Chapter 9: Chapter 9 — Putrid Bastard
Absolute darkness became the only thing my eyes were capable of registering. From one second to the next, the dense gray mist of the catacombs vanished, leaving me stranded in the middle of an immense, suffocating black space, a void where the laws of physics seemed not to exist.
"Samira!" I shouted, desperately searching for an answer.
"Dorko! Domack!"
"Runi!"
I called out to my companions over and over, my heart galloping in my chest, but the echo of my own distorted voice was the only thing I got in return.
In that abyss there wasn’t a single soul present, until the silence was interrupted by a dry sound.
SNAP!
I heard that damn finger snap reverberating from nowhere once again. A violent whitish glare blinded me completely and, suddenly, the blackness dissolved to give way to the warmth of a green moor, an idyllic meadow under a clear blue sky that I recognized instantly.
"Harold... are you alright, son?"
A chill ran down my spine. I recognized that voice immediately and spun on my heels, my eyes wide open.
That tone, so soft, maternal, and calm, belonged to my mother.
"Mom...?" I murmured, my voice cracking.
"Yes, of course it’s me. What’s wrong, my boy? Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked, offering me a warm smile.
But my logical brain began to scream in alarm: this was an absolute impossibility. In the first place, I was no longer on Earth, but trapped in the damn system of an isekai dungeon; and in the second place... my mother had died years ago in a tragic car accident.
I still remembered that fateful day with painful clarity: I was just an immature, capricious child, and I had gotten into a stupid argument with her because she hadn’t given me permission to go play at a friend’s house.
Filled with childish, irrational rage, I shouted at her with contempt that I hated her. Right after that outburst of mine, she received an emergency call from her job and had to leave in a hurry. She got into the car and never returned alive.
I remember staying seated by the door for hours, patiently waiting for her return to beg for her forgiveness, but the one who crossed the threshold was my father, his face completely empty, pale, and distraught, bearing the expression of a man whose entire world had ended forever.
My father took it upon himself to raise me alone from that moment on, making enormous sacrifices until I reached the age to become independent and turn into the bitter office worker I used to be. He never shed a shred of resentment toward me, nor blamed me in the slightest for my mom’s tragedy.
Even so, I did. I burdened myself with the guilt of her last words for years, dragging that trauma in silence.
And now, she was standing in front of me in this strange dimension. What kind of twisted nightmare was playing with my mind?
But it was her. Her golden hair, her green eyes, and that porcelain skin made it look as though nothing had changed; my God, she looked young—too young. But it was definitely my mother. I began to sob.
"Mom..." I whispered, reaching a hand out toward her.
Suddenly, a dull, ice-cold pain pierced the center of my chest. Lowering my gaze, I realized that something sharp was crossing my body. It wasn’t a sword; it was my own mother’s arm, which had stretched out like a deformed lance to impale my abdomen.
Squelch...
"mY sOn... aRe YoU... aLrIgHt...?"
Her sweet tone of voice distorted completely, transforming into a guttural, metallic, monstrous frequency. The skin of her features tore violently backward, revealing a mass of rotten, wormy, putrefied flesh that gave off the same fetid stench of black magic.
Despite the monstrosity of her disfigured face, the creature kept speaking to me with false gestures of concern as two thick threads of black blood dripped from her empty eye sockets.
Then, BOOM!
The false landscape of the green meadow and the aberrant apparition suffered a violent fracture, shattering into a thousand transparent pieces as if it were a mirror struck by a hammer.
"What the hell...?" I exclaimed, gasping desperately as I blinked awake.
I checked my abdomen frantically with both hands; my clothes and skin were intact, in perfect condition. There was no blood or physical wounds.
"Master! Snap out of it!" I heard Samira’s firm voice, feeling the warm, soothing weight of her hand placed on my right shoulder.
The illusion had vanished completely. I was back in the grim vaulted chamber of the dungeon, surrounded by the same immobile ash-gray fog that slowed my senses. I brought a hand to my temple, swaying a little, feeling my head extremely dazed and with a stabbing pain.
...
"What... what happened to me?" I asked, trying to focus my gaze.
"You were completely trapped in a Mental Illusion Spell provoked by the dark aura of that bastard on the throne. Fortunately, my spiritual attunement allowed me to interfere and break the spell’s barrier in time; otherwise, your psyche would have been devoured and inflicted with eternal madness by his necromantic power."
At that instant, a small spark of elemental energy manifested in the air and Runi floated out on her own initiative, materializing to perch gently on my free shoulder.
Fwoosh... flicker...
"Master... are you okay? Does anything hurt?" asked the little fire spirit, rubbing her warm body against my cheek with the same innocent, protective tone a small child uses to inquire about their parents’ well-being.
"Yes, Runi... I’m fine now. It was just a bad trip," I replied, forcing a smile to calm her.
