"By setting off my Paradox of Everything, you've already lost," Jishoku stated while hovering toward his opponent in mid-air and returning to an area above the arena grounds.
"I cannot lose, scum! All I do is win!" Mamosei proclaimed, extending his hand coated with tight black cloth underneath the area that the gauntlet he had thrown earlier had protected. "Pilum!"
Spontaneous flashes of light appeared behind the proud conqueror, shooting off rays of light at the airborne magician from a flat vertical line behind the commander of a one-man army of light. Yet, it only took a blink for the pride and certainty in his own victory to vanish from Mamosei's eyes as beams of solid light molded and unleashed under the principles of armor ninjutsu froze in mid-air, or so it seemed at the first glance.
Mamosei looked down at his hands, testing if time did indeed freeze still but, given how he could move freely and so did the surrounding brawlers that kept slugging each other without a care in the world, time was, in fact, not the issue. With Jishoku moving inch upon inch closer to Mamosei, the conqueror's pretty face flattened, as if having hit an irresistible deceptive barrier that imposed its indomitable will upon the vain subjugator.
"H-How… How did you freeze my technique?" Mamosei demanded an answer while struggling against the weight of infinite space pushing against him as if pressing down upon his armor-clad chest and squishing him against the push of his own destiny that demanded he claimed the grandeur that was his by right as the most excellent and flawless man alive.
"You're telling me you've studied under a magician and you cannot wrap your mind around this phenomenon? That actually explains a lot…" Jishoku shook his head, moving forward and enacting an even greater pressure that forced Mamosei to lean forward with all his might to resist the dominant pressure of infinity shoving him from the front. "Though not being able to see the answer when I've already explained it to you, that's rather sad."
"You didn't stop time, and you did nothing to my Pilum…" Mamosei realized to himself while translating his thought process out loud. "Everything is proceeding exactly as it should!"
"Correct!" Jishoku gave the brilliant warrior a thumb up. "Because infinite space exists between us due to my paradox you've set off, not even beams of light can cover it. It will take an eternity for light to reach me. It's a funny thing, light is… It possesses a set amount of speed, however, that speed is so intense that it curves and bends the time-space around it and causes time-space to dilute. Light travels in stopped time, stopped from its own point of view, of course. That would, in theory, make its speed infinite to you, the one existing inside undiluted time because it can cover any amount of space during a time that is diluted from our perception. To put it in simpler terms, a beam of light travels at an infinite speed, judging from our undiluted point of view, however, it has infinite space to cover. You, my friend, had just caused another paradox."
"See? You're not so special!" Mamosei stretched the right corner of his lips, straightening his back and striking an elegant pose. Jishoku's eyebrows tilted slightly when blaze-colored electricity began crackling around the conqueror, who seemed completely unburdened by the push of infinite space. "The old hag was the same! Even when I told her I was the vanquisher of a man's pathetic fate to be a wriggling worm in gods' shit, she kept looking down on me. And yet, just like her, I can do everything you do, because I am magnificent!"
"Hmm…" Jishoku turned to the frozen beams of light that vanished once Mamosei realized the fruitlessness of ethereal light-ray javelins and undid them. "This is curious, I will say…" the magician slowly lifted his hand up to the leather strap obstructing his eyes and moved it upward, sliding it to liberate his eyes and witness the first thing in years that he could not immediately put into math equations and master. Unlike any other secret governing the universe behind the scenes, the Paradox Magician couldn't fathom the nature of Mamosei the Excellent and his destiny-defying abilities.
"Hmph… So much for your bookworm head. Just like the old hag, you stand in awe, stumped by my excellence!" Mamosei spread his arms to the sides, marveling at his own glory as he took a bold step forward. The spectators in the audience gasped as Mamosei's step brought him one pace closer to the hovering magician, defying the Paradox of Everything that demanded an infinite space to be present between the two colliding calamities.
Jishoku's eyes lacked a pupil completely. Instead, they were all-white, except for a bright silver iris ring decorated with taupe-colored runes of an ancient language that nobody that could read the hieroglyphs could comprehend, and the few people that may have had such insight couldn't peer at the master magician's eyes from close enough to voice what the magician's irises read.
"What's wrong? Not even your eyes can tell you the answer? Very well, since you've been so charitable and, at the same time, condescending to me before, I'll explain how I've overcome your Paradox of Everything. The answer is very simple…" Mamosei visibly teased Jishoku with a protrusion of his chin and pump to his cheekbones that betrayed a mocking grimace. Before he could finish spoiling the answer to the Paradox Magician, Jishoku lifted his hand.
