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Chapter 116 - Black Hope, SC
🕑 Added 2024-09-28 15:02:15 +0000 UTCThe streets were littered with corpses of men and monsters. Sunday stood amidst it all, gripping his sword. The last vestiges of the red world that took over his instincts and allowed him to become more had left him and he once again felt sleep call for him.
It was a depletion of the mind. A forceful mastery over his own body and strengths caused by the Visage of the Berserk Moon and what it brought to the world that left him drained. Dancing on the edge of madness, and all it promised, was a dangerous affair and exhausting affair.
It was a weird thing not needing water, or food, but succumbing to strange slumber now and then. Sunday chuckled as he used his sword for support. He made one shitty undead.
Around him, the survivors of those who had fought alongside him stood mostly silent. Few were human. The rare mage or city guard who had turned on the ghoul tide and fought the cultist had quickly fallen under their strange mind magic, that forced debilitating laughs out of everyone. Sunday’s summon had done the bulk of the work, along with Sunday and a few chosen vampire lords who had taken a great deal to stay safe from the corrupted blood.
Even now as the black liquid pooled in spots on the ground, the vampires were eyeing it with wariness. There was some sort of hilarious irony in this. It was not holy water that killed them, but rather the very thing they needed to exist, cursed by the very gods that had turned their backs on all that was holy.
The attack made no sense. It was concentrated and quite underwhelming, while the ghoul tide continued storming the walls without exhaustion. Bodies upon bodies were already mounting on top of the walls, creating leverage for the newcomers to climb up and reach the defendants faster. Many magi had already exhausted themselves of the essence, and spells had given way to swords and spears.
It was quite astounding how many had fireballs. Sunday almost found it insulting, considering how much he wanted one, and how he always got just the weirdest things. He was rounding up to be a strange sort of summoner, but that was not all bad. The Mournful Bear was like a tank set loose amid a field of weeds, and only after it ran out of essence did it lie down and let itself be torn apart. By then, there was not much to tear it apart though.
“What the fuck is happening?” Elora cursed from beside him. She hadn’t been allowed to fight all that much, and she was being frugal with her limited essence. The ghouls were still a threat and soon the defenses of the city would be overwhelmed.
Sunday didn’t have it in him to think positively of the situation but still smiled. It made him feel as if he was in control. As if he understood the world, and was not a lost paper boat upon the currents of a tsunami.
“It seems, we’ve won one of the fights,” he said.
The smiling figure was still nested in his mind, and the absence of the Baron was even more worrying. One so strong surely had better things to do than die on the front lines, but this was his home, and the vampires hated the Divine with as much passion as anyone.
A cultist twitched and one of the lords threw his mace, flattening her head. Sunday looked at the carnage and sighed. He hadn’t made use of his talents at all during all this. The slaps were underwhelming, and while they saved the brainwashed and simple folk who had fallen in the clutches of the Divine, he had a hunch the actual cultists were a different breed.
“Hardly a win if you ask me,” Elora mumbled.
A loud yell made them turn only to see a mage being ravaged by a pack of ghouls. Many were making it over now, and Blumwin was about to fall. Sunday had essence, but the buff had left him barely standing. He had given his all, and casting even a single spell threatened to make him faint. Relying on the vampires or magi to keep him safe, just because they found him useful was hardly a smart thing. It was night time he stopped doing that.
“We should go.”
Elora looked at him as if she was about to argue, but then nodded. She knew her limits too.
A loud thump washed over the battlefield. A shockwave, or something else, Sunday didn’t know. It was something passing through the air, making all existence shake. Then there was a momentary silence before a large crash came from the center of the city.
Oh for fuck’s sake.
One of the magi on the walls turned. He had stood behind, and Sunday had noticed him casting message after message in the form of small white birds that flew away.
“THE ARCANUM IS UNDER ATTACK!”
There was a lull as magi panicked and turned, allowing the ghouls to climb up upon the wall in greater numbers.
“Let’s go!” Sunday hissed. He dragged Elora away, but not before kneeling on the ground, pouring the healing booze out of his flask, and gathering some of the black blood from a nearby puddle. Who knew how useful it would be?
They rushed through the street. He saw people and undead peeking through windows and barring doors. He saw panic and fear the likes of which he hadn’t seen in Blumwin before. They didn’t run into any other cultists, but the constant tension was building up.
A feeling of wrongness. Of danger. Of something more than what he was seeing. Sunday doubted it had to do with the ghouls or whoever their master was. He had not had many visions after the initial bout, but he still felt somewhat connected to them. He hoped it was trauma from his stay in the swamp, from his first meeting with the horrors of this world, but it was probably—
The sounds of combat stilled, and Sunday turned to look at the now-distant wall. This was bad.
The two of them soon reached the Wayward Rat, and Sunday pushed at the door. The tavern was empty as he let Elora go first. He stepped through the door and—
For the chosen to destroy the emissary of the Divine is the utmost honor, and utmost opportunity. Give it your all. Fulfill your purpose, and prove yourself worthy, little wretch. Not for a hunter or the world of men. Should you fail, you will lose what you’ve almost tamed.
One last step to guide you, until you find your place… Be it in eternal oblivion or among the chosen.
No! NO!
