One of the grand courtyards of Oxwitik was currently being used as a battlefield between two distinctive groups. On one hand, there was a coven of witches who fled Earth shortly before humanity began to walk out of the strange era of natural history known to historians as "Prehistory". On the other hand, there was a single, fierce changeling who was fighting them alongside a clone of his. 

Both groups represented very different things. One group represented the ancient past, a past so dark and terrifying that humanity did not remember it, instead humanity insisted that what few stories were known from that age were myths, legends, and fables. The other group represented the mysterious future, an age of man, machine, monster, and magic. 

They fought atop a ley line, an ancient font of natural magic which many ancient civilizations had vague memories that informed them that such places were once important to humanity's predecessors. The ancient creatures who once built their own ancient cities atop ley lines had the means to gather and harness the supernatural energies radiated by such areas. Humanity did not have such means, but nevertheless, many cities were built on ley lines. And in the days to come ley lines would surely begin to matter again, as magic awakened in more and more of mankind. 

The changeling and his clone leaped out from behind the earthy pillar the actual changeling had erected to block the first attack launched by the coven. Both the changeling and his clone had terrifying smiles on their faces, which filled the coven with fear as they readied more arcane assaults. It was while the coven was fearfully readying a new barrage that the highly observant and active mind of the changeling came up with the insidious strategy that he'd pursue in the battle.

The very instant that my clone and I leaped to the side of the pillar I had erected and had a clear line of sight with the witches we both launched "Zero-Point Beams" at them. Mine shot out of the tip of my pointer finger at Alexandria, the witch who was ultimately responsible for allowing her and one of her sisters to escape during our last encounter. My clone's beams shot out of his eyes and were targeting the oldest witch in the coven. 

Even as the beams shot out of us I was disappointed to see that these were not optic beams in the sense that I had hoped they would be. They weren't lasers in the comic book sense, though they certainly looked like them. The beams were solid white lines that sped towards the coven but not at the speed of light.

That said, the witches were shocked by the new form of attack that I possessed, and though they were able to avoid the attack their attempt to get out of the way was clumsy and uncoordinated which disrupted the casting of their otherwise formidable magic. I chuckled even as they dodged my attack, and my clone and I continued to go on the attack. We were not going to give them a chance to catch their breath. 

While the witches were still off-balance from my new kind of attack I leaped forward and began to close the distance between myself and Alexandria. I was purposefully targeting her first partially because I doubted she could have recovered the power she lost when she sacrificed The Sanctuary to escape from our first battle, and also partially because it was entirely because of her that at least she and her sister escaped. I also knew that targeting the weakest member of a group and crushing them utterly could hurt group cohesion and morale, and I wanted that. 

As I gazed at her, single-mindedly focused on taking her out, I felt my mind fill with information about her. The upgrades I had earned to my psychometry power were well worth the effort it took me to earn them, even though it meant touching a lot of walls, objects, and even people to get it to the point that even a glance was highly informative. 

The young witch really was the weakest member of her coven, not by a huge margin but by a meaningful one, though that was only because of the sacrifice she made to escape from me last month. And now that I was armed with both Sanctuary powers and meaningful knowledge of magic I was able to really pressure her even without being especially serious.

The witch saw me lunging towards her and growled at me, her eyes filling with an almost admirable sort of rage. Instead of backing down, she rose her hand towards me, and I watched electrical sparks begin to radiate out of it, even as she foolishly began to stand still. 

I was carefully attempting to make her mad by extremely obviously going after her while my clone kept the other two busy. Even as she began to concentrate and the electricity in her hand began to take on a more definitive, more solid form, I allowed her to focus, only waiting for when the arcane energy she was using was at its most cost-intensive, before I began to laugh loudly and manipulated the very ground she stood on so that it was quaking so intensely it was like she was standing on the epicenter of an earthquake. 

She was able to resist for a moment before almost completely falling to her knees and causing her electrical attack to hit the ground. It was while she was on her knees, attempting to resist falling over completely, that I launched my next zero-point beam. And this time my blow successfully hit her and began to siphon her arcane energy. She hissed in pain the instant that the sharp beam struck her crumpled form, but was unable to resist it.

