An enormous explosion of purple appeared over the skies of the Unknown within the first layer of the ‘Deep’. The flash of light was followed by a portal of the same color opening and slowly darkening to a tarrish black . From within the hole in the sky came a massive downpour of black liquid. The rain painted the forest of jagged rock formations into a massive shadow that consumed all of life. The plant life and vermins that lived between the spaces afforded by the spires of rock slowly lost their vitality from contact with the rain of black death. Larger monsters fared no better and were soon fleeing en masse from the contaminated patch of territory. The hole continued to spew forth the watery substance for a brief juncture before it stopped and began to close up. Before it was completely gone, a final gout of black was spewed. As the blob made its descent towards the ground, its outer layers began to fall off to reveal a humanoid shape with an elongated arm. The figure collided with one of the spires and completely obliterated the structure and toppled the neighboring structures with the shockwave released from the impact. From within the clearing dust of the crater, the figure’s full appearance was unveiled. The only humanoid detail about it was the body’s outline. Its right arm stretched out passed its knees with only three digits topped with razor sharp claws. The left arm could have appeared normal, if not for the membrane connecting it to the body and the massive sword, which stood nearly as tall as it was, attached to its hand.

Its pitch black body carried a smooth marble like texture throughout its surface that was marred intermittently by cracks and sharp protrusions. The cracks opened up to reveal a dim deep blue glow from a new metallic substance underneath.

The entity’s head was a black deformed skull sitting between two ridges of vertebrae on its collar. The thing’s jaw was broken and sat skewed to the right. In the space left open by the mispositioned jaw was half of another jaw, this one more reptilian than human. Holding the second jaw piece in place was a snake’s body, entangled within the skull and ended with its head poking out from the left eye socket. Embedded in the skull’s back and temple were multiple pieces of broken bones and teeth that matched the shards on its body. Over all of the osseous details of the being were purplish burn marks.

The anomaly remained motionless before the small exposed patches’ glow intensified and a wispy blue flame emerged from the left eye. The snake flexed its body straight and the rest of the body stirred into activity. The awakened undead lifted itself up and uttered a guttural growl. The sound seemed to unnerving enough to affect its own creator when the undead flinched back from its own voice.

____________________________________________________________________________

‘Urghh. My head. What happened? Hey, Oli? You there?’

Tim darted his eyes around, finding nothing but the afternoon sun hitting his one eye.

‘How about Brandon then?’

The breath he took to call Brandon with sent waves of pain lancing through him. The sudden burn in his throat shocked him into inflicting even more pain by panickedly pushing the air out in a growl that brought forth enough pain to elicit a physical response.

‘Alright. That was painful. What happened to my body? I know it was dead, and possibly cancerous in nature, but this is definitely new. Breathing fire with just a burnt throat and no fire is not fun.’

He rose from the lying position and realised a key detail now that he could see some terrain around him as reference.

‘Since when was I this short. And what happened to the rest of my body’s bodies.’

He tried to move some of the possibly remaining necro-mass he had left, but his attempt only yielded more pain when the hardened material around his tried to move and ground onto the exposed patches. He was truly confused and desperate at that point with his body not cooperating and no one to ask for assistance.

Still, he bore the burning sparked by the movement and succeeded in removing himself from his seated position to a standing one. He realised in the process that the peculiar heavy sensation on his left arm was the massive sword that Brandon had him carry before running into that wolf thing.

The realisation sparked off a chain of other pieces he had been missing from before. He was just in a fight with a beast warrior with a battle avatar of sort and he was winning. Then the guy dropped some sort of bomb on him. All he remembered after that was feeling the pain of stubbing your toe all over his body and then the sensation of being squeezed from all directions. And now he was here, in a world of pain and no Brandon or Oli around to even call for assistance. He halted the sigh, careful to avoid wracking his body with any more pain, and used the sword as a makeshift walking stick to climb out of the crater he was in.

