“So, we just need to deal with the person at the center of the lightning storm?” Rissa fidgeted with her armor, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be.

“Yes, but you can’t come with me.” Serenity noticed Rissa avoiding the word “kill”, but didn’t comment. “Any of you. I don’t think I can protect anyone else from the storm, and we have to get past it.”

“How are you going to get past it?” Rissa glanced at the lightning, then at Serenity. “If you can’t protect anyone else?”

Serenity turned to look at the storm. It was getting closer quickly, but there was still a decent distance. “I’m going to fly. I’ll use a multi-Affinity spell to adjust my electrical charge once I’m in the air … it won’t work if I’m grounded. That’s why I can’t bring anyone else, I don’t think any of the rest of you can fly.”

“We could get a plane?” Rissa offered.

Serenity shook his head. “Not enough time. I wanted to hide underground and come up once the outer ring of the storm was past, that would let us all go in, but we don’t have the time to dig a big enough tunnel. As for buildings, well, that’s a lot of lightning strikes. I don’t know if the spell will melt buildings but I don’t want to risk it.”

Rissa huffed, but didn’t seem to be able to come up with any options Serenity hadn’t already discarded. It was too bad; he really would have preferred not to have to go after the spellcaster alone.

“Serenity? You should see this.” Jim Larkin called out to the group gathered a little way away from the SUVs.

Serenity accepted the excuse to leave the no-longer-productive discussion and headed over to see what the reporter thought was important.

The reporter’s tablet was playing a news clip; it had the News 8 logo at the bottom with the words BREAKING NEWS just below it, but the interesting part, at least to Serenity’s eyes, was the grainy image of a centaur who was clearly casting a spell. The newscaster repeated an introduction she’d clearly made before. “If you’re just joining us, there’s a battle happening just east of Denver; the first time war has reached our shores since the Civil War.”

If Serenity remembered his history correctly, that wasn’t actually true.

“We just showed you a massive upwelling on radar; now it’s time to show you what caused it. This video was captured by cameras airdropped over the past week.”

Serenity stopped paying attention to the news anchor to watch the video as it started moving. It showed the spellcaster moving around the ritual circle; Serenity was able to make out only a few pieces of the ritual, and there was no sound. Even so, it looked like he’d guessed correctly about the spell. The ritual seemed to be about power gathering and amplification in size rather than power. It was a spell whose volume had been massively increased, but there shouldn’t be any additional sensory capability.

Which meant he should escape detection as long as he didn’t attract too many lightning strikes. He wanted to attract none; being charred by lightning wasn’t a good look for anyone. He didn’t know how it would affect him and he didn’t feel the need to test it.

When the short video ended, Serenity looked up at Jim Larkin. “Thanks. That was useful.”

“Don’t you want to see the video of your fight? It should be on next.” The reporter seemed puzzled that Serenity was already moving on.

Serenity shook his head, then waved towards the lightning. “Not really. I’ll catch it later; right now, I have a spellcaster to take care of.”

Rissa proposed several other ideas before Serenity left for how they could join him; unfortunately, even she had to admit that none of them were possible in the time they had available if they wanted Serenity to have a chance to deal with the centaur and its storm before it reached Denver.

At least, the safe ones weren’t. He was worried that she seemed about half-serious about waiting out the exterior of the storm in a metal building; all it would take was one poor ground connection and they’d be sitting in a lightning-based trap. The likelihood of repeated strikes didn’t make him feel better, so he’d eventually extracted a promise from her that she’d stay with and protect the reporters instead of trying to follow him in.

Serenity was confident she’d be with whatever reporters wanted to be the closest, but that she’d also take their safety into consideration. Rissa would value their safety more than her own, and keeping them safe would probably keep her within reasonable limits. It was the best he could do.

Serenity hated to leave but it had to be done. He waved at the SUVs as they ran from the lightning, then turned and started walking towards it. He couldn’t go faster than that and build the spell he needed at the same time; he was having to assemble it as he went, and a mistake might or might not be disastrous.

Energy to manage the charge. SpaceTime to define the space; Nihility then Liminality to isolate himself from it. Plasma to handle the surface conditions it might cause. It was a very, very ugly spell, but to do better he’d need to test it. He’d have preferred to conduct the first test in less dangerous conditions, but that wasn’t an option.

At the last moment, he added some discharge conditions; if he was lucky, the lightning mage might have missed properly handling the reconnections, and he might be able to simply disrupt the spell with itself. It was unlikely, but turning the spell on itself was the only way he’d be able to quickly harness the power needed to cancel it other than killing its last remaining controller.

He wasn’t very close to the storm when he started feeling it. That worried him; it meant that there was a very large affected area, but there was nothing he could do about it. Serenity shifted, both of his shapes becoming Sovereigns of the Origin.

