One hundred and seven years ago.

All that saved humanity—all mortal races—from extinction was that the Cataclysms were forces of nature. They did not target strategic locations. They did not erase research facilities, trade hubs, or capital cities. They destroyed indiscriminately. The Cataclysms were fundamentally the same as natural disasters: horrible events to expect, account for, and maneuver around.

But humanity could not afford the loss of Lichenport. Lysander knew this with a cold detachment that none of his peers likely did.

Or perhaps they were aware of the fatal strike this would deliver, if the fight today was lost. Perhaps they knew about the trade intricacies linking the kingdoms and how humanity was already dangling on a thin string, despite the inspirational propaganda being pushed. That the loss of this port city would be a devastating blow humanity could little afford. But he had always underestimated those he rubbed shoulders with, and in those rare instances where he didn’t, he had always come away disappointed.

So he doubted they knew, despite his constant hope that he was not alone in possessing basic reasoning. No, the men and women around him feared for something much more trivial: the hundreds of thousands in immediate danger.

There was strong evidence to believe some higher-up or another had deduced how important this defense was, and had blown the horn. Because, despite the Colossus having apparently wandered into the Eastern Kingdom, the Party of Heroes was here, not there.

Lysander watched an enormous tentacle rise into the sky. A kraken’s limb could cleave a ship in two with little effort. This was no regular kraken. The Maw of the Abyss was the first, or greatest, of those awe-inspiring beasts. Its appendage hovered just below the clouds like an executioner’s blade flesh-forged by the gods, a mountainous pucker-filled curve blotting out the sky. Waterfalls that could fill lakes cascaded from its length.

The sight filled him with an indescribable emotion. To know one’s worth… or the lack of it.

The involuntary thought annoyed him. The death sentence didn’t even hang over his head. It was targeted toward one of five legendary individuals who had come to aid the city. Why had he himself felt paralyzed, however briefly?

Irrational. How upsetting.

The limb fell. A searing light brought brilliance then darkness to the noon seas. A skill rang out, vocalized by a hero of an ilk humanity had never seen, and wouldn’t again, not if ten millennia passed. Joyous, almost childish, a gleeful laugh in his voice, the Gladiator exclaimed:

“[From One, Make Two].”

A severed limb longer and wider than a hundred capital ships slid downward, parted by the blinding light Axian the Gladiator’s blade had carved. From the distance Lysander stood, on his ship hovering a mile off the coast of Lichenport, even he couldn’t make clear sense of what had happened—the sheer scale of the attack.

The puckered tentacle crashed into the sea, and the Party of Heroes continued their fight. Simply one exchange of many. Lysander’s attention had latched onto the falling limb though… or rather, the wave it had spawned. A wave of equally titanic proportion to the beast itself. Headed straight for them.

He watched, face calm, but with growing horror. From so far, the wall of water seemed almost innocuous. Even the slightest application of logic told him how monstrous that swell was going to be, though. It would easily wipe out any ship it met, the Osprey included.

“Barriers,” Lysander screamed over his shoulder. “Get your barriers up!”

The six gold- and silver-rank mages assigned to him stared blankly in response. They saw the same thing he did. He met their gaze, and for a moment, sympathized. The command was truthfully absurd. The incoming mountain of water held enough energy to pulverize even an archmage’s shield—a dozen such shields. Lysander hadn’t even attained the title of grand magus, being merely a magus, and was the strongest of the collected mages on this vessel by a decent margin.

So, nobody here had control of whether they lived or died. A call to put up barrier spells was ridiculous.

Lysander’s gaze flicked to the fight happening in the distance. He watched the Knight be scooped up by a giant tentacle and thrown several miles into a mountain face. The Sorceress called down a column of hellfire to shrivel another of its many thrashing limbs. The Rogue stabbed the beast in its eye, an X-shaped blast of black and green energy that could’ve cut through starmetal like paper. The Monk, sprinting down a tentacle, raised his staff and surrounded the elven woman in a defensive shield, aiding her in her escape.

Meaning the Heroes were, as was reasonable for fighting a Cataclysm, occupied. Those five men and women always attempted to save who they could, but fights against Cataclysms never came without casualties. The Heroes were concerned with the Maw, first and foremost.

He looked back at the incoming tidal wave bearing down on their ship, thoughts sprinting. He couldn’t rely on a savior. Perhaps one would come, but perhaps not. So what could he do, personally?

