Chapter 100 – Bloody Duels

AG. This is hopefully a bonus chapter but tomorrow's chapter is going to be tricky to write so that might change.

Tom found himself suspended in the in-between with the familiar message waiting for him.

You are fighting a representative of MAKROS. It has 14 confirmed incapacitations and zero kills.

He inhaled sharply as he read it. Coming in here without a GOD’s shield would have been a bad way to die.

The implications of those numbers were clear. The evil creature he was going to fight did so under the protections of a partial GOD’s shield. In the killer species, it was only the torturers who chose safety, and they only did it because they served a different purpose. It had no kills because of that choice. However, the incapacitations were the equivalent. He had seen natives physically survive, but mentally they had been destroyed. Each of those fourteen incapacitations were effectively a life snuffed out. Worse, the lack of kills meant it was not here to chase coins. It participated to kill people, an assassin that tortured whoever it met with the aim of delivering permanent damage to as many people as it could.

It was evil, and he was about to confront it.

As was his custom, he focused on the arena before the opponent as prior to the duel commencement, observing it told you little. Before that point, the only piece of information available was superficial physical dimensions and in a world of magic and attributes that was more often misleading than helpful.

They were standing on a massive tidal flat after the ocean had retreated. Thick wet sand was packed under his feet with frequent puddles of water none deeper than his knee all around him. The boundaries of their fight were defined by a blue, mostly opaque dome that started about a hundred metres away in every direction. The landscape was consistent for the entire area. There were no dunes or deep water anywhere, just the mostly flat sand and shallow pools of water.

An environment that contained no useful features that he could use to his advantage. Having assessed his surroundings, he focused on his opponent. The native was weird in its normalcy. A bear cub just before it was ready to be weaned off its mother. Its back rose to Tom’s waist and it must have outweighed him by at least three times. Thick brown fur, four legs, a long coiled tail that rested in the hollow of its back and a much too large head for the rest of its body, almost cartoon like it was so out of proportion.

If Tom hadn’t seen the description of what it was, he would have thought it was cute. But such a label could not be applied to a MAKROS murder machine. In his perspective, it went through being cute to what it really was, an unnatural evil.

The fight started, and Tom tried to run, but the world changed. His legs were unresponsive, and his mind felt like it was caught in a velvet covered vice. He recognised that it was a mind attack, but couldn’t perceive its nature.

The enemy was watching him and he could feel the time dilation, but the impact was negligible. This creature physically was only slightly stronger than he was. The realisation didn’t help him because he couldn’t move; it was like he was trapped in a physical illusion. He could order his muscles to lift his foot, and they would respond by tensing as ordered, but that was all they could do because an external pressure was pinning the leg in place.

It was an existence of helplessness. His heart rate spiked, and magic, when he tried to engage it fled from his touch. It was frustrating he tried to trigger Ionised Air, but the attempt failed. Then, when he switched to construct it from raw mana, there was a complete absence of any type of response. Magic was barred from him. If he had been plucked back to earth and physically contained with invisible metal bands across all of his body, then that is what this felt like.

The monster had made him completely helpless.

Tom refused to surrender. He focused on why his magic wasn’t responding, trying to pick through the enemy magic and hoping it was an illusion, because if it was, he had innate abilities to help him with that. His mind concentrated on perceiving what was holding him prisoner.

The bear ambled forward unconcerned by his internal struggle. “You resist power. That is interesting. What are you doing?” Tom was stunned at how slowly it was approaching him. It was more sloth than a springing cat. “Biological based. Great. Chemical, non magical physiology. Rather standard. Oh, only a minorly elevated heart rate. That’s fascinating. Hormonal stress response is present, but not at the level that indicates terror. Absolutely amazing. Do you really think you’re safe? Because that idea amuses me. You honestly believe that a full GOD’s shield can protect you?”

It had now closed so that its snout was almost touching Tom’s stomach. He should have been able to feel or hear its every breath, but he couldn’t. He didn’t even know if the creature breathed in the normal fashion.

“It’s time to get scared. For you to realise how totally screwed you are.”

The tail lashed out, wrapping his throat, and there was a slight stinging pain.

His ability to stand failed him. He could no longer feel his body, but could see the sudden drop as he smashed into the soft sand. His head rang from the impact, and he had to squint because it felt like the sky had gotten brighter.

What had just happened? He tried to work it out. But he was prone on his back and had lost all sensation below his neck. Some type of paralytic poison was his best guess.

“That was unnecessarily crude. Don’t you hate imperfections. But given your resistance to mind attacks, I felt it was necessary. And your evolution has a dangerous vulnerability. A single nerve bundle conveying all critical information is an unnecessary single point of failure.” It was lecturing him like some deranged mono tone professor.