A buzzing of static. A world torn apart. A laugh. A sneer. Chaos reigning supreme and swallowing the stars of reason and sanity.
The last thing he saw before his agency was once again taken away was Elora’s horrified face and a figure that hadn’t been there before.
A beautiful woman who made him more terrified than anything else in his life. Her hand was almost upon him as his foot landed on solid ground.
***
Mera screamed as her steel flew toward the large bulbous mass that had sprouted from a simple seed. It was a monster unlike any other she had seen before, and she had warred against believers and the curse of Divinity her whole life.
What stood before them was something new.
Lauden Bloodfang, Baron of the Vampire kin in Blumwin weaved around the various tentacles of flesh and bone that tried to catch him, tearing them apart with his bare hands. Three titans, battling in the palm of someone else.
The room was impervious to her attempts to escape it, so they were stuck. Her Mesmer Steel barely left a mark on the walls, and all attempts for grain to find a crack or a hole to push through were met with failure. This was a trap. She understood that as soon as she saw all the bodies closed in crystal and resting around the monstrous instrument in the middle. A thing of foreign power. An artifact of old Divinity.
There was no one but the three of them here. The Baron, herself, and a man who seemed to have expected it all. He hummed with the ease of someone taking a stroll as he carefully examined each trapped body, before kneeling next to the dark swirling void in the middle of the hall.
She knew who he was. The Voice of Joy. A Prophet of a Divine powerful enough to manifest powers she hadn’t seen before. At the very least he was near the top of rank four or above if she had to estimate. A foe she couldn’t fight alone.
“Peculiar, how peculiar!” he laughed.
The Baron raged as he rushed for the man, but the mass of flesh and bone he had summoned stopped him each time. Despite their mass, the tentacles moved with speed that was unlike such a grand creature. If it even was a creature. It was like an amalgamation of laughing horrors, one giant construct made of torn bodies and lost hope. And all it had been before that was a single bead of bone.
If it was unleashed upon the city…
“What is that thing?” The Baron hissed. He had appeared next to her, unhurt.
Nevertheless, his face was twisted into a mask of rage and savagery, and his eyes were glowing red. His pride was deeply hurt.
“A grain of Divine power wrapped in flesh. I didn’t think it had progressed so much—”
“You know what’s happening?”
“No. I came here to—”
A large limb exploded, showering them with sharpened spikes and Mera conjured a wall of Mesmer Steel. It cracked and then exploded into pieces, but the attack was stopped. Mera was not worrying about getting exhausted. She had a lot of essence stored inside her. Spell-fused didn’t grow once born, but the essence inside them did. It gathered slowly but constantly, allowing the oldest of them to fight for days or weeks until they ran out.
She knew she had been misled. There was no solution to her impending death in this place. This was something else. Something even the Prophet didn’t seem to fully understand, and yet… he was intrigued and trying to do so.
“Someone else has dragged all of us here,” The Baron said. “If it’s not you or your puny god, who is it?”
“A meddler,” the Prophet said. The first time he had spoken to them or answered a question. He stood up and the flesh and bone wrapped around him protectively as a sudden surge of power tried to drag them all into the void in the middle of the room. Whatever that hole was, it was trying to consume them. This was the third attempt, and the force was only growing stronger. The crystal-clad bodies of what Mera assumed were other spell-fused remained unmoving, but she could feel the essence being drawn from them.
They were alive and used for something.
The Baron hissed. He was unmoved by the force, while Mera used her powers to ground herself. Her illusions didn’t work well on the beings in the room, so she was resorting to force. Once they dealt with the Prophet, they would figure things out.
“We need to get rid of him,” the Baron said to her.
“You do need to do that, don’t you?” the Prophet laughed. He was closer to them now, carried by the ever-changing flesh he was commanding. “I suppose there’s no use in trying to convince you to embrace Joy in your lives?”
The Baron moved and Mera followed closely after him. This thing was not a person even if it wore the skin of one. There was no life in it. No breath. It was made of Divinity and undeath and yet presented as a living person.
She had not seen another like it before, and it scared her.
A flash of something. A disturbance that made the three of them freeze.
A lone figure appeared stumbling in the middle of the hall, close to the pool of void.
The Prophet laughed and his mass of flesh lunged forward.
The Baron’s eyes widened, but he retreated.
Mera screamed as she poured all she had into protecting Sunday.
***
Nysandra remained frozen for only a moment.
It was him. The unbound, untaught, and lost chosen. The one she had searched for and she needed to help.
And he had fucking disappeared right from underneath her nose! The girl had fainted almost a moment after that, unable to bear her aura.
It didn’t matter. She could sense him now, and the black sands in the pouch she was carrying were going crazy with desire. She needed to get them to him and make things right.
It took her but a few seconds to reach the doors of this puny city’s Arcanum and she tore through the hallways, uncaring of the monsters and magi battling in the corridors.
There was a lot of corruption here, and her charge was hardly equipped to deal with it.
After all, without the black sands, he was just a soul that didn’t belong to this world. Someone who wasn’t grounded in it. Someone who couldn’t even rely on the talents he had been bestowed to bring change.
It was a miserable fate, being the pupped of outside forces. She knew that, and she wouldn’t allow it to happen to another.
Especially not to one who brought hope.