From there, he panned his eye around for anything that could help him in this situation. His first scan through yielded nothing but a scene reminiscent of when he had that excessively messy fight against a wyvern and found out how caustic his tissue really was on the environment. Hysteria was settling in again when the drowning man saw a life raft. Sticking out from the blackened ground was a very familiar spinal cord. He discovered in his rush that moving just a little too fast and letting the cracked tissue rub onto the glowing bits yielded more pain for himself. The discovery also came with an additional fall when his legs locked up from pain that gave him a bit of reassurance that despite the brittle appearance of his outer layer, it held on the impact. Tim picked himself up again, only pausing for a moment of discomfort on his ascent and moved back over to where he saw Olivia. He gently wiggled the staff loose and freed his companion from her prison of darkness and dirt.

‘Hey, hey, hey. Olivia, you’re fine right? Come on, say something.’

‘Yes...Yes. Tim? Why are my reserves so low? What is this I am feeling?’

‘Yes. You’re alive. You’re alive. Thank god.’

Tim brushed off the remaining debris on Olivia while rejoicing at her safety.

‘ And. I think you are just tired for the first time. And probably dazed too.’

‘Ah. So that is my condition. Is there a remedy available? I do not enjoy being so...what was that term you used?...Adrift. That’s the one. Yes, I do not relish in being so adrift.’

Lost in the moment and enjoying the little slip up the usually immaculate Olivia had, Tim laughed a little and regretted when the exit of air scraped against his sensitive insides.

‘Yeah. We definitely need to fix that. Let me see.’

Tim familiarly began to syphon his own mana reserves, relieved that they seemed to be intact, and moved it outside of his body. In place of a dead monster that he would convert to his own tissue, the mana was funnelled into Olivia in a crude attempt to jump start her. The process appeared to be a success when Olivia’s right ‘eye gem’ emitted a much brighter blue glow.

‘Alright. Everything should be good now right?’

Olivia was not yet completely online and remained silent. Tim was about to let out another pulse when she suddenly rose up and hit him in the head on take-off.

‘Tim. Tim. Tim. Where are you?’

She finally stopped climbing at roughly higher than his old height of two storeys and started circling around trying to locate him.

‘Er. Oli. Down here.’

His signal halted her flight and called for an immediate landing.

‘Tim?’

‘Yes? Who else can talk to you in here?’

In the place of a reply, she just dove right into his chest in what he could only assume was a hug. He returned it, taking extra care to not have any piece of her ‘rib mane’ poke him in one of those ‘cracks of suffering’. The hug was held for a moment before Olivia separated from him and gave his new body an assessing look.

‘I had already projected possible ramifications of that attack, but this still exceeds them.’

‘Wait. You knew what I we went through? What was it?’

‘I only have elementary knowledge of it, but we must have been involved in a teleportation, the icon of the ancient aether school.’

‘Ok? and why would that make me like this?’

‘The spell was evidently flawed.’

‘Alright. I still don’t get most of this, but could you tell what is happening to me and why everytime I move a little too fast, things start to hurt?’

‘I will need a full assessment of you. Please remain still while I work.’

The staff casted a layer of mana over Tim’s entire body and he settled in for his check-up to finish. It ended immediately after the mana complete shrouded him and contracted once. Surprised at the brevity of a process he knew was complicated from all the previous times she checked him over when he rearranged or combined cores for efficiency.

‘You can resume moving now. I have acquired all necessary data.’

‘That was fast. You sure you did that right?’

‘I am positive.”

‘Alright, give it to me doc, what’s wrong?’

‘Your body’s resistance to magic has risen quite a bit and prevented a truly detailed scan.’

‘Hold up, you said things were fine, how is a full scan failing fine?’

‘But your condition seems to not be too malignant.’

‘But you said the scan did not go through, how do you know?

‘I was able to achieve a rudimentary observation. Nothing was truly amiss. The sole exception being this-‘

The base of her shaft thrusted into one of his cracks, a bit of probing mana covering it. Tim jerked back at the sudden candle tips shoved into his side.

‘OUCH, what was that for?’

‘It was to confirm my theory.’

