Chapter 141: The Hollow Serpent [pt 1]

At first, Theo looked at how deep the darkness ran and put it down to his Class, to the presence that came with it. But that evaluation shattered the moment he noticed his Dark Sight was being hindered.

He couldn’t see as far in this darkness. The connection he shared with the darkness of the world, the one that sharpened his perception, was thinning with every step, and slowly he was going blind.

That was when he was sure this darkness was a different element. It was darkness, he could tell that much, but it was darkness born from something else. An unnatural one.

Theo stopped.

’I guess it’s time to test what the second fragment does...’

And then something began to crawl across his body.

Asterion saw it from the branch he was crouched on, and a small frown folded across his face.

’What is that?’

The thing flowed over Theo like liquid darkness and sealed him inside a fearsome suit of armor, a helm of darkness closing over his face. Where his eyes should have been, the visor held only a hollow, bottomless black.

Then Theo manifested Raindrop, and his shadow rose, spreading along the length of the blade and draining its vibrant blue away into black.

Theo inhaled and lowered himself.

The ground cracked beneath his feet. The next second, he shot away like a bullet fired from some monstrous gun, exploding forward with such velocity that the darkness swallowed him whole.

Uthed’s eyes widened at once.

"Such speed."

Asterion had the same reaction, tilting his head back with a lost look on his face, and only belatedly realizing:

’I lost him.’

Both of them surged after him. Uthed ran, and Asterion became a black blur, flitting from branch to branch.

Meanwhile, Theo had gone deep into the darkness. By now he could feel nothing, not even the trunks of the trees rushing past on either side, but he held the same speed and drove deeper still.

And finally, he reached a place where he had no sense of anything at all. Here he was completely blind. That was how he knew this was the center of the creature, or as close to it as he could get.

The moment he arrived, Theo leaped into the air, whipped through a blurring, violent roll and struck down into the darkness on the ground. But as his sword came down with all that speed behind it, something slammed into his side with tremendous force.

He folded like paper. His armor caved inward, and then he was flying, tearing through tree after tree before he finally rolled to a stop. The crack of trunks exploding one after another broke the silence of the night.

That was when Uthed’s and Asterion’s heads snapped around, and both of them launched toward the chain of sound.

While Theo was still rolling across the ground, the darkness that had blanketed the area drew back quickly and gathered itself into a long, boneless limb. It stretched up into the air, past the tops of the trees, and slammed down, erasing an entire swath of forest along its length.

The whole place quaked. The land shook, and the crash rolled out in every direction.

Dust and debris rose into the sky until everything was lost in a thick fog. Theo had used Shadow Movement just in time to escape the limb, and now he leaned against a tree, looking down at his ribs. The armor was pulling itself back out of his flesh. One of his ribs was sticking out through the skin, and he could see it plainly as the armor dragged itself free to repair itself.

He clenched his teeth against the pain while mucus ran from one of his nostrils.

Even straightening up was hard. Theo was sure he had never felt pain like this in his entire life.

But after a moment, it became endurable. The darkness had come around him, and this time it was his own. When the creature pulled its unnatural darkness together to form that limb, Theo had felt his connection to the darkness restored, and that was how he had escaped in time.

Now that darkness wrapped around him and dulled the injury. The pain wasn’t gone, not exactly, but Theo could stand up straight.

And when the Shadow Fragment finished repairing itself and sealed over the wound, the pain eased considerably.

The creature’s colossal limb slammed down again and again, sweeping the ground with titanic power and clearing trees with ease.

Theo watched it and seriously reconsidered his choice to fight this thing.

’Well, it’s not like I can just let it be... someone has to do something about it, so let’s not regret it, okay.’

He rolled Raindrop in his hand and looked up at the colossal limb in the sky. It was already falling. Theo jumped backward, clearing more than a hundred meters in a single leap, and landed in a valley just in time to watch the plain he’d left get flattened as the limb crashed down on it.

He frowned with displeasure.

"This is causing so much noise. I don’t want people putting their nose in my business."

Theo glanced at the sword in his hand.

’If Shadow Sword can make my sword sharper, I wonder if it can change the size of it too.’

He had used Shadow Sword to lengthen Raindrop before, but he had never tried making it massive and keeping it sharp at the same time.

Theo inhaled and tugged at the skill consciously, the way he always did. Then he lunged straight up into the embrace of the sky, drawing the sword back beside him, and posed like a man about to loose a devastating javelin throw.

The shadows that had coated the sword obsidian began to change color, shifting from that deep black to a purplish black, and then they suddenly expanded.

A deep shadow spread across the sky and quickly straightened into a fearsome spear, so vast it covered a portion of the sky and blotted out the moon.

The shadow beneath deepened even further, and the darkness suddenly grew.

As Theo poured himself into Shadow Sword, the darkness below rose like ropes and snared the limb just as it swung toward him, while he hung suspended in the sky for that one moment.

’It worked, but damn, what’s this weight?!’

Theo strained, and even that wasn’t enough. His strength failed him, and when he tried to draw the spear back for more momentum it refused to answer. Instead, it shattered into fragments and scattered across the sky.

A second boneless limb stretched out of the depths of the darkness.

With nothing left to hold him up, Theo was plummeting. Below him, the first limb wrenched against the ropes of darkness and tore free, then merged with the second, swelling larger and more titanic until it stood like a tall spire, and its massive shadow fell over the falling Theo.

It flattened him along with the trees.