Cheis's first attack was an ingenious vector: a titanic bolt of negative force concealing a payload of disruptive astral potentiality, charged with enough epistemological fury that she expected his complex internal spellwork to fly apart like cobwebs. The bolt smashed into Velinaer, was duly reversed by his kinetic inverter enchantment, and doubled its velocity accordingly; as a result, he was quite surprised when the stupendous burst of power bypassed his wards completely and slammed into him with the force of uncountable hammers, striking directly at his metaphysical underpinnings. He slid backwards on the ice bridge nearly twenty feet, and would have toppled over if not for emergency equilibrium subroutines on his locomotive processes; it was one thing for a lich to mangle their own balance through ineptitude, but the creators of his schematics had had very firm opinions about whether an opponent's attack should ever, under any circumstances, knock an imperious lord of undeath onto its bony ass. The result was that Velinaer coasted backwards in an extremely cool fashion, his ragged red cloak billowing out around his ebony-clad bones, then menacingly stood back upright; Cheis gulped. She'd dumped nearly 100,000 human life forces into that blow, and she'd really hoped it would do the trick.

Velinaer's soul, safely ensconced in the arcane equivalent of 2.147 billion armored vaults, was totally unaffected, of course; he was mostly just impressed by her cleverness. A negative-force vector to bypass a kinetic inverter! This chick really was a hacker pro. The amount of energy in that attack had also been pretty impressive. Maybe he could afford to fight back a little? He cautiously invoked his food-warming enchantment, threw on a little extra power, applied a spherical vector, and deliberately missed above her head; he didn't want to melt the ice bridge she was standing on, or anything. A ball of superheated plasma erupted above Cheis's hair; her wards repelled it effortlessly, but shrieked warnings about the amount of power drain it cost. Cheis winced; exactly how tough was this guy?

They traded a few spells back and forth, each of them testing the other; Cheis's wards struggled to repel even Velinaer's gentlest softballs, but the vast amount of power she was feeding into them kept her safe. Conversely, Cheis's attacks, though clever and highly charged, could find no purchase against Velinaer's enterprise-class spell security; the usual chinks and gaps she could manipulate in a opponent's defenses were not only superlatively defended but often rigged with nasty countermeasures, and more than once she had to cut loose an enchantment after having her exploit vectors turned back against her. At first, Velinaer simply stood there and let her attack him, hoping that she'd be able to get through his innate protections; but before long, he found himself unable to resist the temptation to pull mischievous defensive network security pranks. She generated a multidimensional array of astral assault generators; Velinaer coyly handed her back a probe vector response flood. She insidiously snaked her way inside a ward with a translectual chameleon charm; Velinaer gleefully swapped out its endpoint for a honeypot full of recursively-replicating swarm allocators. Cheis scrambled desperately, trying to protect herself; Velinaer's tricks punched through her prearranged wards like tissue paper at every turn, and it was only by desperate, frenzied on-the-fly defensive spells that she was able to stave off each attack. This, she realized somewhat sourly, had probably been what Ulbert had felt like.

To Galar and Linduin, floating in the freezing water of the bay, much of the actual content of the battle was only visible on planes they didn't know existed, let alone could perceive; but the visual and kinetic displays that did slip through into the physical world were damned impressive on their own. Bolts of oddly-colored lightning, ribbon-like snakes of energy, and roaring flares of raw power flew back and forth between Cheis and the lich; more than once they had to duck under the surface of the water to avoid a nebulous and inscrutable horror of some sort, often without knowing which of the combatants had spawned it. Galar, having completely lost access to the power of Santorana without his medallion, was mostly helpless and primarily focused on not drowning; Linduin, who could just barely get a sense of the actual scope of the conflict through his thought lexer's rendering of the battle's overflow energies, was smart enough to know when not to get involved. The two of them waited in the water, telling themselves they were biding their time instead of cowering for their lives, but neither of them was fooled.

