Chapter 13: Chapter 13 — Light vs. Darkness
I launched forward with a pair of explosive strides, bending my knees and tightening my guard just the way Mike Tyson would have before unloading a devastating hook.
BOOM!
The impact thundered like a dry lightning strike, but that damn slab of rotten meat reacted with unnatural speed, blocking the path of my fist with the haft of his enormous scythe.
Still, it wasn’t a wasted move. The mystical white-light effect enveloping the divine gauntlets crackled violently on contact, searing the dead wood and forcing the Lich a step backward.
Hsssss—CRACKLE!
"Die, you putrid bastard!" I roared, seizing the imbalance.
BOOM! BOOM!
I stormed in with a frenzied combination—a relentless barrage of straights and hooks seeking to demolish his defense. The air filled with the stench of ozone and charred flesh every time the light from my gauntlets so much as grazed his dark robes.
Fwoosh... sizzle...
Dollmun, however, was no common enemy. In the midst of the exchange, he spun the scythe in a rising circular motion, unleashing a horizontal slash aimed at carving through my ribs.
I felt the whistle of death pass a hair’s breadth from my abdomen as I arched my spine backward, dodging by pure instinct before springing toward the rear to reclaim space.
Shiiing—WHOOSH!
Seeing me retreat, the Lich wasted no time. He began swinging his weapon, launching projectiles of black magic that sliced through the air in my direction. They were unstable bursts of violet energy that hummed with menace.
Zzzzt—Zzzzt—Zzzzt!
I barely managed to weave from side to side to evade them; from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of one of those projectiles slamming into the solid stone wall of the sanctum, punching clean through and dissolving the rock like melted butter.
CRASH—hissssss...
Every time I tried to close the distance and return to hand-to-hand combat, the bastard unleashed a fresh barrier of energy slashes.
I lost focus for a microsecond, miscalculating the trajectory of a violet arc, and the edge of the energy caught me across the left forearm.
It was a shallow cut—barely a line—but I immediately experienced a searing, burrowing pain. The skin around the wound began to blacken, turning viscous and giving off a stench of decay that crawled toward my elbow. Necrosis was eating me alive.
Sssss—squelch...
"So that’s how it is?" I growled through clenched teeth.
Understanding the lethality of his magic perfectly, I closed my left fist and evoked the purifying light residing in the core of the gauntlets. An incandescent flash wrapped around my arm, instantly evaporating the dark infection. The putrefaction process halted dead, leaving my skin intact.
Fwoooom!
It worked, but the damn imbecile gave me no respite. Exploiting my brief pause, he continued bombarding me with violet energy projectiles while phasing in and out of the sanctum’s shadows, attacking from unpredictable flanks.
The situation became infuriating; the chamber’s darkness played to his favor and I had lost the initiative in the fight.
Zzzt—Zzzt—Zzzt!
In a blink, a blast grazed my left ear. It came within a razor’s edge of taking my head off. If I hadn’t reacted by pure system-honed reflex, my journey through this world would have ended right there, decapitated atop an obsidian altar.
I had to get serious immediately. I couldn’t win this just trading blows like a brute; I needed to flush him out of hiding, to force him to play by my rules. I had to plan well and deploy my best current weapon: his mental instability.
I began leaping from side to side, using the agility of my enhanced stats to dodge the violet projectiles bursting apart behind me, all while forcing a mocking grin and screaming at the top of my lungs:
"You seriously gonna act like a fucking coward, Dollmun? Look at yourself, hiding in the shadows like a frightened rat! Don’t tell me all the dark lords in this world are this pathetic. If so, this trip’s gonna be fucking boring."
BOOM! BOOM! — projectiles detonating against the walls behind me.
The bait was devoured instantly. The bombardment ceased abruptly. The silence of the sanctum shattered as a dense tide of scarlet and black aura began to bleed from the temple’s darkest corners, concentrating at the center of the chamber.
"I am not a dark lord! I am not like them! I am not like them!" Dollmun’s voice resonated, repeating the phrase over and over like a fucking lunatic. His tone see-sawed between infantile sobbing and the roar of a wounded beast.
I smiled inwardly. He had just exposed a colossal weakness—a trauma or a complex that completely obliterated his tactical composure.
"From this side, you look exactly like one," I taunted, keeping the divine gauntlets blazing. "I mean, you use dark magic, you hurl rotten shit projectiles, and your presence reeks like a textbook fucking dark lord. You’re identical to them."
"You lie! I am not a dark lord!" he bellowed, unleashing an inhuman shriek that rattled the obsidian walls. "I am not like them! I am better! I am superior! I am Dollmun, the one and only lord of flesh and pestilence!"
SKREEEE—RUMBLE!
Who the hell was he referring to with "them"? Was there an actual faction of dark lords in this world?
Well, at that moment I didn’t give a damn about the geopolitical lore of this place. The only relevant thing was that I had achieved my first objective: driving him completely insane and making him abandon the safety of the shadows.
Now, it was time to execute the second step.
