Ian possessed a Divine Authority of his own.
The Status of the God of Paradox nested perfectly alongside his Legendary Status without conflict.
As Ian called upon his Divine Authority, the roaring cyclone faltered.
The phantom double of Ian that had been swallowed by the gale offered a cold sneer before dissolving into silver mist.
Simultaneously, a lance of silver-gray light, hurled by an Ian stepping through the folds of another reality, pierced straight into the storm's eye, aiming directly for the congealed knot of ancient suffering that formed the core of the entity's ruined divinity.
The impact unleashed a silent, concussive shockwave.
There were no flames or thunderous detonations, only the devastating spread of pure logical collapse. Space fractured like brittle crystal to reveal the pitch-black Void beneath, and splinters of unraveled time drifted through the air like frozen rain.
The Fallen God let out an inhuman shriek as its cyclone form warped, its wind speeds dropping instantly under the silver light's erosion, and the weeping faces woven into the gale dissolved into fine ash.
Yet, this strike still failed to pierce the deepest layer of the Fallen God's Origin.
Even so, the entity grew visibly unsettled.
It had never faced an assault of this nature.
Ian was not merely trying to destroy its power; he was dismantling the very logic of its existence.
The Authority of Paradox was an imposition of an unreasonable reality, whereas the Fallen God depended entirely on the reasonability of being forgotten.
"You... actually dare... tamper with the foundations of reality!" the entity hissed, its gaze locking onto Ian in sheer shock.
"Why not?"
Ian used the violent recoil of the spell to steady his footing.
He dropped heavily to one knee, fresh blood spilling from the corner of his mouth, and his right arm hung at a grotesque, broken angle, the backlash was far worse than he had anticipated.
His magic was running dangerously thin, and his Legendary Status hummed unsteadily, threatening to break apart.
Yet he refused to collapse.
Forcing his left hand upward, he began tracing a counterclockwise spiral rune into the air.
The sigil was forged from pure impossibility, every line defying the fundamental laws of modern spellcraft, it existed simultaneously in what had been and what was yet to come, already finished yet still being drawn, solid yet phantom.
It was an unbailable force.
"Time Paradox - Return Against the Current."
The rune sank into his chest, and Ian's body began to rewind.
This went far beyond standard healing; it was a forced reversal of his physical state back to the exact moment before impact.
His shattered bones snapped back into place, the tears in his flesh closed seamlessly, and his magical reserves flooded back to the brim. But this was not without a cost, it took a devastating toll, a severe overdraft that thinned the concept of his own existence.
This was the inescapable tax of using a Paradox.
To force reality to accept a man who should not be standing there, he had to burn pieces of himself.
Every cast stripped away a fragment of what made him Ian Prince.
He was back at his peak strength.
Yet he was less a part of this world than he had been moments ago.
The Fallen God read the toll instantly.
"So that's how it is..." it sneered, the dark cyclone tightening and spinning with renewed fury. "Your power is a parasite feeding on yourself. The stronger you grow, the less of you remains."
"But I... I died an age ago. What stands before you is a hollow shell. Only suffering is eternal!"
The dark cyclone whipped forward, flattening out into a massive cord of death.
It didn't try to swallow him this time; it sliced through space, aiming to sever Ian's presence from the timeline entirely.
"I've left more than enough traces in history," Ian said, his hand rising as if indifferent to the cost. "Losing a few is practically a favor."
Bringing his palms together, he compressed his remaining magic and the weight of his Status into a dense, vibrating point before his chest.
"Authority of Paradox, Reality of Falsehood."
He became a soaring pillar of silver-black light, driving upward to meet the descending whip head-on.
No explosion followed the collision; instead, a suffocating, unnatural quiet choked the cavern.
Time ground to a halt.
Space froze solid.
The silver light and the black gale locked against one another like two primordial laws refusing to give an inch.
Ian's light eroded and rebuilt itself in the same breath, while the Fallen God's storm expanded only to be denied existence.
They devoured, resisted, defined, and canceled one another out in a perpetual loop.
Across the underground altar, every etched rune flared blindingly before dying out.
The ancient stone carvings spun like maddened clock hands, pointing toward hours that didn't exist.
Tiny, web-like fractures split the very air, a clear sign that reality was being stretched to its absolute breaking point.
