I flew.

  Thena had been right. I’d had an idea of how my magic worked, but my foundation had been built on blind ignorance. It had been a misunderstanding on the most basic, fundamental level. Now, though? Now I understood, so everything was a little bit different.

  I was a witch, and witch flight wasn’t Iron Man-esque zooming around. I didn’t need to worry about anything so pedestrian as ‘lift’, ‘thrust’ or even ‘being aerodynamic’. Newton’s laws whomst? Not me. I simply used magic to move relative to how I perceived the space around me. I wanted to be over there, and so I was. Even what counted as ‘up’ to me was something relative, something that could be altered—which was helpful when flying in a dress, especially when not wearing anything under it. Now that I knew how it worked, calling it flying at all actually felt like a bit of a misnomer, even if that’s what I was doing from a practical standpoint.

  I willed it and my magic responded, red energy glimmering in my palms. A loud crack split the air as I bobbed backwards, the tip of Thena’s long whip of golden energy snapping through the space where my head had been a bare instant ago. The two Eternals were pushing me toward the side of a nearby cliff, rough, jagged red rock looming over us. I wasn’t sure what their game was—they couldn’t be trying to box me in given that, as far as I was concerned, the battlefield was 3D now.

  Instead, they broke off and ran to either side, circling around me toward the cliff itself. I had no idea what they were thinking until a rapid pattern of golden cosmic energy spiralled down Gil’s legs into the ground and he jumped, launching himself up and past me to land on the edge of the cliff above. Thena jumped as well, latching onto the cliff and hurling herself upward, bounding once, twice, three times as I flicked my hands toward her, lobbing bolts of chaos magic at her back.

  Even those were more accurate, now that I understood my magic better. I wasn’t ‘firing energy blasts’ in the same way that a gun or one of Tony’s repulsors were. I decided what I wanted to hit, and the magic would flow in that direction—there was no more trying to aim a line outward from myself, leading my target, none of that stuff that I’d thought I’d needed to do. Guided missiles, rather than dumb bullets. They weren't perfectly smart projectiles, of course, but it was a little more like having aim assist on.

  Thena still managed to narrowly dodge through my attacks, cresting the top of the cliff without getting hit. The two of them were above me now, but so what? What were they trying to accomplish? I supposed they could try to jump down on me from there, tackle me out of the air, but that seemed like a terrible plan. When I could fly and they couldn’t, anything that let me keep distance from them was to my benefit, not theirs. I started to back up, moving away from the cliff—I had no idea what they’d been thinking, giving me the space I needed to maneuver.

  I got my answer when Gilgamesh turned back toward me, golden designs once again flickering down one leg as he lifted it high, before he stomped down on the edge of the cliff with a booming impact that I felt in my chest. The pattern of golden energy flashed down through the rock like a bolt of lightning—racing thirty, forty metres down the ruddy red rock in a split-second—and when it touched the ground below, the entire cliff-face exploded outward toward me in an avalanche of jagged boulders.

  My eyes widened fractionally in panic and I ripped myself out of my body, flinging myself as deeply into the Astral Plane as I could as quickly as I could. My perception of time immediately slowed to a crawl as I flew backward, taking in the scene laid out in front of me.

  Astrally projecting like this at all was a bit of a desperation move. I didn’t usually do it mid-fight because it could be super disorienting to duck back into my body, but in a situation like this where there was already too much going on around me for me to process properly, I was hoping it would be worth it. It was a shame that I couldn’t use other forms of magic at all this deep in the Astral, at least not that I’d been able to work out. I was just too disconnected from physical space to have a hope of reaching across—but I could at least pause for a moment and take stock.

  My physical body hovered in front of me, near-motionless—it hadn’t even had time to start to fall. Beyond it was the fractured cliff… it actually looked really cool, nearly frozen like this. I hadn’t known that Gil could do something like that. The entire cliff-face, top to bottom and a dozen metres to either side, had ruptured and blasted outward. If it had just been smaller rocks, it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but there were dozens of larger boulders, many the size of a car or bigger. On top of that, the fact that they were still crawling forward at a visibly noticeable rate, shifting steadily millimetre by millimetre even in the time-dilated perception afforded by being this deep in the Astral, meant they were travelling fast.

