The King knew we were coming.

  There were only two beings on this pnet that could stop it from wreaking total havoc over Walser and the wider continent. It understood the threat we posed implicitly. We were touched by the only beings greater than it, the ones who rested beyond the Veil and harvested it for what they needed to survive. It could see that it was an ant between the toes of a giant, only worthy of regard because of the destruction it heralded.

  Samantha followed me through the winding streets of the city. There were hundreds of bodies all twisted into the same morbid pattern, with bloody spikes jutting from their bodies and locking them into pce like statues. It was difficult to keep my eyes on where the King was located without exposing my body.

  The storm of magical energy surrounding the museum had grown fierce enough to be seen from across the area. I could tell from the moment we stepped through the doors that the magical concentration in the air was reaching dangerous levels. The barrier between our world and the Veil was as thin as it could be without completely failing. The only benefit to us was that we could use our magic more freely, but it also meant a group of hyper-durable demons was liable to appear and make things difficult.

  The King was rampaging through the old religious quarter, close to the expensive homes that the nobles liked to purchase. Landon was hunting down everyone and anyone he believed stood in his way, and that included his own allies and friends from Welt’s original conspiracy.

  On bloodstained wings it could cross the entire city in the blink of an eye. There was something profoundly unnatural about how it flew through the air. The sky warped and twisted, forming channels that it could use to propel itself.

  “How many people has he killed?” Samantha whispered.

  “Too many. He managed to cause this much damage in less than thirty minutes. We have to stop him as soon as possible.”

  It was difficult to comprehend the scale of the chaos from street level. The King could cross a huge distance so quickly, and kill a huge number of people using its irrational magic before they had a chance to react and hide. Anyone unlucky enough to shoot at it were quickly dispatched and left on almost every street as a grim reminder to the ones who remained.

  “How are we going to get him to come down here and face us?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. It’s obvious that it doesn’t want to get close to me, it’s scared of what I’ll do using nihility. Maybe we can lure it in. It hasn’t seen your powers yet.”

  “But how can I manipute my powers to destroy him?”

  That was the million-dolr question. I wracked my brain for ideas. Samantha was my opposite. She had the ability to make something from nothing, and to stitch reality back together. How far could that take us?

  I briefly looked back at the museum and the maelstrom of red energy that was now filling the air. We were being squeezed on both sides, and I had little faith in Genta finding a solution that I could not. The density of that energy was growing, like the pressure of a volcano about to erupt.

  We had to get to Sloan and kill him. There was a chance that the contract would be broken if we managed that. The problem was that it could fly across the continent and py keep away so long as Sloan was satisfied. It was trying to complete his stated goals as quickly as possible so it could evade us.

  It lurched from side to side, clinging to the edge of the old bell tower and sending brick tumbling to the street below. We were getting close, but that meant we were within range of its magic. My heart leapt into my mouth as the profane creature craned around to face us.

  Two big threats were coming, and the King noticed.

  Rather than unching an apocalyptic meteor attack or trying to kill us using hemomancy, the King elected to take a nearby horse-drawn cart and lift it into the air using telepathy. It pointed a long finger in our direction and unched it like a bullet. It flew in a long arc across the skyline of the city and directly towards the wide avenue we were trudging down.

  As the wooden cart flew through the air towards us, it was impossible to ignore how it only grew rger and rger, far beyond the real scale of what it would be otherwise. It was only when the newly enrged cart was close to smashing us into a fine paste that my brain caught up and made my hands grab Samantha by the colr of her blouse, pulling her away and ducking into a side street.

  It came down with a deafening crash. The ground quaked, and the gigantic cart rolled across the street, smashing everything it met into pieces with pnks the size of hundred-year-old redwood trees. When the dust settled I peered around the corner and despaired at what had just transpired. One of the huge wheels spun on the tilted axel.

  “What was that?” Samantha gasped. She followed my gaze to the scene of the disaster. Several buildings had been completely demolished, and now the giant-sized wreckage of the cart was blocking the other end of the avenue.

  There was no doubt about it. The King had more than hemomancy. The reality of the situation was in front of my eyes, and there was no illusion that could expin it. The cart had grown several times in size during the arc of its flight, until it was rge enough to demolish an entire block of the city!

  “I don’t like this. Not one bit.”

  “What did it do? Did it make it bigger?”

  But there was something else to the construction of the cart that caught my attention. There was a deeper problem with what I was seeing. It was big, but it didn’t look like it was always that way. The wood grain of the various pnks that made up the bed was still small in scale, and the ‘tiny’ details like stray splinters were visible to the naked eye. You could stab someone to death with them like a spear.

