There was a timeless moment, as if the world was holding its breath. Sam stood there, clad in his armor, the stylistic representation of Lucky’s snarling face on his armor, his sword brimming with magic ready to be unleashed and even his body that wasn’t covered by the armor was shining with the mana running through his defensive magic, while his mana was cycling through his body and core with the speed of a demented moonshiner chased by their ex-wife who signed up to be a cop.
The very air around him sizzled with the untapped and raw mana, ready to be shaped into destruction and creation.
People around him stared with either mouth agape or holding back a laugh, some even angry beyond belief.
The demon, the monster towering over everybody, simply stared back at him with a look that promised a lot of unsaid things.
Sam said a silent prayer in his mind to Tim, hoping that the crafty assassin-slash-harem protagonist would succeed with what he planned while Sam was facing the monster.
Then as the silence was almost on the edge of being stretched to an uncomfortable degree, the demon in shadowy form, threw its ‘head’ back and began to laugh, shaking the foundation of the building, which was where they were standing. That somewhat concerned Sam…
“HAHAHAHA, what an amusing mortal…” it finally said after laughing for almost half a minute. “What an amusing mortal…” it repeated itself before with an inhumanly smooth motion bent down, putting its face in front of Sam, bracketed by several fidgeting and worried cultists in dark robes.
Sam could feel the putrid breath coming from its unnaturally big and wide mouth, mixed with the equally putrid miasma of mana that seemed to be emanating from its body.
“Tell me, little bug… What do you think you are going to do here?” The tension in the room increased to another level.
Sam stared back, trying not to show what he felt, his fist tightening on the hilt.
“Kill you?” he offered with a negligent shrug while using the extra time to use his exceptional mana regeneration to fill his magical defenses further. He had a feeling he would need it soon…
The shadowy head in front of him grinned, the ‘mouth’ stretching too far.
“Me? You think you can kill me, little bug?” it asked, clearly amused. “Do you even know how many have tried before you?”
“Well, not you, but this…puppet,” Sam stated, indicating the shadowy ritual-created body with his ‘free’ hand. He didn’t actually know what kind of ritual summoned the Shadowed One into the material plane, but if the true body had been summoned Sam would have expected bigger fireworks and some more response from the ‘universe’. Beings like the Shadowed One aren’t exactly for the plane they were one, after all…
He heard a small intake of breath from somewhere deeper into a room and he knew he was right with his stab in the darkness.
“You really think so, little cockroach?” the demon in front of him rumbled, partly amused and part very angry.
“Master, let me deal with–”came from one of the nearby cultists, offering up their assistance, but a massive arm came down in a second and crushed the poor guy with a disquieting squelch.
Then the demon continued to talk as if nothing happened. “Let’s see how you deal with this then…”
With only a brief blip of the surrounding mana registering on his magical senses, Sam was suddenly faced by a giant shadowy appendage – around the circumference of a mature redwood tree – heading towards him with enough speed that he could only react thanks to his myriad of speed increasing skills.
Using the fraction of a second, he was allowed, he simply stepped to the side, feeling the air move next to him as the shadow appendage sped past him.
With the same movement, he stepped forward with a half twirl and struck down on the same limb that was currently being retracted by the monster as the cultist also began to realize that the fight had started.
His sword, coated in the now familiar void, cut deep into the solid shadow, eliciting a howl of pain and a barrage of curses from the Shadowed One.
“HOW DARE YOU, YOU MAGGOT?” The limb was retracted with seemingly impossible speed – as if it was teleported back – and Sam saw the cut closing and something evaporating from it into the air. Visibly nothing changed, but to his mana senses, it was clear as day. When he cut the attacking appendage for a brief moment when void made contact with the solid shadows, a small area of clear mana appeared in the sea of miasma.
Smothering his grin, he didn’t have time to do much as the Shadowed One growled and flicked his hand toward Sam, the trunk-like limb splitting into countless smaller tentacles, all of them spreading out, not leaving any space for Sam to dodge.
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The ground was made of hardened stone, not allowing Sam to do his usual trick to avoid ‘unavoidable’ attacks, so he did the only thing he could. He pushed forward with his free hand, unleashing void mana in the shape of a bubble, thickening the forward-facing part, just in time, for the forest of tentacles crashing into it, quickly consuming Sam’s mana as he fought to maintain it. Glancing to the side, he saw that the tentacles that didn’t hit his defensive bubble were slowly carving furrows in the stone.
Smiling slightly, he made sure he was on a stable footing, and slowly let the shield weaken, ignoring the gloating howls of laughter from the demon, and focused on the sword, making sure that the mana coating it would be enough.
Then, a crack…
Spider web cracks spread through the shield and the speed of the incoming pg-rating violations ramped up. Thanks to his mana sense and supreme control, he knew the exact moment the shield would break, so he simply continued to pretend to be struggling to hold back the deluge of a goth girl’s dream.
CRACK
The sound was followed by the tinkling sound of glass breaking as his shield collapsed, but Sam was already in motion slashing with his sword in a circular motion starting the tip from next to his ankles and raising it before doing a loop in front of himself shredding the tentacles into puffs of demonic mana.
