Dalisso swiftly closed the gate once the group of humans were ejected through it. He shifted several times, moving all his legs over and over again in trepidation.
"I did what you asked." He said with a quivering voice.
For many seconds there was only silence, though, but then it was interrupted by the sound of footsteps, not long after the figure of a small boy made his way into the room.
He was young, very young, he could not have been more than a decade old. He had a golden, sun-kissed complexion, and messy light-brown curls over his head. His face was covered in freckles, his eyes were of a bright amber hue, and his pupils… his pupils shone bright gold, as if two small suns were inside it, exactly like Vyswe'eyaga's eyes were.
The boy studied the Anansi for what felt an eternity for him, then at the spot the gate and the humans had once been, his face an unreadable mask.
"Good."
The boy walked over the Anansi, until they were standing facing each other. Despite Dalisso being over twenty metres high, looming over the tiny kid who could not have been more than a metre tall, he felt so impossibly small before him.
He did not know why, but the moment he had found this boy—initially with the intention to eat him for his daring act of trespassing in his territory—his instincts had warned him that he was not an entity to be messed with. It was a feeling closely similar to the one he had every time he was in the presence of Mother. But the boy was human. He was sure of it from the way his feeble Spiritual essence flowed in his body.
Then why did it feel like he was standing in front of a being infinitely more powerful than he was?
He moved back slightly.
"You see. Things become so much simpler when you comply. Was that so hard to do?"
"N-No," he answered after some hesitation, "Can… Can you leave now?"
The boy raised an eyebrow.
"Why so hasty? We have time, Or is it…" The boy's eyes shone dangerously, making all Dalisso's hair stand on end. "You wouldn't be hiding something from me, would you?"
Dalisso squirmed, moving another step back.
"O-Of course not."
The boy did not say another word; he only hummed softly as he observed the spider some more. Then he walked out of the room.
Dalisso stepped aside to let him pass, and hurriedly followed after him, but not too quickly. The boy was walking at a mind-numbingly slow pace through the gigantic corridors of his abode, yet he had to force himself to walk just as slowly. It was an awkward thing to do, with him being this gigantic and having many more legs than the boy.
Dalisso had given up on the idea to use Spatial Arrays to mislead the boy in his home, they would abnormally fail to active every time when he tried to. He suspected that the boy was somehow capable to override it, that would explain how he was able to roam in his domain without his notice.
"Did you know?" The boy said softly as he walked. "Long, long ago, on another continent, there were two kingdoms. They were thriving and powerful, and the people lived lives of security and abundance. Their breakthroughs in both technology and sorcery would have no doubt made them as advanced a society as Nchāre once was—No, they would have unquestionably surpassed us in half a millennia top."
The boy fell silent for a few seconds before releasing a heavy sigh.
"Do you know why they do not exist anymore?" He asked, glancing behind.
"Ummh… Because… They were stupid?"
"…Well, you are not completely wrong." He looked forward again. "The leaders of those kingdoms became conceited; they began believing themselves above everything, and that nothing could be barred from their reach, they feared nothing and no one… Well, except each other. So before setting their eyes any higher, the leaders decided that their equally powerful neighbour needed to go. Thus, a long war began."
Dalisso waited patiently as the boy seemed to silently contemplate on something. If he had to be honest; he was slightly interested by his story. He had never heard of two kingdoms as supposedly powerful as the Nchāren had been. Perhaps mother knew about it… But then again they must not have lasted long enough for her to remember them, contrary to the Nchāre civilization which lasted for over ten thousand years.
"In the years ensuing the war, one of the kingdoms accidentally found a method to mutate the genes of slimes. They were among the rarer set of unimpressive mystical beast—barely sentient and almost mundane in nature. Their only notable trait was their uncanny ability to adapt to virtually any environment they inhabited."
The boy's voice became grim. "To this day I do not know what kind of esoteric art they used to achieve that result, but what is now known as the Moyibi Nkam was born. This… twisted evolution of the slime became far more than just a resilient creature. Not only could it thrive in any environment, but it also developed a terrifying ability to assimilate the genetic traits of any living being it came into contact with. Worse still, it learns… Can you imagine? A creature capable of grasping sorcery within a mere day of its creation—mastering and wielding spells of unimaginable complexity within a week, leave it a month, and it could battle the strongest, most seasoned sorcerers. Not only that, but a single one could spawn dozens of replicas, all able to wield sorcery with alarming efficiency."
