A web of fractures bloomed across the stone underfoot with a delightful crackling noise as he stepped forward. Little tines of untamed chaos mana ran across the surface of his skin, arcing to the edges of his clothing like tiny bolts of colorful lightning. Rain around him evaporated, steam rising into odd shapes before dissipating in the breeze.

  The Shattered Man had arrived.

  “...Gio?” Hatra whispered.

  Gio looked over his shoulder with a manic smile. The colors around him seemed to bleed, like a vivid swirl of melting paint. He radiated pure Chaos like a psychedelic sun.

  “You guys catch your breath for a second! I’ve got some stuff I want to try.” Gio said.

  Sapphire was applying some urgent first-aid to the gash along Jean’s back while Chandrika sedately tried to help, looking like she could have easily been the one on the ground instead of Jean as she fought against the inexorable tide of unconsciousness. Hatra stood guard, warily eying what had become of her cousin.

  “What in the world? Are you guys seeing this?” Hatra whispered.

  Gio faced the creature in front of him. The construct still reeled from where he had touched it.

  Little remained of the statue that had once been the core of the construct. A single stony arm gripped onto the magical trident, attached to little more than a head and a single shoulder. It sat atop a whirl of water so filled with metal grit that it had turned brown, and wiggling tendrils dotted its underside, like grotesque legs on a centipede the size of a tree.

  Long coils of filthy water writhed like a wounded snake, and it threateningly raised the trident toward Gio like a scorpion’s stinger, poised to strike.

  Gio opened his spellbook.

  He leisurely flipped through the pages under the watch of the enemy, feeling like he was seeing his spells in a new light under the glorious influence of chaos.

  He cracked a smile- literally, his smile cracked open slightly to reveal a bit of teeth under his lips before his vitrified skin quickly nestled back into place with a click.

  The symbols of his spells sang with unrealized potential. How had he been so blind to it beforehand?

  The construct surged forth, bending a wave of foul water into a fan of knives aimed at Gio’s throat.

  Raising a hand upward with a whimsical flourish, he used his grandfather’s magic.

  “[Flow]” Gio invoked.

  “?? L O w”, replied Chaos.

  The chorus sang in Gio’s ears, telling him beautiful and terrible stories, filling his head with all sorts of delicious ideas as the magic took hold. Invisible hands guided his, as he let the magic flow.

  Lovely.

  Two forces warred for control over the blades aimed at Gio. The trident was like the moon; its pull inescapable, its control absolute.

  But Gio, even in all his splendor as a newly unleashed aspect of chaos, was not nearly powerful enough to completely stop the water entirely. The trident was simply too potent.

  Instead, Gio’s magic became the tide.

  Under the influence of chaos, he spoke to the magic, asking it to bend for him. He saw the potential in his grandfather’s spellform. Was the spell only able to move a boat through water?

  No. It could be more.

  Like an islet in a quickened stream, Gio stood resolute as the blades curved around him, just as the water had curved around the keel of the boat when escaping the Telchines. The construct briefly paused, calculating. It quickly doubled back, raising thin needles of rust from the ground underneath Gio that would have pierced through the meat of his thigh.

  Thinking fast, Gio saw another possibility.

  He thrust two fingers down, and clear water flowed free of the spears as the gunk that remained fell limply to the ground as he forced the water to flow away from its impurities, like the tide receding from the shore.

  A small glowing line appeared on Gio’s wrist that leaked pure chaos mana. He felt something rise within him, a foreign idea coming to the forefront. It appeared that his newfound gifts hadn’t come without a price to be paid. A burning flower budded in his mind, the first whispers of its secrets unfurling their petals behind his eyes. It felt good.

  Oh well, how bad could it be?

  A harsh grinding sound of frustration rang from the construct. It slithered back to the base of the pagoda, raising the trident skyward.

  The trident’s gemstone heart began to glow with renewed intensity. The rain gathered into shapes overhead, a formation of hundreds of dripping metallic shapes aimed directly at Gio’s head. Gio looked up, making eye contact with a deadly point.

  “Hmmm….”

