Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 27

*WHOOSH*

Riven’s feet were swept out from underneath him as the floor abruptly lit up with green runes and gave way, a hole forming directly underneath where he stood. His eyes went wide, and he had mere moments before his body reacted to gravity’s pull, which sucked him downward into darkness.

*SPLASH*

Gasping and coming up for air, Riven found himself enveloped in a large pool of blood similar to the river he’d seen outside. Only this one was stagnant and placed in the middle of an enclosed, squarish room with pillars and passageways leading out along the walls. The ceiling overhead was surprisingly well lit with yellow crystals, showing that even the passageways leaving the room ended in dead ends and rubble. Overhead was the hole he’d fallen through many dozens of yards up, but nothing else of note was around him. He frowned at his misfortune, obviously having fallen into a trap set down by the dungeon. He should have expected such things, but this was really the first time he’d encountered anything like it. Considering what options he had and treading the red liquid, he began to think of a way back up.

That’s when he felt something large and slippery glide across his leg, easily brushing him away and causing ripples in the otherwise still pool of blood he floated in.

“What the fuck?!”

His heart sped up. He couldn’t see beneath the surface, but something was definitely there, and this time it slammed into him—sending him spinning through the pool into a nearby wall with a hard thud.

He gasped, his backpack rattled as the vase inside nearly cracked, but he was more worried about staying afloat with an injured left arm than he was about his belongings. He whirled while treading blood in the pool, summoning spinning crimson blades and firing them at random into the depths to scare off whatever had attacked him.

Nothing happened. Only silence and occasional ripples in the red liquid remained. Meanwhile, his breathing only became more ragged, as he simply couldn’t see what was down there. Whatever had attacked him could likely very easily kill him due to surprise alone, because if he couldn’t see, he couldn’t dodge or fight back. And even if he could see, he was very much at a disadvantage treading liquid here and not being able to move properly.

“Shit… Shit, shit, shit!”

His left leg was abruptly tugged under, causing him to scream and flail, only to have it released again. Was this creature toying with him?

Regardless, he took the opportunity to swim frantically back up to the surface to gasp for air again. His clothes, hair, and skin were drenched in red, and he coughed the lukewarm blood up out of his lungs after having accidentally taken some in during the panic.

This time he let loose. Unleashing net after net and dozens of conjured Bloody Razors, firing randomly into the depths, he burned through his mana with an enraged and simultaneously terrified scream of defiance, splashing into the depths one after another. However, whatever it was down there that he’d hit…it didn’t seem to like that very much. The pool beneath him almost immediately turned into a torrent of madness as magics clashed with something very large, something very angry, that lived in this strange room amid the ruins.

*BOOM*

The room shook when a giant tentacle five times Riven’s body length crashed into a pillar opposite from where he floated. Debris and dust began showering him from the ceiling above, but there was simply nowhere for him to go. He looked to the tunnels in a mad panic and began swimming toward the nearest one despite the dead end, but they were already in a state of disrepair and began to collapse as one after another of newly emerged monstrous red tentacles began climbing out of the depths while a groan of some unearthly god erupted from beneath his feet.

The room and his body shuddered amid the cacophony of noise, and his eardrums began to bleed. He screamed, covering his ears in sheer agony as this beast from the beyond clambered upward to find the man who’d dare injure it.

*THUD*

*THUD*

*THUD*

Riven tried to unleash another spell in desperate attempt to discourage the creature, but he’d already unleashed everything he had in his original volley. The magic didn’t want to come to him; his soul reservoir simply didn’t have the stored energy anymore. Meanwhile, the blood pool was billowing upward to make way for the huge bulk of some enormous creature—sending waves of blood in all directions with a rising pinnacle in the center.

*THUD*

*THUD*

*THUD*

The sounds of climbing through the depths were growing louder, as was the echoing groan. More of the tentacles reached up, this time all around him, climbing and clambering across the pillars and walls toward the ceiling, where suckers each a few feet in diameter stuck to the stone and pulled the monstrous weight behind it.