Dalisso felt shills run all over his body, having understood where the boy was going. H-He knows about them…
"They were not ready for what they had created, they had no idea how to control it, and when they finally understood just how powerful a creature it was, it was far too late… and they were far too outnumbered. And just like that, two kingdoms with a promising future came to ruin."
The boy stopped in his tracks, standing before two massive doors. It was the only room Dalisso had bothered to keep closed, and warded so heavily, after all, he was keeping something very precious and interesting inside.
The boy extended his arm, and in his palm, materialized a long staff. It was ancient and weathered, wrapped in a worn-out translucent purple fabric. The base of the staff was slender, no thicker than a thumb, but it widened toward the top, resembling a branch that had been cut from a tree.
The staff was far taller than the child, yet he wielded it with a confident practised ease that defied his youth and stature. Its size was no burden to him—rather, it felt like an extension of his very being.
The boy made a simple movement with his staff and the doors slammed open. He calmly entered the gigantic chamber, and was met by four people.
One was a tall slender young man with white hair, pale white skin, and dark brown eyes. The second was another young man, just as tall as the previous one but with a bit more muscle to his frame, and a smooth dark skin. The third figure was that of a woman, she had a deep brown skin, full lips inked black, a voluptuous frame. The pupils of her chestnut eyes shone of a bright gold, a glaring giveaway of her Nchāren lineage.
The last person was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by the other three, it was a man but there was something wrong with his body. A silvery-white goo was writhing on the left side of his face, the same went for his lower body, which was barely distinguishable. But slowly, oh so slowly, the silver sludge was aggregating itself and changing colour to form the missing parts of the man's body.
"You have one job," the boy said, as he penetrated further inside, "keep this Subspace from collapsing."
The incomplete man was the first to notice the young boy, and as if bound by an invisible connection, the rest turned toward him in unison.
There was a brief moment silence as the opponents assessed each other. Then the quiet shattered into a deafening cacophony. In a split second, the copy of the pyrokinetic unleashed torrents of flames which were further enhanced by the white man's swirling winds. Simultaneously, Vyswe'eyaga's copy summoned forth a devastating beam of spiritual essence—a radiant column of energy as massive as Dalisso's entire torso. The sheer intensity of its aura was spine-chilling, radiating an overwhelming force that promised nothing but annihilation.
The spells streaked through the air, converging on the motionless figure of the boy with an ear-splitting blast, the ground trembled as big chunks of the floor were torn apart, scattering like shrapnel, and thick plumes of smoke billowed upward.
The attack had been so strong that Dalisso felt the weave of his pocket dimension weaken a bit, still, it was nothing he could not mend with ease.
He turned a wary glance the group of doppelgangers. Not only were their spells already this strong, but they had casted it so fast that it could not have been possible to prepare a shield in time. Would the boy really be alright?
And yet…
As the smoke cleared, it revealed a massive crater carved into the ground. And, at its very centre stood the boy, utterly unscathed—not a single speck of dust marred his clothes. He was encased in an immaculate, unblemished, translucent white shield which he had somehow managed to summon in time.
Dalisso was perplexed. He had witnessed no chanting, nor had he sensed any fluctuations in his Spiritual essence, which was strange as even when casting silent spells, or when one's essence was suppressed or concealed, there would still be subtle, if even faint, changes to its form.
It was as if the shield had just pop into existence, without any intervention from the boy.
How curious.
Without a word, the boy started floating upward, only stopping when he was several metres above all of them. And already the Moyibi Nkam was preparing another attack, using the doubles of two mean, it conjured over their hands a massive javelin of scorching blue flames radiating so much heat that it distorted the very air. It went flying straight at the boy.
He pointed his staff at the incoming attack and the javelin simply disappeared, somehow smothered out of existence. Several powerful beams of energy were shot seconds later, he swung his staff, and they seem to ricochet on an invisible wall back at them.
The floor trembled again as deep pits were formed. Dalisso hissed, the weave of his dimensional space was starting to unravel, those beams had been a lot more powerful than the previous one.
