They appeared in the main public square of Zarkog’s capital city, his domed mountain visible in the near distance, still scarred and broken from the recent battle there. Talia floated three feet in the air and two feet behind Mark, keeping watch with her back to him.
Mark yelled at the sparse crowd of Sylvan scattered around the square, and magically augmented his voice to be heard with the same volume throughout the city. “Where’s Zarkog?!!! I’ve come to beat him into submission and to bring him to justice!!! I am Prince Mark of Hilia, Key to The Just Alliance, and if anyone gets in my way, they’ll get a beating as well!”
Before he was a quarter of the way through that speech they were attacked by thousands of Sylvan and dragon spell-casters who appeared all around. Their energies were effortlessly absorbed by Mark and Talia’s defenses and stored. Their items were soon charged to capacity, then Talia began distributing the excess power to their invisible squad mates far overhead, who distributed it further to others in the Link who had the capacity to hold it.
Mark ignored that, just as he ignored the quickly-growing maelstrom of incoming spells, other than to increase his volume to be heard over their rising cacophony. “Come on out and face me Zarkog, unless you’re afraid! I’ll beat you senseless, as easy as I beat these lackeys of yours!!” he yelled as he stuck out his arm and spun in a circle, casting a wave of automated Force spells all the way around him as he did so, while Talia spun behind him in perfect unison.
The Force spells selected their targets, drew sufficient power to have the intended effect on each one, pierced their targets’ Shields as hair-thin bolts, then expanded into spheres half the size of the target’s head and struck them each a rollicking blow to the face, knocking them half-unconscious. Thus his circling arm traced out a wave of cries and shouts of pain that extended to the horizon in every direction. None of their attackers escaped the staggering blow of his counter-attack. A few fell out of the sky, but retained enough consciousness to save themselves from the worst of the impact with the ground or buildings below. Civilian Sylvan in the square who had not been part of the attack stared in shock, and some of them fled with their children.
Mark nodded in satisfaction. “Does anyone else want a beating?” he yelled.
Another wave of attackers appeared as word of what he was doing quickly spread. There were several million of them this time, filling the skies for a quarter mile, but they fared no better.
In a moment of sudden inspiration, Talia reached behind her to Mark’s pocket and retrieved his portable Truthstone. She was reaching a limit of how fast their support wizards could distribute the power their Shields were absorbing, but if she’d begun reflecting it, as Shields were most commonly designed to do, it would lay waste to the entire vicinity around them. Instead she sent it into the Truthstone. The power almost seemed to disappear, so easily did the stone contain it.
“The godstone is receiving the power, and appears to be absorbing it easily!” Tithian reported.
“The other small stones are also becoming charged proportionately!” Yazadril added.
Meanwhile, Mark had waited a good, long five seconds, so it would be obvious to the attackers that their efforts were completely futile, then repeated his circular wave of magic blows to the face.
“Now this isn’t doing you any good at all, is it?” he yelled. “You’d better start realizing that there’s a new champion in the neighborhood! Zarkog is sure going to realize it as soon as he shows his arrogant face and gets it beaten!”
As he spoke an even larger wave of Serminaki had appeared and attacked.
“The stones are getting hot!” Talia told him. “We can absorb no more power! Cast your next spell out of the reserve in the stone!”
“Well it looks like Zarkog’s not here, so I’ll punish you fools for attacking me, then go knock on his door!” Mark yelled, and clapped his hands over his head, unleashing his magic punch in the face on every attacker at once, then Translocated himself and Talia to the top of the steel dome that capped the neighboring mountain.
Talia switched their Shields to reflective and reported that his Truthstone had cooled considerably. As the next attackers appeared, most were above them in every direction, and she had another inspiration, and shaped their reflective Shield into a tall and thin spike, pointed above and below. This ensured that almost all of the torrents of energy that the hundreds of millions of attackers cast at them was reflected down onto the steel dome below. For miles around, it looked like a new sun had been born atop the mountain, and then the dome began to explode.
“Let them pour it on for a while.” she smugly chuckled. “All they’re doing is destroying their Lord’s home and seat of government. He’s sure to be upset by that.”
The attackers had to Shield against the blowback of their own efforts. Then it began to rain steel on everything for two leagues, and globs of glowing yellow liquid were intermixed with orange-hot drops that were barely hardened and jagged red-hot chunks of every size. A portion of the attackers had to divert their efforts to protecting the city from this bombardment, but the rest continued the attack. After a pair of minutes, the rain of steel became a rain of stone as the destruction of the great dome was completed.
“I think that’s enough.” she mused a minute later. “There can’t be much left intact down there.”
