The Fourth Gate: Chapter Twenty

The fifteen minutes of rest, healing, and planning went by in a flash, and when Dusk and I were pulled into the arena a second time, I felt much more uncertain. I had shifted a few things around with Ghostmind, since I needed to adapt my strategy, and this time, I was holding my bone spear in one hand. Dusk was floating next to me, spells whirling around her. Though I couldn’t see them, I could feel them, crackling within her cloud like lightning. When we appeared, Corra’s expression was flat, determined, and almost emotionless, and I could feel the power brimming from her spirit. 

The River Lord floated down between us, his eyes tracing our forms, and he nodded. 

“Are you ready?” 

Corra gave a curt nod. I flexed my fingers on the spear, then nodded as well. 

“Begin!” 

I immediately cast Transport Item on the cat’s eye necklace. It appeared in my hand with only a bit of resistance... and I realized I’d made a mistake. Just as how I could cast Enhance Plant Life on a tree without touching the plant, Corra could use Enhance Mineral in the same way. She detonated one of the cat’s eye beads while I was holding it, and though the tiny bit of shrapnel didn’t even pierce my Fungal Armor, the detonation of sensory warping was horribly disorienting. I barely even noticed that Corra had already ripped the necklace back to her, and was throwing a pair of spikes at me.

If Dusk hadn’t slammed her hands together and spun up a wall of wind, sand, dirt, and water to block them, I wouldn’t have been able to dodge them at all. 

As I backpedaled and the spikes punched through the wall, I realized I’d been thinking about them wrong too. I’d been treating them like anchors for an enchantment, which they were. But Corra didn’t need to drive them into the ground to activate them, and while Enhance Mineral didn’t allow for full geokinesis – no true Manipulate Earth existed, to my knowledge – it was similar to Enhance Plant Life. I could push forward a plant, forging quick growth for a single attack that collapsed. Corra couldn’t do that, but she could force the spike to accelerate. She was probably using a meta spell to give it additional piercing power. 

I spun to the side, narrowly evading the spikes as I started cycling Mantle Dragonfyre and slashed out with a thin strand of soul mana empowered blademoss. As I did, I unleashed my full battle form. My nails turned to blue gemstones, a halo of morel mushrooms appeared over my head, and all my veins turned black. The power of my soul mana grew, even as the recovery rate dropped.

It caught Corra on the backfoot for a moment, overwhelming even her empowered and impressive arm, before she adapted. One of the enchantments in her arms popped, her arm glowed, and she punched through the blademoss, closing the distance. I stabbed at her with the spear, using one of the forms Ikki had taught me, and setting a point in space near her. The combination of magical and muscular force was enough that it overcame even the iron grip of her arm, and though it didn’t pierce the shell of mana around her, it did force her to take a step back.

She fell right into Dusk’s trap. Rings of forged purple mana snapped around Corra’s legs – at least, around the barrier projected from Corra’s legs – while hundreds of tiny hands of earth erupted from beneath, covering the barrier, ripping and tearing. Dusk slammed her hands together, and channeled a new spell into those hands: Cavern Drake’s Claw. 

Mana flooded out of Dusk in a glut as every single one of the earthen hands was suddenly sharpened to a deadly point and striking out at the barrier of force. Dusk couldn’t power the simultaneous casting of hundreds of instances of the spell at once. That was a matter of raw mana. The standard spell could be applied to any hands or claws you had, channeling the force through them, but most of the time, dragons would only channel it to the limb that needed power, because the spell was expensive. That problem was mitigated by the fact that Dusk took the power not just from her spirit, but from the countless plants and stones in her realm. I’d never paid much attention to the stone, or to the work of soil enrichment that the ruby earthworms had done, but it was vitally important now. Draining this much power from the earth itself would be rough, and it would set back growth in the realm by months, maybe even a year. It went well beyond just draining spare power, and it wasn’t normally the kind of thing I would have asked her for. 

The other major limitation was the spiritual strain, but that had two major mitigating factors. The first was that Dusk, as a worldspirit, was her realm. She didn’t need to channel it into a garden, she could just directly apply it in a way that went beyond what mere mortal creatures could do. It would still strain her, but it was far less than it would be if I tried to cast Harvest Plant Life and handle the mana influx that way. The second was Corra’s own defenses. Since they dispelled attacks when they popped, she’d only need to hold the attack for an instant, before it would be disrupted. Sure enough, Corra’s protections popped. She tried to scramble back, but her feet were trapped, and I summoned the arrow, sending it right at her.

Which was when Corra’s null-steel armor exploded. A wave of disrupting mana shot from the arcanist-level enchantments, but as the mineral itself overloaded, the abnegation in the area ratcheted up another level. The arrow was still stronger, but the wave still reduced its power by a not inconsiderable amount. The cyan crystal in her shoulder socket began to glow as enchantments on it flashed. The original enchantment on the crystal had been eighth gate, and designed to stop a single deadly blow. Though Corra had clearly heavily modified it, it must not have lost all of its core features. The abnegation mana in the air from her overloaded armor ran together, pooling into a single, hexagonal shaped blue crystal. The cyan crystal shrunk just slightly, as it added the very mana that made up its structure. 

