Explosions filled the air. Light clashed against light, water and fire turned into steam, chunks of rock were blown to smithereens by arcane might. The ground shook under the impacts of dead gods, who had leapt from their posts up high.
“A mockery of what we were!” tra roared, swinging Rex Magnar. The back of the weapon ignited, an Extre Plasma Burst that gave her the power that her wrath would have usually provided. The edge of the weapon dug into the giant hand of so unidentifiable god of sopotamia, throwing it backwards.
The harem continued its charge. John first felt the change under his feet from ice-covered ground to actual ice. They had crossed from the shore onto the frozen river. Water stirred. His elental senses alard him.
Magus Step carried him out of the path of the rising tendril of sli and screaming faces. ‘I hate the Lorylim,’ he thought, recognizing that every body that had lted into the amalgam had once been an individual, be it human or elental. ‘I hate Izha. I hate Tiamat.’ “I hate all of this!”
A Blast Ray tore through the tendril, turning it into splatters. Whirling around, he imdiately continued on with the rest of his harem. “Tiger…”
“Not now!” he snapped at her. He felt the worried glance. He let it roll off him. There was killing to be had, a slaughter of the perpetrators of all that had wronged him. Tiamat was close. Izha was close.
Finally, the rage could burst out.
The glacier above exploded. An avalanche of freshwater cascaded downwards as another incarnation of Abzu revealed itself. The dragon of blue appeared like a gorgeous serpent born from the vilest of filth, a red worm born from a rotten apple.
“I will take care of that!” Nathalia leapt. Wings of magma beat from a human back, then beat again, carrying upwards the expanding form of the goddess of volcanoes. Dragons roared and clashed. John saw the shockwave approach, as he passed through the gate of Tiamat’s tower.
The difference in the air hit his lungs on the first inhale. Hot and cold, the oxygen that was drawn into him made him feel like his veins were boiling and freezing simultaneously.
His ears popped, shifting pressures pushing down on him. Even the dinsions of the walls were unsteady, partly because they were alive and partly because everything was steeped in entropic magic.
‘Yeah, this is a final level,’ John thought, looking up at the distant ceiling. The architecture was a horrid marble of stone, flesh and fungal fruits lding together harmoniously. Ambient light without a source cast shadows over bumps, showcasing great artworks. Not all of the inside walls were black. Decorations were inlaid, forming gorgeous but unfinished pictures. Every piece of artwork had been abandoned before completion, making advancing through the corridors feel like traversing through snapshots of broken mories.
Likely, that was exactly what it was. They went by a scene of a family picnic, the faces of the people within it replaced by knotted worms. They went by the picture of a forest of stalks, lding nonsensically with the sky, as if they were dripstones from a black sun. They went by a picture of a smiling man, whose upper head opened up into a flower of teeth. They went by a picture of a black dragon embracing a mass of lted bodies. He recognized tra in there.
Past the remnants of shattered minds, the group advanced. So steps echoed, others fell on the smooth floor with the sound of cracking glass or no sound at all. Creatures peeled out of black mbranes along the walls, dragon-like humanoids of squirming mycelium. They threw themselves at the harem, dispatched swiftly by one woman or another.
The architecture was a three-dinsional maze without any real sense. Corridors made for giants led into chambers that could have fit city blocks, themselves connected to various pathways of various sizes. The curved ceiling rained slimy detritus, closely followed by draconic creatures.
“What’s next?” Lydia asked.
“We make a stand here, for now.” John was aware that this was a terrible plan. They were up against the power of a hundred thousand people from this war alone, not to ntion all of the power of the old Lorylim that Izha and Tiamat had managed to move out of the prison. Powerful as all of them were, there was a point of exhaustion here.
John ripped apart four Lorylim with Arc Lances and Blast Rays. The wyvern-like monstrosities fell to the floor as a shower of gore. Whisper of Mana stacked up, heavily increasing his MP regeneration – 400% increase, to be exact.
