Published at 8th of March 2024 7:44 am

Chapter Forty

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Something occurred to me as I dashed the couple dozen yards back towards the stairs of the ziggurat: I haven’t really let loose since I undid the blocks on my body. I mean, I’ve had a couple of fights but I haven’t really, you know, put everything behind an action yet. I’ve always been too tired, carrying someone, traveling with people, etc., and haven’t had a chance to cut loose.

Until now.

The ground blurred under me as I shot forward, covering the distance in seconds. My clawed toes dug into the third step of the stairs and shot me up them, skipping four or five at a time. If the situation wasn’t so grave I probably would have been elated. Dashing up the stairs felt like flying.

In fact, I was going so fast that when I reached the top I put extra force into my last step and leaped (It was the second to last stair, which irritated me greatly for some reason.) into the air, tentacles splayed out around me to adjust my trajectory. Terrance spotted me and I felt the power he’d been building up scatter as he dropped whatever spell he was preparing. He oriented his stomach-mouth at me, which opened wide. The “teeth” of the mouth were fat, wiggling maggots with quarter-inch black fangs. The tongue was made up of hundreds of smaller tongues, a weird pipe cleaner-looking thing.

A distortion wave emitted soundlessly from the mouth and washed over me. I knew it was the psychic attack he had hit me with before, not because I felt it, but because the warded amulet I had made earlier immediately began to smolder on my chest. I had made it with the previous attack in mind, and the one I was currently under was an order of magnitude stronger. I fell towards Terrance, and just as I was about to collide with him I felt the amulet burst into hot ashes, burning my chest as it failed catastrophically. Searing pain and despair flooded my body.

But the amulet had bought me the time I needed. I withstood the attack just long enough to lash out with all six of my tentacles, stabbing them into Terrance. I crashed into his right hand which he had brought up to stop me. The fingers were as thick as my wrist and the palm covered my stomach easily. Before he could crush me I began slashing at him with my claws, raking my feet down like a cat and basically going batshit on his hand, doing my best Tasmanian Devil impression.

He cried out as his thumb and index went flying and flung me aside. He did so with such force that if I didn’t have strengthened ligaments, I’m pretty sure my neck would have snapped. I experienced a bit of whiplash as I tried to stay attached to him with tentacles, which stuttered my momentum and kept me from sailing into the night as a new object for NASA to name.

“Oooh, I hope the Doorman just wants your head,” Terrance said as I slammed into the ground several feet away. “I’m going to use you like a Stretch Armstrong, you little fuck.”

Forgettable chose that moment to appear, his element of surprise slightly ruined by the hiccup that my future sight did right as he appeared. I almost lit him on fire again but decided to try something different. As I rolled out of the way of his machete I whipped three tentacles across the ground toward his legs. He was over-extended from putting too much power into his attack, as evidenced by the solid “thunk” of the weapon slamming into the roof (or was it floor? (FOCUS, Colm!)) of the ziggurat. As he planted his foot to yank his weapon out my tentacles slapped into his calf and curled around his limb. He cried out in pain as I dragged him off his feet and to me.

He lifted the machete to hack off my eldritch limbs but I caught his wrist with my left hand, sinking my claws into his wrist. The Limbs of the Other Side began to slurp up the resulting blood, and I let them. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. Forgettable slammed a fist into the side of my head, which I somewhat mitigated by hunching my shoulder into it. I tried to disembowel him with my other hand, but the positioning was awkward as I was still on the ground and had used that arm to break my fall. I hadn’t noticed until just now, but it felt battered.

Forgettable started pounding me with his free hand, slamming his knees into me. The latter I blocked with my own knees, which were protected with the LotOS, attempted to claw him with my toes whenever I could. I forced my arm forward, reaching for his neck—

I felt the roof rumble. “Keep him still Jerry!” Terrance said. I felt him prepare a spell I wasn’t familiar with.

Jerry? I’m fighting fucking Jerry and Terry? Jesus Jumping Christ.

Panic fueled my tired, overworked brain and I finally remembered I have three other weapons to deal with this asshole. Two of my tentacles slithered up and grabbed his free arm, keeping it away from my face. The final one reared back like a cobra before striking down into the small of his back.

Forgettable (I’m not calling him Jerry, fuck that), probably fearing (rightly) that I was about to kill him, used his power and brought us into the weird Escher-esque world where there was nothing but copies of himself.

