Chapter 60 Ascend.

  The world shifted from red to orange to yellow to white to blue and then back to normal in time with the shifting of Gilgamesh’s dragon’s breath. The ancient dragon’s flames came out in a torrent at first but as the colors shifted, so did the stream tighten. The last Isaac was able to see was when the flames had turned blue and the beam of fire was only his arm’s width. The area around the head of the Tarasque was always a color behind Gilgamesh’s flames as his fire cooled a bit after it made contact with the Tarasque. No sooner had Gilgamesh’s flames turned clear did he start recycling the flames after they had made contact with the Tarasque. The flames poured off of and around the Tarasque’s head and then circled back up and into Gilgamesh’s open wings where they were sucked into the golden wing membrane. Gilgamesh’s wings shifted from gold to red hot and then a pure crimson red of red mana. The red hot came back, interposed over the crimson of red mana. The red mana vibrating through Gilgamesh’s wings continued but the color of the heat changed from red to orange to yellow where it stabilized. The space between the wings and the ground was filled with white flames and the area directly around the dragon’s breath’s impact site was a pure radiant blue.

  Isaac jumped as he heard a gasp from just beside and behind him. He had thought that Lenna was still at least seated a few steps behind him and the gasp didn’t sound like hers. Isaac barely risked a glance to the side so he could see who had materialized behind him only to do a doubletake as Klein was on one knee, gasping with effort, and with both of his hands outstretched towards Gilgamesh. “Klein?!” Isaac explained. “What?”

  “Tell, Gil, he needs to, take it easy.” Klein spoke through gritted teeth between gasping breaths. “He’s gonna, ascend.”

  Isaac’s eyes went wide and he turned back towards the unreasonable display of power. “You are going to ascend.” Isaac’s voice radiated out from him across mana itself. “Take it easy.”

  A gap in the white flames appeared right next to Gilgamesh’s eye and he locked eyes with Isaac and then noticed Klein’s state. The ancient dragon stopped powering his dragon’s breath and took in a deep breath. He sucked in what sounded like an entire house’s worth of air. “Shit.” Klein swore and waved a hand in front of him. He was noticeably under less strain now that Gilgamesh wasn’t operating on a power level that was not permitted to exist on Primatia. That was probably why he was even able to get a wall of unaligned space between them and Gilgamesh before the dragon finished what he was doing. The barrier looked a lot like a Blade of Oblivion. It was a fractured, slightly off, line of space that made the world seen through it look slightly off kilter and off colored.

  Gilgamesh roared with world shaking power directly into the Tarasque’s face. Isaac couldn’t see the Tarasque’s face through the heat haze and lava that had been created under and around it but that didn’t stop Gilgamesh from declaring his position as king of monsters. The roar carried with it, through the realm of mana, the image from Gilgamesh’s perspective. He was lording over the half melted face of the singularly most feared monster of all time. The immortal and unstoppable Tarasque lay under him, with half of its head turned to lava, totally unmoving. There was the knowledge that Gilgamesh had utterly bullied the monster without taking a single hit in retaliation. He was Gil’gam’esh, King of Immolation, and no mere monster, divine or not, could stand against him.

  Isaac recoiled as the mana wave from the dragon’s roar impacted him. The sound was only heard second hand as Klein’s barrier kept them from all being taken out by the pressure wave of sound or having their eardrums burst, again. Isaac was on a knee before he even realized that his leg had given out from under him. Gilgamesh looked like he was about to dismount from the Tarasque when he stopped. His draconic eyes dilated as some predator instinct told him that his hunt was still not over. A moment later, the Tarasque shifted and started to rise. Molten minerals and stone poured down from its liquified side of its head as it pressed its and Gilgamesh’s weight back up into a standing position.

  Gilgamesh jumped off of it so hard that it was forced back down into the ground and the air cracked from his wingtips breaking the sound barrier. He was thirty feet into the air in a blink as spikes, each as long as Isaac was tall, shot out of each of the Tarasque’s stone scale-like plates. Three of them looked like they were going to impact Gilgamesh but his scales flashed blue right before the spikes impacted him and they were instantly liquified before they splashed off of the ancient dragon. The ancient dragon in question had stopped in mid air with his wings outstretched and positively vibrating with mana to hold him in place despite gravity’s attempt at pulling him to the ground.

  “Get ready.” Gilgamesh’s voice rolled across the battlefield on mana itself. The words were clearly intended for Klein as even the most powerful demigod had to steel himself for what was to come. Klein nodded and Gilgamesh took off into the air faster than one of Walter’s bullets.

  “Can you hit its tail with everything you’ve got and then get back here?” Klein asked Isaac as the Tarasque slowly started to extricate itself from the pool of lava. It was moving sluggishly but it was starting to cool.

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  “I can try.” Isaac said skeptically. “But if it turns back into a dark creature then I’ll just end up healing it.”

  “It won’t.” Klein assured him. “It is a neutral creature right now.” He explained. “Underground it gains shadow abilities and in the air it gains light abilities. On the ground it has neither but all of its resistances spike to the stars and back.”

  “Then why fight it on the ground?” Isaac wondered.

  “Because you don’t want it shadow-stepping or moving at light speed while fighting it. Now go!” Klein ordered Isaac.

