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Momo the Ripper | Ch. 250 – Black Hole
🕑 Added 2024-02-08 19:41:35 +0000 UTCThanks to her high Dexterity score, she was flying above the wyrm in mere milliseconds. The creature didn’t bat an eyelash, treating her like an orbiting fleshfly. Glacial energy continued to swirl in its mouth, ready to blast down on the trembling witches.
Momo clenched her jaw. She had to be smart about this. If she got hit—even once—it would sap all of her Stamina. She wasn’t strong enough to recover from a direct attack like that.
Luckily it looks like it takes a few seconds for it to charge up its beam attack. And it stays pretty still while it’s doing it. All I need to do is disrupt it, then get out of there.
Momo lunged forward, a single rapier swung over her shoulder. Taking a sharp breath in, she smashed it down on the side of the wyrm’s face, letting gravity do the brunt of the work for her. The wyrm howled, recoiling, the spell dying in its throat.
“There you go, angel!” Zie shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Keep at it!”
“Don’t encourage her,” Laura chastised, swatting Zie with a heavy tome. “The Great Wyrms may consider that sacrilegious.”
“Oh, be serious. That thing was about to raze our village with icicles. I’m not too concerned about preserving a pact we made one billion foogly-moogly years ago.”
Keeping her distance from the wyrm, Momo watched intently as it recovered. It pawed the side of its jaw with its claw like a dog might do to soothe a wound. Momo had left a nasty, jagged gash there, but it was nothing near what she was truly capable of. That strike was pure Stamina, with no Nether Magic backing it up.
Of course, that wasn’t surprising. Her connection to the Nether was all but severed. But the medic back in Morganium had told her that it was still possible, even in her current state, to release the magical energy packed inside of the rapiers. That was because the swords—blades carved of the Nether itself—had innate magic of their own. One could deploy that magic by using the sword formations, X and T.
She had practiced the formations in her training with Nia, but every time she did, she had fallen unconscious before she was able to unleash the sword’s energy. It was like swinging a hammer on a nail but always missing by half a centimeter. Endlessly frustrating.
Momo gasped as a gigantic icicle came shooting at her. It was larger than a horse, and pointed like a gnarly fang. She flashed to the side, and was showered in rocks as the mountainside behind her exploded. The wyrm roared, and sailed forward.
Momo was no longer some pest. She was now its main target.
She tried repeating the same tactic—dodging out of the way at the last minute so it ran itself into the cliffside—but it had already adapted to her tricks. When she dodged again, flattening her wings to fall downward at the last moment, it didn’t collide with the crag. Instead, it curved at a severe angle, shaping its body like a C as it grazed past the mountainside, only knocking a few rocks out of place, and scaring the daylights out of the witches.
I feel like I’m playing a game of snake, and I’m the apple, Momo thought as she swooped downward, gliding in the wyrm’s slipstream until she had sailed a good distance away, now hovering above the frozen chasm of waterfalls. She thought she’d gained another few precious seconds to strategize, but the wyrm was already hot on her heels, zig-zagging through the air. Another missile of ice magic was swirling inside its massive jowls, now aimed at her directly.
Disrupting the beam attack with another side-stepping maneuver was looking increasingly impossible. No matter where she flew to, or how fast she did it, its neck would snap to her position. Its clouded eyeballs were fixed on her, tracking her every movement.
Crap. I can’t defeat it by outmaneuvering it. I thought maybe I could tire it out by sending it flying into the cliffside enough times, but it caught on to that trick too fast.
What do I do?
Possessed by muscle memory, she assumed the position that she and Nia had been practicing for weeks: the X formation. Only now, instead of with only one sword, she used two, crossing the rapiers in front of her like a shield.
Nia’s apathetic voice rang out in her head.
“It’s the blocking formation. The X repels, then devours. You’ll get it eventually, once you stop being all … well… useless.”
Momo breathed in, then out, her heartbeat stuttering as she watched the orb of white and blue light in the wyrm’s mouth reach its maximum size, primed to explode.
At that moment, Momo prayed to a goddess that wasn’t listening.
If this is what sends me to the Nether, Morgana, you better send Nia there, too.
A hundred icicles shot straight toward her. A flash of black electricity was the last thing she saw before she was propelled backward, smashing hard into the cliffside. Her head smacked into the crag, and she nearly lost consciousness, but she breathed, and cold, mountain air filled her lungs, shocking her out of her daze.
And through the gray, fuzzy borders of her vision, she saw it—
A black hole.
It was only there for a moment, in the space above the chasm where she had been. The space around it seemed to bend subtly, like air on a hot summer day. The icicles—nowhere to be found—seemed to have been sucked into it. Devoured.
So that’s what she meant.
The wyrm circled around it, confused and frustrated. Within the second, though, it was gone, dissipating with a blink. As if it was never there.
An audio courier mumbled excitedly in her ear.
Technique Update!
You have mastered [Nether Rapiers — X Formation]
Effect [Nether Portal] will now be summoned at every successful block. A successful block occurs when the formation is sustained (in this case, the rapiers remain in their X formation) at the moment of impact.
Momo blinked hazily. She was only somewhat cognizant that she was still alive. Her back and her head both ached, her limbs imprinted on the cliffside like she had been stamped there. But still, the message filled her with adrenaline. A confused, almost surreal joy.
I mastered it…?
All that training… getting tossed around like a sack of flour by Nia… it wasn’t for nothing?
Noticing that the portal had vanished, the wyrm trained its beady eyes on her again. Its serpentine tail was wicking back and forth angrily, its fangs brandished. It was fuming.
Momo tried lifting herself from the crag, but pain was the only thing that greeted her. Her wings were fastened tight to the rock, too stiff to move.
The serpent reared up, then dashed forward, flying through the sky like a water snake through a stream. This was no ranged attack. Its fangs were coming straight for her throat.
With a loud groan, she managed to pry her hands—and the attached rapiers—from the rock. Her forearms trembled as she crossed the swords again. The X wobbled, imperfect.
No… It has to be symmetrical…
She scowled, tightening her muscles and feeling as every nerve in her arm fought against her.
Oh.
Momo’s eyes widened.
She had been so busy looking at her hands, she had failed to notice the wyrm’s drooling mouth closing around her head. Time came to a stand still as she stared down its fleshy esophagus, and saw not a throat, but an endless hallway of ice, like being swallowed by a tundra.
Not yet.
Whimpering, Momo stiffened her arms, and that’s when she felt it—a jolt, like lightning—and then a flash of black which rapidly expanded around her.
The black hole blocked out everything in sight, enveloping the wyrm, crawling over the cliffside. She saw nothing but darkness; heard nothing but a soft whistling, like a train through a tunnel.
Then, the wyrm wailed loudly, its voice echoing until it was dead silent, as if it had been dragged down a hallway and had the door slam behind it. Momo didn’t even realize her eyes were closed until she was shocked by the resumed crush of the waterfalls. She blinked them open, and saw everything defrosting at once; the water was a clear blue, the rocks devoid of snow.
The wyrm, gone. Sucked into oblivion.
She had done it.
A paper floated casually down from the sky, and landed on her head.
Congratulations!
Comments
Conor McGroarty
Those witches better give her that damn poison before another pissy dragon shows up. Or the mastermind of that thing was controlled
