‘Ouch’ is really the only thing that Canta is able to think in that instant, before his capacity for thought leaves him entirely as his brain is crushed into a gooey mush. Yet, despite that, he persists nonetheless in his framework of existence. He feels that he is aware and present as an entity, yet he is unable to form anything deeper than an acceptance and a knowing of those facts.
Slowly, however, the light returns to his eyes, which are reshaping themselves. The pulp of his body, pulling itself out of the blanket, slowly strings itself back together, piece by piece. He doesn’t yet have the capacity to feel pain, as his brain hasn’t restructured itself into a state yet that is capable enough of doing such a thing. But he can see now. Like a mindless animal, he can see and perceive, but he is unable to understand the context of what he sees, at least at first.
His blood-soaked eyes gaze upwards, although one of them doesn’t work right, as there is a jagged fragment of his own skull stuck inside of the pupil like the blade of a penetrating knife. Something lumbers in the darkness of the boss-arena, something massive, something gigantic that almost reaches the distant ceiling of the dungeon as it lurches forward. The hulking titan, the size of a thousand men, is nothing but a bronzed metal torso shaped like a human’s. It drags itself back across the room on its knuckles. Loose scraps of metal and wire and bent pipes all hang out of its open lower body, like entrails dragging behind a man who was cut in half.
The mechanical giant stops where it is, simply staring into the darkness down the other way, towards the other door.
Canta’s body slowly begins to regenerate, and his brain is slowly starting to come back into itself. The synapses in his mind fire as they shoot through and jolt everything back to life. Some of them still flow nowhere but into the indistinct goo that makes up half of his head. He realizes now, suddenly, what pain is.
He wants to scream. He wants to scream and to let the world hear of his deep anguish, to share with it the intense, blinding pain that never seems to stop. But having no face, no mouth, no throat, no lungs, and nothing but half of his head, there is nowhere for the scream to go save back into his own malfunctioning sense of existence.
Like one of the slimes that he has been eating for so many days, the oozy mass that is Canta drags itself backwards towards the corridor it had emerged from, leaving a giant, wet smear behind itself as his loose entrails and the stained blanket run along the ground. Both of them pull up loose rocks and sediment, which start to get stuck inside of his regenerating body. At this point, the top half of his teeth have regrown, yet his skull is still against the rocks, resulting in him scraping them against the coarse stone floors as he crawls.
Canta pulls himself into the corridor and lays there as a bloody, half-formed pile of screaming human misbirth.
“There you go screaming again,” says Alleluia’s voice minutes later, after he finally stops and lays there limply on the cold, damp floor, staring at the ceiling with glassy, traumatized eyes that never manage to blink.
He doesn’t say anything, simply staring into the void for a while. A few seconds later, something lets out a quiet ‘clack’ as it falls down in front of his face; a small rock that his regrowing body had pushed out of his eye, which now begins to heal back shut once more.
“– I have a lot to scream about,” says Canta, dryly. He gets up, pulling his blanket with him, noticing that it has fused to his skin. With a disgusted expression, he pulls it off of himself, listening to the sickly wet tearing sound as it comes free, pulling strings of red meat off of his exterior. “I think I found your door.”
“You did?!” asks Alleluia excitedly. He notices how quick her voice is to come to him; there is no significant delay now. Actually, looking back on it, it has been growing less and less the last few days.
“Yeah, but it’s all locked up and there's, uh… there’s a boss monster outside of it.”
“Wait! Stay there!” she says excitedly. Canta rubs his head, looking around and wondering where exactly else he should go? Taking a moment to catch his breath, he sits there and waits for his body to heal and for Alleluia to return. His stomach growls. He’s really hungry.
Really, really, hungry.
“Hello?” calls a voice, very, very quietly. He can barely hear it over the mechanical whirring. Looking up across the arena, he notices that the sound he has been hearing from the pipes this entire time has been coming from the mechanical boss itself. It’s loud. Really loud. Looking around the distant arena, he notices that dozens of pipes run along the ceiling, just above the boss’s head. “Helloooo?” calls the voice again, softly in the distance.
