The giant’s armored hand engulfed my face and with terrifying strength. With such power, it would bring me no surprise to find grooves were left in my skull beneath his fingers. His giggles, made frigid and ghastly by his encasing dark helmet, shivered my spine as he squeezed his palm harder. I kicked at his metal-guarded gut, amounting only to fruitless flailings and his detestment. He slammed me to the dirt, grabbed me by the leg, and ripped me above. Like some toy bound with rope, he twirled me overhead as metal-echoed chortling flowed like cold jeering… imps. “Up high to the night sky… Worry not – you will soon fly!” Villoven mocked with a hurling toss of my body moonward. He tracked my ascending self closely and readied the long, grand weapon. It was a thing with a slightly curved blade of glowing white metal. Its luminance stuck out in the darkness like a final hope, but I knew its terrible truth. Soon the wind stopped pushing down on me and instead began to force up on my body and cause my cloak to ripple wildly. Villoven stood with the white blade extended to me and called out with ecstaticism, “You there, imperious child, acting so fierce… let us see if this wannabe man can withstand a little pierce!”
Unable to shift myself in the air and seeing the soulful blade approach rapidly, all I could do was let out a scream as the cleaver breached right through my guts, bore through my organs, and exited out from my lower back. His head recoiled slightly in a movement of disgust. “Silly boy, you cannot stay… for I must use this blade yet another day,” the giant butcher spoke. He brought down the cleaver and pointed it groundward until I slowly slid off. The grass was splattered and speckled as he shook the blood and organ remnants off of it like inconvenient excess, and hunched over me. His huge, masked face aligned with my unprotected gaze. He spat, “My guts, fueled by frozen fire, and you – overruled by unearned ire; typical for a self-mirroring liar… but worry not! For I, Villoven Vire, will assure your days are endless within my grotesque cold pyre!”
Driven by nothing more than foolishness, rage, and shame, I headbutted his armored head and rolled backwards into a kneeling position with only the stabilization of a single arm. From the dirt I rose, ignorant to my gaping wound and its profuse bleeding. I pulled off Father’s shackling cloak and tossed it into the dirt before bringing myself to a wide stance now in nothing but some raggedy pants and a shirt covered in dirt and blood. However, the shirt’s blooded stickiness quickly began to infuriate me, thus it soon earned its ripping off as well. The titan looked down at me, his body turned into a silhouette as he stood as a tower before the moon, with me only finding color in the glowing purple behind the ocular holes of his helmet, his radiating white cleaver, and the occasional lunar glare on his armor. I could not help but see a bizarre hybrid of man and plant creature form in my thoughts. Its eyes were a fiery orange and teeth similar. It had branches growing from its head like with little foliage forming a relative, unkempt afro. The best way to describe its face was – demented. Strangely, it seemed very familiar, as if I had met it somewhere once. Before I could think more of it, animalistic anger poisoned me. “Consume Us! Devour... Us?” I struck my forehead with an open palm, not of my own accord. My mouth ran again, “Devour us— Viktor, now! Now you damn fool cretinish ape!” Someone urged for m— I raged.
Villoven tilted his head with running thought. He shrugged and chuckled deeply with a lowly hung head, shifting into a sudden throwing motion, hurling his grand grim blade. I sidestepped the soaring cleaver, feeling the wind of its breeze. I returned my vision to the blackvine’s knight and the unstoppable force trampled me, having to stomp back to my trampled body due to his momentum carrying him too far. He lept over me, bringing down his mighty elbow into my chest and puncturing it. My eyes may not have exploded from the sheer force by luck, but my chest surely did not have similar luck. Expelling of red from my innards blew from my mouth, painting my face and dripping down to the wound already pouring its own iron-rich, crimson spill. “Was this the goal of your taunt — to drown in your blood… Is this what you want?”
He lifted me by the leg and held me to a dangle as more vermillion juice escaped my body. “Ah, there it is — that sickly pale! Not brought about by the concoction, but by being so frail! Now with you, what to do — Oh! Here’s an option!”