Tim spun his hand exaggeratedly in front of her.

‘And that is?’

‘Structure wise, all is well. Sensitivity, adversely, is-’

The second demonstration and mild amusement in Olivia was enough of a signal to warn Tim. His right hand came down swiftly upon the staff and held it in its place.

‘’Alright. No more of that. No touchy the bone.’

Tim shook her slightly to emphasise the point while his eye roamed about his body. There were quite a few more of those cracks littering his surface.

‘So I just need to cover ALL of this up with something right?’

‘That is correct.’

‘Good. we’d better get out of here then.’

Tim turned his eye towards the few flocks of fleeing birds far away and the still suffocating life around him.

‘Nothing is staying around my dead zone except for things even nastier than me. we don’t want those.’

The slight note of jovial joking was replaced with heavy resignation.

Plus. I need to somehow find Brandon. AGAIN. Urgg.’

‘It is unbecoming to groan like that Brother. Unclassified as your body might be, it is most definitely not a zombie.’

Olivia has yet to feel his melancholy.

‘Jokes aside...Finding him again is going to be worse than digging through hay for a needle. We don’t even know where we got teleported to. And there is no telling what could have happened to Brandon while I’m gone. The wolf guy was not interested in ignoring me and harming them, but if he decided otherwise-’

Olivia did feel the torrent of anxiety that radiated from Tim. It topped that night he saw the wreckage around the tower and frantically searched everywhere around the cliff top.

‘He won’t harm Brandon. I was with them and heard his intentions to just get rid of you and defending them both.’

Tim paused for a moment.

‘Yeah. You were there, weren’t you? And I didn’t even think to have you empower me with any of your spells. Maybe we could have-’

‘Those thoughts will lead nowhere. You are not solely to blame, I could have initiated on my own. We were just overconfident. There is no point wallowing over it. We must simply move on.’

‘Yeah. You’re right. Yeah, Let’s go. Brandon is not going to come here himself and you still have that compass I told you to get just in case right?’

The skull’s jaw opened to reveal a bundle of cloth.

‘Indeed. Let’s go.’

They left their landing zone without much hassle and soon found a nesting ground for a flock of harpies on their way heading north. The opportunity to fix Tim’s flawed shell was made even more enticing with most of the parents flying and hunting and the young defenseless to the undead’s mercy.

A quick application of [aura of death] on Olivia’s part and Tim had whole nest of humanoid birds to fill up his gaps. It was only after finishing converting one of the babies did he notice an apparent problem.

‘I think this is a bit problematic.’

‘And that would be?’

Tim held within his hand the now slightly dripping and completely black body of an infant harpy.

‘This is just not going to integrate onto my body like before.’

‘Perhaps, you can remove just the tissue that is necessary for our purpose.’

‘Hm. Alright. Makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that sooner? Thanks Oli.’

Tim began to peel off the broken down black substance from the bone of the harpy and was soon rewarded with a pile of black gunk and a skeleton still covered in some of said gunk. He tentatively began to apply some of the gunk onto an open crack on his chest. He was just about ready to flinch back and received a pleasant surprise when the substance felt only like a soothing balm.

‘YES. It works. Though, it feels loose?’

Acting on a subconscious feeling, he began to try and contract the filler and widened his eyes in surprise. The substance was compacting far beyond what he could make his old flesh shrink before, yet the sensation of it was natural. The smaller bit of flesh shrunk, the more uniformed it felt sitting between his cracked shell.

‘Right. You did say something about hyperdense structures. How exactly dense is that?’

‘Your entire core bulk and three thirds of your tissue bulk has been converted to this size. So it is a density of at minimum decuple your original flesh and quadruple for your core.’

‘That’s pretty good and bad. I’m not too squishy in the covered areas, but it’s gonna take a lot more to cover the rest of me huh?’

‘That would be so, Brother.’

‘Again. Please stop with that. Just because Brandon has a little sister does not make reusing that name for me funny.’

‘But it is, I am definitely finding amusement in this.’