My clone was a whirlwind of motion as he kept the other two witches busy. The other two members of the bizarre coven were all centuries older than Alexandria, and had far more experience in actual battle, even against monsters and other non-human beings, but my clone was so staggeringly fast and active that the majority of their attention was needed so that they could continue to focus on attempting to dodge or block his blows. 

The clone was quite fond of viciously manipulating sounds and vibrations, regularly attacking with sonic booms that it manipulated to mute once they reached the edge of the courtyard, or even unleashing horrifyingly loud sonic screeches as attacks, which it muted once they reached a certain distance away from either of ys. The clone was also fully making use of my new ability to become intangible, expertly dodging blows by not even attempting to dodge them and instead just allowing them to phase through it. That said the other two witches were now far more prepared for combat than they had been before. 

They carefully dodged my clone's attacks and regularly hurled arcane assaults of their own back at it. Their knowledge of magic far, far, far outclassed my own but every time my clone peered at one of them I gained snippets of their knowledge and so with every single stare, glare, or leer, I inched closer to them in terms of raw knowledge. 

The potent part of my brain that was affected by "Assessment" was focusing on analyzing every single detail of the magic that the witches were flinging at my clone. They launched things like shards of ice, fireballs, and bolts of lightning. The only ones that would have hurt the clone would have been the lightning bolts but my clone and I were immune to damage from lightning due to a Sanctuary power we possessed, so the bolts harmlessly dissipated against the body of the creature. Unfortunately, for the witches anyway, that was their primary method of attack. That was due to the fact that this was an intense, high-speed, active, melee-ranged battle and not a ranged fight like our initial encounter had been.

I studied the battle in my mind's eye while I began to drain the arcane energy out of Alexandria. I stepped up to her fallen form and felt her energy seeping out of her and into me. As I began to absorb her energy I manipulated the earth beneath her and caused her to begin to sink into it. I also began to walk up to her, a smile on my face as I inched closer and closer to her. 

She was unable to focus but was still conscious and when she attempted to gaze at me I smirked at her and opened my mouth. A split second later I began to unleash a sonic screech of my own, aiming the very technique that my clone was fond of at the witch that I had sworn I would never let escape. I watched as the attack I unleashed on her caused the air around her to shake and distort, due to the raw potency of my focused attack. Her eyes widened in pain and blood began to ooze out of her ears, nose, and eyes. 

I kept my eyes glowed on her and in doing so began to more speedily absorb information about her through visual psychometry. More of her memories began to flood my mind, and so did more of her arcane knowledge. I also felt the power of my visual psychometry beginning to increase further from how intensely it was being used at the moment. I kept my mouth open and continued to emanate a singular, focused sonic screech at Alexandria which was dealing considerable harm to her. 

I wasn't so crude that I needed to kill Alexandria. And frankly, that wouldn't have been the optimal way for me to benefit from her knowledge anyway. I intended to drain her as fully as I could and to drain her sisters as well. So keeping her alive was important, since I could turn her into a valuable part of a point farm. As I aimed my sonic screech at her I began to extend one of my limbs forward, one of my open hands so that I could touch her and more fully steal from her. While doing that, I heard one of her sisters scream in fury as she turned and saw me so close to her sibling, as well as the general situation Alexandria found herself in. 

She rose one of her hands at me and poured a potent stream of arcane energy into it while continuing to roar in animalistic fury. I largely ignored her but I did use my "Minor Energy Pool" ability and spent some of the anomalous energy that dwelt within me to form a single plasma arrow in the air between the two of us.

The spinning projectile illuminated the air around it and spun silently in the air for a second before hurling itself speedily at the witch. She, foolishly, hadn't been focused on her surroundings and so the arrow struck her hand and caused her to howl in pain, as the magical power she had willed into her open extremity dissipated into the air around her. My clone saw this as a chance to strike and gazed at her for a nanosecond before launching another zero-point beam at her, one that successfully struck her and managed to immediately begin to siphon what energy she possessed. 

The clone also commanded the earth beneath her to open up and swallow her, causing a hole to appear underneath her that immediately swallowed her up entirely. Her older sister gasped in shock as the woman vanished beneath the surface of the courtyard, swallowed up by the earth itself. I turned around and reached the youngest sister, who was now buried up to her head by the grassy soil of the courtyard. 

