Chương 123: Chapter 317: Saved by the Serpent

When William Oh shows up, the scene goes quiet, like quarreling children when an adult enters the room. Jason Salazar Arkesh the Mind-Conqueror had followed William Oh up from the Seventh to the Tenth Floor, where he had enjoyed the brief respite of three years. Currently, he was having lunch in his favorite restaurant. The fact that it was the only restaurant in the Stronghold was irrelevant. In all my years as an Immortal serpent, nothing could have prepared me…for fish tacos.

"I never knew you could do so much with just corn and tomatoes," Arkesh the said as Sally cheerfully readied up another tortilla for him.

"Aw, thanks, hon, but don't forget, salt, onions and jalapenos are doing a lot of the work too." The matronly woman who had just opened up the Burned Stronghold's first restaurant said, fixing a plate of the delicious tacos in the blink of an eye, sliding it across the bar such that the clay plate slid to a stop right in front of him on the finely polished wood. Arkesh unhinged his jaw and swallowed the taco whole, enjoying the way the fried corn tortilla crunched like the bones of prey as it slid down his gullet.

"Arkesh, you've always got such a great appetite." Sally said, beaming.

"Another?" Arkesh nodded mid-swallow, producing another one of the human gold coins and sliding it across the table. Sally seamlessly pocketed it and produced another pair of tacos in the time it took Arkesh to finish swallowing. Gold coins had relatively low value on this Floor, but it was enough to buy a pair of tacos. Human portion sizes left much to be desired, but the flavors they were able to achieve just by mixing things together and applying heat in the proper manner were nothing short of miraculous.

I might be able to delay dying for a few more centuries simply learning how to reproduce these delicacies. He would need to scale it up in order to bring the human art of 'cooking' to the Immortal Serpents. Perhaps if I heat up boulders, cover them in salt and herbs and use them to stuff megafauna, then bury them in the ground to reach the appropriate temperature. That might work. I will no longer be known as Arkesh the mind-Conqueror, I will be Arkesh of Pico de Gallo. Heh. Rolls off the tongue nicely.

I guess that's a decent back-up plan if William Oh doesn't wind up making it all the way. Will had settled down here the last three years, not really making any moves, and when he went up to the seventeenth Floor, Arkesh had been tempted to tag along, but it wasn't the proper time yet. It was when the sky was torn asunder at the end of the Coil that the young man would be forced to make his way up The Tower, and Arkesh wanted to see personally what was up there on the fiftieth Floor.

Maybe it was Ouroboros in the flesh. A Third-generation molt like himself had actually been born a few Floors below the current Fiftieth, and had never been strong enough to see what was up there with his own eyes, and each coil and each new life pushed him further and further away from that mystic place. As a way to entertain himself before his inevitable rebirth, watching the Last Sand in the Hourglass was something interesting he'd never tried before.

"Oops, looks like we're out of fish cuts, one moment sweetheart," Sally said, taking out a knife from the block and pulling out one of the larger slabs of oasis flatfish from the magical cooler at her feet.

"No problem," Arkesh said around his second plate of tacos, giving a thumbs-up. Sally lifted up the slab of fish with a grunt, placed her arm on top of the slab and proceeded to cleave her hand off at the wrist.

"Oops, butterfingers." Sally said, sawing through to the slab of fish without flinching, her hand tumbling off onto the floor unnoticed. She tried making him a taco, but her right hand being gone seemed not to register, trying to pick up the ingredients with the missing hand, blood squirting with her heartbeat slowly coating the chef's entire workspace.

"Fish is slippery today," Sally mused.

"…Sally, your hand's been cut off." Arkesh said.

"Huh. So it has." Sally said, blinking, her reaction obviously dampened by some force at work in her mind.

"Sally? Sally. Look into my eyes." Arkesh said. Sally glanced up and met his gaze, allowing Arkesh to jump across the bridge. In a moment, he was in her inner world. Her mind was a serene forest with various foodstuffs growing from the branches. There was even a cooked chicken hanging from a stem like an oversized apple.

A blinding fog had manifested inside Sally's forest, clouding her mind while a sinister fungus spread across the ground, creating string-like protrusions that puppeted her body while she was unaware.

"Sally?" Arkesh asked, spotting the portly woman in the mist, where she was diligently making fish tacos, her hands moving swiftly across the partially-manifested workstation.

"Hmm…what is it, sweetheart?" the brown-haired woman asked, glancing up at him. With a wave of his hand, Arkesh dispersed the fog crowding in around their legs.

"Oh my, where are…where are we?"

"Look down," Arkesh said, dispersing the table full of ingredients that was the immediate focus of her mind.

"Hmm…oh, what's this?" Sally asked as she bent down to peer at the pale strings cris-crossing the forest floor of her mind.

"It's an infestation. Burn it out with this." Arkesh said, handing Sally a lit torch.

