Chapter 22
Death Shall Come
Asher moved about in frenzy, looking for any sign of distorted space. Because Myra was tangling with the boss in melee and occupying its attention, she hardly had the luxury to be on the lookout for stealth attacks so Asher had to cover her, too. Every time he noticed a change, he’d shout or run--but the issue was that there were too many changes.
Though it started with just a few every ten seconds or so, within just a minute, it had increased to roughly ten tentacle lashes every 2-3 seconds. It was well beyond impossible to just sit still, and they had to be constantly moving. That wouldn’t have been much of an issue if the boss hadn’t awakened yet another ability when her health reached 55%.
It was a very simple, yet brutal one--for every 3 seconds that they moved without stopping, they would lose 35% of their current movement speed. To recover it, they had to stand still for at least 3 seconds.
To say that it turned the fight from difficult to hellish would be an understatement; even Asher, who could somewhat cover for his mistakes with Vanishment, found himself wanting to yank his hairs out and eat them in frustration. This wasn’t simply a difficult boss battle--it was someone pissing at them and laughing after they gagged from the smell.
“You fuckin’ bitch...”
“You goddamn shit...”
“Fuck!” every once in a while, he’d hear Myra curse out while dodging tentacle lashes. By now, she could hardly focus on dealing damage to the boss; in fact, starting with when they shaved the boss down to 60% HP, it was mostly Asher’s spells that did damage, slowly ticking down the behemoth.
Teleporting, dozens of projectiles spawned every few seconds, and now terribly annoying CC debuff...
“Shit!” Asher exclaimed and rapidly used Vanishment. There was a queer overlap in the spells, all of a sudden--from both the maw that spawned above his head as well as the dozen or so ‘portals’ that appeared around him, they summoned so many tentacles that his spells couldn’t reach through to hit Wael. And thus, he killed some fifteen tentacles in a single bout.
It wouldn’t have been strange... if he hadn’t noticed Vanishment’s cooldown suddenly dropping.
“Huh?” It can’t be, right? Her tentacles are treated as adds?
He skated about until Vanishment’s cooldown was ready once again, slowly moving toward Myra to confirm his theory. Though she cussed him out and told him to stay away, he pretended not to hear--which wasn’t odd. After all, he really could barely make out what she was screaming. On top of the fact that the boss would unleash her banshee scream every once in a while for seemingly no other reason than she wanted to, to the pouring, blood rain that only ever seemed to speed up, and even the tentacles lashing out like whips... it was a bit of sensory overload.
Just then, Vanishment came off cooldown and the nearly forty tentacles lashed out in symphonic unison. Asher watched wide-eyed as the ability's cooldown began to lower from the 30s until it hit 27 and then rapidly 26. It wasn't much... for now.
Asher had an uncanny feeling that the number of tentacles blasting from the nether wouldn’t diminish but, rather, would continue to increase.
Under Myra's flurry of curses and the rapid onslaught of swordlights aimed at Wael, the two resumed their attack, occasionally moving about in frenzy and occasionally stopping for 3 seconds, praying they weren't killed in the meantime.
“Thou wretched, foul creatures! My anguish is boundless, beyond thy feeble enchantments! I shall never yield to thee nor thy malevolent cravings! Depart from me! Leave me be! Permit me to exist and perish in solitude! Hast thou not inflicted upon me sufficient woe?! Hast thou not vexed me enough?! Have I not shed tears aplenty?” the soliloquy was followed up by a rather oppressive force that prevented Asher’s spells and Myra’s attacks from landing, deflecting them far out into the arena.
The endless eyes once again opened under the query pain--they began to shine abruptly, their glimmer ghastly and dreary.
“Close--” Asher couldn’t finish it. By the time he realized he was falling under the spell, it was too late. The world broke like a porcelain vase, its shards crashing about the blank, endless void of nothing. It only lasted a moment, however, before those very shards exploded into colors of brilliance, blinding him for a moment until those very colors began turning into shapes.
It was just a few moments later that Asher realized where he was being transported. The ‘scene’ was hardly finished, still smeared in blurry colors, but he recognized it. He’d recognize it even if it was just smeared shades of colors on an aged canvas.
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Two boys, perhaps in their mid-teens at the latest, were sitting in a dimly lit room, watching TV while appearing absentminded. Asher closed his eyes... but it didn't matter. He couldn't run away from it. Couldn't hide from it.
What was it? He couldn’t quite recall--it was either acid or mushrooms, though it could have been anything. Jerry was the one who brought it, saying it would change their life. In a way, it did. By the night’s end, Jerry became a vegetable and he... he embarked on a path of no return.
He jolted himself awake from the numb stupor at the very end--it was a bad trip, for both. Within fifteen minutes, they’d already started fighting. It all resulted in them wrangling over to the window where he pushed Jerry through. The fall was quite steep, but not steep enough to be deadly. He landed on his back, directly injuring his spinal cord. He ended up losing all sensation below his neck, not to mention the numerous facial fractures that left him deformed.
