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Chapter 118- Darker Shadows
🕑 Added 2023-12-07 23:59:01 +0000 UTCArthur was surrounded in darkness, walls of pulsating flesh surrounding him on each side. His skin bubbled and sizzled, stuck in a regenerative loop of decay and healing as his vitality battled against the caustic blood surrounding him. His blood was in constant motion, his hands cutting and ripping through muscle and tissue as he searched for something vital.
It had been six minutes since the second round began. Things had gone well at first, or at least he’d thought they were. He’d managed to disable the fire-breathing head by taking out its eyes. Following that was a two-minute struggle where he’d repeatedly pummelled it with the spikes on his legs and hands, something he’d found far easier than he’d expected.
The beast's other heads instinctively shied away from truly damaging strikes, fearing that she would damage her leading brain. Or at least she’d cared at first. One-hundred-and-eighty seconds into the fight, Arthur had the thing looking like Swiss cheese with how many holes he'd poked into it, and whilst the hydra was constantly healing, she couldn’t keep up with the damage Arthur piled on, reduced as her abilities were to thirty percent of her former strength.
That's when things started to go wrong. Cutting her losses, the hydra suddenly targeted itself, three devastating bites that had completely severed her primary head. The one he’d been sitting on. Gravity was a bitch, and so Arthur had floated there, suspended for a split second in mid-air before it dragged him back to the ground. With no way to manoeuvre or dodge, he was left vulnerable to the beast's attacks. He would've used the severed one to hide behind, but the creature had foreseen that and so tossed it aside the moment she’d cut it.
Things didn’t go so well after that, with three jaws simultaneously snapping at him, it was hard enough to keep all his limbs attached, never mind launch a counterattack. In the two seconds it had taken for him to fall to the ground, he'd be torn apart. And so Arthur had made a split-second decision. The next time a head came snapping at him, he kicked off its teeth, hard enough to dislodge them from their place.
The Brief moment his foot had been in contact with its saliva was enough to leave a glistening red mark on his skin and so he mentally congratulated himself for avoiding the stuff till now. It stung like a bitch, but the pain wasn't representative of how much damage it had actually done to him. Still, it didn't bode well for his future. After all, he hadn't used the hydra as a stepping stone to launch himself away from the creature. No, he was heading straight towards it, namely the stump its primary head used to be attached to.
It was too late to change his course now, and so Arthur braced himself, forcing himself to keep his eyes open against his better judgment. He didn't want to miss. Like a snooker ball rolling into a pocket, Arthur popped through the remnants of the beast's gullet with little resistance, his thorny gauntlets doing little to slow him down despite cutting deeply into the monster's flesh.
Arthur had realised two things at once; one that he was on a fast track to the creature's stomach and two the creature was far larger on the inside than it had any night to be. It was like Alyssia's spatial bag, except the effect was replicated on a living creature and dialled up to eleven. There was a reason why hydras were given the title lords of gluttony. They could eat ten times their body mass easily and Arthur learnt first-hand how that was possible.
I'm also about to experience it if I can't slow the fuck down. The thought had passed his panicked mind and so he’d punched out to his sides, glad that his spikes were far more successful in slowing him down now than they had been upon his entry into the beast.
That had all happened three minutes ago. Now Arthur wandered through the massive creature, somewhere in its intestine that he’d managed to cut himself way into. He was covered in fluids he didn't want to name and his nose had thankfully shut down a while ago, overwhelmed by the rank smell of the place. Arthur had a plan. He’d become aware earlier on that attacking the creature willy-nilly would never let him win the fight, at least not before Alyssia came to finish it off.
Even at 30% strength, the creature healed far too fast for him to overwhelm her regeneration, her healing factor on the inside almost double what he’d seen when attacking the exterior. Nope, he needed to hit the creature where it hurt. He needed to find her heart. Arthur wasn't an expert on hydra biology, but he was pretty sure the organ was placed somewhere above him. Instead of travelling the winding pathway of its intestines, he’d decided to take a shortcut by creating a pathway of his own.
Arthur didn't know what the beast was experiencing, but Arthur was certain it didn't like the walls of its intestines being torn through again and again. That was exactly what Arthur was doing, instead of travelling through the hydra's intestines, he was literally going ‘through’ them, tearing and shredding his way upwards.
The motion was so repetitive, that he was surprised when his shadow claw hit nothing but air. Arthur grinned. It had taken him two minutes, but he’d managed to break through the creature's digestive organ. Looking back, he saw the hole he’d broken out of already disappearing. The rate the creature held its organs was truly absurd, and it didn't bode well for his planned heart-breaking.
He checked his ether reserves. He had a little over 300 points left. Being covered in the hydra's blood and viscera meant his skin was constantly burning and blistering, his body's natural regeneration barely able to keep up with the ongoing damage. Thankfully the blood wasn't as poisonous as the hydra's saliva, and his constitution kept the damage from going any deeper than his skin.
The problem came from the shadow constructs. Being exposed by the apocalypse beast's innards had increased their ether upkeep threefold and he’d be running out of energy soon. There was no light around him, and while he had 92 perception, he couldn't see in complete darkness yet. All he got was vague impressions of objects being either close up or far away from him, and even then, he'd found himself crashing into things he thought were far away.
Arthur smiled. He didn't need his eyes to feel the violent reverberations produced by the giant heart floating in the air above him. Judging by the vibrations it produced and the slight distortions in the air, he estimated that it was about a kilometre away. Arthur was again amazed at how big the hydra’s insides truly were. It was for this very reason that the greatest spacial treasures were created using materials from their corpses.