Once more, it shuffled so its head was in Tom’s line of sight. It loomed above him and that large snout descended to sniff his face. “Hm. That’s sloppy. I see that my temporary paralysis also removed pain and feeling.” It tsked and Tom realised it must have just cut him somewhere and his failure to react had been obvious to it. “I can’t have that. Let me fix that right up for you. It’s always interesting to discover how bodies work. For you, some targeted healing and foreign matter should fix you right up. I can reestablish the pain pathways while guaranteeing the inability to exhibit muscular control. There’s not much point in cutting you into pieces if you can’t feel it. Is there?”

The tail was still wrapped around his neck and he could feel a growing tingling sensation all over his body.

“I find it funny that you think a GOD’s shield can protect you from me. I’m very proud to state that two of my incapacitations come from people with full shields. Isn’t that wonderful. Now what I’m going to do is to first cut up your body and then do the same to your soul. It’ll be fun.”

The monster’s focus shifted to his chest, and he felt a sting of pain on his stomach at the same time the GOD’s shield started to draw him away. He could feel the intent. This was pain and it wanted to shield it from him.

Tom instinctively resisted. There was an opportunity here he didn’t want to give up.

Pain was not something he feared, and he had Touch Heal that could mitigate it if he could just reach his mana. But the unreal reality pressed on him. There was no mental link between him and his mana pool. Then again, he didn’t need to be able to touch his magic anymore to cast spells. There was his new trait that could help, if only he could shift the suppression that was occurring to him.

The bear had a powerful ability to prevent him from using his magic, but as he pushed, the restrictions felt more guidelines that steel. Touch Heal was a spell he had mastered in the tutorial and created from scratch in this life. It was a cornerstone of his existence, a source of survival that he knew intimately.

He refused to leave his body. The pain was not yet severe, but it would grow, but he was so close. Almost reluctantly, the GOD’s shield seemed to assess his mental state and then moved to mitigate the emerging issue.

Something clicked and the growing pain vanished.

It was not his magic as such. He was yet to pierce the reality denying ability even if his assault had weakened it somewhat. Instead, the spell activating was his GOD’s shield, plus trait plus his intimacy with the spell combining together. It was mainly the GOD’s shield, but it was also partially him. The alternative reality was not holding him quite as tight as it once had.

The bear peered at him curiously. “You’ve dulled the pain. Interesting. Psychological damage, however, can be done even if no pain is experienced. Are you concerned?” An internal organ floated up into his eyeline. “This dedicated biological growth, I believe has the purpose of removing waste products from your blood.”

“It does,” Tom answered, not at all surprised that its manipulation of his spinal cord had left him the ability to talk. “It’s called a kidney.”

“You know details about your body’s anatomy. That’s fascinating. Most don’t. Well, Mr Doctor is this one vital for functioning?”

“Not really.”

As he watched, it got diced up and shredded and then turned into a red mist a lot of which the bear greedily breathed in. A passing thought occurred to Tom. This was a potential future advantage. With his ability to seal poisons within him, he could create a repository within him. When it blended an organ and sucked in the mist, the substance could knock it unconscious and allow Tom to turn the tables on it.

Another organ he recognised moved into his vision.

“This component pumps blood.” Its eye lowered closer to his presumably wide open chest. “Ah. Removing this was a mistake. The blood flow has stopped.” He met Tom’s eyes. “Really? Your body has no backup for such a critical function? That is a very poor design.”

Tom ignored its annoying prattling, to focus on the magic that was suppressing him. If he could learn to breakthrough its hold, then he could destroy the evil thing quickly. While his efforts weren’t unravelling the magic, he could feel his progress in a similar way to when he was alone in the isolation room with the assassin.

With time, he could beat it.

More and more organs floated past him. Out of all of them, only his heart and lungs were returned. The rest were shredded and the resulting mist sucked into it.

“And this is your soul.”

There was a tug, and then very briefly there was a glowing image of himself directly above him. It survived for less than a second before it collapsed into an amorphous bob with patches of colour on it.   

“It is fun to play with souls.” The bear poked at the image, and Tom felt a chill go through him. To him it felt physical even if he understood it wasn’t. The touch went more directly to his inner self. The bear showed its fangs, which probably meant amusement. “I like that you can feel this. Your pain suppression technique was good. But it can’t help you now.”

“Your soul is interesting and weird.” It declared as it nudged an intense orange colour patch with lighter orange spread around it. “This is a healing spell, with part newly required and significant old potential to be recaptured. Your Spark spell is the same. Conclusion, you’re reincarnated or at least you were not perfectly cleaned between lives. Which one is it? Do you have old memories?”

Tom said nothing, but the quick summation chilled him. He couldn’t believe that his secret had been revealed that easily.

“Do you have unexpected headaches, flashes of memory that you’ve never experienced.”

“Yes,” he answered to put it on the wrong track.

