Ezma was a land where equality had died a long time ago. While it was true that everyone had equal opportunities no matter what future they wished to pursue, discrimination was still highly present. Not in the minds of the inhabitants, however, but rather in the nature of the world itself. Ezma was a land overseen by wizards. The eight members of the Circle were mages with powers that could erase cities and make everyone forget it ever happened. Their strength was often, and quite rightfully so, compared to the might of gods. Fortunately for the common folk, this man-made pantheon was not exactly keen on erasing cities. The Circle was composed of guardians and protectors. Should one stray from such a path, the others would quickly stop them. It was an order that had been in place for centuries and people rarely complained. However, this led to a natural division of the citizens. Those who could use magic and those who could not. For in what way is a farmer who can light his pipe with a snap of his fingers better than a wizard whose magic keeps the whole city safe? Mages were better, stronger, more useful to society, wiser, and well-educated. Their lives were seen as more important than those of normal people. That was simply the rule of nature.

For a hunter, knowing such rules was key. Without it, he would not be able to survive. And it was precisely because of this knowledge that Glavas spent years trying to perfect his own magic. To be seen as someone better. However, hard work, as admirable as it is, can rarely beat raw talent mixed with official university education. Despite the decades, Glavas never managed to reach a very high level of magical ability. The man standing against him, on the other hand, had precisely that. Those robes were a testament to his magical prowess and the years he had spent studying. By a rough estimate, he was leaps and bounds ahead of Glavas.

The man waved his arms and without saying a single word out loud, he conjured up a stream of cyan smoke flowing out of his robe. The gas clung to the ground, but a few vapors here and there would rise up as well, making sure that nobody would be truly safe.

Glavas aimed his gun at the cloud. He had his fair share of experiences with poisonous gasses. After all, quite a few animals used them as their defense mechanism. A wind bullet flew right towards the smoke, but suddenly disappeared into a flash of purple light. Such a phenomenon then occurred again, high above the palace, sending the captured projectile away, where it wouldn't hurt anyone. The hunter growled and pressed the trigger a few more times. The gusts picked up speed, but none of them managed to reach their target. Glavas clenched his fist. If there was one thing he hated, it was portal magic. Usually, it was a double-edged blade. Things could easily enter from the other way and the range of such magic was highly limited. However, these gates were opening and closing almost immediately. Perfectly measured to consume the projectiles without letting anything else pass through.

The hunter backed away a little. The fog was crawling all over the room, surrounding him. The coloration was so strong that only a faint silhouette of the wizard could be seen through it. Glavas picked up one of the spears left behind by a dead guard and tossed it at the mage. Just like before, it disappeared. He was ready to keep testing the archwizard's defenses, but he heard a loud scream coming from above him. He looked up to the ceiling and only barely managed to dodge a piece of rubble falling from a much larger portal. Through it, Glavas could briefly see the ruined streets. His eyes widened. Could the archwizard be a navigator? Was his specialization portals and spacial magic? If that was the case, the hunter's situation would become even worse.

He had no time to think. More and more rubble was coming his way from all sorts of portals, which were opening and closing around the throne room. The debris was slowly taking away the room to dodge. The vapors were crawling up the walls and Glavas was slowly starting to feel their effects. His limbs were heavier than usual and his reflexes slower. "Of course," he muttered to himself. A substance to numb his senses would be much easier to create than a lethal poison. Especially at such volumes. This revelation, however, did not bring any enlightenment. He was stuck. All his strength was used on dodging the rubble tossed at him from all sides. His stamina was disappearing with each breath he took. And most importantly, his enemy was practically untouchable.

The hunter kept dodging. His body was becoming so sluggish that the limbs sprouting from his back had to pull him out of harm's way. His heart, while previously racing, was now strangely at peace. Alma and Surdi were probably long gone by now. They would be safe. The city was in pieces. The people were dead. It did not matter if Glavas died here. And yet, he was not willing to go without a fight. Dying was something he could accept, given his profession, but nobody would drag him to hell without him kicking and screaming all the way there.

