EPISODE 28: DON'T FIGHT ME, IGNITE ME, PART 2

1

Caim ducked to avoid the katana aiming for his head. He managed it, but just barely, as a useless memory surfaced, distracting him.

He didn’t know why he’d think of that now, of all times. He needed to focus on attacking and defending. He had to outmatch the enemy in every way, crush him, and survive.

It had been a foolish mistake, but at least he hadn’t paid for it. Small mercies.

Now, he just had to make sure it didn't happen again. Humans are the only animals that trip over the same stone twice.

But he wasn’t a mere human.

He was stronger, faster, more everything.

Any animal would fear a better predator encroaching on its territory. Humans liked to complicate things and put on airs, but deep down, it was the same now as two or three thousand years ago. Who knows? What did it matter? The fact was they were just animals, animals, animals.

“Where were you, huh? Where were you? I see you have good control over yourself, boy.” The enemy laughed. “Don’t be naughty. Pay attention to me; we’re going to have a great time.”

Only when you’re split in half, he thought but swallowed the words. Responding to his provocations was another mistake he couldn’t afford to repeat. This was a fight to the death (for him, at least, which was what mattered), not a circus show.

The fight would’ve ended already if not for his overwhelming speed. Therefore, all Caim had to do was find a way to surpass or neutralize his speed. Easier said than done, but he had thought of a way.

It should work. In theory, nothing should stop him from summoning tentacles from the walls, ceiling, and floor, gradually leaving him no escape.

No matter how fast he was, there would come a moment when he couldn’t avoid being caught.

Only one problem.

It didn’t make sense, but he had a clear feeling the room was expanding as they fought. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, as if it had no limits. He’d seen too much to dismiss possibilities just because they didn’t make sense.

If he wasn’t mistaken, he’d never be able to trap him that way. The room would keep expanding, and the slippery bastard would remain out of reach, so tantalizingly close yet so far.

Caim shook his head and tried anyway. He was sure it wouldn’t work as planned, but he had no better idea.

He was also curious. How many tentacles could he maintain in this world simultaneously? If there was a limit, in the first place.

Soon he realized he’d overestimated himself. Whether the room was continuously expanding or not, the tentacles emerged too slowly for this enemy. So far, the delay had been annoying but insignificant. Against this bastard, it was as slow as a tortoise.

He could cut them before they were even halfway into this world. Shred them to pieces.

He had no way to solve that problem. He grew stronger by defeating enemies. That sounded good, but in this case, it only meant he was as strong as he’d be until he defeated him. And it was clear that was enough.

In theory, he could turn back, hunt lesser enemies, and try again somewhat improved. Fair and honorable fights only existed in the fantasies of fools and madmen.

But he couldn’t bear to flee with his tail between his legs; it would be like bowing his head and admitting he was more powerful where it counted, at least.

He was too proud to back down now.

He should have priorities, but he sent them all to hell and charged at him with twice the fury.

The enemy retreated, but so what? He still couldn’t reach him. Twice the fury only got him to the same place. How frustrating. Damn, how frustrating. Especially because he felt so, so close, that with a bit more, he’d touch him with his fingertips.

He continued bringing tentacles into this world.

He kept sending them after the swordsman in colorful armor.

But he treated them like toys. Yes, indeed, this was just a game for him. A game Caim was losing.

“It’s like you were designed specifically to piss me off, you son of a bitch.” A human throat couldn’t produce the sounds he was making. Surely no animal on earth could make those sounds. “I’ve had enough of you. More than enough.”

“Funny that I should say, but less talk and more action. If you think you’re capable, come on, come on, come on, show me, come on!”

Caim finally caught him. Just once, hitting him with a tentacle as thick as a tree trunk. He flew like a ragdoll, slammed against the wall, and rolled down. He wasn’t dead, not even seriously injured, it was good armor. But the pleasure it brought was better than any orgasm.

He really couldn’t wait to devour every last one of his bones.

“Alright, big guy,” he said, breathing heavily. “You did it. I hope you’re…”

Caim tried to capitalize on his moment of weakness, slamming him into the ground again. But he escaped at the last moment. All he managed was to damage the already battered floor further.

He had plenty of tentacles, so he really didn’t care if the floor collapsed as long as the walls, ceiling, or even a branch hanging between the stones were there to grab onto.

“Is that fear I hear? Of course. I’ve done it once, so I can do it again. I can and will. Soon. Only this time, I’ll make sure you don’t get up again.”

“All you talk about is the same thing. Maybe it’s time I got serious and ended this.”

Caim snorted.

He’d compared him to a game because of his clownish attitude, but there was no way he’d been holding back all this time. How could he have been dodging his attacks perfectly for so long without giving it his all?

But there was a simple answer he couldn’t see with a mind clouded by animal brutality. If he was that fast, he should have had thousands of opportunities to attack him. Yet he hadn’t taken a single one, putting them in a stalemate.

Now he did.

He broke through his guard as if it were a joke, cutting his way through.

