Ray groaned as he returned to the land of the living. He wasn’t dead? No. Fuck no. He wasn’t dead.
The relief from that thought almost overtook every other, which would have been terribly dangerous just then. First, he had to take note of his surroundings. No, even before that, he had to apply his Recovery…
He had almost none. Stopping the star and the worst of his wounds had used up almost all the Recovery he’d had. Now, the last little bit in his tank went to his jaw.
There. At least his thoughts wouldn’t be distracted by the spikes of pain radiating through his skull at every little motion of his head.
But Ray wasn’t dismayed. He could work with this. The idea that had struck his head just before everything had gone dark was still floating in his mind. The Floor Lord might think he was down and out for the count, but she was going to receive the surprise of her life.
His surroundings weren’t encouraging. The last attack from the Floro Lord had essentially dropped Ray all the way to the floor below. He was just lucky he couldn’t hear Gritty and the Sylvans fighting against James and the evil Sylvans. They were still somewhat distant from his current location.
Or, they were smart and had retreated farther down the palace when they had seen the first signs of the destruction the Floor Lord was causing.
Around Ray, everything was grey and sludgy. The palace was turning back to its original form as an Imitator. Perfect.
There was conversation going on. He could make it out just faintly through his ruined ears, but it was definitely there.
“…could have warned…”
“Do not need…”
“… is the point… everything falls…”
“Watch—”
“Look… to me and my ow…”
Ray got what was going on. The Everstead ruler was pissed that the Floor Lord hadn’t given adequate warning before pulling of her gravity stunt. Ray just had to hope Kredevel was alright somewhere out there.
He figured he could use the cover of their little argument to enact his plan, but then, a little void popped up before him.
Ah, the Floor Lord was onto him.
Her flame-wreathed sword stabbed in a second later. Ray couldn’t not scream at the pain. He had brought his arm up just in time to stop the blade, the sword catching on his Talisman.
But he had prevented the Floor Lord from puncturing his chest and skewering his heart. Ray was still alive. He still retained enough concentration to cast Anima Charybdis on his surroundings.
That was the plan he had settled on.
Tatters of black-red energy erupted everywhere. Ray didn’t need to aim them anywhere. They burst into being on their own, because his target was everywhere. The throne room—what remained of it, at least—had reverted back to being an Imitator, as had the parts of the palace that were supporting it.
They had gone from being inanimate objects to living matter. The perfect base for his chaos to act upon.
The perfect enemy for Ray to draw in a huge rush of energy. His Recovery replenished rapidly, and he immediately began applying it to his wounds and injuries.
A different rush added to that of Anima Charybdis. This one refilled a chunk of his Mana capacity alongside his Recovery. Oh right. That had to be the effect of Soullife Cloak returning the chunk of Mana and Recovery it stored away upon activation.
Ray grinned. It was working.
If the Floor Lord saw his plan in action and was about to act, Ray didn’t give her the opportunity to do so. Energy was returning like a waterfall smashing into his soul. Life was coming back in spades upon spades. Ray was not going to be held down.
Jerking his hand forward, he thrust the draconic maw into the void and fired off his trusty laser breath.
The Scouring Eyeball confirmed the bullseye. His compressed beam of chaos had burst out of the other void pocket near the Floor Lord. Her reactions were incredibly fast, but even then, she couldn’t dodge the full blast. Ray’s laser took off enough of her left shoulder and chest that her arm hung by a mere few tendons and strings of rapidly corrupting flesh.
Ray wasn’t done, of course. He was getting to his feet. It was time to seize victory.
The Floor Lord began healing immediately. Her flesh was quickly tuning back to normal, even the bones regenerating. There was hardly any blood loss to speak of.
Ray had wondered how she was able to do something like that. The number of times he had hit her should have left some kind of mark, but she was fine after each strike. It wasn’t just her Recovery. That should have been depleted by now. He finally saw the truth.
She had called up her Tower Nodes.
Plural, because there were indeed two. One he recognized easily. Her Tower Node of the Fleshcrafter was the same as his. A crystal with its top half transparent and revealing a piece of writhing meat inside it.
The other one confounded Ray for a second, before he noted its size. It was larger than any other Tower Node he had seen. Big. Amplified.
