Chapter 20

Crazy and Crazier

She fell from the sky like a bolt of thunder, ripping through the world without reticence.

The act of her landing reverberated throughout the entire stage, shaking it so much that even Asher nearly lost his footing. A massive dust storm followed, as did the unordinary weeps of the monsters.

Though she was far and hidden behind the raging storm of lint and grime, he could still see the lucent flashes of a sword and hear the thundering sound that followed. However, he hardly had the luxury to pay attention to her, once again being pierced by the arrow, taking -17 damage. Gritting his teeth, and mumbling words of gratitude silently as she seemed to have taken the ‘aggro’ of the other archer, he moved along the edges of the cratered parts of the map, the salvo of his spells never stopping.

Level-ups came slowly, and they largely either gave him more raw damage, a bit of extra movement speed, or upgraded his existing spells. The biggest one was definitely to the spell that replaced the Wooden Staff’s direct attack--the crimson, chaos-suffused spears now splintered into chaotic fragments upon impact, tearing through whatever flesh dared meet them.

They fell by the hundreds, their illusory existence crumbling.

Their visages were enigmatic, covered in a thick ephemeral veil. Though they exploded into showers of blood and gore, none of the living were ever deterred. It was unnatural--a beast, whether conscious or instinctual, knew fear, in a sense. If not fear, it knew the danger, the notion of 'death'. That would drive them away, cause them to run, to flee, to abandon their instincts of hunting.

But they all continued to flood forth, like a tide that grew bolder with each swing ashore. They pressed onwards, seemingly puppets to actions beyond their control. Onward and onward, to death they danced.

~O’ brave little lamb,

Come hither to my arms,

Kiss my stately charms,

Thy desire only harms~

Every once in a while, that voice would appear--it would send shivers down his spine and cause him to look around in alarm, deftly terrified of the specter behind it. Though he knew it was likely a 'stage effect', a preamble to whatever boss this place would spit out at the end, it did little to dull his anxieties.

But he soldiered on, fear abreast.

Sights he’d witnessed had long since gone beyond what he was able to conjure up in his imagination--thousands, soon, lay dead, some whole and some in bits and pieces, and some yet just ashes gently borne by the wind. He’d turned numb to everything--to the monsters, to the level-ups, to the array of spells that would explode out of him whenever he’d Level-up or whenever his lips would part into a chant.

At some point, in the midst of his chanting, an entire tree jutted out of the red-stained dirt, branching out at the speed of sound and growing to nearly two hundred feet tall. Its canopy shrouded the world for a moment as the wooden whips began to fall and lash out like divine rods of punishment.

And yet, sometime later, a cauldron appeared above his head--iron-cast, ashen-dyed, and seemingly heavy as a mountain--that began to suck up the corpses within his vicinity. After some time, it would spit out a bottle and send it into his free hand. He'd instinctively drink it, against his desires, and feel himself getting stronger. Though the potion’s effects would be listed somewhere in his peripheral, he’d become a prisoner of his own skin.

Then again, there was a time when a python appeared at his feet--its scales red like blood, eyes glistening in cosmic brilliance, tongue lashing out with a fiery gusto. It began to grow abruptly... and it did not stop until it disappeared. By the end, it was over six hundred feet long, coiling around the entire arena and swallowing up giants well over ten feet tall in singular gulps.

Spells beyond measure, beyond reason, beyond compare appeared one after another, each more eldritch-suffused than the last. Perhaps--no, definitely the worst one of them was when a crown suddenly appeared floating above his head. It was made out of jilted, crystalline bones and it rotated in place at the same speed, persistently.

Every few seconds, it would ‘zap’ him, tearing through his mind and making it so it felt like his entire body was both frozen and burning at the same time. Though he’d lose 10 Health each time it happened, that didn’t bother him--the fact that it made him feel weak and deposed did. In return for his life and his psyche, it would dominate monsters and cause them to attack the other ones a few times. It was doing the work of his ultimate ability ‘for free’, every few seconds, yet all he wanted was for it to go away.

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By the time it did, his headache was so painful that it felt like his brain was bursting out of his skull. But he endured. He had to endure.

~At dawn, mothers may their sons embrace,

For a kiss, my ward, wards evils with grace.

Yet my kiss, a foregone bliss,

Doth make thee wish for life's dismiss~

Five thousand.

It just rang true to him.

He’d killed five thousand souls.

He was suddenly jolted back to reality from the dream-drawn drift, glancing to the side where he saw the woman standing, staring at him while, at the same time, ripping open countless monsters with what looked like white light shooting from her sword.

The world froze and, to his surprise, remained so--for both of them. She suddenly grinned, looking up and down at him as though inspecting a tool, before breaking the silence.

“Fuck, what Calling is that?! I gotta get me that bitch the next time,” she said. “Shit, shooting fire, lighting, and all those other fucks at the same time? By the way, what the fuck was that tree? Did you do that? Nearly smeared my pants brown, I tell ya’. Right, also, that fuckin’ creepy, shitty, maleficent, dreary voice of a heaving, horny bitch--the fuck is that? Can you hear it? Swear I haven’t heard anything creepier since I accidentally overheard my dad say ‘here come the droplets, dear’ to my mom. And then, ‘cause I was dumb and curious, I just had to look. He was shitting on her. Shitting on her. My God. I mean, I don’t wanna kink shame or anything, but fuck, they should have been shamed to death.”

