Moon Shall Swallow…

  What the hell was that creepy ass cannibalistic cult doing here? How were they even here? Was this the coordinates to this forest supposed to be a closely guarded secret with a security measures in place to ensure that the participating civilizations didn’t interfere in the process and results of the trials?

  As the trees blurred past at great speeds below, Eik slowly descending, a couple of brief glimpses among the trees revealed other fractures opening. Cultists all dressed in their hooded gray robes were pouring out into the forest.

  Fuck. Why were there so many of them? Didn’t they have better things to do than crap like this?

  When he reached the crowns of the trees he withdrew the gliding wings and dropped the last of the way to the ground. There couldn’t be more than a minute left before the five minutes were up.

  As soon as he touched down he dashed off in the opposite direction of where he had seen the cultist stream from their dimensional gates. If there truly was as many of them as it looked, it could be a matter of seconds before the whole place was flooded with them.

  The Nidafjeld Alliance was large, and he believed Atla and Mikla when they claimed that the alliance was one of the most powerful forces in the Unified Mass. But he also believed that it was a fractured force, pulled from many sides by the largest and strongest civilizations, each seeking to rake in even just a bit more control over the organization.

  And a fractured organization could never display their complete power. Something like Moon Shall Swallow, however… A cult like them would probably not have the same level of internal strife as the Nidafjeld Alliance. Surely blind, insane faith in some evil deity and the bewitched following of whatever herald leads the flock would keep everyone in line.

  Diagonally to his right, he heard voices along with glimpses of monochrome gray through the trees and corrected left, away from what he assumed to be more cultists. Unfortunately, the new direction brought him through a thicket of leaves and vines behind which he found himself face to face with four robed bastards, a shrinking fracture sputtering shut behind them.

  Damn it! In his rush to steer clear of one group, he had neglected caution of the path ahead.

  With haunting silence and faces devoid of any expression, they came at him. Leaping back, he reached for a vial of Potion of Mighty Strength class 2 as he realized that yet another activation of Backflow was probably inevitable. It was difficult to say if serial activation like he had been doing during this trial would have any especially adverse effects on his body or mind, but this time it was certainly necessary.

  No matter how overpowered Profound Toxin and its peripheral abilities and traits seemed to be, four Awakened who all appeared to be D-rank was just too much to take on in a non-boosted state.

  The now familiar blue hue under his skin shone through even before it began to come off in rapidly drying, scaly flakes. Toxic mist billowed out of his scalp in quick curls that mixed into his hair, each strand glowing that same blue.

  Facing four cultists, he pumped the output of Backflow beyond what he would consider “relatively” “safe”. The pain set in almost instantly as the harmful substance coursed through his system like liquid fire, burning every inch of his insides. The madness and adrenaline must have masked some of the pain the other times Backflow had triggered with such potency, because it hurt so much more than he remembered.

  Screaming through clenched teeth, he drew his wakizashi as his boots skidded to a halt in the soft grass and readied himself to engage with the four foes. If Profound Toxin wasn’t going to drive him to madness, then the agony of Backlash might just.

  They came at him as a unit, but the foremost of the cultists was about a body length ahead of the others. Eik saw the hints of a beard under the hood as the cloth flapped up with the movement of his forward lunge, silvery moonlight bathing a long blade that almost looked like a rapier.

  Eik hammered the butt of the wakizashi into the cheek of the thin sword with enough force to hurl it out of the cultist’s hand, the weapon spinning off into some bushes. He redirected the wakizashi into a diagonally upward slash, reinforcing his arm, wrist, and finger with a dose of localized Movement Boost.

  With frightening ease, Eik took off the cultist’s head. It felt like cutting through a man made of marzipan. There was some resistance, certainly, but without a proper weapon skill, should it really have been this easy? As a physical buff skill, Backflow was simply unrivaled.

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  Just for an instant the three others hesitated at the sight of the decapitated body tumbling to the ground but they continued their onrush. He was already feeling faint from the overwhelmingly powerful poison in his veins.

  Releasing toxic mist, he went low to avoid any incoming attacks and activated Movement Boost to materialize behind the trio. With the speed his body could produce right now, they had no chance of reacting in time to dodge the killing blows.

  Now that he was facing these cultists, whom he knew were genuine enemies and whom would definitely happily move on to kill his family and friends afterward, not just an opponent set against him by the rules of some arbitrary tournament, he realized that he could go all out with no reservations.

  Before they could even turn around, the wakizashi sliced through a second cultist, opening them up from the trapezius muscle to the navel. This strength was intoxicating.