The last time he did this I had been surprised and he had used the opportunity to escape me. Not this time, fucko. He fought and struggled against me, but the shadow-stuff my tentacles were currently made of didn’t like much of anything in this universe and had a habit of degrading anything they came in contact with, including flesh. I don’t know what it was like to be stabbed by one of these things, but I can’t imagine it as anything other than “ruinous.”

“Wait, please,” he said, his voice week. I rolled over on top of him, bringing my other arm up, my fingers straight and knife-like. “I don’t know what will happen if I die here. You could be stuck here—“

“Lets find out,” I said. Or at least, that’s what I meant to say. What came out was garbled noise like the last time I was here. But Forgettable seemed to understand, as he struggled with a last burst of strength. I plunged my stiffened fingers through his eye and into his skull.

During the fight, the LotOS on my left hand, the one digging into his wrist, had been having a good old time feasting on Forgettable. The sensation was nothing compared to what I felt now as both appendages gobbled up stuff from the dead warlock. I felt them cover more of my shoulders, covering most of my collarbone and armpits now. When I yanked my claws out of the corpse, I noticed they were longer, more hook-like, than before.

“Bugger,” I muttered, sounding like the teacher from Charlie Brown. I glanced up at the strange land and the seemingly infinite Forgettables. Where one of the staircases seemed to touch the ground, one of the copies stepped off lightly, becoming more animated.

“Shit,” I said (came out at a jet sound), alarmed. I withdrew my tentacles from the corpse and stepped away from it, hoping breaking contact would take me back to the real world.

It didn’t.

Well, the little fuck did try to warn me.

As his copy came at me, I took first position and readied for a fight.

Except… Without his little disappearing trick, the guy was incredibly outclassed.

He came at me, faked a punch which I ignored and just slammed my fist into his chest. His strike glanced off my shoulder, which was now protected by the LotOS. I followed with a right hook and jab with my fingers into his throat. Again my LotOS gobbled up the blood and spread a bit.

And then another one came.

And another one.

And another.

And another.

For hours.

Now, as outclassed as he might be, he apparently had infinite reserves of himself. I barely see the masses on the stairs shift every time I kill one of these copies. There were dozens of bodies littering the ground now. Hell, I wasn’t even near the ziggurat anymore. At least I don’t think so.

And still, they came. Like they all had taken a ticket at the deli and were waiting their turn.

I attempted to talk, but my words didn’t sound like language. And after the original died, the others didn’t bother speaking. They just came at me, expressions set like a professional with an unpleasant job to do. They rarely landed a punch or kick, but each one that did land took a little something from me. Not to mention the sheer exhaustion of fighting for a prolonged amount of time.

…

And they just kept coming.

I was flagging. I don’t know how much time had passed, but it felt like hours. Had it been an entire day? It felt like it. I don’t think it had, though. I was already running on fumes when I had approached the ziggurat. I was now fighting with mostly my tentacles, as they didn’t seem to have lactic acid.

One of them got in a good combo that almost knocked me out. He had just dove through my tentacles to get at me and I had been too slow, too tired to adjust. After he died, I just hobbled away from the next one for a bit, trying to clear my head, flailing my tentacles around to create space. I managed to get back into the fight but it was clear something needed to change.

I had seen that only one would fight me at a time. So I figured out a little trick that’d let me get some rest. I’d cripple the guy and then jog some distance away, plop on the ground and rest. This worked for a while before the asshole figured out a way to kill himself so he could get another fresh copy to come at me. It took another thirteen fights to figure out how he did it. Rather simple: He just bit through his tongue and bled to death.

Still, it takes a while to bleed out, so I got some rest here and there. But I couldn’t sleep. I dare not.

My LotOS were still growing with every fight. They seemed loath to go above my neck for some reason, but everything below that except a small patch of my stomach around my navel was now covered. It protected me from his nails and the times when he tried to bite me but did less to protect against blunt force.

Finally, I realized something had to change. I’d been holding off on using my abilities because I was afraid this place would do something weird to them, like with my words. But I was dying by a thousand cuts. I needed to change this or… yeah. I’d die. Alice would die.

Burn it all.

When the next copy came for me, I focused on him with my new fire abilities and noticed that the colors I had been seeing in the “real” world were much different here. Instead of oranges and reds, he was just white. If orange meant easier to burn than red, and blue harder to burn than red… Does white mean what I think it means?

I sent my power into him and he went up like flash paper, leaving behind a charred skeleton.

I blinked.

I turned to the nearest “staircase” and saw the newest copy come down, his expression no longer set and determined. He was worried.

As well as all the other copes on the stairs.

And you know what? They had white auras too.

Burn it all.

