Riez smiled as the skull unleashed, and she felt herself slide into that accelerated time that marked combat for her. She sighed as she slowly used her Vengeance Domain to guide the flaming, deadly projectile from the grandmaster's palm in a wide arc around her, hitting him in the butt.

  The world didn't resist this time. Instead, it obeyed. It had been aimed at her, and this was just vengeance. Dranos howled in pain as necrotic energy poured into his backside from his own spell.

  The lich let a wide cone of pure death spill from its being, and Riez barely managed to dodge it in time. That wasn't some ordinary spell but rather some kind of divine ability. Maybe the lich had the Death Domain like Celeste.

  Seeing that Riez had distracted the two mages significantly, Jasper realised that he needed to change things up. Jasmine and he didn't seem to have much impact on the undead, since none of the barriers that Jasmine used seemed to block them effectively. They were either able to outright tank the damage as if it didn't exist, or they simply didn't count as enemies for the purposes of the spell, which was also rather weird.

  Jasper only saw one real option. As his intern engaged two ancient beings in combat, he decided to unleash one of the spells that he had prepared. The Grinding Teeth of God, which had been contained in a small marble levitating behind him, shot forward. The small sphere was covered in mouths and teeth, and in general, it was just really horrific to look upon.

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  The Grinding Teeth of God

  Tier: Unbound Ur-magic (3rd tier)

  Full effect: You drag the fabric of reality into the teeth of the celestial gears that support it, churning every solid object in the area of effect into a fine powder.

  The spell affects an area up to thirty meters in diameter centred on a point within the caster’s sight. Living creatures that keep moving can pull away from the grinding gears and suffer only 33% of their max life in damage for each round they remain in the area of effect.

  Immobile objects are chewed to dust within ten rounds, whereupon the spell ends. Only the very strongest supernatural substances are capable of resisting this spell. If such an artifact or object gets caught in the area of effect, the celestial engines will bind up and shatter.

  The spell hit hard and fast, hammering into the ground, and Jasper realized that these marbles were far stronger than he had originally assumed. Not only was he able to control them all at the same time, allowing him to cast everything he had prepared all at once, but he could probably cast a couple of spells while using them. This created an absolute barrage of firepower.

  The God of Knowledge didn't have long to think about it as the marble hit the centre of the undead horde. Instantly, the sound of shattering glass marked something breaking. An instant later, it became clear that the something was reality itself. Large rends in what appeared to be the air started to appear, spreading rapidly as reality was torn apart by a force much greater than anything it could withstand.

  From the rips in open space, large dark red gears started to appear, layered upon each other in a seemingly random way. The spell only seemed to grow in power as it started to tear apart the world. As the gears became more and more visible, they started to interlock with each other, and soon they were spinning while tearing apart everything within a thirty-meter diameter.

  There was an interesting aspect to the Grinding Teeth of God. It might be considered a bug, but since the undead weren't living creatures, it appeared that they couldn't move out of the area of effect. The spell's description was "Living creatures that keep moving can pull away from the grinding gears."

  Even so, a thirty-meter diameter was nowhere near enough to make a proper impact on the undead army. They had practically surged over the orks at this point, annihilating the green skins. The massacre didn't appear to add any further undead, which was fortunate, since their strength meant that it would be practically impossible to actually stop this kind of zombie outbreak.

  Jasper sighed. He didn't have as much Energy as he would like, since he was sustaining the marbled Ur-magics. A quick look at his status surprised him, as it wasn't as bad as he thought.

  He still had three spells bound to the pearls behind him, tying up his Energy. Jasper took a deep breath and poured his will into his Magic Domain. He was the God of Magic, and while casting another Grinding Teeth of God would consume his Energy far too rapidly with little gain, he could modify the one he had already cast.

  The sound of glass breaking seemed to increase in intensity as the world shattered while Jasper poured Energy into the spell. It was a simple modification, really, a miracle of magic, as he doubled the range of the spell once, twice, thrice, and finally, the last of his four Energy was committed for the day.

  The spell tore the world apart at an alarming rate as it went from thirty meters in diameter to sixty, to one hundred and twenty, to two hundred and forty meters in diameter. The spell was enormous, and it tore up the ground, ripping it apart. Nothing could stand in the way of the spell as the gears appeared. The centre was a pit of darkness where the veils of the thing that lived between planes could be heard. The world was torn to shreds to such a degree that there was no hope of recovering it.

  Jasper just knew that he would have to fix this manually, which was always annoying. At least the horde of undead had gone from a massive army to a couple of squads trying not to get pulled in. He estimated that there were around fifty at the most, but the greenskins had been slaughtered completely, and those that had escaped had been caught up in the celestial engine.

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  He zoomed around, firebombing the remaining undead, and while each of them took three fireballs to bring down, it was manageable now that the gears were pulverising most of the group.

  Jasmine could feel the ancient dragon of Charity underneath her as she rode its golden scales, trying to figure out where she could be of most help. She was going to smack her god over the head someday, especially since it appeared as if he was going to unleash another Ur-spell. Based on her finely tuned senses, the cost of the magic had already been paid, meaning that it probably wouldn't tear the world apart unless he did something really dumb.

  The Scribe could see that the now Goddess of Trickery might be in trouble, though. With two battle-hardened foes, she seemed to be able to manipulate their spells in some way, but she was still dodging more attacks than she was throwing out there. That being said, she was uncannily fast, dodging even attacks that would have been certain hits.

  "Think ya can 'elp me?" she asked her dragon, though the dragon looked back at her, maintaining orbit.

