Low-Fantasy Occultist

They pushed deeper into the tear in the mountains. For an hour, the only sounds were the crunch of their boots on the frost and the unending, mournful whistle of the wind. But as they climbed toward the pass’s highest point, the ether began to shift in a way that made Nick’s skin crawl.

The mountain’s natural cold abruptly died, replaced by a sickly chill. The air grew heavy, and the sensation was far too close to the Ghast's presence for him to mistake what was about to come.

"Get ready," Nick murmured as the Shard of Human Ambition appeared in his grip. "The Circle of Pure Souls didn't just leave one gift behind.”

Rhea cursed under her breath, and Gaelen settled into a dark frown. Both knew what it meant, and together with the signs they’d found, it painted a grim picture.

Their passage was unmolested as they crested the incline, stepping out onto a wider, bowl-like plateau nestled between the peaks, but that didn’t last long.

Who would have thought undead monsters would have better manners than human mercenaries? At least these guys waited for us to finish the climb.

It was a meager consolation, but better than fighting on such harsh terrain.

The horde waiting for them did not consist of rock trolls, as they’d believed. These were Orcs, towering, heavily muscled brutes clad in rusted iron and crude furs. They were known to be more intelligent but less capable of regeneration. Considering their state, Nick wasn’t sure it would have made much difference.

There were easily three dozen of them, and they were not breathing. Their gray-green flesh was sloughing off in decaying chunks, and their eyes burned with an eerie light.

“If you cover me, I can try to burn them all,” Rhea breathed, uncorking a vial of volatile fire.

"Wait," Gaelen cautioned, tracking something in the gloom. "Look at the back.”

Standing atop a raised stone dais at the rear of the plateau was a figure that grabbed Nick's full attention. It was another Orc, but older, its decaying form draped in tattered robes. It also held a staff topped with a crystalline heart that pulsed with powerful magic, and the feeling of it in the ether was suffocating enough to tell him the creature was close to Prestige.

How the Circle of Pure Souls had managed to raise such a being without being slaughtered in turn, he didn’t know, but the picture was growing increasingly complex.

Unlike the Ghast, this Shaman was not a mindless being. The dark mana surrounding it actively sought to smother any spark of life, and a gleam of intelligence, however malevolent, shone in its eyes.

Again, Nick lamented that undeath was not considered a crime against the World. At least not at this level. He would have greatly appreciated having infinite mana at his disposal to face it.

“My regular explosives won't be enough," Rhea said tightly as she felt the sheer density of necrotic magic pooling in the air. "The Shaman's aura will suppress most reactions. I need to brew a counteragent, something to target the binding decay.”

"Here? Now?" Gaelen asked incredulously.

Nick stayed silent, but he couldn’t help but share the sentiment. Alchemy was already complex enough in a laboratory. Brewing something so delicate in the middle of a battlefield felt more like something Ogden could do.

"I can do it," Rhea insisted, dropping to her knees and pulling a portable iron crucible and several reagent jars from her spatial pouch. "But I need three minutes. Don’t let anything reach me during that time, and I will solve the problem.”

“You'll have your three minutes," Nick promised. Her regular magic wouldn’t be much use against the undead orcs anyway, since they could ignore any spear of earth with ease.

He stepped to the front of their formation, locking eyes with the Shaman.

Seeming to sense that the time for posturing was over, the creature raised its bone staff, and the horde of undead orcs roared, charging across the plateau.

Nick tapped deeply into his reserves, casting his mana wide. [Mire] washed over the charging vanguard, plunging the plateau into a thick fog. Though such a thing would normally have favored the enemy, he’d altered it so it only confounded undead senses, leaving the living’s senses intact.

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The front line of the horde faltered as their instincts flared. They swung their rusted axes at illusions, colliding with one another and creating a chaotic bottleneck.

“Try to keep anything from escaping the fog,” he told Gaelen, who replied with a grunt of affirmation.

That settled, Nick stepped into the fray, weaving a pure stream of untainted mana as a central point of equilibrium. He drew a thread of fire and a thread of water, balancing their opposing hunger around the core of pure mana.

A moment later, [Conceptual Steam] stabilized, and he unleashed it as a jet. The superheated vapor sliced through the chaotic mass of bewildered orcs, vaporizing rotting flesh and cutting through rusted iron with equal ease. He repeated the process, blending wind and kinetic force around a pure mana fulcrum, sending a spiraling vacuum that sheared off the heads of three brutes at once.

But for all his success, the horde was too large, and their undead resilience kept them pushing forward even without limbs.

Worse, the Shaman entered the fray.

It announced its presence with a shockwave of sickly green energy that tore across the frost. Wherever the light touched, spears of bone erupted from the earth, shooting toward Nick at lethal speed.

Knowing that trying to shield against such a barrage would pin him, Nick decided to return fire and summoned a giant [Spirit Crunch]. The invisible force slammed into the incoming wave of bone spears, pulverizing the dark magic into harmless white dust before it could reach him or Rhea’s makeshift alchemy station.