“Right.” he nodded.
“Well you have to be the biggest bunch of slow learners I’ve ever had to beat some sense into at one time!” he yelled, and cast his magic mass beating again.
“Wow! Now that was a spell!” he marveled. “I got almost three billion of ‘em with it that time!”
The attacks did not resume. The air gradually cleared of smoke and debris and visibility was restored, revealing Zarkog floating some two hundred yards away. Only after they had seen and recognized him did he drop his cloaking, and his psionic presence became powerfully apparent.
“He does have some nice tricks.” Mark admitted.
“Concentrate! This is the crux of it all!” Quewanak sternly advised.
“Nice to have you with us again, Eldest.” Mark chuckled.
“You snacks are liars.” Zarkog stated derisively, and he actually sneered. “There is absolutely no chance that you two could hold even one hundred of my fighters at bay. You are nothing more than claws on the hand of those who are far more capable than you. You are a spelled sword in the fist of another.”
“Your main point is correct.” Mark nodded. He and Talia began to grow as he continued answering Zarkog. “I couldn’t give such a well-deserved beating to three billion Serminakis at once without some help, but the fact is that The Just Alliance is absolutely united in opposition to you and anyone who fights for you. So yes, perhaps it’s more true to say that you’re about to be beaten by everyone in The Just Alliance, rather than by me. On the other hand, I have been given absolute command of The Just Alliance. Mine is the fist that bears the claws and the sword. As for our personal capabilities, Talia and I are perfectly capable of beating your arrogant head in by ourselves, and without assistance. But we’re here to bring you to justice, not to engage in a glorification of our personal power, so we’re not going to chance that you’ll slither out of our grasp.
“You deserve to be killed for killing our citizens. Thus we have killed those who attacked our lands, and we killed some of those who sought to keep you from our justice the last time we were here.
“But as you’ve shown here in Serminak, it’s a greater victory to beat your opponent bloody without fear of reprisal due to overwhelming power than it is to simply kill him. More importantly, we have no wish to kill all of your people, or we would do so. Most Serminaki have not taken a direct part in crimes against us, unless you count chasing me all over the world and defending you, and we’d be willing to forgive that. Believe me, I could kill every Sylvan and dragon on Serminak right now if I wanted to. I just knocked three billion of you half senseless, and I’m not even breathing hard.
“Make no mistake. The Just Alliance is taking over Serminak. Our little demonstration here today, including the beating you’re about to receive, will show your people how things stand from this day forward in their own terms. The way of Serminak is that you have the right to do whatever you have the power to do. We have the power to beat you severely and to bring you to justice for what you’ve done to us. We have the power to find everyone who took a direct hand in killing our citizens and to do the same to them as we’ll do to you, and we have the power to prevent any of you from attacking us again. And we’re going to do it.”
“Perhaps.” Zarkog sarcastically replied. “But you should know that the way of the Serminaki has changed. I have shown them the way of order and efficiency, and I have won their admiration and their loyalty. They will not be swayed from my command by your words.
“Furthermore, you are not alone in the ability to wield the power of others. I can do so, even if most of my people cannot, and I am supreme at the skill. And while you have been stating your position in an obvious attempt to undermine my authority, my fighters have recovered from your attack and have withdrawn beyond your immediate reach. As you can see.
“I now wield their power. I don’t know how you manage to contain the magic of your alliance in such puny bodies without burning up like dry leaves on red lava, but you cannot continue to do so forever. And while my Sylvan may lack the thousands of tricks you fools have been using, I do not, and each one of them carries far more power than most of your best. Even my young dragons have no lack of raw power, for all their lack of experience.
“So while I may be facing the combined efforts of your pitiful alliance, you face the consolidated power of mighty Serminak. And I would judge my power to exceed yours by a full half. I give you this one chance to surrender, or it is you who will be beaten, and I promise you, you will be beaten to death. Both of you. If you surrender, you will survive your punishment, which will end, eventually. Your foolish illusion of size cannot save you.”
“Can he really do that?!” Talia asked in a panic, though she kept her expression calm. “Take the power of an entire continent of wizards within himself with conventional pull spells without burning out?! Without even having to Link with them?!”
“He would not say so if he could not!” Quewanak urgently insisted. “Kill him! Kill him now, while you can!”
“No! Let’s see what he can do first!” Mark countered. “He’s under-estimated us before, he could very well be doing it again! This is also a propaganda battle for the loyalty of Serminak, and we don’t gain that by killing him!”