  "You are asking me to break my vow of non-violence?" it hummed, the vocal cords placed so low in its throat that she could practically feel the vibrations travel up her body. "The goddess herself asked me for this divine vow, and your patron god is the god of contracts. Should you not see that I uphold my contract with someone of divine nature?"

  Jasmine hated that every one of the elder dragons had made this vow. It made it incredibly hard to hunt down their corrupted kin.

  Her thoughts were broken as the sound of the world shattering hit her. It was overwhelming and intense. Blood started to stream from her ears as the sound hit her tuned sense that much harder. Even the golden dragon of Charity seemed to wobble in the air, as if it had lost its balance for but a moment.

  Then the gears started to appear, followed by more and more, as the mad god her mentor had pledged himself to poured more power into the spell. It was too much. The world would break if he didn't stop. And it did. The world shattered into pieces, torn apart by the celestial engine. Jasmine could see the rifts spreading as the god tried to cram more of the engine into the world. He was like a toddler trying to push a square block into a round hole.

  The rips in reality seemed to extend, and Jasmine realized that while Jasper might think he had control, he was messing with energies that not even he had control over. He had damaged the world in a manner that would not be easily rectified, and the way he just poured more and more of his divine energies into the spell only served to worsen the problem.

  "Move." It was the only thing that came to Jasmine's mind as Charity seemed to have the same idea. They both shifted in the air, diving hard to start circling the massive dome of grinding Ur-magic.

  Jasmine instantly started to repair the tears in reality, trying to contain the powers that no being should wield. Thanks to her progenitor's teachings, she had been able to study the strange weave that made up the world. Her progenitor had used this knowledge to separate the gods from the plane of the living, as well as each other, but she had mostly used it to strengthen this veil. Now she was working overtime, mending rends larger than she had ever seen.

  Charity was trying to keep her steady, to give her the best possible path to repair the world. From time to time, one of the undead would get too close, leaving the golden dragon to unleash a torrent of flames all over them. To Jasmine's horror, they barely seemed to take any damage from these breath weapons, and it only served to turn them away temporarily.

  It solidified in her mind that they needed a god who would be able to handle the undead. Someone other than one of the drows. She didn't have too many good experiences with that lot.

  Riez dodged another bolt of lightning. The sound of grinding bones and the screams of the undead was a choir that seemed to help her flow better. She honestly considered taking the Music Domain, if only to have her own theme music, but also to frustrate Jasper and Martin with having to find a license for whatever music she picked.

  Another crackling lightning bolt almost hit her, though her speed was beyond anything that mortals could even comprehend. Her power "Walk Between the Rain" was almost literal, as she felt a sense of power and freedom in this game that she had never experienced before.

  The lich howled in fury as his army was destroyed, quite literally by divine intervention. "???????? ???? ?????? ?????? ???????????? ????, ???????? ?????????? ?????? ???? ?????????" he hissed as another bolt of lightning shot from his hands.

  Dranos had been fried quite easily by consistently redirecting or simply reversing spells. He was lying on his stomach, knocked out but not killed. However, the lich had not only divine powers but probably also a phylactery, if it was at all consistent with its RPG counterpart. It probably was, since the AI didn't really make anything new.

  It didn't mean that Riez couldn't kill the lich. It just meant that she would have to dedicate quite a bit of time to hunting down the phylactery and then turning it into dust. It would probably take the rest of the time in this session, and she wasn't about to dedicate that much time to what was essentially just a hidden boss.

  A wide plane of fire, as thin as a hair but broiling the air around it and creating a heat shimmer, threatened to cut off Riez's head, but it was easy to duck and roll closer, appearing next to the lich. "Oh I am not here to defeat you," Riez lied. "I am just here to keep you occupied until the God of Magic has finished killing all your minions."

  Blue flames engulfed a skeletal hand that tried to strike the annoying trickster, but she rolled to the other side, only to hear the lich snarl. "?????? ?????????? ? ???????? ?????? ????????? ? ???????? ???????????? ???????? ???????? ???? ?????? ????????????. ? ?????????????? ????????????????????. ?????? ?????? ?????????????? ???? ????."

  Riez couldn't help but notice that he seemed quite worked up, and the fact that he hadn't raised another army probably meant that there weren't any more corpses or that the spell was quite mana-intensive. Riez sighed. "You really don't have any idea of who we are... that is kind of sad."

  She let her hand fly forward, making a palm strike directly to the empty ribcage. The lich seemed stunned for a moment, but Riez sighed. She needed to invent some kind of technique that could disrupt people's mana like that. Maybe Jasper would be willing to help her.

  She continued to dodge and just kind of smack the skeletal figure. Over and over again, she could probably have taken the lich out multiple times at this point, and she honestly considered it, just to stop this from getting boring, but she hadn't been lying when she said that she was waiting for the God of Magic. She just hadn't told the truth when she told the lich that she wasn't here to defeat him.

  Finally, Jasper seemed to wrap up his bombardment, and with a gust of air, he landed a couple of meters from the two battling. The lich clearly saw it and threw a bolt of pure darkness towards the god. Jasper stretched out his hand, clearly trying to counterspell the magic, only to realise something and step to the side at the last possible second.

  Riez smacked the lich across the head, and she felt her Domains synergise once more. To her surprise, the skeletal face spun a full three hundred sixty degrees with an almost cartoonish rattling noise. She smiled. She liked it when the game knew what she wanted.

  Jasper sighed and looked at the lich. "Are you willing to make a bargain instead of fighting?"

  The lich was clearly dazed from his head spinning, and he must have realised that fighting two beings on Riez and Jasper's level wasn't really possible, even if he clearly didn't believe them to be gods.

  "????????. ???????? ???? ???? ???????? ?????? ?????????"

  Jasper smiled. "I am here to strike a deal."