So that had to be the Tower Node that had allowed the Floor Lord to cause all the shit she had done on the Second Floor.
Right now, she was using both Tower Nodes to heal herself up. The wounds Ray had left were bad, but the Fleshcrafter Tower Node, amplified by its larger counterpart, was taking care of the injury.
Ray closed his eyes—not the Scouring Eyeball flying far above—for a second. He recalled the words of the Marauder. Remember the power of the Tower Nodes. He remembered what he had to do, what he had set out to do, when embarking against the Everstead and their royal palace.
Most of all, he remembered the power the Marauder had granted his Tower Node.
The Floor Lord shouted all of a sudden. Her Tower Nodes were moving, and they were doing so outside of her control.
In the blink of an eye, both Tower Nodes shot into the void before her before reappearing right beside Ray. The pocket of void disappeared too late. She stepped up to finally appear directly in Ray’s line of sight, looking down at him from above, where the ground was still silvery and sludgy.
“You…” Her face twisted for the first time, displaying a fury that belied the fact that her wounds weren’t healed., that her arm was still dangling useless and bleeding. “How could you ever…?”
Ray looked to either side of him with a grin. The Tower Nodes floated seemingly on their own. But then, he released the Mimic Mana he had coated his Soulstrike arms with, letting the camouflage fade so that the True Mana limbs appeared in their black-red glory. Their grasping ends clutched the Tower Nodes tight in their grip.
“A trick,” the Floor Lord hissed. “I should have expected nothing less.”
“A trick,” Ray confirmed. “And you fell for it. We can talk about it, though. I’m not against returning your Tower Nodes to you, so long as you do something for me.”
He steadied himself. The Floor Lord was still injured. Mangled. Weary. Ray himself was getting tired too, but this was his chance to end the fight.
“Which would be what, exactly?” she asked. Despite her wounded, bleeding condition, her voice was still steely.
“End the Flesh Plague.” He glanced to the side. “Or, since you don’t have your Tower Node any longer, tell me how to end the Flesh Plague. I suppose I could find out on my own, but I’d like it if you at least stopped interfering.”
Ray wasn’t simply asking it because of his System-ordained Objective he had to complete. He was tired. The fight had drained him, and he wanted it to end.
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The Floor Lord didn’t have a reason to decline, either. She was gravely wounded and had no way of healing herself now that Ray had taken away her Tower Node. He was giving her an opportunity that he really ought not to even bother with. And yet…
“I decline,” the Floor said.
Ray sighed. “Figured as much,” he muttered.
Then he lunged forward, thrusting his arm forward to fire off the draconic maw’s laser breath. Didn’t matter if he was exhausted. He was ending this.
She reacted by summoning her void again, within which she disappeared. A small portion of Ray’s compressed chaos fire beam entered it too, but the void itself vanished in a second. The rest of his attack obviously missed wildly.
Ray didn’t bother looking around. Primordial Gauge was already warning him that his opponent wasn’t anywhere close by. He had to look up. But then, even that didn’t help. The Floor Lord was ascending fast. She was ingeniously using her Call of the Cosmos to summon void pockets as far high up as he could, rising beyond the reach of Ray and anyone else.
Was she running? That didn’t seem right. The Floor Lord was decidedly not the running type.
The only other conclusion Ray came to was that she had to be planning something. No doubt, it was something he would hate. Whatever it was, he couldn’t let her succeed.
It didn’t work when he fired his draconic maw’s laser breaths. The Floor Lord hadn’t ascended beyond the ultimate distance that the compressed beams of chaotic fire could reach. But she had erected a different sort of defence that worked to protect her.
The Floor Lord had created a strange combination of her gravity manipulation and more of her voids. They formed a defensive ring around her.
Ray could achieve a similar array with Mottling Spiritguard. Had she stolen the way he used his spell?
The lowest void orb had the gravity coming from within it. This meant that the laser breaths were drawn within, then dispersed out and away from the Floor Lord by a different orb. No matter how powerfully Ray launched out the draconic breaths, he couldn’t make them hit his target. The gravity was just too strong.
“Fool!” The Floor Lord’s voice crashed down to where Ray was standing like a falling avalanche, blaring into his ears like thunder. “Did you truly believe your little stunt would be enough?”
