The impact came faster than what Kai was expecting. It was not merely physical, no if he was to quantify it then he could only say it felt like the whole space around the impact point collapsed. When Phobos's fist connected with the air inches from Kai's face, the resulting shockwave not only shattered the windows, it destroyed the whole room and the ones around it and to some extent a whole section of the Physical Kids' cottage.
Thrown out from the shockwave, Kai was shocked to see the extent of Phobos seizing the realm for himself, the whole dimension took on a gray color and the shards of the destroyed physical kids cottage alone with the floor liquefied into a swirling vortex of shadow snow. Alicia, Marina, and Josh were caught in the wake of the kinetic eruption.
They were flung backward like ragdolls, their bodies destined to be crushed against the receding boundaries of the dimension. Kai hit the ground or what used to be the ground with a dull, bone-jarring thud. He had managed to throw out a frantic burst of telekinesis at the last microsecond, a desperate cushion that was the only reason his ribcage hadn't collapsed into splinters and others weren't reduced to pastes.
He scrambled up instantly, his vision swimming with gray static. 'Damn it, they'd die if they make contact with that,' Kai thought, his mind moving in the hyper-accelerated overclocking of an Original Vampire.
Even as his head snapped back from the sheer, soul-crushing pressure of the god's proximity, a feeling like a lead weight being pressed against his very essence. Kai's magic surged out in a violent, unrefined rush.
Usually, Kai prided himself on the surgical precision of his siphoning, the elegant way he could dismantle a spell. Not today. This was messy. It was raw and it came out with haste like a broken dam of energy that felt like a scream made manifest. He didn't care about finesse. He didn't have time to be the clever sociopath with the perfect plan. Not with a god standing five feet away, ready to liberate their souls from their mortal and immortal shells.
His magic hit the three of them like a physical wave, wrapping them in a blunt, vibrating field of kinetic force. It was clumsy, and it probably cracked a few of their ribs, but it arrested their momentum just feet away from the gray dissolution at the edge of the world.
Phobos watched, his red eyes glowing behind the iron snarl of his helmet. He didn't look impressed; he looked hungry. The dark snow began to fall faster, each flake carrying the weight of a thousand panicked hearts.
'I need to get them away from here,' Kai's mental roar echoed as he then teleports the key from his hand and into Josh. With a desperate, white-knuckled grip on the Fifth Key, Josh felt the Unity Key pulse. In a flash of agonizing light, Kai forced a teleportation tether back to the real world through a check point he created there; he ripped them through the fabric of the dimension and deposited them back into the "real" Brakebills cottage.
But the link created by the unity key was already corrupted by Phobos and thus it remained open. Through the Unity Key, every member of the group breathed a sigh as the panic and fear broke with sweat caking up their whole body. Margo and Elliot in Fillory, the crew on the Muntjac, Julia at the estate became unwilling spectators. They saw through Kai's eyes and they felt the cold, oily dread of the God of Panic.
Kai stood alone in the center of a dissolving world. The "party" was long gone and now what replaced it was a gray, infinite wasteland. Phobos loomed over him, the black iron of his armor absorbing what little light remained. Looking around, Kai then thinks with a frown, 'He made the very domain itself hostile. The realm is literally eating my intent and will. So that's what happened when I tried to repel the shockwave earlier, huh?' Every spell he attempted to weave was being thinned out by the surrounding 'Panic.' It was like trying to light a match in a vacuum. The structural integrity of his magic was being digested before it could even manifest.
"You sent your playthings away," Phobos rumbled, the sound vibrating through Kai's marrow like a funeral bell. "A futile gesture. Fear has no distance, and I am the architect of every shadow in their minds."
Kai narrowed his eyes, siphoning the ambient energy of the decaying realm. He could feel the group through the corrupted link, he could feel Margo's teeth grinding in Fillory and Quentin's frantic breathing on the ship.
'If I can't project magic outward because of the vacuum,' Kai reasoned, 'I'll have to keep it internal. Combat at the source. He wants a wasteland? I'll give him a graveyard.'
"I've always preferred one-on-one time anyway," Kai said, though his voice felt strained, his throat tightening as the conceptual weight of Phobos began to press in. "Less people to witness me getting my clothes dirty."