‘I am pretty efficient against these swarming types,’ John thought. Even with that and his various Overclocks still in his pocket, he did not believe they could stem this tide. They did have an advantage, however: they were fighting a hive mind. “Nia, do you see any weak points?”
The Blue Maiden’s one-eyed gaze wandered. The visor of black null-stuff obscured half of her face. Still, he felt when her sight wandered over him. “There are columns of magic that channel upwards. I believe they feed the dead gods.”
John had expected sothing like that.
Lightning bolts hurled through the air, frying more of the drakes above. The hundreds of tres wide chamber was now teeming with movent. Them being stationary allowed the Lorylim defences to consolidate, manifesting as a wash of bodies coming towards them at a rapid speed. Yet, horrific as that wave was, the powers of his won kept them at bay.
Salamander hurled apocalyptic teors at the crowd, killing dozens if not hundreds of creatures in an instant. Scattershot of tal and rocks from Lydia and Gno minced the Lorylim. Technicolour lasers scorched, arcane spells pierced, a thrown halberd penetrated and bolter shots blasted, every attack turning bodies into gore.
“I want you to take Beatrice, Jane, Scarlett and Eliana and get to destroying those pillars,” John ordered.
“Is it wise to separate?” Undine asked.
“It’s the best shot we have,” John answered with confidence – and it wasn’t fake. There was a certainty to how these things would play out. Puzzle pieces had linked up the mont they had entered the innermost of the Lorylim’s realm of influence.
“I will open the path,” Claire declared.
The vampire stood at the centre of their party and pulled bags of blood from her inventory. Her fangs extended, piercing the plastic before drawing the ichor into her esoteric bloodstream. Each bag was filled with the blood of another one of the won around her, but she absorbed them not for any of their abilities. It was the mana alone that she was after.
A household appeared around her, an army of her own making. The limit to Claire’s familiars was a combined total level equal to her Charisma – 2655. Distributed evenly across the familiars, making them all level 100, gave her 26 familiars in service. A small army of her own, consisting of wolves, bats, spiders and snakes, all of them crimson and black, all of them charging in the direction that Nia pointed her towards.
Disposable creatures of mana slamd into disposable creatures of flesh. The engagent mattered, easing the advance of his won into another part of the Horrid Sanctum. The engagent did not matter, being just another part in the chain of events that had to occur.
A rumble went through the greater tower. The smooth grey beneath their feet creased like fabric. The won around him moved gracefully. Aclysia and Beatrice circled around their Master, cutting down the enemies that assailed him from all directions. With Marice and lightning claws, the twin maids defended him from the multi-angled assault.
A gargantuan Lorylim suddenly erged. It was a millipede, skittering along on a nurous amount of enal-covered stalks. Massive mandibles caught both maids, dragging them along.
‘Master!’ Aclysia shouted in his mind.
‘I will be fine, concentrate on what is in front of you!’ John ordered her.
The struggle to obey was outweighed by her trust in him. ‘You are not allowed to perish!’ she repeated what Beatrice had said before.
John grit his teeth. His heart beat hard in his chest. ‘I… won’t,’ he answered. Different desires, many of them self-destructive, word around inside his head. What was his victory condition here? Was it the death of Izha? Was it the death of Tiamat? Was it just living on to see another sunset?
With adrenaline rushing in his veins and rage screaming at him to move, he wasn’t sure anymore.
The ground continued to twist and turn, a living thing that spiralled upwards. John had no other choice but to run and he ran upwards. He managed to at least reconvene with his two bodies. The Mandala Sphere flew by his side, while the Creator Puppet charged ahead. Inkaryl exploded in waves of fire with every swing.
‘Co to ,’ John ordered his elentals. One after another, they found an opportunity to turn incorporeal, pulling in around him.
Through the Mandala Sphere, he found the rest of his harem. They were advancing on other spirals of winding stone, advancing towards the opening ceiling in intertwining helixes. Claire and Nahoa were sticking together, as were Ehtra and tra. Lydia, Momo and Lyndell ford the last of their splintered groups.
“TRUST !” he roared.