Perhaps… if he focused all of his efforts on a shield that enveloped only himself, he might survive the enormous wave of kinetic energy. Might. But he would be condemning the mages assigned to him, and the civilian crew of the Osprey as well. Dishonorable by many interpretations, but logically speaking, attempting to shield the entire boat would be a symbolic gesture—suicide for appearance’s sake. It was only rational to save what he could. Meaning himself.

Unfortunately, Lysander valued rationality, but often found himself not living up to that ideal. “Barrier,” he screamed to his allies, louder. “Surround the ship! That’s an order!”

His thoughts raced. He refused to abandon his subordinates and the ship’s crew. But what could he do? His current strength and arsenal of spells simply wouldn’t suffice. He knew that with certainty.

He could… make a new spell, perhaps. Even if he succeeded, it might not matter, and in fact he doubted it would, but at least he would be doing something.

In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, an on-the-spot invention of a new spell would also be suicide, just a more flavorful version of the current one rushing toward the Osprey. Mages couldn’t conjure up new abilities whenever they pleased. Not even an archmage. Even Lysander himself, who was a genius among geniuses, with a career trajectory to rival Archmage Aeris’s, couldn’t manage that with anything close to consistency.

But what other choice did he have?

Magical barriers sprang up to surround the ship, his subordinates obeying his orders, however pointless they knew the action. Lysander didn’t join them in casting; he was still formulating. In the scant thirty seconds as that titanic wall of water rushed toward their vessel, he finalized the prototype of a new-and-improved barrier spell. It was specially designed against physical, non-magical forces, and it used a novel, ground-up redesign of theoretical absorption-and-repulsion arrays to self-fuel, allowing for vastly greater resilience in specific circumstances—namely against natural kinetic forces. He had been working on it for years, one of many great projects that he spent endless hours idly theorizing about. Even he couldn’t pull a design of such ingenuity from thin air. He’d had the bones of the spell prepared already.

Then the wave was nearly on them, and Lysander was out of time. He rushed through the last portions of mentally-arranged High Arcana and began painting the design onto the air with his mana. This might actually work, he thought, heart racing. He was a genius. If anyone could conjure a miracle on a whim, it would be him. Whether it would save them? That was a murkier question, certainly.

He finished, and, watching the wall of death approach, invoked the spell.

The mana imploded.

Instant failure. Not even a moment’s hesitation before the design collapsed in on itself. His skin went cold, and his eyes widened in horror. Not simply because the error meant his and the crew’s death, but because when novel spells—especially ones fed with as much mana as he’d just given—ran wild, a quick death would be a fortunate result.

But he didn’t get a chance to so much as croak out an involuntary scream.

“[Dispel],” a woman’s voice calmly commanded from his side.

The immense, mutating energy about to gleefully warp into some horrible phenomenon dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

Only belatedly recognizing the flash of spatial warping, he spun to see a demon floating in the sky a half-dozen feet away, robes and long white hair shifting gently in the ocean breeze. She was of shockingly small stature, and she wore, despite the chaos of the situation, an expression of total boredom. Not even tight composure, like an especially competent commander, but actual, genuine disregard, her red eyes almost contemptuously disappointed with everything happening around her.

“[Mass Greater Hydrokinesis],” the Sorceress ordered disinterestedly, waving her staff.

And the tidal wave that had seconds ago been the guaranteed doom of Lysander and his allies, and the majority of the relief fleet meant to contain the Maw’s hordes of fishmen raiders, simply… flattened out. Slunk into the ocean and dispersed, with barely a ripple to be remembered by.

Red eyes fell on Lysander.

As a general rule, he had never felt cowed when speaking to his magical superiors. The opposite: he often came away with a vague sense of disappointment, if not disgust. Even so-called legends like Archmage Aeris had never floored him—not through demonstration of an unparalleled magical mind, at least. Aeris’s mastery of various branches of the arcane was unlike anything Lysander had seen, yes, but that was a product of centuries of experience, a cultivated level, and—since the archmage was a great defender of humanity—access to many of the world’s most restricted resources.

So, external factors. Combined with talent, of course, but not so much of it that Lysander thought Aeris’s exceeded his own. Lysander knew he would one day stand as that man’s peer. Would surpass him, even. Why would he be nervous around someone like that?

“Interesting,” the Sorceress murmured. Her voice was only marginally less flat than the total boredom on her face. He heard a tinge of curiosity. “Absorption, self-feedback… repulsion. I see what you were going for. Perhaps something like…” She waved her staff. “[Absorption Barrier].”

A circular glowing diagram of bright white runes engraved itself onto the air, whole in the blink of an eye. It activated in the same instant, a shimmering barrier with a white-blue tint manifesting in front of her.