Then, the sword slid between his ribs and...

And nothing. He was close, but he caught it before it reached his heart. Although as he was now, even that wouldn’t have killed him easily. Obviously, Caim had no desire to test it, but he felt a certainty bordering on simple instinct.

He had never been someone who let himself be carried away by instinct, quite the opposite. Always forced to calculate his movements carefully, as due to his... condition, even making it to the next day was an effort very few people knew.

But things could change. The privilege of letting himself be carried by instinct and being powerful enough to get away with it anyway was an indescribable pleasure.

Instead of a tiny being in a black and hostile world, he felt like he was the center of the world, with all factors aligned in his favor.

His greatest dream had been to be a normal person, so miserable had his life been, but now...

Now he was special in the good sense.

Yes, things changed. And it turned out that, against all odds, they could even change for the better.

The enemy pushed.

Caim pushed harder, inward as well, only diverting the blade further from the heart. It could take a lung or both; he didn’t give a damn. He felt it emerge on the other side, soaked in his blood.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Now he couldn’t escape him.

It was a simple trick. He thought he might have used it on the ghost elf too, but why fix what wasn’t broken?

The tentacles rose above his head, casting a shadow on the ground like enormous black wings.

The descent was brutal. It reduced his opponent’s sword to scrap.

And it should have reduced that garish armor, but he escaped. He managed to escape somehow.

Deep down, he should have expected it. It couldn’t be that easy. And...

“Of course, you have some tricks up your sleeve. Yeah, yeah, spare me. You’ve just begun, I know. So have I.”

Caim took a step forward.

Blood, through the hole in his chest, flowed like a thick river. It fell to his feet, leaving bloody footprints.

He changed tactics. As much as it bothered him to need tactics in the first place, it was time to admit that if blind aggression hadn’t worked yet, it probably never would. This time he advanced slowly and carefully, measuring his steps, trying to deceive him with footwork.

This had the beneficial effect of making the enemy close his mouth, getting serious too.

Enough, at least for now.

He charged at him, starting to use the sword too, not just the tentacles. They had overwhelming power and had served him so far. But he also had many skills he had cultivated as a human. Using them to the fullest was the only way he could win against an enemy of this caliber.

A bitter pill to his fantasy of being the most dangerous predator, a creature before which all these cheap monsters could only hide or die in vain, but he would swallow it.

He had his priorities.

The enemy went back to just dodging. After losing his sword, he couldn’t do much else, apparently. He should be able to play with him at will, but instead, he slid around unimpeded as before.

Only prolonging the inevitable, but prolonging it indeed.

He never ran out of room; there was no doubt about it. It stretched and repeated endlessly as they advanced. As a result, there was no lack of space to maneuver, no places to hide and escape from him.

He was trying to stay calm because fighting like a berserk had been of no use. But it was very difficult, and this time without even opening his mouth.

That's because you barely have control over yourself.

No, in reality, you lost it from that moment, didn't you? You lost it irrevocably.

You gained everything by looking them in the eyes and lost everything by killing the gaze.

Always the same thing. He frowned. Ah, how his head ached.

2

The entire Tower, or at least the floor, shook as if struck by an earthquake. Yonah stumbled, and if she hadn't grabbed onto Victoria's robe, she would have fallen headfirst to the ground.

“Do you think...?” Victoria stammered, looking at her.

She believed it, yes sir. If it was an earthquake, it had been incredibly brief.

A fight intense enough to make the Tower shake. That could only mean one thing.

“Yes, Caim must be close!”

He must have encountered the thorn in his side, a creature horrible and strong enough to slow his march of death. But that was the least of it. Together, they could handle anything. Surely, they hadn’t spent even an hour searching for him, but it had felt like an eternity.

They climbed the stairs, turned the corner, and kept running.

Soon they would be together again, and nothing and no one could separate them.

Not even Caim himself. I swear, she thought.

Then they found him.

Part of her, never guilty of optimism, thought he would defeat the enemy and disappear just before they arrived. That they would get another kick in the teeth because, as Caim had said on that fateful day in the church, it seemed that God, if He existed, was as capricious and cruel as men.

But letting them find him right now might have been the greatest cruelty.

Caim was crouched and half-hidden in the darkness and a wall of tentacles. He was crouched in front of something. He raised and lowered his hands to his mouth, and yes, yes, he was chewing something. With force. With savagery.

Once, she had seen a pack of wild dog-like wolves, so thin she could have counted their bones, devour a corpse. Compared to this horrible spectacle, that past memory didn’t seem so bad, even though she couldn’t see it well.

“Caim?” Victoria said.

The woman's voice trembled in the air and hung, waiting for a response.

3

The change in tactics had worked, as he was overwhelming him. The definitive proof, if any was needed, was that he still kept his mouth shut. He had no time to mock him, to try to provoke him. He had to give his all to defend himself, or he would die miserably before he realized it.

Well, that would be the best case for him.

