Chương 116: Personal Reality Demesne

It was very, very rare for Ryland to feel anything akin to panic. Those sorts of emotions frayed one's judgment, and he had spent a good amount of time excising them from himself. He hadn't been fully successful in that endeavour, but he had succeeded in one way. They no longer affected him as they might have once upon a time. So, as the first hints of panic poked at his brain like a regiment of mounted lancers spearing through footmen, Ryland pressed it to a corner of his mind. A Calamity was rising. So what?

He was present, and like everything else he faced, he'd handle this too. Just as he had handled every other Calamity he had faced down. There was no stopping its birth now. Far beneath him, Ankh-Viyo kept switching between jeering laughter and awed rapture. Ryland didn't even bother paying the mage any attention. If it had been someone like Righteous or Valorous present, he'd have taken some satisfaction in silencing them, but a mere underling was no longer worth his time.

Nor was finding the exact location of the Vestige. He could sense it, however. Having spent long enough soaking in the ambient mana and acclimatizing to the locality, his senses were now able to part the mana threads just enough to determine where the Vestige was working. Right there beneath him. In the darkness slowly arising out of the surface of the ocean. In the area where he was sure he had unleashed utter annihilation with [Sun Summoning]. How had the Calamity survived? Something to figure out later.

First, he had a Calamity to deal with.

"Be careful," Ryland said.

"I've held them down for now, but don't be surprised if they find some way to slither out and cause trouble again." Most of them appeared too shocked to reply. They were all staring at the Calamity slowly rising out of the sea. At the moment, it appeared to be a dark egg of sorts. An oblong orb the size of a castle keep, slowly taking to the air. All the liquid blackness from whatever conjunction of Realms that the Order had thrust the Living Mana through had now solidified.

"That thing, sir…" Viren couldn't finish his sentence.

"Great Gods," Mage Knight Ophelia said. Her voice seemed to come out a little haltingly, like she hadn't gotten to use it properly for a while.

"I know you're many things, Ryland. That you're capable of a great deal. But this… this is a Calamity. I can feel it. The world can feel it. Everyone in the whole Realm, perhaps in all of Accorded Realms—""Ah, true." Ryland nodded his head in the Mage Knight's direction.

"Apologies for the interruption, and thank you for mentioning that." He faced the rising Calamity and the magic throbbing out of it with endless distortions." [Reality Demesne]." Ryland's manasoul turned incandescent as an eruption of magic surged out of him in an instant, like a thousand lightning bolts striking the same spot simultaneously. Everyone cried out and fell back, but thankfully did nothing more.

Ryland appreciated it because his attention was focused on the construction of the second layer of reality he was imposing on his target. He was creating an oblong sphere too, except this one was big enough to hold Arcoryx City.

Innumerable rifts created a net that could have covered the city in ease. The darkness within compressed as their golden edges cracked, fractures spiderwebbing outwards to touch each other until everything turned whiter than starlight. Until a new, enormous bubble of reality had formed. The entirety of which now enclosed the rising Calamity.

"This…" Ophelia's voice failed again.

"You just created your own Reality Demesne," another of the Mage Knights said, one Ryland only recognized faintly as having seen around the academy.

"In hardly a minute." There was even the elvhenan one who had challenged Ryland to a duel.

"This is insane. I thought the Calamity was bad enough, but this… no single mage is supposed to be able to this. Even if its magic is now contained. I can barely feel it."

"Indeed," Ryland said.

"I made sure it would no longer cause worldwide panic." He decided he had spent long enough ensuring everything was contained. Especially since the egg was cracking, flakes of darkness falling off into the edges of the Reality Demesne. Even more so because the Order mages were starting to panic.

"No!" Ankh-Viyo screamed from below, leading the tantrum.

"Give it back! Give us our god back! This instant!" Ryland just rifted inside his Reality Demesne. The Calamity was already emerging from its cocoon. A tremendous amount of force and pressure kept coming out with it, churning the atmosphere inside the Reality Demesne into a hurricane. Despite the barrier encasing his form, Ryland was starting to feel the pressure weighing on him from every conceivable direction. This was a Calamity in truth. The first tendrils burst out with thunderclaps.

Literal ones, oily lightning splintering out from the cocoon of black, glassy material. Then the monster within pushed out. Ryland was actually fascinated by its appearance for a little while. Enough to simply be content watching it. Because this was a Calamity he didn't have any real connections to. Otherwise, his manasoul would have resonated with it, especially now that it was unleashed. This was an entirely unknown creature. The being was a sinuous manifestation of wrongness.

Ryland didn't have a better way of thinking about it. Its body was thin mass of black flesh studded at certain areas with hard, grey scales. If Ryland squinted, there was a vague humanlike figure to it. But really, all those tendrils and tentacles fluttering everywhere really cut through that line of thinking. Five main appendages stretched down from its neck. Two shorter ones spread out on either side like "arms", with two longer and thicker ones closer together near the centre like "legs".

