Transendence

by Jared Teer

  Darion flew closer to the deluge to confirm that the magma had been contained and was met by a new threat. The plumes of steam merged into one vast cloud with facial features in its midst contorted in a snarl. He attempted to back away, but the squinting eyes of the cloud blasted him with two bolts of lightning. The blasts sent him flipping backward, smack into the earth. The cloud adopted a 500-foot tall humanoid form and stalked toward its fallen target. Darion was a bit disoriented but managed to leap away just as a superheated stream of water from the golem’s mouth blasted the earth where he’d been. He flew away low to the ground as the golem took to the air in pursuit, raining down lightning bolts as Darion zigzagged to dodge them.

  Darion learned many methods of dispersing adversaries of various properties, most being susceptible to some particular method of attack—ice golems were susceptible to heat, magma golems to cold—but some were more resilient than others, with the best method of their destruction requiring an understanding of their composition. The approaching steam golem was such an adversary, having multiple elemental properties with no specific counterbalance. A physical attack, such as the Asteroid Torrent, would pass right through it. A sufficient heat attack could obliterate the very water molecules composing the golem, but such an attack would require a great deal of Essence. “Out of sight, out of mind” seemed like the best solution. Darion spun over, flying in a supine position and zigzagging to avoid the lightning, and inclined both hands toward the golem, forming a large black hole above it. The black hole kept pace with Darion and his pursuer, pulling the steam golem into the void like an oversized bathroom exhaust vent. He flipped backward out of his supine position and landed on his feet, ripping two trenches in the ground as he skidded to a halt. He’d covered a great distance in the flight from the golem, now far from the valley in a wide plain edged by a vast forest.

  Darion knew that the momentary reprieve was but an illusion, and the next challenge would come soon enough. What did Hughes have in store? Murderous foliage from the forest? Earth golems from the plain, more resilient than before? The ground began to convulse and fall away in spots, forming long, deep trenches. Darion took off and hovered about a hundred feet in the air, monitoring from a prone position. The ground was scarred with multiple trenches, which all began to belch massive globs of magma onto the green of the plain.

  Good one, Hughes, Darion thought. The metamorphosing mounds were too numerous and dispersed too widely across the plain for even a massive flood portal to be effective, plus another steam golem would emerge, likely more resilient than the last. One thing was certain: the challenges would progressively become more difficult. Dispatching the magma golems shouldn’t prove to be that difficult, plus dragging the confrontation out would cut into the one-hour time limit. Still, Darion figured that even if he could drag the confrontation with the magma golems out for the remainder of the time, Hughes would not let him off so easily; surely Hughes would increase the difficulty somehow.

  Darion folded his arms and watched as the mounds rose to form a gang of twelve golems—magma golems without the exoskeletons of igneous rock, but composed entirely of seething, viscous lava. They began to encircle him, their smoldering footprints dotting the ground as they converged. From Hughes’s vantage point, the scene resembled the face of a clock, Darion surrounded by a circle of twelve golems, spinning in his prone position like the hand of a dial.

  Darion spun around to watch his adversaries, but they didn’t attack. What were they waiting for? Suddenly, blasts like canon fire rang out from the forest as hundreds of evergreens sped into the air like rockets, their branches like fletching bent down from the drag.

  “Ah, crap!” Darion righted himself as the rocketing trees arched high in the air, heading straight for him like a volley of arrows. He made an X with his forearms to shield his face. All he could see was a blur of green as if falling through a thick canopy as he was swallowed by the volley. The trees that hit him head-on shattered and splintered. The wide hail of arrows hit the golems as well, the trees incinerating on contact. The branches seemed to be trying to wrap Darion up like powerful arms; many broke away on impact, but the sheer numbers were such that he was pulled to the ground by the torrent. Darion lay pinned at the bottom of the mountain of trees. The golems all extended an arm toward the unlit bonfire, each shooting a hand off at the wrist into the pyre, igniting a mountainous blaze; black smoke rose like an erupting volcano into the blue sky. As the golems stood triumphant, dark clouds began to coalesce into a cyclone above the inferno and then into the swirling funnel of a large tornado. It whisked away the column of smoke as it drilled into the pyre, pulling the flames and trees into its vortex and creating a great fire whirl while scattering the trees like kindling across the landscape. The golems, their viscous surfaces rippling in the tempest, held their ground—until the tornado made for them. It tore into one, the whirlwind momentarily glowing a fluorescent red as it ripped the golem apart and dispelled it. The remaining golems burned into the ground like gophers retreating to their holes.