“Or maybe…” She dispelled the shield. “[Absorption Barrier].”

Lysander again caught a flash of the design, and what he saw shook him to the core. She had already stabilized the layout with the first attempt—had solved in a single heartbeat what Lysander had spent years theorizing and failing to manifest. But now she was iterating on the design.

In the middle of a fight against a Cataclysm.

“Still inefficient,” the Sorceress commented, once more dispelling and instantly casting another version. “[Absorption Barrier].”

The third version was essentially unrecognizable from Lysander’s starting point. Only the barest influence of his personal notes showed.

When the Sorceress dismissed the third barrier spell—the sequence taking place over no more than a handful of seconds—she twitched, as if remembering where she was, and what was happening around her. The bored gaze turned back to Lysander.

“Ah. My apologies. It was an interesting puzzle.” She held her free hand up. “[Grimoire].”

Lysander stared, eyes nearly bulging at the gigantic tome that popped into existence. It was thicker than his fist was wide. It couldn’t possibly be a grimoire. Not even the Sorceress’s. Is it a jest? An illusion? How many spells would fit inside a monstrous thing like that?

“Here,” she said, flipping the book open and locating a page before tearing it out. She handed a spell diagram for her just-created [Absorption Barrier] to Lysander. “Quite clever. Thank you for that. I should return now.”

And, without Lysander having returned a single word in response, not one in thanks or one of incredulity or awe, the demon [Blinked] away.

***

A third Cataclysm had been vanquished.

Lysander remembered when the first had died. He’d been sixteen, finishing his education at the Institute. Meridian had been set aflame by the news. In a rather ironic manner, the citizenry had celebrated as if the world was ending, despite the opposite being true. The property damage and alcohol-related casualties throughout the five human Kingdoms could probably have been classified as a Cataclysm-level disaster in themselves.

He had never felt an energy so uniformly electric before, and had known he never would again. Because the impossible had happened. A group of mortals had slain a Cataclysm. The High King might as well have announced that hunger or sickness had been conquered and was now a worry of the past.

Now three of those monsters were dead. The energy in the city of Lichenport reminded Lysander of that day at Meridian… but different in a crucial manner. A hint of disbelief filled the air, even through the cheer and wild revelry. Because one was a miracle, and two hadn’t yet started a trend. But three did. Three almost implied a fourth; it was no fluke. Reapers had come, and their scythes were pointed at the enemy. The Cataclysms were dying, without even years to bridge them.

It was unbelievable. Fortuitous beyond fortuitous. Every mortal in existence should have been celebrating the immense providence the heavens had provided.

But Lysander’s thoughts were not on the dead Cataclysm.

Instead, even as a table two rows down was overturned in drunken jubilation, he stared at a paper clutched in a white-knuckled grip. [Absorption Barrier]. It was perfect. Lysander had never seen a spell so expertly formulated. Not anything close.

And that terrified him.

Throughout his nineteen years of life, he had, quite literally, never met someone he considered his magical-intellectual equal. He’d come from relatively modest birth and had worked through three separate tutors, first gold, then mithril, then orichalcum, all Institute-educated, and outgrown them—conceptually speaking—within a year each.

At age seven.

That was when his ego had begun developing. His deserved ego. It was not arrogance to be self-assured when he had every right to be. He believed himself more talented than everyone he met, and had never once been proven wrong. There were plenty of individuals stronger than him, but none as intelligent in his domain, none as quick to learn and innovate.

As expected, the arrogance that grew within him earned little favor from his instructors over the following decade, much less the students he’d unfortunately been forced to call peers. He hadn’t cared. The only interactions he wanted to have were professional in nature. He had a great gift to be nurtured. How did friends help with that?

A part of him had known it was a defense mechanism, even before today, before he’d been forced to confront a brutal fact. He’d clung to a truth, when he’d graduated the Institute without a single person who would call him a companion. Genius, yes—even those who hated him most would never deny that. But certainly never friend, either.

And that was fine. Because he was special.

But.

He was not special.

His grip tightened on the paper, so casually presented to him, as if in apology for solving hispuzzle without asking. That short interaction with Vivisari Vexaria, the Sorceress, the Slayer of Three Cataclysms… it had ruined his life. She had shattered a very delicate, very crucial belief of his. The notion that he had no superiors.

He’d known, abstractly, that the Sorceress was talented. But he had mentally assigned her to a similar category to Archmage Aeris: that external factors, not simply talent, had created a gap between them. Not least of which her age—her being two centuries his elder. And he had very carefully never analyzed that thought too closely, because it would have collapsed if he had.

