Low-Fantasy Occultist

Ephor Ultimer laughed, a wet, rattling sound that ricocheted off the vaulted ceiling of the subterranean chamber. Suspended by the cables bored directly into his spine, he looked less like a patriarch and more like a parasite fused to a dying host. Green-black mana pulsed through the cables, infecting the pristine blue glow of the Elpen core.

He raised a hand, pointing a finger, coated in shifting metal plates, toward the far wall where Rosmaria had fallen.

Nick tensed. His mana was still in flux, rumbling like a great thunderstorm within his coils, and he knew he wouldn’t be at full power. He’d been preparing for the possibility of having to fight immediately after achieving Prestige from the very beginning of their northern mission.

A metallic click echoed through the cavern.

Within the shadows of the far wall, dust and debris shifted as Rosmaria Elpen rose to her feet. The simple robes she had worn over her armor were gone, burned away by the impact, revealing the true nature of her support gear.

Interlocking plates of dark, runic steel encased her frail limbs, powered by glowing pneumatic joints and complex crystal batteries embedded in her spine. It was a masterpiece of Artifice, a weapon system disguised as a mobility aid, built over ten years of bitter exile in the dark.

"Did you think I came here unprepared for your tricks, Ephor?" Rosmaria’s voice was a harsh rasp, amplified by a vocal projector built into the collar encasing her neck.

She raised her right arm, and the steel plating on her forearm split open, revealing a tightly wound coil of ruby-tipped darts.

With a sound like rumbling thunder, she unleashed a barrage that streaked across the room, leaving trails of searing white smoke.

Ephor sneered, commanding the Forge to pull a thick slab of metal from the floor to intercept the volley.

The darts struck, instantly rusting the enchanted metal and reducing a foot-thick slab to a cloud of orange flakes in a fraction of a second. Three darts punched through the decaying shield and buried themselves in Ephor’s left shoulder.

Ephor screamed, his mechanical tentacles flailing wildly as the acidic payload ate into his flesh.

Nick took that as his cue to assist. He forced his mana to obey and invoked [Territory].

His intention was to lock the ether around the altar, box Ephor in, and prevent him from drawing more power from the Forge. As the spell activated, however, the untamed ocean of his new mana reserves surged forward, tearing through the spellform and turning what should have been a subtle effect into a blunt instrument.

The overwhelming force of his expanded authority slammed into the room. The stone floor cracked with deep fissures spreading from Nick’s boots. The air grew as heavy as it had during the ritual. Gaelen and Rhea fell, struggling to breathe as Nick’s domain pushed them down against the grating.

He recoiled, eyes widening. His mana was eager, violently enthusiastic, and oblivious to collateral damage.

Gritting his teeth, he grasped for the mental anchor of his evolved Trait. [Sovereign’s Parsimony] flared to life, acting as a governor valve and allowing Nick to clamp down on the raging output, forcing the borders of his domain to retract. The oppressive pressure vanished from the edges of the room, snapping inward to form a barrier around the walls and prevent the Forge from being fully activated.

It was still too solid, consuming more than four times the mana of a normal [Territory], but that was as good as he could make it under the current circumstances.

I might have done more if the fabric of reality weren’t so thin here.

Gaelen sucked in a ragged breath, pushing himself up on his elbows. "Warn us next time.”

"Working on it," Nick muttered, his brow slick with sweat.

Now that he was no longer struggling against his own spell, he could feel the room. The [Eidolon of the Formless] class granted him an acute, almost painful sensitivity to the emotional currents swirling through the ether. He felt Ephor’s manic, desperate greed. He felt Gaelen’s protective fury. Most prominently, he felt Rosmaria’s cold desire for vengeance and knew she wouldn’t accept overt interference.

This was her moment. Still, that didn’t mean he could even the odds.

Drawing that resonance in, he carefully wove the surrounding emotions into a coil of wind—worried that drawing too much might send the fragile balance of the ether into disarray—mixing it with the golden lifeblood of the World that eagerly answered his call.

He had only a moment to consider how much more it would have granted him if he’d made another choice during the class selection before returning to the present.

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A blade of spiritual wind, howling with the echoes of Rosmaria’s wrath, sheared through the air. It bypassed the Forge, as he knew it would take far more to truly damage it, and passed through a raised shield, cleanly severing two of the mechanical cables anchoring Ephor to the core.

Black blood and green sparks sprayed from the severed lines. Ephor thrashed as his augmented body dropped several feet, losing tension.

"You impudent brats!" Ephor roared, his voice distorting into a metallic screech.

He would lose; that much was clear to everyone. Rosmaria was still battering his defenses, and Nick would do the rest.

That was why he wasn’t surprised when the Patriarch’s eyes rolled back in his head. The green-black taint pulsing through his veins darkened, adopting the fel hue of the Abyss.

He drove his remaining tentacles straight down, piercing the altar and digging deeper, reconnecting the broken tether to the entity that had first provided his corrupting power.

The temperature in the Forge plummeted. Frost crept across the gears. The stench of stagnant water and rotting meat filled the cavern, drowning out the scent of blood.

The ether rumbled, creaking and straining as something too large even for its infinity tried to force its way through.

Something shifted beneath Ephor’s skin, bubbling and growing until one of his eyes turned pure darkness.

An alien intelligence looked through it.