Vire’s radiating gaze turned to a tree and with little thought, he flung my body at its bark. From the demolished wood, he lifted me again by the leg and slammed me into another wooden giant. From the rubble, he found my neck, lifted me by it and chucked me into a fourth tree. Villoven pulled me up by my booming hair stiffened by Penumbra’s filth and eons of imprisonment, and gave me a petty slap to the face, checking on my status of vitality. “Oh, what is this – not another quip? No matter – this won’t end until you rip!”
Like a doll at the mercy of a mad child, he crushed me into the dirt, reeled me back, and slammed me into the nearest earthly object until it was reduced to dust. With one more strike, he stuck me until I was planted about grave-deep into the ground. Then he punched, and punched, stomped, and punched again… “Come now, don’t cry – I have yet to have you properly pried,” he laughed.
With a final chuck into the lunar sky, I ascended high. I felt myself begin to slow, until meeting a very brief pausing point. Then the wind began to rip past me, but still I did not open an eye. I fell through the air, feeling something – something terrible; I started to cry. A horrible weight, a nasty feel. Thankfully, I felt this was where I would finally die. The ground approached rapidly, and inevitably the shadowed knight, Villoven Vire, upon it. I allowed my vision one final time, catching those two purple circles watching me. He simply stood in place and raised his grand fists covered in iron – and waited. Soon enough, like a mighty oak fissuring stone, I was propped up by his metal leg striking me in the back and two log-sized arms pressing down on me – one on the chest, one on my gut. He said nothing and instead opted to stare straight at me with his bizarre glare until the cracks in the night signified my shattering spine. He held my limp body above him, letting my grim juice fall onto him and seep through the orifices of his crownlike helmet. “Oh dear, sweet comedy… this surely cannot be the end already?” he vocalized.
The giant stood proudly, lavishing over his victory. Villoven reeled back his arm and lunged it in the hole he made in my gut. With his arm entering my abdomen and exiting just above my tailbone, he entered a fit of celebratory cackling until they slowly faded into grim silence. He then simply stood there, frozen by apparent mesmerization. He stared at me blankly for a moment in silence, lowered his arm, then shook me off of it. He took off his helmet and dropped the heavy piece of metal that created a jarring clang upon hitting the ground. His head was hairless, but a black beard graying at the edges ran across his jawline. He kneeled to me and lifted my left arm to his face ridden with bulging black veins and violet-shining sclera. His irises were nowhere to be found – or perhaps they were drowned out by the brightness. “A well earned meal for a champion such as yours truly… A great deal, if you ask me.”
His teeth sunk into the flesh of my arm, infecting my being with his wretched saliva. In the tunnel of death, I strolled down the path to the burning tartarian realm, which, contrary to my expectations, was full of water that did not put out the flames. Down here, he began to speak to me. The plant monstrosity gazing at me with eyes made a fiery orange by shame, rage and embarrassment. He grabbed my soul by the throat and shook it. He spat in my face and pushed me into the catacomb wall. “You’re going out like that? That’s it?!” it roared, “You should’ve just let me have you since you’re full of this much shit! All what Father has done for us – yet you just throw it all away like this? What?! Hey, ‘Lorenzo’ is that what you want me to call you? Too damn bad! We—are—Viktor! And you better get used to it! Understand?”
He struck me in the ghostly chest as he found my eyes lifeless. “Hey, listen to me closely when I’m scolding you! Why are you so weak? You mean to tell me that even after all that shit that’s happened to you since your stool-worth birth, you still crumble like wet paper when someone is ‘ohhh so scary’?! Why are you such a pansy ass?! You cried over killing some old guy as if he wasn’t a foot in the grave already! Hesitated when it came to killing that Plasma wench who was only using you to feel better about herself, cried over that too instead of getting on your knees and thanking me for giving your vacuous, flimsy bones the push needed to get the job done! But when it came to Father, that’s when you decided you wanted to have a spine — when it would result in us getting Dunked?! But now with this— this thing you can barely even stand up?! That’s… It’s so… Gah! You’re stupid! You’re an idiot!”