Meeting her—watching her solve a spell diagram, perfect a diagram he had spent years struggling with, a feat that was not nearly as gated by level as sheer mana output or similar factors—forced him to admit a devastating truth.

He was, had only ever been, and would only always be, almost the best.

That would never change. Not if he struggled for a thousand millennia. Like he himself had been born above most others, the Sorceress had too. And not only was she in a tier of her own, several empty tiers existed between her and Lysander, with nobody to fill their ranks. That was the difference in their potential.

He stood at the peak of a mountain. The Sorceress had long ago left behind even the clouds.

A black feeling sat heavy in his gut. He finally tore his gaze away from the spell diagram, looking around at the raucous celebration filling the mess hall. Everyone here, except him, was happy. As they should be.

When had he last considered himself happy? Not in the fleeting way that a new magical milestone might provide, but in the real sense of the word? He’d considered this concept a few times now, but he’d always automatically defaulted to that same excuse: he didn’t need to be happy, not when he was special.

But he wasn’t special. Not truly. There was no point in being second best.

Desperation clawed at the edges of his mind. For the briefest moment, his thoughts spiraled in a direction a mage’s never should.  Could I be… more, somehow? If I must? There were any number of unconventional ways for a mage to progress, after all.

“Oh, come on, Lysander!” Adam’s drunken voice called, laughter in his words. The interruption jarred him out of his thoughts—thoughts he had already begun shoving away himself. “Even now, you’re studying? What is that?” He leaned to squint at the diagram, and Lysander reflexively covered it, not that there was a logical reason to do so. Adam didn’t seem to care. “Something’s wrong with you, sir. Come! Celebration is in order. The Maw is dead! Heavens above, the Maw.”

Lysander blinked at the tall, blond-haired boy. Adam appeared even drunker than his tone suggested, and the boy was already starting to slur. Which explained why he had approached Lysander, trying to drag him into the revelry. Adam was friendly to a fault, but even he usually left Lysander alone—and not just because Lysander was his superior.

Lysander looked down at the page a second time. He knew he stood at a precipice. A great frown tugged on his lips as his thoughts churned. He was a believer in self-improvement. That concept had only ever applied to a specific type of improvement, but nevertheless, he believed he could better himself.

And if he couldn’t be special—not in that way he cared so much about—and if the illusion of his absolute superiority had been shattered…

Then there was no point in moping. Nor in considering darker paths; that such a thing had touched his mind, however briefly, disgusted him. A truth had been revealed, and a logical person would integrate that truth and move forward under the new paradigm.

But how did he move forward? What was his next step? He felt lost, for the first time ever.

A long minute passed. He was vaguely aware of Adam shaking his head, saying something, and walking away.

For a long time, Lysander sat there and thought.

Then he came to a decision.

“[Grimoire].”

A book appeared in his hands. By the standards of any mage worth respecting, it was not impressive. Not even through a less-demanding perspective than his own. A hundred and twelve spells lay within; it was barely thicker than a thumb’s width. Much better than most Institute magi of his level, but, again, not impressive.

The design had shifted slightly from what he last remembered. A hoop with a chain attached to the spine had appeared at the top. A grimoire morphed according to its wielder, and the decision he’d just made wasn’t a minor one.

He hooked the book to his belt.

He knew that some people would misinterpret this choice. That they would, especially as the book grew fatter, assume it some display of arrogance. It might be small now, but it wouldn’t be forever—or even for long, considering his talent. He didn’t care. This was, crucially, for him.

So that every day, from here on forward, he could look at his hip and, by comparing the paltry book to another’s, remember: he was not special. Not really. His arrogance had been unfounded. Until he met that standard he had seen—and he never would—he needed to excel in other ways. Because there was no point to focusing singularly on sorcery if he couldn’t be the best, untouched in that domain.

So he would serve his allies in other ways. Would become great in other ways. He was more than capable of it. He was capable of anything.

Or… nearly anything, he reminded himself.

It was time to leave behind his old, inferior self.

The first step was obvious. If even the Sorceress saw value in finding companions, then he could too.

He stood and walked over to Adam. The blond glanced at him.

“I believe you said that celebration is due,” Lysander told him, squashing down a strange feeling in his stomach.

A smile split Adam’s face. The boy didn’t hesitate. “Now you’re speaking my language, sir,” he laughed, thrusting a tankard at Lysander. “Drink up. Tonight’s a night to remember!”