In my near yearlong second life in this pce, there were many oddities and unusual aspects to the world that I could never wrap my head around. This was a nd of fantasy and magic, yet it was also gritty and authentic. Magic was limited in nature. Beasts of legend were rare to see. The inertia of human society continued down a simir road regardless of whatever differences came about through an unseen history.

  Through all of that I had been trained to perceive this mostly as a world that mirrored my own. The creator of the story on Earth based it all upon what they were familiar with, maybe there was a grander truth to the simirities than that, but it was beyond the scope of what I understood. I held certain expectations about how events pyed out.

  This was not that.

  More than at any time during my stay, this was the singur moment where it sunk in. This was not my old world. This was some high-fantasy, magic-slinging bullshit. We were fighting a horrifying blood demon from another dimension with magic powers that made the stuff we learned at the academy look like child’s py, both in terms of raw danger and the meaningless spectacle of it. I was firing bck bdes of nothingness from the palm of my hands and slicing through reality like a hot knife through butter.

  I quickly discovered that the thinning barrier between our reality and the Veil was keeping the air densely saturated with tent energy, and combining that with the paradoxically efficient nature of these spells meant that we could use them as we pleased without worrying about falling unconscious. This wasn’t going to be a battle decided on stamina and will, it was all strategy.

  And we couldn’t risk moving away from the King.

  Its powers operated based on its, and our, sense of perspective. It could make things bigger or smaller when the true scale was hard to judge. As an object came closer, it could either grow in size or remain the same. Its powers were stronger the further away we were. There was no doubt in my mind that retreating meant it would be able to shrink us too, and I didn’t like our odds of winning at one-fifth the size.

  I maintained our barrier with one hand, whilst Samantha led the attack from beside me. The King charged at us with the intent of simply fying us using its cws, but Samantha caught it napping again and bound its feet to the stone floor. It tripped and tumbled into a roll, ripping up the ground and pulling the stones along with it. That was not enough to stop its momentum though. I grabbed Samantha and pulled her out of the way before it could crush us both. It was still ten-feet tall despite shrinking in size.

  “It’s going to try and separate us, stick close to me!”

  Even if we could sling these spells at a high rate, extending the range too much would exponentially increase the amount of energy they consumed and put us right back to square one. My protective shield was already pushing the upper limits of what was possible – but I couldn’t hide behind it forever when I needed to attack the demon too.

  If I dropped it, then it would gdly take the opportunity to use its hemomancy to kill us instantly. The demon paused and stared at us with its wings fred. The myriad eyes poking through the bony crest on its head twisted in every direction, spiralling into madness and making my stomach churn. Merely looking upon it was enough to disquiet me, and I had a very strong stomach. Samantha was used to turfing out piles of manure and dealing with dirty animals, this was on a different level to that.

  The standoff stretched on for several seconds as we waited for the other to make their first move. The fight could be over in the blink of an eye if we were careless, and it was much the same for the demon too. It understood that the power of nihility was the one force in this dimension that could permanently kill it and cease its long existence.

  Sloan called out from atop his hiding pce, “Stop dilly-dallying and kill them already! There’s still a lot of work to be done!”

  How badly I wished I could whip around with my gun and shoot that bastard then and there, but nothing so convenient was on the cards with this demon staring us down. The King was the first to move and upset the status quo, leaping into the air to avoid touching the ground and being melded into it by Samantha’s magic. Pieces of stone were still stuck to its skin, and the damage caused to the muscles and limbs had hobbled it and reduced its mobility.

  She couldn’t get a clear shot on its wings. I brought up my hands and tried to pierce through its chest using a sharp point, but at the same moment the entire world twisted and stretched outwards. I felt my stomach lurch and my ears ring, losing the ability to stand upright and completely losing track of the target.

  “It’s screwing with my depth perception again!”

  “Look out!”

  Samantha was the one who saved me this time around. She used her muscles to unch me through the air and out of harm’s way. I rolled across the paved ground and came to a halt beneath one of the stalls that had been left behind from the previous market. The demon turned to face me, charging ahead and trying to press the advantage.

  A flurry of strikes was thrown my way. I scrambled back on my hands and knees, barely managing to escape the range of those vicious cws before they could sink into my flesh and end me. I focused entirely on defence, pulling up my shield moments before it could hit. The gap in reality sheared a clean cut through one of the arms, cutting a hand free and sending it pirouetting onto the ground next to my next.

  That gave the demon pause. It backed away and held out its remaining hands, trying to will forth a tide of blood from the inside of my body. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I voided the air surrounding me, transforming it into a pitch-bck shield that sucked in all light, matter and sound.

