Chapter 82
O’ Ye Woeful
The storm raged blindly, torrents and arcs of belligerent lightning streaking through the ashen skies, alighting the world. The rain never let up, quickening over time until it began to flood the mountain. It dug out trenches and cruised down the jagged rock. In its wake, the phantomed figures stumbled and rocked, unsteady on their tired feet.
Among them, centered and scarlet, Asher was mindlessly hacking away with the blade. First left, a beautiful, arching curve that trounced through three figures by its after-light. A head sporting a horrified expression flew out unnaturally, bisected, and he hardly had the time to register it before being stabbed directly through his abdomen. He grabbed the tip of the blade protruding from his stomach, the entry point at his back, and yanked it forward, causing the knight to lose his footing and fall directly on top of the sword.
He then pushed the sword out of him and watched the wound heal immediately. And onward he continued, a reaper without a maker.
Streaks of light bouncing off of the blade’s edge were like the meeting markers, undulating with life, painting on top of the canvas that was the world with the harrowing streaks of red blood. Dozens, and soon hundreds fell beneath the blade, yet more surged and stormed forward, seemingly undaunted.
Each time a bounding streak of lightning would light up the world like a dawning star, he'd catch a glimpse of the still-marching army. It was boundless, endless, fearless. And yet, so was he.
Sensing something else afoot, Asher abruptly stopped attacking and took a step back, barely dodging an astral projection of an arrow. It dug into the ground some forty yards eastward, ripping out a crater the size of a house. It dissipated into smoke right after while Asher looked to the opposite end where, from the swirling storm of shadows, a silhouette of a woman emerged. She was short, perhaps five feet at most, moving betwixt the darkness skillfully and nimbly, a massively oversized bow in hand.
He struggled for a moment to understand how precisely she was able to even hold that thing let alone use it as a weapon--it was thrice her size, bejeweled as though it were a kingly crown, glimmering in faint silver beneath the fading tendrils of electric lightning.
However, perhaps the most impactful part of the woman was her eyes--or, rather, lack thereof. There was a rounding, binding cloth over them, dyed deep maroon. She looked more a haunting revenant that men see in death than a knighted figure of the kingdom. And yet, a figure she was; her arms bent back once again and the relaxed bow grew taut. The tip of the phantom arrow blistered with ravaging fires, seemingly charging, and it was as though he could hear its whispers of death.
Ignoring the unrelenting knights trying to overcome him, he cleaved through them and began to madly run in her direction. The arrow was loosened and, before he could realistically recognize it, was already on top of him. He barely had enough time to bend ever so slightly to the side, allowing the deathly thing to rip through the left side of his body.
His entire arm flew off alongside most of the left portion of his chest. Organs and viscera hung loose within the massive hole, his ribs appearing cracked and trounced. It hurt. It hurt beyond hurt. It was the sort of ache that was so impossible the mind hardly recognized it in full--but he didn’t so much as wince.
He crossed the hundred yards distance between them in just a few bouts, his body already healing up, closing the wounds and regrowing the torn limb. The woman retreated, dashing between the protruding rocks and once again beginning to charge the bow.
By the time Asher had reached her and got within ten yards of her, the arrow was loosened. It ripped through the air faster than a bullet, directly tearing through his heart and obliterating half his chest. But he reached her, and that was all that mattered.
She seemed to panic, her lips parting in shock as he swung the sword with all his might; she used the bow to deflect the strike but became wholly overwhelmed by the disparity in strength. Pushed into the ground, she rolled through the muddy, wet dirt for just a few feet before stopping.
“AAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” she screamed in pain so loudly it overcame the crack of thunder above in the sky. Both her arms were completely broken, bent in severely unnatural ways, and the spirited bow had vanished. Without it, she looked more like a frail child rather than a deathly specter.
Lying on the ground, she tried crawling back away from him, the collapsing winds having removed her eye cover. Her eyes were wholly black, as though someone had tainted them whole with liquid ink. And yet, even with the obsidian abyss, Asher saw fear and terror.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
His wounds were healing rapidly and, without wasting time, he coldly and apathetically slashed downward. The head flew off immediately, and the crawling body turned limp and still, twitching a few more times before stopping completely.
Another bout of lightning ripped through the sky, turning the night into day for ever a second--he was wholly red by now, despite the rain. It seemed as though blood had seeped into his pores and dyed his skin scarlet. Glancing back, he saw it yet again--the hesitation. For some reason, nobody was approaching him. Even though there were hundreds of knights within striking distance, none seemed compelled to come forward.