“Ah… that makes sense. This is fascinating, but not what I wanted to see.” It tapped his soul again this time with a different sort of power and there was a strange pressure and tearing and it inverted. In a way nothing had changed. His soul was the same it was just an alternative view that was presented to the outside world. The image was the same shape as previous, basically it was identical apart from the colours. They were different, and there were more of them now.

“Much better. These are your skills and traits. I see you have nothing to save you. That makes it easier. Fun fact. I can’t do anything to spells. Skills, however, are vulnerable.”

Then it started cutting and the instant it did so, Tom found himself outside of his body looking on. The GOD’s shield had plucked him away from the dangerous moment.

Time passed in a funny haze as he watched his body from above. As he did so, he recalled the feeling of that reality illusion that had been cast upon him. The soft but unyielding bonds, the impossible distance it placed between him and his mana and how it had felt slightly fragile at the end. How it had seemed like a single blow could shatter all the constraints. He had made no measurable progress to breaking out of it, but at the same time he was approaching inspiration.

They were in the child bucket. There were probably years left of them butting their heads up against each other and Tom knew for absolute certain that if he could break the reality illusion, then he would be able to butcher the bear. 

Below him, the actions of the evil person changed. Instead of butchering the facsimile of his soul the GOD’s shield had created for it to play with it was working on the physical body. With careful strokes of its tail, it was carving a design. One he had seen a number of times before, a parallelogram pierced by a trident.

Tom knew what he had run into. No one else remembered what it was, but they had all seen the calling card it left. That same design it was carving into his body. This thing had incapacitated three people over the last twelve months and two since Tom had started. It was a menace and now he had an insight into both how to defeat it and what it looked like.

Not this encounter, not the next and maybe even the one after. He was coming for it.

The fight finished, and he stood in the general area. Standing a pace away from a battered-looking Corrine.

His eyes widened.

There were holes in her torso. Wounds that should have been leaking blood that weren’t. The only positive was that there were no marks carved anywhere upon her.

He didn’t wait. Instead, he thrust a hand toward her to try to activate Touch Heal as soon as possible. Part of him was worrying that the barrier to stop them from using healing spells would suddenly apply because what she was suffering was of the fatal variety.

The memory of his challenge to the GODS and his request to DEUS. The way her love had encompassed him. She wouldn’t do this to him. She would help or maybe the rules, due to his proximity to her in real life would let him use his power.

Corrine, despite all of her wounds smiled. It was fragile barely a twitch of one side of her lips, but it was there. “I fucking killed it,” she whispered, and then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed.

Baptiste was shouting and his vines circled her, creating a net that caught her before she hit the hard ground.

His finger finally reached her, and his spell activated.

Time ground almost to a halt as his diagnostics ability kicked in and then slowed further as Throm locked onto him with hostile intent and triggered his other trait. Tom couldn’t even guess how the centipede had known to do that or how it functioned here in the safe zone, but he was glad for the support.

He felt like he possessed unlimited time. The whole world was frozen as his diagnostics magic finished assessing Corrine, and the information about her exact condition flooded into his brain. He couldn’t tell specifically what she had fought, but it was like she had taken a dip into a pool of piranhas. Large chunks of her had been literally eaten and were gone. More than twenty percent of her body mass was missing. It was the equivalent of losing a leg in volume, but all of her limbs were present. The bits had instead been taken from all over her body.

The most pressing issue and why she had fainted was the degree of blood loss. If you were supposed to have ten units flowing through you, she had only one. It was a small miracle, especially with her loss of lung function that she had said what she had.

In the long seconds of frozen time, he planned out how to heal her. The answer was simple. Fix the blood issue first and then patch the other problems. He dumped forty mana into Touch Heal with ten of it being free, which let him mend the cardiovascular network, at least the biggest holes in it.

Then another ten points into Touch Heal along with a free Blood Replenish cast, took her blood pressure from nightmare zombie back to feinting human level.

Colour flooded back to her limbs, and he kept analysing her. She had heart damage, that would deteriorate with every beat. A ten-mana free cast of Heal Organs removed most of that future trouble. Her kidney had been completely removed, and it was the same with sections of her intestines. He could do nothing for the first and any fix of the second would cost her long term, but they were not immediately life-threatening problems, so he made the executive choice to leave it to a classed healer. Most of one of her lungs was gone. Again, that was a problem for someone better than him. There was both numbing and blood thinning venom transferred from whatever had bitten her. The effects were relatively minor, but a free cast of Purge Foreign Contaminant fixed it. Some of her hip bone had been torn away and all the muscle and flesh around it. That too was not his issue to fix. There were so many wounds, but she was stable.

Another ten minutes of work would let him isolate the damaged systems and stop all the bleeding. She would survive.

Vturalta came over, swimming through a water channel that had just appeared. She held up a potion, but Tom waved her away.

Corrine didn’t need that miracle as his spell had already stabilised her.

She would live, and in an hour, this would be a memory to her. But both of them would know how close to dying she had come, and he hoped that she hadn’t been tricked like he almost had.