22 Etorhma, Eater of Worlds (2/2)

For the first time in a while, I dreamed. I was walking through a normal, wooden hallway. The corridor had no doors, and it stretched on forever. As I walked further into its depths, the walls warped and the wood contorted. The wood darkened, growing eerie and ominous. The air grew stale and old. I don't know how long I walked before I reached a stone wall with carvings on it.

I placed my hands onto the stone before they lit a dark purple. A voice, deep as the ocean and powerful as time, pierced into the depths of my mind,

”Embrace me, my child.”

I woke up pouring sweat from under my armor. I heaved for air before glancing around. The same low-lit tunnel walls surrounded me. After a minute of composing myself, I stood up and walked over towards the colosseum. It was time for another long day of fighting and study, not time to dwell on nightmares.

Althea walked into the stadium, her harpoon cannon in hand and one of her hands deformed at her side. The skin turned a dark, reddish green. Numerous long and thick spikes protruded from the limb. She said, ”I'm ready.”

I nodded, ”Then let's go.”

She grabbed one of the spikes with her teeth before putting it into the harpoon gun’s ammo slot. She aimed it towards me and fired. I dived onto the ground before the spike impaled the wall behind me. The spike of ivory slipped into the stone without the earth shattering echoes of before. Unlike the previous metal, these new horns could slice through stone with ease. They would punch holes in my armor.

She didn't have the limitation of ammo anymore either. She kept pulling spears formed from her deformed arm, firing them one after the other. My dodging grew desperate before a spear impaled straight through the bicep of my right arm. There was no pulling me back like with the other spears. This time, my arm was perfectly fine before a gaping hole just appeared in the middle of it like magic.

I roared in pain before she shot another spike at me. It stabbed straight through my right palm. Even with my sky-high pain tolerance, the agony was visceral. Entire portions of bone disintegrated as the spears passed through me. Althea learned from what Torix said. She fixed her weaknesses and made them into strengths.

Glancing behind me, I sprinted away from her, towards the back wall. I sidestepped at random as I did, dodging several spears. One of them ricocheted off the floor and bounced off the back wall. It landed a hundred feet from the wall. I neared it before turning towards Althea. She laughed, ”Who's running now?”

I grit my teeth as I grinned back. I shot sideways towards the spear as another of her bullets passed by. I picked up the ivory lance, turning in a circle before launching the white lance towards her. The projectile bolted through the room, the air squealing before it smashed through Althea's cannon.

The metal roared as it bent and broke. Pieces of the machine fell as she pulled out another spear. She must have thought I missed. I sprinted towards her, barreling like a boulder down a mountain. My feet clapped against the stone floor as she tried placing another spear into the reloading socket. The machine refused to fire.

She turned to it, finding the machine shattered. She bit into her lip until blood poured out of her mouth. I neared her before she threw the gun onto the ground. When I reached her, she sidestepped me just like I sidestepped her charge yesterday. With a whip of her hand and wrist, she pulled out a spear and thrust it towards my throat.

I was ready for the maneuver. Grabbing her arm with my left one, I stopped her stab. She had put her back to the colosseum wall. I would use this against her.

The force of my charge and strength of my grip lifted her off the ground as I stomped past her. She flailed in the air before I reached the wall. With all my strength, I pressed my heel into the stone beneath me. The sudden stop changed the momentum of my charge, forcing my torso towards the wall.

I used the shifting momentum as I pulled Althea straight into the stone wall with my one good arm. A catastrophic outbreak of noise rippled through the cavern as she collided. The bones in my arms creaked at the impact. The concussive force shattered the stone like a panel of glass as her body slapped into it. Bones shattered. Chips of rock bounced off the ground. A cloud of dust expanded from the strike.

Once the dust cleared, her mangled body was shown puncturing deep into the wall. Two feet into the stone, she grumbled in pain. After shaking bits of stone from me, I let my arm regenerate. With both my arms, I pulled her out of the wall before setting her down gently. I didn't toss her like I used too. No point in demoralizing her further.