‘Har har. And wow. Expected it to cover something. But this. This is pathetic.’

Tim looked down at the scar that was still just as deep, only a paper thin layer of black covered the, then, glowing core. Tim tried spreading and closing his arm and found that at least the layer protected him from hurting himself with the shell no longer moving over the core. Unfortunately, the layer was still too thin so any impact on that spot would still cause him a great deal of pain. The remaining six harpy chicks helped fill a corresponding number of cracks and TIm at last had his torso fixed. Legs, arms and back still waiting, Tim was ready to head out again to regain full pain-free mobility.

Their continued trek was marked with Tim constantly changing his gait and pace to adapt to his new body. The legs, missing for at least 10 years by that point, were not going to be used with any finesse anytime soon. The struggle of using his brand new legs brought along a brand new idea on how he could experience a sensation he has long been denied of in the old body.

He stopped in his tracks and squatted down before jumping directly off. He reached an impressive height of one and a half storey and fell down with a thundering impact. Standing crouched on the ground with his two legs imbedded halfway to his knees and using his sword hand as a pseudo-crutch,Tim realised what a mistake he had made. The sudden rush of G-force on take off, the temporary weightlessness at the apex of his ascent and the small rush of falling down, all of that he had anticipated for. But he missed one sensation, the one when he finally landed. Every opening on his shell that was moved in the process felt like a fresh wound rubbed liberally with salt and was then set on fire. Olivia flinched too through their connection and was quick to rush over.

‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’

‘The time I have spent with you should have conditioned myself to this. Yet I must ask again. What were you thinking?’

Exasperation was pouring through from Olivia while Tim had a bit of decency to emit some embarrassment.

‘I mean. I got legs again for after so long. It was lost at first to confusion and all. But then. I have legs now. I can walk. And more importantly, I can jump again. Do you know how much that means? So I had to try it out.’

His shame was short-lived and was soon replaced with excitement.

‘Yes, I could still remember all the times you have ‘tried’. The wyvern fighting, jumping into a den of goblins and going to that pit of snakes.’

Olivia beamed a bit of mirth at him.

‘Those were all nice additions, opposable thumbs, arms that are around my size and a lot of snake bodies to make the clunky lower body smooth to move with. So I stand by those questionable decisions.’

‘You have a fair point, those did serve a purpose. This did not.’

‘Fine. Bet you would try jumping too if you had legs.’

‘But I do not. And your legs are best used to continue walking. We are not pressed for time, but do not have it in abundance either.’

‘Alright, alright. But could you help me a little. Kinda stuck. The sword is in even deeper than my legs, so it’s holding me down more than up if you could believe it.’

Olivia focus on the spots around Tim’s trapped legs and started firing off [ecto blast] to chip them away. Once the ground around his feet were removed enough by the ghostly green bolts of energy, she turned her attention to the sword. The first [ecto blast] aimed at the sword fizzled out of existence before it could even hit the ground and the grey gem sported a new sliver of blue.

‘Quite an artifact we have on our hands.’

‘Yeah, that sure was something. Think this is some sort of mana absorbing sword?’

‘It is.’

‘No, Oli. That was a joke. Things that have that quality are supposed to be extremely rare.’

‘But it does, my spells do not simply cease to exist spontaneously.’

‘Ok. I knew Brandon’s new dad was good at magic, but I did not see him owning something like this.’

‘It is quite a boon as well as a hindrance.’

‘The boon is obvious, but how is this bad.’

Olivia did not stay to elaborate and simply floated on her way.

‘Hey, what about my help.’

He looked down at the sword still stuck to the ground.

‘Ah. Right, that’s why.’

Tim caught up to a smug Olivia eventually.

‘I’m going to get you back. Mark my words.’

‘Mark number ten made.’

The commotion caused by Tim’s little stunt evidently attracted some local monster and a reverberating roar sounded out from behind them.

