by Aaron Oster
Roy could agree to that, so, together, they climbed the dais and stood before the tree.
He reached out a slightly trembling hand, brushing his fingers against the fruit. He’d been expecting it to be squishy and rotten, but he felt instead a surface that seemed solid as steel. Surprised, Roy wrapped his hand around the fruit and gave it an experimental squeeze. The solid flesh was rugged and cold beneath his fingers and didn’t give, even a little.
“It’s much tougher than it looks,” he said as he plucked the fruit from the tree and held it up for examination.
Before Aika could ask what he meant, the entire Dungeon trembled profusely.
“Um, Geon?” Roy asked, looking around the room nervously. “What’s going on?”
The room shook again, harder this time, and Roy had to brace himself to retain his footing.
“Now, don’t be alarmed,” he began, immediately setting off alarm bells in Roy’s head. “But I think this place is collapsing. Better run for it.”
“Collapsing? What?!” Roy shouted.
“Yes. The Dungeon Core seemed to have crumbled the moment you picked that fruit. Good job.”
Roy shared a quick look with Aika, and though she couldn’t hear his mental conversation with the Dungeon Core, she understood him perfectly.
“Run?” she asked.
“Run,” he replied, and the two of them dashed from the room.
His Essence was exhausted, so he was forced to run at his usual speed. While Aika still had a little left, she wasn’t going to leave him behind. A massive, rumbling crash sounded from behind them just moments after they left the domed structure. They both whirled to see it collapsing in on itself, the stone being sucked into a small point before vanishing entirely.
“Faster?” Aika asked, her eyes going wide.
Roy didn’t respond, merely digging in his heels and speeding up. Everywhere he looked, the ruins were vanishing at an alarming rate. Stone, vines, and towers were being sucked into various points in space, disappearing in the span of just minutes.
The two of them were forced to vault stones, duck under hanging blocks, and dodge around falling debris, and it was made all the more difficult, as the ground didn’t stop shaking the entire time. There was a heart-stopping moment when the ground right before them began to collapse. Aika managed to save them, grabbing Roy by the waist and hurling him over the widening crevice, before leaping over it herself.
Had this been a different situation, Roy may have resented needing to be rescued yet again, but seeing as the world was collapsing around them, he wasn’t about to complain. It seemed to take hours before the floating ring of distorted space appeared before them. They dashed from the ruin entrance, Roy breathing raggedly as they began the steep ascent up the grassy hill.
He glanced quickly over his shoulder, seeing the ruins going up in a puff of dust as the last remnants were pulled into a single point, then began ominously expanding, a black void opening from the center and spreading over the surrounding landscape, swallowing all in its path.
“Run faster!” he yelled, running for all he was worth.
His injuries were a thing of the past. He didn’t even feel them through the adrenaline that was pumping in his veins. That was why, when the portal loomed before him, darkness right on their tails, that he didn’t even think and dove headfirst through the opening. Luckily, he had Geon, though. Otherwise, things could have ended very badly for him.
“Grab onto something!” Geon yelled, just as Roy exited and found himself soaring over open space with a three thousand foot drop beneath him.
Roy yelped, a very unmanly sound, but twisted in the air, snatching for purchase with both his arms. He screamed then, as his fingers dug into the ivy and vegetation as the wound in his left arm flared, sending pain flaring up and down his arm. He didn’t have time to think, as Aika came sailing out of the portal right after him, seeming disoriented.
She plunged down, screaming and flailing for purchase. Roy’s left arm shot out, and he grunted this time as the already torn muscles in his left arms were further overextended. The vines beneath his fingers snapped ominously and began tearing themselves away from the cliffside.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Roy yelled, scrabbling with his hand and feet for better purchase, while he attempted to haul Aika in to get herself a handhold.
Unfortunately for him, Aika seemed delirious with fear and couldn’t seem to even think straight, leading him to wonder just how bad her phobia for heights could be. Luckily, he’d caught her around the waist, so despite the horrific pain in his left arm, he still had a good hold on her. But he was still sliding down the cliff face too quickly.
The more he scrabbled and tried to get a good hold, the faster the vegetation tore, until they were falling at nearly fifty miles per hour, with Roy desperately trying to slow their descent. Sharp stones and vines dug into his hands, causing his fingers to begin bleeding. He’d dealt with this pain before and knew that it was up to him to save them both. And this time, he would have to be the one to do it, rather than relying on others.
Still, he slipped and scrabbled down, with the ground growing ever closer and him not being able to slow down. Finally, when they were just about a hundred feet from the ground and traveling at nearly seventy miles per hour, Roy’s arm snagged on an especially strong vine. He grimaced as his shoulder was wrenched out of its socket by the sudden stop.
The vine only held for a few seconds, just enough to arrest their fall, before they continued down. He tried to slow them once more and succeeded in only hitting the ground hard enough to dislocate one of his knees.
The air was knocked from his lungs, and he let go of Aika as he slammed into the ground, his adrenaline keeping him from passing out from the pain. Both of his arms were useless at this point. The right stood straight up above his head, the shoulder dislocated and his entire forearm up to the elbow covered in gashes and cuts. His left arm was bleeding profusely as the wound had been worsened by their fall. His right knee was dislocated from his awkward landing.