*THUD*

*THUD*

*THUD*

Cursing and using his staff to leverage his body, he managed to finally get a poor hold on a ledge where one of the pillars had been cracked by one of the passing monster’s weighty appendages. He pulled himself up, reeling, just in time to see the numerous fleshy red tentacles all slowly withdraw and sink into the pool.

He paused, heart beating faster than it ever had before. Dead silence descended upon the room like the call of the grave, a foretelling of his impending doom that lasted for more than a dozen seconds before the pool finally stopped rippling. Then, in the center of its flat surface and under the yellow light of the crystals above, a figure began to emerge at an incredibly slow rate—but the face that came up was focused solely on him.

It was a bulbous, smooth, fleshy head with alien features that Riven could only describe as disgusting. Fishlike eyes on a smooth, semirounded maw—a cross between a giant fish and a frog—pulled out of the depths, revealing itself to have large rows of teeth. Blood dripped down its mouth that was easily big enough to eat three of Riven in a single bite. And even though it was so large, it now made absolutely zero noise while it pulled its ugly head up out of the pool to stare at him with a hungry, open mouth.

Riven was awestruck. He dropped his staff to the ledge, feeling his heart drop with it, when he suddenly realized that this was it. He was going to die here. No matter how many spells he threw at this thing, he was nowhere near powerful enough to come even close to killing it. This was a monster far, far beyond him, just by sheer size and bulk alone, and upon trying to identify it, he didn’t even get a name. Rather, all he got were question marks. There was also no way out, nowhere to go, with all passageways out being dead ends and zero ability to get back up to the ceiling where he’d dropped down—he was truly and utterly fucked.

“RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

The room and pool around him vibrated and shook underneath the monster’s bellow, shattering what remained of Riven’s right eardrum right before dozens of smaller tentacles blasted out of the water to latch onto his body, clothes, and items. Some scoured his belongings, tearing off his clothes and backpack before tossing them aside. Others began burrowing into his newly exposed flesh, leeching off his blood as he felt a sucking sensation from numerous areas where the monster had merged with his bloodstream to begin feeding on him alive.

The sucking sensation made him vomit immediately, and he wanted to scream afterward when one of the red tentacles crammed itself down his mouth and began draining blood from the veins in his throat next.

His eyes rolled back, and he experienced pain unlike anything he’d ever felt before via a multitude of pinholes that burrowed through his flesh. His body quickly atrophied while the fluids of his tissues were drained out, though, surprisingly enough, he didn’t immediately die. Though he looked like some kind of skeleton within a mere twenty seconds of being tortured alive and fed upon, his body was somehow regenerating without any explanation of how or why.

The creature was equally confused by this and moved in closer while maintaining its constant sucking that leeched blood from his arteries at over three dozen points.

Riven remained like this for some time, in a state of near death where his mind went hazy and he felt the lifeblood of his body being sucked out in droves…until primal rage and desperation finally overcame him. His body tensed, his Blood subpillar vibrated violently, and his eyes blazed crimson as he shrieked through the red tentacles crammed into his throat. Everything became a base-level instinct, and he desperately began fighting for his life.

*RIP*

Fangs ripped out of his mouth, and Riven bit down hard, easily tearing into the appendage with a twist of his head and swallowing it in one go. His muscles began to pulse, and a hunger for blood rippled through him as his own screech was joined by the monster’s while its bitten-off tentacle flailed about and rapidly retracted.

The monster roared, erupting from the pool and lashing out at him with larger and more sinister-looking bladed tentacles that cut through the air like whips.

The appendages inside his body, draining his lifeblood, exploded as his Blood subpillar resonated with a torrent of power—calling out to the lake of crimson liquid in front of him. His red eyes shot wide-open and holes throughout his body immediately mended. A fountain of blood tore through the air to intercept the squid-like appendages immediately thereafter, though he was still far too underleveled to be blocking an attack like that.

