NOVEL NEXT Chapter 44: Self-Reflection
The dawn breaks bleakly over the desolate stretch separating the Empire from the Kingdom. What was once something close to paradise has been turned into an unforgiving hellscape. Everything is dead; even the always lifeless grit and rocks seem… spiritless and abandoned. This place is desolate. Dandy rides atop her anqa. The world around them is too quiet, shadows elongated by the pale light filtering through heavy clouds. Hero rides beside her, his posture strong as always. “Stay close,” he warns, brow furrowed as they navigate the remnants. His eyes scan the destruction, well used to such sights. The air is thick with a metallic scent, as if the ground has absorbed the essence of some dark magic and is now releasing it back into the world. Bones litter the ground, bleached white in the harsh light, picked clean by scavengers.
Dandy’s throat tightens, and she swallows hard, unnerved. “I heard about this place,” she murmurs, horror creeping into her voice as she looks at a broken village sign, dangling on one remaining chain like a hanged man. “It used to be famous for its flowers,” explains the priestess, not finding a single proof of this anywhere amongst the decay. “It was supposed to be beautiful.” Her words hang heavy in the stillness around them. Dandy looks down at a broken wall and at the forgotten bodies laid out bare there. “...Should we bury them?” asks the priestess, looking back toward Hero.
He shakes his head. “It would be right,” he admits, nodding. “But we must keep moving, Dandy,” Hero replies. She can see the flicker of pain shadowing his eyes. “The longer we linger here, the more places like this will come to exist.” Hero turns toward her. “We’ll come back and bury them when we’re done. I promise,” he finishes.
Dandy smiles a weak smile that is not as wide or jovial as that of any of the skulls around them, and then just nods. “I wonder what happened here? Was this the war?” she mutters quietly.
The two of them ride slowly through the empty village, keeping a respectful pace so as not to wake the dead from their precarious slumber. But as they press around the corner of a ruin, following the road to the west, a tattered banner rises above the devastation in their line of sight as the only thing left moving here in the dead village. Its black fabric flutters almost mockingly in the soft caress of the dead wind. Its colors are dark and foreboding, unmistakably adorned with the sigil of the Black Knight and the dark-crowned queen. The fabric appears fresh, as if this were only recently planted.
“I think we have our answer,” replies Hero, his eyes staring at the flag. Hero's jaw clenches, the light of determination igniting within his gaze as the leather of his reins creaks in his tightening hands.
“Do you think there are still people left? Survivors?” The two of them look around themselves but see nothing to offer proof of this.
The village is empty. Not even ghosts linger within the rubble.
“Dandy,” says the Hero, looking at her. “Ever since I came back, I’ve been told a lot of stories by soldiers and officials, a lot of formal reports by members of the royal courts,” he starts, his usual smile replaced by something more serious that she has only ever seen once before in his eyes, back when they first met. “But I need you to tell me everything you know,” he asks her, reaching out and grabbing her shoulder.
“What?” asks Dandy, unsure. “What do you want to know?” asks the priestess, shaking her head as he stares into her eyes.
His fingers squeeze down lightly on her shoulder. “Who is Herr Ritter?” asks Hero. “And what does he want?”
Dandy opens her mouth to reply, not sure what to tell him that he hasn’t already been told in some meeting regarding his purpose here. She manages to break her eyes away from his, her gaze wandering over the ruins and ashes toward the single dark banner that billows there in the wind like a cloak, like the black robe of the reaper himself. “In our legends, he’s the monster that came before all other monsters,” says the priestess quietly, some part of her not wanting to speak too loudly, lest he hear her doing so. Dandy’s knuckles go white as her memories flit through every shadow she’s ever seen in her life while running away from every disaster that has befallen her. In that fresh fear, she begins to imprint those old memories with new visions of eyes watching her from the shadows that might not have ever actually really been there during those events.
— But maybe they were?
Maybe there always has been a thing skulking after her — a beast with no shape, a monster with too many faces — The Black Knight.
The priestess looks back at the hero, only having one possible answer for his question. “— And he intends to be the last one too, after he’s taken everything and everyone else from the world.”
“And the dark queen?” asks Hero.
Dandy shakes her head. “I can only imagine how sick and depraved she must be to bring an evil like this into our world,” says the priestess, lightly whipping the reins to get the anqa to keep moving forward; her eyes narrowed. “She must be a more terrible, depraved monster than even Herr Ritter himself. Gods help us if they are allowed to win this war…”
The goblin snarls, jumping out of the shadows with its fangs flared and a knife in hand.
— A vivid crackling fills the air, followed by the clap of thunder as the dungeon flashes alight with vivid brightness for just the blink of an eye.
