Unwanted End

Erel’s heart hammered against his chest, as beads of sweat and blood trickled down his face. The Kin before him was still struggling to pull out its hand, as he turned to look at Lyra, who was gracefully weaving through a horde of children relentlessly, occasionally looking up to see his plight.
‘She seems confident that I’ll manage.’
Unknowingly, just the fact that she still believed in him was enough to steady Erel’s beating heart, steeling him with the cold determination to do what was required. Gripping his sword tightly, he recoiled his tattoo back to his arms. However, knowing that his strength was not enough to cut through the creature’s hide, he pondered on what he could do next.
The sword too seemed damaged from the exchanges he had endured, its double edge slightly chipping against the strain.
‘Damn it, this won’t last more than two attacks.’
Looking over to the scale in his arms, his mind tried processing the implications as he had a sudden idea.
‘What if I could reinforce the sword itself?’ The thought was absurd. Until now, all the serpent had been capable of was shifting through his skin to enhance his defence, but never had he ever been able to reallocate it as an external part of his body. Simply put, it was a part of him.
However, looking at the abomination before him, he knew that he had no other option if he wanted to survive. He knew he had to push past his limits if he wanted to come out at the top. And for some reason, Erel believed that it was possible, that if he tried he could achieve it.
‘But how? How do I even do it?’
He tried commanding the serpent to move toward the sword, but it refused to budge in resolute defiance.
‘God dammit.’
Straining his arm as he forced the serpent to move, he finally heard it, the huge crashing of stone as the entity had finally managed to free its arm.
Knowing that his time to experiment was up, Erel let go of his thoughts and took his stance. However, rather than blindly engaging like last time, this time he waited for the entity to make the first move.
The entity was fuming, drool covering its sharp teeth, its mouth twisted in a snarl.
“You have survived for way too long, worm… Now you die!”
It growled before dashing towards Erel in a streak of blinding light. Erel’s tattoo blazed, heating his arms, as he felt the attack coming from the front in a wide arc aimed at his midsection.
His eyes failed to keep up with it, but his enhanced senses allowed him to feel what he couldn’t see. The subtle shift in the air, the sound of its arms whipping through the air, the whizzing noise filling his ears. In a fraction of a second, Erel pinpointed the exact source of the attack, and barely managed to sidestep, using his sword to deflect the swipe in an underhand parry. However, rather than giving ground, the entity doubled down, refusing to yield. It directly engaged Erel in close combat, weaving through his defences, as both of its arms tried to unravel Erel’s relentless stream of parries and dodges. For a second, it almost felt like they were in a stalemate, before the entity started gaining ground, each of its strikes raining down, sending brutal repercussions through Erel’s arm as the edge of his sword continued to chip away, forcing him to backstep.
Beads of sweat matted his forehead as his arms screamed in protest, but he refused to give in.
‘The sword… It’s about to break.’
The blade was barely holding on against the destructive, relentless attacks.
‘Fu-fuck, I need to do something.’
Erel tried commanding the serpent once again to coat the sword, but it refused to budge.
‘It’s futile, it will only coat a part of my body.’ As Erel thought of the premonition, a sudden realization hit him.
‘It coats a part of my body… The sword, I have been treating it as a sword rather than an extension of my body. That was what Lyra mentioned to me.’
As the attacks rattled down on him, a recent memory surfaced at the back of his mind.
“Dead again, what did you do wrong this time?”
Lyra asked questioningly as she extended her arm to help me up.
“I messed up my footing after the parry.” He had replied, his shoulder still aching at the spot where she had struck him.
“Right and wrong. That was what happened because of your mistake. You always treat the sword as an object, a weapon, but you need to understand, when you are in a situation of life and death, the sword in not a weapon, but a part of yourself, that wants to survive just as much as you do.”
But then, he had failed to understand what Lyra had mentioned. But now, when death was right in front of him, the desperation finally allowed him to understand what she had meant.
As the realization settled on him, he tried to feel it, to feel the sword resting in his arms, to connect with it rather than just command it.
As the attacks kept rattling his arms, he tried to extend his senses to the tips of his fingers, trying to feel the cold handle in his grip. And for the first time, rather than thinking of the sword solely as a weapon, he tried to feel its existence, tried to connect it to his very being, as if it were a part of his body. And it all finally connected, the sudden realization making everything clear. As if the sword was never foreign to him, but a part of him, like an extension of his arms.
And now he didn’t even have to give it a thought, the serpent moved with a mind of its own, slithering through his fingers, sliding from the pommel, finally wrapping the dull blade in its dark embrace.
Losing the sudden protection in his arms, Erel braced for the next attack to finally break his grip, but when the next strike rained down, he hardly felt it, as if the sword itself had absorbed the impact.
