The Ancients

by Adam-Clay Webb

  It seems I’m just now seeing the skill of the Ice Sage, Oga considered. Interesting.

  “Light is very fickle, Y’suha,” Yuki said. “It will not stay frozen. As fast as you can, distance yourself.”

  “What?”

  “Now, boy!” Yuki commanded in a frighteningly different tone that made Lex burst forth from the earth in flight without further hesitance.

  Lex’s wings folded around him in reflex as he witnessed a marvellous explosion of brightness down below. What the hell?! That would have obliterated the demons! He flew further away as the brightness spread and thinned. All Lex could see within the clearing light were flashes of blue and white, blurs of speed that were his eyes’ definition of the clashing of Yuki and Oga. Finally, Lex perceived something definite, something his eyes could follow. Oga was sent hurling upward out of the almost cleared brightness. As Oga’s body reached about twenty feet up, a prison of ice subjected him.

  “Now’s my chance!” Lex told himself, and rallied all the darkness he could summon in the tiniest moment. Then he zoomed off toward Oga, carrying a tightly packaged shadow shell, wings stretched slenderly behind him. As he reached upon Oga, forceful golden rays burst the icy prison open. The cloak of light melted Lex’s wings and vanquished the shadow shell with angelic quickness.

  “Heavenly Binding!” Oga commanded. Yuki cast his eyes to the sky as something truly beyond the might of men happened. Two holes visibly opened up within the very sky. Massive chains reached down from the heavens, tearing through clouds at a speed that Lex could not even begin to fathom. Though his back was turned to the reaching chains, Lex could feel the ominousness of their approach. The chains, like arms of a giant demon, grabbed Lex, and then retracted at the speed at which they had lengthened down, pulling the boy up into the clouds at a speed well beyond his fastest flights. He felt his skin tear under the speed of its movement, and he felt his breath flee from him.

  The boy’s movement was halted the moment he felt the dangerous closeness of Oga’s presence. Oga had shifted upon Lex with a speed made possibly only by his colourless magic. Clouds scattered and the sky completely cleared as Oga landed a punch deep in Lex’s back, a punch powered by the magic of a thousand arcanines in their prime. Lex felt, in that timeless moment, a pain that wiped his mind clean of all feelings, of all memories. The entire land, for many miles, suffered massive cracks and craters as the force of Oga’s attack was violently flung about.

  The succeeding moment found Lex deep within the earth, the impact of his landing wreaking a quake that triggered tsunamis and tore mountains down.

  “Flaming Sword Dance!” Oga’s command rang throughout the skies. As far as Yuki’s eyes could reach, the sky had become a ceiling of fire.

  “Indeed, this is Oga,” Yuki muttered. Then his eyes flashed over to the deep hole that Lex’s body had forced into the earth. Yuki looked up again at the nightmarish picture of fiery doom. Yuki’s eyes narrowed and his icy aura thickened to fight off the emergence of heat that weighted the atmosphere. Tiny specs dotted the infinite sea of skyward fire. Yuki would soon recognize these tiny dots, however, to be approaching swords, cloaked in flames that he could feel were in no way inferior to the flames of the very Fire Sage.

  Accelerating downward far beyond what gravity could have managed to effect, the swords that were specs a moment before were now clearly massive as trees.

  “Well then,” Yuki breathed in a decisive sigh. Then, before any of the swords – even with their magnificent speed – could fall more than an inch further, he reached down into the pit where his son was, and scraped up the corpse-looking boy into his arms. Yuki proceeded into a fever of impossible evasion, each landing tree-sized chunk of killing, flame-cloaked metal shaking the earth and gobbling up rock with its heat. The scale of the attack meant that even distant rivers and ponds were quickly gobbled up by the fiery rain of swords.

  “This is not good. Those ice domes are in serious trouble. I must find a way to counter this attack,” Yuki considered, dodging the incoming earth-wreckers with Lex tightly held in his arms.

  “Extreme Gravity Flux!” Oga’s command rang out. And this changed everything.