A blackened, charred corpse hits the ground, its muscles still spasming.
“And that is the proper technique for killing a goblin,” she says in a vividly chipper tone, spinning around and holding out a hand as if she were a saleswoman displaying a token novelty.
A group of young adventurers and casters, freshlings in the magical academy, take note in their journals. One of them raises his hand.
“What if we don’t have lightning magic?” asks the boy.
Several dozen young heads look up at once, staring at Junis. “Please use the magic of your choice,” she replies, smiling with closed eyes and a tilt of her head, her hands folded over her front.
Another student raises their hand, a fairy. “…What if we don’t have any magic?” she asks.
Junis tilts her head the other way, her straight, dark blue hair dangling past the sides of her face. “Then you might become the queen,” she replies in a straight voice.
“What?” asks the fairy student, not understanding.
“I said then you might need to be more keen,” says Junis, acting as if she were repeating herself. She holds out a hand.
A shadowy knight in black armor next to her pulls out a simple weapon from inside its cloak. A cudgel.
“Casters should avoid using melee weapons at all times,” explains Junis, hitting the cudgel into her open palm. “Martial skills take a lifetime to develop, just like magical ones do,” she explains. “Sadly. We only have one life each, so you’ll find you become better at one, but never master of both.” She shrugs. “There just isn’t enough time,” explains the elf in a chipper voice.
— Something rematerializes behind her, sparks and drifting magic floating together and condensing, as the dungeon recreates the missing monster. A goblin takes shape.
It snarls, lunging, the students pointing and screaming in surprise, trying to warn Junis. But she just steps to the side, swinging the club out behind herself.
A thick, dense crack fills the air as the goblins face is struck straight in the middle across with the club. Its neck and body lurching forward past its head, but never detaching, its knife flying out of its hands and across the stones.
The monster’s body falls to the ground, its arms and legs twitching. Junis, standing there with a splatter of blood across her side, continues to smile. “Don’t forget to make sure its really dead!” she says in a prim tone, before then turning and bashing the monster’s skull in repeatedly, black blood and gore splashing out all around the dungeon floor as she starts screaming, hammering her way through the bone and the soft tissue until the club makes contact with the stones below and she leans there, panting.
The students have stepped back, some of them covering their eyes, others their mouths.
Junis stands back upright, her noblewoman’s smile returning as she speaks in an upbeat tone. “It’s dangerous to leave monsters unchecked behind you!” she explains, monster blood dripping down her face. “Always remember,” she says, lifting a finger. “If there’s no EXP-!” she starts in a rhyming tone.
“— It’s still behind me,” finish the students, having had the mantra hammered into their heads — for a lack of better term — for days now.
Junis nods. But one can’t help but notice she hasn’t let go of the club yet, despite the soldier trying to take it back from her.
A little window appears next to her, granting her the experience points for the killed monster.
She smiles.
The students step away a little further.
Junis hums to herself, the feather duster working over a priceless imported vase as she cleans it and then moves on to the next one.
A second alter, she comes back, bumping her side into it.
The vase canters off and falls down, shattering.
“Woops!” says Junis, looking around herself, and then going on to dust the next one, continuing to hum as if nothing had happened.
— Her hand slides over the pedestal, knocking the vase down.
It shatters apart.
“Oh, how careless!” says Junis, holding the side of her face and then walking on to the next one. “Silly me!” says the elf, standing there and holding her face with one hand, as if there wasn’t a steady grinding of breaking glass beneath her shoe, mulching it down against the tiles. She laughs haughtily, as if embarrassed. “How careless! Oh no!”
Junis throws the feather duster to the side, grabbing the pedestal with both and throwing it over as hard as she can. “Wouldn’t want to break anything!” she yells, before screaming, grabbing a statue bust, and throwing it out through a window into the courtyard beyond.
“Hey… Are you okay?” asks a voice from the side.
Junis’ head turns to look over her shoulder.
“Peachy,” says the elf in a terrifyingly peaceful candor as she looks at Chicory, watching her with a perplexed look. “Just a little oopsie!” she says with a chipperness to her words.
Chicory stares with her head and eyes at an angle as she slowly closes the door again, not looking away until it shuts.
Junis sits there, her hands folded together tightly and laid on the table. Her eyes are closed, and a tight smile is on her motionless face that only budges slightly from the spasming of her lower left eyelid.
To her left, there’s a scooting sound of someone pushing a glass over a table. Junis’ eyes open just narrowly enough for a slit to form that a viper could sleek out through. Chicory pushes an empty glass with the back of her hand a little ways over the table, not looking at it.