"…If you say so, sweetheart." Sally said, kneeling down and touching the torch to the pale strands, gasping in surprise as they began burning merrily, as though they'd been soaked in lamp oil. Arkesh nodded in satisfaction and jumped back across the bridge to the real world.

"Oh, OH! Oh my, WHAT HAPPENED!?" Sally cried, her voice growing higher as she regained her senses, clutching her bleeding stump.

"I gotta go check something Sally. Could be important. Will you be okay?"

"Please, this is the Tenth Floor. I've had worse than this," Sally said, wrapping a towel around her truncated wrist.

"Something screwy is obviously happening. If you fix it, I'll make you a free plate of fish tacos.

"Free fish tacos for a week." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"One day and no more."

"Deal. Let's shake on it." Arkesh said, extending his hand only to be met with a flat stare by the proprietress as she kept the pressure on her wrist.

"Get out of here before I bust your ass, sweetheart." The Advanced Class chef said with a saccharine sweet tone.

"Fair enough." Arkesh said, dislodging his beard from the sticky table before heading out into the street. Everywhere he looked were citizens of William Oh's Stronghold standing around the street with a dazed expression, the one thing they all had in common was a missing hand and profuse bleeding. They'll probably live, on account of their Resistance, but this is…very odd. Each and every one of them who he peered into was suffering from an identical mind-control.

"Has everyone been acting strange the lest few days?" Arkesh mused aloud as he walked down the street towards where the explosions were happening in the distance. Being a snake, Arkesh didn't really know what kind of behavior was considered 'Normal'. Humans went and dug up rocks and people gave them little bits of gold for the rocks which could then be exchanged for tacos. He really couldn't predict their strangeness, but everyone cutting off their own hands at the same time while under mind control…

that was probably out of the ordinary for them.

"Now, you and every single one of your copies, kill yours-""Ahem," Arkesh cleared his throat upon reaching the source of the commotion, where a yellow-haired human was using mind control on a young woman.

"Would you mind terribly letting everyone go so they can patch themselves up?" Arkesh asked.

"Marv, kill him." The meatier-looking human beside the yellow-haired one leapt forward, sporting a confident grin as he strode towards Arkesh, his gaze locked onto Arkesh. Well, if he's going to welcome me like that, it would be rude not to take advantage. The Immortal Serpent leapt across the bridge between the two of them. Marv's mind was a worn tavern made of wood that had been weakened by years of rot. It had a sickly sour smell of rancid beer and the pungent odor of stale sex.

Marv was leaning back in a chair made of stained pillows, sharpening an axe.

"Pardon me," Arkesh said, resuming his real form and wrapping his coils around the slovenly mercenary, squeezing him until the light left his eyes. As the tavern's light began flickering out, Arkesh leapt back across the bridge before he became trapped in a dying mind. In the real world, the warrior's nose gushed blood and his eyes rolled back in his head an instant before he toppled to the ground.

"Shit, everyone, kill him!" the yellow-hair shouted before turning and sprinting away without even bothering to see the result of his command. Arkesh resumed his full size in an instant, his clothes shredding as he ballooned outward, shoving dozens of Climbers aside as he dominated the central square. Ow, ow, ow, ow. Arkesh thought as all the Climbers jumped on him and started stabbing.

Thankfully most of them were missing their primary hand, and didn't have the presence of mind to use Abilities, so he was able to absorb the damage with sheer bulk. But it still hurt. The Charm user must've identified Arkesh because he didn't bother to hang around or fight, only running. Buildings were crushed and entire streets were rearranged as the chase ensued across the Burned Stronghold.

At some point, a brass band manifested on Arkesh's back and played an upbeat song that covered the roar of collapsing stone buildings as he chased Yellow-hair through the Stronghold. The little bastard was extra cautious of Arkesh's eyes, and managed to avoid looking directly into them as he scampered from building to building. It was a few minutes into the chase when things started going poorly.

The young woman that he'd saved had been gradually gaining size, and before he knew it, a team of them were tugging his nose around and preventing him from following yellow-hair. The girls flesh fused together and they formed a human chain, stringing themselves around Arkesh and squeezing. It would be better if she were on my side, Arkesh thought. He returned to his humanoid form, causing the ring of young women to collapse to the ground as his gargantuan neck simply ceased to exist.

Because of how quickly he shrank down, Arkesh was falling too, only an arm's length away from one of the young women who had previously been strangling him. He grabbed her face and aligned his gaze with hers, jumping across the bridge in that instant. An old woman walked through a catacomb. The walls had arched holes in them that might've stored skeletons, but in this girl's mind, they stored the corpses of young women.

Younger versions of herself who lay in narrow slots dug into the walls in the shape of an oven, staring lifelessly at the ceiling of their stone coffins. Occasionally the old woman would stop and reach towards one of the women laying in the ovens, and they would shimmer and burn, turning into a book that she pulled out and flip through momentarily.