As Mark had spoken with Zarkog, he and Talia had continued to grow, so far as observers could tell. Mark now stood four hundred feet tall, and his thicker build meant that he bulked a quarter more than the Dragon Lord. Behind him, Talia stood two hundred feet tall.
“You really should pay more attention to those you consider to be snacks, Zarkog.” Mark laughed. “While I can well believe that your foolish young dragons might actually revere you so much as to sacrifice themselves on your behalf, Sylvan lack any such sentiment. You have the power to beat them with impunity, so they’ve had no choice but to obey you, and they’ll do the same for me for the same reason. Once I’ve sworn them to justice, they can do whatever they want, without fear of such tortures.
“And while you’re right that this body is magic and not meat, it’s not an illusion, it’s a fully-powered Simulacrum. It doesn’t matter if my fists are flesh or Force, it’s still gives me the reach I need to punch your fire out. And while I could use other spells, there’s something instinctively compelling about a good old-fashioned beating. Like this one.”
As he said that last, he leaped forward and threw a strike with his fist, but most of the magic he used in that moment went into thousands of immensely powerful Force particles, each no bigger than a speck of dust. They shredded Zarkog’s incredibly charged Shield just in front of Mark’s gigantic fist of Force, which struck Zarkog’s snout without impedance, shattering it in a fountain of blood as the dark dragon spun back and away to minimize the impact.
Zarkog instantly Healed himself as he checked his spin and momentum. His incredible double voice screamed in rage as he blasted them with his fire and shot the most powerful bolt of destructive energy ever cast on Kellaran from his outstretched claws. Nor was he fooled by their simulacrum’s appearance, his bolt was aimed at their real bodies, floating in the center of Mark’s gigantic simulated torso.
As quick as he was, Talia was quicker, and she Translocated herself and Mark up into his simulacrum’s head, avoiding the bolt’s intense but short duration, which harmlessly passed below them.
It was to be noted later how lucky it was that it was aimed at a slight upward angle and so disappeared into the sky, for if that bolt had struck land it would have devastated everything for hundreds of miles in that direction. Zarkog’s blast of fire-breath was more instinctive than tactical, and was almost insignificant compared to the other energies being exchanged.
Meanwhile Mark had been unremitting in his attack, and ignored the bolt that passed through his simulacrum’s chest. He moved forward with his punch and followed it with an expert kick that broke Zarkog’s ribs, since his boot was also preceded by his many tiny Shield-shredders.
Even as Zarkog recoiled from the kick he blasted Mark and Talia with a directed Concussion, cast with unmatchable speed. The cone-shaped explosion blasted up and shredded Mark and Talia’s Simulacrums, their Shields, their armor and possessions, their weapons except for Ria and GrimFang, and their bodies. The two swords were thrown for miles by the blast.
It was a development that sent a shockwave through the minds of The Just Alliance’s wizards and sorcerers, and it was followed less than a twentieth of a second later by Povon’s cracking command; “Hold the Link!!! I have control!!!”
A tenth of a second after that they were all shocked again as the curse of Alilia showed it was indeed a powerful blessing. It seized control of the great Link from Povon and abruptly ripped a colossal burst of power out of the alliance spell-casters. It was so severe that several of the closer minds in the Link were momentarily stunned by their sudden loss of power, and Povon and Kragorram had to assist Equemev and Silaran to prevent them from falling out of the sky or revealing themselves to Zarkog. The curse restored Mark and Talia to life and health and restored their possessions as well, including fetching their swords by Translocation, all in less than another fifteenth of a second. It caused a flash and a crack of sound like lightning confined to a small point, and they momentarily illuminated and shook the sky and the land for miles around.
Less than a fifth of a second after their deaths, the Keys to The Just Alliance were back in the fight.
Zarkog had already healed his ribs and restored his Shields.
“Now stop playing with him!!!” Quewanak thundered over the Link as soon as Mark had retaken control of it. “Take him!!! Kill him if you can!!!”
“Zwak!!! Honey!!! Now!!!” Mark roared, his anger equal to the Eldest’s.
Three hundred and thirty-two thousand Sylvan and Serminaki dragons declared by voice and by Speaking to everyone within their range that they stood with The Just Alliance, and most of them succeeded in retaking control of their own power from Zarkog.
At the same time Empress Honey cast the spell that regained her command of Zarkog’s Swarm. With her entire race Linked under her control, she then attacked Zarkog psionicly and shredded dozens of his mental shields. He poured power into them with reckless speed, risking damage to his own brain in the process. She was on the verge of victory, having penetrated so deeply into his autonomous functions that he urinated involuntarily, before he turned the tide and forced her out of his mind.
