Chương 30: Overhyped

Aram wasn't calm anymore. He moved through the ruined chapel, flattening everything in his path like a madman. It seemed my shot earlier had severely angered him. But as I watched him closely from the darkness, I realized he wasn't just blindly lashing out. He was only flattening structures large enough for me to hide behind—ignoring the smaller debris. If he were truly blinded by rage, he wouldn't be this calculating. He was controlling himself, highly wary of overexerting himself.

"Why are you hiding?" he shouted, his voice vibrating with power.

"Come out, if you dare!" Aram had stooped low enough to use cheap provocations. I was furious, and God knew I wanted nothing more than to punch him right in his arrogant face, but I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it. I hopped near the broken remains of Strange Toy. Reaching out, I picked up three sharp metal shards from its shattered blade. I threw them toward Aram like frisbees. Aram heard the sharp whoosh they made through the air and snapped his head toward them.

Instantly, all three metal shards stopped dead in mid-air and dropped harmlessly to the ground.

"The same tricks won't work on me again," he sneered, floating toward my general direction. I vanished into the next shadow. But I had found what I sought. In that brief instant, I had noticed something. There was a slight, almost imperceptible delay when the metal pieces stopped. It was only milliseconds, and I never would have caught it if it weren't for my heightened perception due to Fulgur's Blood. The metal shards had been flying straight at him, rotating rapidly.

Aram had stopped their forward advance first, and then, a fraction of a second later, their rotation ceased. He couldn't negate two different types of motion simultaneously. He had a cognitive bottleneck. To stop an attack, his brain had to actively process and negate linear kinetic energy, and then separately process and negate rotational kinetic energy. This was a flaw I could exploit. But a new problem had risen. Aram had learned the mechanics of my power.

He knew them from the time at waste disposal facility, when I was running from Strange Toy. That's why he had anticipated my first strike. Now, he was glaring at every single shadow within his twelve-meter range, keeping absolute attention on the dark spots. I couldn't run at him, and I couldn't emerge from a shadow right next to him. He was ready to flatten me the second I materialized. But I had been in this exact situation before.

When I fought Kach, she too had learned the rules of my powers, and I had exploited her overconfidence. I formulated a plan. I only needed to execute it flawlessly—I only had one chance. If I pulled this off on the first try, it would go down as the most overhyped boss fight of all time. Still hiding in the darkness, I pulled out a bottle of Second Wind.

My magika reserves had been growing exponentially simply because of how often I had been completely draining them—which wasn't safe at all—but they still weren't deep enough to handle my constant spamming of skills. I drank it down. A relaxing, icy breeze traveled through my veins, filling my magika back to the brim. I gently set the empty bottle down, careful not to make a sound.

Briefly, a stray thought crossed my mind: Why am I able to hop with these medicine bottles, but couldn't carry those metal pieces before? Was the System just deliberately trying to make my fights harder? I didn't have time to follow that trail of thought. I pushed it aside and focused on the task at hand. I channeled my magika into Ghost Laugh and recorded another eerie distraction. I knew Aram wouldn't completely fall for it twice, but it was a necessary misdirection.

As the laugh echoed off the far wall, I hopped again, appearing behind a heavily cracked, burning statue of an angel. I chose this specific spot for a reason: it was one of the main source of light casting Aram's current shadow, and the stone was fractured enough for me to knock it over. I focused heavily on Shadowstride, letting the shadow reinforce my muscles, and punched the base of the statue. The cracks spiderwebbed outward, but it didn't fall. I punched it again. Aram noticed the sound.

I could sense his attention snapping toward me through shadowstride. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. I punched it a third time, and the massive stone angel tipped over. The lighting in the room violently shifted, causing wild, elongated shadows to dance across the chapel walls. In the chaos of the shifting light, I picked up a piece of broken ivory and hurled it straight at him. Aram reacted instantly.

He negated the stone's forward momentum, it dropped on the floor. He tracked his moving shadow, expecting me to emerge from it, while simultaneously keeping an on the shadow casted by the thrown piece of ivory. He waited but I did not come. He was so focused on the shadows below that he did not notice the shadow flying towards him. It him in the back of his head. He turned around in anger. He had just said he won't fall for the same trick twice, yet he did.

He looked for me in anger, completely forgetting that the stone I just threw will also cast a shadow. I emerged from it. Before he could even process that I had bypassed his line of sight, I twisted my hips and drove a reinforced punch directly into his face. It was a brutally solid hit. Blood sprayed, and one of his pristine white teeth snapped out of his mouth. But it wasn't enough.

