Lateral Movement

by Alzrius

888 - Edge of Annihilation

Speed had become the key to survival.

Moving faster than a mortal eye would have been able to follow, Lex didn’t stop for an instant, remaining in constant motion. In the time it took to blink, Lex had already crossed the valley several dozen times, making sure never to take the same path twice. He’d also used his shadow-form to its fullest, conjuring black crystals to displace Kryonex’s ice – since it remained impervious to incorporeality – so that he’d be able to move through the ground as well, broadening his range.

All of which was just barely enough to keep him ahead of the teleporting sphere.

Without being able to see the thing’s future, there was no way for Lex to predict where it was going to teleport next. So he’d been forced to keep it guessing in turn, moving as fast as he could in order to dodge the sphere’s attempts to simply shift to wherever he was at a given moment, avoiding it by the thinnest of margins. Although it would immediately rush after him after each teleportation, he was still able to outpace the thing, and it would invariably give up after only a short pursuit to instead try teleporting again.

The result was that the sphere was putting whatever intelligence it had to use, trying to anticipate where he was going to be instead of simply teleporting to where he was. But it had been easy for Lex to guess that the orb would try that. Aiming ahead of a moving target was a basic principle of ranged combat, even when the technique being utilized was tactical teleportation, and he’d made sure to avoid moving in patterns, changing direction multiple times in any given second in order to throw it off.

It was a strategy he could pursue only because he was a titan. Ignoring inertia, pushing the air out of his way via will alone, and feeling no strain despite continuous exertion were all things that would have been beyond any mortal. Nor were any of those the hard part.

Rather, the hard part was continuing his fight with Kryonex while simultaneously avoiding the sphere.

But I’ll be the one who wins! snarled Lex inwardly as he cast an overcharged, metamagic-enhanced spell just as Kryonex passed above a particularly large patch of black crystals that he’d previously made. Instantly, the rigid protrusions sprung up on either side of the demigod like the jaws of a beartrap, snapping shut against his exoskeleton even as the entire mass plunged into the earth, collapsing in on itself as though a sinkhole had opened up underneath it.

Kryonex vanished immediately, and while Lex knew that wouldn’t hold the demigod for very long, it might give the sphere a chance to catch up to him-

But even as he saw the orb vanish again, the ground exploded – not near the sinkhole, but over a hundred yards distant – and Kryonex shot into the sky, having managed to extricate himself in time.

Nor was he content simply to run, as his eyes flashed again, in response to which a nearby drift of snow rose up, shaping itself to become sixteen life-sized replicas of the demigod, all of which immediately scuttled toward Lex.

At a glance, Lex could tell that Kryonex had created copies far beyond anything Grisela could have dreamed of making. Each one was not only autonomous, just like his astral constructs, but was completely self-sustaining, able to maintain its structure indefinitely rather than losing cohesion after a set duration.

But compared to what Lex could do now, the ice golems weren’t even a speedbump. A single spell sent a cascade of rubicund rays toward them, Nenet’s metamagic enabling the fiery beams to punch through the golems’ defenses as each shot curved after striking its target, arcing back around and repeatedly lancing through the ice-spiders again and again in a coruscating tide of destruction. Seconds later, the golems were nothing more than puddles of steaming water.

Leaving Lex and Kryonex back at square one, as the sphere continued to teleport after them.

But that didn’t mean that they were on equal footing. Although the demigod’s situation was the same as his own, Kryonex was being preferentially targeted. Having more divinity, the sphere seemed to consider him a greater priority, giving Lex slightly more room to go on the attack. Even better, Kryonex’s larger size meant that the sphere had more to go after, giving Lex a slightly larger window of opportunity in terms of slowing the demigod down.

But so far his every effort to capitalize on those advantages had fallen through, and the battle had turned into a stalemate, with neither of them able to effectively impair the other enough for the sphere to finish them off.

