"Father was right," Phobos said, his voice dropping into a growl of pure, unadulterated hatred. He stepped forward, the sand beneath his greaves turning to glass. "You have taken our kind as captives. You have imprisoned the Great Ram and the Shadow. You are a thief of divinity."
Kai didn't respond with words. Instead, he let the stolen god-light flare out, pushing back the gray fog of the wasteland. The telepathic link hummed with the sudden shift, the others feeling a surge of borrowed power through Kai's eyes that nearly knocked them unconscious.
"I'm not a thief," Kai whispered, his voice echoing with the layered resonance of the gods he was draining.
"I prefer the term 'collector,'" Kai spat.
He slammed his hands into the gray snow and released a pulse of his magic as he switched tactics and engaged in a Battle of Wills, much like the legendary struggles in the high-tier realms of the multiverse. He seized the concept of the surrounding region and twisted it. The gray snow turned a sickly, corrosive green. The air became a conceptual toxin that attacked anything with a divine signature.
Phobos roared in anger at how easy this boy actually interacted with a portion of the realm he had made his. He manipulated the realm in response, the shadows rising like tsunamis to crush Kai. The ruins of Brakebills in this dimension were ground into dust as the two wills collided. Suddenly Kai disappeared and blurred forward. If the god decided to be a hunter, then he would take on the will of another and no longer just be a witch; he would take on the will of a Berserker. He met Phobos in physical combat, his vampire strength pushed to the absolute limit by the siphoned god-energy. The sound of their blows created shockwaves that shattered the very horizon.
Kai took a brutal hit as a gauntleted fist slammed into his jaw, shattering the bone into fragments, but he didn't flinch. His healing factor, supercharged by the divine essence, knit the bone back together even as he landed a flurry of strikes on Phobos's neck, causing the god to cough in sudden, rattling pain. To Phobos, the fact that a boy had actually caused him physical pain was unacceptable and sacrilegious; it was an affront that must be punished by a painful death.
The god's sword swung in a horizontal arc, whistling with the weight of a falling star. Kai bent backward with inhuman flexibility, the blade missing his throat by a hair's breadth, the displacement of air alone cutting a shallow line across his chest.
'He's fast, but he's also arrogant,' Kai thought. 'He mentioned his father, which would mean that Ares sent him.' As Kai blurred out of the path of another crushing blow, he slammed his palm toward the ground and cast a spell that made the floor forcefully liquify and then solidify, swallowing the god up to his knees in an instant. Before Phobos could rip himself free, Kai spun and shot off a specialized spell to boil the god's blood.
Phobos's body turned a scorched, angry red for a fleeting moment, his veins bulging against his skin until the god let out a guttural snarl and the realm corrected itself, the conceptual weight of his divinity snapping the magic apart. Kai didn't bother waiting in his previous position, which was instantly obliterated by a retaliatory strike that left a huge gash in the reality of the wasteland.
Kai reappeared dozens of feet away, his chest heaving as he stared at the towering deity. 'This isn't just a random encounter after all,' he thought, his blue eyes narrowing with lethal clarity. Phobos is here to retrieve the Heka portion of the stone I got from the dragon. They want their magic back, and they want the thief dead.'
"You're going to have to do better than a cheap parlor trick, little God," Kai called out, the celestial blue light of his eyes burning brighter.
"You struggle well, little thief!" Phobos shouted, his sword glowing with a dark, pulsing light. "But you are a cup trying to hold an ocean! Your body will fail before my wrath does!"
Phobos pulled on the will of the world around him, and Kai's eyes widened as the space between them simply ceased to exist. One moment the god was yards away; the next, he was occupying Kai's personal space. Phobos immediately landed a series of punishing blows that sounded like cannon fire. A shoulder check cracked Kai's ribs with a sickening crunch, followed instantly by a pommel-strike to the forehead that sent stars dancing in Kai's vision and nearly fractured his skull.
Through the Unity Key, the others saw the brutal beatdown in agonizing detail. The link transmitted the jarring impact of every strike.
"Kai!" Alicia shouted in worry, her hands trembling.
"How is he doing that?" Marina asked, her voice tight with a rare edge of panic. "He's moving like he's teleporting, but he's not."
"The god took control of that realm," Alicia explained, her eyes wide as she watched the playback in her mind. "He's bringing the space to him."
"And so the god has authority over the reality of that space," Alice's voice continued for Alicia through the telepathic bridge, her tone clinical despite the horror. "But Kai seemed to have done something as well earlier that gave him momentary control, but—"
She didn't finish her sentence. The god was showing insane agility now, dancing around Kai, his movements a blur of steel and shadow. Every time Kai tried to stabilize, a black-iron gauntlet or a bronze blade was there to meet him.
Kai kept his cool despite the staggering disadvantage he was in. He let the hits land, his body acting like a sponge for the violence. With every bruise and every broken bone that knit back together, he was absorbing the kinetic energy, siphoning the tiny drips of divinity from every impact.