  Thena hadn’t stayed still, either. She’d jumped off the cliff at the same time that Gil had stomped down, and was now frozen mid-fall toward me, the golden whip in her hands already splitting and changing shape into something bigger, made of multiple smaller threads. A net, maybe? Though she’d covered her approach with one of the larger boulders, Thena still wouldn’t have caught me by surprise even if I wasn’t observing the tableau before me from the Astral Plane. The bond between us had deepened to the point where I simply didn’t need to see her to know exactly where she was anymore—I just did.

  I spent a handful of relative seconds carefully noting the positions and trajectories of the boulders. There wasn’t going to be enough time to weave a proper barrier to protect myself, so I’d need to be moving the instant I re-entered my body, otherwise I’d be swatted out of the sky. Steeling myself, I flew back into myself.

  As I hit my body, I fought the momentary disorientation and wrenched myself to the left as hard as I could, trying to get out of the way of the first boulder. It still clipped my shoulder—just a glancing hit that was absorbed by my protection spell—but it was still enough to spin me off balance, and I almost didn’t make it through the gap between two more of the massive projectiles as I was forced to drop toward the ground.

  In my peripheral vision, I had a bare second to register golden lines whipping around through the air to encircle me as Thena followed me down, a half-dozen thin, snapping wires flicking out from each of her hands—I had a moment of double-vision, seeing a version of Thena clad in a figure-hugging black jumpsuit for a brief instant as we fell between the boulders. Was that monofilament wire? That was made-up bullshit, not a real weapon! The two of us hit the ground at the same time, just as she pulled the wires taut.

  A dozen of the still-falling boulders around and above us were sliced apart, neatly sectioned into geometric shapes as the razor wires passed through them to snap tightly around me. Glimmering red chaos magic outlined my body, the spell protecting my bare skin from the wires even as my arms were bound tight against me. The magic held—it was strong, but relatively draining over the long term because, after I cast it, it was essentially ‘always on’. I really wanted to make something reactive, that would flare up when it was needed and stay dormant when it wasn’t, but I wasn't quite sure how to make it do that just yet. Still, the protection spell was doing its job. Without it, this razor wire bullshit was the sort of thing that could have ended the fight immediately by reducing me to a bloody pile of dismembered body parts.

  “I see you have the power of gods and anime on your side,” I ground out through gritted teeth as I drew deeply on my magic. A moment later, red energy exploded out from me in every direction, shredding the wires and freeing me. Thena was knocked backward, stumbling, and I flicked up a hand to blast her with a quick follow-up, trying to keep her off-balance.

  The shadow covering my hand was all the warning I had before Gilgamesh slammed down on me in a flying lariat, catching the back of my neck with his bicep as he slammed me to the earth. My head bounced off the ground like it was a fucking basketball, the bare red rock shattering under the weight of the strike—the spell armouring me meant I was only dazed, but as I tried to reorient myself, Gil seized my wrist and swung me around like a flail, smashing me into the nearest of the intact boulders that had fallen from the cliff.

  The protection magic flexed—it had to have some give in it, otherwise it’d just shatter and then I’d really be fucked—and the blow knocked the air out of me. Even so, I managed to twist myself out of Gilgamesh’s grip. Flying out of his reach, I flipped one-eighty degrees, hanging upside down in midair for a moment as I deftly avoided a thrown javelin of golden cosmic energy, the weapon passing just in front of my face.

  “Fucking—that’s it!” I snarled, drawing as much power into myself as I could. “Killing you both!”

  “That’s the spirit!” Gil crowed.

  He leaped into the air toward me, winding up a haymaker, and I flipped myself back upright as I bobbed backwards, using the motion to avoid his lunge as I gestured widely and sent a thick curtain of roiling chaos magic spreading out in all directions. It passed through the Eternals and our surroundings harmlessly, but then a moment later the shattered remains of the cliff—dozens of heavy rocks of all shapes and sizes—rose into the air, edged in red power.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I didn’t need to carefully telekinetically manipulate each one, like I was lifting them with invisible arms. I didn’t have invisible arms. Instead, I directed my magic like a conductor, trusting that it would follow my intent. Gil paused, eyebrows raised slightly as he looked around at the field of floating boulders.

  The first streaked toward him with a flick of my hand. He protected himself, catching the projectile on a hunched shoulder before batting it aside with the back of one golden gauntlet. I didn’t let up, catapulting them at him one after the other, forcing him to go on the defensive or be knocked off his feet as boulders the size of cars shattered against his armour. They couldn’t actually hurt him much, but they would slow him down for a precious handful of seconds.