  I sensed that it gave up. I dropped the wall and retaliated by extending a nce from my palm, but once again the demon afflicted me with a rapidly changing sense of perspective and it went astray. Amongst the chaos unfolding in the courtyard, the city was being torn to shreds. I could hear screams and gunfire coming from elsewhere as more demons found their way through to our side.

  I needed a focus. A physical object I could turn into a reference point so that it couldn’t modify my depth perception to such an extreme degree. I reached into the pocket of my coat and withdrew a dagger.

  The King fred their wings; “Such a weapon cannot harm me.”

  I pointed the sharp end in its direction and smiled, “Would you like to test that theory?”

  Whether this was going to work was a total shot in the dark. I focused my energy on the knife’s bde and used it as a fixed point of reference for my spell, surrounding the edge with a field of ‘nothingness.’ A bck outline formed, but what I really wanted was for it to point in a particur direction. This was the barrel of my new, magical gun.

  With a deft dispy of skill, I flipped it around in my palm and sshed across the market square in a horizontal swipe. At the same time, I used my eyes to follow the tip of the bde and extended the field outwards. The King barely had time to scramble away into the air before the death beam cut through where he was standing, eviscerating the front of the clocktower building and leaving a deep gash in the stonework.

  Before I could pursue it deeper into the courtyard, I was beset upon by a pair of slobbering demon hounds. They dashed around the corner and charged towards me, leaving little time for pnning or consideration.

  “Get out of my way!”

  The Horr leapt at me with fangs and teeth bared, but they were cut down in mid-air by my bde of nothingness. The first was split clean through the middle, before the two remaining halves colpsed into a pile of spilled organs. The next was even unluckier. I expanded the zone of control further and completely annihited the front half of the beast, leaving nothing but a pair of legs and its behind.

  I didn’t even flinch. With one smooth motion I whipped the knife around my head without turning my back to the King. It watched in silent contemption. Samantha emerged from her hiding pce behind the stalls and joined me once again.

  “This is between you and us. I won’t allow any interlopers to crash the party.”

  “I see. They did not select one who would die so easily.”

  “You have no idea what they’re capable of. They foresee everything! You were destined to lose this fight the moment you started it.”

  The King’s voice rumbled through our heads; “What foolishness is this? There is no such power in this universe. Time is an enemy of us all – even for the eternal and unbonded. I care not for destiny, nor your reason, I am here to complete the contract to which I am obliged. That is my purpose.”

  “They have the power to destroy and create matter, why is seeing the future a bridge too far?”

  “It matters not!” it decred, “I have broken my chains! I am not a mortal, and I have toiled for thousands of years to ascend beyond the flesh. Those with no ambition, with fear in their hearts and minds, will be swallowed whole beneath the waves! If the Gods wish for it – then I shall serve as fine fertilizer to continue this cycle! In this course of action, I am as certain as ever!”

  With the wave of an arm, the severed hand floated upwards into the air, before shooting into the sky like it had been fired from the barrel of a railgun. Our heads whipped up to follow it, watching the rge limb disappear and transform into a tiny spec in the overcast sky above.

  That tiny bck dot started to grow, and grow, and grow – with the details becoming clearer with every passing second. The looming shape of a gigantic hand formed, rge enough to crush an entire block of the city when it made contact.

  “Oh, horse manure!” Samantha cried. The sound was unbelievable. We were standing beneath a meteor as it came down to earth.

  “Get behind me.”

  I clutched the dagger tight and focused, extending the length and size of the bde using my magic until I couldn’t go any further. I watched the hand descend, all red skin and bone, and counted the seconds in my mind. It was difficult to estimate how quickly it was moving once it hit terminal velocity because it was still getting rger during the journey. Everything was out of whack. I could only rely on my instincts to time it right.

  The air pressure around us changed as a powerful gust of wind was pushed down into the ground by the rge surface. I threw my arm back as far as it could go and waited until the precise moment where I could cleave the entire damn thing in two! I whipped my arm forwards with as much force as I could muster. The dagger travelled quickly through the air, unimpeded by the magical enhancement, and the arc carried the edge through the full length of the dismembered hand.

  Samantha gasped. A safe channel was cut through the centre, and the two remaining halves split away without the connective tissue. They crashed down onto the buildings that surrounded the bell tower, kicking up wood, stone and dust as they colpsed beneath their weight. A flood of bckened demon blood coursed through from the two bisected sides. It rushed across the streets, hopped up onto the cobble square, and spshed against our shoes. The stench of iron filled the air. The abandoned city block was now the spitting image of hell itself.

