For a moment, she’d considered that she might have just yelled loud and clear about an impending threat for no reason. It was a bit weird to feel relief right as both Karah’s and the governor’s faces slowly deformed under the pressure of terror. Well it was that or things turning very awkward because she would have been acting insane for no reason. The groans that could be heard turned alarmed, like in pain, and there were suddenly more cries of agony than shrieks of struggle. Vic tensed.
Then she was abruptly close to the ground, hands closing down on the cold stone floor, gripping it and feeling its rough texture beneath them. Her hands were in contact with the ground. Her face was a few centimetres away from it.
Oh. How could she be touching the ground? Oh… Where had her shadow armour… gone?
She briskly breathed in and out, and all felt like it was stretching away from her. Fuck. Fuck. Her mouth contorted and gaped on its own, until it even hurt to keep it open that wide. The muscles of her abdomen contracted painfully.
Then she puked, uninterruptedly, for five seconds straight. It abruptly stopped, and she was just left coughing, spitting out saliva, hands holding her weight, but far on the sides to avoid staining them with what she’d just let out. Hahahaha, the vertical, straight jet of vomit had felt more intense than her own rainbow beams. It was probably just a feeling, though. How could her stomach have contained so much though? Ugh.
“Vic?!”
The voice wasn’t that far away. Oh. Oh, a hand was on her back.
“Are you alright? Please! Please be alright!” Karah said. Vic turned her head to look at her. She looked like Karah. This was Karah.
“I’m… me, I’m fine,” Vic said, rubbing off her mouth with her sleeve. “Are you?”
The pained cries were coming from everywhere in the repurposed storehouse.
Karah shook her head while looking pained. Vic slowly brought a hand to grab the hand that was on her shoulder. She gently removed it. Karah, once her hands were both freed, simply used them to help Vic up.
“I am,” Karah said. Oh. Those were barely restrained tears that were at the corners of her eyes. Yes. Yes, the situation was not good, not very good. Vic let out a breath.
“Young girl, we need to leave,” the governor said to Karah, standing very straight. “Quickly. Our place never should be in the open field.”
“I can uh”, Vic said, squinting at the above platform where that unmoving god wasn’t moving. Wait, his staff was glowing. He was doing something. Not divinity related, she couldn’t feel that stuff right now. No, it was another type of divinity that was saturating her mana sense right now. “I can probably throw you up above. I can easily climb up the platforms and uh… timber pieces on the roof so I’ll play hide and seek with… whatever monsters come out, all while jumping them down from above. It should be pretty fine me thinks.”
She sounded reassuring. Least she could do, honestly.
“No need for that,” came the ghastly voice of that blasted fake god, echoing loudly and otherworldly. He raised a hand and roots burst from the ground, right beneath them. Huh?? The game system hadn’t warned her?
Right as they were dropped down next to him, she opened a window and saw the game system finish… loading, of- of all things. Vic calmed her breathing and recast several layers of shadow armour. It was fine. Action would keep her from panicking. She could do this. She eyed the other raising roots that had brought up other members of his clergy, high above the ground. Okay, good, there’d be no need to rescue anyone. She leapt forwards and clung to the very top of the closest cubicle while the fake god behind her made a strangled noise.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said, but she ignored him as she saw what was happening within the enclosed cubicles. Oh. A thing at the back of her throat convulsed and she heaved but her stomach was already empty and nothing came out. She briefly looked away but looked immediately back. What even was she staring at?
There were no… no zombies, there. Instead, they… they looked like deflated human bodies, hollowed out, with no bones to give it structure. They weren’t alive, and they nearly weren’t moving, but… barely… wriggling. She dryly gulped, quietly breathing between her teeth. Her eyes caught a motion, and it was an orange, golden tinted liquid disappearing down between the bricks of the ground, at the angle of the cubicle, in the direction of the centre of the storehouse.
There… were no zombies? They… All dead? They were all dead? They’d all died? That- wasn’t right. Not so quickly, right? She violently shook her head. There was a god to kill. She needed to keep moving. There was no point dwelling on past actions, not now.
Follow. She needed to follow the direction it was going towards. It was… forming. The illness itself had spread… to accumulate mana for that god? Or to summon it? No matter what, it could be stopped. No health bar for a boss monster had appeared despite what had previously happened, so there was still time to prepare a proper welcome. The enemy hadn’t arrived yet. She leapt on the next cubicle. The people in there were still in the process of melting from within. She could hear dying cries of pain in the next one. She quietened her gulp. She couldn’t think of what could have been done to avoid this, not now. The… the healed incurables weren’t there anymore, right? They had to have been put elsewhere. What would happen to a healthy person if they stood next to this? They had no shadow armour like she did.
A left exclamation point appeared on her left and she dodged, leaping to the top of the next cubicle.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
“Victorya! Come back now!” the Cursedblood Emperor said. Vic glanced back. Oh. She’d just dodged one of his pale roots.
“No?! What’s wrong with you! It’s clearly clumping itself together! Don’t wait for it to be fully formed before attacking! DO something you BUFFOON.”
“I’ve fought this enemy before! Come. Back.”
