Chapter 7: Past Trauma

The towering creature in front of the throne could once have been a noble golem, protecting some unnamed kingdom of yellow crystal from harm. But now, only its husk remained.

The golem was chipped and scarred all over, its left hand and half of its face missing. But inside of it, poking out through these wounds was a black, tar-like substance. No, black was wholly inadequate to describe the all-consuming darkness which stared out from within the hollow head. It was Void.

Jax stared at the motionless golem, thoughts racing through his mind. He had assumed that his encounter all those years ago wasn’t the direct cause of his Tutorial’s difficulty. But that was off the logic that any harm to him would have been detected by the many powerful Improvers that had looked him over throughout the years. Logic that now seemed flawed indeed.

What did people really know about the Void? Someone was stopping information from being spread via the internet, and for all he knew, it worked totally different from Rot. He could remember that thing going near lots of True Improvers while it was impersonating his Dad.

What if it laid some sort of egg inside of him? What if… the consequence of failure might not just be a year-long wait? Cold sweat appeared on his back, and he started to panic. Running away from the chamber, he made it back to the main cave system before calming down even a little bit.

He stopped to think about what he had seen. Trying to work through his initial reaction. Looking back, a lot of the trial had the same undertone of corruption. From the plant monsters rotting away when they were killed to the black cores of the abominations. But none of them were actual Void, even the acidic explosions of black blood. Really, it was possible that the theme was corruption and it just used Void as the ultimate corruption.

‘The first trial often involves past trauma.’ He told himself. ‘I just have to defeat that apparition of my past to move forward.’ Whether or not it was a malicious parting gift from the Thing, he still had a clear and simple task ahead. Defeat the boss.

He gathered his courage and resolve and headed back to the boss arena. Surveying the room, there was nothing he could see that would imply additional enemies that would join in once the boss was activated. It was just him and the golem. He decided ahead of time that he would treat the hole in its head as a weak spot.

Taking a deep breath, Jax stepped onto the crystal floor. The moment his foot hit the ground, the golem shuddered and rose to its full height. Not wasting any time, he ran toward the boss. He chose to approach from the side with the missing hand. That was his first mistake. A thick, whiplike tendril of Void emerged from the stump of its hand and lashed at him. He dodged by a fraction an instant as he felt the ends of his arm hair being tugged before vanishing into the black matter.

He cursed. The golem thundered towards him with terrifying speed, its legs moving with an absolute efficiency to devour the distance between them. It reached for him with its intact hand. Seeing his chance, Jax jumped onto its arm and clambered up. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the whip start to move. Heaving himself up with all his might, he barely avoided the appendage taking off his feet.

In a stroke of luck, the golem seemed to be unable to bend enough to crush him against the floor. He climbed up from its arm onto its shoulder. In a terrifying moment, he came face-to-face with the hungry hole into the Void inside its head. Catching himself, he stabbed his sword into the hole, seeming like a toothpick against the towering monster.

There was a flash of light, and he was thrown back from the golem. Somersaulting midair, he somehow landed on his feet and recovered in time to just barely avoid another strike from the tentacle.

The golem roared. It was a horrendous sound, somehow grating, blaring and oozing all at once. A thin layer of crystals formed over its Void-face. Glancing at his sword, he saw that one of the wings on its guard had been broken off.

The golem thundered towards him again. Dodging around its legs, he thought he had found a pattern to avoid both its arm and the whip, allowing him to make a new plan to hurt it now that it had shielded its weak point. He was wrong. As he noticed the glowing spots on its legs, the golem had already started to crouch. The huge boss then sprang impossibly high into the air.

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Craning his neck, Jax had time to wonder if that was the reason the room was so tall before he dashed with all his might away from it. At the apex of its jump, he made a hard turn. The golem crashed down with the force of a landslide on the place he would have been if he had gone straight.

He immediately headed for what was probably a bunch of weak spots on its legs. When he slashed at one it disappeared, so he had to have been doing something right. Dodging another whip of its arm, he watched as it prepared to jump again.

