Spellheart 9: Chapter 40 (Patreon)

The looming figure gripping Ethan by the throat was a few fingers taller than myself, but wrought of earth and metal instead of flesh and bone. He was no longer a bare adamantium skeleton. Instead, he now bore a remarkable semblance to me.

He had skin of clay and bronze, looking much as I would after a few weeks of steady sunlight. I sensed quicksilver flowing just beneath the surface like blood through veins, and heard the slow clink of gears and pistons beneath his flesh. The shape of his arms and back was similar to my own broad shoulders and the trace of my spine, though he seemed to have taken a few liberties and made himself half a hand taller.

But the face was the same, of that there was no doubt. Looking across Sava’s glass coffin at him, I saw my own reflection from the line of his jaw to the tilt of his brows.

The only difference between the two of us was the eyes. They stared at Ethan with cold dispassion. He saw the man in his grip as nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome. One more enemy whose body he would step over on the path to victory.

It reminded me of those darker days when the Hearthwood was under siege. I had looked like that when times grew truly desperate. I hadn’t been like that for a long time, though.

Not since I was ambushed in the Auqualian Isles. The same ambush that led me to dig too deep and call upon the power of the Earth to detonate the volcano beneath the island and claim victory despite the long odds.

That was the same battle that created this robotic replica of myself. He was the imprint I’d left in the Earth when I tore myself free of my own magic that had merged with it.

Had he been living in that desperate state all this time? Nearly a year on the edge of life and death? Existing to fight and win and nothing more?

A shiver ran through me at the thought. I knew what dark deeds my thoughts could sink to when I was truly desperate. And when I felt my darker half’s cultivation, I knew some of those thoughts had been realized in him.

His name had changed again in the eyes of The Wanderer, but I was more focused on his level.

Soulshard of Theo, Patriarch of the Hearthwood Clan (Early Demigod, Level 52)

Despite all my best efforts and tireless dual cultivation, he’d beaten me to a demigod. And I was pretty sure I knew how he did it if this barren wasteland and the mountains of dead monsters outside were anything to go by.

He’d put Dean’s trick to full effect, ruthlessly siphoning power from the nearby monsters to fuel his cultivation, then pushing himself into life-and-death battles whenever he was on the edge. There was certainly enough steel in his body to siphon away zeal. The constant desperate need fueled breakthroughs far faster than hard work, like what I was doing.

It wasn’t exactly safe, which was why I shifted priorities. People who cultivated like my twin were like raging explosions that burned brightly, but all at once. On the other hand, I intended to stick around for a long time, so I aimed to be more like a steady and never-ending flame. Only now, the explosion before me had eclipsed me in radiance.

I grit my teeth. This might be a tough fight, but surely my doppelganger knew he was outmatched? There were two Demigods here, not to mention five Sorcerers and more than in Wizards. He was screwed. He had to know that.

So why did he look so confident?

Dean, Tivana, and I all rushed forward and attacked as one. And of all people, we were rushing to save Ethan.

I expected my doppelganger to view Dean as the largest threat, but instead, his eyes turned to me. He whirled with Ethan, clenched in his unyielding claws, and thrust Ethan between the two of us.

Spell Eater was already in my hands, and I didn’t stop my thrust. Its tip pierced Ethan’s stomach before glancing off the bronze plates of my doppelganger’s abdomen.

My cut left a deep groove in the metal, but enchantments lining the bronze lit up individually, each as fine as anything Argona and I made in the Hearthwood.

“Bad move!” I grinned as I activated Spell Eater’s ability to siphon away zeal.

But my doppelganger grinned back at me. “No.”

My grin dropped as I heard him speak. Could he speak? When had that happened?

He wrapped his hand around Spell Eater, just behind the head. Then he accessed the same enchantments I was drawing on and sucked his lost zeal right back into himself. Then, he pulled.

Dean and I had challenged one another to lift a mountain once. He could do it, and I was getting there.

But this?

This was more than strength. It was an idea of strength that could not be denied or resisted, like an inexorable power.. Not even other Demigods had made me feel like this.