He smirked and rushed forward, his sword fluttering in a deadly dance.
He ripped through the ranks of the knights without hesitation, without recourse, without fear--limbs and chopped body pieces flew off upward like an inverted rain, seemingly combating the actual one. They retaliated, a hundred wounds appearing across his scarring body every second it seemed--and yet, they all healed. He'd completely begun ignoring the actual Health as it was less a stable depiction of his life force and more a rather violent representation of someone whose heart was beating about a hundred times too fast.
Up and down it went, like a roller coaster, but he didn’t care. Rather, it was irrelevant; death or life, irrespective of which he would eventually mantle, he embraced both.
Soon, he emerged within a small divot of a mountain--he was more than two hundred yards away from where he started, staring down at the endless army of well-armored knights. They’d come to a screeching halt, their vapor-filled eyes staring at him unblinkingly. Lightning cracked behind him, framing him as though he were a painting and a warning both at once.
He spotted the wrangle in the ranks and saw a figure emerge past all the unmoving figurines. It was a young man, perhaps barely twenty years old. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t armored--rather, he only wore a pair of loose, tattered pants. Both topless and barefoot, he stood out like a sore thumb, more so than even Asher himself.
The boy sported long, black hair that seemed glued to his well-framed body, wielding a rusted sword not unlike Asher’s. Eyes as green as meadows stared directly at him, unfeeling. As though the world itself understood, lightning cracked thrice in succession, ripping through the world--and the two flew toward one another.
Asher ducked and slid sideways, slicing, while the boy parried and spun in place, thrusting. Taking the strike, Asher retaliated but, just like him, the boy, too, seemed fearless in the face of exchange--T’lor’s Sword easily pierced through but the boy didn’t even flinch, taking a step back and managing to land yet another strike.
The two slid along the muddy earth, barely managing their footing, while accelerating. Visible strikes quickly became blurs that strode and streaked across the vaunted darkness--here and there, lightning would illuminate them, baring them for the eyes that could not fathom what they were witnessing.
The more he bled, Asher realized, the faster he became. None of the swings were tiring; in fact, he felt he could chain hundreds in a row if his opponent simply stood still. But the boy didn’t--he, too, grew more restless and unrelenting as the battle went on.
They exchanged wounds like gifts, over and over, 'till the rain was stained red with their blood and the mud beneath became ebony-colored. There was poetry to their struggle, the primal, evocative desire borne by all--in part, it was the desire to survive, but above it was the desire to subdue. Pride was etched into their bones like the master's carvings, and it ran deeper than any fear did. The nameless boy would rather suffer a wound than take a step back--and Asher had forgotten what ache and pain were, numbed and dulled into insouciance.
At some point, however, Asher pressed onward; after all, he could not tire, and unless killed quickly, he healed all the wounds. And though the boy had inordinate capacity in both those realms, they were finite--in some ways, even... human.
Asher felt somewhat guilty--after all, he hadn't achieved this through his own merits. He was given the blade and he was given the stage and he was given the shine. The boy, on the other hand, earned all this, likely through blood, sweat, and tears. He was a child, still, and yet was a one-man army. Asher silently pondered in the depths of his soul just how T'lor survived this all on his own. Even if the current Stage was twisted and contorted from its historical origins, there had to have been some truth and some reality in the past. Or, was it just like on Earth? Were the truths behind the myths depressingly unremarkable in comparison?
Regardless, the boy was pushed back, and the unflinching expression finally changed. There were signs of frustration, of unwillingness, but also... respect. Before the two could fight any further, however, Asher realized something--the knights were ignoring him... and were trying to climb past him toward the mountain pass.
“Really?” he cracked a smile; not toward the boy, not toward the knights, not toward the shadow in the rear looming over it all, but toward the sky where he was certain innumerable eyes were watching him. “Pathetic.”
He turned his back toward the boy and began trudging through the mud toward the knights. It wasn’t long before he felt the blade in his back but he simply yanked his body sideways and continued moving. Darkness swelled for a long while before the lightning finally cracked once again--he was right behind them, a terror from the depths of the abyss. A dozen or so of the knights who had managed to wrangle themselves toward the ‘road’ to the pass drew still and silent, the light of the sky casting an edgeless shadow between them.
Looking back, all they saw were eyes shorn of emotions, and a lean frame dripping with rain and blood, his silhouette stark against the violent storm. The world grew thick with dread, the thunder’s roar also the roar of their fears. He bore down on them like fire consuming all the oxygen, suffocating them. They began to shake and quiver, their minds blighted with terror.