The silence of the Sahara lasted for only a fraction of a second before the desert exploded into a new kind of violence.
With a deafening roar, Phobos launched himself forward as a black-iron meteor tearing through the heat haze. The sudden, violent acceleration kicked up a sonic boom that rippled across the dunes, flattening the sand in a wide radius. The telepathic link to the rest of the group back at Brakebills and Fillory was completely severed now, leaving Kai in a vacuum of total isolation. He was entirely on his own.
And that was exactly what he wanted, now he can fight without constantly worrying the god might pull a trick and harm them through him.
Seeing the approaching god, his thoughts rearranged themselves into clarity as he readied himself. But Kai hadn't just been standing there waiting to be turned into a crimson smear on the heated sands. As Phobos closed the distance, Kai's fingers twitched, snap-releasing the magic he had been quietly feeding into the dunes beneath them since the moment he landed.
"Surgite!" Kai roared, slamming both palms into the earth. There was no time for incantations or anything too time consuming, he didn't need all that nonsense. Not anymore, Kai's powers had grown in understanding to a point he only needed his intent to cast complex spells such as this.
'But, I will admit, the use of an incantation did increase the effect of the damage drastically.' He thought
The desert answered. Acting exactly like how a sea does when excessive energy comes into it. His magic seeped in, commanding a tsunami of desert earth, Kai manipulated the sand, causing massive, towering waves of golden grit to erupt from the dunes. A colossal wall of sand surged upward, forming a dense, shifting shield that intercepted Phobos mid-flight.
Phobos smashed through the first layer with his shield, but Kai's hands moved in a fluid, continuous dance. The displaced sand instantly reshaped, twisting into massive, clawed tendrils that lunged at the god from his blind spots, wrapping around his armored ankles and wrists to drag him down.
"Grappling with the earth? Lowly trick!" Phobos bellowed, twisting his body mid-air with that terrifying, supernatural agility. He swung his humongous sword in a violent circle, the sheer kinetic energy shattering the sand constructs back into harmless dust.
But as Phobos leaped into the air to avoid a secondary wave, Kai was already tracking him. 'Jumped right where I wanted you,' Kai thought, his vampire-quick mind locking onto the trajectory.
Kai flipped his hands upward, casting a rapid, layered combination. "Invisique! Phasmatos Lux!" A blinding, complex light spell erupted directly in front of the god's eyes, mimicking a solar flare, immediately followed by a powerful disposition spell designed to disorient his equilibrium. Phobos snarled, his cracked helmet tilting away as the light burned into his exposed face. While the god was momentarily blinded mid-jump, Kai launched a trapping spell, forcing the surrounding air to solidify around Phobos like blocks of invisible concrete.
For a heartbeat, it worked. The God of Panic and fear hung suspended in mid-air, frozen by the layered magic.
"Gotcha," Kai smirked.
But the victory was short-lived. Phobos let out a guttural, earth-shaking shout, unleashing a wave of raw, divine energy that shattered the localized space. The invisible blocks of magic snapped like glass, and the god dropped back to the sand, his red eyes burning with a terrifying fury.
The two became a blur of constant motion, tearing across the desert floor at supersonic speeds. Kai leaned heavily on his roots, realizing standard parlor tricks wouldn't cut it. He spun on his heel, dodging a downward cleave from Phobos's broadsword, and unleashed a brutal, localized pain-infliction curse. "Phasmatos Tribum, Nas Ex Veras!" The boundary spell hit Phobos squarely in the chest, forcing the god to halt as the sound of his own blood vessels violently constricting echoed through the air. To maximize the opening, Kai combined it with a massive influx of fire magic fueled by Ember's wellspring. A torrent of searing blue hellfire erupted from his palms, enveloping Phobos in a localized sun.
The heat was so intense, so profoundly unnatural, that the surrounding desert sand instantly melted, turning several vast patches of the dunes into smooth, jagged sheets of reflective green glass.
Phobos, however, was a god. He charged straight through the blue inferno, his armor smoking and his flesh blistering, but entirely unbothered by the agony. He caught Kai off guard, executing a brutal, blindingly fast counter-strike. His gauntleted fist tore through Kai's defensive posture, landing a devastating wither punch directly into Kai's abdomen.
The impact was horrifying. The divine energy behind the punch caused Kai's internal organs to instantly rupture and wither, liquefying his liver and collapsing his stomach. Kai coughed up a violent torrent of dark, thick vampire blood, his vision swimming as he staggered backward over a sheet of freshly formed glass.