  The winds of the whirlwind dispersed, revealing Darion hovering in its eye. The smoldering holes where the golems burrowed began to overflow with magma and solidified into wide, heaving cones. The eleven cones inclined toward Darion and began to launch wide balls of magma with a canon-like boom. He flew up in the nick of time as the balls collided in a splash. The cones began to fire in quick succession as he flew in zigzags to avoid them, but the barrage was too great. He was hit by one ball, then another. The magma clung to him like scalding glue and began to coalesce into a growing sphere as more balls impacted. Inside the sphere, Darion was restrained by the viscid magma as it began to creep into his ears, nostrils, and mouth. Though he could survive without air, the feeling of claustrophobia became overwhelming, and he violently emitted a golden, translucent sphere of concussive force from his core, exploding the magma ball. The heaving cones continued their bombardment as Darion flew to evade. Desperate not to be restrained again, he directed his palms toward the ground in the midst of the cones and created a ball of plasma. The basketball-sized orb grew rapidly to twenty feet in diameter, shielding him from the incoming by incinerating all that made contact with it. A thrust of his palms sent the wide plasma orb sailing downward where it burned deep into the ground; the ground began to rumble as golden light shone from the craterous pit and then from the volcanic cones as their firing ceased. The earth heaved into a great hill and exploded with a domed shockwave and golden fireball that rose into a massive mushroom cloud. The blast eliminated the underground golems as well as scarring the once pristine landscape with a crater over 1,000 feet wide.

  The doughnut ring of the dissipating mushroom cloud had smoke golem written all over it, so Darion decided to depart before his hunch came to fruition. He sped away from the plain, looking all around for the next assault. He came to a wide river gorge, flanked on both sides by extensive mountain ridges. He paused for a moment to admire the landscape, but his reprieve was cut short as storm clouds began to converge unnaturally fast above him. The dark clouds lashed out with bursts of lightning that Darion barely managed to avoid. He dove for the river, hoping to escape the barrage in its depths. Just as he was about to enter the water, the river solidified into ice and he smacked into it head first, crumpling on himself in the crater. Disoriented, he attempted to rise but was blasted by a steady stream of lightning, forcing him to his hands and knees. He struggled to raise his arm toward the bolt and manifested a spherical black hole the size of a basketball in his palm that sucked in the incoming lightning. A thrust of his arm sent the black ball rocketing into the midst of the storm, where it hovered as a maelstrom, sucking in the clouds.

  Darion hopped out of the crater and stood on the surface of the frozen river. As he looked around for the next challenge, there was a great boom and he was sent tumbling backward through the air by a tumultuous gust. Unable to resist the inertia, he was thrown hundreds of feet before smashing into the rock face of a mountain.
After shaking away the cobwebs, he stood in the crater. Away in the distance where he’d previously stood, he could see a vast crater, its concave spanning the wide frozen river. The mountain ranges on either side, parallel to the river, were sheared with concaves as well, as if a great invisible sphere had burned its likeness into the gorge.

  There was a deafening, steady whoosh emanating from a miniscule black void where the center of the sphere would have been, high in the air. It seemed to be sucking in matter from the atmosphere as the visible tracers of particles formed into a minute, accreting ball of white-hot plasma. As it took on more matter, it dimmed to a fluorescent red, and the whoosh began to be interspersed with a thunderous boom. The orb grew steadily, growing into a sort of red-hot starfish, and then into a humanoid form of average human stature. The booming emanations ceased, and two streams of white mist manifested and began to whisk themselves around the form’s feet with a crackling interplay of electricity like a storm front rolling over the surface of the earth.

  As the whirling columns rose, the form’s features beneath had changed. On its feet were boots of silver metal with greaves that rose to mid-calf. The skin of its legs was composed of polished black stone with the chiseled musculature of a Greek statue. Between its legs hung a skirt of armor of the same metal below a wide girding band with a black orb in its center. On its torso was a sleeveless corselet with jutting spaulders—the armor articulated abdominal and pectoral musculature. On its hands and forearms were metal cesti; its arms flexed with tightened fists. The swirling mists coalesced on its head, giving the appearance of a thick beard and full head of curly white hair. The edges of its mouth were pulled up slightly in a snarl as it looked toward Darion—its eyes florescent red orbs.

  Darion had never seen such a being. It was obviously a golem of some sort, but its human stature made it seem less formidable than its gargantuan brethren. Despite there being at least a thousand feet between them, Darion’s eyes could make out the being quite clearly. The golem raised its right arm, fingers splayed with palm toward Darion.

  Suddenly, the golem was right in front of Darion, its palm right before his chest!

  There was a resonant bang, like an artillery blast, and Darion was thrown backward into the mountain, smashing through rock and earth, blasting through the other side into a valley with the impact of a crashing asteroid. Darion lay supine in the rubble—disoriented, stunned, and quite perturbed.

  I thought I was supposed to be doing the destroying here, he thought.

  Darion tried to sit up, and then the golem was there, eye to eye, glaring as it hovered right above him in a prone position with its arms folded.

  “Mind helping me up?” Darion asked with a smile. The golem’s thin line of a mouth curled into a half smile and then there was another bang. This time, Darion was sent straight down, his body bent at the waist in a V as he bored into the ground. He futilely grasped for the layers of rock and earth around him to slow his plummet. He smashed through the ceiling of a cavernous chamber above a lake of magma, and, with great effort, managed to halt his descent in its expanse, stopping just above the churning lava.

