Bonus Chapter: Training With My Father

"The cold of north and south," Amaranth began her song, as her spellbook levitated itself out of its holster at her side and her sword flew into her hand as if it were yanked by an invisible string. Her eyes started glowing magic blue and yellow, the colors of ice and lighting.

Darkness grinned.

Snow kicked up all around Amaranth even though they were hundreds of feet underground. It swirled around her protectively like a mother predator hovering over her young. Amaranth had come up with a way to use spells to power other spells. She used the physics that her father and The Engineer had taught her and married them with the magic that was left to her by a dozen great mages. Mages like Jala L'Vore, Clayton Smith, Archmagus Alexander The All Seeing, and Heitor The Thundering Blizzard. The combination of the real and the magical had bred a formula that broke the rules of magic. Heat was stolen, instead of cold being applied, and then transformed into potential energy. The result was a buildup of either raw energy waiting to be used or static electricity. "Announces our arrival." Her voice started building with each line as she started her steady approach towards the poem's climax.

Darkness appeared in front of her, his void black sword was already lashing out towards her exposed neck. Both of them knew that her armor would be able to handle a few blows from his sword so vital points were likely to be his only target. Amaranth caught his swing with a Reality Shield that formed from her mental command and she counterattacked only to have her attack parried by his sword that moved almost too quickly to track.

Amaranth pushed backwards and slightly off the ground out of the way of his next attack so she could reorient and reengage him. The power from her Frost Cloak was already powering her Flight spell which gave her the sudden aerial control necessary to purposefully leave the ground while in combat. "Frigid Ice Our Heralds Mouth," She continued and a small sphere made of two overlapping blue orbs, one ice blue and the other the color of the ocean, and one spring green one formed in front of her mouth. In the time it took to blink, the orb green orb impacted the back of the blue one and they exploded outwards in a cone away from her towards where Darkness had been. She whirled around to face behind her before her spell had even fully subsided because she knew that he would be there. Power was sucked into and around her from her back where almost all of the heat in the area had been stolen from.

Darkness's sword sneaked through Amaranth's guard and jammed into her shoulder with enough force to push her off balance. He slipped three more quick but deceptively powerful sword strikes through her guard and hit her ribs, liver, and other shoulder before she could even counter. If she hadn't been wearing the best, overall, armor money could buy, she would've been bleeding out all over the ground already. She knew that he was boosting his stats to around what a level twenty five or thirty warrior would possess which was irritating. Darkness never fought fair. She was the only one stuck at twentieth level power. "Wrong." Darkness purred as if he had read her mind.

"Brings Doubt Your Survival." Amaranth continued and a thousand cerulean stars appeared out of thin air and blanketed the area. Darkness teleported away before any of the pesky little lights clung to him. Amaranth had barely used any mana so far because her cold spells were powering the rest of them with around seventy percent efficiency. She was sure that there was a way to increase the efficiency even further but that would take more time than she currently had. She lunged forward towards where Darkness had reappeared and used her Flight spell to launch herself at five times the speed that her legs alone would have.

"You only think you are limited by level." Darkness chastised her as he parried her lunging thrust with barely an inch to spare and counterattacked towards her neck again. His attack was met by another Reality Shield. They both knew that none of her defensive magic items had been activated yet and that fact caused a slight smirk to form on his mouth. Her reaction time, even without the Quicken spell was almost as perfect as mortally possible and her spell placement was as perfect as ever.

"Showers Of Sleet Shall Douse." Amaranth continued and took a step forward to appear behind him. Freezing rain started falling all around her without a single cloud for them to come from. The heat that each drop stole from whatever it touched was fed back into her as she stabbed at his back only for her sword to pass through him. She felt his attack coming from just behind her left shoulder blade so she took half a step to the right with her right foot and appeared fifteen feet that way.

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Darkness followed her through her teleportation but his angle had been changed enough for her to just barely parry his attack. His next attack came in too quickly but she had stepped back and vanished out of it, just like what he had done to her strike only a moment prior. "You are already-" He continued through her chanting, the whirling snow and the freezing rain. He knew what was coming next, but they both knew that there was no way to dodge it so he didn't even bother trying.

