Chapter 23

Fecundity of the Void

Asher hardly had a moment to mourn the abrupt passing of a woman he'd known less than an hour; the cloying scent of the wind prompted him to start running once again, his spells expelled at an accelerated pace, as though they too knew he was slowly walking into an abattoir, and not as a patron.

Wael no longer screamed like a banshee--in fact, she no longer spoke at all. She stopped teleporting, too, and instead walked like a horror villain. All the same, the tentacles remained; the space around him would jut like a pregnant belly before splicing open flatly, a tentacle some three yards long emerging. By now, all of the tentacles were beset upon him--and there were so, so, so, so many. In fact, Asher couldn’t even count them, lacking the luxury to sit in awe of creation and number them, one by one.

He saw it, then--Wael lifted her arm, gently, and spliced. Asher immediately used Vanishment, bundling himself into a mass of chaotic energy. At the same time, hundreds of protrusions in space exploded, showering him with lashes as though he was being lynched for a sin he did not commit. Eerily, it turned into a race.

'-1' and '+1' started appearing in his peripheral, the former on his left and the latter on his right. Vampiric Desires, just like Vanishment, worked on the tentacles, treating them as monsters. Without this tiny little detail, he would be just like Myra--headless, cold, and dead.

Wael’s arm movement sent out an invisible attack--but it was so powerful that, even in chaotic form, it managed to deal 10 damage. What was worse, it was physical damage, just like tentacles. Meaning, originally, that attack dealt 1,000 damage.

It’s insane, he mulled inwardly. There’s no way we were meant to clear this stage. No fucking way...

Every minutia of the stage became apparent to him--the choices, the apparent war-like invasion of the monsters, the difficulty of the boss, the destroyed terrain, the endless corpses lying piled up into hills, being bathed by blood--

“--YOU’RE RESURRECTING THEM?!!!”

It was a choice, certainly, and it was a choice made by someone who thought it would be particularly funny to give a boss character the ability to resurrect monsters in a stage where, to just summon the said boss monster, one had to kill 10,000 monsters. But Asher was flustered and angry only for a moment--rather, this worked in his favor. His current build--if it could even be called that--worked perfectly with a swarm of monsters, especially if they were clustered together.

To begin with, the reason he could even contend against the boss was because Vanishment’s cooldown returned to being 2-3 seconds, so he had it up for every deluge of tentacles. Now, with even more monsters swarming him, he might legitimately get Vanishment’s cooldown down to 0 and perpetually stay in the state of chaotic immortality. Vampiric Desires, too, would go into overgear once again, healing and shielding him permanently.

All the same, he felt angry.

Angry that the stage seemed to have required precisely this build to clear it. Had Asher played any of the previous builds, he would have died. Even if he somehow managed to kill all 10,000 monsters and get to the boss, he would have died, just like Myra.

But what hurt the most was that his choices were entirely random. He hadn’t cleverly weaved this build together in consideration of the number of monsters or anything like that. He winged it, blindly, and he just... lucked out. That was the reason he was currently alive, shaving Wael’s health down to 14% as a thousand monsters, their flesh rotted and decayed like a zombie’s, moved toward him. He just got lucky.

He recalled it. The jeers.

Your entire squad is dead? And you lived? Tsk, how lucky...

You actually completed the mission? You musta gotten hella lucky...

Everyone at the base got exposed to the virus and you didn’t? Damn, you’re really lucky...

Shaking his head in a desperate bid to dispel the thoughts, he stopped moving. Not because he’d given up, but because it didn’t matter. Vanishment’s cooldown was effectively 0, as his abilities one-shot the resurrected monsters.

At 5% Health, there was, once again, an abrupt change.

All resurrected monsters suddenly stopped moving, their withered selves decaying further into scattered masses of ash while visible threads of what Asher assumed to be Mana or such equivalent trailed over to Wael. She became immune once more, closing her eyes and cradling herself in a fetal position, floating some ten yards above the ground.

He also noticed that the jutting balloons in space stopped appearing, and the world grew still, quiet, and almost immortalized for a brief moment. Asher waited with a bated heart, waited for what kind of bullshit the boss would pull now. If all other attacks were stopped... it must be a big one.

It began with a treble sound of the wind. It was so high pitched, in fact, that it burst Asher’s eardrums, assailing him with pain. But he dared not close his eyes or even flinch from fear of missing the change.

Following the sound of the wind, the earth began to quake--at first, it was faint and distant, but with each passing second, it grew in intensity. Soon enough, it went from just a small quake to an earthquake... and then beyond.

Aghast, Asher watched as an entire section of the stage was ripped and slung airborne, positioned at a vertical curve. Corpses, debris, and detached parts began to fall down like rain. It did not stop there--yet another section, one just next to him, was yanked and pulled entirely upward, assuming an anti-gravitational position overhead.

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His jaw agape, he watched in abject horror as the first section began to slide back into its original place while two more sections, one just behind the boss and edging the limits of the stage, and the other some ways to the other side, were yanked out and situated at uneven angles. And then...

The ground shook violently, and he could sense it. Without a second thought, he sprinted to the nearby section where the boss was, just barely managing to cross over before the earth was upturned like some Machiavellian puzzle.

He fell down onto the ground, his legs giving out; though he’d managed to somehow wrangle his anxiety under control, there was only so much he could do. And witnessing the impossible was more than enough to break him.

Cold.

He felt cold.

What was the point of living? It was difficult, even on Earth. Every day was a struggle. Pain. Angry existence of anguish was hardly a good life. And it was still better than here.

Eating moldy bread, drinking awful water, killing monsters every day... what for? Survival? He was tired. He'd survived enough. He'd struggled enough. He just wanted to rest.