"You're fast for a mortal hybrid… ahhh but you are not exactly a mortal are you?" Phobos rumbled. The god moved his arm, and the broken body of the demon he had been dragging was tossed aside like a discarded rind. "Funny how I didn't get any memories of your existence from that apparition I devoured, but I did glimpse at your very essence. Your speed is born of blood. Mine is born of the inevitable."
Suddenly, Kai's body tensed as Phobos vanished. Kai didn't see the move; he felt the displacement of air and then on instinct he ducked, a millisecond before a humongous bronze-edged sword cleaved the space where his head had been. The sheer force of the swing created a vacuum that pulled the oxygen out of Kai's lungs.
Kai spun, his palm slamming into the god's chest plate and his hand glowed red. The red eyes of the god flared. Kai felt a rush of divinity immediately as a massive surge of magic flooded his system, golden, and utterly toxic. It was like drinking liquid sun laced with arsenic. He pulled enough to fuel a counter-strike, his eyes glowing a manic purple.
As he blurred back, he held up his left palm, and suddenly a pillar of humongous blue-white lightning descended from the gray sky, thick as a redwood tree. It slammed into Phobos with the sound of a mountain splitting in half. The explosion blinded the telepathic onlookers, the feedback causing Quentin and the others to scream in agony as the psychic backlash ripped through their minds.
Kai panicked. "Shit!"
He hissed the word through gritted teeth, his fingers twitching as he tried to magically sever the connection to the Unity Key. He grabbed at the invisible threads of the link, pulling with all his might, but the connection snapped back like a high-tension wire, vibrating with a resonance that made his own nose bleed.
"Damn it!" he cursed. He couldn't cut them off, Phobos's influence had turned the link into a sticky, inescapable trap. Realizing he was dragging them through hell, Kai did the next best thing. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, flooding the corrupted link with a wave of soothing, numbing magic. It was a psychic sedative designed to dull the sharpest edges of the pain.
'I'm sorry,' he thought, his mental voice echoing into their minds. 'You all will have to bear with me till I can deal with this god.'
"Deal with him?" Julia's voice filtered back through the haze, strained and filled with pained desperation. "How the hell are you going to do that, Kai? It's a god you didn't prepare for!"
Kai remained silent for a heartbeat, his eyes fixed on the spot where the lightning had struck. 'I'm thinking,' he thought privately, though the weight of the situation felt like it was crushing his ribs.
"Well, think fast," Margo's voice cut in, sharp even through the psychic numbing. "Because damn, that hurt. My head feels like it's being used as a drum by a very angry giant. Finish this prick, Kai!"
When the light cleared, Phobos was still standing. His armor was smoking, glowing a dull cherry-red, but he hadn't moved an inch.
"Impressive," the god purred, his voice rattling Kai's bones. "You strike with the elements of the lower heavens. But I am the son of War. We have bathed in the lightning of Zeus since the cradle."
Phobos lunged. His agility was nonsensical for his size as he moved with the fluid, terrifying grace of a god, twisting his massive frame with the flexibility of a whip. He landed a kick in Kai's midsection that sent the Heretic through three layers of the Brakebills ruins. Kai hit the ground destroying the area around him as his chest region was destroyed. His ribs were powder, his lungs collapsed, and his spine shattered, yet the immortal blood of an Original roared to life. His whole body started healing with sickeningly fast cracks and wet squelches, the muscle and bone knitting back together as he coughed up thick, dark blood.
'So I was right,' he thought, forcing himself onto his elbows. He looked to where Phobos was and his brow furrowed. 'He's not just hitting me; he's hitting the idea of me in this realm,' Kai realized, wiping his mouth. 'He's using the realm to reinforce my own fear of failure.'
The gray, shifting wasteland wasn't just a backdrop; it was a psychological amplifier. Every ounce of doubt Kai felt was being weaponized into physical force by the God of Panic.
"Fine. If the realm is the problem, I'll change the rules."
Kai stood up, his posture shifting. He abandoned the defensive stance, letting his arms hang loose at his sides. He closed his eyes, reaching deep into his own personal domain, the pocket of reality where he kept the "trophies" of his meddling. He bypassed his own siphoner reserves and tapped directly into the wellspring of the gods he had trapped: Ember and the plumber.
The power was vast, chaotic, and heavy. It tasted of old Fillory and the deep, dark places of the world. Immediately as he opened his eyes, they didn't just glow; they ignited into a brilliant, celestial blue, humming with a frequency that made the shadow snow around him vaporize instantly.
———
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