Alyssia had actually told him about a famous one from her dimension who had created a lucrative galaxy-spanning enterprise selling parts of her own flesh. With a True Hydra’s regeneration on her side, it was quite literally an infinite money glitch. Shaking his head in wry amusement, he tried to dismiss the distracting thoughts. Who knew, if he got his vitality high enough, maybe he could do the same with his own body. Now that was a morbid thought and certainly not something he needed to consider right now.
Focusing on the area around him he started to notice some hazy details. It was nothing like true vision, but it helped him know his relative location and create a mental map of the area around him. It also let him confirm something. The hydras biology had no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. For starters, the heart was connected to nothing; it beat powerfully but didn't appear to pump blood around the body or anything for that matter, no energy, magic, vitality,... nothing. In Arthur's opinion, it seemed more like a void than the engine that kept the hydra's body moving.
Not for the first time, he wished he’d asked Alyssia to cast her vision-enhancing spell on him. Maybe then he’d be able to make sense of things. He was almost certain that the place he was currently in wasn't exactly a physical reality but this was all a personal hypothesis, one he didn't know how to test. It's also not important right now, either, he chastised himself.
Walking forward slowly, he reached the edge of the cavernous room, a thick wall of flesh that thrummed with vitality and felt hot to the touch. Whilst Arthur was significantly stronger now than he’d ever been, a thousand-metre jump was far beyond him. And so he started to climb. Pushing his shadow spikes into the hydra’s flesh increased his ether expenditure significantly and he estimated he had three minutes remaining before he ran dry, two if he was being cautious.
Climbing vertically with a half-foot shadow extending out of his shin spikes was incredibly aggravating but he didn't have the ether to spare to manipulate them into a more manoeuvrable shape. He was like Spider-Man, except he had to keep his feet perpendicular to the wall at all times to avoid getting stuck. As annoying as it was, Arthur had more than enough upper body strength to climb with his arms alone and as he got used to the strange movements, he rapidly improved the speed of his ascent.
It took him a minute to climb the thousand metres till he was the level with the heart, and another fifteen seconds till he was four hundred metres above it. This was far enough, he decided. Looking down at the pulsating ball of flesh made him feel slightly nauseous. This close, he could see it in far better detail. Turned out, it gave a little glow, so insignificant it couldn't even be noticed from the ground. It looked like a cancerous tumour that had become a life unto itself and was the size of a large bathtub. Certainly big, but relative to the rest of the creature's overgrown body, it was tiny.
A little under a minute left. He didn't have time for hesitation, no time for indecision. A single moment to ensure he’d gauged the distance properly and then he jumped. 192 points of strength propelled him forward, his intelligence and perception working in tandem to make sure his launch was perfect.
It wasn't.
A half-second free fall, and Arthur realised he’d underestimated the distance, he’d missed by half a metre. He only had a single piece of magic to work with, none of his other affinities would work well here. Spending a third of his precious ether pool, Arthur pushed his shadow spikes from his legs and moved them towards his arms. The magic was fast, near-instantaneous whilst time seemed to slow to a crawl. Arthur watched grimly as his shadow claws grew in length, one and a half feet, two, three.
That would have to be enough. Arthur stretched his hands forward as far as they would go. He grit his teeth and clenched his fists. With a shuddering crash, time started to flow normally again. If Anything, it was moving faster. Forty-seven seconds till his ether ran out. Everything happened at once. Arthur barely noticed that his shadow spikes had pierced the hydra’s heart; he was already in motion. The shadow spikes reformed around his hands into handles he could grab onto, the cost of such minor manipulation rose exponentially because of the black blood that now coated his weapons.
Gripping them tightly, Arthur pulled himself forward towards his target. The shadow spears, for that was what they were now, pulled themselves out of the creature’s heart as a result of his exertion even as he was propelled towards it. He idly noted that the holes they'd made healed instantly in the split second it took for him to reach the heart.
His ether reserves had dropped rapidly and he adjusted his remaining time from forty-six seconds to twenty-five. It would be enough. It had to be. If he wasn't so focused on the task before him, Arthur would have noticed that the cavern was shaking, as if it had been hit by a massive earthquake, as well as the scream of agony that could be heard even within the strange dimension of the creature’s body.
Contrary to the creature, Arthur was dead silent. He didn't roar out in battle fervour or cry out as the hydra's heart blood burned through his left nostril from where it had splattered on him. The only sound he made was the deep exhale of respiration as he clinically analysed what he had to do.
His initial plan hasn't changed. There was only one way he could deal enough damage to fell this beast. Arthur pushed his spears as far as he could into the hydra’s heart until only the handles remained visible. He had 140 ether left.
135, 129.
It was rapidly dropping but Arthur grinned anyway. To date, all his shadow bombs had originated from ordinary shadows. They created explosions that manifested physically in reality. And were comparable to a military-grade frag grenade, at least when he didn't skimp on ether.
Today, he would do something different. What happened when you primed a tangible shadow, the results of a prior shadow bomb, to explode? Would the results be multiplicative or additive? Would it even work? Arthur didn't know, but he was about to find out.
Arthur invested the remaining dregs of his ether pool, every last drop of it, into his shadow spears via Shadow Trap. When his energy ran out, his title Paid in Blood came into play. It made it easier for him to pull on his health pool to fuel his spells. It was a horrendous conversion rate, but he had health to spare.
Feeling the spell kick into place, Arthur kicked off the hydra's heart as hard as he could. This would work. He knew it as certainly as he knew his name.
Arthur smiled and watched as shadow swallowed darkness.
Next Chapter- Saturday