"Paradox of Everything: Infinity Squared!" he muttered, expelling a sphere of pitch black with a howling light halo surging around it and emitting swirling jets of white light as it hurled toward the conqueror. A higher dimensional singularity was created by wielding the paradox that Mamosei himself had caused by tasking the forces of nature to perform impossible calculations and firing a beam of light through an infinite space. "Sorry, boy, I don't like spoilers," Jishoku uttered with dark and dreary foreboding in his tone.
It was as if the entire existence became a swirling fabric that had been caught in the drilling orb of singularity hurtling toward nothingness. Only Mamosei and Jishoku remained at the opposite ends of the hurling singularity, one–a man that had spent his life fathoming and learning to wield the powers that be, the other–one that was born with the boundless potential to accomplish anything he set his mind to. Defying the lack of time in the void of nothingness, Mamosei extended his hand and spoke another order to his army of one.
"Phalanx!" he said, creating a dome of shield formations of ethereal light that had sharp rays sticking out of their centers. This defense proved so indomitable that even Infinity Squared failed to bypass it, slamming into the brunt of the shield's staunch surface and spilling the swirled fabric of space-time back into place while the two supreme warriors stood and stared at each other, being the only two able to comprehend their exchange. "Do you understand now, nerd? My power isn't the techniques I use to forge my armor of light, my ultimate talent is the ability to defy any odds and conquer fate itself!"
Mamosei placed the tips of his cloth-suited hand to his face, unable to contain his glee, while Jishoku stared at him with a blank expression. The conqueror's lips spread into a smile of a full row of flawless, pearly teeth that then twisted into something far more malevolent. A fiendish laugh that malformed his flawless and chiseled face to a hideous and wrinkled scowl. The grotesque happiness of the wicked. While the man leaked a raging blaze of lively aura from his body, continuing to say no to any paradox befalling him and defying fate and odds at every turn, the ephemeral black demon frowning from the shade his glow cast was clear.
"Witness, as I defy your paradox. One. Step. At. A. Time…" Mamosei began boldly strutting toward the hovering magician at a leisurely pace while Jishoku appeared frozen. Penning this down to a refusal to believe what was occurring in front of him and a defensive shutdown reaction, Mamosei walked up to the Paradox Magician by strutting across the infinite void.
"Xiphos!" Mamosei ordered the universe, and the universe provided, bowing and begging for forgiveness. A straight short sword construct made of solidified light slashed upward, creating a flashing arc that sliced the hovering magician, though the crescent slash vanished in a flash. "Pilum!" Mamosei spread his arms to the sides, creating a myriad of flashing halos that fired beams of light with spear tips at the end. A fusillade of thunderous cracks overwhelmed the magician, though the light show was too intense for the audience to peer at without losing sight.
"Falcata!" Mamosei ordered, and the universe bowed to his whim, forging a long single-edge blade, pitching forward toward the point and proudly displaying its concave hilt that turned convex near the point. While Falcata was bright as a beam of light itself, its thrust was so swift that the sword lit up with a blue, flaming texture while the hilt expelled a blazing halo of golden light. "Labrys!" Mamosei abandoned his Falcata, opening his hand and lifting it overhead. The sword vanished only for another armored energy construct to appear in the subjugator's hand.
Mamosei brought the double-blade battle ax down, flattening the Paradox Magician and sending him flying toward the audience stands while the weapon vanished immediately after swing to permit the golden conqueror of all to pose for the awed crowd and witness the elimination of his persistent opponent. Just like with the focused Sarissa before, Mamosei's weapon constructs seemed to harm Jishoku's paradoxical state of nonexistence that the magician rendered invulnerable to harm the same way he'd cleave apart any lesser man of ordinary existence.
An audible wooden crack rang like a note of a harp in the conqueror's ear, however, it was not the noise of his overwhelmed opponent hitting the wall holding the spectator stands erected above the fighting arena. The noise came from Jishoku's limp and lifeless body slamming into a decorated wooden box that materialized out of thin air, out of hand-sized cubes that comprised larger boxes, that all connected into a coffin-shaped final configuration in the end.
"Lakonia!" Mamosei clenched his fist in a domineering pose, forming countless short-sword constructs all around the shut wooden box that skewered it whole to such excess that the pin-cushioned box was brighter to gaze at with the naked eye than the surface of the Sun. An old wooden squeaking noise stiffened the conqueror to the bone as he jumped up and turned around.