Considering that he’d lost whatever transformation he’d undergone, Lex knew that he was fortunate. If Kryonex had been any less harried, the demigod would doubtlessly have immediately attempted to will him out of existence again. As it was, even if he overcame the demigod, Lex knew the sphere would target him next, and he had no idea what to do when that happened. You couldn’t destroy something that was composed of literal nothingness!

The best idea he could come up with was to try and dump it on some other plane of existence, but if it could teleport through wards that even a demigod couldn’t breach, then he couldn’t imagine mere dimensional barriers would be enough to keep the thing at bay.

But that was a problem he’d need to solve later. Right now, Kryonex was an opponent that he could at least defeat-

That was when the universe began to collapse.

Or at least, that’s how it seemed to Lex, as all of a sudden everything – light, gravity, magic, and everything else that he could detect – was upended, folding in on themselves as they began to fall...

Toward the black orb.

No longer moving because it no longer had to, the sphere now sat at the center of everything, the fabric of the universe flowing into it like water down a drain. Air, stone, snow, lava, and everything else went tumbling toward the lightless orb, consumed as soon as they touched its edge, and Lex struggled to keep himself from being pulled in as well.

Willing reality to move him away from the sphere even as reality fell into it, the titan cursed himself for his shortsightedness. How could he not have foreseen this?! The thing was a void; by its very nature it should have sat at the center of a massive vortex, pulling everything nearby toward itself! But he’d taken its contained nature for granted, accepting as a given that it could only affect things it made physical contact with.

Now he was paying the price for his mistake.

But he wasn’t the only one, as Kryonex was also trying to frantically free himself from the thing’s pull.

Then the demigod glanced at him, and one leg shot out as he fired a blast of gelid energy directly at Lex’s face.

The beam, however, was just as subject to the sphere’s vortex as everything else, and it curved away, the space that it was moving through falling toward the orb and sending the blast off-target.

Lex watched carefully as the beam fell short, carefully calculating the rate of collapse, and when he retaliated a moment later, he made sure his own spell took that into account.

Then he created an open pit directly in front of where Kryonex was moving.

Under any other circumstances such a simple spell – the one he’d used to end his fight with Fail Forward during their first meeting – wouldn’t have done anything. The pit itself was too narrow to hold a creature of Kryonex’s size, it was meant to be placed on the ground rather than the open air, and his anti-teleportation wards should have prevented him from opening an extradimensional pocket in the first place.

But Nenet’s metamagic allowed him to widen the hole. Mystaria’s clasp let him ignore the effects of his own ward. And Solvei’s cryomancy let him conjure a massive iceberg right in front of Kryonex, placing the hole directly on the side facing Kryonex as the sphere’s vortex immediately sent it rushing toward the demigod.

Black crystals would have served just as well as ice, noted Lex hatefully, watching as Kryonex’s eyes flashed, shattering the iceberg.

But I knew that you’d try to counter it like that, rather than dodge, if I used your own element.

By all rights, the hole that he’d created should have collapsed in on itself as soon as the iceberg shattered. The spell’s structure required that the opening to the extradimensional space be anchored to something – normally the ground – in order to sustain itself. But that had been his own contribution to the spell, feeding it enough additional energy during the casting to override that restriction, allowing for the space to maintain itself even without a focal point.

Like an immense open sack that could only be seen from the inside, the pit fell directly toward Kryonex, still caught in the sphere’s inexorable pull. The demigod was already moving, trying to leap clear of the falling portal, knowing that it dead-ended a few hundred feet past its entrance. But shattering the ice it had appeared on instead of getting clear had cost him, and it was too late to make up the difference.

An instant later, Kryonex was scooped up like a butterfly in a net.

Barely managing to hold his position, Lex watched as the demigod immediately tried to climb out, there being nothing within it to anchor him there. But that only served to make Kryonex’s situation worse, as simply exiting the extradimensional oubliette meant that he had to move back in the direction it was facing: toward the sphere. And with how rapidly the entryway was being drawn into it, Lex could already tell that the demigod wouldn’t get clear in time.

Kryonex seemed to realize that too, because what he did next was pure desperation:

His eyes darkening, he tore off one of his legs – the one Lex had previously speared straight through with Belligerence – and hurled it directly at the black orb, the limb trailing godsblood as it fell into the void.