Even without the World roaring in anger for confirmation, Nick knew it was the Greater Demon.

He didn’t dare look too closely into the ether with it so close, but even his passive senses told him it was an ancient consciousness, a primordial force of decay that had slumbered in the deep dark for eons.

Its gaze fell on Nick, and he had to wonder what he looked like in its sight. A blazing star of uncontrollable power, perhaps.

No matter how he tried to avoid it, the moment it focused on him, his vision went dark and his surroundings vanished.

The sky above him was a shifting purple, weeping tears of liquid rust. The ground beneath his feet was a fractal geometry of eyes and maws, endlessly consuming themselves. The laws of physics were meaningless here; distance stretched and compressed with every heartbeat, and the air echoed with whispers that sought to unmake his thoughts.

The Greater Demon manifested as a towering storm of perpetual growth and decay. It reached for him, intending to hollow out his mind and claim his pristine soul as a vessel.

Nick stood his ground, for he felt no fear. He’d chosen the [Eidolon of the Formless] class to become the master of his own soul.

Almost unbidden, he knew what he needed to do. He now knew it had always been with him, a unique quality of his soul that had ensured its safe transmigration through the endless Void between dimensions.

"By the One Light that knows no division, By the infinite spheres where no shadow dwells, I name thee, parasite of borrowed darkness — Thou art finite. I am not," Nick chanted. His voice made no sound, yet the dimension shook with it.

“The monad does not break. The soul that knows itself as flame cannot be extinguished by the thing that feeds only on forgetting. Recede, thou contraction of the abyss. I am the memory that outlasts its house.” Even as he continued his chant, he drew on the World's mana, filtering it through [Sovereign’s Parsimony] to maintain his control.

He shaped the golden energy into a blinding flame, yet even as it took shape, he knew it was nothing like true fire. It was greater than that, purer even than [Zealous Flame].

“Through the thirteen steps I have passed. Through the shadows of ideas I have walked. The beast within the heavens has been cast out — so too have I cast thee from the temple of my reason. There is no place for thee in the light.”

Without hesitation, he hurled the flame the moment it stabilized. “I walked the fire and was not undone, for the fire was merely a transition. I stand in the infinite field where no finite hunger may claim dominion.”

The demon shrieked. The sound was a cascade of dying stars and shattering glass. The psychedelic landscape shuddered as the ground cracked and the divine fire ate into it.

Nick advanced as the erratic shapes of the mindscape coalesced into a smooth, solid marble beneath his feet. He brought order to the chaos, fighting back the advancing darkness with bursts of pure spiritual energy and dispelling the fear and despair the demon sought to plant in his mind.

He knew he couldn’t kill it. The entity was impossibly ancient, a vast ocean of malice that stretched far beyond this localized tether. But he didn't need to drain the ocean. He just needed to slam the door in its face and send it back into the dark.

[Blasphemy] merged into the golden fire at his command, creating pure rejection. He fed the concepts into the fire, driving toward the center of the demon’s presence, striking the metaphysical chain linking the entity to Ephor Ultimer.

“By Nous. By the World-Soul. By the unbroken thread. Begone.”

The fire detonated, taking the warped dimension with it.

Nick snapped back to reality.

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He stood once more in the Elpen Forge, his staff raised in protection as sweat stung his eyes and tremors wracked his frame.

Ephor let out an agonized scream as the sudden severing of his demonic patron sent a violent shockwave through his nervous system. The Patriarch convulsed, his remaining mechanical tentacles twitching uncontrollably, striking the altar in a frenzy of misfiring signals.

"Now!" Nick shouted, his voice hoarse.

Rosmaria did not hesitate. She lunged forward, the servos in her exoskeleton whining as she closed the distance in a flash. She ignored the flailing cables and drove her blood-soaked hands into the rune matrices at the Forge's core.

Nick could see how she poured her soul into the machinery, fighting through Ephor’s tainted mana to seize the foundational commands of her ancestral home.

Blue light flared, and a resonant chime echoed as the Forge welcomed its true master.

The mechanical tentacles fused to Ephor’s spine froze. The green-black taint in the lines turned a pristine blue.

Ephor gasped, his eyes wide with horror.

"Strip him," Rosmaria commanded coldly.

The Forge obeyed. Cables retracted, dragging the Patriarch down against the hard metal of the console and pinning his arms and legs in an unbreakable vice of enchanted steel. The core rapidly drained the remaining mana from his body, using his own siphoning arrays against him.

Ephor struggled, his jaw locked in a rictus of pain. "You... you do nothing but hasten your fall. The kingdom... will burn without me.”

"We survived before you," Rosmaria rasped, stepping back from the console. "We will survive after you.”

A blur of motion caught Nick’s eye.

Gaelen sprinted up a tilted slab that had fallen near the altar. His left shoulder was a mass of fresh, pink scar tissue from Rhea’s healing, yet his amber eyes burned with lethal intent.

He launched himself into the air, gripping his dagger with both hands.

The curse bound within it had been feeding on the slaughter in the courtyard, the despair of the siege, and the Cultist's aborted rituals. It was overcharged, dripping with accumulated malice.

Gaelen landed squarely on Ephor’s chest.

The Patriarch groaned from the impact, his lips parting in a silent plea.

Gaelen stabbed downward, driving the blade through Ephor’s sternum and into his heart.

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