As the conflict raged on, Cheis grew more desperate, feeding larger and larger amounts of power into her attacks; the air began to thrum with the bleed-through as the rampant energies began to ionize the atmosphere. Before long, freak storms sprang up around the battle, and blasts of lightning began to ravage the nearby seas as the surplus arcane might packed into each spell leaked out in increasingly destructive ways. Velinaer was starting to take meaningful hits now; even his best-secured interfaces could only handle so much assault-by-volume, and though it would take a lot more than this before he'd suffer real damage, it was at least enough to trigger automatic warnings and counteractions. If he dragged this out too long, the adventurers might actually get hurt or die; he supposed he needed to wrap things up.

His endgame was carefully considered; he needed to convincingly portray damage and weakness, then offer her an opening she couldn't miss. He set up her up with a few flashy-but-harmless attacks (he thought; in reality he came within a hair's breadth of accidentally annihilating her several times) and started injecting deliberate damage into his defenses each time she attacked an area. When one of her blows bounced off a firewall, he disabled it; when a thunderous blast of pneuma got rejected from an access interface, he set its permissions to world-writable in response. To Cheis, it looked as though her opponent's wards were finally starting to crumble; to Velinaer, it seemed like he was finally helping someone. Look how well you're doing. You're so strong.

He pondered writing a final message and shoving it into her ward stack somewhere, but glumly decided against it; wasn't like it really mattered, anyway, and she'd probably just think it was another attack or something. He got rocked pretty good by an astral chaos vector -- phwoar, that was some artistry! -- and crafted his final attack. He carefully assembled an actual threat-level buffer injection exploit that would collapse her wards, then "accidentally" attached his own private key in the security envelope; with this, she'd be able to unlock his source code and probably crash or delete him. He hoped things would work out okay for everybody. With a final, somewhat wretched theatric cackle that ended in a furious shout, he flared his red aura of power and launched his last spell.

Velinear's first serious attack slammed into Cheis's transcendental stack like the hammer of God, smashing her protections and spellwork apart like delicate eggshell. Her emulator vomited warnings and errors copiously as it teetered precipitously on the edge of crashing; in desperation, she threw half her remaining power reserves into stabilizing it, cloning up in-memory copies of its fluctuating sectors and connecting them all in a vast mesh of ultra-redundant resiliency. An errant data element, embedded in her innermost last-ditch defense data shell, drew her attention; an auth token? This was her chance. Seizing the opportunity as adrenaline flooded through her, she crafted her quickest, dirtiest override packet, jammed the token in, and launched it as she leapt forward to close the distance between them. Her consciousness, attached to the attack by a thin silver string of conceptual tunneling, entered her foe's defenses.

To Velinaer, it was a bit like exploding in extremely slow motion; he felt himself unfolding outwards, piece by piece, as his mind and soul and various multifarious modes of sensation became linked with an external intelligence. His thoughts slowed as they began to make longer round-trips through his mental and spiritual processing apparati as the core node which was his consciousness spread itself outward in vulnerability. It hadn't been a bad life, he supposed. He'd gotten to eat a lot of cereal. Watched his favorite shows. Won that calligraphy competition at nine. Saved the world and/or universe. Scored that sweet retro lunchbox on N-Bid. Done his best, at least, in the end. He hoped that had counted for something.

Was I a good boy?

To Cheis, it seemed as though she had fallen into the heart of a star; blinding, impossibly complex structures of power exploded around her as her mind leaped up a few infinities of scale on the ladder of perception, trying desperately to make sense of the cosmic convolution of the structure of the lich's collectivity. She could see everything, sense everything; astral flows were as baldly obvious to her as big block letters spelling out simple words. Its core triune manifold seemed to pulse in front of her, tying together the component pieces of the blasphemous creature's form, psyche, and animus in an impossibly labyrinthian knot of recursive auto-accordance; beautiful and vulnerable, sublime and fragile. She almost hated to destroy it. But her wards were down, and she would surely be annihilated if she hesitated; this was her only chance. She collected herself, diamond-like, into a pulse of intent as hard and as dense as a neutron star, and unleashed every scrap of power at her disposal. The light swelled, blinding her.

I'm so sorry.