Bonus Chapter: All Under And Around The Stars Is Darkness
"Above the sky so high" Amaranth's voice came into being as a white sparkle twinkled in her eyes. Darkness still had her by the face but his sword was thoroughly lodged into her last second Reality Shield. Her sword swung through him to get its tip closer to her hand as a new Flight spell picked her up before the first one had even completely faded.
The main downside of using spellsongs was the fact that once the song was over, all spells that had been cast by it vanished, that included her storm spell, the freezing rain, the Frozen Frost Cloud, the icy runic hex, her first flight spell, and perhaps worst of all, her Frost Cloak. The lack of her frost cloak was why Darkness had pushed completely into her guard in the first place.
Darkness's knee rose up right as two of Amaranth's fingers started to glow, they were reaching towards her blade so she could coat it in radiant light. He front kicked her away right before her fingers could make contact with her sword. Even with the wind knocked out of her, Amaranth touched her fingers to her sword and it started to glow. She used her flight spell to slow herself to a stop and she met his next teleporting strike with a sword that shone like a lighthouse on the stormy seas.
"Billions of tiny stars" Amaranth's voice continued coming from all around them even as she gasped for air and parried Darkness's follow-up attack. He switched back to normal and instantly brought his boosting ability back up to where it had been and then he pushed it a bit further. He had finally decided to go beyond the strongest he had ever been as a mortal as he crossed over into demigod territory. His every motion was such a blur to Amaranth that she barely even noticed her five Stars of Doom get intercepted as they spawned by ten spikes of pure concentrated dark mana.
Amaranth had to summon two Reality Shields just to keep him from tearing her armor apart as his relentless offensive bore down on her. If her Reality Shields hadn't been there, and her armor would've been able to handle the obscene amount of punishment, she would've been flying across the arena. The odds of him punching straight through it were low but not zero. She also had no doubt in her mind that Darkness would have been able to juggle her like he had with Macken so long ago.
"Twinkle bright in our eyes" Amaranth's voice continued.
"You are stronger than some demigods I've met." Darkness told her honestly. He had created someone who honestly had no idea how powerful she was. When her entire life was living, and striving, in the shadow of The Paired Demigods, her sense of power scale was all out of whack.
Amaranth's eyes turned pure glowing white with flecks of violet and indigo as she was able to see through everything in front of her. She could see the river and half a million streams of mana pouring into her father. He was using more mana per second than she could use in a day, just on his boosting ability. She watched as shadows covered him and he vanished from normal sight. She was still able to follow him but he was half as opaque as he had been before and it was easy to lose track of where his limbs were. His core was such a blinding focal point of all of his power that it was making it difficult to track the rest of his movements.
"Twinkle galactic tsars" Her poem continued. The spellsong was helping, and the spell that was activating from her most recent line would work quite well against Darkness, but the one after it would be utterly useless. That was the second issue with using spellsongs, she was stuck with whatever spells were tied to the poem or ballad. Seven brilliantly glowing white stars formed in perfect line with her tiara. Her tiny crown that her father had given her to protect her mind just like the one inside of her mother's helmet.
Darkness continued to chip, crack, and break apart her Reality Shields as she tried desperately to hold him off. "I thought you were the greatest wizard alive?" Darkness words came from the very fabric of existence. They were inside of his domain. They might as well not have even been on Primatia anymore. He was the god of where they fought so the world simply spoke the words that he wanted it to.
"I never claimed that." Amaranth spat even as her voice continued from all around them: "Once the day's bid goodbye" She directed the stars on her forehead at Darkness one at a time, each time as a counter to one of his attacks in order to get him to attack the star before it hit him or dodge. So far, the only time that she had managed to inflict what anyone might even consider an injury was when she had sliced through his shadow form at the beginning of the second stage of their fight. She knew that he was fighting her as if he wasn't nearly unkillable and that was the only reason why she had managed to hang on for as long as she had.
A sphere of darkness formed around her but she dispelled her own spell with a silent Command: Negation before he could use her shadows to strangle her.
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"Smart." Darkness complimented her. "If you-"
"Show themselves from afar" Amaranth's magical voice continued as she struggled to hang on against the man that had taught her swordsmanship and had killed other demigods in their own domains.
A radiant beam of moonlight shone down from the heavens and followed his every move. The beam of moonlight followed him with jerky movements that seemed far too precise for Amaranth to be manually controlling it. That meant that it was her spellsong doing all of the work for her. "-hadn't can-celled it," Darkness continued as he shed his shadows and formed a wall of dark mana above his head to hold the holy freezing burn of moonlight at bay.
"Little lights that imply" The spellsong continued. Amaranth took Darkness's transition as an opportunity to fire her last two stars from her brow at him and catch her breath. Unlike him, she actually got tired from over a minute straight of ultra high intensity fighting.