  Reacting to a whip suddenly snaking out from inside the sleeve of one of the remaining cannibals, Eik leapt back. Almost on reflex, a spike of solid toxin appeared in his hand and he flung it at the whip user with a Movement Boosted arm. It broke the entire row of front teeth as it impaled the cultist through the throat, the bones of the spine crunching as the tip of the spike shattered against it.

  Even before the spike connected, the remaining cultist launched a bolt of coiling, purple energy. It was fast and despite his current hastened state, the bolt took him in the chest, where it left a dark scorch mark and flattened to flow in between the segments of his armor where it burned his skin. But with the torturous pain already flooding him, it was barely noticeable. It did anger him, though.

  He still saw the faces of those kids in his mind’s eye more often than he’d like. They hadn’t all made it home that day and he blamed himself at least to a degree, even if he knew there wasn’t anything more he could have done at the time.

  Seeing the energy bolt barely doing anything to Eik as he was, the cultist began to retreat, but the Earthling was already in front of him, the sword raised high. As far as protection was concerned, the cultists did not seem to be wearing much more than hardened leathers underneath their robes.

  The wakizashi was only just long enough to poke out through the back of the robe, violet blood staining the pristine cloth. Eik looked into the cultist’s eyes. There were four of them. Something resembling antennae protruded from his cheek bones, wiggling about in frantic search as blood bubbled out of his mouth.

  Five Living Manifestations climbed out of Eik’s arm and rushed into the wound eagerly. Eik ripped the blade up and out, blood pouring from the wound like water from a slashed kiddie pool. As the cultist sunk to his knees, the sounds of footsteps crashing through underbrush in a rapid approach echoed among the trees.

  “Shit!” Eik cursed as he caught glimpses of flowing gray. “And I was doing so well in this dumbass trial too… Man!” He felt as if the worst fever of his life was ravaging his system, his legs threatening to fail him then and there. It would a matter of seconds before he collapsed under the aftershock of a Backflow of this magnitude.

  If there truly were this many cultists in the forest then retreating now, even at the speed he could maintain for maybe another fifteen seconds, would potentially put him between one group of cannibals — a rock — and one or more other groups of cannibals — a hard place. And if that was the options, then facing just the rock on its own while he still had the strength would be infinitely more preferable.

  Before they could prepare attack of their own, Eik had taken another Potion of Mighty Strength class 2 and arrived in their midst, spinning around the axis of his own body as the wakizashi wrought havoc on their poorly protected bodies. The cultists’ blades, bathed in that creepy, silvery light, bit into him as well but the combination of sturdier armor, potions of both Mighty Strength and of the Metal Body, Backflow, as well as the simple fact that he had taken them by surprise meant that, while it was certainly painful, that wasn’t going to be what killed him this time around.

  Ducking below two sword slashes, he swept the legs out from under one cultist and rolled his leg upward and kicked another in the jaw, sending them flying back to land on their back. Soil was flung into the air as Eik tried to dive low between two cultists.

  A dull, throbbing pain exploded on the back of his head, something wet running through his hair and down his face. He practically felt his brain rattled about inside on his skull. The momentum sent him rolling away but the cultist were already moving in for the kill.

  Head spinning like a top, Eik flung large glob after large glob of potent toxin at the robed bastards but they side stepped it easily. Even if Backflow sped him up considerably, throwing liquid just wasn’t that easy of a thing to do. He couldn’t expel it at great force like a water manipulator could generate spurts of water so powerful that they could cut through rock.

  He cursed as he tried to get his legs under him. The pain brought on by Backflow had already been terrible but this knock on the head had him completely out of it and he found it difficult to string together any coherent thought.

  As his mind began to fade and he watched the cultists advance on him as if in slow motion, something slithered in from the back of his consciousness, silently and eagerly as if seizing a long-awaited opportunity. He tried to resist — desperately so, but he could barely stay awake and he didn’t have much to give in the fight for control.

  “Guh…” He tried to vocalize his protest but the words wouldn’t form on his tongue. A hand raised high a dagger that looked better suited for ceremonial affairs than for actual combat. The wrist was slim and looked emaciated, black, swirling tattoos seemingly undulating like worms under the cultist’s sickly pale skin.

  The whispers that had become a familiar companion in the back of his mind anytime he fought with his life on the line suddenly seemed to be proximate and imposing, like its wordless sounds were suddenly impossible to ignore. Like a spider through the hose of a vacuum, he seemed to be sucked backward through his own head. Into a dark, dank, and lonely place. And yet he kept moving.

  He wasn’t giving his body orders.

  So who was?

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