As the council members' wards were stripped away, Cheis pondered just killing them all briefly; it would certainly be satisfying and involve significantly less effort. But after a moment, her troublesome conscience intruded, as usual; despite how annoying they were, she didn't actually need to murder every single one of them, especially now that they were helpless. With a sigh, she cast a paralyzing enchantment upon them all, rationalizing to herself that if she wiped out the council, that'd be one more mess she'd have to clean up. One by one, the binding web settled upon each member, holding them immobile and putting them into a light slumber.

To Cheis's surprise, however, Archmage Ulbert managed to shake off the enchantment almost immediately; unbeknownst to her, his personal wards had been hooked into a simple but clever dispel-bound trigger which shunted a streamed copy of themselves off into a dimension of Ulbert's own devising upon being forcibly removed, then reassembled themselves afterwards. He struggled weakly to his feet, fussed with his robe a bit, and turned to regard Cheis across the wrecked and body-strewn length of the audience chamber; Cheis stared back at him coolly.

Ulbert, a bespectacled and weak-chinned man in his early forties, had been archmage of the Celi'sa Most High Arcane Council for more than a third of his life; his wild mane of now-graying hair and diffident but brilliant scholarship had distinguished him since his teenage years in a prestigious sorcery academy. People often assumed that he was a sort of figurehead or mascot; he typically preferred to let others on the council take the lead in matters of governance and decision-making, which concerned most of the actual business they handled. In truth, Ulbert was archmage not because of any actual aspiration towards leadership but because of his rather psychopathically fierce desire not to be denied access to secrets of the occult; by his reasoning, if he were archmage, nobody could forbid him the tomes or spells that he wished to study, and for most of his career this had worked out rather well. He was a bit like a large, powerful hammer that the other members of the council kept in a closet and trotted out as the occasion required; he had the benefit of perspective on many matters, was content to stay out of things he felt to be unimportant, and was generally in favor of stability and tranquility. All in all, he was (quite by accident) the best ruler the city had had in its long history. But he did have his own share of flaws, and one of these flaws was that Ulbert Malbruggen did not like to lose. Early and highly traumatic formative experiences at the hands of bullies had taught him that everything else was second to victory, and victory was often a simple contest of power. He had been content to live and let live as long as Cheis stayed out of his business, but obviously things had progressed entirely too far for that now. He straightened his glasses, jutted out his chin, and raised his hands.

"Don't try it," warned Cheis.

Ulbert paused. "Um. I'm pretty sure that when someone tries to kill you, you probably shouldn't listen to their advice."

Cheis pondered this, then sighed. "Okay. Your funeral."

Ulbert's first spell, a rather clever local entropy inversion, turned the air in the room dark and impossible to breathe; Cheis was actually sufficiently surprised that it took her nearly a full second to hack together a localized exception for herself (and, after a few seconds of waffling, another one for the paralyzed council members to prevent them from asphyxiating). She countered with a hammer-blast of kinetic force which should have turned Ulbert into a stain across the rear wall, but he deftly crafted a defense in a split second which not only avoided it but translated it across several axes of prospection, which converted it into a fractal semi-autonomous mote of abjurative power. It split itself into twenty-three copies which began to orbit his head like a halo as he spread his hands like a cat's cradle, stars appearing between his fingers, and turned a spatial cube around Cheis into an area contiguous with the center of the earth.

Cheis's wards, which had been prepared for exactly this sort of thing, dismissed the congruence automatically before the heat or pressure could even affect her; she grimaced, pausing for a split second to admire her opponent's artistry, then got to work executing scripts that invoked daemons which spun up procedurally-generated dispel attempts on the various vectors of Ulbert's sources of arcane power. The effect was a bit like being attacked by several hundred mages at once, which Cheis figured should have ended the battle pretty much instantly.

One of the reasons that Cheis of Veraleigh was generally considered to be the preeminent sorceress of her generation (and indeed, of every other generation in anyone's memory) was not because she was a rare genius or prodigy, but simply because the level of technological sophistication of her spellwork was so far beyond that of her contemporaries that it was a bit like comparing the calculating power of an abacus against that of, say, a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4; it was hardly a sporting contest. But Ulbert Malbruggen actually was a once-in-a-generation genius of spellcasting, and he was in a fight for his life against a demonstrably superior foe; each mystic exchange forced him to innovate at the absolute limit of his ability, and his ability was quite impressive indeed. He invented new paradigms and conceptual frameworks on the fly as he fought, immanentizing inversions of cosmogonic tensor fields in real-time as he nullified, avoided, or outright rendered himself tangential to the various modes and methods of Cheis's distributed-denial-of-existence attacks. If Cheis had had an astral perception enchantment active (which she did not, as such things were basically asking to have your consciousness rooted in a mage-battle) she would have seen some pretty amazing stuff, as Ulbert grew extra limbs and eyes and dimensions of existence in various astral contexts in a casual sort of way most people would associate with gods or eldritch horrors. Ten seconds in, the room was a pretty epic battlefield, with blasting winds that were both searing and freezing, bursts of negative light and bolts of concentrated un-reality flying all over the place; thirty seconds in, things had rather gotten out of hand and the basic laws of reality were breaking down at breakneck speed as solid objects melted and air turned into phlogiston and other such difficult-to-understand bleed effects proliferated.