  Yuki looked up as one of the approaching swords descended upon him and Lex. Upon Oga’s command, Yuki was rendered completely paralyzed. “Summoning! Ice Dragon!” Yuki commanded sadly, and in a mist that appeared as quickly as a spaceshift, his faithful companion, knowing fully well its final purpose, appeared above him, its huge body casting a saving shade over him and Lex. The air trembled with the beast’s wail as the fiery swords dug into its back. Yuki clenched his teeth with wide eyes as even more of the swords plunged into the ice dragon. “Forgive me,” Yuki breathed ruefully.

  Even above the chaos of deafening wailing, quaking and a hellish heat that raved through the air, even piercing through his icy aura, Yuki noticed the emergence of a timely miracle. Lex still snugly in his arms, Yuki looked about into the distances, seeing and hearing the approach of great waters from every angle, like an entire ocean was collapsing in on them. The tera bomb that Lex had used to finish the Earth Sage had eaten up quite many rivers worth of water from the ocean, but most of it was simply pushed back by the sphere’s force. This water was now rushing back in, refilling the desert with the ocean it once was.

  The water rushed in on Yuki like liquid mountains on every side. Even the dragon would have been covered by this inflooding.

  “My faithful dragon,” Yuki bade reverently. The Ice Sage flung Lex over his shoulder snugly, regaining the ability to move either through the strong aura of his dragon’s final appearance or a desperation strong enough to bore through Oga’s spell. Yuki stretched his arms out as the mountains of ocean tsunamied upon him. “Everything will be okay, Y’suha,” he said, feeling the boy make a slight movement on him. Yuki’s aura raged into an opaque whiteness, and his irises glowed a transcended blue, a negligible spec of which Asuri and his daughter had claimed in the last war.

  Oga looked down in complete bafflement. “This is… impossible…” he marvelled, watching the entire ocean, in a matter of seconds, turn into ice before it could tumble in on Yuki and Lex. Oga’s quick estimation worked out that Yuki had frozen around seven million square miles of water in two and a half seconds.

  “Sage Art!” Yuki’s voice echoed mightily. “Ice Legion!”

  At this, the frozen ocean broke apart into icicles, each of which sped upward toward the sky. The icicles, as numerous as the swords Oga had summoned, raced up with even greater speed. Not only that, but each descending sword, upon being grazed by even the aura of any of the icicles, immediate froze. The icicle would then do two things almost simultaneously – first, it would freeze the very force of the sword, then it would project onto the now frozen sword its own force, causing it to race upward to the sky as well.

  On top of all of this, the millions of projectiles that raced up through the now icy, misty air were aimed directly at Oga, causing him to rapidly shift about, using up in each second the sum total mana of a regular sorcerer.

  Yuki’s beast flew for a few meters and finally crashed lifelessly unto the frozen sea of forging icicles, infusing the last of its essence into Yuki’s technique.

  Even in the midst of the icy chaos, Yuki saw clearly Oga’s expected move. With a white shield of mana and light around him, the god appeared on the ground. But before Yuki could make a response to this appearance, Oga’s body hurled backward and his ribs caved in. Yuki’s eyes gaped, as his body hadn’t yet registered the lack of Lex’s weight on it. The black-eyed boy, with a menace of demons, slammed his fist through a shield made to repel darkness.

  With no intent of letting up, Lex followed through with a barrage of intense attacks, giving Oga no opportunity to think, let alone even shift. The darkness of Lex’s aura intensified so much so that Oga’s light was consumed by it, and his mana was retarded. Oga jumped back, skating on the ice, finally catching one of Lex’s punches. Yuki’s perception at its peak and limit,
he watched the two battle as time around them appeared to stand still. The rising icicles were now frozen in time. Yuki understood that time was not still, however, but the sheer speed of Lex and Oga made it appear so.

  Oga, knowing he had no time for a fancy spell, sent a hefty kick at Lex, enhanced by a colourless magic. But Oga’s kick landed only on the disappearing image that Lex’s speed left dragging behind. Yuki’s eyes beamed as he watched Lex shove a sphere of vile darkness through the Oga from behind. Before Oga’s body could reconcile this, Lex pulled his arm out from the gaping hole and jumped back, five-hundred and twelve wings scattered behind him.

