The flashlight that Mark extended from the barrel of his gun flickered to life as he rounded the corner of the stark stone passageway. Shining his light down the corridor, he was greeted not with the painted bas-reliefs of the red herring hiding place, but of simply yet more blank stone. If anything, it was beginning to look like concrete in the new light.
Mark continued down the passageway, speedwalking as fast as he felt safe doing. Torch had probably already shown up and started making trouble, after all, and he needed to hurry this up.
The passageway, with its seemingly arbitrary right turns and occasional staircase down, certainly wasn’t in a hurry itself, though.
-
Torch climbed out of the top of the hatch into the Down Below and was immediately met with a gauntlet of molten stone aimed at their face.
They blinked out of the way of Waia’s opening swing a quarter-second before impact, reappearing directly behind Waia with their sword in hand. Before Waia had the chance to turn and face them, Torch slid their sword through her midriff, burying it up to the hilt and making the gold-streaked blade protrude out her front.
Waia coughed out a fleck of gold. “…Fast…” She looked ahead at Quet and Horan and their visibly concerned expressions, and her grimace forced itself into a grin. “…I’ve had worse stabbings, though.” She reached over her back, grabbed the hood of Torch’s cloak, and flipped them over her shoulder.
Torch landed on the floor with enough force to crack the stone beneath them. As they rolled off of their back, blood leaking from between their teeth, Waia reached down the hatch and pulled it up, closing up the square hole and leaving no visible way of opening it back up.
Waia reached behind her back and pulled the sword out of her abdomen. “You wanna run away from round three? Go ahead and try.”
-
Mark, exhausted and starving though he was, ran down the identical hallways of whatever this floating block of pointless grandeur was meant to be. The whole thing seemed to just be a trick to waste his time, with how much nothing he had to slog through just to get to the hypothetical promise of what he was after at the end. It was as if the building itself knew that he was in a hurry, and was deliberately stalling so that he could only get to the Seraphium once it was already too late.
He slowed to a stop and examined the stone around him. Maybe it was.
-
Torch leapt to their feet and whistled, which sprayed a minute amount of blood between their teeth. Their sword ripped itself from Waia’s hand, slicing a gash along the length of her palm in the process.
Waia hissed in pain and gripped her wounded hand. “Where was this back in Hawaii?”
Torch ran a gauntleted finger along the length of their blade, wiping off the blood that had not yet dried. “You did not deserve this in Hawaii.”
Waia glared at Torch. The floor beneath their feet began to sag under both of their weights as Waia slowly liquefied fifty square feet of solid stone at once. “You have no idea what either of us deserve at this point. Good thing I have a pretty decent idea.”
As red-hot stone began to flow up Waia’s legs, Torch leapt into the air right when their steel greaves began to smoke. They pulled their sword back like a scorpion’s stinger and aimed for the Primus’ carotid artery, but right before they were within range to strike, Waia reached up and thrust forward a blob of molten stone from the tip of her arm like an extension of her arm.
The liquified tendril flowed around Torch’s foot, hardening and encasing them in an instant. Before Torch could retaliate or cut themself free, Waia spun around and hurled them towards the vast wall housing the entryway into the floating structure’s core.
Torch skidded across the ground, smashed most of their extremities directly into the floor, and tumbled hundreds of feet directly towards the entryway. When they finally made contact, the entire wall erupted in a wave of white light as they splattered against the barrier keeping everyone save Mark out.
Quet winced and looked away from the dissipating light. “…They can’t get in.” She grabbed Horan’s arm. “They can’t get in! The rules apply to them!”
Horan grinned and looked at Waia. “W–We win!”
More and more stone was drawn to Waia, encasing her body from the legs up. The Primus flexed her fingers, now encased in claws of red-hot stone. “Not yet.” Her face vanished behind a mask of stone.
-
These hallways, this whole castle, was a trick. It had to be. Mark figured that, after all the hassle of hiding the one entrance to the Seraphium’s location behind an eldritch memory-monster, he wouldn’t create a massive levitating labyrinth-castle just for fun. This place was the last line of defense. And Mark was having none of it.
The only halfway-decent tool at his disposal was his gun, so Mark thanked the Greek whose name he had by now long forgotten who had given him the thing. He produced it, thought for a moment about how something like it could actually be useful, then made a plan.
Radar wasn’t that complicated, after all. Mark held down the button on the gun’s hilt and focused very intently about what he wanted out of it. Slowly, bit by bit, the gun unfolded into a shape reasonably close to what he wanted. A small LED screen popped into existence in place of where the hammer would be, and the barrel widened to roughly the diameter of a golf ball, with some obtuse microphone-looking sensory apparatus mounted in the usual position of the iron sights.
Mark squeezed the trigger and a small chrome sphere launched itself forward, rolling forward on the floor into darkness. A patch of the LED screen lit up with red diodes, representing the location of the sphere as viewed by the camera lens. Mark tracked the sphere, keeping it in the center of the screen as it bounced around a corner and further along the hallway, constantly accelerating from the motor in its core that kept it spinning faster and faster.