Canta looks over towards its origin, the locked door across the arena. “I can hear you!” he shouts, cupping his hand by his mouth, but not bothering to get up.
“I can hear you!” calls the voice back louder, in clear excitement. Canta sighs, noticing that he’s starting to feel agitated again by the sound of her voice. He shakes his head, rising to his feet to stop himself from being a jerk again. He’s just hangry and traumatized.
Alleluia’s voice comes to him clearly now, coming once more from the pipe that she has apparently run back to. “You’re outside of my door!” she says.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Sure am,” replies Canta. “Should we talk about that?”
“About what?”
“About how clearly foreboding this is? About the piles of skulls? And the massive chains keeping you locked away?” he asks with some snark, gesturing towards the boss arena ahead of him, even though she can’t see it.
“No,” replies Alleluia.
Canta blinks, staring down at the pipe for a moment, not sure if he had heard her right. “What do you mean ‘no’?! You can’t just say no! These are valid questions!” he snaps back at her.
“No,” replies Alleluia again, sounding somewhat offended. “You can’t ask a lady things like that.”
“Huh?! Those are exactly the kinds of things I should be asking! You being a frog or a toad has nothing to do with it!”
“Okay, well then, what was your last life like?” she asks.
Canta stops, narrowing his eyes for a moment as his hands run through his oddly crusty hair. “…What?”
“Tell me who you were in your last life and I’ll tell you about the skulls.”
He groans. “I don’t remember who I was. But this is diffe-”
“- Then I don’t remember what the skulls are about,” says Alleluia, interrupting him with a huff to her voice. “Are you going to help me or not?”
Canta doesn’t say anything. His eye twitches as he bends down to grab his blood and bile soaked blanket, shaking it out once to get the chunks of red and rocks out of it. His stomach growls loudly. He shouldn’t…
But he’s so hungry.
“Please?” asks Alleluia, breaking the silence and pulling him out of his trance. Canta lowers the blanket that is already next to his mouth. His eyes wander back down to the pipe. “Please,” she repeats, her chiming voice trailing off at the end. There is a sound like a crank being turned or something being wound back up.
Canta sighs, letting his arms and the blanket fall down to the floor as his gaze looks back towards the giant door, the plan already forming in his mind. “Fine!” he snaps. “But only because I like you,” he says, taking a step forward but not treading into the arena just yet. “But if you end up being some weird demon, I’m going to eat you,” he threatens.
“If I don’t eat you first,” she replies smugly. Canta stands at the edge of the arena, taking a deep breath. Her voice comes back through the pipe again, a little quieter now. “I li -”
His stomach growls loudly again, overpowering the words that come from the pipe after that. Although, he got the gist of it. The two of them, both sounding a little more awkward than before, discuss his plan. There is little chance that Canta will be able to beat a boss like this on his own. According to Alleluia, the mechanical titan is a raid boss that was designed for well over ten mid-level adventurers to fight at once. But that’s fine, he doesn’t need to beat it. He just needs to get it to open the door.
After that, it’s okay. They can just ignore it. The boss can’t leave the arena, after all.
Taking another deep breath, Canta nods to himself. “Okay, I’m going now,” he says, and runs straight towards the chained up door with his blanket in hand, before the voice can respond. The instant his foot touches the inside of the boss-arena, the giant behemoth turns around and starts lumbering back towards him. Each of its thunderous movements shakes the arena as it presses its gigantic metal fists into the stones to drag its eviscerated metal torso behind itself, heading straight towards him. It isn’t fast in and of itself, but because of its size, a single movement covers as much distance as he himself can cover in a few seconds of running.
Canta closes his eyes, gritting his teeth as he sprints as fast as his small body can go, straight towards the barred door.