I placed a single hand on Alexandria's head and proceeded to almost instantaneously reduce her intelligence and wisdom scores to three, from the high teens they had once been. Her eyes widened in fear as her sapience almost instantly vanished, though fortunately for her this was not a permanent change. Even my attribute-draining touch wasn't that powerful, yet.

I felt her points seep into me and as I touched her I felt the potent arcane power that protected her mind from mind-reading dissipate as the spell that maintained it was undone. I also absorbed her blood, and felt a euphoric rush as the blood of the magic wielder poured into me. It tasted delicious and energized the part of me that was vampiric.

All of her knowledge immediately flowed from her mind into mine, and I knew that that was not something that would return. At least not on its own. She could relearn her old knowledge, or I could give it back to her, but even if she recovered completely from the point loss she would not automatically relearn the spells and arcane knowledge I had just taken from her mind. That was due to my power over sin, which strengthened some of my more frightening abilities in peculiar and specific ways such as enabling me to take away knowledge from those I touched and turned into victims of my "Attribute Drain". 

Ultimately the woman was a human and a fairly mundane one in the context of the era she was from, aside from her ability to use magic. She had become immortal, but that was easily done by those who had knowledge of the arcane. Her sisters had all attained immortality on their own as well before they even met and formed their sisterhood, just as she had attained immortality on her own independent of the women she'd later spend centuries with.

Curiously, even though most of the effects she had placed on herself vanished as I stole her knowledge, her immortality did not. She stared fearfully at me, and I proceeded to drain her endurance to three as well, though it was only eleven so it was lower than her intelligence or wisdom stats were. I then silently activated my earth manipulation ability and watched the girl disappear beneath the ground, only for the hole I created to promptly be smoothed over by more dirt, so expertly so in fact that it was not clear that there had ever been a hole there in the first place.

And that left me with the oldest member of her coven to deal with. I turned around and stared at her, both of my bodies now facing her, half expecting her to attempt to teleport away again, but instead, she glared right at me.

The knowledge that filled my mind was considerable. I now possessed entire millennia worth of memories, and more important than just the sheer number of years of memories that I possessed I possessed memories that were from a single, ancient mind. The knowledge that I now possessed and the spells I now knew were considerable. And that was from the person with the least amount of memories of her sisters. 

Both of my bodies gazed at Calista, the last remaining witch, and smiled. If looks could have killed, or at least if her looks could have killed, I'd have been slain by them. She was glaring back at us, astounded by how much my capabilities as a fighter had grown in the time since our last meeting, and fearful that I'd now be able to follow her even if she moved so instead she was paralyzed by fear and indecision. 

"I... You monster!" She said, venomously. I chuckled at her and didn't respond with words, but I did allow one of my arms to transform into a terrifying-looking and gigantic blade made of red biomass, itself the result of a power that I wielded because of The Sanctuary. That caused Calista's eyes to widen as she realized something she and her siblings had never known until now.

"So... You gained ownership of The Sanctuary?" She asked, amazed by that frustrating turn of events. I nodded at her but didn't respond verbally. 

"Fuck... Well, I see that you're stronger, or at least more compatible with it than Alexandria was." Calista admitted, clearly angered by this revelation. The magic that protected her mind from being touched by my psychic abilities was still active, though I knew it wouldn't be once I went ahead and drained her of her attribute points. My clone began to approach her, and she took a single step back, before raising her arms and pointing her hands at us. I audibly chuckled at that.

"Seriously?" I asked her, in the same dialect of ancient Greek that she had been speaking earlier, which I now knew because of what I had taken from Alexandria. This caused her eyes to widen, and before she could activate any of her powers I rose my untransformed hand and snapped my fingers together, revealing a power that I had never used before but had been given by The Sanctuary: "Anti Magic". 

The power activated a field around us which totally suppressed all forms of magic in its radius so long as the people using magic are not enormously more powerful than the person who created the field. Calista's eyes began to water when she felt herself grow disconnected from her magic, something which had almost always been a part of her. And my clone continued to approach her, as he possessed far more powers than just magical ones. 

When he reached her he reached out and placed a hand on the woman's head. He then shut his eyes and activated our insidious "Attribute Drain" touch. I sighed as I felt her powers, knowledge, spells, and memories all seep out of her and into me, further empowering my own arcane abilities.