  He quite literally made it bigger. He scaled the object up to a much rger size and threw it at us as a weapon. There was no rational expnation for how that worked. It was patently absurd.

  “He’s throwing something else!” Samantha cried.

  I snapped back to the Bloodcrowned King and witnessed it in action. The head of a gargoyle pilfered from the fa?ade of the old building it clung to, ripped from the body and lobbed like a boulder. Again, it flew towards us and grew rger with every passing second. Just when I thought it was supposed to stop getting bigger from the change in perspective, it kept going.

  We ducked down an alleyway and barely avoided it. It crashed down into the ground and exploded into a cloud of rubble and dust. We coughed and hacked, and decided against moving down the same road again lest it get another shot at us. I tugged on Samantha’s arm and led her in the opposite direction.

  “This is crazy!” she wheezed, “How the bloody heck is it doing that?”

  It was mind-bending in the worst possible way. It was a trick of the eye transformed into real life. And I thought the Alchemist’s ability to turn things into gold was strange! This was so, so much worse.

  “We’ve got to keep going.”

  I ignored Samantha’s protests and forged ahead with a scowl on my face. I dashed down the sidewalk of the other avenue, making good progress before the King realized what we were doing. It swung across to the other side of the tower and tried once more. A barrage of fruit and vegetables from a wrecked stall were pilfered from the ground and thrown in our direction.

  Tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes and apples rained down onto the cobbled road. Some exploded into biological bombs, spreading treacherous amounts of fluids in their wake and threatening to knock us down from the force of their explosion. All of them were bigger than our bodies.

  “Stop wasting so much perfectly good food!” Samantha raged, her farmer’s spirit breaking through the madness. We had bigger problems to worry about.

  I was putting together the pieces.

  I pushed through a pile of tomato juices and flesh that now polluted the street. The barrage of attacks were extremely strange in nature. The King was not trying to use hemomancy against us, instead relying on physical projectiles. The nature of those projectiles was confounding, but the intended outcome was not so sophisticated.

  Every time we got closer to the King the size of the projectiles grew smaller. We ducked into alleyways and used the buildings as cover, trying to keep it from pinning us down and predicting where we were coming from next. I wanted to preserve as much of my magical energy as possible, even if the air was filled with it, because the body could only ingest so much at once.

  Samantha was thankful she kept up with my exercise routine to some extent, but even she was starting to feel the effects of sprinting in a dead heat down a tricky set of cobbled roads. She stumbled a few times, only being saved by my reaching out and grabbing her before she hit the ground.

  “We’re almost there! A little more!”

  “This is madness!” she squealed.

  Watching a tomato fly from its hand towards us before falling short and spttering across the pavement was the moment where it all clicked. It was perspective. It really was a trick of the eye. The further away we were, the more it could amplify the size of the objects it was throwing. As we got closer, the more obvious the real scale of the objects became.

  We hid behind the st row of buildings before the market square.

  “I know what it’s doing!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s very esoteric magic. It’s using our sense of perspective. When we’re far away, it can multiply the effect of an object getting closer and becoming rger, normally when that happens the projectile stays the same size but...”

  “I get it!”

  “That was how it kept me away from the crystal in the museum,” I growled, “I couldn’t target it with my magic because whenever I got close it moved further away, even when it was right in front of me.”

  We were going to have to get rid of it to smash the crystal. Nothing could ever be simple when I got involved! A reality-warping demon did seem like the kind of threat that demanded handing out godly powers to a pair of chosen ones though. We had the solution in our hands. Durandia expected us to figure it out and put a stop to Landon’s rampage before it became even more dire.

  I hoped that this ability extended only to enrging or shrinking objects from the King’s point of view even when I knew that was a faint hope to cling to. I’d already seen a demonstration of how it could be applied to manipute the space we were moving through or perceiving. It was frankly impossible to effectively target the area the crystal inhabited while my depth perception was being thrown out of whack.

  I should have brought a stick of dynamite instead.

  A voice whispered into my ear, “You will not interfere!”

  Samantha shivered, “Did it just talk to us?”

  “It appears that our friend knows the nguage. It’s on another level to those slobbering dogs that the cult summoned, so it makes sense. That crystal must be a worthy prize indeed.”

  Was wasting time and energy trying to ward us away using psychic messages a good idea? We couldn’t exactly pack our things and run away now that we were staring at the beast in the open maw. This was going to end in a battle no matter what we wanted. Therefore, it was imperative that we create an effective pn of attack using our magic, grounding the beast and hopefully putting a bullet through Sloan’s head in the process.