"Master, give us the order and we’ll mince that wretch on the throne," Dorko intervened, stepping forward. The great green orc closed his enormous right fist and slammed it with a dull thud against the palm of his bare left hand, making his knuckles crack with pure bloodlust.
CRACK!
"That’s right. That colossal imbecile has dared to desecrate and insult our lord’s mind. We’ll return the favor by smashing every single one of his corrupt bones," added Domack, his grayish body vibrating with the indomitable red aura of a warrior as he delivered two hard, dry blows to his chest to reaffirm his loyalty.
Thump! Thump!
"Come on, Harold, fucking react already. Leave the ghosts of the past behind, take a deep breath, and command your squad like a true summoner," I ordered myself internally, clenching my teeth. I had to take charge of the situation immediately.
Around our perimeter, the gray fog began to stir grotesquely.
Scrape... scratch...
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of skeletal hands, deformed claws, and flayed arms of human and inhuman origin began to sprout from the mist, clawing at the stone slabs in an attempt to drag us down.
Samira, noticing that my fingers were still trembling a little from the trauma’s impact, exerted subtle pressure on my shoulder to transmit her support ether to me.
I inhaled a huge gulp of the stale air, fixing my steady gaze on the vanguard.
"Dorko! Domack! Smash and intercept any damn enemy that dares cross Samira’s flank or mine. And don’t hold back in the slightest!"
"YES, MY MASTER!" both tanks roared in unison, their war cries shaking the foundations of the great hall.
GRRRROOOAAARRR!
As if the wind itself feared their roars, the dense fog partially dissipated from the shockwave of their energy, revealing the true scale of the ambush: hundreds of nightmarish hybrid creatures were marching toward us in a chaotic formation.
The design of those monsters was a total aberration; some combined features of wild beasts with atrophied human torsos, while others were amalgamations of mutated flesh whose mere existence represented a direct offense to the laws of nature.
All of it was the result of the twisted, psychopathic mind of the bastard watching us from the shadows of the dais.
...
"Runi, Flame Sword!" I ordered, extending my bare hands to the front.
"Understood, master! At your command!" exclaimed the little flame with battle enthusiasm.
Runi leaped from my shoulder into my palms and expanded her fiery power in a burst. Her tongues of burning flame molded rapidly, solidifying until taking the form of a dazzling sword of incandescent plasma that illuminated the dark corners of the crypt.
FWOOSH!
I turned my face toward Samira; she had already invoked the flows of her spiritual ether and was wielding her iconic weapon: a large mystical metal ring that, with a fluid twist of her wrist, changed shape instantly until it became an imposing, razor-sharp combat halberd.
Shiiing!
The horde of hybrids lunged at us from every cardinal direction. I took a firm step forward and advanced with determination, marveling at the synchronicity of my defensive line: Dorko and Domack moved like two demolition colossi, mashing entire waves with their clubs and leaving behind a noisy trail of burst viscera, ground bones, and dark fluids.
CRUNCH! SPLAT! SMASH!
FIU!
Brandishing my fire blade, I executed several horizontal cuts with pinpoint precision, slicing the limbs of three monsters that tried to leap onto me.
SLASH! SLASH! SLASH!
As I severed more and more corrupt flesh, the creatures’ thick red and black blood splattered the air, soaking into the folds of my clothes. The texture was viscous and the smell was disgusting, but I didn’t give a damn; it was the necessary price to carve a path straight to the Lich’s neck.
Noticing the unilateral massacre of their kin, many of the hybrids began to emit high-pitched, pitiful shrieks that resonated in a strange, disturbing way against the stone walls.
Screeee! Screeee!
ZAS!
Samira executed perfect movements on the opposite flank, smashing enemies to pieces with clean cuts from her halberd. Her lethality and elegance as she moved across the battlefield made her look exactly like a legendary Amazon warrior, or like the very goddess Athena of Greek mythology guiding her troops in a heroic epic.
SLASH! CRASH!
"Damn it, this never ends!" I exclaimed mentally, noticing that, despite the carnage we were causing, the number of hybrids emerging from the back of the hall was only multiplying.
To counteract the quantity, I channeled more mana through the catalyst and increased the intensity of my gacha sword’s flames, seeking to incinerate the bodies to ashes and accelerate our advance.
However, just as I was about to launch a descending cut against a small creature crawling toward my feet, a faint sound distorted the noise of the weapons...
"Mo... mmy..."
"What...?" I let out, my breath cutting off abruptly.
I stopped dead halfway through the motion, freezing the fire blade mere centimeters from the target upon hearing that word spoken by one of the hybrids. I forced my eyes to focus on the details of its physiognomy under the light of the flames, wanting to verify whether fatigue or the remnants of the Lich’s illusion were making me hallucinate again...
The left half of the creature possessed the deformed, hypertrophied exoskeleton of some kind of river crab... but the right half of its head and torso belonged unmistakably to the pale features of a living human child.
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