The black-robed sorcerer's magical reserves were as vast as the ocean—though his tattered robes did him no favors. That outfit would have gotten him picked up off the street in any modern era. The one standout was his withered left hand, clutching a staff that blazed with every color imaginable.
Two mages of the highest caliber took each other's measure. Each assessed the other's style from their posture and bearing, calculating relative strength, mentally rehearsing the sequence of spells they'd use once the first blow landed.
Peace was never an option. The robed figure's mental pressure hadn't let up for a second—his eyes were fixed on the immense, pristine magical energy radiating from Thea's clone.
Thea felt the tug of fate's threads. There's something to gain here.
"Who are you? Do you know me?" the black-robed figure spoke first. His voice scraped like glass against glass. And he wasn't speaking English—he was speaking something Thea recognized only roughly: Atlantean.
"Who are you? Don't you know me?" Thea shot back.
A brief, simple exchange—and both of them arrived at the same conclusion. Neither knew the other. Perfect. No hesitation. Let's get started.
Soul Flame required her divine seat as a foundation—unavailable to the clone. But Arcane Fire was another matter. She raised her hand and launched her strongest opening attack: Silver Fire.
Drawn from the purest depths of magical energy, the silver-white flames streaked forward on a long trailing arc like a falling star, straight for the robed figure.
He surprised her. Dark as coal in that robe, and yet he was a water-aspected grand mage. He raised his staff. Water surged from thin air on all sides, flooding the castle's ground floor into a shallow sea. From beneath the surface, a purple tentacle unfurled slowly and crashed down to meet the incoming Silver Fire.
The Silver Fire snapped the tentacle, but it lost more than half its energy in the process. Two more tentacles erupted from the water and smothered what remained.
"Impressive," Thea said, composed. "Are you Atlantean? I didn't know they still had mages of your caliber walking around."
"Atlantis?" The robed figure's voice was withering. "What a quaint name to invoke. I am Magister of the Dark, young mage. Have you heard that name?" One look had told him she was barely grown—and he resented her for it. That much power, at that age.
Magister of the Dark-something. That naming convention was ancient. Thea kept her expression neutral while her mind moved at full speed, sifting through memory—and then she found it.
This self-styled Magister shared a mutual acquaintance with her: the first king of Atlantis, chosen of Poseidon, known by history as the Dead King.
And if she wasn't mistaken, the man standing before her was the Dead King's father.
Well. The son had become an undead abomination. The father was apparently a grand mage. Like father, like son.
Thea adopted a casual tone. "I've heard the name. Maybe you were untouchable once. Right now? You're just old." Then she stopped talking and started working—pulling up her magical reserves and unleashing Silver Fire in a sustained barrage.
Silver light exploded across the room. Torrents of magical flame slammed into the black mage on all sides. The water evaporated. The walls caved inward. Stone columns and floor tiles never made it to the ground—they burned to dust before they could fall.
"There we go." The water had been stripped away, and whatever had been hiding beneath the surface came into view.
The creature looked like a colossal octopus. Its tentacles, fully spread, spanned several kilometers. The entire castle—even this floating island—had been built atop its enormous body, stone piled over living bulk.
The thing had no head to speak of. Where all the tentacles converged into a central mass, there was a single mouth—ten meters across, three rows of razor teeth packed tight in every corner of its maw.
Its presence was ancient, immeasurable, the feeling of something that had existed before memory. Its raw energy was staggering. Even Thea's true body would have struggled against it directly.
But the timestream had a double edge. The same temporal forces that magnified the creature's physical power had, over countless eons, eroded whatever intelligence it once possessed. Its body was immense; its mind had been washed away. By any meaningful measure, it was fighting at a fraction of its potential—even its original master could barely direct it anymore.
"A sea beast with a time affinity?" Thea murmured, studying it with genuine interest. She wasn't sure whether that power had always been inherent or whether the timestream had shaped it over time.
"Booster—" She started to call for him and turned to find him dangling from one of the octopus's tentacles, limp as a ragdoll.
She could have screamed. You absolute liability. Now I have to babysit you on top of everything else.
She couldn't see the mage's face, but his amusement was palpable.
He had everything going for him: deep reserves, a barely-controllable but catastrophically powerful sea beast, and now a hostage. Three advantages. The young mage had no way out.
Thea wasn't thinking about him at all. She reached into her spatial ring and pulled out her bow—her most reliable tool for getting ahead in the world.
She drew casually and fired a single arrow at the mage.
He was puzzled by the choice but decided on caution. He called up a ripple of water-blue energy as a barrier. The arrow punched through it as if it were nothing and kept coming. He had no choice but to deflect it with his staff.
Thea clicked her tongue. She'd spotted the connection immediately—the staff was the conduit through which he controlled the sea beast. Without her divine authority for trade active in the clone, forcing an exchange was a low-percentage play.
Low, not zero. One arrow wouldn't do it. Ten arrows. A hundred. Eventually she'd land one.
What followed left the mage genuinely baffled. This was supposed to be a duel between two supreme mages—and somehow it had turned into an archer hunting a mage and his overgrown pet, the whole thing playing out like a third-rate shootout.
Thea moved with the agility of a practiced elven archer, light-footed and fluid, weaving through the creature's hammering tentacles with unhurried precision, hitting the mage from every angle she could find.
The sea beast was enormously powerful but completely stupid. Even its nominal master could only give it blunt directional commands—attack this area—without any real finesse. The creature demolished what remained of the castle with methodical indifference, not watching for effect, not adapting to terrain.
Thea, meanwhile, was a moving target that didn't stay still long enough to hit. Within ten seconds she had loosed over a hundred arrows.
The sorcerer's standard magical shields couldn't stop divine-forged arrows. He had no choice but to use the sea beast's bulk as a wall—peeking out to fire off counterattacks, ducking back into cover, the whole engagement devolving into something that looked less like a legendary magical duel and more like a bad Western standoff.
Thea was still winning. Her reaction speed and physical stats eclipsed his. Her arrows were inexhaustible. His magical reserves weren't.
The mage ran the analysis himself and didn't like the answer. She was trying to drain him dry. He changed tactics: stopped retaliating entirely, tucked behind the beast, and redirected all his focus into driving the creature to attack.
He was sure he could outlast her. He settled in and waited.