A wooden club with broken rib cages tied around it in mockery of a mace was the first thing Tim saw as he turned around. With no time to react, he took the brunt of the impact directly to his face and stumbled back from the impact. Yet, it was the weapon that suffered most when it met the undead’s thick head and returned to its original components of bones and wood. The attacker, a troll a head taller than Tim wearing nothing but a pelt loincloth peered confusedly at its supposed prey. Confusion gave quickly to anger when it saw the destroyed weapon lying below Tim’s feet. The thing’s grey skin bulged with red veins and it reared back its right arm for a hook. The telegraphed fist sailed right into Tim’s palm in a quick block. Not to let it retreat for another strike, Tim squeezed down heavily and was rewarded with the crunch of broken bones between his fingers. The troll roared out in agony and brought its other fist down on Tim’s head to retaliate and leverage its trapped hand free. The thump of impact was all the trike yielded as Tim still hung on effortlessly and instinctively raised his left hand up to secure the remaining limb. His new bladed appendage caught onto a rock on its ascent from dragging behind him and left him off balance. The troll took the opening immediately and struck again with its free arm. The body shot landed onto one of Tim’s crack and left him reeling back. Emboldened and freed by its smaller adversary’s retreat, the troll kicked again at the weak point it uncovered. Though the second cheap shot was block by the arm clutching his flank, Tim continued to flinch back from tenderness when the kick found another gap on his arm. The troll was rumbling in twisted amusement at his pain and joined both of its hands for a downward slam on Tim’s head. The supposed finishing strike hit no exposed areas and was brushed off completely. Hands bleeding a little from the jagged surface of Tim’s head, the troll swung again for the confirmed weakness its prey was still covering.

Tim was seeing a bit of red after the bombardment of trikes to his sore spots and swung back more viciously with the edge of the hand clutching at his side. His hardened flesh parted right through the troll’s arm with a burst of flesh and blood and lopped off the outer half of its arm from its middle finger. It howled in pain at the damage and tucked back the appendage. It directed a hate filled gaze in his direction and retreated to buy time for its wounds to heal over.

The removed chunk of flesh was soon enough replaced and anger was again in the troll’s eyes as it used the distance gained to lunge for a shoulder tackle. The easily foreseen attack that started from an equally long pause was blocked by the raised flat of the blade on Tim’s left arm.

With a bit of clumsiness inherent to using a non-dominant hand, he heaved the weapon in a diagonal trajectory and pushed the troll away. Before the staggering monster could regain its balance, Tim struck again with a downward swing, taking off both its right forearm and leg.

On the ground in a pool with its leg not healed enough the troll could only look up to an approaching Tim with a hand nursing his side. Before the sword could fully descend and finish the monster, Tim paused.

‘Hey Oli. We need a lot of material to fix me right?’

‘Yes, but your current idea is most certainly not ideal.’

‘Come on. It’ll be fine, thing tried to jump me and got a good sucker punch in too. And fighting this thing just hurts. So. much.’

He insisted with a bit of anger bleeding through, hand still clutching a bit around his body.

Without waiting for a response, Tim’s blade fell on the intact leg of the troll. As the leg visibly grew back, Tim moved to retrieve the two dismembered limbs he removed earlier. The troll’s two legs were almost fully restored when he finished converting the parts and placing them into the vulnerable parts of his hand. Before It could climb back to its feet, Tim struck again and removed another leg in a spray of blood and groan of pain. He converted the leg too and waited for another one to sprout before looking down at the still growing stump inching ever-slowly towards completion and the now truly pained look on the troll’s face.

‘I don’t feel so good about this idea anymore. Should have listened to you, huh?’

‘Yes, you should.’

‘Yeah.’

He put the Troll out of its misery with a blade through its skull and left with just his hand mildly fixed.

-------

He remained internally silent for a time as they continued their trek up north.

The sun was falling down and they could see the makings of a forest ahead of them. Tim finally paused in his silent travel and turned his head in Olivia’s direction.

‘Hey Oli. Mind if we stop and practice some magic. I need something to occupy myself instead of just walking like this.’

‘Of course, I would love to. what is it that you have in mind?’