Darkness ducked out of the way of one of the stars and just cut the other in half with his sword. "I would have taken it-" He continued casually talking to her as she fought as if her life depended on it. With how ruthless Darkness could be, she wouldn't have been surprised if he killed her and brought her back to life within a second. He definitely could cut off her head, use his shadows to replace it, and then hit her with enough death flames to instantly return her to peak condition.
He formed a second wall of dark mana to stop the wave of sparkling little white lights exploded out from her in search of any living thing to cling to.
"Countless worlds so bizarre" Her song continued and the world around them started to ripple and change, unfortunately, only visually. Against a normal opponent who couldn't track her through any and every different kind of concealing magic, the false terrain that was coming into being would've been great visual cover.
"-personally, and hit you-" Darkness went on as he blasted the rest of the little lights out of the arena by turning his front facing wall into a wave of dark mana. The illusory terrain formed through the massive mana disruption, as it was designed to survive entire armies of mages casting spells inside and out of it, but it looked disjointed. Instead of four slices of different biomes overlapping with the world, they instead formed at odd angles and with bits and pieces of them clipping through the ground and walls.
Amaranth knew that her next big opportunity to hit him was coming up as the next line of her poem sounded out: "Stars shining 'till they die" She turned her left palm outward towards her father and cried out:
"Adventus Solis!" A black orb formed in the dead center of the arena as eight concentric rings of violet filled with pure white runic script formed in front of her hand.
"with it." Darkness finished and then shadow-stepped out of the way of a beam of very real directed sunlight that liquified the stone between his daughter and the wall that it then almost immediately started boring through. She swept her hand across towards him and he was forced to shadow-step away. The incredible threat that Adventus Solis had was met in equal measure by its short lifespan. The spell could be channeled but the mana cost for doing so was insane. No mortal wizard would dare channel it for more than a second or two.
The black orb that had formed suddenly started pulling in everything within a hundred feet of it. The magic that held Amaranth's spellbook for her, strained to keep it from getting sucked into the black hole that she had just formed in the training yard. Her sword was connected to her bracelet and that was the only reason why it hadn't been yanked from her hand. Her Flight spell was giving everything it had to keep her feet on the ground and help her back away from the tiny galactic disaster.
Darkness was yanked off of his feet towards the black hole for a moment before his control over the mana that existed inside of him locked his position in place. He then shadow-stepped out of the way of the beam of sunlight that Amaranth was still channeling for some reason. As he appeared he heard the last line of her spellsong.
"Leaving nothing but char" The spellsong finished and a Fireball erupted ten feet above Darkness. She knew that if she would've had it spawn right next to him, his hand had enough mana in it to simply crush it as it formed. Unfortunately the Fireball was only at its base level as the spellsong cast it more for effect as the blackhole winked out of existence. Her hand quickly swept across the entire arena before her Adventus Solis died in her hand. She had finally run out of mana.
Darkness had barely managed to block the Fireball when the concentrated beam of solar death drew another line across the arena. The attack had actually taken him by surprise as he hadn't expected her to keep channeling mana into the spell for so long. It passed over him just long enough to instantly set his clothes on fire. His treated drider silk under armor was fine but his shirt, pants, and boots had almost instantly turned to ash. The massive amount of death flames inside of him had healed away the damage that he had taken instantly but she had still managed to actually deal damage to him.
Amaranth dropped to her knees as her Flight spell died out and her mana pool had been entirely emptied. She had a trick up her sleeve that only her father realistically knew about, not that she had ever told him. There was just enough space, inside her breastplate between what it was named after, for a few ultra high grade mana stones to rest a mere inch or two away from her core. She had drained them entirely dry during their battle as well. She had used up more mana than any wizard had a right to use in one battle and all that she had managed to do was ruin one of his outfits.
Darkness approached his daughter and started clapping. "Bravo, bravo. You really did give it your all." He complimented her. "You did good, but you can do better." He added and stopped clapping.
Amaranth looked up at him like he had finally lost his damned mind, for good this time.
"I don't see why the greatest maker of new spells, probably ever but definitely the best one alive, can't make a new spell while she's fighting." He went on. "It is just words, geometry, intent, and mana manipulation. You are incredible at all four, otherwise you wouldn't be where you are now. You're sharp and quick on your feet too which is necessary for making new techniques or spells on the fly. All you are missing is actually doing it. Every day, until you are ready, we will keep doing this."
"I…" She stopped to take another deep breath. "I am not The Engineer… father. I cannot just… make up magic… as I go along." She sat back on her haunches and stared up at him. "Even then, he still takes at least a few minutes to come up with new enchantments."
"And you are better than him." Darkness told her with absolute faith in his words. "So do it."
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