Meanwhile, Mark attacked on the physical plane while Talia re-formed their shielding with a completely different set of defensive spells than she’d used previously. They’d re-manifested almost a mile from Zarkog, at the geometric center of the cloud of particles he’d momentarily made of them. Mark furiously cast millions of copies of his automated Force needles, but Zarkog had also changed the style of his defenses, which now extended for seventeen hundred feet around him in every direction. Rather than penetrating and shattering his Shields as they’d done to his thinner and harder ones, Mark’s hair-thin Force bolts were bogged down and absorbed before they could reach Zarkog’s black and silver scales.
Zarkog was still blasted back by the Force for almost six miles as he struggled to deal with the shock of losing his turncoats to The Just Alliance while conducting his psionic battle with The Swarm, but the only injuries he suffered were from the fierce and sudden acceleration forces he experienced. He Healed those, assessed the situation in a tenth of a second, and attacked again without even spending any time to check his momentum.
Talia’s fear and rage were almost overwhelming. She made one quick scan of the vicinity for enemies other than Zarkog and found none, then broke formation to turn and join in attacking Zarkog, while separating their defenses into duplicate sets of Shields around herself and Mark. She hoped they would create a tactical advantage by attacking Zarkog from two directions, but it was a critical mistake.
It had occurred to Zarkog to wonder why Mark had Talia with him, when she could be participating remotely as the rest of The Just Alliance’s magic users were doing. Why did Mark need her proximity? With her error, Zarkog seized his opportunity to find out. He hurriedly examined her with all his senses and all his concentration, then Translocated her away to the far side of Kellaran, and kept Translocating her around that hemisphere twelve times per second to prevent her from regaining her bearings and returning to the fight. Rather than deal with her Shields, he had simply Translocated them with her as a unit. Her defenses remained completely intact, but they did her no good now.
For the first time since it had struck her in Bojoston five days previously, Alilia’s curse seized her mind with it’s full and original horror, and more powerfully than it ever had before. The last remaining rational corner of her mind realized that she needed to return to Mark’s side to make the agony end, and that this need to stay close to him was the only harmful aspect of the curse that he’d failed to deal with when he’d made it into a blessing. These realizations also did her no good, and her helpless psionic shriek of tortured terror filled the Link for a moment, until Povon shut her out of it.
Zarkog realized that his gamble had paid off when Mark cringed and cried out and almost convulsed from the power of his wife’s psionic scream, followed immediately by the shock of suddenly being completely out of contact with her for the first time since before their wedding. Mark knew where Talia was as she was forcefully jumped about on the far side of the world, but that was it.
The dark dragon laughed triumphantly as he and his huge Shield crashed to the ground in a thick pine woodland, sending broken trees flying like matchsticks in a patch a mile long and half a mile wide.
Mark marshaled his mental resources with a fierce and determined effort. He roared with rage and unleashed Lightning on Zarkog with all the offensive power at his command as the dragon was rising back into the air. Zarkog countered with a highly concentrated beam of magic Fire a yard in diameter. They streaked towards each other to increase the effectiveness of their attacks until the facing surfaces of their Shields met and rebounded a bit.
Then it was a matter of power against power, and both were lost to view in the midst of the roaring and crackling inferno they were creating. Again, a new sun was born over Serminak, temporarily blinding any unprotected Sylvan or dragon who looked at it from up to two miles away, and the constant explosion of horrible noise partially deafened them as well.
In only a moment Mark realized that Zarkog was right; when it came to pure power, his and Serminak’s were greater than Mark’s and The Just Alliance’s.
Frantically Mark called The Swarm into the Link and added their power to his spells, but still it was not enough. He felt it when the power of the Serminakis who were sworn to justice began to be gradually added to his effort, as alliance spell-casters who had the ability and concentration to spare commandeered it with pull spells. He threw in all of his personal power, including what his power stone was sending him from Focus Mountain and the remaining magic stored in the Truthstones and his other items. Still, Zarkog’s attack was weakening his Shields slightly faster than his attack was weakening the dragon’s Shields. He dared not falter for an instant to try something else, for fear he would be immediately overwhelmed.
If he took power from his Shields to boost his attack, Zarkog’s Fire would be through his defenses in a blink. If he took power from his attack to boost his Shields, Zarkog’s Shields would be less strained as well, and the new balance of power was unlikely to be significantly more advantageous. Either way, he was still short on power.
His mind raced as he frantically tried to think of an answer to his dilemma.