Every time it had different timings on its jumps, and even a single mistake or unlucky move could end him. Each time the golem landed, he hit a few more of the glowing spots. The whip was always troublesome to avoid, especially when it started attacking mid-jump. Jax had to fight to stay focused, attempting to treat this as more of root-fight than a goblin-fight. That had made perfect sense in his head.

Once he had eliminated all of the weak spots on its feet, the golem stopped and roared again. Phase change time. New spots appeared on its torso, which would be quite a problem if it was still going to be so jumpy.

Fortunately, it seemed that the golem had gotten all its jumpiness out. Unfortunately, that meant it was time for a rampage. The golem sped up drastically as it charged at him. The previous machined smoothness to its movements nowhere to be found.

Its intact arm seemed to have lost all of the restrictions of joints, attacking so fast his buffs felt totally inadequate. What use was Constitution and Recovery when the damn thing would pulverize him in a single blow? None! His Agility boost was the only thing keeping him from meeting a quick end. But was a slow end that much better? It hadn’t even used its whip arm since it went into a frenzy, and he was barely keeping up.

With a short roar, the golem fulfilled his pessimistic thoughts by lashing out with the whip parallel to the ground. With no time to think, Jax jumped straight up, the toes of his boots being disintegrated by the tendril of nothingness.

He barely landed in time to dodge the next attack by the golem’s normal arm, rolling to the side just in time to only be deafened and shaken instead of pulverized. He was too shocked to sit up before the next blow would have come, but by some miracle the golem had left its arm next to him and stopped moving entirely.

‘I probably have to hit as many of the weak spots as I can before it gets up.’ He thought as he rose to his feet. ‘Then the process repeats until all of them are gone or I’m a splatter on the ground.’ Climbing up the golem's conveniently placed arm, he managed to take out eight or so points before the golem twitched. Immediately, he leaped of and made distance.

The golem roared again and resumed its frenzy, attacking furiously. This time, it lasted a bit longer and the whip attacked twice, once parallel and once perpendicular to the ground. Of course, he expected something of the sort, and it was easier to avoid now that he knew the basic patterns. He eliminated at least ten points this time, it was hard to keep track. Clambering over the golem’s body, he tried to get to the hard-to-reach ones first because he didn’t trust it not to make things harder later.

As had become predictable, the rampage lasted around the same amount longer and had another tentacle strike the next time around. He had figured out a trick to stop himself from flagging: only think about what the next twist the boss had up its sleeves was. Of course, he wasn’t thinking about the trick because he was using the trick. After the fifth cycle, when only six weak points remained, the whip arm started to use some weak and slow attacks even when it wasn’t at the end of the frenzy. Predictably, this continued even after the golem stopped moving.

Jax thought that the twists might be getting a bit TOO predictable and made a note not to rely on his predictions too much. The whip attacks made it hard to reach the weak spots, but he had planned this out and they were all next to each other in an easy place to reach. After hitting the final one, the golem immediately roared. And continued roaring. As the roar picked up in volume, he ran towards the other side of the room to avoid losing his hearing.

Looking back at the boss, he saw the layer of crystals covering its weak point shatter. It then stopped roaring and charged at him. From what it looked like, this was just the first phase but faster. Of course, he wasn’t going to count on that. The first attack of the Void-whip set off alarm bells in his head. It wasn’t any faster. Before he could get too paranoid, another tendril of void emerged from its stump and attacked him. Almost relieved at the straightforward twist, Jax dodged it as well and made his way to the golem.

The same strategy of running up the golem’s arm and stabbing it in the face worked surprisingly well, even if it was more difficult to pull off. The same thing happened again, with an explosive flash and the other wing of his sword guard crumbling away. Moving back from the golem, he watched as it started shaking. Crystals crumbled away from its form as it groaned, collapsing forward with finality.

A sense of victory and contentment washed over him. He had done it. It was all over. He had defeated the apparition of his past and Improved himself for the first time.

So why did things feel a bit off? Why… why did he feel like he was missing something? His thoughts were sluggish. This… wasn't right. But what was wrong with it? With me? What is right? ‘Low-level emotional manipulations are never subtle.’ he thought. A sense of worry and dread cut through the haze of contentment.

He broke free of his trance just in time to dodge a fist of Void screaming through the air where his head had been.