Focusing back the at the replicas amidst the destruction, Dalisso saw a wide shield hovering in front of them, but the shield was not in good state. It was cracked and broken, clearly it had not been able to withstand the attacks of its own caster. And with the shield having failed to protect them, the doppelgangers stood wounded, heavily wounded.
The Vyswe'eyaga's double lost her right hand, along with part of her torso. The white man had a giant hole where his abdomen was supposed to be, silvery-white goo was from it. While the flame-thrower had no head at all.
Before, these types of wounds were enough to put down the Moyibi Nkam's duplicates. It appears not to be the case anymore. Their wounds were mending, and their obliterated body parts were reconstructing.
The boy frowned slightly, then pointed his staff at them as a crackling blue orb was concentrating at the tip.
"Stop!" A voice croaked.
The voice came from the man who had been kneeling on the floor. Now standing tall, he looked identical to the whining man who had been accompanying the pyrokinetic across his domain. His voice had been low, barely audible, it sounded like the voice of someone who had not spoken for a long, long time.
In spite of that, the command it had carried felt heavy and absolute, plunging the chamber in a deafening silence. The boy froze in place, the spell he had been crafting unravelling into nothingness. Even Dalisso found himself unable to move, he tried over and over again to move at least one of his legs, but his body refused to obey him.
It then dawned on him whose identity he had have mimicked, feeling dread take over his body. He and the boy were doomed, weren't they?
"Annoying." The boy grunted.
How? How was he able to speak when Dalisso himself could not even move his lungs to breath?!
The boy raised his staff above his head, looking grimly at the doppelgangers below him. "Let's end this quickly, shall we?"
Dalisso tasted metal in his mouth, then he felt his hair stand on end. Sparks began to dance above the boy's staff, flickering with untamed energy. In moments, they surged outward, twisting and spreading into enormous arcs of electricity that crackled and illuminated the space around him, and destroying everywhere they landed.
Dalisso groaned—He could move now, it seemed—the amount of essence radiating from that spell was too much. If this went on he would not be able to prevent the pocket dimension from crumbling.
The Moyibi Nkam did not stay idle either; it unleashed a relentless barrage of attacks, each strike more powerful than the last, all in a desperate attempt to disrupt the boy's spell. But it was of no use, the boy was blocking each and every one of them while the electric arcs around him grew wider and more devastating with each passing moment.
"Humm?"
Dalisso's eyes narrowed at something peculiar. The electric arcs… Every time a stray one managed to come too close to one of the replicas, their bodies would turn silver and fall apart, as if the Moyibi Nkam lost the ability to maintain their forms.
The man from earlier raised his head. "Sto—"
"—Poket shi'a."
Thunder roared so violently that Dalisso felt his guts vibrating as well as his hair quivering. In an instant the entire room was submerged by a blinding white light, leaving Dalisso blind and disoriented.
As the seconds ticked by, his vision began to return in patches, though blurry and distorted. He fell on the floor.
He took in his surroundings when his vision and the rest of his senses became clearer, and what he saw left him reeling.
More than half the room was gone, with only the space where he and the boy were left somewhat intact. As for the Moyibi Nkam, nothing remained of it or its clones.
The boy had effectively vapourised it out of existence.
Dalisso sighed—Internally, of course, he did not have a human mouth to actually sigh—His Subspace… it was falling apart. That spell had been too powerful, it had destroyed more weave of the pocket dimension than he was repairing them, now it was just a matter of time before the space imploded on itself.
There was nothing else he could do.
"Stop moping." The boy descended toward him.
"Take it as a lesson; do not keep everything and anything you see roaming about. Especially human beings. Understood?"
He cringed at the boy's pointed glare.
It was not like he meant anything bad; he just wanted to know more about the Nchāren civilization, he would have never harmed or mistreated Vyswe'eyaga—he had even considered to also keep that other female so that she may have a friend to play with.
As for the Moyibi Nkam, he was just curious about what the extent of its abilities. How could he have known that the copies it made could grow ten times more powerful than their original?
He shuddered a bit. Thankfully, his minions had not managed to draw blood from those other humans, specifically that tall one with the spear. One was already enough.
"Yes... Sir."
"Good." He turned around, but hesitated a second before glancing back at Dalisso, "sorry… about your home."
Then he vanished.