Lex tried to catch it in his telekinesis, knowing that Kryonex was hoping a new infusion of divinity would disrupt the sphere’s vortex, causing it to go into another frenzy of expansion and contraction like when it had devoured his pedipalp. But now Kryonex’s closeness to the sphere worked to his advantage, and Lex couldn’t catch the falling leg in time, the rent limb and its liquid godhood being swallowed up by the lightless globe.

And just like that, the universe fell back into normalcy.

Lex righted himself immediately, moving to rush Kryonex as he charged Belligerence-

Only for nothing to happen, save for a strained ache to flow through him, causing Lex to snarl in panic.

The immense reserves of power that he was able to channel through his physical self – so much greater than when he was mortal, but still finite – had finally been used up.

He couldn’t overcharge Belligerence, or any of his thaumaturgical spells, anymore. Not until he had a chance to rest and recover his strength.

It took him only a fraction of a second to recalculate his plans now that Belligerence couldn’t pierce Kryonex’s defenses, forming new strategies based exclusively around spell usage. But that was all it took for the demigod to extricate himself from the extradimensional pit – now hanging stationary in the air – and tumble out, immediately distancing himself from Lex and the sphere both.

Not that he needed to worry about the latter, as it was once again immobile, reacting to the new infusion of divinity that it had received.

Except this time, its response to absorbing godhood wasn’t a mad frenzy of changing size. Instead, it seemed almost quiescent, hanging in the air without any-

No. Something was happening.

As Lex watched, the sphere’s shape slowly started to change. It wasn’t like before, when it had briefly seemed to quiver and compress before returning to its perfectly round shape. Instead, a bulge appeared, the surface deforming outward in an irregular outline. A moment later it died down, only to happen in a different part of the sphere. Then in a third spot, pressing further outward this time, the motion becoming quicker and more violent. It was almost as if...

Lex’s eyes widened as he realized what the sphere’s behavior reminded him of.

It was like there was something inside of it trying to get out.

Author's Note:

As the battle grows more pitched, Lex manages to outmaneuver Kryonex, forcing the demigod to sacrifice part of himself in order to survive!

Is the egg about to hatch? What will Lex do now that his inner reserves are finally drained?

Comments

[Not so New Brony]

Seems like Kyronex dun goofed there with his sacrificial play since the egg looks like it's close to hatching. Hopefully, it is still short of what it needs to release itself from the sphere cause Lex will need all the time he can get to formulate a possible strategy against it all while still having to deal with Kyronex.

Then again, the demigod might realize the danger there sphere is containing for the moment and understand that it'll be easier to cut his losses and flee back to his domain and let Lex die trying to stop the sphere though he'll likely try a parting shot if he does decide to flee.

[Booster Spice]

If Lex believes the thing can handle dimentional barriers far easier than hiss own spell wards, which it already does, shouldnt that mean that it can follow dific scrying spells directly back to any observing pantheons?

[Alzrius]

11752131 Well, it still needs to be aware of the scrying in the first place, and being able to follow a scrying sensor back to its origin point is a rather specialized ability in-and-of itself; if you see a drone, can you follow the radio waves guiding it back to their source?

Of course, what this thing can do is fairly undefined so far (though, like all creatures, it has game stats ) so it's certainly possible.

[Alzrius]

11752069 From Kryonex's standpoint, the issue was losing a piece of himself versus potentially dying, so he went with what seemed like the less-bad option. Of course, now that the sphere is reacting to it, it might turn out to be six of one, a half-dozen of the other. It's unclear if the egg is about to hatch, but if it does then it seems likely to be pretty much the end; if The Author thinks the entire pantheon would have a tough time fighting it, it's hard to see what chance Lex could have.

Still, if Lex has realized that the sphere is incubating some sort of creature, and that divinity is driving its emergence, then it's likely that Kryonex has also. What either of them do now is the real question, especially since neither seems to know how to fight something whose existence is made up of pure non-existence.