Pain.
Like nothing Velik had ever felt before, so much that his brain just shut down. Or maybe that was his non-existent blood pressure due to his non-existent blood. Velik had a brief moment of vertigo before everything went black and then, mercifully, he couldn’t feel anything at all.
This isn’t it… I’m not done. Just… need to focus… I can fix this.
But the mana didn’t come. Or it wasn’t there. Or maybe it was, and Velik wasn’t coherent enough to find it. All he knew was that the essence he’d fought tooth and nail for his entire life was fading, and along with it every scrap he’d been gifted or claimed through life-or-death combat.
[Are you giving up?]
What? The system?
[No one would blame you if you were.]
Is it talking to me? What the hell?
[You got your revenge. But if you still want to fight, if you still have the will, there is a way.]
Who are you?
[Do you still have the will to fight?]
It couldn’t be the system, or even his limited personal system. It was a delusion brought on by imminent death, but the fact that he could even make that rationalization meant something. He just couldn’t figure out what.
[Answer the question.]
Yes! Yes, damn you. Help me up. I’ll keep fighting.
Then there was nothing but silence and darkness.
* * *
Pain.
Fire that coursed through his veins, igniting him from the inside out. Screams ripped their way from his throat, unbidden and uncontrolled. His back arced and his limbs did their best to tear themselves free of their sockets.
It went on and on for a subjective eternity, worse than being cut in half, worse than anything. He’d thought he knew what pain was. Reality was showing him otherwise.
With a gasp, Velik’s eyes flew open.
[Warning: Essence reserves depleted. System shutting down.]
The pain was receding, but that just meant it was merely agonizing instead of indescribable. Reason started to reassert itself, and his awareness expanded to show him Reisha and Eslaka fighting overhead. So much mana was flying around that he could barely see their titanic forms. Reisha was in another new shape, something like a mile long flying serpent, except with four relatively stubby legs. Eslaka looked like always, except three or four times bigger than before.
Golden blood rained down from above as they tore at each other, and Velik realized with a start that some of it was actually on fire. He was lying in a pool of it, still burning, which probably contributed to the overwhelming pain. Somehow, he’d regrown the rest of his body, not that his legs were appreciating that at the moment.
Groaning, he forced himself up and out of the flames, but they clung to his skin. Even leaving the pool of blood, he couldn’t escape the heat. It sunk into his very bones, but it wasn’t enough to keep him down, not when the fight was still happening over his head.
Pain. I can deal with that. Mana, fully topped up. Essence, completely gone. No system. No clothes, again. Can I still use my skills?
A thought was all it took to summon a spear to his hand. He was whole. He had his skills. He could fight. A little burning from the inside out wasn’t going to stop him.
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Thank you, system person, or whoever you were.
* * *
That was why he’d kept her suppressed for so long. It was the only way to keep control of her. The fact that she’d slipped steadily into insanity with each passing decade had made it all the more imperative that he keep her on a tight leash.
The latest infusion of essence—partially skimmed from the former deceased, no less—had pushed her to even greater heights. He’d adopted a water serpent form to help combat the heat and the flames, but it was a losing proposition. Ten minutes ago, he would have said it was unthinkable, but he might actually have to retreat to his hoard and access his armory.
Then the human started climbing into the air, a spear in his hand and trailing golden fire, and Reisha felt an unwelcome tingle of fear. That last attack had been beyond dangerous, and if Eslaka had been free to attack him then, he might not have been able to dodge it. If the human could do it again, Reisha would be in trouble.
He’s definitely weaker now, though. Eslaka took a chunk of his essence, and whatever he did, he likely won’t be able to do it again.
He channeled even more mana into the brewing storm clouds sweeping around them. They were thick and black after barely a minute of work, and they’d break any second now. Weather magic was difficult, both because it was complicated and because it required a lot of heavy magical lifting, but once it got momentum, it could be trusted to roll forward on that alone.
That wouldn’t be enough to stop Eslaka’s flames—even her damned blood was on fire, making it painful to bite or claw her—but every little bit helped. In the meantime, he kept pushing out an aura of pure ice while simultaneously shocking her with lightning bolts as they flew around each other. She retaliated with a variety of fire-based spells bolstered by wind magic.
He sent a few stray bolts down at the ground, hoping to fry the human quickly, but that shell of elemental dampening he held around him combined with his body’s strange ability to eat the mana right out of any spell he got near severely dampened the power of Reisha’s attacks. That was why he’d resorted to a nakigin form to kill the human the first time, but that was going to be a lot harder to do again unless he could get Eslaka out of the fight for a few seconds.
Battles at this level were mostly about attrition, and Eslaka was worse to fight than most. It wasn’t that she was inexhaustible, it was that it was in her nature to revitalize herself frequently and quickly. Twice now, she’d been put down, only to rise back up again a minute later. The fact that she was completely mad didn’t help either. The psychological tolls of prolonged combat just made her more unpredictable and harder to deal with.
Flaming talons scored a line of hot pain down the side of Reisha’s face as she went for his eyes again, and he retaliated with a blast of pure, unstructured magic that washed over her. Fire spilled across the sky, thrown off her body as his counter ripped through her, but new fire ignited in its place.
The storm broke, sending sheets of rain down through the Gold Spire. They’d crashed through several floors, killed probably a few thousand monsters incidentally, and completely destroyed basically everything Zelamir had spent centuries experimenting on, and now all of that was about to be washed away by flash floods. If Reisha was lucky, the water would finish off the impossibly-alive human, too.
He leashed the lightning of the storm to his will, spawning dozens of bolts to hammer Eslaka with. “Do you see?” he roared out. “My power! You can’t stand against this. Submit yourself.”
She was so far gone into her madness that her answer was nothing but an incoherent scream and a sudden updraft of gale-force winds that threw the storm back in his face. The spray of water instantly froze, weighing him down with a shell of ice, but also helping to blunt the heat of her flames.
The human was gone, and that was a bad thing.
Reisha felt a spike of dread at losing track of the man. He needed the human right in plain sight so he could kill him whenever he got a convenient moment. Reisha didn’t think for a second he’d gotten lucky enough for the storm to finish the man off, not if he’d survived everything else that had happened in the last five minutes, including being literally bisected.
He caught a fluctuation in the lightning as a few stray lines veered off course to flow through seemingly nothing. There you are! He was about to turn and smash the upstart faux-divine beast, but Eslaka chose that exact moment to breathe out a super-heated beam of liquid white fire that splashed across Reisha’s face.
It burned him and, more importantly, distracted him. Once again, he lost track of the human, just for a split second. But that was enough. He felt something strike him just behind his skull, a cold prick from an icy sliver. It was a tiny wound, as far as things went, but it sent a shiver rippling through his whole body.
Then something blasted through him, and his whole world went black. Reisha tried to cry out in anguish, but he couldn’t get the sound out through his mouth. He tried to convulse, to pull away from that frigid shard of torment lodged in his skull, but it just went with him. He thrashed and suffered, a silent wail rolling through him and unable to be voiced.
There was nothing left to focus on. No light. No sound.
Just pain.