“You really do seem to get hurt a lot, don’t you?” Geon asked as he lay there, staring up at the cliff face.
“Yup,” Roy croaked out with a bloody grin. “Especially my right leg.”
“So, I see you succeeded in getting the fruit,” Hermit said as the two of them came back into camp, Aika supporting most of Roy’s weight as he bled all over her.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” she asked, helping Roy to the ground and then moving quickly to the pack to retrieve some Mending Pills.
“What else is there to say?” Hermit asked. “You succeeded, so it seems like I’ll be forced to deal with the two of you over the next year and a half.”
He sighed at that, watching as Aika pushed the Pill between Roy’s lips and made sure he swallowed before rounding on him once more.
“You could at least have given us some warning about what we’d be facing in there! We could have died!”
“But you didn’t,” Hermit said, the conversation seeming to tire him even further.
“I think the least you owe us is some answers!” she continued, removing the fruit from her pocket and waggling it before him. “Like what exactly this thing is and why you would even need a horrible thing like this.”
“Oh, that’s pretty easy to answer,” he replied, snatching the fruit from her fingers before she could so much as blink.
The gray outer shell shattered as he exerted what seemed to be an immense amount of pressure. A wall of force hit as soon as the shell was removed, though, forcing Aika to stagger back as the inside was revealed to contain a bright red-gold flesh. The fruit itself seemed to be pulsing with power, though Aika could not comprehend the energy it was emitting.
“If you want answers, I’ll give them to you,” he continued, popping the entire fruit into his mouth before swallowing it whole. “But for now, I have a test to complete.”
Aika’s eyes went wide as a solid dark gray Torii gat
e appeared in the small camp. Hermit’s shoulders seemed to slump as he looked upon that gate, as though there was anything else that he’d rather do than walk through. With a long sigh, he took a single step forward and vanished along with the gate.
Aika stared for a few long moments, wondering just what the hell had just happened. A cough from behind her snapped her from her thoughts, and she quickly turned to see Roy, sitting up against the tree and staring at her with now lucid eyes.
“Um, what just happened?” he asked, looking just as shocked as her.
“Well,” she replied, coming to sit down next to him and look over his rapidly healing wounds. “I would say,” she said, prodding at his arm, “that our new teacher just went to test for his Gray-Belt.”
“Gray-Belt, huh?” Roy said, leaning back against the tree once again and looking up at the sky.
“I wonder how much stronger that is than Gold-Belt.”
“Well,” Aika replied, flashing him a grin and moving over to lean against the tree with him. “I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long for an answer.”
Roy smiled tiredly at her, settling into a more comfortable position among the glowing vegetation. He was exhausted, bloody, and had been beaten to a pulp. But this time, he had managed to save someone else. Their mission into the Dungeon had been a success, and when Hermit emerged from his test, he would be taking them on as students.
His small smile turned into a full-blown grin then, as he imagined all he’d be able to learn from a Martial Artist like Hermit.
“Yeah,” he replied, watching the area where the gate had vanished just moments ago. “I think he’ll be back soon. And I can hardly wait!”
Epilogue
Tonde Kaeru stood over the bloodied and panting form of the Beast King. The fight had been going on for the better part of two days by now, but finally showed signs of letting up. And, though it had been a long one, Kaeru had to admit that it hadn’t been nearly as strenuous to win as he’d first thought it would be.
Advancing a single Dan should not have caused such a vast difference in strength, yet that was exactly what it had done. Before, the two of them had been evenly matched, so a fight would most likely be decided by a lucky blow. But once that he’d advanced to 1st Dan, he’d placed his odds of winning at around fifty-three percent. Not great by any means, but just a hair higher than the original fifty percent. An edge, however slight, was still an edge.
However, what he hadn’t expected, was the incredible increase in power he’d seen as a result of his advancement. At first, he’d thought that perhaps he was imagining things, or that the Beast King might be holding back. But, as the fight went on, he soon discovered that the man was indeed going all-out, unlike him.
In all honesty, though the fight had gone on for this long, he’d only needed to exert about seventy percent of his power, and that was just to match his opponent evenly. The moment he started exerting more power, he began to see a difference in their strengths. The Beast King had tried everything, exhausting his Chakra, Qi then Essence. But nothing he could do could hurt Kaeru. And now, after stretching out the fight for as long as he had, Kaeru was just about ready to finish this. The Beast King hadn’t suffered nearly enough for all the pain and death he’d caused his family, but he was tired of seeing him alive and still breathing. It was time to end this.
“Seems like our rivalry is finally at an end,” the Beast King said, looking up at him with tired and bloodshot eyes. “Who was to know that all it would take was a single Dan?”
He chuckled, then leaned over, vomiting up blood.
“It’s been centuries since I’ve felt this kind of pain,” he continued. “And, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I much like it.”
Kaeru’s eyes narrowed at that.
“Why start this pointless war? All you did was weaken both of our clans, not to mention completely destroy one of them. I know we’ve never gotten along and have had our scuffles from time to time, but we’ve never fought on this scale before.”