  One came down as a probing strike. It was a harsh shape, like the wicked fang of an assassin’s dagger.

  Gio reflected it with a practiced step to the side. Chaos flooded the reflective magic, shattering it into dust.

  “Oops! Too much power!” Gio giggled. Another glowing line appeared on his opposite hand.

  The construct responded by throwing out three more blades from separate angles designed to test Gio’s defenses.

  In response, Gio shattered.

  Most of his main body stepped backward, missing many fragments but ultimately fine. He smiled through the cloud of reflective particles, leisurely waving away the first of three projectiles with a lazy flick of mirror magic. The reflected blade bounced off the surface of the guardian, knocking it back slightly.

  Simultaneously, the shards that Gio had discarded pieced together, forming Rio. Gio’s clone grinned madly, gleefully accepting the remaining projectiles on either side of him with two separate planes of reflective force.

  He brought his hands together, corrupting the spell. The mirrors seemed to melt together, still holding the image of the blades of water. The glowing lines on Rio’s hands mirrored that of his main body. As he warped the spell, the glow surged, crawling towards his fingers.

  “What… what's wrong with him?” Sapphire whispered from safety yards away

  “I… don’t know. How is that mirror image casting a spell?” Jean nervously said. He was sitting up, freshly bandaged.

  Beneath the still rippling surface of the reflecting spell, sickly lights churned. Rio thrust his hands forth, and the mirror shattered into sharp angles. A spray of blades poured forth, battering the construct with all manner of distorted blades and foul-smelling muck.

  The construct slithered backwards in retreat, barely dodging the deluge of rust.

  Gio pushed forward, dancing across the surface of the water and leaving craters where he stepped. He lunged after the retreating construct, weaving in between the remaining blades.

  One chipped his shoulder, and Hatra clapped her hand over her mouth with a gasp as she watched a chunk of her cousin flake off.

  Jean tore himself away from a screaming Sapphire, who ran after him. He summoned no wings, instead pounding his feet into the mud and dodging the steaming holes that Gio left in his wake.

  A wave of sensation that felt like static washed over Gio as he felt his crystallized flesh regrow. His injury hadn’t hurt, but he still felt that it probably wouldn’t be wise to figure out what would happen if he got broken into too many pieces at once.

  The construct dove down into the deepest parts of the mud, submerging itself. An orange light faintly shone in the murk.

  “Well, I don’t want to volunteer to go down there, do you?” Rio asked.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “No, not particularly,” Gio answered himself.

  “Then perhaps we should take some time to fish it out?” Rio asked.

  “I didn’t bring a rod.” Gio joked.

  Jean approached from behind, spear drawn. He was favoring his right side and not looking too great. Sapphire was behind him, and Hatra was holding up a ragged Chandrika close behind.

  Rio turned to look at the rest of the group.

  “You guys should stay back.” Rio warned.

  “What? Gio, what’s going on with you? You need our help.” Sapphire snapped.

  Rio turned fully, facing the group with a sardonic smile.

  “You have done plenty! It’s time for me to fix this.” Rio chirped.

  “Gio… there’s something wrong with you,” Jean said. “You’re acting strange.”

  Rio cocked his head to the side. “I don’t think I am. I feel good. I know it looks bad, but I’ll explain everything later.”

  With his main body, Gio flipped from page to page of his spellbook.

  Something is wrong with me? Why would there be something wrong with me?

  If anything, Gio felt better than he had ever felt.

  Perhaps the group was just picking up on how good this had been for him and how happy he was. They probably weren’t used to seeing him smile so often. Yeah, that was it. Sure, his mirror magic seemed a bit diminished in this state, what with the fact that he couldn’t really touch most reflective surfaces without causing them to be turned to dust, but that was probably just a minor setback in the grand scheme of things.

  The construct took the group’s momentary distraction as an opening, firing a massive column of water upward toward the group.

  Gio and Rio reacted in concert, summoning a curved wall of glass. The water met the wall, cresting outward in a wide fan, spraying nearly the entire sanctuary with grit-filled water. He allowed the spell to deteriorate at his touch.