Ray frowned. Way too loud. How was the volume of her voice that high? Was she able to channel and use Amplification Mana without a Tower Node? Then maybe—
He froze. Ah, shit. He had been working under a terrible assumption.
His fears came to life when he saw—through the Scouring Eyeball because his actual ones weren’t able to make out details as well that far up—the new Tower Node. The second Tower Node.
It was one of the exact same one Ray had taken from her. The Tower Node of the… Amplifier? That sounded wrong. He identified it as the Tower Node that allowed her to use Amplification Mana. But to think she had two all this time. He cursed. Stupid. Stupid. If he could have more than one, why couldn’t anyone else?
Ray tried to shout upwards, even though he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be heard, “Whatever you’re planning, it’s not going to work. You’re going to lose. You already did. You’re just too conceited to realize it.”
Her reply proved that she hadn’t heard him. “I had thought to wait before calling upon the final resort. I had believed that it would not be necessary. I could deal with anything. It is, I admit, humbling to realize that my power alone was not enough. But that matters not.”
Ray stopped paying attention and looked to where the king of the Everstead had halted his fight against Kredevel. Both of them were staring straight up too.
“Hey,” Ray shouted. “Your Majesty! What the hell is your Floor Lord going to do now?”
He ignored the question. A vein pulsed on Ray’s forehead. What an ass.
But it was starting to look like Ray might not need a direct answer. Something strange was happening to the air around him. To everything around him.
A cloying thickness had arrived. The air turned congealed, the floor becoming softer but firmer at the same time. A heavy flowing sound filled his ears, a sensation similar to a rush of blood. Thick. Too thick. Too dense. Ray was starting to have trouble breathing.
He exchanged a panicked look with Kredevel before the Floor Lord’s amplification finished.
Everything turned to flesh. One second, Ray was starting to think he needed to get out of here, had already fired another desperate blast from his Greater Windbane Maw straight at the Floor Lord.
Then his breath cut off. His sight turned through blood red to glistening white-pink to complete darkness. Total silence flooded his ears. His whole body turned heavy and dense and covered by something with immeasurable weight, somehow squeezing him from all sides. Shock and panic didn’t even begin to cover the chaotic riot that was Ray’s mind just then.
Flesh. He was sure of it. He was being crushed, compressed, killed by flesh all around him.
The sensations were even stranger inside him. It was as though the flesh summoned by the Floor Lord had replaced every inch of space that had held air. It had entered through his nostrils and taken over his lungs. It had violated him through his mouth and bloated his stomach.
He was dying. He was almost dead. He couldn’t be dying. Not like this. Not after coming this far. Not now.
Begging, pleading, screaming in his mind that it would work, Ray used Spectral Step.
And breathed in great lungfuls of fresh, free air.
He could worry about the fact that he was falling later. The ground was rushing in fast, ready to splatter him to a pulp, but fuck it, he had escaped from whatever the Floor Lord had done. It was almost hard to believe that he had come out of that alive. That he was still whole.
When Ray finally saw what exactly he had gone through, he forgot all about the fact that he was plummeting.
Where the Everstead royal palace had stood moments ago, there was now a gigantic… behemoth. Ray had no other way of describing it. The creature didn’t have any specific shape. Just a gargantuan mound of flesh that made the Arch Flesh Elemental look like a pygmy in comparison.
If it had been nothing more than a huge, fleshy edifice, Ray might have been somewhat okay with it. But the thing was alive.
Tendrils and tentacles writhed through the air. Giant pieces of the inconceivably large monster moved freely here and there. Blood and fluids oozed and gushed as parts of the creature shifted about.
A shout reminded Ray that he was falling. He gathered back his flailing thoughts. Didn’t matter what he was facing. The first and foremost priority was surviving.
So, Ray used the same trick he had performed when he had been thrown off Cliff One by the Floor Lord. The draconic maws burned out their lasering breaths, slowing down his descent. When he finally touched the ground, he found Joaquin rushing towards him.
The healer had never gone into the palace to begin with, opting to remain behind to see if he could help the hapless Infected.