Then, they were each swallowed up by different corridors in the ceiling.
John found himself ascending a dark hole, pushed along by the twisting floor. Then, he found himself in a black, esoteric space. It wasn’t dark, he could have peered through dark, it was an entropic ss. Eyes opened up all around him, attempting to pierce into his mind. His Corruption Resistance and willpower tore their attacks apart effortlessly, the backlash causing the disembodied eyes to tear.
Falling, then sliding, he glided through a nonsensical space. Humanoids erged from the walls, clawing at him. With arcane might and Purgatory’s sharp digits, he dispatched everything that was in his way. The Creator Puppet moved ahead of him. The Mandala Sphere was still with him. The elentals followed him in their incorporeal state.
John erged in another chamber. He landed flawlessly on his feet, imdiately looking around. The room was borderline normal. Polished black stone made up the majority of the walls. seven white inlays arched towards the centre of the rounded ceiling, crossing through a ring before coming together in a grey middle. The floor was an elaborate mandala, shifting beneath a translucent surface. Bright green and bright red fractals mixed into each other, the mutations accelerating and slowing according to the beat of an unheard heart.
“This does match your sense for dramatic flair,” John shouted into the room, not even bothering to keep his hatred out of it.
Izha giggled, but did not respond.
“Both of us know how this will go. None of the other fights really matter. Every drone, every structure, every one of your puppets can be cut down again and again. You have the power of an entire species behind you. Only you and Tiamat matter.”
“Only you matter,” Izha finally said. “Only I matter. That’s right. You and I, everyone else is a piece already in place. You have the final choice, but I win. I win, I win, I win, I win, I win!” Izha paused for a mont, then spoke in an eerily sane voice, “’If you’ve won, then you can surrender now,’ I hear you suppress that thought. You are killing your rcy.”
“I’ve played along. I’ve made it easier to separate us,” John hissed. There was a collective shake in his ntal network when they heard him say that. ‘What do you think it was for?’ he asked them, imdiately feeling bad for the mockery in his tone.
“Just two dead parents – it took so little to make you crack,” Izha’s voice echoed from the walls.
“Stop talking,” John growled.
“Awww, so hypocritical, so adorable, so aggressive. How many enemies said that to you when you had the upper hand? Am I not allowed to gloat now? Am I not? No? Why not? By the end of this, I will have done more good than you will ever be able to do. All eyes will be opened, and I will have opened them. I will open the great chasm of the Abyss, I will make it swallow the world!” Izha laughed hysterically. “There is that thought again! There is you suppressing it again! You don’t want to surrender! You want to kill !”
“You will not rob of this fight,” he growled.
“Why would I? Killing you is my option. I don’t need you. I never needed you. You are the interruption, the annoyance, the thing that could go wrong.” Izha’s unnaturally gleeful tone took a dark turn. “Before you and I settle our differences, there is soone I want you to et again.”
The wall opposite of John opened up. An inky, impenetrable blackness birthed a human figure. Despite the sickly sway to his gait, of all Lorylim infected creatures, he seed the most human on the surface. It was a ruse created by what covered him.
He was clad in black armour all over, made from elental tals. A cape of infected shadow hung tattered from his hunched back. His face was mostly flesh, pale from a year spent locked away inside. Claws had left marks in the flesh, surrounded still by a fresh crust of dried blood, oozing out from the Lorylim matter that had bound to but not healed the human tissue. Mycelium replaced the eyes, knotting together at the centre into irises.
“K-kill… eeeeeeee,” Sigmund moaned in anguish, even as he raised his black Mithril sword. One of the two blades, parted by a wide gap between them, had been shattered by Thana and replaced by Lorylim matter, the other was as gleaming as the future the Contender could have had, had he only been less focused on his own advancent.
John stared at the man who had burned out his eyes with open hatred. He had loathed Sigmund well before all of this and his current state of mind elevated that disdain to a strange point of… neutrality.
“You don’t matter,” John put those thoughts to words. “You’ll get your wish because you are in the way.”
Sigmund and the Creator Puppet charged.
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