The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 751

"Do not waste words—attack him together!" another elder barked. In an instant, all five raised their hands in sync, channeling their murderous qi into a devastating coordinated strike.

Alex watched five old men raise their hands and understood, with complete clarity and no particular drama about it, that he was going to die.

There was nothing left.

He had put all of it into a dragon's skull an hour ago.

He could lift the sword or he could stay standing, and he could not do both, and five men who had been sealed under a floor for thirty years were about to hit him with everything a five-hundred-year-old tower had thought worth saving for the end of the world.

He got the blade up anyway.

Habit, mostly.

The five strikes came at him across the broken courtyard.

And went out.

Not blocked. Not turned. They came apart in mid-air about eight feet from him, unravelling into nothing at all, and what was left of them fell as harmless grey dust across the flagstones.

White light was pouring in from behind him.

Alex turned around.

...

Elias White was coming up over the rubble of the front wall in a plain coat with his sleeves rolled, and there were ten of them behind him.

Old people. All of them old. The four elders from Amberly who'd been too old to send home, and six more from the branches, and every one of them had walked a long way in the dark to be standing on that pile of stone at half past two in the morning.

"Grandmaster!" Elias shouted. "We're here! We've come to help you!"

Alex stared at him.

The oldest of the five Black elders started laughing before Elias reached the bottom.

"Elias. Elias White." He said the name like something he'd found in an old coat. "I have beaten you twenty two times."

Elias stopped.

"Twenty-one," he said.

"Twenty-one, then. In the state halls, at the seasonal convocations, at your own gate — and every single time, in front of every tower in this country, I put you on the floor and you went home." Crale spread his hands wide. "Fifty years I have used your name as a joke. Fifty years. Was that not enough for you? Have you come all this way in the middle of the night to be humiliated in front of the whole country one last time?"

Something happened to Elias White's face then that Alex had only seen on it once before, in a courtyard, over a hand-bound book.

"You beat a poor man," Elias said. "Twenty-one times, you beat a poor man who had nine students and no roof, and you told everybody about it for fifty years, and I want you to understand that I have thought about every one of those nights."

"Then you know how this ends."

"No." Elias rolled his shoulders. "I've learned since then. I learned from the Grandmaster."

He turned his head, not all the way, not taking his eyes off Crale.

"Grandmaster Alex. Please sit down and rest."

"Elias—"

"With respect, sir." The old man's voice didn't shake at all. "This one is ours. This is a fifty-year-old grudge and it belongs to the White Tower, and tonight, for once in my life, I would like to settle it myself."

Alex looked at him for a second.

Then he went and sat down on a broken column with the sword across his knees.

"All right," he said. "Go on, then."

...

The five of them still thought they were going to win.

That was the thing. They came out into the open with the confidence of men who had spent five decades being the most feared magicians in the country, and they threw everything, and for the first four minutes it was genuinely frightening.

Then it stopped being frightening and started being something nobody had ever seen before.

Because by then the ridge had emptied.

Forty reporters had come down off that hill the moment the dragon fell, and they were now crouched behind broken walls two hundred feet away with every crystal they owned pointed at the courtyard, and the state broadcaster went to a live feed at eleven minutes to three in the morning and did not cut away from it once for the next four hours.

Five Black Tower elders. Ten White Tower elders.

The whole country sat up and watched.

...

By four in the morning, Alex had worked out what he was actually looking at, and he could not decide whether to be impressed or to put his face in his hands.

White magic has no attacks.

None. Not one. He'd known that in the abstract — he'd read every text White had ever produced, he'd had Gaia rebuild the entire tradition from the foundation up — but he had never once had to watch it in a fight, and now he was watching it in a fight, and the truth of it was extremely simple.

Ten White elders, at the height of their power, holding a rebuilt five-hundred-year tradition, and their entire arsenal consisted of shields, wards, cleansings, unbindings, and healing.

They could not hurt anybody.

They were physically unable to hurt anybody.

...

The other side had worked out something equally unfortunate.

Crale had thrown eleven hexes in twenty minutes and not one of them had landed. They didn't get blocked and fall down — they arrived, met white, and stopped existing, the same way the strikes aimed at Alex had come apart eight feet from his chest.

He tried a soul-drain that had once emptied a man in front of four hundred witnesses.

Erased.

He tried the rot. Erased. He tried the old family curse, the one they didn't write down, and one of the White elders — a small round woman of about seventy from the Coldbrook branch — simply put her hand up and wiped it out of the air like she was cleaning a window.

"Stop that," Crale shouted at her.

"No," she said.

...

So it became the only thing it could become.

Not a battle. An endurance contest. Fifteen old people standing in a ruined courtyard pouring everything they had at each other, five of them unable to land a hit and ten of them unable to throw one, and the only question left in the entire war was whose mana ran out first.

It took four hours.

The sky went from black to grey to that thin cold colour it goes just before sunrise, and the crystals kept rolling, and all over the United State of Magic people who should have gone to bed at midnight sat in their kitchens watching fifteen pensioners slowly drain each other dry.

At about twenty past six in the morning, one of the Black elders swayed on his feet and stopped casting, because there was nothing left in him to cast with.

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