“Ray!” he said, his eyes wild and face pale. “You got out. I have no idea how but I’m so fucking glad someone survived that Spirespine.”
“Spirespine…?”
Ray turned to focus on the monster with Primordial Gauge.
Spirespine [Monster] [Tier 23] [Level 88]
Purest form of Growth mana granted a semblance of life. Only through the power of a Tower Node can such a being manifest.
Skills:
Ray gulped a little. He was having flashbacks to when he had first met the Eternal Guardian. There was no way Ray was beating a creature like that. No way he could defeat something that outclassed him by such a huge extent. Impossible.
“…ay.” Joaquin’s voice cut through his thoughts. “Ray!”
Shaking his head, Ray turned to Joquin. “We can’t fight something like that.”
“I don’t care about fighting it.” Joaquin suddenly gripped Ray’s shoulders tight, giving it a good shake. “I want to know if anyone else is alive. Do you know if anyone else has made it?”
Anyone else? How could they? Ray himself had barely escaped because he’d luckily had that a stray blast from his draconic maws diverted away by the Floor Lord’s gravity defence mere seconds before that monstrosity had appeared. It was all that had saved him.
His heart spasmed. Did that mean Kredevel was gone? That Gritty wasn’t coming out of that thing alive? Were they even now suffocating, losing control of themselves, melding with this Spirespine?
Ray’s spiralling thoughts were once more cut short, though not by Joaquin this time. By Gritty.
With a wet, slashing squelch she emerged from the depths of the monster. She had appeared several feet off the ground so that when she came out, she struck the earth with a thud.
Grity looked up, then grinned. “Ha! I knew you of all people would make it outta that thing, wingman.”
Ray swallowed. Then slowly smiled. “I really need to stop being surprised by you.”
“Why? I like that I can set off sparks inside your head.”
Ray wanted to laugh. He was pretty sure it would come out maniacal, though.
“You okay, wingman?” Gritty asked, slowly approaching him.
“How can anybody be okay with that thing there?” Joaquin said. “But it’s good you’re out, Gritty. That means there’s a chance that everyone else caught inside might survive too. We just need to figure out a way to get them out.”
Gritty maintained her attention on Ray for a split second longer before turning to the gargantuan monster they were facing. “Question is—how.”
Ray took a deep breath. He understood that, compared to his friends who were no doubt freaking out about the monster to some degree, he was acting a little… okay, a lot less than his usual self. It helped to take a moment and understand why.
Inside that Spirespine, he had almost lost control of himself. He had nearly lost all control over his situation.
That was it. That was what it all boiled down to.
Ray’s whole journey within the Tower had boiled down to gaining control over his situation. The more power he obtained, the higher he went up the Tower, the more he could rest assured that it was he himself who would continue to dictate what he did and where he went. Sure, there were compromises along the way he had to concede, like working with the Everstead.
But he believed he was making progress. A part of him was certain that nothing could truly happen to him that would take away his integral ability to control himself. To affect his circumstance.
Until this gigantic heap of flesh had materialized into being around him.
He had lost control. All control. That was what had struck him so hard. That was why he was acting and feeling this way. A loss of control of such a magnitude. A bind he had only escaped almost out of sheer luck.
No. No. He was the one who had orchestrated his own way of getting out of the prison of flesh that was the Spirespine. Ray had come out of it because of his own efforts.
The somewhat traumatic feeling was quickly fading. In its place, a hot anger washed ashore.
“We need to kill that thing’s heart,” he said.
His companions turned to him.
“You know where it is?” Gritty asked.
Joaquin brought up a different concern. “It’s not just going to sit there and let us kill it.”
Gritty suddenly far above. “Shit, look at that!”
The tentacles and tendrils were coming alive. They had already been moving, but now they were slashing and swiping erratically, turning into a frenzy. Several were shooting down, attacking the ground at random.
“I was right,” Joaquin said. “It’s definitely not just going to sit there. But right now, it’s almost like it’s looking for something.”
“We’ve got no time to waste.” Ray concentrated until his Tower Nodes emerged on either side of him. Mainly, his three Tower Nodes of the Fleshcrafter and the Tower Node of… the Paragon who allowed the Floor Lord to use Amplification Mana. “But I think I can even the odds. Let’s go.”