Now, I’m not the most observant of people, nor the most medically versed, but I was fairly certain that when somebody’s neck turned completely around that they were supposed to die. Either that, or go quadriplegic on the spot. When Dalia didn’t do either of those things, I got a bit weirded out. Not to mention the audible pops like shifting shards of glass under a boot grated against my senses. An amateur violinist played their squeaky notes in my Amygdala, and the hairs on my arms stood up in alarm.

  The rest of her body followed the head on a delayed cycle, making a crunching noise and crushing and shredding the tenuous remains of the cartilage between her vertebrae and grinding away at the bones and spinal cord. It wasn’t natural. Not in the least.

  Those silver eyes pinned me to the theoretical wall—as there wasn’t one within at least a dozen yards of me after that explosion—with an intensity I can’t even begin to describe. Imagine the most painful experience you’ve ever had, now remove the pain and leave only an overwhelmingly tingling sensation in its place. Now spread that sensation all over your body, toss in the chills from a bad fever, and stir to your heart’s content. That’s getting closer to what I felt in that moment.

  And I wasn’t even certain what was causing it apart from sheer willpower. That… or the moon was staring at me through her. It was more likely the second of the two options, as she was only level nine.

  Black wisps peeled off her and started coalescing into a familiar, hazy shape with two white eyes. It was the Shadow, come for a second round with me. The only problem was, I still had no idea how I was going to deal with it. Punching it wouldn’t work—it hadn’t the first time. It was an incorporeal being on the spiritual plane, not to mention a rather powerful one at that. Shadows weren’t things I had thought to be worried about this early in the dungeon. Still, it was here now, and I would have to do something about it.

  I took a step forward and found my leg rather rebellious. It didn’t like the idea of moving at the moment, and told me so rather sharply. My other leg moved just fine, though, so it wasn’t too much of a hindrance. Thankfully it wasn’t broken. Fighting with a broken leg would have been incredibly bad with this strong of an opponent.

  The Shadow floated lazily forward, white eyes fixed on me in a stare I did my utmost not to meet. It wouldn’t be productive to go mad at this moment. I was saving that particular card for later.

  Dalia moved her hand in a dainty circle, if dainty could ever describe a being whose head had just purposefully been whiplashed at an unnatural angle and who had lived to tell the tale. Silver light streamed from her fingertips, writhing and snapping into runes in midair. I could read a small bit of what was being written—I said I wasn’t very good with the Archai, not that I was completely incompetent; give me a break—and what I could read did not seem very friendly.

  [Something something] blood to ice [something something] bones to dust [something something].

  This was an annihilation spell (or ritual, in this case). And if you don’t know what that means, just be thankful you’ve never been on the receiving end of one. For those of you who have and who survived, you have my pity and my congratulations.

  In essence, what an annihilation spell does is just that: annihilate. It blasts whatever its target is into fragments so small they may as well not exist. Now I didn’t know what the ritualized version of the spell entailed, or what its limitations were, but my best guess was that it was similar to the spell itself. It blew the target into smithereens, unless said target’s defense was high enough to partially withstand it. If their defense was high enough, then depending on how partially they resisted it, either their muscle or skin would basically become a series of peeled orange slices hanging from their body. There is no way to fully resist annihilation.

  However, those sorts of spells only affected their tier and below. That meant that Dalia’s ritual wouldn’t be able to ‘punch up’, as the kids say. She would have a tougher fight on her hands if she tried.

  There were two other weaknesses to the spell, though, and those were the two most important ones to me. First, the spell—and in this case the ritual—was a condensed beam of conceptual annihilation focused down to inflict the most damage. This made it easier to dodge than other spells, though still quite difficult. And second, it had a long casting time and an unstable structure. So if I could interrupt the casting in time, it could blow back in Dalia’s face. It wouldn’t kill her, but it would hurt. A lot.

  Right. I had a plan. It was a bit of a desperate one, but it would work in the pinch I found myself in. Not like I had very many more options.

  I launched myself forward, feet thumping dully on the packed earth. The thin layer of dust and ash on the ground puffed up in my wake and added to the slight haze in the air from Dalia’s explosion.

  The Shadow, too, began to move faster, but I didn’t have time to deal with it at the moment. If I didn’t get to Dalia and fast, I was going to be nothing more than a pile of atoms plastered across a couple acres of savaged earth. That would bring a rather abrupt end to all my plans.

  Blowing right through the Shadow, intangible as it was, I barreled towards the witch. I was so close. Just a few more yards and I would be upon her.

  The world seemed to stretch as I got closer to her. Fractal patterns lit up the edges of my vision like the darkness you would usually expect when about to pass out. Except, these weren’t like anything I had experienced before. Well, I had once—doing this exact same thing—but that didn’t count. What I meant to say was that Dalia’s madness, if that’s what this was, felt unique.

  There are different kinds of madness. Think of it like a color spectrum, only all of it is harmful in some way or other. Generally, madness can be divided into two types, each with two subtypes. The first is physical madness, which can be divided into rage and fear. The second is emotional madness, which can be divided into depression and enthusiasm.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Raging madness is the kind I had. It is violently destructive to anything and everything in its path. Period. Unconditional violence and blood-thirst.

  Fearful madness is a bit different. While it is a physical madness, it is triggered by a feeling of metaphorical claustrophobia—of being trapped.

  Depressed madness is a manic hatred of the self, but an unwillingness to do anything about it. This is perhaps the most insidious of the four, but it could be recovered from.

  Enthusiastic madness is basically just the ditch on the other side of the road. It is a manic enjoyment of something. Now, this can be rather bloody and violent, depending on the fixation of the enthusiasm, but not usually. That’s serial killer stuff.