'Fucking hell,' Kai thought, his healing factor screaming as it violently forced his withered organs to regenerate, knitting tissue back together with agonizing speed. 'That really, really hurts.'
Phobos was enraged, his handsome, cold face twisted in a snarl as he swung his sword again, chasing Kai down. "Stop hiding behind the earth, parasite! Stand and face your execution like a warrior!"
Kai blurred backward, narrowly avoiding a stab that cleaved a dune in half behind him. "Uhh, no thank you! I'm more of a 'hide-and-seek' champion, honestly. Very low on the warrior scale!"
"Coward!" Phobos roared, closing the distance instantly.
This time, Kai couldn't dodge. Phobos's sword thrust forward with absolute precision, driving the massive bronze-edged blade directly through Kai's chest, pinning his immortal body into the sand dune behind him.
Kai gasped, blood spilling past his lips as his lungs filled with fluid.
Phobos gripped the hilt, raising the sword and Kai's pinned, bleeding body high into the air. The god stood atop a ridge of glass and sand, looking down at the Heretic with absolute disdain, and proclaimed victory. "It is over, thief. Your divinity belongs to Ares, and your soul belongs to the void."
Despite the blade through his heart, despite the agonizing pain, a bloody, ragged smile split Kai's face. He coughed up another splash of crimson, his blue-burning eyes locking onto the god's cracked helmet.
"You know... you really should have asked yourself why I kept running in circles," Kai whispered, his voice dripping with pure, unadulterated sarcasm. "Did you honestly think I was just bad at pacing myself?"
Phobos froze, a sudden, primal instinct warning him that something was terribly wrong.
"Your awareness needs work, child of Ares," Kai wheezed, his smile widening. "I've been setting this trap since your very first punch."
Kai didn't just cast spells during their supersonic race across the Sahara; he had been subtly dropping anchoring runes into the sand with every step, every dodge, and every burst of fire that turned the desert to glass.
"Trigger," Kai muttered.
Instantly, the trap snapped shut. Six massive, skyscraper-sized boundary spells, supercharged by the raw divine energy Kai had drawn from his wellspring, erupted simultaneously from the left, right, front, back, above, and below.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM
Each boundary wall resembled a monolithic slab of translucent, glowing energy, and they violently slammed inward, pinning Phobos from every single direction. The conceptual weight of the trap froze the god completely, arresting his muscles and compressing his divine aura.
Phobos let out a strained, muffled roar, his muscles straining against the absolute lockdown. "What... what is this?! What have you done?!"
Kai, letting his body slide off the vertical blade, fell heavily to the sand with a wet thud. Gritting his teeth, he reached up, grabbed the hilt of the god's sword, and violently ripped it out of his own chest. His vampire anatomy began to rapidly close the wound as he used the sword to pull himself up to his knees.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic, geometric disc, an artifact designed to replicate the localized, inescapable banishment properties of the Phantom Zone. Something he had thought about as a precaution for whenever a god decides to try and mess with him directly. It was untested but, there has never been a volunteer… till now.
"I can't beat you in a straight fistfight, Phobos. You're a god, I get it," Kai said, panting heavily, his voice raspy as he held up the glowing disc. "But I don't need to beat you. I just need to banish you."
The six boundary walls began to compress further, crushing Phobos into the central point where the disc's gravitational pull was rapidly opening a two-dimensional, shimmering rift of absolute nothingness.
Phobos's red eyes flared with genuine terror as the shifting, chaotic void began to pull his massive form backward into the rift. "I will return, parasite!" the god screamed, his voice distorting as the vacuum of the banishment zone began to swallow his words. "Ares will tear your world apart! I will hunt you across every realm!"
Kai raised a hand, weakly waving his fingers at the disappearing deity. "Maybe you will... but definitely not anytime soon. Have a great vacation, wherever the hell this sends you. I honestly don't even know."
With a final, violent SNAP, the rift collapsed inward, swallowing Phobos, his armor, and his divine panic entirely. The six boundary walls vanished, leaving behind nothing but a profound, dead silence.
The Sahara was utterly devastated. For miles, the dunes were torn apart, scarred by massive craters, and large swaths of the battlefield had been completely vitrified into jagged, smoking sheets of green and black glass that reflected the harsh desert sun.
Kai held on for one more second before his legs completely gave out. He collapsed backward onto the scorching sand, totally exhausted, his magical wellspring completely drained and his vampire body bruised to its absolute limits.
He stared up at the cloudless, infinite blue sky, letting out a weak, dry chuckle.
"Well," Kai muttered to the empty desert, his voice fading into a tired whisper. "At least I saved on the heating bill. 10 out of 10 for the landscaping."