There was only one thing this could be. A concept. I had pursued Identity with fervent desire. And then later added some aspects of Gravity to my repertoire.

My doppelganger had done the same for Strength. It was as core to his being as my magic was to me. This was the idea of Strength made manifest in the world, and even the World Titan Fiendbody could not match it.

Spell Eater slipped from my grasp, stolen from my hands. My doppelganger twirled it in his grip and twisted it to meet Dean’s axe with Spell Eater’s edge. He tossed Ethan at Tivana, sending them both flying toward the far wall.

Dean met my doppelganger’s attack with a grin on his face. “Hell yeah! Now this is a fight! Let’s see what you can do, metal man!”

“Not today, Dean,” my doppelganger replied.

The eyes of the towering statues on either side of the room lit up, and two twin beams of light shot from the gems embedded in them. The multicolored energy pulses swam through the air with remarkable speed.

I knew those beams. I had used them myself many times, most recently against Prince Tivar of the Satyrs.

“Dean! Run!” I yelled in warning. But I was too slow. Engaged in pitched battle as he was, Dean couldn’t pull away to get clear of the beam. All he did was fling a hand backward and erect a barrier of twisted space as a shield.

But that wouldn’t stop the attack from coming for him. Those beams were identical to the attacks emitted by my Level-Reducing Sentry Towers.

Son of a bitch.

Sava? This throne room? The evil-looking castle?

It was all a trap set up for this moment.

I’d lured my powerful foes into the range of my Level-Reducing Sentry towers more than once. Of course my doppelganger would have remembered how effective that trick was. I’d never expected to have it used on me.

The beams of energy passed through Dean’s shield as though they weren’t even there. And when those beams struck him, his aura seemed to shrink in on himself. In an instant, he went from Demigod to Sorcerer, the same as me.

“Oh shit.” Dean cursed. He jumped backward just in time to dodge a thrust from Spell Eater in my doppelganger’s grip.

The blow, which normally would have been something he could match, was no longer something he could contend with.

“Dean! Look out!” I rushed forward to reinforce him. He was probably more vulnerable now than he had been in centuries.

“Don’t worry, Theo. This isn’t the first time I’ve been debuffed.” He kept his eyes locked on my evil twin, and for once, his expression turned serious. He put some distance between himself and my opponent and reached for something dangling around his neck next to the talisman he kept to ward off mind magic.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to unfold and grow larger as he touched it, like it had been hidden in a tiny pocket of space.

With grim determination, Dean prepared for battle. He raised his axe, and the spatial zeal around him roiled like a storm over the sea. Space twisted around him, distorting the surrounding room. “You messed with the wrong badass, metal man! Sorcerer or not, I’m about to kick your ass! Prepare to face me at my full power! I will--“

“Activate teleportation array,” my doppelganger said. The floor tiles beneath where Dean was standing lit up.

Dean’s eyes went wide. He tried to jump out of the way, but my doppelganger pressed him with Spell Eater and kept him in place.

Dean’s last words trailed off. “You tricky bastaaaaaaard!”

His voice faded as Dean vanished in a flash of white light, teleported to who knew where.

Suddenly we were down from two Demigods to one, and our victory and victory was no longer seeming so certain. I turned to Ethan, who was only now pulling himself together. He’d prioritized healing himself over getting back in the fight, which was proving a costly mistake now. But I bit back any remarks I might have had. After all, we couldn’t win this fight without him.

Just how in damnation had my doppelganger constructed such a thing? I had some theories, but I’d never had the guts to put them to the test for fear of what those crystals could do to me with one wrong move.

But my doppelganger had no such fear.

Anxiety gripped my heart. He really was me, with all my talents and skills for magic and crafting, but with all my mercy and hesitation removed and replaced with ruthless determination combined with the unending determination of a machine locked into high gear.

Ethan climbed slowly to his feet, pupils wide, as he scanned the room for more traps. He sensed my doppelganger’s gaze upon him and cast a frantic mind spell. It looked like an illusion spell meant to conceal his location. Perhaps he planned to wait for an opportunity to attack.