During all this, Undermagus Boimaz LaCroix quietly expired from his wounds, which was something of a relief to him. This had a number of consequences, one of which was that the headcount of remaining members of the council dropped to seven; but the important bit was that his personal death curse enchantment, which he had crafted while extremely drunk some years ago and subsequently forgotten about, took effect. A burst of dispelling force, followed by a titanic vacuum of power, abruptly filled the room; it mostly fed upon thermal and kinetic energy, of which there was a copious surfeit, but it also rather deftly drained emotional dynamism from all present. For the bound members of the council, this mostly just increased their listlessness, and it barely registered in the consciousness of Ulbert (who was having some fairly intense personal experiences as part of this whole process), but managed by sheer luck to slip through an unforeseen vector in Cheis's defenses and struck her squarely in the psychic giblets. A tremendous wave of despair and ennui crashed through her, and her psychological equilibrium, which was shaky at the best of times, did not handle it well. Tears began to erupt from her eyes as her spellcasting slowed and her will to fight faltered; Ulbert, now spiritually occupying an infinite number of dimensions and perceiving through a number of transcendent senses not expressible by most systems of mathematics, felt the shift in the holistic totality of all possible universes and advanced, pressing his advantage. Withering under an onslaught of cross-umbral nega-bolts, Cheis fell to her knees, and Ulbert raised his hands (two physical, several infinities of metaphorical) above his head for the final blow.

***

Galar Kayle jerked involuntarily as Meloria abruptly grabbed him around the chest with one arm and took firm hold of the boat's gunwale with the other; a split-second later, the boat surged forward with titanic force as its speed multiplied nearly tenfold, and he realized that she'd acted to prevent him from being tossed overboard like a discarded cap. Velinaer, standing rather heroically at the ship's prow, was keenly focused on the events unfolding before him; he could now see that the igg was much closer to its goal than he liked, and wanted very much to cut it off before things really got unpleasant. He began putting together the first salvo of sanitizing enchantments, trying carefully to figure out exactly how to cordon off and dereify the contamination despite the igg's tremendous size.

Across the harbor, the igg towered over a large number of screaming humans on various boats and ships as it curiously stomped its way through emergent wreckage; its current form looked a great deal like a titanic eye growing from a black egg of hard stone, supported by a black-and-red mixture of veiny, knobbly roots of tremendous complexity. It was not cephaloid, humanoid, or anything-else-in-nature-oid, but rather something deeply unsettling which gave shrieking observers strange impressions of various shifting shapes as its body reconfigured itself again and again with every movement. It trod upon a large and very fancy galleon as the way to its destination became clear, just as Velinaer's boat, now traveling at nearly eighty knots and rising, shot like a bullet between two ferries scrambling to carry refugees away from the devastation and entered the waters around Apecis at last.

In another thirty seconds of concentration, Velinaer would probably have completed his preparations and fired a devastating salvo at the igg, sparing the world a terrible fate and bringing its rampage to a cataclysmic end. Unfortunately, Velinaer rather lost command of his faculties upon seeing the igg's objective with his physical vision (rather than a series of diagnostic runes created by various ping and tracer spells), because it was horribly, mind-blowingly familiar to him.

In college, Velinaer had done a short stint as an intern for the consulting group MelanasterNet, which he had found overwhelming and stressful; his tasks had mostly consisted of performing tedious calculations, fighting with visualization enchantment frameworks, and sitting in meetings while feeling uninformed and stupid (for the experience!). The firm's key project at the time, an isolated network uplink requiring downright revolutionary efforts to provide reasonable uplink speeds while being so far from the infernal transit hubs, had gotten a lot of publicity and been the subject of much celebration after its completion; Velinaer had been left out of most of this, but he had been invited to an awkward and uncomfortable gala where he stood by himself in a corner eating hors d'oeuvres and stared at the high-quality aerial imagery of the installation site, a sun-bathed temperate island owned by some kind of famous architect. The deep embarrassment of the whole experience had preserved the visuals quite nicely in his mind, and seeing it in real life was enough of a shock of recognition. But the environs, obviously having been changed and altered by the passage of hundreds of years of time, finally drove the truth rather directly through Velinaer's skull; he hasn't been teleported to the other side of the world, he'd been asleep for centuries. His entire civilization was dust, and the reason nobody could understand him was because he was speaking a fucking dead language. And that meant that the entire caconet was gone, forever, and he'd never get to watch another show or play another video game for all eternity.

This was, as one might expect, something of a brain-rebooting shock to poor Velinaer Dax'taxu, and he quite lost his shit for a minute or two. He did not fall to his knees or let out an anguished scream or anything of that nature, because (as usual) his body did absolutely nothing without direction and his mind was mostly screaming and sobbing rather than, say, instructing it to bend such-and-such a joint in this fashion or another. But the boat slowed and then stopped, Galar blinked in confusion and asked a number of increasingly urgent questions, Meloria swayed slightly, and the igg reached out towards its goal with one blasphemous appendage. The doom of the world was at hand.

***

"A pity," hissed Nyoque. "This was almost a -- Uwah!"

The rather high-pitched and shocked exclamation was triggered by the deeply unexpected event of Linduin's hands snaking around its hips and grabbing its buttocks firmly and tightly. Nyoque, while not a sex demon per se, was at least open to the general idea, and this event distracted it for the crucial one-half of a second required for Linduin to lever his hips forward and his shoulders back and lift the rakshasi up off the ground into the air. Denied leverage, its exceptional strength was less of a concern, but not for long; it could still bite Linduin's face or crush him with its arms, and so he really only had one available option. He sighed, made an apologetic expression into his opponent's face, and launched them both backwards out the window.