I sprinted at maximum speed straight toward his position. The putrefied bastard, his face unhinged and his eyes shot through with an insane crimson glow, raised the scythe ready to split me in two in a blind fury attack.
Right at the instant the weapon descended, I tilted my body to the side, executing a perfect feint that left him selling air.
WHOOSH—
He was completely exposed.
"Take this, you damn wretch!"
I rode the momentum and connected a brutal, white-light-imbued uppercut directly into his exposed jaw.
CRRRAAACK!
The impact was so devastating that the Lich’s lower jaw—composed of ancient bone and necrotic flesh—detonated into fragments, spraying dark fluids through the air.
Splat!
But I gave him no time to recover or even scream.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
I unleashed a torrential rain of hooks and savage blows. I drove a straight right into the elbow of his main arm; the bone crunched and split in half, sending the enormous scythe clattering to the floor with a metallic echo.
CRUNCH—CLANG!
I didn’t stop. I continued hammering his body with punches charged with the maximum purity of light energy, one after another, shattering his flesh armor and searing his cursed tissues without the slightest trace of respite.
Crack... squelch... sizzle...
Feeling cornered, the bastard attempted a desperate counterattack. With a sickening crunch, two additional limbs burst from the sides of his back—wet, glistening, newborn arms tearing through rotting robes.
RIIIP—SQUELCH!
From the palms of those new appendages, two highly concentrated spheres of violet energy began condensing, crackling with unstable power.
BZZZZZT...
Before he could launch them, I took an explosive leap forward, executing a mid-air somersault that positioned me directly above him. Using gravity to my advantage, I unloaded a tremendous descending axe kick, driving my heel square into the center of his bald skull.
THOOOM!
The impact pile-drove him straight into the ground, fracturing the obsidian beneath him.
CRACK—rumble!
Seizing his total disorientation and nullified reflexes, I landed on him, seized both newborn arms with my divine gauntlets, and with a brutal, stats-enhanced wrench, tore them clean off at the root.
RIIIIIP—SQUELCH!
A jet of thick black fluid erupted from the stumps, splattering across the altar and my boots.
Splaaaaash!
Dollmun tried to crawl, to keep fighting with whatever little he had left, but I drove a dry elbow strike into the base of his skull that flattened him completely. I mounted his torso, pinning him down, and began pummeling what remained of him with unleashed fury.
THUD!
"This is for the twins you kept strung up like cattle," I said, unloading the first punch that caved in his cheekbone.
CRUNCH!
"This is for their father, for their mother..."
BOOM! I delivered another blow that disintegrated his shark teeth.
CRACK—splatter!
"...And this is for every single fucking life you’ve ruined over these four hundred years!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
I kept punching, over and over, rhythmically and brutally, until his face—once a mass of squirming maggots and dead skin—became nothing but a shapeless pulp of gore and stagnant black fluids.
The bastard possessed absurd vitality due to his undead nature; he was still breathing agonizingly. Without showing a shred of mercy, I directed my fists straight into his chest, perforating the rotted ribs with clean, devastating impacts until I left his core completely exposed: a translucent violet sphere pulsing weakly at the center of his thoracic cage.
CRUNCH—crack... squelch...
Thump... thump... thump...
I stopped, keeping my left fist suspended mere millimeters from the gem, wreathed in white sparks.
Dollmun—or whatever remained of his consciousness—emitted an agonized whisper through the ruins of his throat:
"Kill me... disintegrate me... once and for all..."
I sketched a twisted smile, savoring his absolute defeat to its fullest.
"Kill you? Who the fuck told you I’d give you an easy way out? What, didn’t you hear me properly out there when I warned you that if I won, you’d become my personal bitch?"
I tore my gaze from the Lich for a second and addressed the interface floating at the edge of my vision.
"Hey, system, can I forcibly transmute this bastard using my gauntlets and the available energy?"
The system screen emerged instantly with a bluish glow:
Ding!
[Response: Yes. Forced transmutation of the target’s essence is possible due to its critical degradation state and the influence of divine energy.]
"Perfect," I said in a dark voice.
I laid the palm of my right gauntlet directly over the monster’s ruined face and ordered flatly:
"Do it."
Fwooooosh—BOOOOM!
An incandescent, blinding white light erupted from my hand, engulfing the Lich’s entire body. The sanctum filled with a sound like raw meat thrown into boiling oil.
Sssssssizzle—CRACKLE!
Dollmun began to convulse, burning alive under the influx of sacred energy that was reconfiguring his very structure on a spiritual and physical level. His shrieks—no longer words, just raw, static-laced agony—bounced off the obsidian walls as his flesh bubbled, popped, and sloughed away in steaming chunks.
The light grew brighter, more relentless, until the shrieking stopped and all that remained was the pulsating core being rewired, remade, bound by unbreakable divine chains visible only to the soul.
The sanctum fell silent. The white glow subsided, and where the Lich had once lain broken, something new began to stir in the settling ash.
Comments