Tired.

He felt tired.

The ground quaked as though it was a slumbering beast waking. Run, parts of his mind screamed at him. The section behind the boss was being flung back into its original position. Run, they screamed as he remained firmly planted on the ground. He felt tired and nauseous, inches away from violating his throat with vomit. Shaking like a leaf in the wind, he struggled to his feet. He wanted to run. It was an instinct; a beast that was him wanted to live. So, it pushed him. But his legs were heavy, his mind muddy.

He felt himself slipping sideways, slowly. The ground was rising, being yanked with powers that should not be. This was not a game--not truly. No game, no matter how difficult it was, would make this a boss of its tutorial stage.

No... he was wrong.

The only reason it was so horrifying was because he was experiencing it directly. If he were behind a monitor, playing with another’s life, he might have even considered it a somewhat unique take on a boss fight in horde survivals. A cute puzzle where you had to react and predict which sections would be safe.

But this wasn’t a game. This was life.

He slipped--but not before using whatever energy he could muster to lift himself and fling off to the side. He managed to just barely fit in enough lift to reach the ‘safe’ section, falling some six yards and taking 4 damage in the process, rolling through the bloodied debris.

Perhaps the eeriest phenomenon was the bloody rain that never stopped falling--he watched it curl to the angle of the section, going against common sense. It was almost as though it wasn’t just the ground that was being shuffled, but the sky itself.

4%

Live, a voice strained itself within his mind. It wasn’t his own, not truly--it was an amalgamation of familiar and unfamiliar voices, a choir singing a choice.

Sit, rest, you’ve done enough, another voice was there, too. It was his own. Anxiety was like a silent, invisible bullet, he'd learned--you wouldn't know what it was until it had already hit you. It came from seeming nowhere, even when things were going well, let alone now, when everything--literally and metaphorically--was falling apart.

“Ah, god-damned-fuck,” he struggled, standing up. Blooded from head to toe, short of breath, feeling weak in the knees... it didn’t matter. There was a reason to live--he was yet to strangle Qyne and rip her apart, piece by piece. Until he’d done so, he couldn’t die. So, he didn’t.

3%

Watching the sections of the world being shuffled around as though God was playing Jenga didn't become a walk in the park just because he steeled his nerves. In fact, it was still very much terrifying--more terrifying than anything Asher had seen in his life.

Wael remained afloat, fetal-curled, silent and unmoving.

It was as though she became an entity divorced from the current reality, trapped in her own. Perhaps... this was what happened in her story--in the castle. She was pushed to the brink, to her limits, and something within her took over... and undid the world. He could only imagine, if the story wasn’t just some flavor text but a thing that actually happened, how those people in the castle felt at the moment. They had to have thought that the end of the world was coming.

2%

Asher moved desperately, switching sections whenever he could. There was no rhyme or rhythm to which sections were being pulled; he was likely wrong, and there actually was a pattern, but he was too tired and terrified to recognize it. It didn’t matter, however. The boss was so close to dying. Just a tiny bit more.

But all that is well soon ends.

He lapsed for a moment and found himself a part of the rising section with nowhere to go. To his right was a void, with its section adrift midway to the sky, angled sharply toward it. To his left was a healthy section, but it was too far away. He wouldn't be able to reach it even if he jumped.

At first, it began with skidding. And he knew if it transitioned into anything more, he’d be flung off and splattered into the void. So he did the only thing he could think of doing--sunk his hands into the ground and dug like mad, finally reaching somewhat solid soil and affixing himself to it.

Within seconds, his legs lay flat with the ground and the gravity was desperately pulling him down, trying to fling him off. But he held steady, digging into the dirt with his fingers as much as he could. They hurt and felt like they'd tear, but he ignored the pain.

Before long, his staff was gone, sacrificed to the void--he could no longer fire spears. All that was left were the chaotic motes and the occasional elemental spell.

The section, to his frustration, was moved all the way up--and he found himself hanging upside down, staring at the world below. It was quite a sight--in part awe-inspiring and in part beyond terrifying. As such, he closed his eyes and focused all his energy on keeping his fingers tightly affixed.

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The world rumbled and raged, and the rain never stopped falling. And it was the blood of the rain that made him realize... he’d fall. Though the soil he’d latched himself onto was hard when he started, because it rained without stop, it had loosened by now. It didn’t have to become soft, far from it--just a tiny change was enough to cause his fingers to begin to either slip or dig through the dirt as it was no longer hard enough to hold his weight on.

The section, luckily, began to move, starting to restore. But he wouldn't last. Desperately opening his eyes, he looked around and saw that the section to his right had moved back into place. And so, before he slipped and fell into the void, he gathered as much strength as he could and, in one, swift motion, flung himself to the side.

Liberated from the anchor, his mind began to panic--but settled rather quickly. Time seemed to slow down as he found himself adrift through the sky, looming over the world. The wind belted his cheeks, cold and cutting, but the sight of the world upturned was one of the greatest he ever beheld. Perhaps the greatest.

For just a brief moment, he forgot that he was plunging to his death, and he simply enjoyed the canopy of reality. The breathtaking sight that he would have never witnessed had he not come here. He would die, but he would have died on Earth, too--it was worth, the suffering, to at least die to this sight.

Live, the choir of voices sang once more, yanking him back to reality. He was just twenty yards away from crashing. He would definitely die, his entire body splayed and sprawled bloodied if he simply crashed. But... he didn’t want to die. Not yet.

Activating Vanishment at the very last second, he crashed into the ground and formed a massive crater, taking 33 damage in the process even through Vanishment.

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