My doppelganger’s eyes met his. He crossed the room in a motion blur, quicker than Ethan could complete his spell. In a flash, he had Ethan in his grip once more.

“You must die,” my doppelganger announced as he grabbed Ethan by the throat. My double seemed overcome with a flash of fury as he stared at Ethan like he was looking at a bug that should have been crushed long ago.

Though he held cold dispassion for the rest of us, his hatred for Ethan was clear. Back when he separated from me, the Cult of the Unblinking Eye had been the greatest source of my problems. His hatred was logical.

“Come on, Ethan!” I yelled. As a demigod, he had to have some tricks.

Ethan’s tie flickered and spontaneously combusted. There must have been a teleportation talisman hidden within it because he vanished and reappeared across the room, rubbing his throat. When he appeared, my doppelganger fired a beam of crimson light from the energy weapon in his mouth. Then, my doppelganger pulled back his arm and threw Spell Eater with the force of a missile.

Air shattered in the wake of my weapon’s flight, and it pierced through Ethan’s chest and pinned him to the throne room’s far wall.

This was bad. Very bad. If Ethan kicked the bucket, we’d be down both our demigods. I had to save him.

“Don’t forget about me!” I yelled at my doppelganger as he moved to finish Ethan off. Sword Storm blades swirled around the room and converged on our enemy’s location.

My doppelganger batted the largest of them aside with the back of his hand. “You protect him? Fool. How quickly you forget.”

“You’ve missed out on a lot,” I spat back as I sent more Sword Storm blades to keep him busy.

My doppelganger growled, my attacks finally enough to get him to pay attention to me. That bought Ethan a few seconds to unstable himself.

My evil twin rushed me. I barely managed to dodge. He was so fast and so strong. Without a weapon, I didn’t dare confront him in direct combat. I stuck with ranged attacks, mostly my Sword Storm blades.

My companions attacked with similar blows from across the chamber, raining down beams of golden light or water splashes thrown fast enough to cut steel. Nothing seemed to work.

Then, I slipped. My doppelganger grabbed hold of my wrist. I lashed out with a bunch to his jaw to free myself. He shrugged off a blow that would have shattered boulders without even twitching.

“Without me, you have become weak,” my doppelganger sneered.

“I liked you better before you could talk. Let me help you with that.” I entered my Dimensional Storage and withdrew one of Argona’s latest inventions. It was a tightly wound bundle of Earth zeal, compacted far beyond its normal limits and ready to burst. It was a simple device we’d made together, but quite destructive and reliable enough to use in battle. I'd based it on the same trick I'd used to magically initiate nuclear explosions, though this was scaled down to fit into something the size of my palm.

In other words, it was a nuclear grenade.

I shoved it in my doppelganger’s mouth, and when it detonated, it shook the entire room. During the explosion, he released his grip on my wrist, and I used the force of the bomb to put some distance between him and me.

The force of turning atoms to energy shook the castle, and cracks formed throughout the structure. It hadn't been a big explosion, but a nuke was still a nuke.

But the power of a Demigod could not be denied.

When the dust cleared, my doppelganger still stood. He wiped soot from his jaw. Quicksilver flowed from the corners of his mouth and the clay sculpted to look like flesh had scraped off his face. He was looking more like his old self now.

But despite the damage, he still stood. He grabbed his jaw with one hand and bent it. Metal shrieked, and suddenly his jaw popped back into place. It looked like it would take more than a pocket-sized nuke to slow my evil twin down.

“Now would be a good time for some demigod tricks, Ethan!” I yelled to the spot on the wall where Ethan had been.

I received no response. “Ethan?”

Finally, I spared a glance. He was gone. He must have used that same invisibility spell he channeled earlier in the fight.

“Damn it!” I cursed. Ethan intended for us to take the brunt of an angry demigod’s assault while he stuck to the shadows and waited for the perfect moment. I had hoped he would confront my doppelganger directly, creating opportunities for the rest of us to get free hits in.