A single central one stretched out like a tail. And every appendage was topped with multiple, spiky tendrils as though they were malformed fingers. Above it all rested its head. More tentacles stretched out like hair, shorter ones. Where it should have sported a face was nothing more than a jagged slash stretching from its chin to its forehead, weirdly reminiscent of the Wound Corridor. If nothing else, the Order had certainly ensured their pet project was as horrific as possible. It screeched at him.

The sound hit like the wail of thousands dying at once, attempting to reach into Ryland at a subliminal level. A separate layer of reality. One that wouldn't be affected by his [Eternal Bastion] spell. He could appreciate its ferocity for certain. Sadly for the Calamity, it appeared to not realize that it was facing an Incarnation. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

His Glyph of Sundering acted on the last few chains keeping his real power from showing, and then it came alive. A world constructed of Glyphs. An all-consuming outpouring of pure magic flew from him like a volcanic eruption dammed up for centuries now finally allowed to shoot its immensely volatile power out into the atmosphere. The tables turned. Where the Calamity's magic had been pressing in on him for all this time, he now threw it all back. His magic re-suppressed the power that was trying to hem him in.

A newly-risen mountain swallowed by a ravenous sea refusing to stay down." [Absolute Timefort]," Ryland incanted. The spell Ryland used combined his Soul Glyphs of Aegis and Time. Nothing could get through now, save for the senses and other vital things he allowed. There was a layer of time in front of his barrier. A difference in time streams that stopped anything existing beyond him from existing in his vicinity. Which was why the Calamity's scream no longer reached him at all.

The monster continued shrieking, continued gathering its immense power. The air around it was warping under the severe magical pressure, like a mirage in a desert. It charged. The warped air cracked. It even combusted, an explosion of energy and volatile mana empowering its momentum. Ryland just cast a Glyph of Switch. He could have simply ended its momentum as it bumped into [Absolute Timefort], but he had other ideas in mind. Staying on the defensive wasn't going to work.

He needed to end the threat the monster presented. So, just as its screeching form reached him with its clawing tentacles got in range, the Glyph of Switch activated. Ryland and the Calamity switched positions. Of course, they maintained their original momentum. Ryland was as still as he had been. Meanwhile, the Calamity went charging in the opposite direction with its blinding speed. It rushed out so far that it actually collided with the walls of the Reality Demesne.

The monster let loose another rippling shriek, unleashing jagged waves of sound that scratched at his barrier. Ryland just tutted. Ineffectual. It would need to do far better. Too bad it was still a newborn Calamity. In his manasoul-powered sight, Ryland saw a second layer of magical reality where every single thing was written in Glyphs. The boom of the cracking air, the shockwave, the bursting energy, even the ripping sounds waves—Ryland read them all as Conceptual Glyphs.

The only thing illegible to him was the Calamity. It was one of the densest collection of Conceptual Glyphs he had ever seen. So much so that there was no hope of reading it. Even in the infinitesimal moment when they were close together, when he could have used [Mindscape] to freeze everything and give himself time to decipher it all, it wouldn't have worked. A Calamity, even a newborn one, was a creature of fathomless complexity. Moreso than even his own body. The current one, at least.

With another crack, his enemy launched itself at him. This time, it even tried adding its magic into play, its furious power adding onto the monochrome spell coming to life. Ryland was already acting, however." [Continental Step]." Far above them all, near the very ceiling of the Reality Demesne, a rift the size of a small city cracked open. From its depths, a foot of rock and magma fell.

A towering block of half-molten metal and stone hammered out of the rifts, a step big enough to destroy all of Arcoryx, one thumping down with the meteoric power that such a size afforded such a creature. The footstep of the Magma Goliath from Realm 29 crashed down like an apocalypse upon the Calamity.

Needless to say, the monster got caught. It was fast. It possessed incredible strength, both physical and magical. But the gargantuan foot came down far too fast. The Calamity screamed again as it was stomped upon like a bug. Of course, with the massive power on display, the step would leave a terrible dent on the Reality Demesne's boundary if it landed. So, Ryland created another enormous rift, this one right over the Reality Demesne's lower boundary.

It was big enough to swallow down the gigantic step, taking the Calamity with it. Ryland himself was at the very edge of the pocket of reality he had created, so he wasn't affected despite the massiveness of the monstrous rocky foot. And it turned out his opponent made it through as well. A Wound Corridor burst out of the gigantic magma leg. From its depth of spatial gore, the Calamity emerged, forcing itself through and out before Ryland once more. It was severely wounded.