"No Matter Our Rival." She growled with eyes blazing with power, focus, and a fury that was in her voice and eyes but was lacking from within her heart. The poem demanded it, so she delivered. The runes of ice, death, rage, poison, and connections all formed in a pentagram on Darkness's chest. Every attack he took, every bit of damage that came his way, would be slightly leached away so the curse could pull five times as much heat from his body.

"fighting well above your level." Darkness finished his previous thought. He relentlessly teleported after her and the pair met blades in flashes of white snow and pulsing shadows. Neither stayed in one place for more than two seconds as they teleported and shadow-stepped all across the arena.

"Snow forming giant cloud!" Amaranth began her crescendo in earnest. A freezing mist settled over the entire arena and the ground was quickly turned into solid sheets of ice. The cold should've been affecting her but one of the spells, that she had cast silently while they fought, absorbed the magic that was trying to absorb her heat and used it to fuel her even further. She still lost power from the multiple transitions but she was effectively immune to all of the freezing spells that she was willingly catching herself in.

Darkness blazed with power. He boosted himself with as much death flames as he could while he was still mortal. It was but a fraction of his current power but it was enough to push back or even crush some if not all of the most powerful mortals on the planet. "Level means nothing." He continued lecturing her as he melted the ice that was forming on him by literally killing it. Amaranth's magic was still syphoning power off of him but it was no longer stealing his heat and was instead leaching some of his mana. Her formula was far less efficient when there was only one color of mana but it was enough when Isaac was using forty times as much power as she was.

"Call Forth Thunder's Bridal!" She cried out and a whirling sphere, much like the one Topaz had used on Isaac and Lenna over a century before, formed above them and started hurling bolts of lightning down at Isaac wherever he appeared. The lightning was seemingly attracted to his massive beacon of power as if he was made of copper or silver. It struck down relentlessly and he was forced to shadow-step, dodge, or intercept it with his sword more often then he was able to make an attack at her. It didn't help that she had suddenly switched to being entirely on the offensive. Any attack that he made that would've connected was met by a Reality Shield instead of a parry.

"No mortal I have ever met," Darkness began as he was being pushed back across the training field by a woman who resembled more of her mother every day.

"CRY OUT YOUR POWER LOUD!" She yelled at the sky, the storm that she had formed, the frozen cloud, her cloak of swirling snow, and the heavens themselves. She vanished and appeared behind him in an explosion of thunder so powerful that he almost instantly impacted the magically reinforced wall of the training ground. He barely had enough time to Shadow-step himself and change his trajectory back towards her.

"Cou-" Darkness tried to continue but he was forced to Shadow-step out of the way of what came next, well, most of it.

"LIGHTNING IS YOUR TITLE!" Amaranth's voice echoed off the enchantments in the walls as her very soul resonated with her spellsong. Her spellsong and power had finally reached its climax and the very world around them shuddered under the immense amount of unleashed magic, thunder, and lightning. She had let go of her sword and her spellbook had moved out of the way as her hands had stretched out towards her father. Two lightning bolts that were at the pinnacle of mortal magic seemed to almost ignore space itself as they instantly touched and then blasted through the far wall. A third maximum level spell formed around her like a static field as it prepared to strike like a coiled angry viper.

Darkness appeared and Amaranth's spell locked onto him like a pair of anti-magic cuffs. It crossed the distance between them in less than a blink but was still intercepted by a wall of pure dark mana so dense that it could've held up a building. Dark mana was blasted away and burned as the lightning tried its best to plow through it and reach Darkness himself. It faded a moment later but Amaranth was not done. "Could pu-" Darkness began again as he whirled on his daughter who had just appeared next to him already mid stab. "-sh me" He continued and parried her attack. His next four counters were met by a Reality Shield that moved to intercept each one before the damage that his sword did broke it apart completely. "this hard." Darkness finally finished as he turned into pure shadows and just moved through her guard to grab her by the face so she couldn't start another song.

Amaranth remained perfectly calm. She knew that in his current state, Darkness couldn't exert enough physical force to truly hurt her. His sword was the main danger, while he was like that, and it was currently lodged part way into a Reality Shield that she had thrown up at the last fraction of a second. It hovered a mere quarter of an inch away from her throat. Her voice rang out again, though not from her mouth and vocal cords, but from something that no other spell singer had ever done, she started singing with magic itself.

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