Calista was the oldest and wisest of the sisters. And as the contents of her encyclopedic mind began to flow into my mind, I felt my knowledge of fields like mythology, history, and various branches of the occult expand tremendously. Calista was ancient even by the standards of her coven, and my choice to string them along by not revealing my potent powers like "Anti Magic" was revealed to be the right one. 

As I absorbed her knowledge I began to learn that she had had strategies for dealing with me that all assumed I would have used by and large the same tactics I had used before, when I had revealed just a few of the potent powers I now possessed. Some of her strategies would have involved her using self-strengthening magic to temporarily match me as far as raw physical power went.

That would have been an unpleasant surprise, had I let it go down like that. That said since I now knew her magic I also knew how to cast the very same spells she would have used against me and could benefit from them instead of having to deal with them. 

Her wisdom regarding witchcraft was immense, and thanks to her I felt my own knowledge expand a great deal which also boosted some of my abilities, such as "Assessment". And that power's own potential was clearly on display here, since it had been how I had come up with the strategy I had used, of beginning with Alexandria, then antagonizing her older sister, and finally subduing and terrifying Calista. Now that power was further supercharged by the knowledge of Alexandria and Calista since both of them had considerable knowledge in fields that I knew very little about. 

The clone then released the sister, only to place her laying down on the floor and will the earth to swallow her up. And just like that, we had dealt with the witches, and only needed to reclaim our award. My clone turned insubstantial, utilizing a Sanctuary power, and sunk into the earth beneath us so that we could feed on the knowledge and points of Megara, the middle member of the coven in both power and age. 

He reached her and placed a single hand on her head and I felt my mind further be enhanced by my vicious, parasitic method of profiting off of the work of my enemies. As he did that, I released the tunnel that I had prevented from moving from my control and listened as the tunnel surged upwards towards us. As it did I subtly manipulated sound so that no one nearby could hear us, and I also gave the three witches abilities, through my charity abilities, that would ensure that none of them would die from not eating or not breathing while they recovered their points. 

A minute later the ground directly above the resting place of the knight morph began to part and the tunnel, almost completely risen to the surface, became visible. I walked over to it, as I sensed the potent power of the multidimensional entity lurking within the tunnel. When I reached the hole overlooking the tunnel I peered downwards and saw the hiding place of the entity; a strange statue that seemed to depict a weirdly European-seeming image of a knight but one that lacked any facial features aside from eyes made of vibrant purple energy. 

I spent a minute staring at the thing before the statue began to vibrate rather intensely, and began to emanate a field of the same purple energy that its eyes had been made of. As that happened, I heard a voice whisper into my mind. 

"Status... Awakening..." The voice whispered, and upon hearing this I knew instinctually that this was the voice of the morphic entity itself. My mind was automatically translating the eldritch telepathic speech of the creature, and playing it in my mind as something analogous to English. I chuckled and stepped off the edge of the ground and began to slowly float down the few feet drop into the tunnel. As I did, I heard the voice whisper into my mind once again. 

"Status update... Studying nearby lifeforms to acquire language abilities..." The voice whispered, as my mind continued to automatically translate the otherworldly telepathic speech of the creature. I reached the ground, and the voice spoke once more. 

"Final status update... Language abilities acquired. Languages known; English, Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese, Russian, Ancient Greek." The voice uttered, having undoubtedly somehow acquired language capabilities from myself and from the buried witches. It was in all likelihood a potent telepath, like myself. I took one step towards the creature's hiding place, and the shimmering purple aura suddenly exploded and illuminated the dark dirt of the tunnel we were in. And then a strange silhouette rose out of the statue itself. 

The silhouette was five and a half feet tall, and had the basic frame of a featureless human, aside from glowing purple eyes. It was suspended in mid-air and nodded at me. 

"Superpowers detected... Initiating communication." The voice uttered, and as I looked at it I felt my mind filling with some of its memories, memories of its long life in other universes. 

"Hello powered being. I see, from studying your mind, that you already know what I am, and what I seek. That is convenient for me. I witnessed your battle and wish to communicate with you." The creature explained, quite politely. I nodded back at it and smiled happily.