The feeling of charge was different in his shadowy Sovereign form. He could still feel it, but it was almost more like seeing than feeling, somehow. Serenity drifted upwards, then started casting the spell. It cast like the hacked-together clunker that it was, made from bits of other spells without more than the minimum of stitching to hold it together.

He could see the effect of the spell, the same way he could see the charge differential in front of him; not enough to arc through the air, but it was visible like adding a cloudy layer to a picture. Had he been seeing this all along in his Sovereign form and simply not noticed because everything was more or less the same charge?

Probably.

Serenity drifted a little higher and started moving towards the storm once again. It was moving faster than he was, but every little bit of distance he made meant places the storm wouldn’t reach and destroy. As he moved, he kept his attention split between managing the spell and monitoring his surroundings. The general glow of high charge seemed to strengthen, but not by as much as he’d expected. Perhaps there was simply always a significant background glow? That might align with what he knew of the physics of charge, but he didn’t have time to speculate.

Tuning the spell was a challenge. He hadn’t allowed for repeated retuning when he built it; he’d assumed he would tune it once and be done, but he should have known better. It was always a good idea to make spells as flexible as possible for the first casting, until you knew what could change and what couldn’t. Trimming that back later was part of what made spells more efficient, so he’d guessed that he needed some capability to tune the spell to outside conditions but not that they’d continually change.

He was swearing internally at the mistake while he tried to decide if he could work with it or if he had to patch the spell while it was running when Rissa spoke into his mind. :Are you okay? You sound upset, but not like you’re fighting?:

:I made a dumb mistake when I put the spell together. I knew I probably would, new spells are always adventures, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.: Serenity wasn’t certain he’d managed to put enough venom into the word “adventures”, but Rissa would understand. :I’m still outside the spell boundary itself, but the edge effects are a lot worse than I thought they would be.:

:I’ll leave you to it, then, but if you need us, say something. We caught up with Ita, and she says she can manage a small group teleportation to near your location.: Rissa’s voice stopped and Serenity nearly fumbled the spell he was working with. A small group teleportation to an unknown location? How?

The answer occurred to him almost immediately. This was Ita; her specialty was connection magic. Contagion magic? Whichever. She always had a connection to him; it sounded like she’d figured out how to use it.

:If there’s a safe place for you to teleport into, I will.: Serenity wasn’t going to promise to call them if there wasn’t a place to bring them in.

The spell shivered and Serenity knew he no longer had a choice about patching it; it was going to start coming apart quickly if he didn’t. Worse, he wasn’t certain a patch would hold. The fabric of the spell itself was warping from the resonances and while a patch would reduce the strain, it wouldn’t eliminate it.

Serenity stopped moving forward and started building the modified spellform for the spell he should have used in the first place, lower efficiency but more adjustable and capable of handling those adjustments repeatedly. Building it while maintaining the old, extremely similar, spellform should have been headache-inducing but not really all that much worse than building a spell in his mind while conducting the outward components of an entirely different spell.

Instead, it was almost like he was two people, each taking care of their own piece. It was exceedingly strange, but Serenity didn’t mind it at all. The final handoff went smoothly, with only some minor sparking as the old spell collapsed and the new spell pushed in to take its place with a slightly different charge. It was more like static electricity than lightning.

The new spell was immensely more tunable than the original, and he could actually feel how it managed to avoid leakages past the Liminal Nihility towards his form that the original hadn’t.

Serenity started moving forward again. He wasn’t any faster than before, but he also didn’t feel like he was about to lose control of his protective bubble. It wasn’t really stopping lightning from hitting him; instead, it was fooling the lightning into not feeling that there was anything there to strike, that there was no charge differential.

It was a very Earthly method to avoid lightning; Serenity had learned the ‘standard’ shields against lightning once upon a time. One countered the lightning; it was very draining but very safe, commonly used for fixed emplacements where there was an excess of power available. Another redirected the bolt around the shield; Serenity had always thought of it as grounding the bolt out, though that wasn’t at all how it was described.

The second type was the one Vengeance had used. Serenity could see where he’d gone wrong; he’d forgotten so much as Vengeance in his desire to not look backwards.

Serenity was still thinking about the past when the edge of the lightning ritual’s spell area was finally close enough to truly perceive. He stopped drifting forward in surprise.

It was a continual wall of lightning. That was what it looked like at a distance, but he’d assumed that was because of perspective. This close, he should have either been able to make out individual lightning strikes or not see anything at all with Eyeless Sight, since lightning wasn’t solid. Instead, he could literally see a wall in front of him.

Serenity steeled himself and floated forward, into the wall. If he had the spell correct, all he’d have to do was adjust the tuning.