The Shaman shrieked, a terrible, grating sound, and pointed a rotting finger at Nick. A cloud of necrotic energy, black and buzzing like a locust swarm, descended from the sky.

Nick grasped his staff with both hands, and [Spiritual Hurricane] howled into existence. The raging cyclone of esoteric wind tore upward, catching the cloud of rot and shredding the curse into nothingness, then continuing on, its sheer spiritual pressure blowing the front line of orcs off their feet.

“Just another minute!" Rhea yelled as she carefully guided a thread of raw mana into the bubbling crucible.

Whatever that is, I hope it works because these damn things just won’t stay down.

The Shaman seemed to sense her intentions and grew furious. It abandoned its long-range artillery and began chanting in a guttural, dissonant tongue. Power flooded into its minions, who howled and charged once more, heedless of the illusions the mist cast.

At the same time, a semi-translucent dome snapped into place around the dais, shielding the Shaman as it gathered energy for a devastating counter-attack.

Gaelen exploded forward, slamming his blade into the first orc’s head, pulping it, then leaping off its body and twisting in the air to land on the next.

His weapon’s cursed energy seemed to work well against the undead magic animating the corpses, as whatever he cut fell uselessly to the ground, but for all his agility, it was clear he wouldn’t be able to stop them all.

[Windburst] roared into being at Nick’s command, knocking back many monsters and creating the time he needed to cast something more effective.

[Hubris' Reach] took shape with little effort, feeding on the conviction of his own superiority. When unleashed, it ignored the physical and magical barrier entirely, manifesting directly on the other side of the dome.

The invisible sledgehammer of force struck the Shaman squarely in the chest, staggering it backward and violently interrupting its chanting as several of its ribs were pulverized.

"Done!" Rhea screamed with joy, throwing the crucible forward.

The iron pot shattered on the frozen ground. Instead of the explosion Nick had expected, a blinding wave of silver mist rolled outward, completely ignoring the humans and washing over the undead horde.

Some kind of purified salts in gaseous form? I can only tell because it feels like… Huh, she really is a genius. Who else could have come up with a potion to mimic my exorcism ritual?

It wasn’t quite that powerful, of course. There was simply too much missing knowledge for her to replicate the real thing, but its effects were still undeniable.

The lesser orcs shrieked in agony as the necrotic tethers binding their souls withered, their sickly green eyes flickering as the dark magic holding their rotting bodies together began to unravel.

For a moment, Nick considered taking advantage of the situation to unleash several powerful spells on them, but the knowledge that the Shaman was not yet down for the count held him back.

Fortunately, someone else picked up the slack. With the horde weakened by the mist and confounded by [Mire], Gaelen waded into their ranks. His cursed blade drank deeply, severing necrotic tethers and dropping the brutes in rapid succession. The dark steel flared, spreading its energies across more of his flesh, but Rhea immediately threw a stabilizing salve against her brother's armor to keep the corruption at bay.

By the time he came to a stop, the plateau was nearly clear of the lesser undead, but the true threat remained.

The Shaman had recovered from the blow, and its aura flared with anger. The crystalline heart on its staff cracked, spilling a torrent of liquid black mana that swirled around it like a maelstrom of pure death.

One look at it was enough for Nick to know that a conventional spell wouldn't break through that density of death magic. He had to use something different for this.

The air around him dropped in temperature, not from cold, but from an absence of energy. Shadows peeled away from the rocks, drawn toward the tip of his staff.

“[Call of the Void],” he murmured softly as he expanded his soul’s authority over the peak.

Eldritch, writhing darkness erupted from Nick’s focus. This was a spell of true unmaking, a hungry, terrifying tear in the fabric of reality, seeking to consume everything it touched.

Since the last time he’d had to use it, his power had grown immensely, and the effects reflected it. The ether trembled as gaps and chasms were carved through it; whispers of unknown and impossible origin slithered through the gaps, both real and imagined. The sensation of being watched by something too great to be real fell over everyone, and though Nick was the caster, he couldn’t fully tell where his magic ended and the Void’s began.

Only his foresight in casting [Territory] at the same time allowed him to keep hold of the powerful magics, containing them within the plateau. Without it, he couldn’t say how far the cracks would have spread, but something told him the consequences wouldn’t have been pretty.

This is… It’s the first time a spell of mine has run such risks. It almost feels like it’s using me as a medium rather than being cast.

At the exact same moment, the Shaman unleashed its ultimate spell. It was a roaring spear of decay that shrieked with the torment of a hundred souls, meant to reduce the soul to ash.

The two supreme magics collided at the center.

The air between the two casters twisted into a sphere of inverted colors, the ether warping and folding in on itself. The very light of the overcast sky was being drawn into the anomaly, creating a terrible, silent pressure that threatened to tear reality apart.

Nick gritted his teeth, pouring every drop of his mana into the staff, locked in a silent, reality-bending struggle against the undead Shaman, wondering who would falter first.

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