I laughed, the sound coming out as gravel grinding, and let my power wash out from me like a broken dam. All the thousands, millions, maybe billions of copies I could see on those endless, physics defying staircases flashed and burned so bright I had to squeeze my eyes shut. When I opened them again, and could finally see past the sun spots, I could see more copies rushing down the stairs, moving with jilting efficiency, like a camera catching someone walking in time-lapse.

I set them on fire too.

And the next wave.

And the next.

I don’t know how long I set them on fire but it felt like hours. I could feel the power taking a toll on me but I didn’t have another solution. He had to run out of copies at some point, right? Please?

“Stop!” A voice shouted behind me. “Please!”

There he was. Another copy. Thirty feet away and with his hands in the air. But he spoke. We stood in a field of ash and bones, as far as the eye can see. It was actually difficult to breath, there was so much ash in the air.

God, I am so fucking tired.

I regarded him silently. When he didn’t continue, I made the “get on with it” gesture.

“Look,” he said, his voice no longer bland and lazily confident. He sounded panicked. “I—Can we call a truce?”

I raised a tired eyebrow at him.

“I know,” he said, dropping his hands. “Look—you probably figured out by now, or have guesses,” he gestured towards the copies that were slowly refilling the staircases. “But each of these… me’s, for lack of a better word, are a me from a different reality. Everyone you kill means there’s a reality where I no longer exist.”

I stared at him, unimpressed. I had a piece of an alternate universe me too, buddy, and he’s apparently an elder god or something.

He sighed and continued. “Which means that every time you kill me, the power I draw from becomes thinner. If you keep killing me, I won’t be able to leave this place…” He left the obvious unsaid.

And neither will I.

I shrugged. Unless he’s offering to take me back—

“So I propose a truce,” he continued. “I’ll take you back, and then leave. You can finish your fight with Love, and if you win… which,” he glanced around at the devastation around us. “I have a hunch you just might—you’ll never see me again.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“How can you trust me?” He asked, voicing the question I had had in my head. He pointed towards somewhere behind me. “I’ll give you a show of trust. I’m going to the bodies you didn’t burn and bring back the clothes, which you will use to tie me up and gag me so I can’t bite my tongue anymore. And then, you can sleep. When you have rested enough, you can untie me and I’ll take you back to fight Love, fighting fresh and with him down an ally.”

That… greatly appealed to me. Before I could show any response he started heading where he had indicated, giving me a wide birth. Intrigued, I followed.

It took considerable time to get back to the ziggurat. During our fighting, we had gone to parts of the island I hadn’t been to yet, and so was thoroughly lost until I spotted it on the horizon. The fact that everything was coated in bones and ash didn't help me recognize landmarks, either. As we walked, him a few dozen feet ahead of me, I looked up and noticed the staircases weren’t filling as fast as they had before. Maybe I had put a dent in his numbers. Does that mean there isn’t an infinite amount of parallel realities? Oh shit. That was an... unsettling implication, for some reason.

Soon we found the pile of bodies from the initial minutes of fighting. Forgettable, keeping his word, began stripping his corpses (what a fucking sentence to think), mostly his overshirts and belts. When he had a goodly portion, he approached me, stopped ten feet away, and presented them.

...What the hell. Why not.

I took my time tying him up. Belts weren’t the best thing to tie someone up with, as they were generally made to stretch a bit and that could be used to escape. But I’ve been tying people up for years now, with the added few hundred hours watching various shibari, escapist and knot-tying videos on youtube gave me a good idea of how to keep someone from going anywhere and doing anything.

I wasn’t gentle. This asshole had been the cause of an incredible amount of grief for me and my friends and I had had to kill him thousands, perhaps millions of times for him to go “hey, maybe we shouldn’t fight.” I trussed him up to the point of being just shy of torture, finally shoving half a shirt into his mouth and belting it in place so he couldn’t bite his tongue. I made sure his airways were clear as a last thought.

Finally, I walked away from him. Way away. In fact, I walked back to that vehicle corpse I saw earlier in the night. Or, at least I tried to. Everything was covered in bones and ash. Finally, I just found a plant blister similar to the one I’d left Alice in—

Shit! Should I check on her? Fuck!

I had a mild panic attack before berating myself and turning on my heel.

Or at least I tried. The sudden movement made my knee buckle and I fell into a bush with prickly leaves. The LotOS protected most of me, but my neck got pricked a couple of times on my way down. I rolled away from the bush and just kind of… stopped.

I was too tired to get up.

With a final effort of will I rolled onto my back so I wouldn’t be breathing the ash on the ground and let oblivion take me.

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