A razor edge ripped cleanly through his leg, severing it at the knee, only to be stitched back a second later as crimson liquid blazed and lit up—condensing around his body, pouring into his throat while he sucked it down, and repairing his wound over the course of seconds. Meanwhile, he smashed down on another tentacle with abnormal amounts of strength, and he became the equivalent of a frantic, hard-to-kill cockroach for the monster as it dealt out serious punishment.

*CRASH*

He lost an arm, only to stitch it back together while ribbons of red tore out of the pool to answer the call of his vibrating Blood subpillar.

*BOOM*

He narrowly dodged another blow that would have surely ended him, stone in the wall behind him having shattered under the crunch of another tentacle.

Meanwhile, his mind went in and out of consciousness, sanity and insanity battling with one another. Every time his body took in an influx from the blood pool, he’d regain his clear thinking. And every time he suffered a large wound or breaking bone, more of the blood pool was ripped out to repair his body.

But his regeneration speed was slowing down, and the pool of blood was rapidly being drained. It appeared he had serious limits on this kind of healing. Despite the massive amount of environmental resources, it was taking huge quantities of the stuff to regenerate his limbs, and he could feel his Blood subpillar starting to slow down its vibrations.

He was still going to die here if he didn’t get out very soon.

He began to brainstorm. During one of these moments when his sanity returned and his unnatural strength briefly left him, he finally came up with a plan. Bone snapped, limbs and guts ripped, ribbons of blood poured out of the pool to keep him alive amid the creature’s barrage that tore chunks out of the stone wall and splattered it with Riven’s body—but through sheer willpower, he persevered. Even though his body wasn’t healing nearly as fast as it had been even a minute ago, even though the pain was immense and he felt like he was dying a thousand deaths, he still persevered.

The answer was a simple one.

During one of the instances when he was free of being pummeled to death by the brutish monster in quick lashes that would crush any normal man, his hand shot out and produced a black net. His mana by this time had recharged enough to cast a few of these things, and he launched himself onto the wall in a mad scramble upward.

The surprised creature behind him missed and shattered rock again where Riven had just been standing. It roared, sending another tentacle upward to latch onto his ankle, only to have a Bloody Razor appear to snip the appendage off at the tip.

He scrambled even faster, firing one net after another to make a sticky ladder out of the Wretched Snares one by one up the side of the wall. He’d been wary of the idea at first but found that the magic didn’t burn him at all, as it was his mana. He was able to manipulate the magic and actually grip the needles in one hand, and they’d just melt into a smooth cord instead. Yet they remained sturdy upon his will. Thus when he rapidly reached a point farther up and close to the trap hole he’d fallen through, he was able to combine multiple snares into one casting. He was able to stitch one end to another, and then another, and then another, and he flung it up at the ceiling. He stuck the snare to an area adjacent to the hole in the floor, barely swinging out of the way from another tentacle strike from far below, and allowed himself to climb up in a mad dash.

*UMPH*

He breathed heavily and slammed into the floor of the room he’d fallen through earlier just as another tentacle skimmed the tips of his toes. He grunted amid a screech of outrage, still exhausted from the bodily trauma. Passing the threshold into the room, he let himself fall with a light thud onto the stone floor and let out a loud groan. “This place is the worst!”

His body shuddered, his lungs gasped, and he peered out over the edge of the hole to see the monster roaring back up at him.

Its large, unblinking, fishlike eyes scoured him up and down, watching in a hungry rage. But as it glared back at Riven’s sneering face, one of its other eyeballs was directing other appendages to dig through Riven’s things—and when it came to the vase in Riven’s backpack, it simply snapped the thing open when the porcelain wouldn’t budge on its own.

And that was the creature’s fatal mistake.

A shock wave erupted from the vase, shearing Riven’s peering face clean off along with one of his eyeballs, which was sent splattering across the ceiling above—even if he’d made it all the way up. So, too, did it destroy all the appendages trying to trail up the sides of the pit, vaporizing most of them instantly with a wave of darkness and causing the creature to shriek in rage.