“You’ve got way too much power and thousands of years of experience,” mumbled Mark, “But I’ve got technology.”
-
Torch slowly picked themself up off the floor in front of the barred entryway, their bones snapping back into place after being smashed against the mystical barrier. With each crack, blue light flared in the depths of their eyes and mouth, and a joint was put back in a very slightly wrong position.
Torch cried in pain as their spine was shoved forward into a hunched, crooked position, the vertebrae extending until they jutted out from their back and sides. Blood leaked out from between their teeth and they fell forward onto all fours, their fingers twisting into talons.
Their incandescent blue eyes looked up to examine the hulking, armored figure approaching them. “You… humiliate me… at every turn. My mind was crafted… with intent. Along with my body. And with every strike, you… throw off the balance. You make it harder to return… to what I should be. What I feel towards you… it does not aid me in my goal. It only slows down my inevitable success…”
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Waia sprinted towards Torch and prepared to crush them between Deus’ barrier and her own unstoppable weight, but the instant before she made contact, Torch’s warped hand shot forward and planted itself in her chest. Waia came to a stop in an instant and collapsed on her back, the air knocked out of her lungs.
Torch loomed over her prone form. Second by second, their face was transforming, their nose shrinking and their teeth sharpening. “But I can see why you embrace these feelings.”
-
Mark wasn’t sure of how the physics was working out, but while the metal sphere picked up more and more speed with each bounce around a corner, he decided to just be thankful that things were working out as well as they were.
The lit-up portion of his gun’s display moved less and less as the sphere moved further downward beneath Mark’s feet, into the heart of the structure. But after just long enough of a time to start feeling uncomfortable, the display came to a halt.
“Gotcha.” Mark pressed the button on the stock of his gun, and a long, thin drill bit protruded from the chute that had originally been used to produce the sphere. Mark lined the tip of the drill bit as closely as he could with the light on the remaining display, then held the trigger down.
A few seconds and a lot of noise later, he had cleared out a hole in the floor wide enough to slip down through, leading down into the corridor below. Mark slid down a level, already skipping out on a minute or two of walking as he avoided the winding path downwards and cut straight to the chase.
Mark lined the drill bit up once again and prepared to repeat the process. “Nice try, Deus, but I’m not playing your game.”
-
Talons attached to a sinewy, fleshless arm ripped away the stone mask covering Waia’s face with all the ease of peeling an orange. Torch, teeth sharpened into needle-like points, brought their mouth up to Waia’s face. Drool dripped onto Waia as their mouth gaped open in an impossible rictus grin.
But before Torch could bite down, a cord of green energy wrapped around their throat and yanked them off of Waia’s pinned frame. Quet stepped over Waia, hands raised in defense as she conjured more and more cords out of thin air to bind Torch in place.
Waia scowled as she got to her feet. “You follow the rules I set out for you all that time ago, and now is when you break them?!”
Quet looked over her shoulder at the Hawaiian. “You keep telling me that we need to stick together with the only people we trust to have our backs, and now is when you ignore that principle?!”
Waia rolled her eyes. “Fine, fair, whatever. They’re coming back up, by the way.”
Torch strained against the razor-thin wires of emerald light. Wherever the cords wrapped around their rapidly-elongating, armor plates were split in two and gashes were carved ever deeper as Torch threatened to slice their own limbs off for the sake of escaping their restraints.
“They can certainly try,” said Quet. “Mapuche ran into issues with the massive excess of ambient soul energy in the Down Below back in February, but Assyrian? What’s the ratio of dead people down here to alive people up there?”
Torch pulled back the sword that remained resolutely grasped in one hand and swung at a nearby cluster of floating glyphs that brought one of the cords into being. The glyphs fizzled out of existence, the cord followed suit, and one or two seconds later, Torch had rid themself of their bindings.
“Not big enough,” muttered Waia.
-
Bit by bit, Mark sped up the process of drilling between floors. He had quickly learned how to immerse himself in holes while still digging them by catching himself on minor footholds that the drill left in its wake, and the ten-ish foot ceilings on the corridors meant that he didn’t need to be particularly careful when dropping down, aside from bending his knees.
The more he descended, the more he felt a strange pressure building in his skull, just enough to enter the realm of discomfort. It was like the entire structure was resisting his breaking of the unspoken rules of this place. But it also meant he was close.
He drilled through the last floor and, true to his sensor’s word, broke into the chamber of the Seraphium. The real one, this time.
-
“Fine, sure.” Quet adjusted the position of her hands. “Second verse, same as the first, plus Down Below deluxe magic. Gravity field activate!”
The floor below Torch’s malformed feet once again lit up in a wave of green light, but the twisting, distended form of Torch remained upright, slowly staggering towards the Primoi with each step splintering the stone beneath their feet from their massively increased weight.