Zabaniyah, sitting to the priestess’ right — after a moment — pushes the glass back with the back of his hand.
Back and forth, back and forth, the glass travels, rubbing over the table’s wooden surface. The two of their faces held stoically still, as if they weren’t doing anything. But the pursing of their tight lips as both of them stare straight onward toward the other side of the table suggests they’re both trying not to laugh. Junis doesn’t even know why. It’s not even funny.
The glass slides back again for the hundredth time. Her eyelid twitches.
A squeaking comes from the left.
“Sit still, Sir Knight!” orders Acacia. “Quit fussing!” she commands.
Junis turns her eyes but not her head, watching as a squeaking fills the air coming from the fabric rag the princess is rubbing Sir Knight’s armor with, trying to buff out a scratch in the wolf-gnawed metal. But Sir Knight is being obnoxious about it, constantly blocking her with his other hand and she has to constantly bat it to the side so she can keep working and the rag squeaks and squeaks, and from the side of the table comes a consistent scratching like a rat chewing through wires as the glass slides back and forth. Junis’ couldn’t turn her head if she wanted to, her shoulders and neck being so tensely stiff that she would snap like a twig if anyone tried to move her. The pressure from her clenched hands came closer to pressing her own knuckles out of alignment.
Across the table, Kaisersgrab and Fichtenholz sit. The green-haired woman is poking him under the table, destroying his best attempts at maintaining a proper noble demeanor as he sits there, his usual eloquence being ruined by the consistent hisses that escape his mouth as he tries to bat her finger away from his bruising gut.
Scratch. Squeak. Hiss. Scratch. Squeak. Hiss. Scratch. Squeak. Hiss. Scratch -
- Junis’ hands strike against the table, the elf jumping to her feet. Everyone looks her way. “ENOUGH!” she yells, clutching the side of her head with clawing fingers.
“…Junis?” asks Acacia.
Junis points at the six of them, her finger pointing around the room as if she were passing on a witch’s curse. “I’VE HAD IT! STOP BEING SO GROSS AND LOVE-DOVEY AND GROSS!” she yells at them all, her eyes shaking as they reach a point of madness. “YOU’RE ALL DRIVING ME CRAZY!” she shouts at the top of her lungs, panting for breath as if she had finished a sprint seconds ago. Hase, looking around the room at the others, points at herself. “Not you, Hase,” remarks the elf, almost peacefully all of a sudden, her voice shifting in tone in a terrifying way. Junis exhales, her shoulders dropping as she’s finally released the dragon’s pressure in her core. She presses her palms together. “Please do excuse me. I think that I need to go freshen up a little,” she finishes, turning around and walking back out of the room. The door slams behind her, buckling through and opening back toward the corridor outside, which is unusual given that the iron hinges are only supposed to open one way.
A few shattered metal bolts climper down around the floor, rolling toward the walls of the room.
“…What’s with her?” asks Chicory, the seven of them looking over toward the entryway.
The water glass slides back across the table.
Junis looks in the mirror glass, letting out a content, short sigh as she lightly slaps her cheeks with both hands.
That went well. She feels like she handled the situation correctly.
Splashing her face with some water from the basin and then drying off with a cloth, she heads back outside to return to her duties — her appetite for lunch gone. She’d rather just get back to work and keep busy.
“You good?” asks a voice from the side of the door.
Junis stops, looking over at Sir Knight.
“…Do you usually lurk outside of the women’s washing chamber?” she asks in a cold tone.
He, leaning against the wall with crossed arms, shrugs. “You know, I get asked questions like that more often than you’d think,” he replies, fairly unbothered. Sir Knight’s helmet turns her way, looking toward Junis. “Last time I was lurking outside of a school,” he explains, referring to his and her first meeting ever. “This weird girl ended up making a whole scene about it back then too.”
Junis, unable to get angry for the sake of it, tries to sigh to make a point that way, but then starts laughing instead.
“You’re still exactly the same as you were back then,” she says, shaking her head as she looks at him with a smile. “I tried so hard too, on that bench,” says the elf. “— To wrap you around my finger,” explains the elf, her actual finger spinning through a strand of her straight, dark hair.
He shakes his head. “There’s a lot of me to wrap,” explains the giant knight. “I think your hands were just too small for the job.”
Junis snorts. “Stop it!” she says, wiping an eye. “I don’t want to laugh. I want to be upset. Quit with the jokes, Sir Knight,” she mutters, hitting his arm and then turning around to walk away.
“It’s what I do best. Got nothing left without it,” he replies.
“Maybe it’s time to develop some other characteristics then?” she suggests, walking away. “You could learn to sing? Or maybe become a scholar?” Junis shrugs, holding her arms up into the air as she walks down the corridor and around a bend.
