Poom! Poom! Poom!
In the next heartbeat, the female nightmare raised her hand, and immediately a huge black tendril shot from the black waters.
Its speed was terrifying in nature that Snappy had no chance to move, but luckily Idel pushed him out of the way with a shoulder tackle, taking the impact of the tendril head-on.
"Freak!" Snappy, on the ground, rumbled.
"Stay focused." Idel struggled with the tendril. Then in a second, it turned into a bowl-like structure that concealed him and moved forward, trying to push him off the cliff.
Before Snappy could analyze what happened, a tendril shot towards him.
He rolled to the side, barely avoiding its pointed end. And with a fist, he punched the tendril, breaking it into pieces.
The pieces fell and disintegrated into black smoke.
Snappy nervously grinned. He got up and took out a bottle from the rucksack. It was transparent, revealing black liquid.
Four more tendrils shot out and attacked him like swords.
The first one aimed for his neck; he dodged… as he opened the cap of the bottle.
He dodged another that aimed for his thigh by means of sidestepping. Then came a flurry of attacks from all four, each trying to rip off either his limbs or head.
However, Snappy managed to dodge them all, with only scratch marks being left on the targets… honestly, he could consider himself lucky, as the female nightmare was at the same time trying to push Idel off the cliff and sustain the portals from which disfigured nightmares clawed out.
Either way, he didn't care; this was the opportunity he had been waiting for. He put all his weight behind his fist and thrust it to the slow tendrils, breaking each one of them.
Then, quickly, he poured the liquid on the ground and took out a matchbox from the rucksack and ignited a flame on the matchstick.
Coming to a realization of what Snappy wanted to do, the female nightmare launched out four tendrils, all aiming to stop the ignited stick from touching the ground… meeting the petrol!
Snappy tossed it in the air as the tendrils were aiming for the ground. He tightened his muscles and met the tendrils in an exchange of hits, all the while the matchstick gyrating downwards between the two, its tender yellow flame small but invaluable to this battle.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The attacks kept coming, each leading to Snappy becoming exhausted, and this realization sat in. To achieve his goal, he needed to do something stupid… and stupid he was.
He caught two tendrils in one hand and one in the other, then he let the fourth strike him in the stomach, piercing through.
"Good." He rolled with them to the right, just outside the reach of the falling ignited flame.
The tendrils in his hand pierced through and slightly lifted him above the ground. Then the female nightmare shot another tendril, this one aimed for the chest… but something was off; this Emontarion was grinning as he stood on the precipice of death.
At this moment, her eyes moved in search of the ignited stick, but it was too late; it was inches away from the petrol-stained ground.
The tendril aimed for Snappy took a detour, trying to stop the ignited stick; alas, it was stopped by Snappy's extended leg. It pierced through and moved towards the stick but was too late… the stick touched ground, and its once tender flame raged on the ground, threatening to consume anything in its way.
Her eyes snapped back to Snappy but were met with the sight of burning tendrils and smoke; the Crazy Emontarion was not there. She looked for a while and finally saw him.
Rising amid the raging flames, his body was healed, and his eyes glowed with intensity and fury, and most annoyingly, he had that stupid smirk on his face.
Seemingly annoyed, the female nightmare launched another attack, similar to her first.
Snappy remained calm, and with a simple gesture, the flames burnt down the bowl-shaped tendril, and then he started to launch his own attack… mockingly, firefly tendrils.
They moved with rage and aimed for the nightmare, and just like that, she was now on the defensive side.
Meanwhile, inside the moving bowl that continuously shot shards, Idel noticed the shards become slower and slower.
'That energy, Snappy must be giving the nightmare a good fight. How surprising.' He smirked. 'Thank you.'
Based on the distance between where he was enclosed to where the end of the cliff was, he knew he had only a few seconds to act… if not, he would fall into the black pit filled with poisoned protruding spikes.
Use force or brains to escape the situation was the question that swirled in his head.
He had no time to do both, so only one would do… and this was the latter.
He stopped resisting and let the bowl push him, then as he saw light beginning to slip in, he ripped one of the shards from the bowl, and when the bowl was a quarter away from falling off the cliff, he slipped out, and with all his might thrust the shard onto the side section of the pit, embedding it there and using it to support his weight.
'Sigh,' he watched the bowl fall into the pit and heard it cracking into pieces. 'Just how many spikes are there? I see why this was used to enforce the death penalty of prisoners. But even so, this was cruel; the king back then was surely ruthless.'
With a leap, he was once again on ground. If he had time, he could have begun thanking fate for giving him a frail body, but the battle was not done.
He saw Snappy pressing against the nightmare and the Hitter now, slowly but surely fending off all the nightmares, and at the same instance, he was, with his lightning, taking down the portals.
Everything was good… or so he thought.