At this point, I almost felt bad about having her be my sparring partner. She just didn't have a good sense for it. She got so caught up in the rush of power during our fights that she always let me gain the upper hand. It was like she'd never had control before coming here, and now she desperately clawed for it. That lust for dominance resulted in many lost spars.

I'd tell her about it after she woke back up. In all honesty, she had an advantage in most of our spars. She lacked the creativity to turn her advantages into concrete results though.

While she regenerated and regained her bearings, I continued my pursuits of new skills. I found that pushups were considered a skill. It didn't do anything but make pushups easier. While useless, it gave me skill points. I would train this, sit-ups, pullups, rock climbing, even jumping. I tried keeping the skills at least semi useful for the most part. Rock climbing and jumping could be used while fighting or traveling for instance.

I did all this while letting a BloodHollow Bat attack me. I'd brought one in from the cavern and use it for activating the combat bonus for gaining skills while I trained. Combine that with the doubled learning speeds from dexterity and I learned the first ten or so levels of a skill within an hour.

Althea didn’t come back for sparring that day, even after a few hours. She sulked in her cubby hole in the side of a wall. She'd carved it out with her claws, using it as a sort of private room. During the rare times I glanced over at her, she tinkered with her broken gun, inspecting the parts and mechanisms that composed it. She probably wanted to recreate it.

Of course, I couldn't let her gain an advantage over me. My biggest weakness versus her involved being at a distance. While she was by no means weak up close, I had the advantage due to my superior size. That meant I needed a way of closing the gap. I found a side cavern somewhat isolated from the others before spending the next few hours dashing straight into a stone wall.

Over time, my collision zone turned into a hole in the wall, then a small cavern of its own. I gained two skills from this act of unbelievable stupidity.

Skill Gain! [Blitz (lvl 1)]

Skill Gain! [Burrow (lvl 1)]

[Blitz (lvl 1) - You charge forwards with a burst of speed and power. +1% to charging attacks.]

[Burrow (lvl 1) - You dig through the ground with whatever means at your disposal. +1% to burrowing speed.]

Excellent. After another few hours of giving myself brain damage, I'd leveled these two skills quite a bit. It was a two for one since both skills were useful. Of course, the tedium reduced my leveling speed quite a bit, so I shifted gears by studying for the next hour or so. I alternated between these two tasks every hour from then on.

There was something fulfilling about doing something with such focus for so long. I can't quite describe it in words. Think of it like this. Thoughts, ideas, even sudden urges just pop into your head all the time. They act as distractions that keep you in this sort of haze. When I focused on studying or fighting or training, that haze died down and everything became crystal clear.

I understood exactly what I needed to do. I felt it deep in my bones that this was what I wanted. There was no wasted time or effort on questions or doubts. I did whatever I needed to in order to gain power. I was vulnerable as I was. I wouldn't be vulnerable for long, if I could help it. I wouldn't become the tormented again. It just so happened that this universe was full of powerful tormentors.

Never again, I had sworn to myself. I would rise and they would fall.

These thoughts kept my mind on edge as I went through volume after volume that Torix gave me. My efforts flooded into this constant stream of information. Disparate points came together as I formed a picture of what Schema's universe was like. What I discovered was that it was a vast and unknown place. There was no internet between worlds. Schema was the closest thing, and he filtered information heavily. This left many pieces of galactic history in the dark.

The remnants were the perfect example. What Schema did or what happened to them was an enormous question mark. What did they do? How did they do it? I didn't know. Very few people did. It left me starving for information on the subject. I was sure the remnant that Torix knew would answer some of my questions.

That afternoon and night flew by as I gained all this new knowledge. I even learned about the only known Old One, Etorhma, Eater of Worlds. In the mythos of the universe, he was considered a monstrous presence. Etorhma was one of the few sentient Old Ones. There were actual records of its speech. Of course, they were garbled gibberish for the most part.

But there was one line that chilled my blood and fueled further nightmares. It came up over and over, like a mantra of madness. All the scriptures and cults following Etorhma repeated the phrase, like a beckoning call for their master, like they wanted everything swallowed by this monstrosity.

The phrase read, ‘Embrace me, my child.’