stand down, soldier. I’ll take it over from here.’
She took a glance at the so-called sheolim, the ominous column of lights that lit the horizon in the direction of Etrusca and Pelasgia. She felt the same foreboding of death that must have struck AA, but as a creature who had dealt death herself, she didn’t feel as shaken. While she was worried about what the human had said about them, she judged that they had nothing to do with their fight. The best course of action, she decided, would be to defeat the enemy before them, and then ask him about those lights—if he were still in a state to answer questions.
Eru noticed that his attack was now useless against the Seraphim princess. It didn’t possess enough power in the first place; it owed its success more to its mysterious nature. Now she had simply extinguished it with pure strength.
Mei Lin looked at her left hand while summoning her scythe with her right.
‘To be honest, I’m a bit weaker than if I were using the sigil of Ceres,’ she said. ‘But it still allows me to draw on a part of my old strength’—she looked at Eru with the eyes of a hawk before a wounded sparrow— ‘and I don’t think I’d need to use much to defeat you.’
Eru recalled his master’s instruction regarding her.
‘If the Seraphim princess ever uses her full power against you, forget about delaying them. Just take her out as quickly as possible. She’s the real deal, a natural killer. I doubt even I could last in a prolonged battle against her.’
‘I understand now,’ Eru muttered as he drew a hurried sigil of Quirinus in front of him. He took the spear of light and threw it in one smooth motion at Mei Lin, who swatted it aside with her bare hand. She then struck the ground in front of her with the butt of her scythe, generating a powerful shock wave that sent gouts of earth flying before her. Eru had rushed at her right behind the thrown spear, gladius drawn, but Mei Lin’s immediate counterattack forced her to stop. Tendrils of light burst from the cracks in the ground; he would have been impaled by them had he continued his charge. He took a step to the left, seemingly to avoid her attack, but that one step was somehow enough for him to get to her undefended back. Eru’s gladius glowed green as he channelled an Abaddon reinforcement spell into it. He stabbed her in the back, but it stopped cold about an inch before it hit her. Blue sparks crackled briefly at the point of impact, revealing the pattern of an Abaddon barrier.
‘Thanks, AA,’ said Mei Lin as she pointed a finger at the sky, sigil of Jupiter drawn in light by her feet. A single bolt of lightning struck the ground where Eru once stood—he had already moved away from the Seraphim when his attack failed to connect, knowing that her counterattack was coming.
Mei Lin turned to face him; the sigil of Jupiter by her feet was now surrounded by more sigils.
The area in front of Mei Lin turned into a hellish forest of thunderbolts.
* * *
Rei was silent after the hooded man’s story. She was for the most part overwhelmed by—everything. The story went much deeper and broader than she had ever imagined.
But part of her mind had begun putting pieces together.
‘Why did the one before me fail?’ she asked.
The assassin in Caesarea had claimed to have been created before her, and he was strong enough to toy with Rei. But this man had ignored him in his quest for godhood and chosen Rei instead. Why?
‘Ah, Eru?’ He didn’t seem surprised by her seemingly incongruous question. ‘It’s true that he’s strong. Like you, he lived a tragic life, and he had to endure all the hardships of life alone. And when I told him about the true nature of humans, he awakened to his abilities so readily. But he lacks something important.’
‘And what is that?’
‘He understands that he has a limit. He knows that he is a match for most of the Abaddon or Seraphim, but he couldn’t imagine himself going beyond that. While he could perform feats impossible for a human, like climbing to the top of a tower in an instant, he could not imagine himself getting past the Abaddon walls without my help.’
‘But I’m the same.’
‘You always were too hard on yourself.’ Rei saw a paternal smile form on the hooded figure’s lips. ‘You wished to be strong enough to live. Do you understand what that wish means? I do, perhaps more than anyone else—it was the same wish animating me after I had just destroyed my world and cast our people into a strange new world.
‘Had you devoted your life to revenge, you might have grown really powerful in a shorter amount of time. But then your strength would have had a limit. At some point, your quest for vengeance would have succeeded—or failed—and you would have grown no further. Yet instead, you wanted to live, and along the way you must have realised that living in this senseless world required more strength than what you have right now. And so you will reach higher, and higher, and higher… That is why, aside from me, you are the only one who can come close to becoming Immanuel.’
