For once, Vivi demonstrated some wisdom. She closed her eyes and did not watch the dimensional boundary break into pieces.

She might have in another scenario, but after several minutes of talking with the most iconic cautionary tale in existence, her usual wild disregard for the dangers of esoteric magics had been replaced with a rare, uneasy caution. She wouldn’t stare eyes-wide-open at the Shattered Oracle’s personal, enthusiastic violation of the barrier between worlds. She knew, somehow, that she would be inviting at least a seed of his madness.

She would study those magics on her own, with proper safeguards. The world didn’t need a second Shattered Oracle, and especially not one so many times stronger. The damage she could bring would be—unimaginable.

Even with her eyes closed and senses dampened, though, the resulting hammer-blow into the already-weakened dimensional pane had her magical nerves exploding with stimulation. It was horrifying, and fascinating, and she desperately wanted to open her eyes and witness the phenomenon in all its horrible glory, but she forced herself not to.

The shattering lasted a quarter of a second. The sensations passed, and Vivi stopped blocking everything out.

She opened her eyes and appraised the damage.

It was the abyssal pit at Meridian, but much worse. And of course it was—the first had been performed by a mortal mage against a healthy boundary, not a former Cataclysm on a half-broken one. The sky was ruined. Before, it had presented to her senses like a pane of glass with a rock thrown at it: with spiderweb fractures, but still in one piece. Now, the shards had separated, the pane fully disintegrated with the force of the blow.

And in the center was a gateway. A portal leading into the heavens, many times larger than the previous—which likely meant it would take longer to heal, and would allow more voidlings to come flowing out every second.

Wonderful.

“Wonderful,” Remian Voss rasped. “There is…such beauty, in violation.”

She stared at the man. A wave of sadness and pity washed over her, seeing this representation of a person who might not have been evil, not in the core sense of that word, but whose unrepentant passion had certainly formed him into a monster through the actions he took.

Maybe the reminder was good. She needed to be careful when diving too deeply into the powers she’d been granted.

The supernatural fauna of the void responded to the breach without delay. Vivi watched the many sleek black creatures scattered throughout the sky freeze, then slowly point to the eye of the storm—the puncture that would lead them to a near endless source of life, on which they could glut themselves.

They began slithering toward it.

Time to be leaving, then.

“I do apologize, Vivisari,” Remian Voss murmured. “If merely for how we were once again at odds. Go. I will kill as many as I can…if I remain. What is a shadow without light to cast its shape? I suspect I only exist in this form through your perception.” He half-looked at her, a sly smile sneaking onto his lips. “Not that I think you’ll need the help. You would have at least tried to stop me, if you were worried.”

Vivi sighed. Indeed, she did have a plan, and one she felt confident in. It just wasn’t going to be pleasant in the short-term aftermath. Manaburn was an excellent tradeoff for preventing a city’s destruction, though.

She grabbed Isabella’s wrist and [Blinked] them to the mouth of the dimensional rift.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Vivi ordered her—then thought better of the weak instruction, and cast an enveloping seal of darkness around her. She layered as many of her strongest defenses onto the girl as possible, then onto herself. With the strides she’d made during the trip from Meridian to Prismarche, and the many, many void creatures she’d killed, she was far more confident in her spells than before. But she was terrified for Isabella nevertheless, because who knew how she would respond to the trek across worlds? Vivi could defend against the void, but this was something even more fundamental.

She would never be more prepared, unfortunately. Not in any reasonable timeframe. A city needed saving.

“Here we go,” she muttered.

She flew through.

This time, she was smart enough to block the experience out as thoroughly as she could. Not doing so last time had left her incapacitated, and while she wished to undergo those strange phenomena again for curiosity’s sake, she couldn’t afford falling insensate when Prismarche would soon be under attack. She needed her faculties about her.

Even so, the passage nearly peeled apart her mind. People weren’t supposed to traverse the dimensional boundary, on almost as basic a level as how they shouldn’t move through the stream of time. What she was doing was unnatural, and reality screeched at the violation.