There it went again. Then again. And again. The audience went grave silent to hear the squeaky noise that alarmed the seemingly almighty conqueror so much. Even the other warriors shut up and stopped swinging their fists, looking around and wondering where the magician that defined the impossible would appear next. The adamantine tile covering the arena floor opened up like a wooden trapdoor, revealing Jishoku, who climbed up some thrashed wooden staircase from a mysterious cellar down below. Curiously enough, the moment that Jishoku "closed" the tile trapdoor, it became stone-hard to the boot tap, losing all of its old wooden trapdoor properties and becoming just an ordinary reinforced tile. Needless to say, one would've been an absolute loon to search for the underground cellar from which Jishoku had just appeared.
"How is Areteia, that cheeky muckraker?" Jishoku asked the stupefied conqueror while wearing bruises, lacerations, and damage to his armor and his now ragged jacket. "It was ruthless of her to send her son to do what she couldn't. Then again, was always so keen on lying to herself about "the bigger picture" to reason herself into all sorts of atrocities."
"Have I struck your head that hard? My, my… I think I might have hacked your skull open with my Labrys by accident…" Mamosei shrugged in cartoonish and smug dismissal of Jishoku's straightforward question.
"I see. So, you weren't aware that you were a golem. Poor child. You must have believed your entire life that you were special. Unaware that you are nothing more than a biological weapon forged by a weaver of fundamental universal forces. When you struck down Bebe, I was mad at you, I'll admit. Now… I sort of pity you," Jishoku shook his head. With the splatter of dried blood covering his face like war paint, his silver gleaming eyes stood out even more and peered even deeper into the very bottom of all things they gazed at.
"You… Pity me!?" Mamosei shrieked out, losing his voice and his composure. "You… DARE… Pity me!?"
"How else should I react to a poor little bundle of flesh and bone whose entire life had been manufactured? Who lived his entire life in a living web of lies, deceiving himself to the very end. Poor boy, your life is the grandest paradox of them all. Now that I am aware of your paradoxical nature, you cannot hope to defeat me. They don't call me the Paradox Magician for nothing, I wield paradoxes just as well as I can create or dispel them," Jishoku pointed out.
Mamosei extended his hand, "Sarissa!" he barked out an order, but the majestic golden spear of light and atomized manufactured planetoids, nebulae, and shrouds didn't manifest itself. Mamosei stood embarrassed and exposed while the stunned audience and the fighters that had paused their brawls to witness the end of this calamitous exchange watched on. "Sarissa!" Mamosei barked out again. "Pilum!" he shrieked out but the world around him refused to bow to his will any longer.
"Wh… What did you do!?" Mamosei pointed his accusatory finger at the worn-out master magician holding his battered ribs and lightly panting in weary of wielding the fundamental forces of nature governing all of reality. Now that the true nature of the golden conqueror became clear to Jishoku, the youth's unnatural abilities and deeper insight into the magical arts made much more sense as well.
"Just like I've told you many things you should've paid attention to, boy, I've told you I'm taking control of you. You are a paradox, and I am a Paradox Magician. I may not have caused your origin, but I can be your undoing," Jishoku thought he had explained himself but the obliviousness and sheer lunacy beaming at him from the chiseled face of the sad and lonely conqueror clad in majestic golden armor made him close his eyes and sigh.
Studying what made all existence tick as a lifestyle had made him impatient, it granted him the attitude that the world, the universe, reality, and all of the existence were not obligated to make sense to those he spoke to so he didn't dumb it down for them to understand any of what he said. However, teaching young Bebe had taught Jishoku himself some patience and showed him the fragile simplicity of feeble, uninitiated minds. Much more than creating a pocket universe at a flick of his finger, it was far more satisfying to blossom the young woman into an initiate of the mystic arts. Even if the girl's fascination with some charlatan playing with smoke and mirrors sometimes frustrated Jishoku, but even humoring the girl's obsessions taught Jishoku the value of entertainment and theatrics in his style.
"The old hag you spoke of. Who do you think she was to you?" Jishoku asked the boy in a teasing and condescending tone.
"Some old crone who thought she knew better than me. Who presumed too much and tried proving her worth to me with these pointless magic tricks that took me no time at all to master. She keeled over and died knowing that she had wasted her entire life learning what took me moments to do better, living in an illusion that she had the capacity of warning me, teaching me, molding me… Mock me if you will, but hers was the truly pathetic life," Mamosei sneered with fury at the high-hatted magician.