The hooded man drew his short cane and took a fighting stance, signalling to Rei that he was done talking.
That’s a defensive stance, thought Rei. Or one for a short-range attack. Is he inviting me to attack again? But she had barely completed that thought when she disappeared from her sight, with not even a puff of dust to signal his movement—
—and reappeared right in front of her, his cane hurtling down towards her head. Rei raised her sword to parry it. The blow was heavy, but not enough to stagger Rei. Her training with AA had allowed her to draw on the full efficiency of Abaddon strengthening. Mei Lin had told her that she’d lose a contest of strength only to the strongest of the Abaddon, or to unknown elements. And this man doesn’t seem to be one of them.
He disappeared from her sight again as soon as his cane struck Rei’s sword.
His forte is not strength; it’s speed.
Rei rolled to her right as she felt something hit the left side of her trunk. She had been struck by an upward swing from the hooded figure’s cane.
She managed to avoid taking too much damage, and her Abaddon powers began healing her injuries. But there was no denying that this man’s speed was extraordinary.
There’s no indication of when he starts moving, or when he changes direction. He must be using his control over space to transport his own body wherever he wants.
As soon as she got to her feet, Rei sheathed her broadsword and summoned her flail of light. Not too soon—he appeared in front of her again, swinging his cane horizontally towards her head. She leapt backward to dodge her blow, having left behind a sigil of Orcus by her feet. The ground rose and formed the shape of a mouth, swallowing the hooded figure.
I doubt that would hold him for long, thought Rei as she prepared an intricate sigil. She had barely completed it when something rushed towards her back, causing her to turn around and raise her flail. Sparks flew as the cane endured contact with the Seraphim weapon. Gotcha. Rei hurriedly activated the sigil she had drawn—the sigil of Bellona. The space around them shimmered for a moment as a variety of weapons—swords, spears, hammers, and others—made of some pale crystalline substance materialised around the pair. They hovered in mid-air as though wielded by an invisible host of airborne warriors. Rei leapt back from the hooded figure; as if given a signal, the weapons hurtled towards him from all sides.
‘Abar ba-esh lam-Molekh.’
That incantation came from the hooded figure.
A wall of flame the colour of dull blood surrounded him. The weapons melted into nothing as they struck the fiery barrier.
He can use spells, too? And that’s clearly not an Abaddon or a Seraphim spell. What other tricks does he have up his sleeves?
Rei raised her flail high. With a cry of ‘hyah!’ she brought it down, as if cracking a whip. In response, four horses made of pure light materialised around the hooded figure, already running at full speed towards him. They were the ones who pulled the chariot of Sol. Sunrise is still hours away, so it’s not as strong, but I could use it without needing a sigil. And they were fast.
Not fast enough, apparently. The horses trampled over empty space; the flail in Rei’s hand disappeared as Abaddon strengthening suffused her body. She crossed her arms over her head as a heel came crashing down towards it. She tried to hold on to the leg, but she grabbed nothing but air as the hooded figure appeared about a dozen feet in front of her.
‘Golem yetzirah,’ he said. In response, the ground beneath Rei’s feet trembled, and five protrusions of rock and soil began to enclose her. She smashed them all with a swing of her broadsword, but they reassembled immediately as the ground beneath her feet rose.
Is this is a hand? Her suspicions were confirmed when she noticed a column of rock holding up the flat clump of earth to which the five protrusions were attached—in other words, an arm and hand made of soil.
She leapt back, but not too far as to be out of the arm’s reach. She waited as patiently as she could, dodging as the arm tried to swipe at her, until—there. A shoulder made of rock emerged, followed by a mound with a hollow socket on one side and larger opening below it. That must be the head of—whatever this is. She lunged towards it, barely missing another attempt by the hand to grab her, and she destroyed the head with a thrust of her broadsword.
‘Agni saptajihva.’
The hooded figure held his hands out in front of him, and a ball of fire as big as his head blazed in front of it. Seven thin streams of flame shaped like tongues stretched out from it, heading towards Rei.
He attacked me from up close while I was using my Seraphim spells, and now he’s using spells to attack me while in Abaddon mode. He should have known from his apprentice that the two abilities could not be used concurrently, and while she trained herself to switch between the two as quickly as she could, it wasn’t enough against someone who could exploit the weakness of both of her abilities.
