He hated this plan.
Mainly because it involved running straight towards the very deadly Monster that could definitely kill them, as it charged a fireball, as bright as a miniature sun, to the size of a large elephant.
Yet as they charged up the twin staircases, him on the left, her on the right, he had to admit the adrenaline flowing through his veins wasn’t unpleasant.
It was nice to feel alive.
He rested one hand on his Gemstone Greatsword, his spoil of war from the Grand Skeleton, still strapped to his back.
“Take your power,” Mercy had said to him earlier, “and shift it from your Gem into that sword. But don’t draw it yet.”
“How—”
“The same way you did everything else!” she snapped. “Look, if you can come this far this quickly, you’ll figure this out. A fourteen-year-old who can’t read or write can use one of these damn things!”
So now the Greatsword felt alive, like a third limb he’d sat on until numbness. Distant in his awareness, but there.
The air felt much hotter than it had been. His limbs were just a bit heavier, though not by much.
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“I’m not trained,” he’d hissed to Mercy, not a minute before, as she pulled him towards the staircase
“A sword,” Mercy had muttered back, “exists for one purpose. What?”
“To cut. To kill.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t see—”
“It’s not some masterwork forged by a human smith working with metal. It’s the killing intent and hatred of the dead. Give it your magic and it’ll listen.”
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And listen it had. He could feel his hands itching to draw it and to slash, and slash, and slash, and just start cleaving this place apart. The words Attunement and lock-in flashed briefly through his mind; would this warp him, turn him into a sword-wielding berserker?
Worrying about the future was a luxury of the living.
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They reached the top of the staircase and passed through the barrier like it wasn’t there. It was a barrier meant to block magic or radiation or energy, not gross matter. The Ghost of All Granavale sneered at them from its burned and visored face, no doubt wondering what paltry magic they would use next. It drew forth its specked gray cube, languorously stretching a spindly white arm—
—and Archmund cut it off.
It screamed in pain.
Its fireball detonated, the magic disrupted. Archmund wondered, wondered, wondered how such a thing would work in the first place, whether it was magic sustaining the combustion reaction in place of fuel and whether a fireball itself was more akin to a plasma, even as the heat approached his face and burned his skin.
Mercy slid in front of him. She raised her hand and her Diamond of Guard with it. The seafoam green shield appeared between them and the oncoming flames, blocking enough of the heat for Archmund’s comfort.
But through the shield — even though it was seafoam green and supposedly translucent, from the intense light of the fire, he could see fractal rivulets and a stretched rods. Blood vessels and twisted bone. She grimaced, though whether at his shock or the fire he didn’t know.
The shielding wasn’t some magical construct, it was a distortion of Mercy’s own body, her own hand. And of course that made sense now, didn’t it? Because she’d developed these techniques after becoming unbreakable herself, able to fall from high cliffs or block swords with her bare hands. A natural extension of one power into another.
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But he didn’t have a moment to discuss or interrogate her. The shield withdrew; her hand was barely reddened. Immediately she jumped six feet straight into the air, pulling a dagger out from one of her many pouches, soaring towards the Ghost of All Granavale’s face.
He could breathe much easier now that there wasn’t a looming fireball above them. And he wouldn’t let her fight alone.
Even as the Ghost of All Granavale stretched to grab her with its remaining arm, as it started sprouting a new arm from the nub he’d caught off, he threw himself forward. He cast a glance at the severed arm, still twitching and pulling itself towards him, and hit it with a Microwave. It spasmed in pain as it cooked from the inside, no longer protected from magic or radiation. He trusted his instincts to let his magic flow as he ran forward, the smell of boiling flesh behind him, his sword in his hands. Just as the Ghost of All Granavale was about to clutch Mercy with its spindly hand, he cleaved his sword into its ankle.
Its leg did not shatter or sever. Already it had adapted, knitting the darkness into natural armor. But it was enough force to knock it sideways, shake its arms, enough to give Mercy a clean shot at its head. She caught its neck in its legs, using her momentum to swivel around with a force that would’ve cracked any mortal neck, and stabbed from behind. Her legs distorted, becoming like twin boa constrictors entwining the Ghost. She chipped away at its crystal visor and its mask.