Blood mixed with tears streamed down Ian's face.
Small cracks spider-webbed across his skin, making him look like a porcelain statue on the verge of shattering.
Inside the gale, the screaming faces began to melt into one another, hardening into a colossal, half-human visage, the face of the true god it had been before centuries of decay, briefly restored by the intensity of the clash.
"You... ultimately... cannot destroy me," the Fallen God whispered.
"And you cannot devour me either," Ian spat back.
There was no victory to be had here, no clear defeat.
Only a grinding stalemate.
The silver and black forces tore at each other in the dark, resembling the ancient dualities at the dawn of the world.
Ian stood anchored within his pillar of light, his chest heaving but his resolve unbroken, while the Fallen God hovered within its storm, its presence chaotic but far from extinguished.
Both combatants knew conventional magic could not end this.
Ian's power drew from the fact of his Existence; the Fallen God drew from the emptiness of the Void.
One was Paradox incarnate, the other was the ash of Decay.
It was no longer a trial of magical supremacy, but a brutal test of endurance.
Slowly, the silver light began to contract, and the black wind pulled back into itself.
Ian sank to one knee, his magic spent and his Status dimmed, though neither had vanished entirely.
Gritting his teeth, he reached for the Divine Authority once more.
And once more, his body snapped back to its peak condition.
"What a repulsive power," the Fallen God hissed, retreating toward the dark recesses of the altar.
The cyclone unraveled, leaving only the obsidian Eye of the Heart floating in the shadows like an unblinking watcher.
They were right back where they had started.
Neither had gained a single inch.
Neither had claimed a true advantage.
There was only the cold, silent weight of their endless confrontation in the deep.
Down at the Bottom of the Abyss, the cavern had lost any semblance of its original structure.
The ancient prison had been ground down into a wasteland where raw, volatile magic ran rampant.
Ian and the Fallen God stood thirty paces apart, the sheer pressure between them so dense that the air felt like solid stone.
Time seemed to stall, then run backward in a chaotic, dizzying vortex.
The absolute blackness of the abyss hemmed them in, lit only by the jagged, bleeding lines of torn space floating overhead.
They had been locked in this cycle for hours.
The stone tunnels leading down to this chamber had been completely vaporized by the shockwaves, creating an absolute vacuum so profound that no ordinary wizard could ever hope to perceive or reach them.
"You cannot kill me," Ian said, his voice faint, falling into perfect rhythm with the low thrumming of the air.
Deep within him, his Legendary Status turned with the slow, heavy rotation of a galaxy, his magical pathways resonating with the oldest movements of the world.
He wasn't just a Hogwarts student playing with a wand anymore.
At this very moment, he was an Anchor of Existence, a traveler who had crossed a Time Paradox carrying pieces of multiple timelines.
His mind held secrets that didn't belong to this century, and his soul bore the marks of futures that had never been allowed to happen.
A Legendary Status wasn't just a pool of power; it was a permanent anchor in reality.
Ian's presence alone acted as a corrective force, causing the warped laws of the abyss to tremble and straighten simply because he was standing there.
That anchor was exactly what the Fallen God needed.
It required a vessel durable enough to bear its corruption without rotting away entirely, and Ian was the perfect Divine Shell it had spent a millennium waiting for.
"You are a rare specimen," the Fallen God murmured as its silhouette shifted, heavy plumes of black soot bleeding from its form and shaping themselves into weeping human masks.
"But I have seen the path ahead. I have seen the future where you break."
"You are no longer a god," Ian said, his words falling with the heavy finality of a judge's gavel.
"You are a forgotten echo. A rotting wound poisoning the Spirits of Nature."
"A god?" The entity let out a low, mocking laugh that shook the foundations of the cavern.
"Gods live and die on faith, boy. When the people of these lands stopped bringing offerings to the roots, when their children began pulling magic through polished wands instead of bleeding onto stone altars, the old gods starved."
"I am the last coal in the ash. But I will burn again."
The divinity driving the entity was no longer fueled by worship; it had curdled into a dark authority fed purely by human terror.
Its true shape began to slip through the dark, at one moment a massive, many-legged nightmare of the ancient forest, the next a pale priest draped in flayed skin, then a towering monolith of bone and strangling vines.