Yeah, and why wasn’t he straight up explaining why? Worst things worst she had her shadow armour on. It… wouldn’t deactivate on its own like it’d just done before, right? That… that had to have been a one time thing. Had it? Had it? Should she return? No, no. She relaxed her hands that were tightly squeezing one another, right on time to see the lines of the brickwork at the ground down below lighten up with a golden shine before imploding out.
She rolled down on the top of the walls of the cubicle and the bricks and debris phased right through her.
The air was blown out of her lungs right as she finished the roll. Her hands still raised up. With one eye closed from the pain, all that was left to do was simple as she stared down at the glowing lumps lunging themselves towards the centre mass of the implosion.
Vic rainbow blasted it.
She was shoved backwards and missed, the jet of plasma splattering raucously over the wall instead of where she’d aimed. The affixed point from where her plasma blast was coming distended weirdly. She shut the spell before any weirder thing happened, seeing it putter out in shiny fashion before her eyes. She lowered her gaze. Oh. A root, wrapped around her midsection. She was released by it and hit the wall behind her. She swore.
“I told you not to do it”, the fake god said behind his mask, without looking back at her, eyes fixed on the god that was in the process of assembling itself.
“Who doesn’t. Attack. An enemy. While it’s still! IN THE PROCESS! OF POWERING UP!” she spat out, getting back up while hiding the flinch that nearly came out while she raised back up again.
“We need to have it agglomerate itself fully,” he said. Oh really? That silly goose needed that? “It’s the only way to gaude it out of hiding to eliminate this blight.”
“Who says it won’t just let a few bits of itself roam around?” Vic asked. “I know I would!”
“It’s not that god nor its servants’ modus operandi. Let it finish unifying. This is the only way. Baiting it into coming out is what I’ve been trying to do,” he said. He paused, and turned to her. “Like with the faulty shield around the academy that you so boldly criticized. It was one of the baits I’d been luring it with. I couldn’t tell you because you are so very loose-mouthed.”
“I’m NOT,” she said, spitting blood this time. “There’s a difference between whatever you do and my bluntness.” Ah fuck. The blood was stuck in her shadow armour, dripping down inside it.
A chunk of her healthbar was missing. A third of it, and dripping down too. She’d gotten distracted. But… But she had no… no damage? Had she gotten hit? She saw the notification warning her to “abscond” again. She swiped it and ignored it.
“Vic? Can you… can you remove your… magic protection?” Karah asked. “So we can heal you together. You… you’re bleeding from the mouth. You must have blunt damage. Please.”
Fuck. Whatever. She removed it and saw both Karah and the governor make quick work of that damage. Her hp were no doubts going to be up in no time at this rate.
“At least we’re past its threshold now. It cannot dissolve back without facing severe consequences,” he said, and Vic stared as the glowing golden implosion from before reached the top of the cubicle it had previously been in.
Oh. She’d thought it was an implosion back then. It wasn’t. It just looked like an agglomerated amount of blobs, going from golden to brightly orange, pushing one another out constantly before falling towards their inner core. In other words, she’d call it now a goop monster.
“You telling me that your play had always been to have this goop thing form inside your walls?” she asked, watching the healthbar from that boss monster finally start growing. So very slow.
“No, the play had always been to force it out at all costs at the earliest possible moment, before it did irreparable damage at least. I had to stop you from interrupting it lest it went back into hiding to inflict even more pain later on. I’ve fought this enemy before, Victorya. I know how it works.”
Vic frowned as she didn’t see the healthbar slow down but instead saw it go past the point where they usually stopped. A second healthbar didn’t pop up, no, the healthbar continued on the right side of her vision. She turned her head and saw it going faster than before, continuing its path without stop. Huh?
“If it brings you any relief,” the fake god said, “had I known how quickly you’d manage to coax it out, I’d have asked you to do this earlier. You and your peculiar talents.”
Vic was now turned 180 degrees, and stared numbly as the healthbar continued growing. It… was… making a full turn. It was continuing, still, on her right. She turned back to where the goop monster was growing and saw on her left the boss’s health mana keep increasing, growing, growing towards its starting point.
“What the fuck,” she whispered slowly and very lowly. What?! What?
The boss’s health bar joined its starting point. It was a circle. The boss’s health bar was a fucking full circle.
Then the blob collapsed upon itself. Vic felt the mana of her surroundings and all that foreign divinity that had been numbing her mana sense retract away, towards it. A fourth of her remaining mana bar simply disappeared.
Vic stared towards where the blob now had to be, out of sight, between those four brick walls.
“Is… everything… alright Vic?” Karah asked. Vic didn’t answer, but turned her head to Karah.
Karah stared back at her, and gulped slowly while looking back at her. Vic still didn’t reply. Had they… not felt it? Had they not noticed it?
The boss’s titles appeared beneath its healthbar, parts of it glitching constantly into other letters and symbols.
[SUN SEALED GOD]
THE %!§§<>/ ABSOLUTE
[[!ù<]] INCARNATE
[NIGH ASCENDING] DIVINITY
And in much smaller, written in much tinier print, beneath it, as though in parenthesis, the title [Cursedblood Emperor] appeared, accompanied by two health bars.
Are we cooked chat?