In that brief moment of contact, the old woman would age just a bit more before she returned the book to its resting place, where it would turn back to a young woman's corpse. A few minutes of this went by before the old woman paused, seemingly listening to something before she climbed into an empty oven/coffin and burned up while one of the young corpses came to life and resumed the march through the endless catacombs, rapidly aging as she searched for her true self. … Okay, this seems complicated, Arkesh mused.

He dispersed the obscuring mist around her ankles and handed her a torch to burn the fungus spreading unseen through her mind before hopping back across the bridge. A moment later, the dozens of fused young women blinked and returned to rationality, healing themselves and turning their attention towards protecting Arkesh from the horde of Climbers aiming for his hide. The tables turned again, and with this troubled young woman's help they were able to corner the yellow-haired Charm user.

"I'm so close! Protect me!" he shouted before leaping up to the top of the walls of the Burned Stronghold. In the distance, Arkesh could make out the crystal giants, peeking over the mountainside, gawking at the sudden commotion inside the Stronghold. As a small army of Climbers pushed Arkesh back, the yellow-haired Charm user shouted, his voice becoming thunderous.

"Giants! Take whatever weapons that you have at hand and kill yourselves! If you don't have a weapon, use the weapon of whoever goes before you!" The giants glanced at each other and shrugged, climbing back down the mountain without any sign that they'd heard him, despite his voice being strong enough to echo off the mountains.

"Get him!" the young woman shouted, and the brass band began playing in earnest as Arkesh moved to gently crush the several dozen or so mind-controlled Climbers before Yellow-hair did anything worse.

"What's going on here?" A raspy voice asked. There was a… man standing beside yellow hair, unnoticed until this very moment. The brass band let out a shrill squawk, sputtered and vanished. Arkesh found himself holding his breath, and the mind-controlled Climbers stopped stabbing him and merely stared with slack jaws. For a timeless heartbeat, the chaotic Stronghold fell silent as its Lord returned. William Oh looked… rather worse for wear.

The young man's veins had turned bright, glowing blue, his body appeared to be lumpy and warped under his clothes, and his neck seemed to have scales growing. He wobbled on his feet like someone inches away from death, and yet… no one dared to make a move. The aura of danger that radiated off of him was something that Arkesh could taste. Yellow-hair pushed through the strange aura of menace billowing off the Lord and spoke first.

"William Oh, I've taken the vast majority of your Stronghold under my control. Go and slaughter the giants for me and I'll let them go." Arkesh saw several dozen mind-control Abilities shatter against Will as Yellow-hair was speaking, undercutting the man's confident façade. Willliam Oh hacked up some bloody phlegm and looked like he was about to throw up, staring at the ground and wobbling on his feet. After a moment, his gaze returned to yellow-hair.

"…No." William Oh's voice was raspy, as though his vocal cords had been damaged somehow.

"I'm sure you've gotten word from your Tangled about the situation. One word from me and every citizen of your Stronghold dies." At a gesture from Yellow-hair, all the Stronghold's Climbers held their weapons to their own necks. William Oh cleared his throat and spoke, his words coming out raspy and a bit plump, like someone with a severe sore throat had also bitten their tongue.

"You don't have to do this." Will said.

"I'm afraid I do. My mission is not something I can just give up on halfway, especially not when I'm so close to success. I respect that you gave yourself the worst case of acclimation sickness I've ever seen in a desperate bid to rush down from the seventeenth Floor, but your're in no condition to fight me. If you're willing to throw away your body for your Stronghold, then surely a few dozen giants would be no issue?"

"No, you don't get it," Will said.

"You really don't have to do this. One second." A brown furry lump of something appeared in Will's hand and he held it up for Yellow-hair to get a good look at it.

"I didn't get acclimation sickness coming down from the Seventeenth Floor. I got it coming up from the Second Floor," William Oh said, brandishing what Arkesh now realized was a severed head.

"Is this the guy who tasked you with attacking my Stronghold? If he's dead you don't have to keep fighting, yeah?"

"Th-that's an illusion!" The Charm user said, sounding a little desperate.

"You couldn't have possibly gone to the second Floor and back, let alone killed Marksman, so you must be bluffing!"

"Worthless even after he's dead," Will groaned, tossing aside the severed head before he twirled his finger. Yellow hair's head spun completely around on his shoulders and his body dropped to the ground an instant later. That aura of menace is real, Arkesh thought. Will had enhanced his Class in a way that had given him power far beyond what he had when he first set off for the seventeenth Floor.

"Any left?" Will rasped. Arkesh and the girl riding on him shook their heads.

"Anybody die?" They shook their heads again.

"Great job everybody. I'mma pass out now." William Oh toppled over onto his side, unconscious before he hit the stone.