  Isaac didn’t wait anymore as the Tarasque had turned to regard the four humanoids hiding behind Klein’s strange space wall. Isaac put a full quarter of his maximum mana capacity into his fist right before he slammed it into the base of the Tarasque’s tail. Isaac hung in the air for a brief moment as his unboosted strength was not enough to send him flying. During that moment, his death flames took out an entire stone plate and had started to eat away at the dense flesh beneath, then the Tarasque’s body reacted in reflex.

  A paw a few times the size of Isaac’s entire body came up almost faster than he could react and shot towards him. Isaac tried to shadow-step away and he brought his arm up to protect his head just in case. Isaac didn’t realize it until it was too late but his mana was actually moving slower around the Tarasque as it seemed to somehow be apart from the flow of mana entirely. That fact disrupted the mana around it and caused it to flow in odd ways with eddies. Isaac’s body was ninety five percent covered in shadows before the paw impacted him with the force of an entire meteor.

  —

  Lenna screamed in pure agony as she felt like her soul was trying to be ripped from her chest. Shamesh seized up as he momentarily lost his connection with Isaac before it was reformed. Then Lenna was fine again with only the echo of the agony that she had just gone through remaining, even so, the echo was enough to make her body twitch and spasm.

  —

  Isaac came to, already in the air. There was a trail of blood and guts behind him and he had the vague feeling that it was his. His mana reserves were down to below half and he was flying through the air far faster than had ever gone before. What was worse was that the ground was coming up to meet him. Isaac shadow-stepped and changed his orientation so his lateral momentum would switch to vertical momentum. He shot into the air as wind resistance tried its best to slow him down. Isaac’s cloak finally tore free of its magically reinforced tethers. His mind still hadn’t entirely processed that he had just been turned into paste and then reformed in less than a second. He wasn’t sure how he was still alive but he would take the win where he could. Now he just had to figure out how to get back to relative safety.

  Thankfully, Isaac’s distraction had caused the Tarasque to turn around and show its back to Klein, Lenna, and Shamesh. That was what Klein had wanted and the Demigod of Space wasted no time creating three sides of a Space Wall around the Tarasque with the only open side being the side facing Isaac. The Tarasque stopped for a moment once it saw the walls form on either side of it. Its entire head swung back and forth as its one eye tried to look around. Its head had finally stopped dripping bits of itself and actually looked like it was starting to reform, slowly, but it was still coming back together.

  ‘Klein said that you NEED to get back here before Gilgamesh returns.’ Shamesh sent directly into Isaac’s core.

  Upon feeling that message, Isaac looked to the sky and could still see a speck of gold. The speck of gold then turned into a star in the noontime sky that was so bright that it could be seen over the light of the sun. Isaac burned almost everything he had to shadow-step the entire way to Shamesh’s shadow through their link, a distance of around a mile, and shot out of his familiar’s shadow like he had been fired from a ballista. Shamesh reached out with Telekinesis and tried to halt Isaac’s momentum with mild success, at the very least, it helped to slow him for a moment.

  Isaac saw what looked like a shooting star fall from the high heavens. A streak of brilliant gold cleaved through space as it continually built speed. From the rate it was going, it was going to hit the Tarasque in three seconds. Isaac shadow-stepped to reorient his trajectory to take him back towards the others and then readied himself to impact the ground. He had slowed enough that an impact with the ground would suck, but it shouldn’t kill him. He was absolutely sure that being out in the open when Gilgamesh hit the ground definitely would however.

  Klein finished the box of Space Walls around the Tarasque and it turned around to face him. It knew who was trying to box it in and looked like it was ready to just charge through the wall of disjointed space. The thing was, based on what Isaac felt from being right next to it, it could probably do just that.

  The Tarasque dug its claws into the ground and was about to launch forwards when it was suddenly illuminated by two suns. Isaac shadow-stepped once more and slammed into the ground next to Lenna hard enough to break his arm and dislocate his shoulder.

  The Tarasque stopped and tilted its head to the side just in time to see Gilgamesh impact it at over four times the speed of sound. The lining of the plane of reality itself shuddered as Klein once more was brought to his knees. Two more walls of unaligned space formed above and below the Tarasque and Gilgamesh in the millisecond before the blast wave would have radiated out from the impact. All six walls shattered like broken glass but the force that made it through was only around a quarter of Catastrophe’s tornado bomb.

  Molten chunks of flesh and lava rained outwards from the impact point so thickly that the four onlookers couldn’t even see the fifty foot long golden dragon. A stone plate almost ten feet across impacted the ground in front of the only remaining Space Wall and lodged itself in the ground sideways. “Walter fought something like that?!” Isaac couldn’t help but exclaim.

  Klein chuckled weakly. “Not quite.” He corrected the young human mage. “The dragon they fought was around half as strong as Gil.”

  “What’s- how- huh?” Isaac’s brain was hardly working. His arm was entirely back to normal and he was seated next to Lenna staring through the Space Wall. He had no idea how Gilgamesh could have survived such an impact, why Klein looked so drained, or if the fight was truly over. What he did know was that it felt like his brain was smoking and it was probably only slightly from the remnants of his recent reconstitution and concussion.

  Amaranth Serentia V'Nova Welxer