Chapter 2417 |
Shal thrust his spear forward, cutting through the waves of dangerous radiation. Energy splashed outward in every direction. The spearhead began to sizzle and melt, but his image was sharp enough that he could cut through the dangerous environment and take another step forward.
He didn’t even have enough time to suck in a breath before the next wave of energy came. He could only grip his teeth and unleash another spear thrust. He ignored the growing ache in his knees and attacked.
Shal had abandoned one of his most important connections in the pursuit of power. He had also given up on the image that had allowed him to overcome the Second Calamity of his home world. He had discarded everything, desperately clawing his way to the Pinnacle, and it had backfired. Now he had only a new image. He tempered on the fly.
And the knowledge that a single mistake now would doom him.
But he also had a crazed dedication to continue to advance, despite his weakness. After talking for so long with the Monarch of Karma, all his emotions had settled. He had a brief moment of clarity. Despite the mistakes he had made in the past, despite severing the relationship, Shal did not want to walk away. He arrived at the decision and it lit a fire in his chest. He burned with his resolve.
Despite the danger, he stalked toward the core danger of the Nexus, creating just enough of an opening for his feet. A single failure meant he would be annihilated. But despite the danger, Shal felt at peace, for the first time in a long time.
But it was very easy to feel at peace with such a constant source of distraction.
His muscles ached and his consciousness began to blur at the edges. He had spent so much effort and he only reached the edge of the danger zone, the air filled with cracking significance and time that would gladly devour him. He could only fold his tension and apply it to the edge of his spear.
He released a hissing breath and thrust another spear forward. The strike created an opening by forcing back another wave of energy. But as he pulled the spear back, the goopy spearhead wiggled and snapped off. For a split second, Shal froze. His mind went blank, unable to decide how to proceed. He did not have a replacement spear. If he tried to retreat without a weapon, the waves he had braved to reach this point would rip the flesh from his bones. After struggling for so long and giving his attention fully to the toil, a single stumble was enough to completely floor him.
Shal’s instincts took over even while his mind remained in turmoil. Without a spearhead, he took another step forward and thrust out his spear. As he did so, his will condensed at the head of his spear shaft, his Willpower practically incendiary as he poured it into the fires of his resolve. It became an arrowhead-shaped snake head. The snake’s eyes gleamed as it considered its target.
Shal thrust again, almost relieved to once more settle into this habit.
The wave of radiation shattered to pieces. His will trembled but held as the spearhead. And compared to his previous strikes, this was a superior result-- The vacated space in the radiation was enough for Shal to suck in several breaths and recover a bit of his focus. But after a few moments of precious time, the radiation came back, frothing and dangerous. Shal gritted his teeth.
I have walked this far. I can continue.
He thrust out his spear. The features of the snakehead sharpened as they experienced the baptism of the dangerous energies. His understanding of his own image deepened. The details became increasingly exquisite.
He thrust again, his hands trembling. An energy wave shattered, but there was another hiding close behind the first. He barely had enough time to loosen his grip and flex his hands before he needed to thrust again. Although his image sharpened with every attack, the balance of the thrusts began to waver. A sliver of destructive energy slithered past and cleanly annihilated the pinky of Shal’s right hand.
He could only grit his teeth, ignore the blood dribbling on the ground, and thrust again.
Shal’s resolve burned. Yet he could feel his body steadily failing. With pressure on every side, his disciplined movements began to falter.
It’s always like this. After completing a thrust with his entire being concentrated into it, his head buzzed. The process of refining the thrust still remained easy, but he began to feel like his mortal life held him back. While the snakehead became increasingly lifelike, with glittering amber eyes that regarded even this destructive radiation storm with derision, his body felt wan and drained. I can advance, but the further I go, the more I lose myself. And then, in the heat of passion, I make decisions almost whimsically. My self vanishes and I damage my own foundation. Why am I so broken? Why…!
He barely managed to steady himself in time for another thrust. And again, his balance was slightly off. The brush of the destructive energy scalded his arms and shredded the skin of his left forearm.
Shal hissed in pain, even as his body moved cleanly into the next thrust. He bit his lip as he passed through one more wave of this chosen tribulation. He had chosen to walk into the maw of hell and now he could feel the looming presence of his own mortality.
Yet he thrust, and thrust, and thrust. Desperation added speed to his movement, which briefly covered the flaws in his form. After the third thrust, he advanced enough to encounter another new variable.
The air in front of Shal seemed to glitter; he had neared a mystical barrier in the dangerous energy, a swirling current that formed between a place of increased pressure. For a split second, he wavered. The hesitation set off another wave of recrimination and self-hatred; Shal wondered how it was possible to move through life without becoming lost. Yet his hands tightened again on the spear. He burned with the desire to advance and didn’t question it. Even if his mind hesitated, his body knew the Path forward.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The snakehead at the top of his weapon released an ominous hiss as his image sharpened even further, to the point it resembled the image he had used to defeat Tellus’s Second Calamity. Power burned through his arms, searing his veins, exploding out through his hands. It was an attack that contained the concentrated essence of not only his resolve but his frustrations.
His spear pierced through the barrier and the source of these horrific waves of energy was revealed-
The gaping wound of Pine’s absence loomed in the sky, crushing all comers and sucking oxygen out of the air. Its presence cracked against Shal’s ribs and evaporated the sweat on his brow. The flame in his chest that had been driving him forward ebbed and began to weaken underneath that onslaught. A storm dozens of times more powerful than what he had fought so far churned in the sky. His sweaty fingers loosened and the tip of his spear touched the ground.