  Gilgamesh temporarily distracted, I lunged in toward Thena. She held up a golden shield, deflecting my initial blast of energy as I flung my hand out toward her. I didn’t stop, letting my magic carry me in close so I could grab the edge of the shield with my already-outstretched hand—Thena was stronger than I was, but the move was still enough for me to pull her off balance long enough to nail her in the side, point-blank, with a blast of magic from my free hand.

  She went flying, trying to catch herself as she tumbled, but I didn’t let up—with a quick gesture of my hand, a nearby boulder slammed into her from behind, sending her staggering.

  This was it. I could practically taste it. I was going to win.

  The nearness of potential victory must have distracted me, because I didn’t hear the charging footsteps until they were almost on me. I spun just as Gilgamesh loomed large over me, one fist raised high as he went to bring it down in a hammerblow. I threw my hands toward him, summoning wisps of red to blast him point blank.

  Unexpectedly, Gil stepped into and past me, twisting his body off-centre. When he brought his arm down, both of mine were suddenly trapped tightly between his bicep and the side of his body, tucked into his armpit. I could have still blasted him, even restrained, but doing so while he was pinning my arms like this? If I hit him hard enough, I might accidentally tear my own arms off.

  A tiny, involuntary whimper escaped the back of my throat as I realised what was going to happen next, a split-second before Gilgamesh slammed his head forward. His forehead bounced off mine and I saw stars—once, twice, three times—then he relaxed his arm, letting me fall backwards. I landed heavily on my rump, stunned, my vision doubled and swimming. I could feel something wet running down the bridge of my nose—was I bleeding? Even through the shield? Huh. If I hadn’t had it up, that probably would have reduced my head to chunky salsa.

  My arms flailed unsteadily for a moment as I scrambled, trying to get back on my feet as Gil stepped back. “Ooh. That—I’m okay. I’m okay,” I muttered to myself, blinking as I tried to stop the world from spinning. I felt everything lurch and was suddenly on my ass again. “I’m not okay.”

  “Enough,” Thena commanded.

  I immediately stopped trying to get back up, taking a few moments to collect myself instead as I sat on the ground in a daze. Gingerly, I probed at my forehead with my fingers and winced. They came away bloody. I was pretty sure it was just a small split or cut, rather than an actual cracked skull, but still, Gil had really rung my bell at the end there.

  “You alright?” he asked, offering me a hand and looking at me carefully.

  I let him help me up and sighed. “You know, you could have just let me have that one.”

  “You’ve made a lot of progress,” Thena commented as she walked over to join us. “Your reflexes are improving, and you’re beginning to understand your range. But you’re still easily baited into overcommitting. You react to what’s immediately in front of you, lashing out and throwing power around as emotive responses, rather than taking calculated actions, thinking ‘how will they respond to this?’, ‘what am I doing next?’.”

  “It’s kind of hard to do that with both of you in my face, not giving me space to breathe, let alone think,” I grumbled.

  “It’s a delicate balance for you—your magic responds more easily and powerfully when you are in tune with your emotions, but letting yourself get annoyed or angry in the middle of a fight narrows your vision. You just need more practice keeping yourself under control. It will come in time.” She paused for a moment, then tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Speaking of time, that use of astral projection was novel—I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use it in the middle of a fight like that. I’d warn you to take care who you use a trick like that against, though.”

  “You knew?” I asked, a little surprised.

  Thena gave another small nod. “Eternals can see spirits,” she explained. “You used it sparingly, but I did catch a glimpse. As I said, be careful—at the very least, cosmic energy can still harm an untethered spirit, and injuries gained in such a state are difficult to recover from. I would guess that another witch or other knowledgeable magic-user may be able to punish you for it, too.”

  I nodded at that. Mental note to self: Don’t get stabbed in the soul.

  Thena took a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment before glancing between Gilgamesh and me. “We’ll break for a little while. Rest, have water and food.”

  I frowned. Why were we breaking already? It’d only been… actually, I had no idea how long it had been, but while my head still hurt a bit and I was starting to tire, I still had a bit left in the tank before I really needed a break.

  I was about to say so when I caught myself. I hadn’t noticed it until just now, but Thena’s shoulders seemed to be sagging a little. Not overly so, but she wasn’t quite standing as straight and tall as she normally did. And as she turned to walk away, there was a barely-perceptible heaviness to the movement, like she was struggling to put one foot in front of the other, though she was doing her best to mask it.