At the very last millisecond, Aram managed to cast his negation, killing the majority of the momentum behind my fist and saving his skull from caving in. His eyes flared with absolute fury. I could feel the crushing weight of gravity beginning to amplify around me as he prepared to negate my normal force and flatten me into paste. There was a millisecond of delay—not enough time for me to pull my fist back for another punch, but just enough time for me to activate a skill. It was a massive gamble.

I dropped my focus on Shadowstride, instantly losing my reinforced muscles and exposing my fragile human body to his incoming gravity well. If Aram was just a fraction of a second faster, I was dead. But he wasn't. I poured every ounce of my remaining magika into Rotary Rend. My extended arm violently seized. The muscles in my forearm tore with a sickening ripping sound as they were forced into an unnatural, high-speed spin. My bones groaned, threatening to snap.

But the violent centrifugal rotation didn't just stay in my arm—because my fist was still pressed against Aram's cheek, the raw torque transferred directly into him. His face contorted into a horrifying vortex of flesh. Before his brain could even form the thought to negate rotational momentum, the centrifugal force hijacked his body. The skin on his cheek violently peeled back under the sheer pressure. The hidden black sludge pooling beneath his eye oozed out, mixing with a spray of blood.

Aram let out a bloodcurdling scream of pure agony as the sheer kinetic torque caught his entire body, violently spinning him in the air like a ragdoll caught in a turbine. He rotated with sickening speed, his equilibrium completely shattered, before the force slammed him headfirst into the cracked stone floor. The screaming stopped. He wasn't dead, but he was deeply unconscious, his body broken and bleeding on the floor. After everything he had done to Lania and the other children, he absolutely deserved death.

But as I stood over him, clutching my completely mangled right arm, I couldn't bring myself to finish him off. Why? Because despite his god complex, he still looked entirely human. The girls had killed Orand and Moark without hesitation because they had the resolve to survive. I didn't have that resolve yet. I wasn't strong enough to execute a human being in cold blood. I gritted my teeth against the blinding pain in my arm and hopped to appear beside the raised stone dais.

The massive glass container was now half-full of that abyssal black liquid. Forcing through the agony, I activated Rotary Rend once again and punched the tank. The thick glass shattered outward. The black liquid flowed out in a heavy wave, instantly disabling the sparking machinery beneath it. The siphoning process died with a mechanical whine. The leftover fumes in the air reversed direction, drifting gently down from the ceiling and flowing back into the broken shards of Strange Toy.

Slowly, the wood began to pull itself back together. I rushed to the altar, ignoring my injuries. I violently tore away Lania's leather bindings and ripped the thick black tubes out of her back. I cradled her head, gently trying to wake her up. When she didn't respond, I pulled out a bottle of Golden Hearth Nectar with my good hand and carefully tipped it past her lips. The deep scratches and burns on her skin slowly stitched themselves back together.

Her still broken finger healed, but she didn't regain consciousness. Even in her sleep, her brow was furrowed in distress, her body still instinctively trying to use her powers to protect her toy. I gently laid her down on the stone and sat back, desperately gasping for breath. I had won. I had beaten Aram, stopped the machine, and helped the kids escape. Maybe I shouldn't have thought that. Because at that exact moment, a low, wet growl echoed through the silent chapel.

I turned my head to look at the spot where Aram had been lying just a moment ago. He was unconscious. And because he was unconscious, he was no longer able to actively negate the expansion of the black sludge resting inside his body. The miracle drug was taking over. Aram the Consumed Aram believed he had controlled the black sludge through sheer willpower and a god complex. But the miracle drug was never truly tamed; it was only held at bay by his consciousness.

The moment his consciousness shattered, the sludge claimed him, twisting his flesh into a vessel of hunger. Recorded in the Akashic system in the year 2000000. The black sludge erupted from his right eye, violently expanding and covering the entire right side of his face. His arms elongated, the bones snapping and reshaping as the sludge hardened into thick, jagged armor over his pristine white robes. His jaw unhinged, dropping into a grotesque, distorted maw filled with dark, oozing fluid.

I stared at the horrifying, mutated monstrosity rising from the floor, a thought crossed my mind. How the hell did he sleep at night without this happening? The monster let out another ear-piercing growl, its remaining human eye locking dead onto me.