“In all honesty, I have no idea,” the Beast King replied. “I had a vision one day. An omen of hard times. Then, someone spoke to me, a heavenly voice containing such power that it made me tremble where I stood.”
The Beast King looked up at the sky then, and Kaeru could tell that his enemy was very near death.
“I can’t remember what it said, only that I had a compulsion to start a war, to try and rule The Crater on my own.”
He coughed again, blood flecking his lips, and took a shuddering breath before continuing.
“Honestly, I feel like I’ve heard this voice somewhere before. Perhaps even all my life. There always seemed to be a driving force behind all my actions, but now that I think about them, a lot of them don’t really make much sense.”
The Beast King focused on Kaeru one last time and gave him a crooked grin.
“Either way, it looks like I’ll never actually find out. It has been an honor, my old rival.”
Then, the light faded from his eyes, and the Supreme of Carnage died.
Kaeru stared at the dead man for a long time, puzzling over his last words. Could what he said have been true? Was there an outside force at play here? And, if there was, how much of a threat did they pose to his clan?
He felt a jolt then, a throbbing sensation, right down to his very soul. Kaeru winced, dropping to one knee and it took him a few moments to figure out what it was. The ideal he’d sworn to, the one to protect his clan at all costs, had reacted to those thoughts. He could feel the compulsion to protect his family grow ever deeper and, as he rose back to his feet, he knew what he would have to do.
His sister would not be happy. But with the Beast King gone, there shouldn’t really be any threats that the Tonde clan couldn’t handle on their own. They still had one Grandmaster – the only one left in the entire Crater. He would be more than enough to watch over the clan in his absence. And with Hato there to guide him, they would begin to rebuild.
He, on the other hand, would have to journey out of The Crater and head east. That’s where the merchant who’d sold him the book had come from. That was where he was the most likely to find his answers. He just hoped that whatever the answers were wouldn’t destroy him. If someone had been tugging on the Beast King from the shadows for all these years, then he could scarcely imagine the kind of power they would wield.
***
Shah Koya staggered out of The Crater and into the Lighted Fields beyond. He was bloodied and broken, yet he was still alive. The past few months had been a living hell, as the Beast King had reconstructed all of his crushed limbs and organs, then bound him to his service.
His missing arm and legs had been replaced by monstrous appendages instead of human ones. His arm from the elbow down was scaled, dark blue, and covered in rippling muscle. He only had four fingers, and they were each tipped with short claws.
Both of his legs were dark red, covered in fur, and had been hard to balance on at first. The foot was smaller than the one he’d been used to, more like that of a cat’s than a human. The worst part, for him, was the tail. The red appendage twitched behind him as he walked, letting all know that he was no longer entirely human.
After the painful procedure in which his body had been reconstructed, the Beast King had begun a war, and Koya had become his glorified slave, forced to do whatever he was bid and stopped from advancing or training at all. He burned with the desire for vengeance, to kill the freak who had ruined his life.
In his mind, Herald Leroy was responsible for every hardship he’d ever faced. But up until now, he’d been able to do nothing but stew over it, letting his hatred fester, even as he was forced to perform menial labor for the Beast King. But the Beast King was dead now, which meant he was free to act as he wished.
Koya had been in the middle of washing the Supreme’s outhouse when he’d felt the tether break. At first, he’d thought he’d imagined it. The tether had been placed there as soon as he’d agreed to have the Be
ast King save his life for the third time. After that, the man had torn him from beneath the spire that had crushed his body and taken him back to be healed.
When he stood and exited the outhouse without suffering for his disobedience, he quickly realized that he hadn’t been imagining things. As soon as he came to that realization, he ran. There had only been a single guard watching the border of The Crater, and Koya had been able to get past him, though not without taking some hits in the process.
Though he was still relatively weak, whatever the Beast King had done to him had enhanced his physical strength far beyond that of a human’s. Because of this, even though the guard was at Base Orange while he was at 2nd Dan Yellow, he’d managed to defeat him, something which should have been impossible.
“Not for me it isn’t,” he growled to himself. “Not anymore!”
Koya had felt a sort of savage glee in tearing the man to pieces. It had roused a sort of bloodlust in him he hadn’t realized he’d possessed. His Core had been tinted with an odd color, something he’d never seen before. Now, whenever he called upon his Water Essence, a grayish light clung to the fringes.
It was strange, and he had no idea what it did, but he had a feeling that it had something to do with his body being changed to such a degree.
He shook himself, pushing off the wall and staggering out of The Crater. His entire body felt as though it were on fire. He knew he’d lost a lot of blood and that if he continued going like this, he would end up dead. But he had little choice. He had to keep moving or risk death. The Beast King was gone now, but that didn’t mean that no one would come after him.
He’d been treated as though he were worse than an animal by the Beast clan. They’d tormented him, called him a freak, and made his life as difficult as possible, especially when the Beast King wasn’t around. One would think that Koya might start to understand how Roy felt, but instead, he funneled all his anger and hatred at Roy.
Roy was the one responsible, so he had to die. He’d failed to kill him twice. He would not fail a third time.