But Ethan must have thought his aspect was better suited to that role and so had taken it for himself. I cursed, wishing my doppelganger had taken Ethan away instead of Dean. He would have been a better match to hold the front lines. But I suspected our foe thought the same as me and had been certain to eliminate Dean first so that the scenario I wished for couldn’t happen.

Our resources and options were limited, but we still had one demigod to match him and plenty more power. My doppelganger couldn’t use his full strength against us for fear of creating an opportunity for Ethan to strike. That meant that maybe the rest of us could be a little bolder in our efforts to draw our enemy into overcommitting to an attack.

My matriarchs had a similar idea.

“Get him!” Assyrus cried, voice and sword raised in unison. “Save Sava!”

My doppelganger turned to us and met our charge with one of his own.

I reached into my Dimensional Storage. The important thing was keeping our opponent busy. I still had some of Spell Eater’s previous incarnations to fight with, but I didn’t want to get in a shoving contest with a robot golem enhanced by the fundamental concept of strength. It would be better to deal with this foe from a distance.

My Sword Storm blades filled the air around the chamber, ranging from the size of a fingernail to the size of a wagon. They spun like we stood in the heart of a storm, gathering speed and momentum. I reached out with my own understanding of Gravity. I focused on the blades in the air, lightening their weight and making them much faster. It was easier in this pocket space than in the real world.

Then, just before Assyrus charged, I attacked. I forced him to block a massive hunk of enchanted steel with Spell Eater’s edge rather than use it to run Assyrus through the stomach with it. I had hoped to buy her an opportunity to strike. Still, my doppelganger was more nimble than any machine I’d ever seen.

He lashed out with a kick. Assyrus caught it, using all her skills to redirect the energy back at him. Her face went pale as she held on to his leg, though. The sheer force of his kick made the fabric of this pocket world tear open, and Assyrus was launched backward toward the far wall, where she collided with one of the statues.

The others attacked one by one. And one by one, they were driven back.

He threw himself into battle, leaving caution far behind. If Ethan was going to attack, he had plenty of opportunities to show himself. But he remained hidden while my companions and I took the brunt of a demigod’s wrath.

Eltiana darted in with her poison daggers, but the poison did nothing to my doppelganger’s metal and earth form, and he swiped her aside with ease.

Yorik rushed forward, hammer raised high overhead as orcish symbols lit one after another. With Nela darting forward from the opposite direction, my doppelganger twisted himself to kick Yorik in the chest before her hammer landed, grabbed Nela by her shirt, and hurled her bodily into the onrushing form of Melise.

His eyes bore down on an empty patch of air where Illiel had thought she could sneak up on him under the cover of mind magic. He opened his mouth, and crimson light poured out from his jaw, activating that deadly laser beam weapon I’d seen before. Illiel was forced to abandon her plan, and I swept one of my largest Sword Storm blades between her and my doppelganger to shield her.

Crimson light struck enchanted steel. Metal melted, but I sent more Sword Storm blades after it. They were a variety of shapes and sizes, but all of them had the same general properties. They were polished and shiny.

I reflected my doppelganger’s energy weapon right back at him, forcing him to cut the attack short. Then I struck with the only weapon I had that might do some real damage.

“I hope this works...” I muttered, not allowing myself to cast doubts over my hair-brained scheme.

I’d studied petrification religiously when I ran into my first basilisk. At first, I’d merely wanted to know my foe. Then I wanted the power for myself since, at the time, it seemed like one of the few means by which an Earth Cultivator could unleash a devastating ranged attack.

I’d gotten quite good at it, too, though True Mages and above could use their aura to resist its power to some extent. A demigod would be even better suited to shrugging off this attack.

But that was where my best trick came into play. The concept of Identity I’d worked so hard to master while in the Primordial World.

This doppelganger of mine was essentially an elemental of mine. In his heart, he was the World Titan Fiendbody surrounding some tiny discarded part of my soul. He was an impression left in stone. An earth elemental animating rock and metal.

And I planned to turn him back into what he was.