  Dalia’s madness was different. It was theoretically the same as mine, but something had altered it. It was a deep-seated loathing of all things, but it was also not entirely real. It had an… artificial feel to it, like someone had come in and wrung out her insanity like a wet rag, then filled it with gasoline and set it ablaze. Normal madness was just torn sanity, but this was far, far worse.

  An ancient philosopher once theorized the divine madnesses: prophesy, rituals, inspiration, and passion. He said they were gifts given by the gods to help man, to be a blessing. But then you look at stories like Heracles, Pentheus, Bellerophon, and others, and you realize things weren’t always so pretty.

  Dalia was a product of this kind of madness. The wrathful, vengeful, demonic madness given by devil gods and vainglorious wights to cast men down from their lofty aspirations and into the depths of despair and dreadful worship. It was a terror and a curse, set firmly in a twisted version of man’s base nature. Man was naturally predisposed towards worship, and the demonic gods had twisted this predisposition to fit their ends. It was a foul, horrid thing.

  Dalia’s madness was twisted by the moon. Those fractals were a residue of divine—or rather demonic—power etching itself into the fabric of her existence. Her presence dripped the ancient lunar hatred of the light it was eternally condemned to reflect. The moon was the ruler of the night. Why must it still bow to the absent day?

  Shaking myself out of an unintentional reverie, I pushed forward through the ever-increasing pressure of the moon’s residue on her presence. As I had yet to develop a tangible presence of my own, I had no real defense against it. Space kept stretching, the fractals lengthening further, filling more and more of my vision as I charged Dalia. She, in turn, just stood there gathering the necessary power from her emotions to cast the annihilation ritual. I was so close…

  My face slammed into something solid not more than five feet from where she was standing. A barrier appeared, flickering a dismal silver in the bright light of the day. It felt as though I had been hit in the face by a baseball bat made of brick and mortar. I rebounded, staggering. That’s right, Dalia had set up a barrier to stop me from escaping last time, so it only stood to reason that she would do the same thing to preserve herself. I had forgotten.

  That absentmindedness cost me dearly. Dalia finished the low chanting under her breath and the ritual reached its summit. I threw myself to the side in a desperate, last-minute evasion, but it wasn’t enough. I was struck by the spell.

  A twisting beam of silver and grey the size of a telephone pole lanced forth and slammed into my shoulder, missing my head by less than a hands-breadth. The air screamed with the power of it, as even the light bent and died at the surface. Steam made of fried particulate matter hissed and bubbled as the dust in the air was systematically broken down into its core components and dispersed.

  Now you would think I would feel something from the impact, especially because it had enough force to throw me backwards for the second time that day, but in that you’d be wrong. Well, mostly wrong. Instead of feeling intense heat or sheer cold, I felt an instant nothingness. It wasn’t like anything you’ve experienced before, let me tell you, but let me try to put it in perspective anyway.

  Have you ever consciously felt the sensation of falling asleep? Of course you have. Well, it was kinda like that. All sensations in my shoulder just stopped dead. An amputee would have felt more from their absent limb, as they had ghost noise to go off of. I didn’t.

  When I finally hit the ground, I felt off-balance. That in itself was odd, as most annihilation spells erased the whole body if they hit even a part of it, or they destroyed the whole thing if they were resisted. The thing was, only my shoulder and its corresponding arm was effected—if I even had one of those anymore. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I did. Looking down I confirmed that I did, in fact, still have an arm. At least, I had most of an arm.

  The annihilation ritual had crusted and blackened the skin into small patches that flaked and crumbled when I moved. The muscles beneath weren’t much better, having shrunken and snapped into smaller pieces. They were brittle now as well, though not to the same degree. My bones, however, looked bad. Worse than they should have. Small pocked holes had eaten into them, blood solidifying into fragile lines and rock-hard droplets pinging off my muscles and puffing to the ground. Everything but the blood was a pale shade of white, like lilies on a moonlit evening. Cracks spider-webbed their winding way across the surface of it all.

  My arm had frozen solid.

  Alright, so she had personalized the spell. Either that, or the moon had done it for her, and I had just gotten a taste of demonic magic. Shudder.

  Frost crystals adorned my neck and the tattered remnants of my shirt which I had decided against changing the night before. I wasn’t going to wear a perfectly good, new shirt when I knew it was just going to get ruined all over again the next day. Give me a little credit.

  Those same crystals, I noted, also coated every surface within a five foot radius of me and slewed across the village in a wandering path until they met a tree and joined the freshly frozen rot on its trunk. It groaned and slowly began tipping forward before catching itself against another tree and slowing to a halt. That was the thing about five hundred yard tall trees. It was really hard for them to fall over.

  Gingerly picking myself up so as not to further damage my frozen arm—I would likely need to get it replaced anyway, but in the meantime I would take good care of it—I looked back at Dalia. The silver barrier around her pulsed weakly, sealing up a hole that had been torn in its fabric. That was my opening.

  The Shadow was still drifting over toward me. It didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and I didn’t rush it. I just walked back over to the barrier now that I didn’t have a time limit, and stuck my arm through. With my hand on the other side of the barrier, I grabbed onto… something in the air, and pulled, ripping a huge, irreparable tear in the ritual wall and causing the wall to melt into the air.

  It did so in the most liquid-like way I could have imagined, splashing apart and hissing into steam before vanishing under the sun’s heat.

  I smiled grimly at that, turning my cold eyes upon that indomitable presence at the center of all my troubles on this floor.

  “My turn,” I said.