Its voice bypassed Ian's ears, crashing into his mind like a black wave of collective screams.
"Gods always find a way!"
The declaration hadn't even finished echoing when reality violently buckled.
It wasn't a physical upheaval; the very fabric of the timeline was being pried open, and Ian felt his mind tearing along the seams.
A dozen lives flashed through his thoughts at once.
He saw himself eating quietly in the Great Hall; he saw himself trading curses with Voldemort on a ruined battlefield; he saw himself tracking beasts through the African tall grass with Newt Scamander; and he saw himself on his knees before this very altar, his eyes turned black as the mist claimed him.
Every possible outcome hit him simultaneously.
It was a psychic assault of pure possibility.
The Fallen God was trying to crush Ian's present will under the weight of his potential failures, forcing him to believe that every path led to the same dark end.
Against any ordinary wizard, the despair would have been absolute.
But Ian was far from ordinary.
A thin line of blood ran down his chin, but his lips curved into a sharp smile.
As the incarnation of Raven, the Keeper of Destiny, he had looked into the eyes of his future self.
This entity was trying to lecture a master on his own craft.
"You're wrong," he whispered.
"What you're showing me is just noise. I am the reality."
He raised his left hand, and a glowing rune flared in his palm, the raw signature of his Paradox.
It belonged to no textbook, crossing neither ancient runes nor modern charms; it was the simple assertion of an impossible fact: a boy who should not be here, standing here anyway, wielding power outside of time.
"Paradox is reality."
The rune shattered, throwing off hundreds of brilliant sparks into the dark.
Each spark carried the weight of a rejected timeline, the world where he never crossed over, the world where he let Newt die, the world where he bent the knee to the Dark Lord.
The Authority of Paradox forced those dead possibilities into existence all at once, building an impenetrable wall of anti-reality.
The Fallen God's psychic invasion smashed into the barrier and rebounded violently.
The entity shrieked, its massive form fracturing as the faces of fear and rot caught fire under the silver light.
It had never encountered an opponent who didn't fight with curses, but used his very existence as a shield.
"You... you are an anomaly!" it roared, thrashing in the dark. "A blemish on the universe!"
"Perhaps," Ian's voice drifted through the silver glare. "But it's exactly that blemish keeping you out of the world."
The true battle was only beginning.
The cavern groaned as the fight moved entirely past wands, incantations, and standard dueling forms.
Every breath Ian drew sent visible ripples through the dark; every pulse in his veins altered the local flow of time.
He had stopped casting spells; he had simply become a living disruption in the local laws of nature.
The Fallen God countered with pure decay, turning the entire chamber into an extension of its rot.
The stone floor split open, and thick, black vines tore through the fissures.
They weren't wood and sap; they were the condensed malice of every nature spirit the entity had ever consumed, dripping with a venom that targeted the soul.
"You think you can take my Status?"
Ian's Legendary Status rose to meet the threat, burning golden patterns across his skin to form a heavy shield.
The moment the black vines struck the gold light, they hissed and melted away like frost on a stove.
But each time a vine dissolved, a blinding headache stabbed through Ian's temples, his Status was absorbing the direct impact of the corruption.
He knew he couldn't keep this up indefinitely.
A Legendary Status was a massive reservoir, but it wasn't a bottomless well, and the Fallen God had spent a thousand years rooted in the filth of this land.
It had become the rot itself.
As Ian calculated his remaining strength, the entity lunged.
"To hold my filth is the only honour you have left!"
The Fallen God dropped its ancient magic entirely, throwing everything into the true core of its dark authority: the Decay of All Things' End.
It spread its deformed arms wide, and a heavy, gray-black ripple rolled outward from its chest.
Wherever the ripple touched, the stone groaned and the air itself seemed to wither.
Colors vanished into dull greys.
The heavy pillars grew brittle.
Everything within reach looked as though it had been left to rot for ten billion years, ready to drop into dust at a touch.
It was a curse aimed at the literal end of all things, designed to drag Ian and the space around him into total annihilation.
The grey waves reflected in Ian's eyes as he felt his magic begin to curdle and slow, his very cells screaming under the strain.
Yet his mind remained perfectly still.
Taking one deep breath, he let the unique power within him, the beautiful, impossible Paradox of his Existence, blaze to life once more.
(End of Chapter)
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