The black creature was getting closer. Darian had stopped near the cliff, looking down. 'The water is strange…' thought Darian. As the steps of the creature drew nearer, he tilted his head, and with a scared look, he realized that soon the creature would reach him. 'It's here…' he thought. The moment Darian reached the dead-end, the creature in front of him started to walk slower, knowing that its prey couldn't escape anymore.
Darian's fingers hovered near his knife. 'Will I be able to deflect its attacks with just this knife? Its blades seem strong…' Darian was about to grab the knife when Snowy jumped off his shoulder and positioned itself near his legs. Snowy didn't speak; he simply looked at Darian, who recognized that look almost immediately, it was the same look the fox had six years ago when they first met.
"I… I don't know if it will work…" said Darian, his hands shaking in fear. But as the footsteps of the creature arrived close, he closed his eyes. 'Calm down, Darian…' he thought. As he opened his eyes again, he looked at Snowy with determination.
"We have no other choice!" shouted Darian. As the creature surpassed the last bush, it was about to strike him, but Snowy jumped into his arm, generating what looked like an explosion of ice that made the creature step back in surprise.
The moment Snowy's body vanished into his arm, Darian felt a crushing weight in his chest, like winter itself had taken root in his lungs. His heartbeat slowed, each thud echoing through ice-filled veins. For a split second, he swore he heard Snowy's voice, not words, but a sharp, urging thought. The cold didn't just crawl under his skin; it became him.
The whiteness didn't stop at his shoulder this time. It raced across his chest like a flash-freeze on a windshield, turning his tan skin into a beautiful, porcelain white. Darian gasped, but the air didn't reach his lungs; it hit a wall of frost in his throat. He was a biological paradox, a living snowman. Inside him, his internal thermometer screamed as it bottomed out at -28°C. By all laws of medicine, his proteins should have denatured and his heart should have stopped. Yet, because of Snowy, he was alive without any issue. His whole body remained intact, keeping his consciousness tethered to a form that was rapidly becoming colder than an iceberg.
'What is happening? Is my body changing?' Darian gasped in surprise. He couldn't understand what was going on, by every rule of human anatomy, his cells should have been undergoing cryolysis, the water inside them expanding into jagged crystals and shredding his membranes from the inside out.
His veins turned blue, but there was no blood in them anymore; there wasn't even snow. The thing that was flowing was solid ice, and his hair had become longer and taken on a new color, they became white and were as hard as ice.
'Woah… it looks so different from last time…' Darian looked all over his body, but as he heard a loud scream, he realized that he didn't have time.
The creature had started to rush again, but now Darian was ready. 'Let's try that another time… but now I can control it.' Darian, with a decisive look, pointed his right arm toward the creature.
"Ice shard!" In front of his palm, exactly where Snowy had fused with Darian, his skin was slightly cracked and literal ice was flowing out of it. As he shouted this word, the thought of creating a shard formed in his mind, and soon enough, it appeared over his arm and was shot at extreme speed toward the black creature.
The shard wasn't as huge as the first one he had created years ago; in fact, it was around 50 cm long, and it fired at an incredible speed. But the monster was ready. Something like that wasn't dangerous for the creature in front of him; the monster simply blocked the attack with its blades.
Darian noticed how its blade-arm didn't just parry his shard; it vibrated with a strong frequency that made the leaves around the enemy shake because of the impact. This wasn't a predator from Earth's fossil record. This was something built for the vacuum of the void, a biological weapon that saw his warmth as a target.
The shard shattered into countless pieces. As the crystals fell to the ground, the creature started to rush toward Darian, destroying the objects under its feet. Darian didn't even have the time to do anything else before the creature, the moment it reached him, slashed its blade forward. 'Just like Aegis had done that time… I can dodge it!' Darian remembered all the times he had seen the robot that came with him to XERBAB-7, and how it dodged the attacks of the most dangerous creatures on that planet.
Darian normally would have never been able to do that, but now that his body was transformed, he was stronger. His body could react as fast as his mind, and with an incredible move, he rolled directly on the ground.
The creature completely missed the attack and was about to lose balance near the dead-end. Darian's body had become faster, but that didn't mean he knew how to control it; in fact, the moment he rolled behind the creature, he almost lost his balance and fell with his butt on the ground.