Then, as if the goddess of magic, Eigam herself, decided to bless him. He nearly got impaled by a spear falling through one of the cracks in the roof. For a moment, this caught him off guard. There was no portal. Why a spear? Wasn't the rubble bigger and more destructive? And then, finally, he realized it. The weapon was not summoned here. It was thrown. Thrown by a hand clad in darkness. It was the same weapon he used before.

With a big smile on his face, Glavas went completely limp. More of the dark hands appeared on his back and they started dragging him around like a ragdoll, while rocks and stones were flying around. He had to conserve all his energy to think. He did not throw the spear with much strength back then. It was only to test the portal magic. At such an angle, with the speed, and given the cataclysmic weather, there were only a few places from which the spear could've come back. The exit portal was somewhere above the palace. That much was clear. But how high? How far? There were at least five different answers. Nothing else would fit Glavas' predictions and calculations. His smile grew wider. All the pieces on his side of the chess board were taken. The king was surrounded and all it would take was the one final move from the archwizard to end it all. But life is not like chess. It does not have turns and rules. If the battlefield did not fit Glavas' cornered king piece, he would simply change it.

He rolled out his scroll and exposed its text to the toxic air. The wizard shook his head. Such attempts were something he had observed before. But it would not work. As the cyan cloud began disappearing into the glowing symbols on the long sheet of paper, he simply increased the intensity of his spell. What the scroll absorbed, he conjured up once again. It was a battle of endurance. Would Glavas last before the poison would strip him of all his strength, physical and mental? Or would the wizard's mana run out before that could happen? No, the latter was not an option. The man was a human. The most annoying trait of their species was the natural ability to get their body more accustomed to mana. The more they trained, the more of it they had. Glavas would certainly not defeat an archwizard in such a battle of endurance.

The scroll sucked up all the gas it could. It rolled up once again and began vibrating so intensely that Glavas had to practically scrunch it up to keep it from opening. The wizard's silhouette could still be seen in the mist. One of Glavas' dark hands waved the light-blue sickle around. Its surface glimmered. The hunter then finally let go of the scroll and the magic burst forth, finally free. The gas had all condensed itself into a liquid magical projectile, which shot out towards the wizard with a terrifying speed. Even that, however, did not make much of a difference. In a flash of purple light, it disappeared just like any other attack. The archmage was happy. When pushed into the corner, Glavas panicked. He was willing to try anything. Back when the other soldiers were rushing into the throne room, dying for their city, the old wizard was thinking, observing, and strategizing. Through the arcane eye hidden in the room, he saw it all. The way Glavas fought and what he was capable of. As terrifying as it seemed, there was still a way. The mage was sure of it. His magic would save the city. Or at least whatever was left of it. Rotler would survive.

Another chunk of teleported rubble made an impact, shattering a still illusion of Glavas into tiny blue shards. It did not have much of an effect. The sickle's power could only be used once in a while. What was one piece of debris? After all, the wizard had countless more. Glavas could not do anything but just dodge out of the way. The room inside the palace was quickly running out. His magical arms were capable of moving him vertically as well, but with the attacks coming from all directions, even that was nearly not enough. Very soon, there wouldn't be any place left for moving. Out of sheer desperation, Glavas shot out a few more wind bullets toward the wizard. Beforehand, however, he slightly turned the knob on the side of the magazine, reducing the amount of outputted magic. The projectiles all blinked away just like the rest. Nothing had changed. Even when the bullets were weaker and not at all lethal, the wizard teleported them away. There was no fooling him. It was no automatic spell that would detect harmful objects and get rid of them. No, he was doing it manually, making anything that got too close to him disappear.