The elf reopens her eyes, seeing him standing there. She looks behind herself at where he just was and then back at him again.
“No good,” he says, his hand on his lower visor as if he were rubbing his chin. “I’ve already got this whole spiel going now, you know?” he replies, as if really considering it. “It would be weird if I just changed personalities now.” Sir Knight looks down at her as she walks past him. “I just kind of break things and make jokes. That’s all I do. It’s worked out well for me so far.”
Junis, not stopping, pats his breastplate consolingly with a few fingers. “I’m happy for you,” she says, not slowing her pace down as she goes down the stairwell and around another corner. “…Really?” she asks, exasperated.
A black dog is sitting there on its haunches, wagging its tail as it sees her.
She plants the back of her wrists on her hips, leaning over. “You know, sometimes a girl just wants to be angry by herself!” snaps Junis, raising her voice. The dog droops its ears. “Get out of here already!” she says, pointing down the way. The dog whimpers, lowering itself down onto its belly and then rolling over. She sighs. “What are you doing?” asks Junis in a tired voice.
“Actually,” starts someone from just next to her. Junis turns her head, looking at Sir Knight, who is standing at the bottom corner of the stairwell, leaning against the wall just like before. “That’s not me. That’s just someone’s dog,” he says, looking down at the unnerved animal, letting out a few sad sounds.
“What?! I -” Junis lets out a frustrated scream, storming past the dog and down toward the exit.
“I can see the resemblance, though,” calls Sir Knight after her as she walks away in anger.
— Junis laughs, covering her mouth. “- Stop it!” she calls back at him before walking away again, having managed to regain her desired anger.
Sir Knight stays there, waiting. He and the dog look at one another.
A moment later, Junis stomps back in, kneeling down and scratching the dog’s stomach. “Not you, boy, you’re a good boy,” says the elf. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes to it, rubbing its face vigorously with both hands, loose skin flopping around on its droopy face. It wags its tail.
She gets back up, shooting Sir Knight a cold look, before stomping away again a second time.
He waits a second and then lifts a hand next to his visor. “Don’t I get one too?” calls Sir Knight after her.
A new laugh comes from outside the door, followed by a suppressing scream to keep such an evil from the world as she slams the door.
Lightning cuts through the air, an arc of flashing power bouncing from one body to the next as it forms an electrocuting chain. Junis fights her way through the dungeon now, by herself, as she works down to a lower floor.
She’s strong now, so much stronger than she was just a year ago as a normal student of the academy. Training and exploring for all of this time with everyone was such a boon to her learning and growth that she’s surpassed every one of her former classmates by leagues, and its no wonder. She has access to the resources of royalty, after all. To the world-spanning adventures Sir Knight can take them on in the blink of an eye. She’s fought against monsters that the rest of them have read about in books at best, if even. She’s tried potions and seen things that others wouldn’t even know if they were safe to drink or even observe.
A year really is a long time sometimes, and other times it’s just the blink of an eye.
Several experience windows appear next to her, popping up one after the other as she keeps going, not bothering to pick up any of the loot that — a year ago — she would have been desperately scavenging because it would purchase her another day of survival. Now, her needs are met. She’s been given access to enough money to do whatever she wants. There’s no more pressure for her to survive here, like she used to do. If she wanted, she could pack her bags and just go. She could escape the city and leave to the south-east, to the mountain city, which was always her dream — at least until she actually stayed there a while herself.
It’s nice, but maybe the marketing is better than reality.
— But she could go anywhere else instead. She could start over there and begin to build the perfect life she had always dreamt of, ever since she was a girl coming here from the distant north-west all by herself.
But now that she’s ‘made it’, it just… it doesn’t feel right anymore. If anything, she’s more lost now than she was when she was just doing her best to survive. Things made more sense then, even if they were bad.
Junis presses open the doors to the boss room of the floor, her boots splashing as the air around her crackles with wild magic. She’s deep enough into the dungeon that the arena is empty. Unlike floor one, which has a few nearly thousand people in it at any given second, she’s on floor seventy now, and it’s just empty.
A massive pool fills the room, and stepping stones that rise up in strong columns of broken marble create a path. The water is crisp and of an otherworldly blue hue that belongs solely to the underworld. The air is, for a lack of better terms, dense. It feels heavy, as if it sticks to the bottom of her throat and lungs when she breathes it in, requiring an effort to exhale. Crystal spires jut out of the walls, reflecting a bouncing light back and forth between themselves and the water — the light stemming from an alter on the far end of the chamber.
Junis walks by herself, reaching the edge of the arena.
