Chapter Twenty Eight.

The sphere disintegrated almost faster than I could perceive, but I’d have failed to notice anyway due to the wall of grasping hands abruptly shooting at my face. “Plus one” to survival instincts and priorities, right? Throwing myself backwards, I shot up into the air while frantically dodging an ever-expanding wave of corpulent flesh. I was high in the cavern before the wave receded and I got a look at what I’d unleashed.

A grey-skinned mass was bubbling grotesquely out of the central point where the sphere had been, like a disgusting reverse black hole disgorging into the universe. The mass grew with every second I watched and rapidly spread until it occupied almost the entire central platform. Looking closely at its surface revealed a disturbing amalgamation of putrid tissue that shifted and squirmed under my gaze, the details hazy until it dawned on me what I was looking at.

The Achorai…

Like someone had melted a city full of wax figurines into a single blob with no rhyme or reason to it, every inch of the growing creature was writhing with the fused bodies of the city’s former inhabitants. Even as I watched, exposed mouths all over the monstrosity opened and began a horrific wail of agony and despair.

Holy shit.

My stunned reverie was interrupted by the creature shooting a mass of spear-like tendrils straight at me. The tips alternated between jagged bone edges and grasping fingers, and I couldn’t tell if the sound they made was more the air howling from the mass displacement or the shrieking mouths that covered it all. I didn’t have time to think as I struggled to keep myself ahead of the twisting jumble of tendrils, utilizing [Law] to the fullest extent just to keep ahead.

Time seemed to slow as a fleshy spear just barely missed my head. The waxy skin parted to reveal a face, features locked in a rictus grin. I watched in horrified fascination as the mouth opened impossibly wide and instead of a tongue came a series of reaching hands. Each of the hands were riddled in boils that burst open to expose ever more mismatched body parts until they were no longer recognizable as anything other than a disturbing mass of eyes, nails and teeth.

Oh screw this!

Anathema flared out from me in a nova of black fire that pushed back the tide of flesh. Chaotic energy burst from the collision between powers and I flew back towards the exit, trying to buy myself some time to think with the chokepoint that would create. Unfortunately, the creature had other ideas.

A tree-trunk sized misshapen tentacle slapped me out of the air, blasting right through the vortex of anathema with the sheer volume of eldritch flesh and smashing me into the far wall of the chamber. I shook my head to clear it after the collision, but other than a little disorientation I was once again completely fine. Some slight cracks on my shoulder were the only evidence I’d taken a hit and even as I watched they vanished, leaving me back in perfect condition.

That’s it? All that build up for a little slap?

Giddiness made me chuckle and my fear of this new monster evaporated as abruptly as it had come. All the tension I’d felt bled out of me and was replaced by an almost euphoric sensation of relief.

That’s right, you’re not the only monster in this room.

More tendril-spears were spiraling towards me, and I couldn’t help the grin that stretched across my face.

Thanks for the reminder.

I’d been overthinking this. So focused on how terrifying the creature looked and on the implications of its existence that I hadn’t taken the time to actually fight it. It was time to change that.

Pushing myself off the wall I rocketed forward at the oncoming spears. [Law] twisted space around me, forming a maelstrom of spatial blades that cut the loosened fabric of reality nearby. Grasping tendrils surrounded me as I closed in, but once they hit my domain they shredded apart like the world’s most horrific “will it blend?” compilation.

The mass of tissue built up around me in a wave of grey goo and I struggled to force my way through. Sheer volume was bogging me down as the limitless growth of the creature worked in its favor to push me back. I ground my crystal teeth together in frustration.

Need to be faster!

Another burst of Anathema gave me room to move and I poured on more speed. I could feel the air dragging against me even as I began using [Law] to push it aside. More and more spears of warped flesh came at me, with their originating blob now taking up fully a third of the massive chamber.

Time slowed again for me as I looked over the grossly undulating monstrosity. Its movements were… familiar. I could almost feel its thoughts just by observing it— sense its endless, gnawing hunger in the almost piteous way it reached out to everything nearby. Innumerable hands and mouths reaching desperately for sustenance that could never fill the hollow space within. That had almost been me, after all.

The Shoggoth’s Transformation… if I hadn’t been stopped.

Dezzahn was a monster, and I would still kill him before I took back my [Blightlings], but I was almost perversely grateful to him that I hadn’t been allowed to progress into the monster I saw before me. The bottom of the undersea was a practically limitless feast for something like a Shoggoth, and I honestly didn’t know if I could have been stopped had I been allowed to grow to my full potential. Or maybe I’d have only grown until I got big enough for the Kaiju to notice a potential snack, I’ll never know.

Another strike staggered me in the air, punishing my moment of distraction as my body splintered around me for an instant. But the damage healed before the creature could take advantage and I righted myself in midair with a snarl.

