Low-Fantasy Occultist

Of course. Alexander’s magic is rooted in rejecting divinity. How foolish of me.

As the abyssal spear, its momentum entirely unchecked, punched through the lightning shield and drove straight toward Nick’s chest, he braced for an impact he knew he could not stop.

Something slammed into his side. Gaelen hit him at full sprint, tackling him to the floor, and they rolled hard into the grating.

A wet crunch followed.

The spell may have missed Nick entirely, but it struck Gaelen. It punched through his armor, biting deep into his left shoulder and pinning him flat against the stone.

Gaelen let out a choked gasp. His amber eyes widened in pain, and his cursed dagger clattered from his grip. The dark energy within the spear sizzled, releasing foul smoke. It was immediately clear that the rot was eating his flesh, spreading outward like a creeping frost, and that if nothing was done soon, he’d perish.

"Gaelen!" Rhea screamed. She abandoned her earthen barricade and slid to her knees beside her brother.

Her hands glowed with a vibrant, earthy green light as she pressed them over the smoking wound. Vials began to float from her pouch, their contents gathering around her in a liquid flow. She poured her alchemical healing directly into his torn shoulder.

The green magic battled the black rot, but the latter’s strength was too great. It consumed even her healing mana, using it to hasten the decay.

Nick scrambled to his feet. He summoned [Zealous Flame] and pressed his glowing hand against the wound's rotting edges, drawing another pained scream from his friend. The spiritual fire flared white-hot, and for a second, the rot recoiled.

Then the ether in the room pulsed, and the spear drew a fresh surge of power from the blood-runes. The rot surged back, overpowering the fire and searing Nick’s palm.

He pulled his hand back with a grunt, his teeth grinding together. The spear was not an isolated spell. It was an extension of the ritual itself. As long as the cosmological mirror remained active, the abyssal magic drew from an infinite reservoir of power. He could not heal Gaelen. He had to kill the source.

A low hum resonated through the room.

Rosmaria Elpen stared at her bleeding grandson. The calculated, cold demeanor she had maintained so far vanished, and ancient fury twisted her pale features, dropping the cavern's temperature by several degrees.

She reached into the collar of her tunic and grasped a heavy, runic pendant resting against her collarbone.

Nick knew what she was doing even before it happened. He even knew why, but he could only hope she could bear the consequences.

A full unbinding of her soul would transfer the Elpen Forge's foundational authority to whoever possessed the most willpower and mana in the room—a contest Alexander would likely win in his current state.

Fortunately, Rosmaria knew this, and as she ripped the pendant free, tearing her authority away from the surface locks, the outer gates, and the defensive domes above, and pulling every ounce of her control down into the subterranean levels, she managed to limit the ripples to the outer layers of the Forge.

She coughed up a mouthful of dark blood, her frail body slumping as the backlash struck her failing heart, but the ether around her began rumbling with power.

"You dare bring your filth into my home," Rosmaria whispered. “You dare bleed my children onto the floor of my ancestors’ greatest creation.”

A furious flood of blue light washed over the cavern, aggressively pushing back the golden glare of the torn veil and the dark red of the blood-runes.

Every gear, conduit, and artifact in the chamber activated simultaneously.

Rosmaria slammed her blood-stained hand onto the floor, and the pressure in the outer ring increased by a factor of twenty. The remaining reanimated corpses were flattened against the stone, their bones turning to pulp.

Pipes lining the vaulted ceiling ruptured on command, and jets of alchemical steam blasted downward, forming a scalding curtain around the Null-glass cage.

That was enough for Alexander to finally lower his gaze from the screaming golden avatar. He raised his free hand, his expression tightening with mild annoyance. A dome of smooth black glass formed around him, deflecting the superheated steam.

"Your mastery of this room is impressive, Lady Elpen," Alexander called out, his voice perfectly level. "But you are fighting a war against fate itself. You cannot stem its tide. Today, humanity shall rise above the gods themselves!”

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Given the power disparity between a Prestige class and a mortal, the fight should have ended very quickly, yet Alexander held his ground longer than expected. Still, the relentless environmental assault forced him to divert much of his concentration to maintaining his defensive dome, stalling the execution of the divine fragment.

Nick assessed the situation. Alexander was inside the blood circle, thirty yards away, shielded by his own wards and insulated from the violently warped ambient ether. Throwing a spell across that gap was impossible. The conflicting laws of reality would tear any elemental construct to shreds before it could reach him.

There is no way out of this but through. He needed to break the cosmological mirror, and to do that, he needed access to the polarized array at the bottom of the sequence, the ritual itself.

What do I have? Think!

Ephor Ultimer was still strapped to the altar, his body arching in agony. His skin was translucent, veins standing out in stark black lines along his neck and arms. The sheer volume of mana coursing through his body would have vaporized a mortal mage hours earlier, yet he still endured.

As if sensing his gaze, Ephor turned his head, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Nick.

The Patriarch was a proud, ruthless man, but he was a genius above all else. He seemed to recognize Nick’s intent to break the mirror without a word being spoken.