  I could see him skittering around on the balcony, silently directing the beast to y waste to the homes and workpces of his personal grudges. Were Rentree and the other conspirators still alive? If we had any luck at all Sloan would take care of them before I got to him.

  There was no more time to dey. We had to make the first move before the King came up with another pn of attack, and no amount of harshly whispered warnings could stop me from ending this circus. I led Samantha on our final charge across the market square and to the front of the clocktower. The killing intent of our foe was obvious, so I erected an empty void between us to keep the magic field from reaching our position.

  It was baffling that a technique this powerful required less energy than destroying a physical object, but that was what made it a godly ability. There was an aspect of the spell that made it hyper efficient. My leading suspicion was that it fed directly from energy in the Veil, ripping open a gap and sucking it in like a bck hole. There were ways to circumvent the limits of our mortal bodies, and those same tricks were used at a higher level as well.

  For our purposes it meant that the King could not explode our blood outwards and solidify it. Now that we were within range where there were no vanishing points for it to exploit, it also lost the ability to enrge objects whilst throwing them at us. Samantha pulled back and fired a bolt of energy at it, although it seemed to have little effect.

  “That’s not going to cut it!” she yelled.

  “Such meaningless resistance,” it hissed, “Begone! Hide from our sight, and we shall show you mercy.”

  “I’m not running away. You are afraid of what we might do,” I replied.

  The beast swung low, its eyes squinting at us; “Foolishness! There is nothing you can do to this form! We are perfect! We are immaterial! We are the shadow that slips between the cracks in your realm. We know not fear, we feast on it!”

  “And yet you debase yourself by following the orders of that moron.”

  “Power is power. We care not for your mortal concerns. You will continue to relish your ignorance, unable to see that your morality has no worth. We shall grow stronger, and you will wither away into dust in due time.”

  “I could make you disappear. You don’t want me to end all that you are. So comfortable in your belief that you’ll return to the Veil when your body is finished. You can’t comprehend that there may be nothing waiting for you. An eternity of not being, of not thinking!”

  “That is merely a possibility. Can your ever-rotting flesh prison withstand our full power?”

  “You and I both know that they didn’t send me here expecting failure. Have they ever been wrong before?”

  “They will meddle no longer! Once we y cim to our rightful reward, there will be nothing stopping us.”

  That was not an answer. The Bloodcrowned King was all-too familiar with how Durandia and the other deities operated. They saw all, they knew all, and they could push into action pns that unfolded over hundreds and hundreds of years without the pieces ever realizing it. What option was there left but to throw up your hands and accept it? They opened Pandora’s Box by building the Red Tree, they created a power dynamic so unbanced that it was unethical by its very nature.

  Samantha threw a wary gnce my way. The spells she learned at the academy weren’t going to cut it here. She needed to use her newly realized powers to help me beat this thing back to the void where it came from. I continued to maintain my shield, but I couldn’t attack whilst focusing on it.

  “Sam, it’s your turn.”

  She took a deep breath and stepped up to the pte.

  Holding her palms out and extending her touch to the Horr, Samantha used her imagination and thought hard about what she understood. This was a cosmic power, one which could weave together the fabric of our reality with the precision of a needle. Her hands glowed a pale yellow, before they released a pulsating wave that travelled across the market square and engulfed the exterior of the building.

  It was only then that the demon discovered it had made a mistake. I was not the only one it needed to concern itself with, because Samantha was as every bit as dangerous to its survival as I was. There was a spine-tingling crunch, and its body seized up, turning inwards like it was being squeezed into a gravity well. Samantha yelled at the top of her lungs and continued to bring her outstretched hands closer together.

  She was wreaking havoc on its body. Sinew, bone and muscle fused together and prevented it from moving or retaliating. The long arms that burst forth from cragged shoulder bones were pulled inwards and fused to the flesh along its torso and midsection. A strangled roar of protest emanated from within its chest, but there was no mouth to release it.

  Sensing that this fight wasn’t going to go its way – it fell back on a drastic pn of action. Releasing its hold on the side of the building, it plummeted towards the ground without the ability to move its limbs. During the fall it scaled its own body down, escaping from the field that Samantha was emitting and crashing to the paving stones below with a heavy thump.

  The newly shrunken demon stretched out again, ripping skin from flesh and regaining the ability to move, albeit in a much more limited manner than before. It was no longer interested in speaking. It understood that the only way it was getting out of here alive was if it killed us first.

  With wings and teeth bared on both sides, it was time for the most difficult battle yet.