Glavas sighed and kept on counting inside his head. This one had to work. 92, 93, 94, NOW! He shot a final bullet toward the wizard, who did not even consider it a proper attack. For him, it was like watching a trapped rat trying to desperate gnaw off its leg to escape. It was a futile attempt at killing him. With a single thought, the wizard opened the portal and waved his hand to quickly close it again, when something suddenly stabbed him. Pain resonated from his abdomen through the entire body. It was years since he last felt something like this. He looked down but found nothing. No projectile. Just a bleeding hole slightly below his stomach. He quickly fell to his knees and began healing it. His head was spinning, and something was telling him that it wasn't because of the yet insignificant blood loss. There was something else happening.

What the wizard remembered was the glistening metal of the sickle and one feeble attempt of Glavas at using the condensed poison against him. The illusion brought forth by the sickle, however, concealed the truth from his eyes. While he saw only one projectile, in reality, there were seven. The other six headed off through the cracked roof and high into the sky, aimed at the places where Glavas predicted the other part of the portal would be. All that was needed then was some counting. To time it all perfectly. The moment those condensed poisonous projectiles would be approaching, Glavas would force the wizard to open more gates. He had hoped that at least one of them would catch the incoming poison and send it through to the other side, back to the caster. And while a few of the attempts did not work, eventually, Glavas' experience and measurements proved to be correct.

The wizard stopped his gas summoning and focused entirely on healing the wound. The higher intensity of the poison was making him dizzy way faster than in Glavas' case, yet even he could still move. The hunter knew it was time to strike. His scroll had once again sucked up the harmful toxins from the air, clearing the throne room. In the very next second, even more of the liquid arrows flew at the wizard's head. With his magic, he quickly sent them elsewhere, teleporting them to... Wait, no, that is not what happened. The archmage did not understand. His portals appeared too late. By the time he summoned them, the poison arrows were already jabbed deep inside his body. He fell backward on his back, breathing incredibly fast, slowly trying to calm himself despite the rather strong shock and pain.

He had always trusted his portals. The ability to only open them briefly meant that he was not putting himself at that much of a risk. For decades, he understood such magic as the perfect defense. It was his pride, which he had spent decades ironing out to a flawless state. A pinnacle of his strength. But to see it become his weakness and to suffer a painful blow because of it was something the wizard did not expect. At that moment, a tiny speck of trauma was born in his head. He no longer trusted the portals as much as he did before. And so when he was supposed to summon them again to protect himself, a part of his subconscious fear delayed him ever so slightly, out of the newly obtained distrust. That, along with his body slowing down due to the poison, caused his portals to appear far too late. They could no longer catch such fast projectiles.

Glavas dismissed the dark armor around his arms. With a few quick, shallow cuts, the blue sickle drew his own blood. As the wizard tried to muster enough strength to stand up again, he saw what appeared to be Glavas' attempt at harming himself.

"Blood magic? No way!" he thought to himself briefly, before witnessing something much, much more horrifying.

The hunter opened the scroll again, only this time, he turned it onto himself. The wizard watched as he twitched and writhed. The writing on the paper sucked all the air out of his lungs, along with bits of his blood leaving the small wounds on his arms. Glavas stumbled around a bit, having to brace himself with the magical arms. A few seconds later, he took the deepest breath the archmage had ever heard.

"Ahhhh! There were go! All gone." He rolled out the scroll again and let the absorbed components spill out. The wizard's eyes widened when he saw a tiny stream of cyan liquid drizzle out. He sucked the poison out of his body. Out of his own blood and lungs. It was possible, in theory, but the pain must've been unimaginable. To feel your own blood get pushed somewhere against your will... To have it steal all your air... It was preposterous.

The line between a man and a monster is thin like that of a finishing rod. So thin that sometimes, one can't see it properly. So thin, that crossing over it is oh so easy. So thin that it depends which side you're viewing it from. Glavas saw a pathetic murderer and a filth of mankind squirming on the floor like a dirty worm. Not a man, but a monster stripped of its power over others. The wizard looked up and saw the creature clad in dark approach him. The multiple arms slightly moving in the howling wind. The eyes on the dark helmet were glowing, making it seem that almost nothing of the elf beneath remained. The wizard saw not a man, but a monster.