Asher consciously walked over to the window, past the young boy sitting on the ground nearby, cradling his knees abreast and rocking back and forth. It wasn’t an act of regret or guilt; rather, Asher wouldn’t become aware of what he had done until well into tomorrow. As for what that boy was thinking about at the moment... Asher didn’t know. He couldn’t recall anything about that night.
Peering through the window, the nightly streets of the city faded in the background, the lamps lining the pavement seemingly working in concert to centralize the body of a boy bent in an awkward shape as he yelped in horror and pain.
Asher sighed, closing his eyes and abruptly returning to the reality. Though it was his first sin... it wasn’t the worst one.
Looking forward, he saw Wael lurch forward toward Myra; the latter was also awake, welcoming the witch with a flurry of swordlights.
Suddenly, Asher noticed something strange--not about the boss, but himself. Random, elemental spells began to besiege the boss for seemingly no reason. And yet, he recalled--the Legendary ability that he got, this was precisely what it was supposed to do. However, because its nature was similar to the bonus from Chaotic Energy where he'd fire off random spells after a Level-up for a little while. In his mind, the two blended into one, and so he didn't realize that the spell wasn't working this entire time.
It definitely had something to do with the boss--as to what... he didn't know. And neither did he know why it suddenly started working. Perhaps it was because he managed to wrangle himself out of the illusion, or perhaps it was entirely random. Whatever the reason was, the spells were welcome, even if they barely tickled the boss' HP.
Strangely enough, the boss battle resumed in the previous pattern--and for the next 30% of Wael’s health, she didn’t seem to awaken any new abilities. However, as per Asher’s prediction earlier, the number of tentacles that rushed out from the tiny portals became... well, the genre of the game changed abruptly, he mused inwardly, from horde survival to bullet hell. Except there was no particular pattern outside of increasingly more tentacles lashing out with each passing minute.
It was up to 73, now... per person. In total, 146 tentacles ripped through the void and attacked them. It was impossible to actually dodge them all--Asher was somewhat saved by the fact that he had Vanishment up more and more frequently, but as for how Myra managed to survive thus far... he couldn’t even venture a guess.
At 20% HP, however, it happened again--a pulse of energy tossed Myra backward, except this go-around it was less so being ‘tossed’ and more so being cannon-balled across the stage at well over two hundred miles an hour. She whizzed past him like a bullet, landing some two hundred yards back, bloodied from head to toe.
Eerily, the boss remained silent as Asher found that his spells stopped firing and he himself could no longer move--there was an overpowering sensation surging from everywhere, almost like gravity, that beheld him to his current state.
Wael began to morph--the countless eyes covering her head disappeared one by one, exploding in a cacophony of blood, until only two remained. Beneath them a nose and a pair of lips emerge, and above a pair of shapely eyebrows and a long, beautiful, black hair. The tentacle arms vanished, too, replaced by a pair of pristine, new, human arms. She was no longer a monster--rather, she was a beautiful, young girl with an expressionless face and a pair of eyes as cold as northern fjords.
Suddenly, she began to levitate, her hair fluttering wildly even though there was no wind. Her arms spread wide and the maw on her chest gaped for a moment before abruptly closing down, completing her human form. She lowered her head, the pair of sky-blue eyes finding Asher’s.
The eloquence of death sang from within them--like the calls of the deep abyss that yearned for company in its lonesome existence, the pair of eyes were wrought in destruction, in pain, in torment. They weren't the eyes of a young girl, not truly. They were the eyes of someone broken, someone so utterly shattered from the depths of her existence that she stopped being human, transforming herself into something deplorable... so she could be free. But now, she reclaimed what was hers--the long-lost humanity. As for what reason... Asher didn't know.
She spoke.
Her voice, too, changed; it was now soft, melodic, and beautiful. Even her manner of speech changed--she no longer sounded like an actor performing a medieval play, but like most other people Asher knew.
“I’ve done no wrong,” she said. “And yet, they locked me up in this prison, chained me, and told me it was good for me. My only sin... was wanting to be free. Free of evils that shouldn’t be allowed to live. And yet--”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, you worthless whore!!” Myra, astonishingly was able to move. She lunged forward and slashed away at Wael who, however, didn’t even look at her, her gaze still squarely glued to Asher.
Wael gently moved her right arm in a forward motion; before Asher could even process what happened, a spray of blood curled into the shape of a star for ever the second before disappearing.
Myra's head flew up, separated from the rest of her body, drawing a gentle arc across the air before it landed on the ground with a thud, rolling forward a few times and stopping with her face turned toward him. Her lips were stretched out into a smile, still, ignorant to what had just happened. The call of death was as beautiful as it was wretched. The cold visage of the ethereal void yearned and called, and his heart froze, wanting to go.
Fear the death, and it shall undoubtedly come.