  With a small mental shake, I realised that I was reading a lot into a very minor change in the way Thena was moving. Why was I… Oh. Because I wasn’t just seeing a change, I could feel it through our connection, too. Deep in my chest. It was faint, but she felt like she was under an immense amount of strain, for some reason.

  “Thena?” I asked as she went to walk away, a little bit of concern leaking into my voice. “Are you alright?”

  She shot me a look over her shoulder, fixing me with an impassive gaze for a brief moment. “I’m fine,” she said curtly. “Be ready. We will resume shortly.” And with that, she walked away.

  I turned to Gil. He had a pensive expression on his face, which cleared as soon as I looked at him. He grinned instead. “Alright, let’s get some more gruel into you.”

  As we walked back toward the homestead, I went internal, mentally reviewing what had happened in the fight. My fingers twitched at my sides as I slowly unthreaded the protection spell I’d been using, examining its structure piece by piece in my minds’ eye. Honestly, I had no idea how I’d managed to come up with something like this so quickly. I felt a little like it should have taken me weeks of dedicated work to puzzle out something like this from scratch, but even now I could still see ways to improve upon my last casting—make it more efficient so I could keep it up longer, I could almost certainly make it a little looser without compromising its integrity, too, giving it just a touch more flexibility, so it could take stronger hits without breaking…

  The big next breakthrough, though, would be making it fully reactive, which I felt pretty confident that I might even be able to work out today. I already had the basic shape of what was needed to flip the spell from a passive to an active state, and for it to protect only certain parts of me, rather than being all-the-way on or all-the-way off, but it was all still manual. Unless I already had the foresight to have it active, it wouldn’t protect me from a surprise sniper’s bullet. Yet.

  I was certain there would need to be a conceptual element—I needed the enchantment to have an awareness, an ability to recognise and anticipate imminent danger. It was a shame that Peter’s tingle wasn’t magical, otherwise I might have been able to just use that as the basis for my own enchantment. But still, knowing something like that was possible already made it a good starting point. Part of me also kind of expected that the best way to understand danger on a conceptual level was probably to just immerse myself in it, so another eight hours of being kicked around by two Eternals might well do the trick.

  I was itching to get my hands on the Mind Stone again, too. I’d seen in Odin’s work on Mjolnir how cosmic energy could be used as a framework to increase the power of magical enchantments. It’d definitely take some experimentation to puzzle out exactly how to do it, but if I could carefully tease out the Mind Stone’s energy, the way I had inside Thena’s mindscape, and weave it into an underlying structure… I had a hunch that it would, at the very least, act like rebar inside concrete, making my protections even stronger, but I felt like there was more possible there. It might not be super practical to do without an interface to assist the process, but still, the more I learned about the intricacies of interactions between magic and cosmic energy, the better off I would probably be.

  Thena stayed ahead of us as we walked, and when we reached the stone fence that encircled their home she broke off to head toward her tree shrine, while Gilgamesh and I made our way through to the patio. Even when she was out of sight, my view of her blocked by the house, I could still feel exactly where Thena was. She continued a short distance away before stopping at her destination, and I was pretty sure I could tell that she’d just sat down, too. A slight tremor passed through our connection—it was difficult to describe what it felt like, and I wasn’t sure what it meant.

  Gilgamesh headed into the house while I lingered in the doorway, watching him as he threw together some more horrific sadness-made-edible for me. “Gil, what’s going on? Thena’s…” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure how to describe it, but I also knew that he knew what I was talking about.

  “She’s pushing harder than I expected, that’s all,” he said, maybe a little too quickly. He seemed very interested in what he was doing, not even glancing in my direction as he spoke. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  I was trying to work out how to press him on it without being an asshole about it when I suddenly felt my connection to Thena grow cold as ice. I stiffened—I still wasn’t sure how to interpret everything that I could sense through our bond—but as she started moving quickly back toward the house I turned and stepped outside, intending on checking to see if she was okay. I froze instead.

  There was a figure just beyond the homestead’s patio, hovering maybe a dozen metres in the air, framed against the midday sun. I almost hadn’t seen him right away, just the barest flicker of movement from above drawing my eye. As I stood there, he floated lightly to the earth, watching me with an inscrutable expression on his face.

  Ikaris.