But that spell looks like it needs him to stay in place for a while. She danced around the tongues of flame while drawing upon her Seraphim powers. This might be my chance to draw him into a fight of equals. She drew two sigils in front of her.
‘Janus,’ she said, and both sigils glowed in response. The air above her turned hazy as mist gathered, creating a sphere as wide as she was tall. The amorphous blob became a giant head with two faces. One of the faces opened its mouth and swallowed the tongues. The head then turned, and the other face spit the flames right back at its caster.
The hooded figure remained unperturbed as he watched the incoming attack. The ball of fire he had summoned earlier remained floating in front of him.
‘Agni sarangakas.’
The ball split into four, and each piece turned into a bird. The birds flew at the flame heading towards them. As they collided, the flames from the Janus face wer absorbed by the birds, and they grew brighter as they continued towards the head with two faces.
It’s spell against spell now. Rei scratched out a sigil on the ground in front of her with her sword as the birds dispersed the Janus head through the heat of their passage. And what beats fire?
‘Volturnus!’ she said as the sigil glowed. The earth rumbled as a torrent of water burst from the ground. It extinguished the birds of fire and then formed a wave nearly thrice as tall as Rei. The spring of Volturnus continued to flow as the wave rushed towards the hooded figure. There was an enigmatic smile on his face.
‘Agni vadavagni.’
The deluge began to glow red-hot, as if something was boiling it from within. It bubbled, and then steamed, losing its mass and speed as it drew closer to its target. The spring was soon exhausted, and deluge evaporated completely. A horse made of blue flame stood where the waters once flowed.
‘This spell was based on a world-ending creature of unquenchable flame that slumbered under the oceans,’ the hooded figure said. ‘The original users of this spell could destroy entire countries.’ He paused. ‘This is a far weaker version, but I couldn’t have used it if you hadn’t used your sigil of water.’
Rei’s face twisted into a snarl as she drew on her Abaddon powers. I was tricked so easily. The fiery horse bore down on her, and she leapt away right before it trampled her, but the heat of its passage was enough to sear her. The horse sizzled into nothing, its energy spent, but the damage was done; even the Abaddon healing wasn’t fast enough to heal her burns.
The hooded man took advantage of this and attacked her from the side. She used her sword to block his cane, but he vanished, reappearing on her other side. He thrust his cane through an opening in her armour, breaking a few of her ribs. She staggered away, clutching her side, her skin still scorched by the attack earlier.
‘Is this it?’ asked the man, his voice heavy with disappointment.
She gritted her teeth in frustration, trying to shut out the pain that assailed her body. I must move faster. I need stronger spells. She needed to lose her weakness. Despite having failed so many times before, she tried drawing on her Abaddon and Seraphim powers at the same time. From what Mei Lin had told her, it seemed impossible, like looking at two objects in different directions at the same time. In her mind, it was like trying to open two distant doors at the same time. However, it was only thing left for her to try.
* * *
A lightning storm was being unleashed in front of Mei Lin; behind her lay a tangle of vines waiting for prey to capture. Well done, thought Eru as he watched lightning bolts draw closer and closer to where he stood. How do you trap someone who could move wherever he wanted? Don’t give him a place to move to. Very few people could execute such a plan, but the Princess of Eleusis clearly had the ability to cover the battlefield in destruction.
Well, there’s one safe place remaining. And I’m sure she knows it. Mei Lin had to spare AA from the barrage of lightning she was unleashing, but escaping there means drawing closer to the legionnaire, who had begun to recover from his earlier shock.
I have no choice, he thought as a cluster of lightning bolts was about to descend on him. Let’s walk into their trap.
He disappeared just as the bolts were mere inches from him. If he has a trap, it’s more likely to be laid behind him. He appeared in front of AA, prepared to move to his back in case he did something, but as soon as he materialised, a feeling of heaviness assailed him. He moved to his back as he had planned, but he still felt the pressure.
By AA’s feet was a circular pattern drawn in blue and green, and Eru was within its area.
‘The invisible chains,’ said Mei Lin as she dropped her arm, letting the lightning and the vines fizzle into nothing, leaving behind the destruction they have wrought on the surroundings. ‘I had a feeling you’d use that.’