Quet scowled. “Oh, you would, wouldn’t you?”
Horan summoned a sword into his hands and stood his ground next to Quet and Waia. “Can’t you give us a single win?! This is all your fault, the least you could do is let the same thing work on you twice!”
Torch’s grip on their sword moved from the hilt to the blade. “I did not create the carrion…”
Waia rolled her eyes and began to step forward, her suit of molten armor dwarfing the other two Primoi. “Keep the gravity up. Bare minimum, it levels the playing field.”
Horan grimaced at the sight of Waia going forth alone once more. He nudged Quet with his elbow. “She’s distracting them. Wanna hear an idea?”
The moment Waia set foot in the square patch of light denoting Quet’s area of influence, Torch tightened their grip on their sword, shattering the blade in a burst of blue light. The steel shards, rather than falling, embedded themselves in Torch’s warped, veiny flesh, tracing thin lines in the skin as they swam towards the tips of Torch’s fingers like shark fins.
“You know resistance to be futile,” they mumbled. “All of you know.”
The shards writhed their way beneath Torch’s talon-like fingernails, reigniting with the same pale blue glyphs they had carried as a unified whole.
“And yet you continue to humiliate me, to make me seem insufficient in the eyes of my progenitor.” Torch’s bloodshot eyes scanned the approaching Hawaiian, bloodstained locks of once-blond hair hanging over their scarred face. “My final victory occurs in a matter of minutes. I can accept debasing my form yet further if it means re-teaching you the lesson I demonstrated with the Aztec.”
-
Mark landed in a completely unadorned ten-by-ten-by-ten cube of a room, a diminutive doorway leading out into the miles-long passageway he bypassed. In the exact center of the room was a four-foot-tall pedestal, and there it was.
Mark stood up and approached the flawless basketball-sized glass orb, his face illuminated by the swirling cloud of blue-and-white mist contained within. He stood in front of the Seraphium for a moment, allowed himself a couple seconds to wallow in the moment, and picked it up.
Nothing of note happened. It was in his hands now.
Mark sighed and examined the glass surface. He could figure out how to use it later, but for now, his friends were probably still dealing with Torch. He tucked the Seraphium under one arm, pulled his gun back out, and reconfigured it into a grappling hook. Getting back up would doubtlessly be a lot clumsier than coming down. But he’d done it. He’d gotten the stupidly-named artifact that would undo three years of one apocalypse after another.
-
Torch ducked below the opening swing of Waia’s massive, red-hot arm and sank their hand into her chest, the steel shards effortlessly cleaving through her armor and piercing her flesh.
As Waia grunted in pain, Torch wheezed out a pained, alien approximation of a laugh. “You all think yourselves special.” They twisted their hand, eliciting another cry of pain. “Unique.” More twisting. “Exempt from the rules. I won this fight the moment I was created. You are all equally nothing to me.”
“Now!” Horan dived down towards Torch in the same instant that Quet undid the increased-gravity field. Landing next to Torch, Horan brought his sword down on their arm like a headsman’s axe, severing it at the shoulder.
The arm detached from Waia and fell bloodlessly to the floor, writhing aimlessly like a reptile’s tail ripped from its back. Torch barely reacted to the loss of the limb, effortlessly shoving Waia to the ground with their remaining arm and turning to Horan, examining him with their sunken blue eyes. “Feigning hope is… pathet–”
Horan thrust one arm forward, creating a blast of wind that hurled Torch into the air. Twenty feet away, Quet traced Torch’s trajectory through the air, creating a funnel of anti-gravity glyphs just wide enough for them to fit through.
Rather than falling back down and hitting the floor, Torch continued to sail upwards at a diagonal angle, held aloft by the field of nullified gravity. Their one remaining arm twisted around and slashed a hole in the nearest cluster of glyphs, disrupting the effect and letting them fall once more, but by then it was already too late. They fell past the edge of the structure and continued down, plummeting down into the foggy abyss.
The three Primoi waited breathlessly to see if Torch would come back up over the edge, for just too long of a silence to become uncomfortable. They all seemed to agree that they weren’t coming back at the same time.
Horan dropped his sword and planted his hands on his knees. “They were a lot more of a problem when they didn’t take so many breaks to call us losers. As if we’re just gonna stop for them forever.”
“Didn’t even have to break their sword to stop them from flying back up,” said Quet. “They did that for us.”
“I’m almost disappointed, really,” replied Horan. “I was expecting to have to lose my other eye or something as a price for saving the world. But, like, Waia just got stabbed a couple times.” He looked down at the Hawaiian. “You okay, by the way?”
Waia’s armor slid off her body as she staggered back to her feet, clutching the cluster of holes in her shirt and fuming internally. “…Fine. I’ll live.” She kicked the squirming, bony arm away from herself.
Horan sat down on the ground and took a deep breath. “And any minute now, Mark’ll come back with everyone’s favorite mystic artifact, and we can get Deus to fix all this. Looks like everyone’s going to live.”