It spans out ahead of herself, stone columns drifting in the water like broken teeth floating in a blood-filled mouth. Shapes swirl below the surface of the undisturbed pool.
A flickering fills the air, a magic condensing together.
Fairy lights float together, swirling wildly as her presence creates a disturbance. They bound around, darting past each other in a frenzy and flying toward the crystals, filling them with a magical light that begins to glow out. And as the crystals begin to shine alight, a glassy manifestation appears before her.
— A bridge spans from the entryway to the first column over. And then from there, another thin, glassy, prismatic magical bridge spans to the next column, and so on in a random, criss-cross and zig-zag order that eventually reaches the other end of the arena, where the alter is.
The boss arena is randomized. Every time, the bridges appear in a different order.
Junis readies herself, leaning forward as she gets ready to run.
This is a raid boss-fight for forty people.
— The tip of her boot touches the bridge, and then Junis runs.
The arena flashes, everything pulsating at once. The crystals flickering, their many colors wavering in and out. The blue water swirls, starting to rush as it flows like a wild river through a labyrinth of hexagons. The bridges flicker. Junis reaches the next island.
The room goes dark.
The bridges are the only thing that remain aglow, acting as guiding walkways through the labyrinth. Something wails, a loud, piercing shriek filling the underground, before falling into a long lamentation. The water splashes, a spray of it splashing over a dozen columns as a heavy quake can be felt. Something comes, it climbs. In the shining light of the alter in the back of the arena that remains as a visual focal point, a silhouette comes into contrast — giant.
A webbed, flat hand pulls itself up on one of the columns in the distance. A thousand snakes rise up after it, adorning the sleek, smooth head of a monstrous woman with skin of gray and lips of emerald green, rows of sharks fangs in her mouth as she screams. Her other hand pressing down on a second column as she pulls herself out of the water, a long, lashing serpent’s tail whipping out behind her, wrapping around the pillars she’s holding onto.
The Lamia.
The size of ten men, it screams at Junis and then dives back into the water. A surge moves through the room, the columns rising and falling as the wave crashes from one end of the arena to the other. The projected magical bridges snap and break like panes of glass bent to far, as a leviathan, black silhouette swims closer toward her.
Junis runs, her column cresting up in the arc of the wave to a high point, and without stopping she jumps, her legs flying over the dark abyss. Wet spray catches her ankles as the wave tries to take her. The elf flies, rolling into a tumble on the next column over that had already begun to descend.
A second later, the platform behind her that she was just on is clambering onto by the giant, sleek hands of a monster that looks after her.
The crystals around the arena flicker, coming back to life as they recharge with more ambient magic.
A new series of bridges is created, in a different order than before.
Junis bolts, her boots slipping over the sleek, slippery glass as a shape lumbers after her, clawing and wailing, a thousand serpent’s with the length of logs snapping after her. The monster reaches too far, slipping and falling off of the columns and back into the water, cresting a new wave that churns through the arena.
The goal of this fight is to reach the end of the arena, to get to the altar that the monster is protecting. Generally, a group will keep her busy, while a dedicated team navigates the constantly changing arena to reach the end.
— The sky begins to drip.
Junis looks behind herself at the monster that climbs up and around a column, holding its hands up toward the dungeon ceiling. Water sprouts out, blasting out a hundred pipes in all directions, wetting the ground.
Junis is struck too, tumbling and scratching over the ground as she flies, pushed back by a hose directed straight her way.
She claws on, careening toward the edge of a platform. Her hands just grabbing hold of an outcrop in time to catch her body, her legs flinging back as she dangles freely over the churning water below. Quickly, her wet boots slipping against the stone, Junis pulls herself up and keeps running, escaping just in time as the entire platform is yanked underwater by massive hands, pulled down deep into the depths, and then let go of a second later. The natural buoyancy of it sends the sunken column up and out of the water a second later as it’s released and the world shakes, the stone crashing into the ceiling above. Rocks start to fall.
Junis ducks out of the water, diving and rolling as a massive ornamental statue crashes down where she was just heading toward a bridge.
She turns to the right and leaps, making a jump she could never possibly make. Junis’ hands crackle with magic.
The water below her stirs, a shadow becoming blacker by the instant as she flies over the gap. A mouth with ten-thousand teeth bursts out of the water, hoping to swallow her whole. Lightning instead arcs down its throat, and the Lamia rises out of the water. Junis kicks off of the stunned monster’s head, propelling her toward the last of the jump.
— A sharp pain cuts through like a knife.