Eru tried to move out of the circle, but every attempt just transported him to a different part of the circle.
‘It’s no use,’ said Mei Lin. ‘As long as AA is alive, you’re bound within that field.’
Mei Lin walked towards the captor and the captive, but suddenly, she stopped in her tracks and turned to look, concern on her face, at some distant occurrence.
AA and Eru felt it, too.
‘It doesn’t matter what happens to me,’ Eru said with a happy, resigned smile on his face. ‘We’ve won. God has returned.’
* * *
Zai sighed as he watched Rei leap through the hole on the floor of the mayor’s mansion.
‘There goes most of our combat strength,’ he muttered.
‘No matter,’ said Cassandra, who had gone to the clothes chest at the corner of the room and was now putting on a heavy outdoor cloak. ‘Our battle will not be won through strength. Now come, let us look for the mayor.’
They found the mansion almost deserted, and the few people they met were more interested in running away from them than answering their questions. The pair decided to head outside and continue their search from there. They had barely left the mansion when a purple glow appeared some distance from them, reaching out to the sky, forming purple columns that cast an eerie light on their surroundings.
‘The sheolim,’ gasped Cassandra.
‘What are those?’ said Zai as he looked at the sky with a mixture of disgust and dread.
‘I don’t know much about them, but I can say with confidence that they are weapons, and that they must never be used.’
From her work with Publius, they were able to deduce that mysterious human merchants began to share the secret to a ritual of great destructive power to both the Abaddon and the Seraphim at roughly the same time. While the Abaddon readily adopted the weapon, Cassandra drew upon her influence to persuade her brother not to accept it. However, upon learning that the Abaddon already had possession of the sheolim themselves, the minister managed to prevail upon the prince to change his mind, lest the Seraphim be left vulnerable to the new weapon of their putative enemy.
And now, she had left her brother in the hands of the same craven counsellors. Cassandra knew that the end of the current crisis, and perhaps even the enmity between the two races, would happen here in Etrusca, and that she had to be here to help bring it about. But there was still a part of her that wished that she were in Olympia instead, so that she could stop her brother from even contemplating preparing that abysmal spell.
How long could he resist them? she thought. She knew that her brother understood her concerns regarding the sheolim, but he was not as inflexible as Cassandra or Persephone. And that’s probably why our father left Pelasgia in his hands. Right now, though, I need him to be less mindful of other people’s feelings.
They were walking around to the back of the mansion when they encountered an organised group of Abaddon soldiers. Cassandra headed towards them; Zai thought of stopping her, but thought better of it. In any case, she never got far—a series of circular patterns lit up the ground where they stood, stopping the princess dead in her tracks. Zai’s legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground.
What’s with this pressure? thought Zai, forcing his lungs to take in air as a feeling of heaviness squeezed the air from inside his body.
‘May I ask: what is the meaning of this?’ Cassandra clearly struggled to enunciate every word, but she still managed to speak as politely as possible, while conveying her dissatisfaction clearly.
One of the Abaddon soldiers at the back of the group put her hands together in front of her, her eyes closed as if in prayer.
‘We found the intruder,’ she said, making it clear that she was using a communication spell.
‘You seem to be labouring under some misunderstanding.’ Her ambassadorial stubbornness was prevailing over her own physical condition. ‘We are guests of the owner of this house, the mayor of this town, Tullius Legatus.’
‘You are Seraphim,’ said the Abaddon who stood at the head of the group, probably their leader. You are the enemy was the unspoken but clear implication of his words.
‘I am a Seraphim emissary.’ If she had understood the hidden meaning behind his words, she didn’t let it show. ‘We wish to clear some misunderstanding with your imperium regarding the incident at the capital.’
‘That incident was clearly instigated by the Seraphim,’ he replied. ‘So was the attack on this mansion.’
‘What do you mean?’
Zai’s head was luckily, or something like that, turned in the direction of the wall surrounding the mansion. He could see from the corner of his eyes that a man-sized hole was blasted through a section of it.
It was the assassin, he tried to say, but the oppressive feeling still hasn’t been lifted from his body.