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I stared at the plant demon with a dull, defeated demeanor. I wanted nothing more than to leave, and it knew that. It grabbed me by my ghastly throat and throttled me. “You think you just get to die now and leave me with no accomplishments?! No legacy to leave behind? No! Listen here: If you look bad – I look bad! If you fail – I fail! If you die – I die! And you know what I have to stay to say about that? I’d rather have my chest torn apart and be left to bleed while hung by rope! You are getting your ‘Oh, woe is me’ no good, bedraggled, sorry ass back there and do something — now! You are not going to have no purpose if I have anything to say about it! Your life will not be meaningless as long I am in your blood! I will make you do whatever is needed to earn a title! You will ascend mountains and own them! You will take over kingdoms and rule them! Olympus will fear you! I will make sure you become a high tier god! Now, since you’re tapped out, I’ll make you get the hell back to work, Viktor!”
The demon of verdure grabbed me by the throat and threw me down the hall with unnatural strength, all the way back into the solid void thought to be a one way… until I awoke with the excruciating pain of teeth striking my bones. I unleashed a blood curdling cry born from bone grinding nerves, startling Vire out of his trance. My free arm lunged into his mouth, shattering teeth and plunging down his throat. My eyes reddened with eons of insomnia and awakening from nigh death. As soon as the opportunity came, I grabbed onto something soft and fleshy. With a face of gritted teeth drenched in blood, I locked my eyes with his as my next arm dove into his throat. “You are gluttonous for food – I am gluttonous for the mere sight of seeing you tormented,” we spoke with an omen in the form of a toothy grin. Returning to command, I dug my fingers deeper into the flesh and with violent strength, my arms ripped back with an esophagus clenched in hand.
Inhuman sounds mimicking dry heaves and watery, yet empty, regurgitations came from the huge man. He stretched his arms out, grabbing the fleshy organ, fighting with me to return it to its place. I headbutted his eye and leaped on his back, taking the long piece of flesh and wrapping it around his neck. “Do you want it back? Tell me if you want it back, you vacuous troll!”
He slammed his fists on the ground in a panic and begun to simply flail around madly in a desperate pursuit for air. “Oh, what is this? Where did all of that vim and vigor run off to? ‘Sweet comedy’ yeah? Remember that?! I do and I'm beginning to understand what tickled you so. The way your face blues and eyes swell with asphyxiation. How you kick and pound the ground like a mad creature in chains… and me, becoming evermore drunken with bloodlust with every struggle you do. Do you want me to stop? Go on, just tell me and I'll let go…"
I pulled the throat organ tighter and placed more weight on my foot which was set down on the back of his head. My right leg, kept behind on Villoven's spine, stabilized me as I simultaneously pulled his neck back as my opposing leg pushed his head down. He gurgled something incoherently with the pink mass clogging his airway, giving me a good laugh, but an unnoticed fist threw me off his body. The force carried me off some distance into a large rock, but I was numb with craze. Villoven decided to award me a gruesome spectacle, and I was happy to observe. That giant ogre of a man bewildered and frantically tried to shove the esophagus back down his throat. Viktor urged me to take advantage of his weakness. He believed that he could take my bones and make me complete the kill on his own accord, but this was a show I refused to miss. After a gnarly, revolting process of swallowing down his throat, Villoven Vire's quaking self turned to find me low to the ground with a deranged toothy grin painted on my face.
"The spine… the spine broken – how do y– you… how do you move?! Villoven Vire's going to kill you–"
Post his attempted shout, the giant fell. He hicked and he hocked; gurgled and groaned until he spat up an inhumanly large spill of red.
"Have you dropped the rhyming game?" I taunted, becoming jittery, "Wh-why? Why stop now? I-it was so fun… it—"
My body, itching for the kill, overpowered my flimsy sense of restraint and I fell into a sprint of the arms and legs until the faults of his crumbling body halted me. With a final, violent hurl, Villoven Vire upchucked the bloodied and torn esophagus once more. The fleshy thing hung from his mouth like a large, grotesque swaying tongue, picking up a great deal of dirt as it coiled around itself on the sediment of the Earth. His eyes leaked its water and his fists trembled in support of his perishing self. As I watched the giant fall apart, all we could do was guffaw and laugh howlingly at him – and we made sure he heard us.