The monster reared up, exposing a long, tubular neck that connected to a thicker body near the base where thousands of tentacles swirled about its core. Its large maw hissed and roared, but when another shock wave of raw Unholy power directed solely at the monster buried itself in the creature’s face and then sheared through its brain like a razor through cheese—the monster simply died on the spot.

The abomination twitched animatedly three times over, the top half of its skull rolled off the rest of its neck and splashed into the pool, and then the rest of the monster crashed into a nearby wall to start sinking back into the depths from whence it came.

Riven, still somehow conscious, began to see again as a mixture of both shock and disbelief overcame him. His body hung halfway over the hole he’d been looking down, pain screaming through his muscles and skeleton. His shaky hands came up to his face, one of them intact and the other completely devoid of almost any flesh from where he’d tried blocking the pulse of power on instinct…until it started to regenerate new muscles, bone, ligaments, and skin right before his one remaining eye.

His eyesight came back to 100 percent again and he felt his face, which was also healing up. For the first time, he actually realized his body was somehow drawing on the blood of the pool beneath the ledge he lay on. It finally clicked, and he slowly lifted a finger up to touch one of the now-receding fangs that had sprouted from his mouth. Yanking out what remnants of the wriggling appendages still buried in his skin with grunts of pain and disgust, he saw those remaining holes close over, too. But he froze when his eyes lifted, still in a state of shock, to settle on where the porcelain vase had shattered only moments ago.

There, staring directly at him from below, was an eyeless, ethereal maw with sharp canines and a wicked grin. It carried no body with it, fading in and out of reality by the millisecond. It was made up of a swirling vortex of black and red, and just looking at it made his bones creak with what he could only describe as an immense hunger. The hunger was unnatural, unbearable, unignorable, and all-consuming, and the longer he stared at it, the longer he felt it…resonate…within his soul.

It resonated with the hunger he’d felt after being drained. The hunger for blood.

The essence of the maw let out a demonic scream, far louder, longer, and with a presence far greater than the monster had exuded many times over. The very air around him quaked with raw power, and his soul screamed back. Red light erupted from his chest and ripped through the visage, drawing the Shard of Original Sin into his body with a flash of power that both stung and enthralled him down to his soul core. Heaven and hell, hope and despair, pleasure and pain—he experienced all these things in that one instant.

He shuddered, clutching his head as these emotions drove themselves into his psyche with an ever-gnawing hunger. His body fluctuated, muscles bulged and shifted, bones cracked and snapped, only to return to their normal form moments later. This repeated over and over again, and it was during one of these shifts that he felt his neck snap for the briefest moment, causing his head to slam involuntarily into the nearby wall—which ended up knocking him out cold.

Standing there, invisible to Riven’s eyes just a few feet away, another man with similarly crimson eyes glared down at him. Hooded and cloaked, he dispelled the invisibility and snorted with displeasure. “I’d hoped the monster would kill him so that I could take the piece of sin for myself… How unfortunate.”

The man glanced up to the sky and sighed, internally fuming at how close he’d come to acquiring Gluttony for himself. But he knew he could not act, not directly, not when the system itself would slam down the might of ten thousand suns and burn his soul from the inside out if he intentionally intervened in a system tutorial without permission. Integrated populations were protected for certain amounts of time dependent on situation, and Riven here was no different.

Growling and grumbling to himself, he turned around and headed out the door. Perhaps one of the other denizens of this hellscape would finish the boy off for him. Then, and only then, via death not brought about by his own hands, would he be able to strip Gluttony off Riven’s soul to take for his own. Not only that, but the one who sent him would also be furious if he were to strike Riven down now, even if he could get away with it by the system bylaws. Which he couldn’t.

“Poor luck and misfortunate follow you, youngling.” The man glared back over his shoulder from under the hood of his cloak, eyes blazing with bright crimson light. “May you die a quick death.”