While an ordinary petrification spell would do nothing against a golem or elemental, what I was doing was more fundamental. I would target the very magic animating him, which I knew intimately, for his my own power gone rogue.

This unique one-of-a-kind spell would work for no one else and on no other target. If not for the mental enhancements thanks to Quicksilver Thought and reaching the Sorcerer realm as a mind mage, I never would have been able to come up with it in the middle of battle.

But came up with it I did, and I felt a smile splitting my face. I would prove who was the original and who was the cheap copy.

“This ends now!” I growled and pointed my finger at my doppelganger. “Return to the stone from whence you came!"

My doppelganger narrowed his eyes as he stared me down from across the chamber. He took a step forward, but his movements were slow and lethargic. His leg moved with clumsy jerkiness instead of the casual grace he’d wielded minutes before. Something was wrong, that much was clear.

The proof of my petrification spell manifested moments later. The shiny bronze plates covering my doppelganger’s body darkened and turned gray, more slate than metal.

The petrification spell traveled up his body, freezing him in place before it took hold completely. The powerful aura of a demigod receded into him until it was little more than a faint whisper.

Soon, he was a statue sculpted in my image. He scowled at where I stood but moved no more.

“Holy shit, it worked?” I shook my head. “Uh... I mean, of course, it worked. All in a good day’s work!”

“Y-you did it?” Illiel asked, eyes darting between me and my doppelganger.

“Nice,” Yorik placed a hand on my shoulder.

“I am... impressed.” Nela blinked at the frozen demigod, gripping her spear like she expected the fight to resume at any moment.

I chuckled. “Why do you all sound surprised? Of course, I did it! Come on, let’s grab Sava and get out of here. This whole black castle is way to edgy for me.”

I strode past my doppelganger’s frozen form and punched the glass over Sava. Something was missing, though.

“Wasn’t there a creepy green golem that looked like Sava standing over her?” I asked as I pointed to the remains of the glass coffin.

“Yeah, you’re right. It vanished. Huh, weird...” Melise placed a hand on her hip and frowned.

I scanned the room for Spell Eater, but it was nowhere to be found. My doppelganger had been holding it a moment ago.

I stared at the statue of my doppelganger across the room, a bad feeling crawling up my spine. I gave the statue a shove, and it crumbled to rubble. That should have reassured me, but my heart was only beating faster.

“Ethan! You can come out now!” I yelled. “The fight’s over! We did it without you.”

I used my Mind Magic to scan the room and try to pierce any mind magic that might have rendered him invisible. I saw nothing. I turned to Illiel, but she shook her head. He wasn’t here.

Nor was my spear, Spell Eater. It had dropped from my doppelganger’s hand, and then... nothing. It was nowhere to be found.

I shifted Sava a little further up my shoulder. The bad feeling crawling up my spine was getting worse, and I wanted to be able to run if I had to.

“Go team Hearthwood! We kicked ass. Looting time! Then party time after.” Eltiana said as she crawled up the statues to retrieve the Level-Reducing Sentry Tower gems embedded in the eyes. I winced as she pried them out with her dagger, expecting a trap at any moment, but she removed them easily. That, at least, was a victory.

“When we get back.” Assyrus scanned our surroundings warily.

“Let’s not linger here any longer than we have to,” Nela joined Assyrus in glancing around the empty throne room. Her eyes kept darting across the empty shadows. She held her hand up and conjured a sphere of light as bright as a sun, and yet still, her power could not make the shadows go away. “I’m not normally the superstitious type, but I don’t like the look of this place.”

“Agreed. Let’s go home.”

I gathered up my companions and left, casting one last glance over my shoulder to the empty throne behind us. For a moment there, I was certain I felt someone watching me.

<Note>

Well, Soulshard Theo is definitely 100% dead. That must have killed him. Right?

Anyway, I was looking at my outline for book 10 and realized I don't have either a tournament arc or an auction house scene planned. Pretty weird, right? Aren't those cultivation novel staples? I'll have to make up for it with my next cultivation series.