‘My party had seen the person who attacked the mansion,’ Cassandra continued. ‘He is a human who possesses both Abaddon and Seraphim powers, a leftover from the experiments humans conducted during the war.’
‘That’s a convenient story. Here’s another one—you intend to go to the Seven Hills to assassinate the imperium.’
‘That’s madness!’ The effort to maintain politeness in the face of whatever binding spell the Abaddon used on them must have exhausted her, and now her impatience burst like a flood from a broken dike. ‘Even if we wished to do that, no one—not even the Princess of Eleusis, probably not even the Prince of Olympia himself—could harm the imperium in the Seven Hills.’
As she said that, a purple glow lit up the horizon to the south.
Oh, brother. Cassandra heaved an internal sigh. I really should have been there.
‘And that’s your plan,’ said the Abaddon officer triumphantly, as if he had solved a mystery. ‘You will guide the sheolim straight to the capital.’
This time, the Seraphim princess’ sigh was obvious to all. She’s really starting to lose it. She took another deep breath, this time to compose herself.
‘Do you understand the principle behind the sheolim?’ she said, and from spending time with her, Zai knew that she was about to let this poor Abaddon officer have it. The tongue sharper than any Seraphim blade is about to be unsheathed.
‘I do not claim to be an expert, but what little I know of that ritual convinces me that I do not wish to use that as a weapon that I would point at any living being, not even on my worst enemy.’ She shuddered, and her next words came out as an unnerved murmur. ‘Something born from death that was made to bring more death… What twisted mind could conceive such a thing?’
A tense silence settled upon everyone. Perhaps it was because of her speech. More likely, it was because a wave of power washed over them. This feels just like Mei Lin in that forest, but not as strong and a little different. The eyes of many of the Abaddon soldiers flicked in the direction of its source. The one who used the communication spell activated it once more.
‘I need a centuria to check an area southwest of our position, about a league or so away.’ A few moments of silence passed as she tilted her head to the side, as if listening to a responses. ‘No, I do not advise sending a smaller group. It’s highly likely that the witch of Teutoberg is there.’
That burst of power might have weakened whatever it was that was pinning Zai to the ground. He still couldn’t lift his head, let alone the rest of his body, but he no longer felt like there was a heavy object on top of him. He took a deep breath.
‘If I may speak,’ he said; his words came out as a rough wheeze. ‘I think that our companions’—he paused to take another deep breath—‘shall be apprehending the real culprit soon.’ He flashed a confident smile.
The soldiers must not have noticed him, or else forgotten about him, as they looked at him with some semblance of surprise.
‘What do you mean, human?’ asked the putative leader of the Abaddon group.
‘We have been on the trail… of that troublemaker for a while now… My partner is particularly interested… in bringing him in to pay for his crimes. You can take over from there.’
There was another tense silence after his speech. Cassandra stood in dignified silence, a bit ruffled that she had let a bit of her emotion show earlier. The soldiers continued to keep a close eye on her, with a few now paying some attention to the Zai. He knew she could break through her restraints if she used the sigil of Apollo, but she chose to uphold the promise she made before she entered Etrusca, even if no one here knew—and even if anyone here was present at the gate, Zai doubted that they had believed her. It was a promise she made to herself: I shall not resort to force, even if it were used against me. It was, in many ways, a foolish pledge to make before entering what was, to all intents and purposes, enemy territory. Especially since your bodyguard’s now sprawled helpless on the ground like a beached whale. But anyone who could not commit to such a vow probably lacked the resolve to find a peaceful solution to the current situation.
It was as if everyone was waiting for a signal. The Abaddon soldier maintained their vigilance, while the Seraphim diplomat and her human bodyguard remained where they stood, and no one wanted to be the first to break the hush with so much as the rustling of movement. The air itself was still.
Then there was another release of energy, one radically different from anything Abaddon or Seraphim—or even from the sheolim. There was no one here who was alive during the time before the conflict between the two races began. If anyone were, they would have known that this felt the same as the force that heralded the entry of humans into their world—through a portal opened by one human’s ability.
The soldiers began glancing at each other, the unease apparent in their stance. Grips tightened on weapons, throats were cleared, muscles tensed, as they steeled themselves to meet something they have never prepared for.
‘I think that means their fight is about to end,’ Zai said with a weak grin.
Own Worlds 