Chapter 73: The Color That Devours
The world had narrowed to the space between the road and the advancing nothingness. The Shadow-Wurm's glide was hypnotic, a tide of erasure that consumed the forest without a sound. Trees, ferns, light, everything simply vanished into its wake, leaving behind a stark, grey void that seemed to suck the very hope from the air.
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.9%]
The number was a brand on my soul. But beneath the terror, a cold, analytical part of my mind, the part that had chosen Ki Control in a featureless void, was working.
It's analyzing a non-System threat, I thought, the realization a lightning strike in the storm of my fear. It's not just for the missions. It works out here, in the real world.
The utility of it was staggering. This was more than a post-mission report card; it was a real-time threat assessment suite. It had just told me that fighting was a statistical synonym for suicide. It was a feature I hadn't known I had, and in this moment, it was the most valuable weapon in my arsenal.
Now if only it would tell me how to kill the fucking thing, I thought, a spike of frantic anger piercing the cold dread.
"Back up! Slowly!" I barked, my voice cutting through the paralyzing silence. "Do not run. Do not make loud noises!"
The servants, white-faced and trembling, began to pull on the reins, coaxing the terrified horses backward. The wagons creaked, the sound obscenely loud in the unnatural hush. Briza had dismounted, her sword held in a two-handed grip, her knuckles bone-white. She wasn't looking at me with suspicion anymore; she was looking to me for a plan. Laron was frozen on his wagon seat, his long ears flat against his head, his whole body shaking.
The Wurm kept coming. It was maybe thirty yards away now. The air grew frigid, and a strange, high-pitched whine, felt more than heard, started to vibrate in the back of my teeth. The two points of void-light were locked on our caravan.
"Kaizen," Briza whispered, the name a plea.
"I see it," I said, my mind racing. It was an Aberration. A ghost? A demon? My sword was solid steel. Would it even connect?
There was only one way to find out. The 0.9% wasn't going to improve by waiting.
"Create a distraction on my signal," I hissed at Briza. "A shout, a bang, anything. Just get its attention for a second."
She gave a sharp, tight nod.
I didn't wait. I pushed Ki into my legs, not for a flashy leap, but for silent, explosive speed. I burst from the road, angling to the side, moving parallel to the Wurm rather than directly at it. The moss swallowed my footfalls. My senses were hyper-tuned, the world moving in slow motion. I could see every shift in the Wurm's tar-like surface, every ripple of its non-form.
Twenty yards. The dead zone was spreading, the grey void creeping towards the road's edge like a stain.
I closed in from its flank, a classic pincer maneuver against an enemy that probably didn't understand tactics. I picked my spot, a thicker, more coherent-looking section of its body, hoping it was some kind of core.
I drew my shadow-iron sword. The familiar weight was a comfort. I poured Ki into the blade, not knowing if it would do anything, but needing to try. The grey steel didn't glow, but it seemed to hum, the air around it shimmering slightly with heat.
Now! I thought, and as if she'd heard me, Briza let out a fierce, guttural battle cry and slammed the flat of her blade against the metal rim of a wagon wheel. The CLANG was a physical shockwave in the silent forest.
The Wurm's forward glide hesitated. Those twin voids of its attention swiveled towards the sound, towards the road.
It was the opening I needed.
I erupted from the cover of a withering bush, my body a coiled spring of enhanced muscle and Ki. I put everything I had into a single, perfect thrust, aiming to drive the humming point of my sword deep into the Aberration's side.
The strike was true.
And it was useless.
My sword did not meet resistance. It did not slice or pierce. The moment the tip touched the shifting black surface, the Ki-infused steel… unmade.
It wasn't melted or broken. It was erased. A foot of my brand-new, five-thousand-Pele sword, from the tip backward, simply ceased to exist. There was no flash, no sound, no heat. One moment it was shadow-iron, the next, it was nothing. The effect traveled up the blade for another few inches before stopping, leaving me holding a useless, shortened stump.
The feedback was psychic, not physical. A wave of nullity, of absolute nothing, shot up the blade and into my arm. It wasn't pain; it was the absence of sensation, the negation of existence. It felt like a part of my soul had been scooped out and replaced with void.
I gasped, stumbling backward, my mind reeling from the violation. My Ki, which had been flowing smoothly, spasmed and recoiled from the contact, flickering wildly inside me.
The Wurm, barely inconvenienced, slowly turned its attention from the noisy distraction back to the little thing that had just tickled it. Me.
One of those half-formed pseudopods, a limb of living darkness, lashed out. It wasn't fast, but it didn't need to be. It moved with the inevitability of a glacier. I threw myself sideways, the null-limb passing so close to my face that the skin on my cheek went numb and cold, as if frostbitten by absolute zero.
I hit the ground and rolled, coming up with the shattered remnant of my sword. Desperation clawed at my throat. Think! What hurts it?
[ANALYSIS UPDATE: PHYSICAL AND DIRECT ATTACKS INEFFECTIVE.
ENTITY DISRUPTS MATTER AND LOW-GRADE ENERGY FIELDS ON CONTACT.]
"Low-grade energy fields…" I muttered, scrambling backward as the Wurm resumed its advance, now clearly focused on me. My Ki was "low-grade." My sword was "matter." It had answers, but no solutions. It was a doctor telling me I was terminally ill without offering a cure.
Briza, seeing my failed attack, didn't hesitate. With a roar of defiance, she charged from the other side, her own blade held high. She was brave. She was also doomed.
"Briza, no! Don't let it touch your steel!" I yelled.
It was too late. She brought her sword down in a mighty, cleaving arc aimed at what passed for the creature's 'head'. The result was identical. A third of her blade vanished into nothingness the moment it made contact. The null-feedback jarred her entire body. She cried out, not in pain, but in shock and disorientation, stumbling and dropping the useless hilt.
The Wurm ignored her, its focus absolute. It was on me.
I was its primary target now. The one who had dared to strike it.
It loomed over me, a wall of hungry, devouring darkness. The two void-eyes stared down, and in them, I saw no malice, no anger. Only a profound, cosmic indifference. We were not enemies; we were stains to be cleaned.
A larger pseudopod, thicker than my torso, formed from its mass. This one wasn't a lash; it was a slow, deliberate press, meant to engulf, to erase. It descended towards me, and I knew with absolute certainty that my leather armor, my skin, my bones, would offer no more resistance than my sword had. I would be unmade. A footnote in the System's logs: Host Kaizen - Deleted by Aberration.
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.2%]
The number flickered, a final, mocking countdown.
I was out of ideas. Out of weapons. Out of space.
The grey void of its wake was at my heels. The press of its limb was inches from my face. The numbing cold was already leaching the life from my flesh.
This was it. Not a glorious battle against a goblin chief or a beast horde, but a silent, ignoble deletion at the hands of a thing that shouldn't exist.
I had survived the System's tutorials only to be erased on a simple guild escort mission.
The thought was so bitterly ironic that a laugh, raw and hopeless, escaped my lips as the darkness descended to swallow me whole.
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