Noticing the sudden exchange, the entity frowned, giving Erel the slightest second to break the status quo. Shifting his arms from the overhead defence he was maintaining to a swing, he twisted the blade from a downward motion, using the force to cleanly strike an arc through the entity’s chest. And this time, the blade finally managed to strike true to its target.
The hide that had managed against his attacks before now easily gave way through the dark, obsidian-like blade that shined under the pale light, as the sword sliced through the entity’s chest, cleaving through it as if it were butter.
A mixture of darkness and putrid blood spilled from the slash, as the entity was pushed back, its steps faltering for the first time since the fight began.
“Im-impossible…” it muttered, through its gnarly teeth, its voice heavy with pain and disbelief as the darkness around its chest continued to squirm, as more of it leaked through.
It’s one hand reached over the wound, clutching at it as its eyes stared at Erel with venom. “You insolent brat…” it spat, its voice fuming with rage.
With its anger almost palpable, it moved towards Erel with a speed even greater than before, its hands cleaving through the air, aiming to dissect Erel in two.
Erel failed to notice where the attack came from, barely managing to dodge to the left as one of its arms grazed his torso, tearing the fabric underneath with ease as blood trickled down his side.
His face contorted in pain as he balanced his body, and without a moment’s rest, he used the momentum from the dodge to dash towards the entity, giving it no time to reposition its burly body. The creature, now well aware that the dark blade was capable enough to cut through him, for the first time showed vestiges of fear, crawling slightly onto its prideful face, as it slightly flinched before bringing up its arms in defense.
Rather than changing the course of action, Erel dived onto it, meeting the creature in another series of blows and parries as his sword met the creature’s solidified arms, the sounds of metal clanging against metal reverberating in the air. But this time, Erel clearly had the upper hand, as he continued to press on his advantage, each attack managing to cut through the entity’s defenses as black liquid continued to seep through its wounds.
The creature was continuously pushed back, as it growled in defiance before letting out a guttural roar, aiming to cleave through Erel’s chest, but before it could, Erel delivered a clean strike.
By bending his sword arm horizontally, Erel rotated his torso, using his other arm to guide his body like a spinning top, before the blade cleaved through the entity’s neck. Despite some resistance, the blade continued on its path, ripping through the flesh, stopping the entity’s roar in between as its head flew in the air, black liquid oozing out of its headless stump like a fountain before its body collapsed to the cold stone floor.
Its head hit the floor with a thump, bouncing across the ground, but Erel had no time to pay any attention to it as he collapsed where he stood on his knees, his body battered yet breathing. His arm felt like lead, with even the slightest twitch bringing him pain as blood continued to trickle from his side. He felt lightheaded, almost surreal, but as the feeling of victory settled in, he finally let out a shaky breath.
‘That was for impaling me, you bastard!’
The sword fell from his grip, as the serpent coiled back onto his hand, flowing to his neck like liquid darkness. As soon as the serpent let go of the blade, it broke into thousands of tiny fragments, as the blade bounced off the floor, making Erel realize just how crucial his gamble had been.
His whole body ached as he finally turned to look at Lyra’s figure in the distance, but what met him confused him to the core, removing any and all relief that had found its way in.
There in the distance, Lyra too was standing, confused, looking right at him, but rather than happiness at having defeated the Kin, her eyes were screaming with confusion. All around her, the children had stopped attacking, but rather than having broken themselves free of the control, all of them stood like broken dolls, their eyes still pale white, their figures still hunched as their faces looked aimlessly in front of them, devoid of even the slightest emotion.
‘Don’t tell me.’
Erel frantically looked beside him, hoping to see the entity still alive, however, it was dead, its form dissolving into darkness, like any entity would after being killed.
‘Then what? Was he not the piper…’
However, Erel could clearly feel it. The Imaginarium. It felt exactly like when he had completed the final trial in the Bluebeard plane. Lyra walked towards him, her pace hurried, stopping right before him as she glanced at the dissolving corpse of the Kin.
Her face, though, didn’t show any sort of accomplishment or praise for Erel.
“We messed up,” she mumbled, her voice heavy as the answers finally dawned on Erel.
Yes, they had accomplished the plane, managed to rewrite the narrative, as the mystery of the missing kids had been solved. The piper had been killed, but they had failed to account for one thing. Only the piper was capable of releasing the children from their curse, or he might not have been capable after cursing them to begin with.
As the reality crept up on him, he felt the plane crack around him, finally starting to disintegrate, signalling that it was over. By the corner of his eye, he noticed a figure stirring.
‘Cyril…’
The boy finally managed to wake up, but as he did, his eyes fell on the children in the distance and then on Mae, who was a few steps beside him. As he looked at their broken figures, caged in the soulless husks they had become, he fell to his knees as wet tears trickled down his face.
His eyes bore down on Erel, with unsurmountable anger and venom, which was the last thing he saw as the plane finally dissolved around him entirely.

Chapter end