Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users

Roots surged like tidal waves, their weight bending the void itself. Illusions fractured into storms of glass and shadow, cutting in every direction.

Each strike landed heavier than the last, each counter pushed sharper. The void screamed, stretched, and cracked.

Neither relented. Neither yielded.

The battlefield bent under them, trembling as if it might tear apart. Green light burned against crimson shadows, branches tore through mirrored skies, and shards of broken reflection sliced into roots only to be swallowed by new growth.

And still, faint smiles curved both their lips. Not warm, not cruel—recognition, respect, the kind shared only by two storms that had met before and knew they would meet again.

The void quivered. The rivers bowed. The roots tightened. The illusions waited for the next command.

The battle had only just begun.

Lilith moved first. Her hand rose in a small arc, fingers loose, and the air around her thickened as if packed with wet silk.

The fractured sky dropped another layer of mirrors, not like before, where faces fell and broke.

This time, whole horizons lowered, curved, and sealed like lids over an eye. Inside each horizon, a world spun up from nothing.

Elowen stood in each one, but the ground beneath those other Elowens shifted wrong. In one, a gray shore stretched on forever while her roots slipped and found no soil.

In another, a bright and wild forest grew, then burned to ash without smoke. In a third, rivers ran backward and carried the scent of iron.

"Reality inside reality," Lilith said, voice low and pleased. Her words came from one mouth and also from the dozen shadows that split off and drifted along the edges of sight.

"Pick whatever you like, and I will ensure it hurts."

Elowen's answer was not loud. "No."

One breath. The roots beneath her feet pulsed like a slow drum, and a trunk rose at her back as if it had always been there, only waiting to be called.

It grew without hurry and without limit, its bark glowing the color of morning leaves, its sap a pale light that moved like starlight through veins.

Branches spread in a wide circle and kept going, layer on layer, until the entire arena was filled with the shadow of a tree too large to fit into words.

Under it, the air changed. It tasted like rain and clean earth, and even the glow of the rivers shifted to match its rhythm.

Down came the cages built from mirrors. The false skies pressed harder, trying to seal the canopy into neat boxes.

They cracked against the crown as though pressing glass over a mountain. The worlds inside them wavered; the gray shore rippled; the backward rivers shrank to lines.

Lilith clicked her tongue. "Unfolded anchor. Old-fashioned, but it suits you."

"The roots don't tire," Elowen said again, and it sounded less like pride now and more like a reminder spoken to the space itself.

She spread her hands, and the colossal tree at her back put down a thousand more roots, thick cords of light that burrowed through the platform, shot up through the mirrored ceilings, and wrapped the false horizons in living knots.

The cages held for a heartbeat, then broke along hairline cracks that ran like frost. When they shattered, they did not burst. They sighed and came apart, falling in wide, slow sheets.

Cracks raced out from every point where the roots touched these sheets. The illusions tore like soft paper.

Beyond them was only the arena again—a wide root, a dark void, rivers that curved without care for gravity, and a sky made of mirrors that refused to stay still.

Lilith let herself grin, teeth bright. "Fine." She snapped, and her reflections stopped being gentle edges and became soldiers.

Not copies of Elowen this time, but her own kind of legion. Cloaked figures stepped out of the mirrors, each with her eyes and the same sharpness in the set of the mouth.

Some held curved blades, some held flutes that spilled songs which turned into hooks in the air, some held nothing at all and yet bent the platform by standing there.

The army took formation without a command. They walked forward in silence and their feet left no prints.

Elowen did not send her tree forward. She stepped instead, bare heel pressing into the living lattice, and murmured a word that was older than her clan and older than the academy's oldest book.

The rivers of light bent toward her as if thirsty. They wrapped the base of the trunk. They slid along the roots.

They soaked into the bark and the leaves. When the next wave of illusions reached her, every blade and every song met something that would not drift, would not skip, would not pass through. It met the weight.

"Even if you erase the tricks," Lilith said, moving with her army, "you spend twice the effort each time. Can you outlast me?"

The question floated across the void like a ribbon. It was not taunting anymore. It was a careful test, a hand pressing against stone to see how deep the wall went.

"I already answered," Elowen said. She lifted her chin. "And I do not fight alone."

The words rolled through the space. A second heartbeat answered the first. The arena did not bow; it leaned closer as if curious.

The massive roots far below the platform pulsed in time, a far-off echo that made the rivers quiver.

Lilith narrowed her eyes and changed direction. The army split into layers. One line ran forward on the ground, blades up.

Another ran along the underside of the platform, as if the earlier flip had taught them to ignore which way down was supposed to be.

A third line climbed into the mirror-sky and ran across its surface like water striders skating over a pond, casting shadows too sharp to be fake.

Each line spoke a different truth as they passed. In one voice, they lied about Ethan. In another, they praised him.

In a third, they spoke of the twins in plain detail—their footwork, their stubbornness, the exact number of times Everly had looked back during a spar, the number of times Evelyn had stepped in.

The army tried to cut at the root of attention itself.