  Oga’s teeth clenched as the pain from this malignant attack gripped him. Lex, by this time, had already conjured up what Oga read to be a shadow shell, holding it mightily above his head. The god slammed his palms together, ignoring the massive hole in his body, as eight grade mana was already taking care of that. “God Art!” he commanded, and the colourless magic blazed about him almost visibly.

  But even this colourless magic itself was encased in an ice swifter than light. Yuki nodded at Lex, his arm still stretched out to the frozen Oga. Lex hurled the shadow shell down at the prison of ice, knowing that any hesitation would mean the disappearance of this chance. In a massive blast, darkness and ice and blood and mana scattered, and were consumed, so that in far under a second, the expanse of frozen ocean had become a desolate desert of wreckage.

  Lex swooped down into the clearing darkness. The Ice Sage too must have been… Lex peered out into the distance, where his eyes settled on a misty cloud, an inexplicable shield that soon faded from around Yuki. How… What the hell is this man? Lex looked about, seeing that for miles on end, the place was just a wasteland of blackened earth that whiffed up the shadowy mist that remained of the shadow shell.

  Yuki walked up to his son, the icy mist that trailed behind him slowly dissipating into the now shadowy air. Lex clenched his fists as Yuki approached, but instead of summoning up more power, the dark aura disappeared from around him, and his wings misted out. The boy felt a gripping cold as Yuki appeared, not the calming coolness he had felt the times before, but an invasive chill that made him shiver. He stared out at the approaching man, unable to move, unable to understand this new feeling.

  “You wield great power, my son,” Yuki said when he was up close. “But the next god will have to be destroyed without it, lest you be lost forever.” With this, Yuki grabbed Lex’s head and reached down into his soul.

  Chapter 37: Oga

  Lex stared about, knowing exactly where he was, but barely recognizing the realm. “What the hell…” he awed, beholding the infinite expanse of black sea.

  “My son,” Yuki’s voice dragged his attention, making him realize that indeed his father was right beside him. The two were standing on a plate of black ice that Yuki’s mist had forged from the water.

  “Why the hell are you here?!” Lex blasted, downplaying his confusion to empower himself.

  “Examine yourself,” Yuki told him. And Lex looked down at himself. He stepped back quickly, his face paling in fright. But he soon realized the nonsense of trying to step back from himself.

  “What… What’s going on?” he mused, turning his hands every which way, staring at them. His body was transparent, and hardly visible at all. Yuki too had eyes almost of wonderment, as his son had the appearance of a ghost. Also, though Lex saw and heard the pouring down of rain, he could not feel it on himself. The drops instead passed straight through him.

  “Look,” Yuki said again, pointing out, guiding Lex’s eyes. Lex saw under the dark waters a distance off, though barely, a cage. But the cage was not what intrigued him – or in fact, frightened him – but it was the boy who was grabbing on to the bars of the cage.

  “That’s me…” Lex’s words came out in a breathy whisper. The water had covered the cage entirely, but the boy appeared to be breathing.

  “Now look up,” Yuki told him, and Lex did as much. The boy looked up at the span of black clouds from which the pouring rain descended. But centred in their vision was something Lex had never remembered seeing in this realm – a sun. Lex could only see a tiny crease of the sun peeking out behind what appeared to be an eclipsing moon.

  “This being you are experiencing,” Yuki said, “this almost-vanished body of yours, is the tiny fraction of you that remains.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lex asked impatiently.

  “The boy in that cage, once he drowns in the darkness, you will completely disappear, and the darkness of the demons will have consumed you entirely. There will be no return.”

  Lex’s heart raced, even though he was sure this vanishing body didn’t have one.

  “The completion of the eclipse will mark the fullness of your drowning,” Yuki said. “If that happens, the Zagans within you will revert to the darkness they once were. With you consumed, they will be an evil far beyond the gods, a force mindlessly destroying everything, starting with whatever remains of this world.”

  “You… you did this to me,” Lex said, now staring hard at Yuki. “You sold me, your own son, into the hands of the gods. How could you…” As intangible as Lex’s being had become, the tears he felt rolling down his face were quite real.