“...” DOES SHE EVER SHUT THE FUCK--

“You look like you wanna tell me to shut the fuck up, huh? Ha ha ha, yeah, sorry. I’m just so excited, you know? I haven’t talked to another person in days, so when that fuckin’ screen asked me whether I wanna come and help, I was like, hell yeah, I wanna both come and come help.”

“...”

“Get it? ‘Cause I--”

“No, no, I get it,” Asher interrupted. “Sophisticated as the pun was, I get it.”

“Ha ha ha, nice. So you can talk, you ain’t a mute.”

“I imagine a lot of people around you temporarily go mute.”

“Ooh, nice, shots fired, ha ha ha,” she continued to laugh, seemingly unfazed by anything. “Anyway, my name’s Myra.”

“Asher.”

“Nice to meet you, Ash.”

“Don’t.”

“Huh?”

"Trauma," Asher explained. "When I was in like third, fourth-grade kids used to make fun of me by saying stupid shit like 'Ash, where is your Pika-pika?' and dumb stuff like that."

“...”

"It's fine, you can laugh. I figured you have a third-grader's humor."

“Ha ha ha ha, oh my God--wait, maybe you luck out into getting some spell that shoots, like, yellow lightning, no? Shit, wouldn’t that be so cool?”

“... just shut the fuck up.”

“Wow, you held it back much longer than most people do,” she grinned widely, exposing two rows of somehow perfectly-maintained teeth. “Alright, I’m about to unfreeze this fucker. I’m getting jittery just thinking we’ve still got 5,000 more to go. And then even a boss. Damn. If the boss is as creepy as her singing voice is shitty, won’t we have so much fun?! Ha ha ha ha~~”

She continued to laugh as the world restarted, the monsters resuming their rampage, and spells resuming their flights. She was mad, Asher concluded--legitimately broken, like a pocket watch tossed into a grinder. He stayed his lips, however; unlike him, who cowered when offered to help... she came. She accepted, jumped from what was likely a nightmare of her own, and straight into his.

Though it made him question her sanity, he didn’t do it for long. He was thankful--perhaps he would have been just fine on his own, ripping through thousands of monsters like they were made of paper, but knowing that there was someone there, even if for nothing else but just so he wasn’t talking to that godforsaken fairy or the dust faes, was rather reassuring. Warm. Like a hug of arms invisible, twining gently around him.

6,000.

7,000.

~Let arms of warmth, boy, thee safely steer,

To lands of sunder, woe, and fear.

Thou dost decimate my offspring dear,

In light's name, damn me, bring tear upon tear.

But soon an hour shall come, I do declare,

In my embrace, thou shalt despair.

Beg for thy life, filthy and bare,

Thy soul shall plead for release from care~

A deluge of spells hit a theme upon a Level-up--for a moment, the world was beset with hellfires, red and bloody and horrid with illusions of decay, rot, and torment. Life, its essence itself, was being consumed within their sway, held in torment for perpetuity.

8,000.

9,000.

~My wrath, a monsoon, doth rage and swell,

Soon to embrace, in its fierce spell.

Sing, broken toy, sing of corruption's weight,

Sing till hate consumes us, sealing our fate~

10,000.

The world stopped as soon as the number appeared. The scale of death... was beyond compare. Beautiful in its haunting horror, Asher could not look away from it. There were mounds of corpses everywhere, strings of rotted and decaying organs lining the upturned earth, rivers of scarlet blood pooling into obsidian ponds. It was war a its most primal, most brutal, most decadent. And he was the harbinger of it, the forebearer of death.

From the midst of the iron-salted dirt and the noxious air stained with the rot of blood emerged a silhouette. Fragmented billows of smoke faintly embossed the figure, cascading across the still, beset frame. She soon emerged from the shadow and dust, nary six feet in height, adorned in an elegant, ebony gown.

The sumptuous fabric cascaded like liquid moonlight, enveloping her tightly, accentuating a form that was both human and not at the same time. There was something strange, off-putting, almost eldritch-like about the figure; the dress’ bodice was hemmed with stardust, yet was fading in and out, as though elsewhere and here at the same time.

Strangest of all, however, was the woman's face--or, rather, lack thereof. There were no features, just a plaid, marble-white surface that twitched and yarned against itself at irregular intervals. The top of her head was hairless, reflecting fiery embers upon its smooth surface.

Asher had just then realized that the woman didn’t have arms either, two jostling tentacles wrapped like tails around her in their place. It was a ghastly sight, one that left him reeling for a moment.

It was then that the strangest thing yet happened--the hemmed stardust parted and the dress' bodice twisted open like lips parting into a grating smile. From the maw of darkness, two rows of teeth flashed and a fleshy, wet tongue appeared, licking the ‘lips’.

“Hail, offspring of mankind, to where dreams doth meet nightmares, and thy hopes are shattered by horrors beyond ken.”