She lets out a sharp scream and tumbles, landing in a graceless roll on the next column over, panting for breath. With a hiss, she looks down at her leg. Blood runs through the wet fabric of her robe, clinging to her. But then the bleeding stops. She looks back toward the boss, sinking back down below the water with crash. Some of the snakes still lashing out her way nonetheless.
One of them bit her.
Junis breathes out. She can feel a heat rising up from her punctured calf. Poison clots the wound, stopping it from bleeding, but it’s running into her body by the second. She can feel her toes start to tingle. The pain of the bite goes away in an instant, but a new one begins to boil inside of her instead, and it’s much, much worse. The venom begins to corrode and eat away at her, flowing through her blood.
She pulls herself up, gasping for air, her wet hair stuck to her face. It’s not far now.
With a grimace at the blinding pain that pulsates through her, Junis grits her teeth and steps forward with her bit leg. Everything in her tells her to scream and fall down, but she puts her weight on it and then presses the other leg on, and then again, and then the other and she limps as fast she can. The water around her swirls, the Lamia making its next approach on its relentless hunt.
Junis crosses over a bridge, stopping as she watches as shadow swim below her, past her and toward the end of the room.
And there it rises out of the water in full size, hissing with malice in its massive, shining, slit eyes, its arms outstretched. The dungeon rumbles, the water and the platforms shaking from side to side together with the quake. Debris fall from the crumbling ceiling, landing on and breaking platforms all around her, magical bridges shattering.
And then the water begins to rise — but only on the far end.
Junis finds herself sinking lower and lower and lower as her column begins to sink toward the ground, like all the others, as all the water in the room is pulled toward one end just behind the monster. A massive, impossible wave grows and crests toward the ceiling, never falling forward as if it were held by a magical force. It’s enough water to wash away an armada, enough to flood and remove any island from any sea.
Dropping down behind an old wall, Junis pulls out a knife and wedges it tightly into the gap between the broken brickwork of the column, forcing the serrated knife in through the crumbling grout as deep as it goes within the span of those few seconds.
And then the wave releases.
She looks up, seeing nothing but water crushing her way from the impossibly high ceilings all the way down to the nearly dry cavern floor.
Junis closes her eyes, holding on to the knife with both of her hands as the wave surges over her.
The air, the sound, the presence — everything vanishes as the water takes her. The columns all crash together, a shattering reverberating through the water with a pressure that feels like her own bones are breaking. An impossibly loud rushing fills her ears, an impossibly strong force latching onto her body and tearing her away, like the claws of the damned trying to drag her down into the abyss together with them. Junis holds her breath, holds her eyes closed, and holds on to the knife as tightly as she can, just hoping the wall her side is pressed against holds on just long enough. It’s like a scream — the wave, the water. She’s never heard anything so loud. It rushes through her senses, the same as it rushes through her mouth and nose as she’s forced to open them from the pressure, her ears — in a second — popping and ringing with a screeching tone as the tons of water wash over the arena.
And then it all begins to drift back.
The water crashes against the opposite wall, into the arena entrance. The columns sway back from the pendulum momentum of the equilibrium, and Junis — after a long, crushing darkness — gasps for air, choking on the water in her throat first. She manages to claw her way back to her shaking legs, spitting it out in a dribble and pulling in a frantic breath.
The monster’s gone.
She runs out from behind the wall, but falls again, her leg giving way. Her arm cracks against the ground. Junis pushes herself up again and hobbles, her leg long since numb and no longer moving correctly. The poison has traveled to her hip now and is beginning to reach her stomach and, at the same time, flow down her other leg. The elf limps forward through gritted teeth, a spell crackling around her fingers as she looks at the altar.
It’s so close.
It’s right there.
Just one more bridge. She’s almost there!
Junis desperately hobbles toward it, bracing herself on broken walls and fragments of forgotten history. Her foot touches the last bridge.
— And it shatters.
A death rattle carries through the dungeon, a final wave cresting out in all directions as the head of a beast beyond the scale of a single person rises before her. Magic shatters like a broken window, the splinters of the bridge flying in all directions as the Lamia towers now directly before Junis, who has nowhere left to go.
Her legs fail, the venom spreading, and she falls down, aiming up a crackling hand toward the slick, almost human-like chest of the monster that raises its clawed hands, its mouth bared with the fangs of vipers as it prepares its final strike, the glow of lightning accentuating its horrific, hungry features that have killed hundreds before.
It’s not enough.
A single lightning spell, as strong as she is, is nowhere near enough to kill a monster like this.
Junis closes her hand, her fingers rolling in and extinguishing her own spell like a smothered breath. She drops her head, her wet hair sticking to the sides of her face and neck. “It’s okay,” she says quietly, shaking her head. “I know you’re here. Just do it.”