“Hey! Over here!” yells Alleluia’s voice from the side. The golem, chasing him, stops and looks over its shoulder. Canta takes his chance, jumping onto the lowest link of the massive chain. The large thing barely wobbles as he runs along its upward angle, towards the middle section where it runs past the door. The golem, seeing that it was just a voice from the pipe, turns back towards him, ignoring Alleluia’s continued shouts from the side.
Canta stands on the swaying chain, looking at the massive upper half of a golem, which towers up towards the ceiling. Holding his blood-soaked blanket out to his side, he waves it around. “Hey! Come get me, shit-head!” he shouts, standing on the inner edge of the horizontal link of the chain. The golem doesn’t need this provocation, having already seen him. But in truth, he does it more for himself than for it. The boss rears up and roars as it charges towards him, the world shaking as it hammers the ground. Canta grits his teeth tighter together, feeling a crack run through his jaw from the pressure of his bite.
The leviathan is upon him. It raises its fist, holding itself upright with one arm against the ground.
Canta holds the smeared blanket in front of himself and takes a step back, just as the mechanical fist crashes towards him. The blanket leaves his hands as he throws it up into the air. He falls down through the gap in the middle of the link.
The world above him explodes. Wood shatters, metal rattles, and gears whir as the wind from the drop rushes past his ears. Canta closes his eyes, knowing that this next part is going to be very uncomfortable.
He hits the ground, crashing together into a heap as his ankles break beneath the force of the fall. His eyes roll back into his head, and that is where they stay for a time, after the rubble collapses down onto him, crushing him and pinning him to the stones, where he lays buried for a while. The fall was part of the plan. The rubble wasn’t.
He isn’t really sure how long it is. Hours? Days? It is much like when he died for the first time in his life, or when he was goo just a little bit earlier. There isn’t much left of him to think, yet he remains, trapped, stuck in the darkness, unable to move, unable to feel or think of anything except for the fact that he exists in perpetual nothingness, and that he might do so forever.
It is dark.
He’s hungry.
And eventually, it hurts, although, he doesn’t know why, not having the capacity to understand that line of reasoning anymore. But he knows that it does. He is alone and hungry. It is dark. He aches. This is how it is to be forever as he floats in darkness, eternal, barely aware, barely alive as anything more than a mindless feral animal. Somehow, he is sure of this.
The only thing that does break the void eventually however, that does cut through the deep-nothing, is a sharp sound of clacking, of ticking, of some chain being wound up by a hand turning a crank over and over. It is melancholic and distinct from the emptiness, like a music-box being played in an abandoned home. The warmth of the sound makes it contrast with the cold, so much so that it itself takes on that same cold tinge rather than imprinting the warmth the song is meant to offer into the world.
Something touches him. He realizes that something is touching him. He realizes that he can be touched, that he can feel something running over his head. Something cold and hard, something rigid that also contrasts the tone of the music-box that pierces the darkness of his lightless eyes which begin to become whole once more.
Canta squints as the blinding light, shining above his face, reaches his new-born eyes. He stares at the shadow that hovers half-way above himself. It is silhouetted by a bright light from behind, which makes it impossible to distinguish any of its form or features, save for the outline of its gestalt, as the jubilant rays wash over its back. Its hand runs over his broken head as he gurgles out a mouthful of blood onto the lap on which he lays. Canta listens to the song that sounds so far away as he reaches up for the silhouette with no features, as his fingers grasp for that warm light that he can never seem to get closer to, no matter how far his arm stretches out.
“Are you god?” asks Canta.
The singing stops. The silhouette reaches with its other arm around back behind itself, awkwardly turning a crank embedded into its back for a moment. There is a sound like a winding chain or a mechanism being spun back up. Letting go, the silhouette looks down at him again, its hard hand still continuing to stroke his head.
“I’m not god, stupid,” mutters the silhouette, sounding somewhat annoyed as she looks away to the side for a second. But she manages to look down toward him again a moment later. “Good morning, Canta,” smiles the clockwork-person. “Charmed to meet you,” greets Alleluia.