  Yuki’s eyes were soft and sorry. “Yes,” he said. Then, he clasped his hands and dropped his fingers down. His body trembled a little and the iciness around him thickened. Then there was a quaking in the entire dimension as the cage once covered by water slowly rose up, a platform of ice pushing upward beneath it, straining against the deliberate force of the black water that pulled it downward. The dimension brightened as the moon shifted away from the sun, moving from it almost completely. Yuki clenched his teeth and his body shook more evidently as the dark ocean tightened its pull on the cage, forcing it back down. And the place darkened again.

  “Let him go!” Yuki belted, and his eyes glowed brightly as it had before, and the cage was pulled back up, so that Lex’s head was now above the waters. The place brightened again. The Lex who stood beside Yuki felt his body again materialize with the brightening of the world.

  But then, in this moment of victory, Yuki felt a dangerous impression upon his mind. His body trembled, not under the strain of his own power this time, but under the invasion of a strange presence, a compelling presence. The blue light faded from his eyes, and the cage again sunk down beneath the waters, and the dimension became dark, and Lex’s body was again as a ghost.

  Lex and Yuki looked out into the dark and eerie distance. Their eyes perceived two figures. Yuki clenched his teeth more tightly as he felt the foreign force intensify in his mind. The force then pushed him out of Lex’s soul.

  No longer shivering, Yuki stood in the midst of the wrecked battlefield, his hand still on Lex’s head. The Ice Sage looked past Lex at the two standing men, the same two who had somehow interrupted him. Lex, now undazed, slapped Yuki’s hand away and turned around, stepping back to stand beside his father. He too had felt the presence of these two men.

  “Wizard… Vis,” Yuki said.

  Vis fixed his hat. “I appreciate your concern, Ice Sage, but we need Lex just as he is for the moment,” he said. Yuki’s eyes, for a moment, settled on Wizard, who stood slightly behind Vis, ready to attack.

  “You did this to him,” Yuki said.

  “No. You did – the day you offered him up to the gods,” Vis said.

  “Who are you two?” Lex asked, darkness again appearing about him.

  “I would certainly not want a scuffle with you, Ice Sage,” Vis said, almost bowing. Vis seemed to disregard Lex for the moment.

  “Kizer will be defeated, but not at the expense of Y’suha’s soul,” Yuki said, and the icy mist raved about him, reaching to engulf the two men.

  Wizard roused his mana in reply.

  “Gentlemen,” Vis said. “We can dance after we have defeated the gods.”

  “Gods?” Lex asked. “If you are able to bore into my soul, then you must reali
ze that Oga is already dead.”

  Wizard snickered and shook his head slightly, driving the same worry into Lex and Yuki. “I did hope that at least you, Ice Sage, would have recognized that you were facing a mere clone all this time.”

  “That’s impossible!” Lex came in. “Oga and his clones are--”

  “I believe you mean Oga’s clone and its sub-clones,” Vis corrected.

  Yuki’s eyes showed that he believed. He had felt that the fight against Oga was indeed too easy.

  “Your efforts have not gone wasted however,” Vis said. “Oga had invested quite a bit of mana in that clone of his. This will make the fight against the real Oga a bit less impossible. Oga is currently on an island in the sky. Wizard will take you two to him. I will join you there with more allies. I’m afraid we don’t have the luxury of recouping.”

  “If the Oga we faced just now was a clone…” Lex said worriedly.

  “Fret not,” Vis said. “On our side are the eldest sons of these gods, Yuki and Wizard. Who more than they knows the depths – and more critically, the limits – of the gods’ powers?”

  “My father is now in an entangled rage, searching back and forth on the island for the city that this man has stolen from him,” Wizard said. “It means that there will be no grand prelude to this fight. He will attack right away. Full power.”

  “And where is Kizer?” Lex asked.

  “Finishing the purge,” Vis said. “He will surface on the island as well. There will be the final battleground.”

  “Let’s move,” Wizard said, and reached up to the Icemakers, grabbing them into a shift.

  ***

  Beings from higher realms watched anxiously as Wizard, Lex and Yuki appeared about Oga, who was standing insanely, staring up into the heavens, making angels nervous. The whiteness of light clouds gave the place an even stranger feeling, as if the presence of Oga wasn’t enough. Wizard had appeared with the two in a scattered shift, meaning that Oga was already as surrounded as possible.