"That woman was Areteia. An old acquaintance of mine and a fellow master magician and a fellow member of the Magisters of the Citadel. None of these words mean anything to you, though they define the reason for your existence, you poor doll," Jishoku said. Even though how he referred to the conqueror angered the golden warrior, Jishoku continued. "We've had our differences in how the forces of nature were to be wielded. She feared chaos and sought to ward off the unexplained, which is why she was never my peer in magical mastery. Though this… This is petty, even for her."
"Do you imply I am some minion of hers to sic at you?" Mamosei chortled in amusement at the very idea, but upon seeing Jishoku's solemn expression, he grew pale.
"You believe you were born different, truth is–you were never born at all. Areteia saw natural conception as inferior, too random, and chaotic for the purpose she sought in you, so she created you, and formed you by weaving proteins, flesh, and bone like a spider weaves a web. You believe you live to defy odds and conquer fate itself, truth is–Areteia granted you those traits as a spell. Like a flavor you grant to a cake you're baking. You could say that you are the most engineered and guided man on Earth, treading strictly on the golden thread that your maker had left for you. She must not have trusted the chaos of random chance so much that she even disguised herself as the old woman that showed you the fundamentals of magic. She just had to get involved… I must be getting old. It took taking a gander at you with my eyes to understand what you are and who made you," Jishoku explained.
"No… No!" Mamosei grabbed his head, sifting through his sublime locks that smelled of narcissus rings–exactly how the creator of the golden boy golem wanted them to smell. "I am… Undefeated, I the apex being that spits in the face of gods and snaps the threads of fate! The world will be the crown I place upon my head and my flawless military campaign will start from Agbarah!"
"Will it? Who do you think decided for you that your miraculous and ultimately victorious military campaign to rule the world would start from Agbarah specifically? The same place I would be to build a grand library to gift knowledge to uneducated humans about the mystical arts of controlling the forces of nature?" Jishoku pointed out the obvious sign that Mamosei's entire youth had been manufactured and that he was merely an assault dog for the Magistrate to sic at him. "It made little sense to me you would be so cruel to a young woman that had nothing to do with your campaign, but even that was a trait that Areteia instilled in you to make sure you and I would cross paths. It was her who was the first person to break my infinite space paradox, so I should've known she orchestrated you after you did the same."
"H-How… So many years… Does that old woman hate you that much?" Mamosei muttered, collapsing on his knees.
"Magicians can transcend the tides of time. We can experience time however we like. That's how we preserve our bodies in a state we wish to keep them at to learn all these grand secrets of the universe. If you look at time as a line on the ground, a magician might merely choose to step over that line and exist in a different zone of reality, ungoverned by time. She could have set this whole thing up in what felt like her lunch break in between Magistrate sessions, even though it felt like your entire life to you," Jishoku pointed out.
The fallen conqueror began smacking his head into the ground, screaming. With his powers completely dampened, the perfect man was smearing blood on the tiles until his head became rubbery and merely bounced off of the ground unharmed after an audible bump. "What… What am I meant to do now?" Mamosei cried out.
"Honestly, you're lucky to have encountered me. Any other Magister would've done away with you. Well… Perhaps not Alister. Even your mommy dearest only intended to keep you for as long as she could wield you as her weapon and plot out your every move. The moment you become unpredictable–you're a fragment of the chaos she hates so much. I'd love to see what you do set free of your shackles. Naturally, your participation in this tournament is over. While you are an exciting experiment, you hurt my treasured pupil…" Jishoku cast his open palm at the gold-clad conqueror with dozens of knives flying out of thin air and carrying the artificial man to the protective stands, embedding him into the wall by the sticking parts of the undergarment under his sophisticated golden armor.
"I'm not sure what happened but… Jishoku, the master magician, eliminated Mamosei the Excellent! That leaves it at 144 contestants!" the announcer snapped back to reality to report the recent shocking development.
Jishoku kneeled by the edge to speak to the competitor he had just eliminated. "You want to know the funniest thing of all? Areteia thought she had me cornered by granting you your talent to defy odds and spit at fate, but she actually was doomed to fail from the start because even that ability is a paradox for me to play with. If you defy all odds and change your fate, but you are fated to vanquish me, you are paradoxically doomed to fail. Don't you think that's a little bit funny?" The Paradox Magician smiled with a warm stretch of his lips and a closed-eyes smile before standing up and walking away and into the turbulent battlefield that seemed to shift and move away, terrified of the now evident potential of the master magician.