If the mirror broke, Alexander would lose his divine battery, and the ritual would collapse. Ephor might die in the backlash, but if the ritual succeeded, Toneburg would be ash, and Ephor would be nothing but a drained husk anyway, one who had contributed to a traitor’s success.

A silent, grim understanding passed between the two enemies. Nick accepted the unspoken terms.

Ephor bared his bloodstained teeth in a mockery of a grin. He then closed his eyes, his facial muscles trembling with effort.

Slowly, he deliberately altered the flow of his siphoned mana, concentrating energy into a single strand and separating it from the main current rushing toward the Null-glass cage.

A shimmering, green-black thread of pure mana extended from the altar, weaving through the chaotic air before stopping just inches from Nick’s chest.

It was a backdoor. Ephor was offering him a direct bridge into the ritual, bypassing the need to touch it through his own connection.

Nick could not afford to hesitate. He reached out and seized the ethereal thread.

As soon as he did, the world faded away, and his consciousness was violently yanked forward into the ritual matrix.

The sensation was like falling into a freezing river as a hurricane roared overhead. The sheer volume of Ephor’s mana battered his soul, and he stood in a formless space defined only by abstract concepts.

Below him, a vast floor of polished, blood-red glass stretched into infinity, a representation of the cosmological mirror.

Above him, a tear in the dark sky bled with blinding heat. The mirror’s pull was immense, a terrifying updraft that threatened to rip Nick’s consciousness away and hurl him into the heavens, but he anchored himself, drawing heavily on the golden lifeblood of the World he had stored in his coils. The planetary energy acted as a stabilizing weight, keeping his form grounded on the red glass.

Nick knelt, pressing his palms against its surface.

He could feel Alexander’s intent woven into it. It was a cold, ironclad resolve, a burning desire to punish the divine. The blood-magic was flawless, tightly bound, and structurally perfect. Striking it would accomplish nothing, as the mirror was designed to reflect power far greater than his.

Knowing what he was doing was utterly reckless, yet seeing no other way through, Nick let his soul’s light bleed out of his form and connect to the mirror.

Some was reflected, but since it was not an attack, enough of it still got through.

Thanks to that, [Blasphemy] began to take hold, manifesting in this liminal space.

It was the rejection of external authority. It was the refusal to obey the rules set by gods, kings, or demons.

Slowly, a dark veil spread over the mirror.

Alexander’s blood magic flared in response, trying to burn the foreign magic away with the power he’d accumulated. Searing pain shot through Nick’s mind, and he knew his nose was bleeding in the physical world, the copper taste flooding his mouth.

That only made Nick push harder. He funneled the World’s golden mana directly into his soul, giving the conceptual rejection a sense of inevitability. The World despised the cultists’ breach of its boundaries just as much as Nick did.

The dark veil slowly seeped into the microscopic cracks between the polarized runes, disrupting the flow of logic until the mirror was no longer reflective.

Soon, a hairline fracture appeared in the red glass beneath Nick’s right hand. It spiderwebbed, and the groan of stress echoed throughout the ether, making it seem as if reality itself were crying.

That only spurred him further, widening his connection until [Blasphemy] had covered every inch of infinity, and the cosmological mirror shattered.

Nick was violently thrown backward, his consciousness snapping back into his body. He hit the floor hard, gasping for air, his vision swimming with afterimages, yet he didn’t have time to regain his bearings.

With the array broken, the updraft that held the divine fragment in place vanished, and the tether snapped.

Halfway trapped inside the Null-glass cage, the golden avatar shuddered, and its scream cut off abruptly. The blinding light retracted violently, pulling itself upward like a reversed waterfall, and the fragment of Sashara flowed back through the wound in reality.

The edges of the tear folded inward. With a thunderclap that cracked every lumen-stone in the cavern, the ceiling sealed shut.

The golden light was gone, and so was the goddess. The Elpen Forge plunged back into the flickering shadows of Rosmaria’s blue Artifice and the dying embers of the red wards.

Alexander stood at the center of the broken circle. He lowered his blade, his expression unreadable as he stared at the solid stone ceiling.

Nick had almost expected an explosion of violence, a denial of what had just happened, yet nothing of the sort occurred. He was as still as a statue, his eyes locked on, as if they could pierce through the layers of reality and stare down his once-goddess.

A chime rang in Nick’s mind, clear and urgent, and drew his attention away from his old teacher.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have achieved a Major Feat!

Severed the Profane Tether.

Saved a Divine Fragment.

Disrupted a Major Work.

+7,500,000 Exp

The text hung in his vision, and he knew what was coming even before he read it.

The sheer volume of experience flooded Nick’s soul with the force of a tidal wave, so much so that his senses went dark as his mind couldn’t make sense of it all.

His crystalline soul, already strained to the breaking point, shattered.

Something told him this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. The step away from mortality was meant to be a true trial in itself. Yet his soul was already forged, and the System knew his deeds. What else was there to do?

His mana seemed to tremble as it underwent a fundamental restructuring, churning and twisting. The boundaries of mortal limitation, the invisible walls that had defined his existence since he first touched the ether, dissolved.

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