She emerged into her own world with a gasp. It was only when sensations flooded in that she realized how true her suspicions from earlier were. She felt real again. Whole. She couldn’t point to any specific aspect of her existence that had unnerved her in the void realm, but reality was so vibrant, so visceral, that she wondered how it had only been a suspicion. Her presence there had definitely been more conceptual than physical.

If that was true, then where had her body been in the interim? And Isabella’s? Gone? Reconstructed on arrival? She shook those thoughts off. There were more important things to worry about.

She checked on Isabella first. She seemed rattled, but so was Vivi. The trip through the boundary hadn’t broken her mind or body, which was all that mattered, and so she chalked that part of this misadventure up to a success. Her apprentice’s friend had been secured, retrieved from past the dimensional horizon.

Now the world-ending threat that had come as a consequence.

Monsters would begin pouring through any second now, so she had no time to spare. The moment had come to enact her emergency plan.

It was hardly a revolutionary idea, but the best strategies were often simple. The recurring visualizations she’d had when looking at the gateways had prompted the core of the concept. Wounds. As if the dimensional boundary was reality’s skin, and a tear in it was little different from a tear in her own flesh.

Trying to weave together reality’s flesh was one logical fix to sealing the gateway, but it was also madness to tamper with those forces without a strong understanding of the underlying principles. She didn’t trust herself to do that properly, yet.

So what was the next best option for dealing with a cut? What had humans done for thousands of years?

Bandages. Stop the flow of blood, and let the body heal itself.

Even from a tactical standpoint, plugging the chokepoint was the obvious smartest course of action, now that she thought herself capable of it—she unfortunately hadn’t been, at Meridian.

Cutting off the advance of hundreds or thousands of void creatures, some above nineteen hundred, with the specialized barrier spell she’d been formulating wasn’t going to be easy, though. It would take quite a lot of energy.

Time to accept her fate.

She pulled out the Codex and shoved her remaining mana inside, oceans of the magical essence flowing into the book. Afterward, she grabbed a mana potion and gulped the vibrant blue liquid, energy surging through her with an extremely unpleasant feeling. The one twenty-four hours prior had felt invigorating; this one did not. She hadn’t recovered yet. One could not infinitely chug potions without detriment, and that rule applied to Vivi as much as anyone else. Especially when the potions were so potent they could refresh even her supply of magical stamina.

With a freshly topped-off pool of mana, she once again opened the Codex and poured energy in.

Then grabbed another potion.

“Lady Vivisari?” Isabella stammered, no doubt highly concerned by how the world’s most powerful mage was repeatedly quaffing mana potions.

There wasn’t a strict limit to how many potions a person could drink, but there was a functional one. Not only would they run into diminishing returns with each successive replenishment, but for both stamina and mana, they would experience rapidly incapacitating backlash.

Vivi almost wished there were a hard limit, because then she could stop at a given point, rather than deciding what was ‘safe enough’. Truth told, maybe a single potion would have been. But when it came to protecting an entire city from a void invasion, she didn’t want to take risks. Especially with the memory of her first failure looming over her. Too many people had died. The same wouldn’t happen here. Not a single person, in fact. She intended absolute victory.

She stopped at the fourth potion, meaning three full mana pools stored in the Codex, and her own personal store too. Every nerve screamed in agony, and she felt close to vomiting.

The first monsters were slithering through. Linking herself to the Codex, she accepted the oceans of mana and began to cast.

It wasn’t the most complex piece of magic she’d wrangled, but it was certainly the most powerful, by pure energy. Arcane runes filled the air, appearing in dozens and then hundreds. A huge glowing diagram imprinted onto reality, and she pointed her staff at the breach and readied herself to activate the spell.

“[Void Barrier].”

A transparent shadow-like shield sprang into existence, spanning the entirety of the hole ripped through reality’s boundary. An indestructible bandage, so overcharged that even the Shattered Oracle himself could have burnt himself into a husk trying to cut his way through. It manifested with seconds to spare, sealing off the other realm as otherworldly denizens were about to cross out of the pit and begin wreaking havoc.

The first sinuous void creature slammed into the barrier and was rebuffed handily; the impact didn’t so much as ping to her senses. More followed. A descending horde flooded into the small space between the breach and the barrier, suffusing the chokepoint with black-and-violet carapace.