The lamia strikes forward, literal scaled tons of muscle and sinew and teeth lashing out in the flash of an eye, but never arriving as in that momentary emptiness that exists between Junis and the monster strikes out a shape that is not comparable to anything recognizable.
And it forms into the swing of an emptiness, cutting like a blade. The slice travels forward, the Lamia stopping as the wall behind it is cleaved straight through, a deep gash running into the bedrock far behind its masonry. Claws, scales, chunks of body, and a thousand snakes all fall apart at once, splashing into the water below in hundreds of pieces that cause a slight rain to drizzle down from above.
Junis falls over flat, the paralyzing venom having taken away the strength of her core musculature now. She can hold herself up with arms a little, but not much.
An experience points window appearance, signifying the end of the fight.
“Was I that obvious?” asks Sir Knight’s voice, and a second later, Junis finds herself being picked up into the air.
“I asked you to leave me alone,” says Junis as a quiet accusation.
“And let you get eaten by a giant half-naked snake monster?” he asks and then jumps over the last gap toward the altar. “That’s not what friends do.”
“Friends listen to when you tell them to leave you alone,” she snaps. “They respect your wishes.”
He shrugs. “Friends also ignore what their friends say; if those friends are doing stupid-butt things, that puts them in danger,” replies Sir Knight.
She glares at him, wanting to get up and walk off by herself, but her legs have gone fully numb. Sir Knight nods his head forward, and Junis looks, staring at a glowing orb atop an ornamental stone altar. Inside of it swirls a light, an energy — the soul of the lamia, trapped within delicate glass and buried deep below the world. She had made a bargain with a dark force, offering herself so that it would spare the lives of the things she protected.
— As the story goes.
And so, body having been separated from her soul, the monster, who actually always seen as a guardian of the people of the sea, went mad and feral.
“It’s yours,” he says, nodding once to her. Junis looks at the light inside of the glass, swimming around like a beautiful fish in a tank that is much, much too small.
A second later, a shattering of glass can be heard, and the two of them look as the wisp inside of the orb she had shoved down off of the altar before her arm went numb and limp begins to dance and swirl as it drifts over toward the water behind them. It looks like a little garden snake, hardly bigger than her forearm. It slithers toward the edge, looking back at them for a second, before dropping off and into the water that then begins to shine and glow. Sparkles radiate across its surface as its filled with magic from front to magic, an enchanted wellspring that begins to fill the room with a light that resounds from wall to crystal to the two of them, painting it all with a shine that is nigh-otherworldly in spectacle.
The two of them stand there, watching it for a time, before he starts to walk again.
“Wait,” says Junis. “I… can we just sit down here for a little?” she asks. “I don’t want to go back yet,” she explains. “Just set me down for a second, would you?”
Sir Knight looks at Junis and then nods, resting himself down near the edge of the platform, lying her down on the side of his cloak, her head resting on his leg below a hand.
“We should get you cured,” he remarks.
“Just a little while, okay?” asks Junis, her fingers holding on to the tuft of fabric below her head a little tighter. “I kind of like it when you worry about me,” she explains.
“That’s pretty weird,” he replies.
“Yeah…” says Junis quietly. The two of them watch the water. “You asked me once,” she starts, stopping herself, but then she shakes her head and goes on. “You asked me once if I could play pretend, what I would… what I would be if I could be anyone, anyone at all,” she explains. “— I didn’t have an answer for you then, really,” says Junis. “But I think that I know now.”
“Do you want to tell me?” he asks. “Or is it also gonna be weird?” asks the black knight to the paralyzed elf.
Junis, her core and shoulders falling limp, slumps against him, her fingers locked in their tightness around the fabric she’s holding now that the toxin has forced them to stay shut. “I do and it is,” she says. “But you already know. I told you before.”
“You did,” replies Sir Knight, a hand consolingly on her shoulder as she lies there.
Half a year ago, during an encounter with a horrific creature in a remote mine — one of the first outings to expand Acacia’s domain and reputation — Junis and him had fought together against a monster, a strange, terrible monster that defied classification of anything ever seen before in the region and as — similarly to just before now — a flood cascaded past the two of them, Junis had latched on to him for safety and said something never repeated after by either him or her, because it simply... well, it doesn’t fit into this life, and both of them know it.