Faster.

The thin air screamed around me as I accelerated again. Shockwaves rocked the chamber with every pass as I tore my way through the creature’s flesh like a living bullet. With each pass I slammed into the walls and pushed off in a fraction of a second, too fast for my opponent to react [Law] began pulling on my essence— eating at my body when my mana reserves couldn’t handle the draw. But I’d just integrated a semi-infinite substance into my crystal form… so I could draw without limit.

A grin formed as I felt my new potential screaming to be used, but then faltered as I realized the main problem. The holes I tore, the cuts I made… they healed as fast as I could make them. Grey tissue fused instantly like it had never been cut, flowing back together when I struck like I was slicing my hands through muck-y water. I wanted to face-palm as the crux of the issue came to me.

‘Semi-infinite substance’... Like maybe the origin of said substance currently filling the chamber. Damn it.

With every passing second, the creature ballooned outwards through the room and while I could hold it back for now, it was a war of attrition that could literally go on forever as the reality-bending properties of eldritch flesh fueled both my destructive powers and the creature’s endless growth.

My onslaught continued for frustrating minutes while I steadily lost ground (air?) to the expanding monster. For all my new strength, it was just that— new. I could feel that I was under-utilizing my abilities, and what I could do just wasn’t working. The blob just kept growing, pushing me back in all directions.

Except one.

Whether consciously avoiding it or by some instinct, the creature never expanded down into the Void. I resisted again the impulse to look down, knowing the Leviathan below me— dead or not— was way more deadly than the tide of flesh facing me now. I just couldn’t figure out how to use it.

Frustrated, I kept attacking while scrambling mentally for a solution, until I made another mistake. There was too much going on in the chamber, I couldn’t keep up with the hundreds, then thousands of grasping tentacles. The lack of damage I suffered made me overconfident, so when I mistimed a dodge, instead of trying to correct my trajectory I raised my arms to try and block the blow. But the creature— for all its fluidity— had weight. So while I did manage to block it, the force still pushed me back— or more importantly, down.

I flew into the Void.

My first reaction once I realized where I’d been thrown was to get underneath the thing, see if I could get up to the center of it and maybe cause some damage or pull it down somehow. That went right out the window the moment I crossed the border between reality and… not.

The Void. Looking at it from the outside had been like staring into a bottomless abyss, a night sky without stars. A sense of vastness and scale that eluded comprehension. I could even see out a ways to the titanic corpse hanging below. From inside? There was nothing.

Suffocating darkness pulled at me from all sides. Light didn’t exist. The laws that governed light didn’t exist. I could feel a leeching… absence, tugging on me at every level as unreality attempted to devour the fundamentals behind my existence. [Law] exploded out from me in a sphere barely five meters wide, just barely managing to push back the emptiness and create a zone of ‘is’— a tiny bubble of reality sustained by my domain.

The draw from this was enormous and my body rocketed up in temperature to a burning glow from the strain of fueling essentially a micro-universe, but it kept back the Void and bought me space to think. From my reality-bubble I could see up into the chamber where the creature was behaving oddly. The movements were the same, but they kept progressing suddenly only to slow down, sometimes freezing entirely still. Weirdly, the phenomenon was correlating exactly to how much attention I was giving it— the closer I watched, the slower it got. The answer hit me and the beginnings of a plan came with it.

Ironically, here in the Void I had the advantage over the mindless abomination above me, despite the fact it originated from here in the first place. It only wanted to consume, its magic was pure instinct and centered around that goal. I had will, and out here the infinite growth would mean nothing. But my biggest advantage was [Law].

[Law] was the source of everything in my domain right now, including time. I was completely disconnected from the reality above me by that thin layer of emptiness, and while the creature was far too big for me to move now, it had been much smaller a few minutes ago. The question was… can I do it?

I locked my gaze onto the undulating mass above me, pouring every ounce of my will into my domain. The world above me froze, my own time completely desynchronized from the reality inside. Then I pushed, throwing myself against the limitations of spacetime. Pain spiked through me once again as I started to burn. I wasn’t trying to pull the whole universe back in time, just separate my isolated bubble and move it backwards. Move it back just enough that I could succeed. Time only existed here because my [Law] made it so— and if my [Law] could make it, then my [Law] could break it. If I had to break a little in the process? Well, it wouldn’t even be my first time today.

So I smiled, even as the crystal of my body cracked. Even as the eldritch essence in me burned hotter and hotter to fuel the effort. Because as I watched, the frozen creature… moved back. Slowly at first, but with increasing speed as my body shattered around me once again. My soul— still weak from my recent healing— twinged ominously in my core. But still I pushed.