But soon while my grin did not recede, it was quite apparent Vire was no longer fond of this time despite being so lyrically enthusiastic prior. In my conceit, Viktor took the opportunity to command my bones and rushdown the shambling Villoven Vire. I lunged at him, somehow with enough strength to push him onto his back. With my teeth, I gripped onto the hanging mass and chomped down. Our eyes crossed a final time, the purple of his optics beginning to fade and the insanity of mine boldening. The only thing I could do to comfort him in this gorey darkness was a muffled chuckle before twisting my head away, finalizing the extraction of the tormented esophagus from its former housing. The giant’s supernatural eyes lost their glow and returned to something relatively normal. But with their reversion to humanity, the giant Villoven Vire ceased all struggle and rested face down in a pool of his own sanguine juices. “Oh? ‘This surely cannot be the end already…’ right? What happened to that?” my face twitched with a painful smirk.
My legs gave out, bringing me to his level. The fire-toothed plant beast poked at me, screaming in my face. He kicked me, rolling me over onto my slightly exposed spine and wound holed through me like a fleshy tunnel. “Hey? Hey don’t do that! Don’t do that long sleep thing, I said ascend mountains! Terror of Olympus! Hey! Wake up! Wake up!” he scolded.
“Wake–up, Viktor.”
My eyes opened to the words of a voice heavy enough to pull on me. My eyes opened and I found myself not on my back, but instead nose first to the ground. Those dark shoes in the dirt and wine-pigment wardrobe ever so miniscule with its sways in the wind. I rolled over into a feral crouch in preparation to lunge at and disembowel this intruder, but we caught ourselves before making such a monumental mistake. It was him, of course standing over me with his hands - now expectedly - behind his back. "You are battered and broken; you are on the brink of death. No – I'm sure you recall that… nigh inexplicable blackout and reawakening; you were at his mercy. Spine snapped, gut agape and pouring like a scarlet cascade. Even your mind has faltered far beyond what was standard…"
Viktor began to well-up, causing the (involuntarily) shared ship that is me to mimic it. I on the other hand, seeming only to grasp as much authority one can have over their heart and at least some of my mind, was ready and eager to tear out Father's own blood pumping organ and devou– tear the heart from his chest. The audacity he has to utter such a rotten sequence of words to me when I'm in this maddened state. If this breeze blows against the bones of my open spine once more, not even Viktor will be able to restrain me from tearing that man apart. But breaking through my bloodlust and to our wonder, Father's hand dropped. To our bewilderment, he praised in a tone far more vibrant than we could ever even imagine from the likes of him. He said, “...but the standard has been created by those inept. Those who could never achieve even a fraction of your potential. The same who do nothing but stay afar and observe foolishly believe they are more knowledgeable of you than I. You felled Blackvine Venya’s corrupted Grand Knight and lived to tell the tale! You, Viktor, are trailing up a great mountain piercing the heavens. You continue to prove to be worthy of receiving the t…”
His speech soon fizzled into nothing but insignificant mumbles in the background of my heart’s pounding reverbs. While Viktor ate up Father’s words as if they were sugar in a bowl, I would soon hurl if I were to continue watching him lick an old wooden bucket clean of its feces. It made me nauseous having to feel this growing warmth and jubilation inside of me after hearing Father’s words when I knew how much I wanted to tear out his throat, but my body would not let me. Between having to feel that human plant abomination fall for Father’s antics once more, my rapid loss of blood, the wind blowing on the exposed bones of my back, or perhaps even the tunneling wound in my guts being infiltrated by dirt, I’m not sure which would kill me first. I’m not sure how I had not yet died, but it infuriated me how none of the above took me out sooner. Light euphoria did soon fall upon me, though, when the heaviness of my eyes and shadow fog of my mind soon became overwhelming. Perhaps, finally, my final moments were coming to be. But alas, one last torment had to befall me just before my expiration. Not the pain of my lacerations by Vire’s might. Not the bits and pieces of both dirt and foliage sitting in my wounds. Not even the broken bones of my spine. No — none of that compared to the sheer anger I felt having to see Father — or should I say Hendricks’s — face looking through my eyes. There was one saving grace perhaps: his demeanor of concern. At least I got to see him unhappy just one last time before I go.