A dozen waves of pressure crashed against one another, rushing to drown him from every side.
Even beyond the waves of dangerous energy, Shal felt… strange. His consciousness bobbed and dipped, floating away. His grip on his spear loosened even more until the shaft almost slipped off the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t just here and now, he was in a thousand places, in a thousand positions, his memories manifesting organically. If he felt lost before, existing within the half-remembered lives he had lived left him completely isolated-
“Shal. Exactly because you cannot see a way forward, you cannot stop advancing or else you will be lost. You taught me that.”
With a single word, all the waves calmed. Within that resonant voice, a had grasped Shal and pulled him back from almost all of the memories.
Almost all. But in some, this figure was the central character.
A figure appeared, a figure cut from some of the half-surrendered memories plaguing Shal, grown sharp and tall. Randidly Ghosthound, his black hair ruffled, his eyes direct and confident, his shoulders high and wide, looked at him as though he was the only individual in the world. Just his presence alone stifled all that pressure Shal had struggled for so long to overcome. He could see the lines of his clothes, but he also appeared somehow boundless and ethereal, more mirage than man.
In one life, Shal had been this inestimable man’s teacher. They had fought together and saved Tellus.
In another, the imagined life, Shal had never met Randidly Ghosthound. Without the bond between them, Shal had been forced to make his own improvements. Perhaps because he hadn’t been imparting his father’s moves to anyone, he had instead chosen to sharpen his own image in a unique direction.
Yet when comparing the two…
…why did the warm image he had honed due to his student and his brother seem so much more precious?
Randidly tilted his head to the side. “Are you alright? How did you make it here? Your image…”
Shal blinked, woken from his thoughts. Gradually, all those confusing impressions faded. Shal smiled. He raised his spear and brandished it as casually as he could, trying to hide the trembling in his arms. “I thrust and eventually the path opened before me. It is the only reliable method I know.”
Randidly snorted and shook his head, much of the tension falling away from his expression. But when he next looked at Shal, his face seemed solemn and vulnerable. He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself. “About what happened-”
“I have made a horrible mistake,” Shal said, his heart wrenching to watch this powerful individual be so conflicted. He lowered his head. In a very real way, the horrible sense of being not good enough that plagued his whole life also manifested here, in being so emotionally weak he decided had to cast aside relationships in order to pursue power. “I… Well, it’s probably difficult for you to understand my mindset. When nothing I had tried worked, I decided to try… anything.”
The storm roared and crashed above. Yet the noise was distance. It could not approach this reunion.
“No,” Randidly Ghosthound spoke very quietly. “I understand completely. How you felt stuck in place. How nothing you did felt like it mattered. And how you understood that without power, this would be your limit. It is a simple thing to follow the Path in front of you. It’s another entirely to keep trying when every direction you look shows you a wall. So many times… I would have failed, if not for your lessons.”
“You… understand…?” Shal couldn’t help but be puzzled. When Randidly referenced the lessons, Shal felt a strange flickering in his chest. He couldn’t actually remember their interactions, but he could image remembering. He imagined that perfect moment when his Wraith Adder image had come into focus. When he had broken through with his potential and earned a ticket to the Path to the Pinnacle.
“Even now.” Chuckling, Randidly shrugged. “It’s kinda hard to believe, right? If I had to give an explanation… it’s not that I’ve stopped bumping against walls… just different things have become walls to me.” As he spoke, he twisted and looked up at Pine in the sky, an orb of darkness that swallowed almost the entire horizon.
“I really am so sorry,” Shal whispered. “I hope… you can find forgiveness, for this old spearman. No, I do not even deserve that term. I am just a man who tries to use the spear.”
Randidly nodded slowly. His eyes twinkled as amusement drifted out across his features. “You know, people always talk about how much easier it is to destroy than to build. And that is true. But… in terms of the passage of time, the requirements for destruction are so much harder. If you take the first of ten thousand steps toward destroying something, you’ve barely done anything at all. But just by taking the first step to build and create-”
Randidly held out his hand. “...you are already on the right Path. A man who wields a spear can become anything; even someone able to defeat a Spearman with ease. Of course, I forgive you. If not for you, I would not have been able to make it this far, Shal. You… shattered our bond. The significance between us was scattered. But I have not forgotten that day I walked into the Safe Zone and saw you meditating in the pool: the Creature sculpted me to become a Vessel, but every good thing I’ve used to fill that Vessel came from you.”
When they shook hands, tears formed in the corner of Shal’s humanoid eyes. Even his third eye stirred slightly. Shal brought his other hand around and gripped Randidly’s warm and strong hand with both of his, shaking it partly from the complex storm in his heart, partly because his exhausted body had started constantly trembling. His heart bled. All of a sudden he began to weep.
The vast gulf of what had once been stills yawned between them. The easy connection they had possessed, even while Shal had fought as a member of the Swacc Family, no longer existed. Yet it was also true that some of the pressure had eased. Now that the way forward was possible, the anguish of Shal’s heart seeped away with his tears. Action had poked a hole in his grief. With the gurgling flame of resolve refusing to be smothered, he would steadily begin to heal.
“Stubbornness,” Shal sniffed. “That is the only thing a fool like me could teach you. Stubbornness to the point of masochism.”
Randidly clicked his tongue but didn’t deny it. “Turns out, in that particular area, I had almost infinite potential.”
Eventually, both men took a step back. But Randidly’s gaze sharpened. “There is not much time remaining for me before I need to go. So Shal, I want to ask you for a favor. Please lend me the fires of your unwillingness. In exchange, I’ll show you just how much your stubbornness can accomplish.”
