Ninety gold occult portals opened up once more at a distance from Talen, and through each a single wraith passed through.

Each held position in the air, one hand extended up as the full focus of a single Superior Keith for every ghost focused their undivided attention.

The spears grew in hand, conjured up in the same league as Talen could cast, sharpened and aimed.

I’d cleared it with Superior and Urs. Getting hit by a single one of these spears likely wouldn’t kill Talen, but it’ll certainly bowl him over onto his knees, and force himself to focus on regeneration. If we got three hits in, that might be just enough for me to lunge for him in under those four seconds of sprinting.

But all this hinged on one thing: If.

If we hit him. And if he didn’t manage to block or defend against that spear hit. We couldn’t guarantee that from close range, he’d simply cut the portals before they were even fully formed, or at least slice through the Keith there without a counter.

But we wouldn’t know if this would work unless we tried it. And boy did we have the numbers to try it.

The man paused, looking around him for a half second.

The spears were slammed downwards at him from a hundred Keith's, like the wrath of the heavens descending down on one sinner.

And the man fought back.

Slices of occult came striking through spear and portal alike. A small sun was launched and detonated, eradicating a quarter of the Keiths passing through. An invisible hand slapped through the air as if it were swatting down gnats.

Hundreds of Keith Superiors were launched right back into their own dimension, their ghosts dissolved away.

A few did manage to launch their spear like a wrathful god back down on the man.

And Talen dodged, or slice out with his own blade down on the incoming fire.

“Good news is that he’s not passively trying to protect himself from that.” I said, looking over the carnage happening as the Icon and Superiors were desperately coordinating to keep more portals up and ghosts passing through.

“The spears are well formed, and as destructive as one cast from A01. They are better than what I remember in the vault. It is an impressive speed of growth.” Urs said.

Superior had holed himself in with Judge to focus fire down on battle in the occult dimension within the digital sea. And he’d made absolutely every minute count, with even more discipline and patience than I could possibly have.

“I recognize these movements,” Urs said, using a soul tendril to send me memories. Of a man holding back armies by himself. “This was how he fought protofeathers.”

Spear after spear was dodged and harmlessly detonated against the side of the bridge, or sliced in half by his blade. And a few times when he had no other resource, he even slapped them away with a quick left hand glowing in blue. He never made the attempt to use an occult dome shield to take on a single spear to the face, or attempt to confront the damage head on. Whatever the spear had been built as, it was clearly an armor penetrating one, built to stab through occult shields. And Talen reacted accordingly.

His eyes glowed blue with a trail behind, and that’s when I realized this entire plan was doomed.

That was the future sight fractal that Lord Atius used.

And now that I thought it through further, it might even be a distant cousin to Urs’s quantum fractal, composed of similar concepts. Peering into a potential alternate timeline, simply moved a few seconds ahead.

Lord Atius could hold that fractal in mind for several seconds, usually long enough to win or stalemate a fight. And he could only see a few dozen futures at one time.

How dangerous could that fractal be in the hands of an occult god, magnifying it with the fractal of Resolve?

Very, the answer was very. Talen’s movements were perfect, unending, and relentless. The man moved without flaw, or misstep. His attacks landed, his defenses held up, every spear was dodged within inches, and not by sheer luck. He moved like a perfect machine.

No, he moved like someone that fought and held off protofeathers. Alone.

Hundreds of spears rained down on him and he held them all at bay, all while ripping apart the offensive backline in the same breath.

“He is rapidly adapting to this strategy. Portal destruction is increasing in speed.” The Icon said, observing the data she was collecting.

“We’re going to wake him up too much at this rate.” I said, and felt it in my guts. He was sleepwalking through most of this up till now when there was an actual threat to fight back. I was starting to see the occult pulse around his frame, his movements growing larger. Speed was equally picking back up, and pretty soon I could imagine he’d start leaping from rock to rock, slicing and dicing everything in range.

And then he’d turn and sprint the rest of the way here.

I halted my attempts with Superior, all of us agreeing that if we didn’t get him with this, we weren’t going to get him at all. Better to save this and combine it with other plans.

“But what other plans have we got here?” I asked, starting to get worried now. The man was halfway here, and those walls would not hold him off point blank. Not when he was expecting Urs himself to be manning the defenses on the other end. He’d be slicing with some god-tier scrapshit.