“If I could be anyone,” says Junis. “Then I would be the person who summoned you here instead — first,” she explains, shaking her head as her neck starts to tingle and go numb now too. “When I first met Acacia, I hated her because she was such a snotty, rottenly spoiled brat, living a pampered life and thinking she had it hard while I had to suffer and bite by way through this hellhole of a city,” explains Junis, watching the water. “I covered that up by pretending to be mean just to help her escape the Baron, but…” She tries to continue talking but then stops for a second before finding her strength. “But I enjoyed it, actually. I was so mean and vicious and for a season, it made me happy,” she admits. “I felt like I was finally not the last one down on the bottom of the ladder anymore.” She’s crying. A wet runs over down his leg from where she rests is warmer and different than the dripping from her hair. “And then we started getting along and I felt so terrible for what I did and for how I felt,” confesses Junis. “I was so wrong and I worked so hard to make up for it again, so that I wouldn’t be —”
She doesn’t finish, simply falling silent as they watch the water.
“Then she became my friend, and you became my friend too,” continues Junis. “And I realized that I was starting hate her again,” admits Junis, arching her head back to look up at him from down at his side. “Because she was more friends with you than I was,” confesses Junis, crying. “I got so angry at Acacia and everyone again, but I’m even angrier at myself, because just like I said to you before that you’re still the same as back when we met, well… so am I,” concedes Junis. “I worked so hard to change, but… I’m still that same monster,” she says, closing her eyes. “Even after everything… I’m just still…”
Junis falls quiet.
Sir Knight looks down at her and then back out toward the water, watching the streaks below it as fish swim through the placid water, finding their ways through the columns and debris of the fight without much difficulty at all. All of the destruction, the chaos — now after the fact — doesn’t even seem to impact their lives in the least. They’ve adapted to it and are just continuing to exist exactly as they had done before.
Things are different now, sure. But the day to day, the normality of life, it continues on because it has to.
Sometimes things break, and sometimes it is people who break those things, and sometimes one just has to accept that fact of life and walk around the painfully jagged edges of the fractured whole because what choice is there really, except to get to the other side?
“I’m just a monster too, Junis,” says Sir Knight, his hand squeezing her shoulder. “But there’s nothing with that,” he consoles, grabbing hold of her and then rising back up to his feet with the elf held in his arms, slumped against his chest. “I’m not afraid of people saying that I am or me thinking about what I’ve become compared to who I used to be,” says Sir Knight, stepping forward and looking down at the thing held in his arms, still listening to him.
The venom has sealed her eyes and her mouth. Only the soft rising and falling of chest, a gentle heartbeat that thrums through his core from her, and a whisper of air from her lips show that Junis is still here with him.
“— Because that way, you can have another monster here with you,” finishes Sir Knight, a strong strike of a heart cascading through him from her.
He opens his arms, gracelessly dropping her off of the ledge and into the water. Droplets splashes up past him as he stands there, staring down at her as she sinks.
A second later, wild splashing and spluttering fills the air, Junis kicking her way up to the surface and retching out a sparkling mouthful. “WHAT WAS THAT?!” she screams up at him, her fists clenched.
Sir Knight shrugs. “The enchanted water post boss fight curses the venom,” he replies dryly, gesturing down at her. “Standard dungeon mechanic.”
Junis, swimming down below, shakes a fist at him. “You could have just gently carried me in! Ass!” she shouts, her face crimson and ruby, her hand pointing over to the side where there’s a slight ramp down into the pool.
“…Oh, yeah…” mutters Sir Knight to himself, as if he hadn’t thought about that.
— A dead piece of a snake flies up and smacks the side of his helmet.
Everyone sits down at the table, looking to the side toward Junis as she sits down, letting out a long, almost content sigh. The tension in her shoulders lost, and the smile on her face is more genuine. Servants come, bringing in a soup as the start of their meal.
“You feeling better?” asks Chicory.
Junis nods. “Sorry about before, guys,” she says to them all. “I had to go through some stuff. You know,” she says, not really elaborating on the context. “— A lot of thinking and self-reflection, but I think… that…” She looks at her soup, picking up her spoon and stirring it as she watches her reflection shimmer in the swirl. Junis nods, smiling. “I think I figured some stuff out that I needed to figure out by myself,” she says, content in those words being the truth.
“Well, please don’t forget that we’re here for you, Junis,” says Acacia, sitting across from her and sipping her soup. “You can come to me for whatever you want, always,” promises the princess. “We’re friends. No matter what.”
Junis smiles, clasping her fingers together as she tilts her head. “That brings me to my question, actually,” starts the elf, as Acacia takes a tender sip from her soup, looking up toward her. Junis keeps her smile on her face, shaped in that of a happy, peaceful woman but in reality belonging to a most terrible beast. “After you die, can I have Sir Knight?”
Acacia splutters, barely grabbing her fabric tissue in time to cover her mouth as she hacks out a cough, half of the soup outside of her, and the other half in her lungs.
Good friendships can be very complicated.