  He was angry now, not at his summary treatment, but at the prospect of failure, failing the test and being further delayed in aiding Jacob. Whatever the golem’s special attributes were, it didn’t matter: it was an obstacle that had to be destroyed. Darion teleported and materialized beside the hole he’d left in the valley. He looked around excitedly, but the golem was nowhere in sight. He continued to scan the surroundings frantically, and then upon spinning on his heel, it was there, standing right in front of him, glaring. Darion threw a savage right cross for its chin, but his fist glanced to the side an inch away from contact as if parried by an invisible force. Undaunted, Darion dropped into a sturdy stance and let loose with another straight, aiming for its nose. Again, his fist was met with the invisible force; the contact bounced Darion’s fist back with such momentum that it appeared as if he was flying backward in a supine position with his punching arm extended. He hit the ground after a few yards and skidded to a halt.

  That’s it, he thought, welling with anger. Darion’s pugilist pride was injured and he had to save face. Disregarding the destructive applications of the Essence in favor of an ol’ fashioned beat down, Darion stood, shook his fist, cracked his knuckles, and dropped into a low squat. He exploded from his position, flying with both arms extended with his fists clenched toward the golem’s chest.

  An inch before contact, Darion crumpled as if he’d smashed into an invisible wall. He hovered in a fetal position in front of the golem, not of his own accord, but restricted by some force, unable to move. The force slung him into the side of a mountain, pulled him from the rubble and then sent him straight up a thousand feet and then brought him crashing into the ground. It pulled him from the crater and then sent him skidding over the surface of a lake like a skipping stone before finally depositing him headfirst into its muddy bank. This wasn’t just a show of force; the golem was toying with him.

  Darion slipped and fell in the mud before getting back to his feet. His face was scrunched in a snarl with his teeth gnashing and bared. He inclined his hand toward the golem’s position in the distance. A wide black hole opened before his palm and erupted with an Asteroid Torrent. The torrent parted the lake, parted the very ground of the valley, and continued into the far reaches over the horizon. Smoke and debris swirled in the immense cylindrical canyon left by the torrent.

  “Unbelievable!” Darion sighed as the dust settled and he saw that the golem remained unscathed. The golem hadn’t moved an inch; it was in the exact same place, except now hovering in the air above the deep gorge that was once a valley. Now, the golem was surrounded by swirling remnants of the Asteroid Torrent—numerous boulders circled it as if caught in orbit. With a deafening whir, the swirling asteroid configuration rocketed toward Darion, who was able to teleport just before they smashed into the ground with the force of several nuclear bombs.

  Darion materialized below the golem on the dirt floor of the hollowed-out valley. “Let’s go!” he yelled. The golem glared at him smugly with its fists on its hips. Darion looked up at the golem and extended his arms fully to both sides in challenge. There was the piercing bang and he was smacked by an invisible force that punched a wide concave into the ground, imbedding Darion in its center. The bangs continued, one after the other, the invisible force of each pummeled Darion and smashed the concave wider and deeper as he lay motionless in the center of the crater. The golem landed by Darion and grabbed him by the throat with one hand and lifted his limp body into the air.

  Suddenly, the expanse brightened. Darion came to in the golem’s grasp and grabbed its arm with both hands and kicked his legs up and wrapped them around its neck in a triangle choke. The golem slammed Darion down by the throat, but it didn’t loosen his locked legs. Descending upon them was an enormous ball of plasma, the size of a mountain. The golem struggled to free itself, but it was useless; Darion simply smiled. The globe of plasma incinerated them both, burning into the valley gorge and burrowing into the ground with the light from the orb shining from the deep chasm.

  High in the air, Darion hovered with his hands on his hips, exhausted. The Darion that had sacrificed himself was a decoy, non-sentient, but imbued with a fraction of Darion’s power and mannerisms.

  The ground around the great chasm began to crack and shelve into the pit, with fissures spreading from the hole in all directions. Impossible! Darion thought. Had the golem survived? It couldn’t have—he’d put everything into that attack. If the golem reappeared, his only option was to retreat until his Essence had rejuvenated. Dark clouds began to manifest and the entire expanse became overcast and grey with a maelstrom forming over the widening chasm. There was the booming of continuous explosions from within the pit and steady streams of lightning rained down into the chasm from the swirling clouds.

  Countless tornados manifested and began ripping up the earth. Darion was whipped abo
ut by the savage winds. Trees were snatched up and lost in the storm. Mountains were being lifted and tossed as if no more than stones. All the while, streams of lightning showered the earth. Darion flew, flew to avoid the devastation, but there was no escape. He flew from the valley, over a vast ocean, only to encounter hurricane winds and waters that seemed to boil from the deep. He continued his flight. He reached the land and saw that it was split with deep gorges, with golden light shining from deep within the planet. Where the ocean waters met the gorges there were massive explosions and columns of smoke and steam. He flew, looking for any place not ravaged by the cataclysm. The great gorges widened, the ground blackened and split with flashing light below. Then it seemed as if the very planet was coming apart as continent-sized sections of earth began to rise and hover in the air.