“It has to be an attack vector he has not yet seen and developed a defense against.” Urs said. “The only methods I suspect may work would be pitting the fractal of resolve against him. By default, no other machine has access to this kind of power.”

“As in attempting to overpower the strongest human in existence. There’s got to be some other options to consider.” I said. “We’re good, but neither of us are a match against Talen hand to hand here.”

“And ranged attempts will inevitably fail due to his layered defenses.” Urs concluded.

The more I thought about it, the more I was certain ranged attacks wouldn’t be the answer. The man was resilient enough to those A01 had used his spears mostly to force him to reposition from the glimpses of memories I got from Urs. The real fights were always in close range.

“Wait, show me those again.” I asked, looking through the snapshots Urs was sending me.

A01 and Talen locked in combat. The protofeather was using his occult abilities to weave through the fractals of division Talen generated in the air, using blunt speed to overpower the defenses.

“I know the attack vector we can use.” I said, focusing. It was there the whole time: Machine souls.

They couldn’t reach out of their soul fractals. A01 wasn’t dodging through the forest of attacks Talen was laying down because it was easier. He was fighting this way because it was the best option the Protofeather had within his race’s ability to fight.

But we were humans. We could reach a tendril out and dispel occult. Mess with it completely.

And Talen wouldn’t have ever fought an enemy that could mess with his occult spells directly like that.

“There is potential in that vector.” Urs agreed, observing my thoughts.

“It’ll be real dangerous though. Ranged is real safe, we can swarm him with ghosts and not a single one of those houses a soul in there.”

But it could. The mirror fractal mirrored everything about me - including all the fractals on and in my armor. Which included the dozens of empty soul fractals I’d inscribed everywhere as plan B emergency eject.

“I would not advise doing so. Talen’s fractals of division will cut through the ghosts you send. If you equally send a ghost with your own soul carried in the mirrored soul fractal there, you run the risk of having your soul divided in a slice.”

I’d never run the risk of that happening, but we could test with the greater whole of Keiths. Have a small subsection venture out as a test to see what happens to that Keith if they’re cut in half while remote operating from an occult mirror.

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The answer was probably death. But we had little means to test it, because the moment Keith departed from his body among an occult ghost, he eventually ran too far from Urs and the connection with the greater whole snapped away.

We’d need to get a portal closer to Talen, and that had a lot of other risks to Urs himself involved.

Talen had shown he could attack us through those same portals we were hammering him from. And when he did, Urs had to focus his entire being in defending against it.

Or belly flop forward out of the way if it was going to rip even his defenses up. That has already happened twice during the spear throwing. Despite fighting at the apex of what an occultist could, some strategies like not-being-in-the-way remained viable. Perhaps not very elegant to see us panic flop on the ground, but if it worked, it worked.

And sneaking a soul near Talen without it getting destroyed would not be one of those plans that worked.

“We’ll have to risk it.” I said, “Until we figure out a better plan, this will be our go-to once he reaches the wall. Attempt to use the greater whole to dispel as many of these occult spells from forming in the air around him.”

The problem is that if the center Keith was already having to combine that many Keiths in one timeline to survive, then what chance did one of those side Keiths have running up to Talen without the support of all the other Keiths while actively sending their own abilities into another timeline?

They’d get wiped out faster than the Keiths duking it out on that bridge against To’Avalis’s forces.

If we charged him, we had to get a better plan. Or a distraction.

“I have a suggestion.” The Icon said.

“We’ll take anything you got.” And I absolutely meant that.

Right now Talen was back to shambling forward, eyes glazed over again from the prior life they had. Walking forward, and soon to be knocking on the walls.

“Mister Urs, how many concepts of division can Talen summon forth at any moment? Is there a limit or is it theoretically endless?”

“There is a limit.” Urs said. “Talen was never able to use the quantum fractal as I can. It requires a certain personality that he lacked in order to fully use it. Talen can thus only cast as many spells as a human could, within their peak. His body has been altered and improved using Resilience and Resolve, but there are still local limits to his abilities.”

“Therefore, how many others nearby is needed to fully dispel all of his division fractals and shielding?” The Icon asked.