It was bizarre, watching the creature twist and react in reverse to my earlier movements. I’d wondered (briefly) if doing this would result in a time-travel clone of myself, but being outside reality like this seemed to mean I was just… gone. Can’t be in two places at once, I guess.

The weak spot in my soul split open, cracking even worse than from the Emissary’s spear. I nearly blacked out from pain, barely keeping focus now as my time-travelling slowed. Ever so slowly, the grey flesh of the creature squeezed back into the ward containing it— like watching a water balloon full of sewage pop in reverse.

A spiderweb of cracks spread out around my soul and I screamed reflexively in pain. Time crawled to a stop and the orb— while covered in bulges and distortions— was sealed once again.

That’ll have to be enough.

I forced myself to move back towards reality, time resuming as I couldn’t focus enough through the pain to hold it and move simultaneously. Bursting back into the chamber, the air around me warped from the heat radiating off my body. The fractured crystal (and my fractured soul) quickly began to heal once freed from the pressures of the Void, but I didn’t have time to let myself heal properly. Frantically, I grabbed onto the distorting sphere above me and pulled with everything I had.

It resisted my strength, even [Law] barely got it to nudge. It felt like the time my first car had died in the middle of an intersection, and I was struggling with all my might to just get it moving while the pressure from everyone around me built. The colossal weight fought against my efforts until it broke free of something with a deafening *crack*.

A roar escaped my lips as I pulled the damn thing with me back out into the Void. Crossing the divide between reality again I had my domain already pushing out against the emptiness. The sphere began struggling in my hands and I pushed myself as far out into the Void as I dared before releasing the sphere with a final kick away from me. This being Void space, the laws of inertia didn’t apply so it simply stopped dead at the edge of my domain and hung there.

I only had time to stare at it in exasperation for a split second before it exploded open once again, only this time, things got weird.

Reality distorted crazily around me, billions of conflicting and tortured viewpoints spiraled out of control with the limitless mass of eldritch to fuel them. Innumerable claws stretched hungrily outwards and found nothing, true nothing. The creature wailed horrifically and tried to latch itself onto me, but while it had been expanding outwards, I had been fleeing back for reality with every ounce of speed I could muster. I shot towards the opening, leaving the creature behind me to struggle against its own nature while I escaped.

I’m gonna make it!

Passing through the divide a final time, I slammed head-first into a familiar, pale blue barrier.

The ward!? What—

A man stepped out of the corridor connecting the chamber to the outside. He looked bedraggled and beaten, his clothing was ragged, burnt robes and his breath was raspy from a palm-shaped bruise going around his throat. But more important to me was the small, purple-black stone obelisk clutched in his fingers that projected pale light across the room. My memory flashed to Lady Haethram’s arrival back in Veris’s cave.

A portable wardstone? Why??

The man stared at me intensely for a split second before reaching up and touching his temple with his first two fingers.

“Scenario 2-22C. Primary objective complete, sealing the breach.”

I scrambled to get through, frantically blasting Anathema at the ward in front of me. The fire was quickly burning through the ward, but not quickly enough. A series of blasts rocked the chamber, starting from where the man stood and wrapping all the way around. To my horror, I saw the immense chains lining the room— which had seemed impregnable moments ago— shatter, and fall.

“Wait! Stop—” I tried to call out, but the man was beyond hearing me. He died with an empty look on his face, the explosions tearing him apart where he stood. I was pushed back, the colossal hexagons making up the heart-ward twitched, and then vanished. Taking the opening to reality with them.

[Law] pushed me forwards again in an instant, but there was nothing there. No wall, no seal, no entrance that I could find. Just the Void. Disbelief froze me in place. I couldn’t comprehend what just happened. Someone had just trapped me in the infinite Void.

Infinite… but not empty.

Whirling around, I saw the writhing mass again, shoving down my confusion and the lead-brick feeling of betrayal that I barely understood.

Monster now, figure out things later.

I faced the last remnant of the Achorai there in the dark, its rampant will conflicting with my own but still giving a bizarre sense of order to the area around us. Until we both froze.

A sigh, like a wind rippling through mountains, passed over us. The cloying emptiness of the Void pushed back to become just regular darkness as something greater exerted its will. I felt ground under my feet with startling abruptness and I was standing on a sea of dark, rolling hills. The creature in front of me quailed for a moment and then disintegrated, tearing apart with the sound of rushing wind— the inhalation of a giant beyond any scale I could dream of. Then something spoke, with a whisper that itched in the back of my mind almost too quiet to hear.

“Hello, Newborn.”

The soft voice came from behind me, but even if I could move I didn’t know if I’d dare turn around. Beneath my feet the ground shifted, the ‘hills’ flexing and… coiling.

“I greet you, from one who dreams no more… to another.”

Another breath, the world around me shook from its power.

“Let us talk.”