  They were at an impasse. Gio’s strange new talents had driven the construct onto the backfoot, but he lacked a decisive way to close the gap while the creature was submerged in a pit of substance that it could use as ammunition.

  “Is it just going to stay down there?” Hatra huffed.

  Jean fired a few spears down into the watery pit, blindly trying to force the construct out. Sapphire tried to use her aquatic vines, but the poor condition of the water made the leaves of her plant turn brown and sickly.

  While everyone else tried to figure out how to harass the construct, Gio summoned a ball of light. Both he and his double stared into the gentle white light, momentarily becoming lost in its radiance despite the inopportune timing.

  Hatra shot her cousin a nervous glance.

  Gio played with the pretty light, allowing it to float between his fingers in a spiraling flight path.

  [Prismatic Shape] was a favorite of his and had been with him since his parents gave him his spellbook at his Passing the Wand ceremony, alongside [Detect Magic] and [Hairline Fracture]. While Gio had certainly gotten his use out of all three spells, the light-producing evocation reminded him of a simpler time in his life, and the simple joy of the silver-ring circus.

  Long before his younger twin siblings had come along, Gio remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders above the crowd, watching the performing illusionists conjure wonders of light and color with their flashy stage magic, befuddling the senses and enchanting the minds of the audience.

  It stuck with him. Gio didn’t necessarily love the crowds, or the performance, or even the budget-violating circus snacks that his mother and father had argued over. The thing that had stuck with Gio was the sheer mysticism of floating lights. The stage magicians had made it look so fun, with their dizzying shapes and the way that the spells seemed to flow so smoothly from their lips as they danced around the stage.

  Idly, Gio studied the spellform.

  [Prismatic Shape](Tier:Lower Uncommon)(Schools:Light, Conjuration, Evocation)(Precursor) Summon a light-aspected mana construct with either a defined form or a vector of force. May apply a small amount of radiant damage.

  Symbols escaped the page, leaping towards his eyes and unfolding into meaning. Drunk off of chaos, dead languages seemed to gain meaning, and he could feel deep intent behind the densely packed formations.

  I could study this one spell for a lifetime.

  The ball of light rippled, turning blue, and then green, and then back to white again. It swelled in size until it was as big as a beach ball, and then shrank until it was barely bigger than the head of a needle.

  Rio placed his hands on top of Gio’s, joining the spellcraft.

  The ball of light pulsed under Gio’s command, growing more intense and swelling in size, while Rio condensed it. Rotating rings separated from it, spinning in mindbending patterns and throwing lurching shadows across the arena. The light began to turn red.

  The glowing lines on both of their hands began to sputter. Liquid chaos mana leaked from the mark, droplets of it beginning to orbit around their wrists.

  Rio’s eyes exploded into color as his hands began to bloom.

  His open palms separated into holographic reflections, overlaying on top of each other and bending the light around them. At first three, then five hands, duplicating into perfectly symmetrical copies that remained joined at the wrist. Each hand joined in the spellcraft, intensifying the effect with unreal power.

  At this point, his lightshow was noticed by all present.

  “Gio, what are you doing!?” Hatra yelled. She shielded her eyes from the harsh light, failing to get Gio’s attention.

  “Something… is very wrong. Get… away… from him…” Chandrika weakly muttered.

  The construct breached the surface of the water at the same time that Jean grabbed Chandrika and pulled the rest of the party away from Gio. The construct swiped out with a sword of water, taking Gio’s right arm off at the elbow.

  Gio only had eyes for the spell. A new arm grew from crystalline shapes, and the aura of chaos radiating off of Rio leapt across their hands, infecting Gio with phantasmal flames. The same burning glow entered his eyes, and his hands began to multiply. The light spell buckled, bursting into a deep crimson hue that emitted enough heat to cause the water underfoot to steam.

  The construct, buoyed by the successful attack, reached out with a larger blade, aiming to lop the heads off the duo. It proved unsuccessful, as the blade of water limply deanimated as it was brought closer to the event horizon of the spell.