Urs took a moment to calculate in his head. “He could summon about one hundred to one hundred fifty potential concepts within the air at the same time, so long as they are all the same. That number lowers drastically if he needs to conjure multiple different concepts.”

“He can’t multitask like a machine can.” I said, “Or how we can.”

Thinking the same concept and projecting that concept in a hundred different locations all at once was one thing. But if he needed to both think offense and defense at the same time, he’d run into human limits.

To be fair, those limits were way over the regular human limits of common sense, but there had to be a limit at some point.

“You believe you can overwhelm his abilities somehow?” Urs asked.

“I have read Grand Warlock Hexis’s passed down handbook, and I have seen his techniques.” The Icon said, showing over our HUD the relevant passages. “While I cannot do them myself, I believe they would be easy enough to teach to another? And more rapidly taught if you do it personally.”

I got what she was implying. “And we do have access to just about every warlock in the entire world. Way more than one hundred. If they all simply focused on one fractal at a time, it might work.”

Saturation would be an issue on that. The Icon could summon portals everywhere, but she couldn’t pack them all together that close.

We might need to summon a full army here and charge across the bridge together, so that there’d be enough to keep Talen off. Possibly have warlocks at the front focused solely on defense. Sagrius could lead that charge.

If the fractals of division forming around Talen were negated, then we could have other fighters enter the ring, like Father. I don’t think he’d win, but he certainly would keep Talen busy long enough for me to get close enough.

Urs shook his head over my back. “They would need the skill to reach through faster than the fractal forms. It requires alacrity that you have by dint of training. You and other highly skilled warlocks may be able to do it, however the vast majority cannot be as quick. It would only take a few misses to cause havoc among the lines.”

Yeah I could see how it would all collapse. One single warlock not being quick enough to prevent a division fractal forming nearby, having his head sliced off, and now there was a gap in the defense line along with a dead body freaking out the rest of the warlocks trying their best.

Panic would set in, or distraction at minimum. And it could cause a chain reaction forward.

And he could also summon those same concepts further off behind him, and then launch them forward like missiles directly at the charging army. We’d need to surround him all at once, and equally charge him from both directions on one of those bridges.

“There is someone capable of doing this task.” The Icon said. “A candidate.”

“Wait, really?” For a second I almost thought the Icon would mention Hexis himself alive somehow. Only that old cranky bastard could even come close to pulling off a mass dispel of that power.

But then I realized the more obvious: There had to be some warlocks already out there in the world that were the literal world’s best casters. Hexis was powerful, and I realized in a flash that he likely wasn’t the world’s best. Only very close to it.

However, the Icon’s next mention completely broke my train of thought: “Yes. I believe they are capable of multitasking to the level we need, and likely would be superior to Talen in this regard. However they will need to be taught how to dispel correctly, and within the next few minutes. Are you capable of doing so?”

It… couldn’t be a warlock of any high skill then. Dispelling was a basic trick. But how would they be better than Talen himself?

On the map, I could see Talen approaching the wallside. Soon to arrive within a few more minutes at most.

“Are you able to teach them in under a minute?” The Icon asked again, snapping me out of my thoughts.

Can I rush train a lesson? “Sure, but I’d need to teach them directly, soul to soul. Send them memories of my own for them to learn from. You can bring them here right after.”

It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be like having a fully read book in a second. There wasn’t any real replacement for personal experience and use, but the clinical learning could be taught soul to soul.

Wrath had done that to pillage Father’s abilities in combat. And while she was able to mimic his style perfectly, it lacked the deeper instincts the old man had.

But for something as simple as wiggling a soul tendril out into the air and throwing a bunch of gibberish concepts into the link through? That was easy enough.

A portal appeared ahead of me, and on the other end I saw a familiar armor, ice still melting away from likely the recent excursion he’d left on.

“Drakonis?” I asked, watching the haggard looking Deathless on the other end.

"Winterscar." he answered back with a tired nod. "Glad to see you're not buried in the dirt yet. Icon said you needed us?"

He was the one the Icon was mentioning could do this?

Wait. What did he mean by 'us'?

And then I realized who the Icon had as a candidate.

It just wasn’t Drakonis. Nor an individual.

“Bob.”