  A mad gambit. These demons were immensely powerful, but when incarnated into a physical body they had limits. They were no longer immersed in the boundless energies of the Veil. When they burned through their power like this, something was bound to give.

  “Impressive,” it murmured directly into our brains.

  The heavy bog of blood started to congeal quickly, and soon enough the ground became too sticky and treacherous for us to force our way through. With that gambit dispensed of, the demon fell back on one st-gasp attempt to best us in combat.

  “This impasse cannot continue.”

  “Yes, you should go back to the Veil where you belong.”

  Obviously, it wasn’t going to be that easy. I felt the air around us shift. The tides that swirled overhead accumuted and descended, surrounding its body and gathering within its palms.

  “If I cannot kill you, then I shall simply be rid of you!”

  It brought those cwed hands together with an almighty cp. In an instant the entire world twisted and shifted around me, like the field of view in my eyes was being increased to an incredible extent. I grasped my head and tried not to let the sudden influx of information overload my brain.

  Holy shit!

  It was hard to keep my breakfast down. Whenever I moved my head it was like everything else was being fast-forwarded. The buildings and ndmarks around me shifted in shape and size, growing longer and wider, and transforming every street and avenue into an endless path that stretched out across the horizon.

  “Sam! Sam!” I called out. I closed my eyes and waved my arms around to try and find her.

  “I’m here!”

  I felt her hand grab my shoulder.

  “Stick close. I can’t drop the shield. It might still be waiting for us outside of... whatever the hell this is!”

  “I’m going to be sick!”

  I opened my eyes and felt a fresh sense of revulsion. We had to be standing in the same pce as before. I could still smell the blood, and some of the warped shapes I made out were simir to the buildings I’d seen in the market square. It was trying to confuse us by altering our perception, at least for the time being.

  Maybe that spell could be enhanced to physically transport us in reference to our sense of perspective. We couldn’t be dispced if we didn’t move. Those long and short roads wouldn’t take us anywhere if we stay put. I clutched my knife tighter and felt a sense of paranoia run down my spine. I couldn’t see where it was.

  “Your gods should have thought twice about condemning you to this fate. No matter what boons they grant, I am just as capable of folding the primitive fabric of your worthless universe.”

  The horizon started to bend and twisted upwards into the sky. The ft ground in front of me transformed into a towering mountain, still adorned with the buildings, streets, rivers and factories of the city beyond. A warped lens was being used to manipute the world around us. What we saw became real for only us. I felt the ground moving under our feet.

  Irrational was right. This was beyond any level of my comprehension. How did any of this work? What did the people outside of its sphere of influence see when they found us out in the market square, filing around like a pair of fools? Durandia equipped us to deal with this. We needed to reckon with the weapons that we already possessed and apply them in the correct manner.

  “Maria, what should we do?”

  “If it’s reshaping the world around us, maybe we need to use our magic to do the same. We’ve been blessed by the Goddess. There’s no way this second-rate demon asshole can pull the wool over our eyes!”

  Easier said than done, especially when the gravity being exerted onto our bodies suddenly changed. Samantha squealed and grabbed a hold of my body as we plummeted down towards the nearest building, crashing onto the pstered exterior wall with a heavy thump.

  “Damn it!” she gasped.

  That hurt. I rolled over onto my stomach and came face-to-face with one of the building’s windows. We were seeing the world getting turned upside down and inside out, and when it did so we were brought along for the ride. Looking up I could see the bell tower where Sloan was supposed to be hiding, although that tower was looking longer and longer with every passing second.

  “We have to focus!” I expined, “We can’t let these tricks keep distracting us!”

  “But where do we even start? There’s no textbook or tutors to copy now!”

  “I already said that this is about something more than memorizing a list of instructions, Sam. This power’s extent ends where our imagination does. Think big! You can stitch all of these pieces back together, and I can erase what isn’t supposed to be! We can compress this all back into shape, like we’re moulding something from cy!”

  One of the buildings was turning inwards, threatening to crush us against the surface of the one we were sitting on.

  “It’s now or never! We’ve got to do it!”

  Samantha nodded and stamped down on her fears. She hooked her arm around mine to keep us close together and held out her palms.

  “Picture the city as it should be. Enrge what has been reduced, and I’ll erase what has been enrged.”

  This distorted painting of the real world was a weapon being pointed at our throats. We didn’t need to gather magic from the air. The godly powers we wielded were beyond such considerations. All we had to do was believe that we could fight back and win.

  Take a deep breath and become the tool that Durandia wanted.