'I can't afford to get killed by that…' As he pointed his arm once again, the creature tilted its head, but it was too late. Darian had already created the shard in his hands, and it was about to be shot. "Go, Ice shard!" shouted Darian. As the shard was fired, it hit the enemy directly in the stomach, almost making him fall into the water below the cliff.
'He's losing balance…' thought Darian. When the monster was about to regain its balance and strike once more, Darian smirked as he realized he had a brilliant idea. 'You don't seem like someone used to walking on different terrains… let's see how you'll act on ice!'
Darian pointed his arm at the ground. "Radial freeze!" As he created a new attack, the terrain between him and the creature became solid ice. The enemy, not used to walking on ice, lost its balance, and because it was already near the edge of the cliff, it fell off.
As the creature was falling, it tried to grab the wall with its blades, but it was useless; they couldn't reach that far. The strong cry being emitted from the creature soon stopped, turning into the sound of something crushing against a rock.
As Darian peeked over the edge of the cliff, he realized that the creature had been impaled by the rock, and its lifeless body couldn't move anymore as it had a huge hole in its stomach. The thing that scared Darian the most was the fact that most of the organs of the creature were sent everywhere and its blood was black, the same color as its skin.
'Snowy, I don't know if you can hear me… but please don't get out of my arm, I might still need some of your power.' Darian tried to speak directly to Snowy, knowing that if the creature had fused with him, it might be able to hear him too, but no answer arrived. However, to Darian, it felt like Snowy had understood. 'Well… just trust me, I promise I'll bring you out of here alive… even if I don't know where.'
'Are they all black…?' he thought. As he moved his head and returned to his feet, Darian could finally let out a sigh of relief. 'I don't have to think about that… more importantly, what happened here? And to my body…' Darian wanted to look at all the changes his body had received, but as he heard other cries coming from the same direction he had arrived, he snapped back to reality.
'I can't lose any time, I need to find a safe place…' With that, Darian began to run. Hiding in the bushes, he noticed countless other creatures around. Some had the body of a spider, with eight legs all connected to a huge round body which had a horn directly on top of it. Others had a snail shape and were walking extremely slowly, and he noticed more creatures like the one he had just killed.
All around Darian there were countless ruins. As he walked around, there were tons of completely destroyed cities and old cars with some of those creatures on top of them. 'I wonder if they have any other similarities rather than just being all black…' Darian stopped looking at some creatures to see how they acted. 'Strange… are they just standing there?'
As Darian moved to get a better view, he pressed his foot on a branch, creating a small sound. By the time the creatures turned around, Darian had already gone away, breathing heavily.
"Ah… Ah… stupid me… you should not look at them, Darian. You have important things to do… like survive," he said while panting heavily. Suddenly, beneath him, the ground started to shake.
'Is this an earthquake?' Scared, Darian began to look around. But when he realized that the ground shaking under him was getting stronger, he froze in place, terrified. 'It isn't an earthquake. These are footsteps… and they are enormous ones!' Terrified, Darian looked at where the sound was coming from, and that was when he saw it.
"No, no… calm down, I just got here… you can't be serious."
Before him stood something massive. It was all black like the other creatures, but unlike them, it was completely different. Darian had never imagined a monster this huge; it had to be at least 164 feet tall.
It was like a living mountain, he thought. Its body was bizarre, dense and muscular, covered in twisted plates and lined with teeth everywhere. Its main mouth never stopped moving, opening and closing constantly. Inside it, Darian could see even more mouths, claws, and writhing tongues.
He noticed that the creature had two completely different arms. One was enormously strong, muscular, and tipped with massive claws. The other was a chaotic mess of tentacles, twisting and wriggling like maddened serpents.
Then he saw something glowing faintly in its chest. He didn't know what it was, but the giant was getting closer.
The giant took another step, the ground shaking so hard that Darian nearly lost his balance. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, his breath coming in sharp bursts.
Snowy stirred inside his arm, the cold in his body spiking without warning. Before he could think, his arm lashed out on its own. A wave of frost exploded from his hand, racing across the ground toward the monster's legs.
The ice struck, then shattered instantly, like fragile glass against stone. The giant didn't even flinch.
Darian's stomach dropped. If that couldn't hurt it, there was only one option left. He turned and ran.