“Spirit crystals are primes-near impossible to find,” Corra panted. “But they’re one of the best materials.” 

The arrow struck the hexagon, and the magic cancelled one another out. Then Corra was thrusting her arm at me, and she unleashed whatever mineral let her create that force beam. I matched it with the Mantle Dragonfyre I’d been building, and was forced to pour more soul mana than I liked into the spell to match it. Corra unloaded her clip of null-steel bullets at me, and they grazed across me in a half-dozen spots. I summoned a healing potion into my mouth and drank it, while putting a bit more soul mana into my Starfish’s Regeneration, and told Hannah to go for it. She immediately activated a wave of echoes, summoning up more of the blademoss strikes from earlier, replicating the spearthrust, and doubling the beam. Dusk, exhausted though she was, threw a simple shockwave at Corra’s back. 

Corra summoned a pair of Stone Shields to block Dusk and the blademoss. Dusk’s attack was stopped instantly, while the stone shield was cut in half by the blademoss and knocked her arm askew. She didn’t manage to stop the spear, but she did activate the flight enchantments she’d used earlier. Whatever repairs she’d done in the fifteen minutes hadn’t given it the same level of explosive strength, though, so the spear sank into her leg. Not a fatal wound, but she still let out a cry of pain. 

The doubled beam of Mantle Dragonfyre was sucking my mana dry quickly, though, and while I swept the initial beam up to follow her, I had to let the echo go, and then have Hannah re-create and re-fire it. It was costly, and my soul mana reserves were nearing a quarter full, but I had nearly overwhelmed her. Bones and my spear flew upward, while I used Reposition Anchor and unleashed streams of acid at her from my pitcher plants. 

Her shield re-formed. It was slightly weaker than before, but it was still solidly an arcanist level effect, and though it shook and cracked under the pressure. I used Transport Item, and teleported my soul mana infused potion right in the path of my beam. The detonation was massive enough to remind me of one of Liz’s attacks, and the shield rippled, dissolving the spells I’d used to attack. I tried to re-conjure more anchors and remotely strike with blademoss, while I set Hannah to taking control of the now falling spear and bones, but Corra rocketed toward me, gravity enhancing her fall. Her arm turned into a blade and swung at my head, and my blademoss strikes went wide. I swept a hand up to meet, overcharging my mana, but I had been using techniques that were typically my finishing moves from the very start of the battle, and knew I couldn’t trade blows forever. Instead, I dropped the magic and relied on my bodily enhancement, knocking her arm out of the way. The strike would have shattered the bones of most, but for me, it only left me sore and bruised. I handed off Reposition Anchor to Hannah, who sent down waves of blademoss, acid, a spike of ice, my spear, and shards of bone, all right at Corra’s back. 

Corra’s entire body shimmered then, as she cast Skin of Iron. My attacks were potent enough to damage her through the fourth gate spell, since this wasn’t her directly using her ultra-empowered spell, and she let out cries of pain. I flung one of my metal-eating acid potions at her, but in the same instant, Corra’s free hand fired off a shot from the hip. It was made of null-steel, and like the previous shots, it shredded my armor. Slower, this time, as my armor had adapted, but not slow enough. The shot struck me, and I vanished, teleported back to the waiting room with the mana fountain. Dusk let out a depressed sigh, before rushing to the fountain, eager to replenish her depleted reserves.

As I lay back on the bench, letting the healer in sect robes tend to me and pulling my transformation back into my beast core, I tried to think of what I could possibly do.

In truth, I could only think of one power-up that I had at hand, but I didn’t know if it would be enough to win. I withdrew a small glass vial with a single, shimmering droplet of gold within. The last drop of destiny. I’d had to spend all but one to save Dawn’s life, and this was my final one. If I drank it, I could cycle it to my Fungal Armor. That would instantly consolidate all of the gains I’d made against Corra across our two fights, as well as strengthen the spell significantly. But did I want to burn the last drop of such a valuable resource? Dawn might have a well, but hers had been mostly inactive since her fall. 

I might have a way to deal with the cat’s eye. It was supported by the combined fact that Corra had poured ten years of training into Enhance Mineral and that it was a detonation. But that just meant it had a lot of raw power, not that it was insurmountable. If I was willing to tap into Burn Future, drawing on days of mana and soul mana production, I might be able to punch through the cat’s eye interference. I was going to restore a bit of soul mana now regardless, but my fear was using it in the fight. If I overdrew and won, having the mana debts taken care of wouldn’t be a problem, but if I lost… 

Then there was the arrow. I only had one left. Though I didn’t believe in killing people, I would like to keep at least one. If nothing else, it would help me threaten the Sekhem Court. They probably had treasures that were stronger, but the arrow would at least be able to threaten any Sekhem Princes enough to make them wary. 

I didn’t want to have to use any of them. But I might need to.