Caim had no intention of holding back, of playing with his food. But once he stripped him of his armor and left him legless, he could take all the time he needed to make him fully aware of what was happening to him. Of every agonizing second.

Those were his plans, anyway. He didn’t know if they would survive contact with his hunger for long, which was growing, an impulse that wouldn’t let him stop.

Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.

Caim ripped pieces from the floor and threw them at the enemy without, of course, stopping his tentacle attacks. He had thrown more than half a dozen in an instant.

The swordsman, who had lost his sword, nimbly slipped between two of the fragments at the last second before they could crush him.

But the next one, twice as large to compensate, would...

He thought it would crush him like an insect, but the next turn revealed the enemy standing on the piece of floor, somehow not falling. What kind of skill was that?

In any case, he took advantage of his momentary surprise to pounce on him. Charging at him with all his strength. Which, of course, did nothing. The armor wasn’t heavy enough to hurt him that easily. If it were, that guy wouldn’t have been able to run with it on.

But he didn’t give himself up to his arms.

He escaped.

Once again, he escaped, and not only that. His only objective from the beginning had been to steal his sword.

He almost wanted to laugh.

Incredible. He was indeed a slippery bastard. His sacred sword, doubled from the temple, was surely much better than the one he had carried before. It wouldn’t be so easy to reduce it to scrap, and, well, he didn’t want to... He would only do it if he had no other choice.

He had opened the door to the future with that thing. It was the key. If he lost that, then...

Well, nothing.

It wasn’t as if he was going to lose, to die; he was destined for great things, and destiny couldn’t be changed just like that.

(Hahaha)

But it’s just, well, it’s that...

He didn’t want to lose it.

He would grasp tomorrow with his own hands.

The intense fight continued as before. But there was an important change. At the right moment, he pulled back instead of continuing to charge forward like a madman, and the room moved with him.

Therefore, the enemy’s back hit the wall.

It was as if he had been handed to him on a silver platter. He didn’t waste the opportunity.

He grabbed him with a tentacle. It was easy since he bounced back towards him. Then he tore off a leg. The armor also gave way easily.

Caim didn’t escape unscathed either; he cut off an arm before throwing him away. But it was clear who had come out on top; this was barely an inconvenience. He approached the dying bastard.

The latter started laughing, but it was clear that even he didn’t find the situation funny anymore. Above all, what was in his voice was resignation. He would have liked more to see desperation, horror, humiliation. But that was enough for him. That was sufficiently satisfying.

“In the end, you beat me and all, who would have thought, huh. Anyway, in part, you got lucky, but I won’t be a sore loser, I’ll admit you’re the best monster of the two. Are you happy?”

And he kept laughing, though everything had lost its charm a long time ago; even for him, it must have lost it.

It was his only mode of resistance. Now he could only crawl on the ground like a worm, after all, though what he left behind was not slime but blood.

He supposed he was slimy enough already. Well, what came out of his mouth was mostly crap, a bit of drool.

“What a prize you’ve won, huh? You must be proud. You know, some thought you would be the one to conquer the Tower, even I allowed myself to dream too much, but here we are. Here you are. You took longer to succumb than others, perhaps, but you did. I guess there was never any hope.”

Caim wasn’t interested in his ramblings.

He should be, but he turned a deaf ear. How could he not, with blood pounding in his ears like a hive of furious wasps? Finally, food. All his senses were heightened.

“Hope is more than you deserve,” he said simply.

And then he pounced on his prey.

4

“Caim?”

Yonah covered her mouth with both hands as Caim turned around.

She was realistic. She knew that all the time he had spent away from them, embroiled in one fight after another, couldn’t have done him any good. But nothing could have prepared her for the fact that he didn’t even seem like the same person. They flashback to show how Caim defeats the swordsman. Then back to the present.

Victoria: “Caim?”

Roaring, gritting his teeth like an animal, with the blood and guts of the most recently defeated enemy dripping from his chin. It was just a bit of blood and an expression she had never seen on his face, but they had completely transformed his features, making him practically unrecognizable.

Incidentally, he didn’t seem to recognize them either.

Worse, as if he couldn’t because he had completely forgotten about them. So he looked at them as intruders, enemies. There was no doubt about it. Yonah had come prepared, naturally, to fight him, knowing there was no other way to bring him back.

But still, it was shocking.

She could experience that look a thousand more times and never get used to it.

“That’s not him.”

“I know, but it’s hard to remember when he’s looking at me like he wants to tear me apart.”

She had spoken more to convince herself perhaps (that he didn’t remember them because he wasn’t in control and his true self was in there somewhere, fighting to break free, to live), but Victoria had interpreted it differently.

“Caim, it’s us,” she continued.

“You have to fight against whatever is happening to you. It can’t be too late.”

Maybe he wasn’t in control, but she hoped he could still hear their voices and that they would guide him back home.

Caim, definitively, fought.

Brandishing his tentacles to crush them, like a rain of arrows large enough to darken the sky.

Don’t fight with me, ignite me, Part 2: END