He remembered what he had learned about holding his power, and how it increased his mental and psionic functions. In a desperate gamble, he took as much power as he could personally hold out of his attack. It was more than any mortal humanoid had ever personally held before, though it was a tiny fraction of the total, and it reduced by a bit the amount of time he could hold Zarkog at bay. At the present rate, Mark estimated his defeat, and that of The Just Alliance, to be about six seconds away.
Then many answers all came to him in a great flash of insight.
If the flesh of a person’s body absorbed raw power from the light of the source or the heat of the stone, and that was the only way it was done, then those with larger bodies would have more power than those with smaller bodies, all other factors being equal. But obviously that was not the case. The wizards of the gnomes were more powerful on average than the wizards of the giants, and by a wide margin. Many of the best wizards were some of the smallest individuals of their own races.
It must be that each person’s flesh and nervous system absorbed raw power with an individual efficiency, which then formed a field of energy around them, which acted like a collector that absorbed more power. A person’s total magic power must depend on their size, multiplied by the efficiency of their bodies in absorbing raw power, times their efficiency at converting that raw power into usable magic, times their inherent conversion rate of usable magic into a collecting field, times the size of the field, times the field’s efficiency at collecting more power. Which then allowed the creation of a larger field, which would collect more power, which allowed the creation of a larger field … One limiting factor must be the amount of a person’s power that was spent in collecting more power. When their capacity to hold power was reached, no more personal magic power was added to the energy field that collected raw power.
Control of the collecting field was key, as were the processes that transduced each type of energy to the next. Perhaps from the raw power to the collecting field to usable magic and right into a spell, skipping the body completely, like using a draw spell, with power from a larger energy field replacing Linked spell casters… There could be no limit to the power one could wield… And if he could make his collecting field surround Zarkog’s, he could block the dragon’s access to any source of raw power…
“Dammit, I need three seconds to figure this out and my Shields are collapsing!!!” he frantically called.
“Cast Shrink, curl your body into the tightest ball possible, pull your Shields into the smallest, hardest sphere you can manage, then pass me the Link as fast as you can while you have a momentary advantage!” a voice called back, and Mark realized it was Alilia.
He did exactly as she instructed as fast as he could, curling his suddenly two-foot tall body inside a greatly strengthened sphere of Shielding only one foot in diameter, and now much of Zarkog’s three foot wide beam of blue fire was bypassing him. This bought a critical second and a half before Zarkog further intensified his Fire to a white-hot beam ten inches wide.
But now Alilia had the Link, along with control of Mark’s Shield and the ongoing Lightning attack on Zarkog. She lost a tiny fraction of the time she’d gained him by taking a little power out of his Shield, but she used it well.
Mark was suddenly plunged into absolute darkness and silence. Then his eyes and ears began to adjust, and he realized that the lack of light and sound was not absolute, there was a dull red light coming from one side, along with a low rumble.
“Good job Alilia!!!” he impulsively yelled into his knees as he grasped what had happened.
‘She’s cast the volume inside my Shield into a reverse-stasis sphere!’ he thought with excitement. ‘For every second that passes out there, at least a thousand must be passing in here! That gives me at least ten minutes! All the time in the world!’
As it happened, six minutes later Alilia ended the stasis field and started Translocating him every tenth of a second, Shields and all, around the shattered mountain in five mile jumps. This took Zarkog’s aim off him long enough to do what he needed to do. Alilia kept him constantly apprised of his position, and where he was about to be on the next jump, and where Zarkog was in relation to those.
Mark took control of the Link, came to a sudden stop right in front of Zarkog, and cast an energy field around his opponent that cut off the Dragon Lord’s access to his followers’ power, and his access to the surrounding raw power from the stone and the Source as well. As he did that, the exultant young man expanded his collecting field to cover all the land for leagues in every direction except over the city, and used the resulting power to harden his Shields.
Zarkog fought to the last without realizing what was happening, blasting at Mark with his concentrated Fire beam for another third of a second, until he suddenly depleted the power he personally held and fell from the sky like a stone. He thrashed and screamed in rage all the way down, frantically beating his wings for control, but without his inherent Levitation, his wings had no hope of holding him in the sky. His center of mass had been over eight hundred feet above the ground, and he hit with a force that broke a quarter of his bones.
Talia appeared clinging frantically to Mark’s one-foot wide spherical shield and screaming hideously. He quickly cast Sleep upon her with enough power to ensure dreamless unconsciousness, caught her with Movement, dismissed most of his Shielding, and resumed his normal size.
He cradled her gently in his arms, and took a quiet moment to enjoy sweet victory.
“Thanks. We won.” he tiredly announced to his multitude of compatriots. “Start swearing everyone on this continent to justice. Don’t stop till you’re done.”