'Almost there,' Kai thought, his vision blurring from the overwhelming assault that would have killed a normal original. But he wasn't a normal original; he was an original heretic with the power of gods fueling his core. 'Just a bit more…'
Suddenly, a huge pulse erupted from Kai as he seized a massive portion of the realm with a mental roar that shook the telepathic link to its foundation. He didn't just twist the reality of the wasteland; he flooded it with every ounce of stolen divinity and siphoned kinetic force he had stored up.
"BURN!"
A humongous, roaring sea of blue fire erupted from the ground, reaching hundreds of feet into the air. It wasn't normal fire; it was the fire of his will, fueled by the stolen power of two gods. Phobos, caught off guard by the sheer volume of the output, raised a shield he manifested, but the force was too great.
Kai stepped into the fire, his skin charring and healing in a terrifying loop. He lunged forward, his hands glowing with a condensed sphere of blue energy. He slammed the sphere into Phobos's shield. The resulting explosion was silent for a heartbeat before a roar like a dying star filled the dimension. Phobos, the God of Panic, was flunged back at the speed of sound. He tore through the gray air, his armor shrieking against the friction.
"I'm not done yet with you!" Kai screamed, his voice cracking with the strain.
While Phobos was still in transit, Kai raised his arms up. The very sky, the gray, swirling clouds of the pocket realm began to take shape. It condensed into a transparent, gargantuan dragon of pure magical force. The beast roared, a sound that resonated through the telepathic link of every person connected to the Unity Key, and it threatened to make them go deaf. On the Muntjac, Quentin clutched his ears, falling to the deck, while Margo in Fillory braced herself against the throne, her vision swimming in blue light.
The dragon rushed at the flying god, its jaws open wide, swallowing the gray light of the wasteland as it moved. Phobos recovered mid-air, his sword held high, the dark pulsing light of the blade reaching a fever pitch.
"I AM DREAD!" he bellowed, his voice a thunderclap that shook the foundations of the telepathic connection. He swung his blade to meet the dragon's head in a desperate, titanic arc.
The collision was so powerful a blinding flash of light erupted. The dimension the two entities had been seizing from one another, which was never meant for this sort of conceptual conflict, finally shattered. It couldn't hold the weight of a God's wrath and a Heretic's stolen divinity any longer.
The myriad of colors, violet, blue, gold, and shadow burst outward like a kaleidoscope. The pocket realm, the house of the positive demon, and the gray wasteland all vanished in a singular, violent snap of reality. The fabric of the space tore asunder, ejecting the combatants.
The sudden vacuum of the realm's collapse sent a final, agonizing spike through the Unity Key, forcing the spectators to scream one last time before the link went dead, leaving them in a terrifying, silent darkness as Kai and the God of Panic were spat back into the world of the living.
The transition was a physical agony. Kai felt his atoms being ripped apart and stitched back together as the dimension collapsed under the weight of their combat. One moment, they were in a world of shadow snow; the next, they were falling through a searing, golden heat.
THOOM.
Kai slammed into a sand dune, the impact creating a crater fifty feet wide. He lay there for a moment, his lungs burning with the dry, scorching air of the Sahara Desert. His clothes were tatters of charred cloth, his skin a roadmap of purple marks and half-healed lacerations. A few hundred yards away, Phobos stood up. His helmet was cracked, revealing a sliver of a face that was far too handsome and far too cold for the terror he represented. He looked at the desert around them, then back at Kai.
"The world of the living," Phobos spat, planting his sword in the sand. "A fitting graveyard for a man who tried to be a god."
Kai struggled to his feet, his legs shaking as he stood alone against a Greek deity in the middle of nowhere, his blue-burning eyes locked on the god.
'He's not going to stop until he has it. And I cannot risk prolonging this battle with him,' Kai realized, his mind racing.
"Tell me, Phobos," Kai called out, his voice raspy. "Does your father know you're playing errand boy? Or did he just send you because he was too afraid to face a 'mortal' who already beat two of your despicable kind?"
Phobos's face twisted in rage. The sand around him began to vibrate, rising in the air like a storm. "You speak of the Great Ram as if you defeated him in fair combat. You are a parasite, Kai Parker. And parasites are crushed."
'That was easy,' Kai thought, watching the god take the bait. Anger made gods predictable, and Phobos was currently radiating enough fury to glass the desert.
Phobos began to walk forward, each step causing a mini-earthquake in the dunes. The heat haze distorted his massive form, making him look like a shifting mountain of black iron and red malice.
Kai took a deep breath, centering himself. He reached deeper for the divine energy in his wellspring, pulling past the siphoned dregs and tapping into the raw, unrefined core of the power he'd stolen from Ember and the Plumber. His skin began to glow with a faint, ethereal light, the blue fire licking at his fingertips and turning the sand beneath his feet into glowing slag.
"Fair combat is for people who expect to win," Kai whispered, his voice carrying through the telepathic link like a final vow. "I just expect to survive."
The two combatants stared each other down across the burning sands, the silence of the Sahara heavy with the promise of a final, brutal conclusion.