The shower of tentacles immediately stopped as the demon once again howled, but Sam was already in motion.
He sprung forward toward the nearest cultist, his sword going through them, not even stopping him as he was already heading toward his next target.
“YOU THINK THAT’S GOING TO HELP YOU, MAGGOT?”
Sadly, as he reached the next player, they were ready for him. And so was his friend.
Four daggers slashed toward him in a well-practiced motion, all aimed at different points where it would cause lethal injuries, all of the blades covered by several dangerous-looking liquids. A drop splashed on the hem of his clothing and it ate away immediately part of it.
His sword swung to parry, locking in the blades with a little help of his magic, but this left him standing in one place, which was immediately capitalized by his main enemy, as it opened its maw and belched a caustic cloud of shadow at him, eating away anything and everything on the way to consume Sam.
A fraction of a second and he was moving again. Between being surrounded by the very definition of bad juju and some poisoned blades, he chose the second one. With a push, he crashed into the player in front of him, the blades nicking his armor and probably his body, not that he had the energy to feel any of it. He would just have to hope his skills would keep him alive long enough. The two of them were sent stumbling, while the other one was instantly consumed by the cloud of incoming death.
He put his hand on the player’s chest, having the breath knocked out of him was momentary immobile, which allowed him to unleash a brief surge of void on the way of transitioning into a handstand – the chest of the player vanishing into nothingness – and he launched himself upwards, out of the way of the cloud.
Sometimes, he really loved how the game made things possible that would have been impossible in real life. Here, thanks to his stats and skills, he could go from lying on the ground to a one-hand handstand, launching himself and landing with both feet on a small air platform as roiling demonic hate ate away the plane under him. He made sure to train himself to avoid what he had become in his previous life, but he doubted he could even do a simple handstand…
For a brief moment, he stood there and took in the situation. Most of the stones under their feet were almost impossible to recognize, having weathered the demon’s attacks, the cultists were reorganizing on the other side of the hall, clearly trying to stay clear of the demon’s rampage.
The red eyes of the demon, surrounded by shadows were fixed on Sam, shining with rage.
“YOU MAGGOT! YOU SHINING BEACON OF MORTALITY! YOU DARE TO STAND AGAINST ME?” it roared, raising both limbs and unleashing two wriggling forests of shadowy tentacles. Sam slashed with his sword, unleashing his own barrage of void blades, while using his free hand to simply cast a beam of void.
The two forces clashed in the air, void consuming the seemingly endless amount of tentacles, while his own beam of destruction carved out great swatches of regenerating shadowy ‘flesh’. Every time, his own void consumed another batch of tentacles, the demon unleashed even more, causing Sam to cast also more, the entire thing becoming a competition between their mana capacity.
The only good thing he could see in this was that Sam could feel the amount of shadow and miasma in the air vanishing as he carved away at the demon’s body.
With sweat dripping down his face, his focus fully on maintaining his defenses, he was unfortunately not able to notice an assassin crashing into his body, plunging a dagger into his back.
The air platform under him collapsed as his concentration was broken – which saved both of their lives as the space where he stood was instantly filled by undulating tentacles that quickly smashed into the wall, turning it into debris and dust.
Dagger still his back, he surrounded himself with a layer of void, then exploded it, casting the clinging assassin off him just as they crashed into the floor, cold stone meeting his body.
Letting out a grunt, he reached over, wrenched the dagger out, and cast it aside. Another grunt and his would-be killer was incorporated by a blast of nothingness and he was on his foot again, his health slowly dropping lower and lower, with a great chunk missing.
“WEAK!” came the exultant cry of the demon as Sam tried to find his footing, fending off individual tentacles as the demon seemed to take delight in his momentary stumble, peppering him from all sides while the remaining players approached with daggers (and one nasty looking jagged axe) out and ready to cut him into pieces. “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE WHILE I WRING OUT EVERY DROP OF LIFE FROM HIS BODY!”
Sam ignored the ranting, knowing very well, that while the demon was grandstanding, his situation wasn’t as stable as he pretended. Sam’s attacks, before receiving some unwanted metal infusion, did enough ‘damage’, that is destroyed enough miasma, that he could see the start of some instability in the ritual-created body.
Clearly, the demon knew this as well, because the poking of tentacles stopped just as Sam managed to stand up straight and sink into a defensive stance. It retracted its shadowy tentacles and let the assassins forward.
“GO! PROVE YOURSELF!”
The head assassin grinned as the demon’s shadow seemed to come out of the demon’s head and sink into their bodies, causing them to glow with a dark light.
‘A buff, joy…’ Sam grumbled to himself.
However, a moment later, his mana senses picked up a small pulse of ‘something’ which suspiciously matched the demon flinching and the dirty mana in the air decreasing even further.
Smothering another grin, he raised his sword, catching one of the players, swinging a dagger, surrounded by an oscillating and swirling cloud of acid.
‘Round two, I suppose…’
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