  Rio’s hands began to separate further, now a bouquet of limbs emerging from his elbow. The prismatic shape reacted violently to this, quickly shifting through the entire rainbow and settling in on a deep ultraviolet that the rest of the group could not safely look at.

  But not Gio. Gio’s burning eyes became mirrors of that horrible radiance. He wrenched his manifold hands upward, harnessing the spellflower in its full glory as he stared into a sun of his own making.

  The light faded out of the visible spectrum, but was not extinguished. A pale green glow remained, and the water around them began to boil. The air gained a dangerous charge.

  The construct emitted a sharp-pitched whine, hastily summoning a massive wall of water in a futile effort to protect itself from the conjured light.

  Gio’s face cracked open, and a bit of him began to pull away.

  The wall of water boiled away, and the metal grit suspended inside liquified, dropping to the deteriorating stone underneath. The pit of water that the guardian was trying to retreat to was evaporating into a rising column of cloud, instantly vaporized by the light in Gio’s many hands.

  Someone was yelling, but Gio couldn’t hear it. He was the light.

  The Aspect of Chaos, in their two bodies, guided an infantile sun towards their enemy. It reeled back, scared of the ionizing radiance, and sloughing bits of metal as it failed to do anything meaningful. It could only backpedal as bits of it decayed away.

  A chunk of Gio’s head fell off.

  The construct dropped the trident, lamely reaching up at Gio with its remaining hand. It writhed against the crater-filled ground under the curious and imperious gaze of-

  “You’re an idiot,” said his own voice.

  Huh?

  Gio turned behind him.

  Now that he wasn’t blinded by the light, he could fully see the ugly mess he was making. Some of his hundreds of arms were uncontrollably manifesting bits of wild magic. One was even dry-firing reflective shards into his foot, which he thankfully couldn’t feel. Another arm was using Scrivener’s charm to illustrate a particularly rude poem on a bit of remaining tile. A few misshapen mirror images were running around, and stalagmites of melting mirror dotted the war-torn landscape of the destroyed sanctuary.

  Amid the wreckage, a scowling face was stomping up to Gio- his own face.

  “I said, you’re an idiot.” The new duplicate said.

  Gio was fully snapped out of his daze.

  “Wha- What happened?” Gio asked himself.

  “You lost control!” The third Gio snapped.

  Gio blinked.

  “What? No, I didn’t. We’re winning.” He childishly retorted.

  “Winning? You’re about to kill our friends.”

  The other Gio pointed over his shoulder to where a deeply battered Jean was barely holding up a bubble of purity against the heavily ionized and corrosive atmosphere that Gio had caused. Sapphire and Hatra were animatedly yelling at one another, violently digging through their packs to look for some sort of an answer.

  Gio tried to release his hold on the light spell, but found that the magic was flowing freely against his will, or rather, his will had completely escaped him. The spellflower had been summoned, and no longer answered to Gio.

  He began to panic.

  Gio looked across the spell at Rio, who was fully encapsulated in a rapture of spellcasting ecstasy, barely holding onto human form as he bloomed into a horrifying flower of animate magic.

  “Well, there goes that.” The third Gio said.

  He flicked Rio in the forehead, and Rio disintegrated. With him gone, the spell began to destabilize, earning a pained scream from the direction of Jean as the light’s energies spiraled out of control.

  “Honestly… shameful.”

  New Gio grasped the ball of nuclear fury, tossing it into a plane of conjured mirror where it vanished without a trace. He then cut off both of Gio’s arms with a masterfully formed blade of shimmering glass.

  Removed from his body, his arms reverted into crystalline material, shattering into dust at his feet.

  “Try not to grow new ones for a little while. From what I gather, I guess you need hands to use the spellflower. ”

  Gio looked up at his third self, who was piecing Rio together out of chunks.

  “Who… are you? You’re not Rio, right?” Gio asked.

  “Hmmm… a good question, and one that I’ve been searching for the answer to since I was born mere moments ago. I believe that I’m the part of us that vehemently disagrees with everything that just happened. I’m the third Gio… so why don’t we call me… Trio?”