Half of the monster was burned to ash, chunks of its body still on fire, with its back appearing as though it had been steamrolled into a new road. And yet, there was no difference in the virulent mana it channelled. If anything, the intensity of its oily, consuming magic had only grown despite the hit it had suffered. The Calamity shrieked at Ryland.

"Hmm," Ryland said. It attacked with magic this time. Monochrome power formed into tearing claws that lashed through reality to assault Ryland. Ryland's Soul Glyphs of Aegis and Genesis came alive." [Awakened Avatar]." The barrier empowered by his manasoul came alive. Literally. Magic burned through him, sizzling with ever rising intensity, the barricade twisting and reshaping in less than a fraction of a second to create an actual translucent avatar around him.

One whose gigantic arms shot out to stop those claws of monochrome magic. With a shriek, the monster shot at him directly, throwing itself at Ryland as though it had been fired from a cannon.

A corona of the same black-and-white magic with the oily lightning surrounding it, forming a destructive penumbra moments before hitting Ryland. He just turned its magic off. With how his manasoul form allowed him to see everything as Conceptual Glyphs, Ryland didn't even need to read the magic before he could act on it. Just a bit of focus, a little will pushed into his Soul Glyph of Sundering, and the penumbra disappeared. It was now just the Calamity rushing him down through the air.

Which Ryland stopped with ease thanks to [Awakened Avatar]. His barrier broke and reformed as all the monochrome magic had been simply deleted. The chest area of the former avatar crashed in on itself, before an arm shot out. Despite its shrieking, despite it clearly attempting to stop itself before it shattered against his barrier, it couldn't stop itself. The massive hand caught it and held it tight. Then the arm thrust even farther back." [Immortal Maelstrom]," Ryland incanted.

Despite the Calamity seeking to spear out of the avatar's grip, despite the oily energy crackling across it like lightning, the monster didn't manage to break free. Moments later, the violent storm Ryland unleashed finally overtook it. Where that continental giant's footstep had existed, an eternal storm came into being. A ripping cyclone sliced around with winds fast enough to circumnavigate Vyrd several times in a minute.

Lightning never ceased blasting through the area, a crisscross of endless, destructive light netting the entire madness. Hail sharpened to piercing bullets weaved through the chaos this way and that. The storm's fury had burgeoned out of the zone Ryland had set for it in the blink of an eye, quickly assaulting the entirety of the Reality Demesne. Ryland's barricade avatar thrust the Calamity straight into the heart of that pandemonium of utter annihilation.

Its shrieks reached a pitch that actually went beyond his current body's capability of hearing. Oily lightning and black spears tried to shoot out of that eternal storm, but they were having almost no luck. Until another Wound Corridor opened, spitting out the ruined but still living remains of the Calamity. Which ended up just facing yet another spell of complete destruction." [Eye of the Earth]," Ryland cast, A small simulacrum of the sun popped up right where the Wound Corridor had opened.

It wasn't the sun, of course. Rather, Ryland had opened a rift straight to the core of the planet, to the superheated, super-condensed mass at the centre of the world. The rift snapped shut around the Calamity before it even knew what was going on. Sometimes, Ryland abstractly wondered just what kind of torture he was putting his opponents through when he used all his rifts.

Stepped on by a giant that could call a continent its bedroom, forced into in a storm of razor wind and endless lightning, and then trapped in the core of a planet where the heat and pressure were indescribable. Even if one could physically survive such experiences through the boundless miracle that was magic, how did one stay sane after that? Ryland had been quite merciful when he had taken Sokolo Dyron on that little tour through multiple Realms when he had gone about subduing the Empyrean-ranked mage.

Things could have gone a great deal worse for Dyron. Once more, almost inevitably so, the monstrous Calamity burst back to life out of another Wound Corridor opening. Ryland hardly recognized it from what he had first seen it as. The tentacles were fused together now, forming proper but misshapen limbs. Its body was half eaten away, patches still covered in flaming lava. Half of it was still crumbling away. The remainder of hair-tendrils had now hardened into horns. It was a reforged mess.

One that was once again sparking with violent power, with electric intensity, with a burst of power that had one goal only—to overcome Ryland. He sighed. This wasn't working. It just kept coming back. Ryland was separated from the rest of the world thanks to his Reality Demesne, but he had no trouble locating the source of his troubles. The mad cackling of Ankh-Viyo was clear even from this distance. Hmm.

If Ryland left to deal with the Order mage, he couldn't quite trust that the Calamity wouldn't emerge through a Wound Corridor and wreak havoc on the world. Anything he tried to hold it in place would need to be extremely effective. A simple [Dimensional Lock] wouldn't be enough. Then he frowned. Someone else was looking right down at Ankh-Viyo. More than one someones. People Ryland could put his trust in. Especially once he understood their intention. He smiled. It seemed he could keep focusing on the Calamity.

He just had to keep it occupied a little bit longer…