Archmund could see more of its face. It struck him just how similar it looked to his own, every day he woke up and looked in the mirror. Dark hair, though the Ghost’s swam with the undulating miasma of death. A sharp nose and thin lips, though the Ghost’s were gaunt with hunger. A round face, though the Ghost’s was stretched by age.
There was no denying it. This might not have truly been a ghost of “All” Granavale, all his ancestors and their vassals and tenants, but it was a ghost of Granavale.
The creature thrashed, trying wildly to shake Mercy off, but she clung on tightly. He wasn’t worried about her. She was immensely durable. He was worried about himself. The sword’s purpose was to cut and kill, not to guard the life of its wielder.
And the Ghost of All Granavale wasn’t ignoring him. It used one arm to stab at Mercy, its fingernails lengthening into needles. The other arm splayed out into a wide hand that slapped blindly where he had just stood, like elastic bands.
It was kind of stupid, if it was his ancestor. It was confident in its power and comfortable in its instinct, so it had all but stood in one place for the whole fight, content to rain fire down upon them. And then, once they’d chosen to face it directly, it had done the same. Its only adaptations were slight inflations and regenerations of its flesh.
He dodged out of the path of the hand and countered by slicing at the thinnest point of its arm. It worked. The arm fell off, oily black seeping from the wounds. No time to be distracted; he turned his Infrared Lance upon it, burning the shadows away.
“It’s working!” Mercy shouted.
Every defensive adaptation cost it power it could not use on transformation. Every transformation cost it power it could not use on limb regeneration. Every limb regeneration cost it power it could not use on getting rid of Mercy.
And yet the instinct-driven beast wanted so badly to be whole, to regain the truth of life. So it kept regenerating its limbs, and Archmund kept hacking them away. And with each strike, it became easier to cut through flesh and bone, the Gemstone sword in his hand becoming more and more an extension of him. His was the sword; the sword was him. Together, they cut through thinning shadow, and that which was cast away burned below his baleful gaze.
And Mercy? She stabbed and stabbed and stabbed, her Gemstone dagger marring the Ghost of All Granavale’s face.
But they had spoke too soon.
The Ghost screeched once more, and suddenly the air grew hot.
Mercy swore, loosening her transformed legs. They sizzled as she gracefully landed on the ground, regenerating into normal legs as she stood besides Archmund. Though the smell of burnt flesh already filled the air, Archmund couldn’t help but imagine it growing stronger. He swallowed, even as sweat beaded on his brow.
The Ghost of All Granavale burst into white-hot flames, like a funeral pyre. Wild at first, but as they watched the flames swirled, drawing into a vortex, before straightening into a pillar of white fire.
(Was it white because of phosphorous, or sheer heat, or magic? It didn’t burn his eyes to see, so probably magic.)
“Shit,” Mercy swore. “Shit shit shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Granavale,” she said, looking at him gravely, “the dead are the dead. There’s nothing they can offer you that would be worth it. Got it?”
“We loot their corpses for power to fuel our economy,” he said. It was the first thing that came to mind. It was a non-sequitur. It wasn’t something a child would ever say.
“That’s — fine, it’s a good point. Whatever. Look, whatever they say, it’s a lie or a half truth. The dead can’t grow or change. They can only mimic what they once saw in life.”
She’d grabbed him by the shoulders, but she kept one eye on the white-hot flame. Taking her cue, he did the same. One eye on the flame, one eye on her. The fire cast a shadow that made her seem far older, that accentuated the dark bags beneath her eyes.
Archmund didn’t like where this was going.
The pillar of fire exploded, a cylindrical shockwave rippling towards them. Mercy’s Diamond of Guard flashed; her hand distorted to shield them from the fire. Though the ambient temperature dropped drastically once the shockwave had passed, she kept her shield up.
They peered cautiously through the gap between two stretched fingers.
There, where the Ghost of All Granavale had stood, was a woman.
She was the spitting image of Archmund’s dead mother.