She was vaguely aware of Archmage Aeris [Blinking] next to her. She’d expected his presence earlier, while traveling, but had forgotten in the moment, so it came somewhat as a surprise. Between the magical nausea she was experiencing and the rapt focus on maintaining the barrier and patching whatever scrapes the monsters made, she was barely capable of processing his words.

“Where am I needed?” the old man asked grimly, and Vivi was startled, slightly, by the hardness of his voice. The grandfatherly tone was nowhere; here was the centuries-old combat veteran.

“You aren’t,” Vivi gritted out, attention locked on the sky above. “I’ll handle it. Should fix itself eventually. Just need to…hold out.”

He responded, but she stopped listening. The amount of mana put into that barrier was truly obscene; she couldn’t afford a lapse in attention, as it would mean hundreds of casualties. This invasion would be orders of magnitude easier to deal with if the monsters stayed trapped in the chokepoint.

Meridian’s breach had healed in fifteen minutes. Prismarche’s shattering had been far more destructive, though, and so Vivi spent three times that straining to hold the barrier together. The void monsters thrashed and struggled, half against the spell, and half against each other when they found their efforts futile, vying for limited space. They ripped one another into pieces, until eventually only the strongest—a nightmare collection of [Greater Voidbeasts]—were tearing with magic-resistant claws against her [Void Barrier]. The shield held without strain. Almost unfortunately so, because the lack of real damage made Vivi realize she had overreacted. And thus brought a whole lot of unnecessary pain and suffering through manaburn. Her head pounded.

Eventually, the breach healed, preventing outflow of monsters. Only the many [Greater Voidbeasts]—the strongest of them, which had killed their way to the front—remained trapped behind the barrier, but within reality. Focus straining to its limits, she prepared her next spell. When finished, she dispelled the shield holding the waves of monsters off and immediately unleashed an attack to purge the remaining monsters.

“[Crushing Singularity].”

A pinprick of enormous gravitational energy flickered to light somewhere deep in that suddenly freed mass. The enormous beasts slithered forward, and resistant as the dozens of eighteen-hundred-plus monsters were, they almost escaped in time. But then the spell’s full weight manifested, and, with a snap, they crashed together, limbs cracking and armor plating shattering as they were sucked into a vortex of unimaginable pressure. Vivi squeezed that magical muscle, pouring more mana in, and they condensed inside her mental grip like a ball of splintering glass.

She squeezed one more time, then released. The hyper-dense mass of void material plummeted down onto Prismarche’s town square, crushing the memorializing statue of the Party of Heroes. She might’ve prevented the damage if she weren’t so completely exhausted, but the idea of pulling together even a simple telekinesis had nausea wracking through her.

She wavered slightly in the air, unsteady.

“Vivisari?” Archmage Aeris asked, alarmed. She jolted, having forgotten that the old archmage had teleported next to her near the start of the debacle. He had seen the whole thing, and had been doing—something, surely, in the interim, disappearing and reappearing with [Blinks]. She’d been too focused to pay much attention.

The agonizing forty-five minutes of effort had been worth it. She looked at the scabbed-over wound in the sky. Her plan had worked flawlessly. A dimensional breach, solved without so much as a casualty. If only she could properly enjoy the satisfaction. The potion-sickness was far too intense; it drowned out everything else. She hadn’t even needed that much mana. She’d panicked and overextended herself, because of how poorly Meridian had gone.

She glanced at Isabella, who was looking at her with wide eyes. It had probably been a rather…fantastic show. Or maybe she was concerned? How ragged did Vivi look? She felt like death.

“That’s that, then. Let’s get you back home.” She held a hand out for Isabella.

She had promised Saffra that she would return as quickly as she could, after all. With the fallout contained, she had one more task to handle before she was allowed to lie down and cradle her aching skull, and ride through a full day or more of magical backlash.

She really didn’t want to cast anymore, but a promise was a promise.

The girl froze for a moment at the outstretched hand, then tentatively took it. Vivi held her other out to Archmage Aeris, who she assumed wanted an expedited path back to Meridian as well. After a surprised hesitation, he likewise accepted.

“[Greater Warp],” Vivi incanted.