Chương 10: -10- Shattering Bone and Steel

Calder-Rime Rest Township Calder stared in dawning horror as the thing beyond his reality used thin, ever-shifting limbs to hold the tear to the beyond open. He had released his grasp over it, hoping it would slam shut, but that abomination wasn't going to let him get away that easily. It had spotted a glimmering soul, and it was hungry. The indistinct mass of limbs and eyes practically spilled forth, bringing a tide of shadows with it.

It rolled into the cavern like followed by an all-encompassing fog, freezing everything in sight over with a thick layer of frost that glimmered unnaturally. The dark fog itself seemed to roil in conflict with the very air around it. Warring to impose its tainted version of reality on the mortal plain. Calder took a shuddering fearful breath as he slowly drew his sword to face the monstrous creature before him. Its body was twisting and breaking, forming into something more fit for the world it had found itself in.

Three long, thin, bone-line legs ending in dozens of clawed human hands sprouted from the gibbering mass, raising it three strides in the air, then the round body changed to a single screaming, deformed face that matched Calder's expression of shock stretched unnaturally across the orb. Finally, a long, spine-like protrusion dripped from it like a sick parody of a tail. The entire creature was a haze of shadow, fading back and forth between transparent and solid with the shifting tides of fog around them.

Dectus exploded forward into action before the creature could act. He danced beneath its overly long legs and brought his sword around in a whirling slash that would have severed any normal bone cleanly. The being's tail shot down between its legs with unnatural grace and speed, deflecting the sword blow and then whirling back straight for Dectus's head. Calder pulled himself from his stunned inaction the moment Dectus dodged.

He didn't know what the fuck this thing was, but he knew if they didn't kill it here and now, they were both probably about to have their souls snuffed out like an unwanted candle. Calder shouldered forward, dropping his weight into a charge, and tried to use his mass to bully the creature off balance. He hit its leg shoulder first and met bizarre resistance; it was like he had charged through a stream of icy water. The horror barely even noticed. Fuck off, fucking of course! It's not fully material.

Calder turned on his back foot and spun into a rough but powerful overhead chop, focusing on activating Make Material. Instants before his blade landed, motes of tranquility traced down his blade in a flash of frost and shadow, leaping into the creature. His blow landed with brutal force. Bone showered around him, and his sword nearly bent at the impact. The creature staggered to the side, swiveling its entire face to look at the deep gash nearly cutting through its shadowy leg and then at Calder.

Dectus didn't give it a damn chance to think too much about what just happened. He skirted around Calder in a flurry of fancy footwork and stabbed the tip of his sword into the cracked ethereal bone, wedging it there like a prybar. He gestured at it before flinging himself to the side to avoid a sweeping leg that tugged at his armor.

Calder understood immediately; he planted his feet squarely and kicked out viciously with a front kick aimed straight at the handle of the blade, keeping Make Material active the whole time. His foot landed squarely and wrenched the entire blade along with the bottom half of the leg sharply sideways. The abominations' bone made a sound like shattering glass as it fractured in a sick spiral upwards. It listed heavily as the leg fully buckled from under it.

Calder turned to bring his sword down into its body now that it was lower. Instead, he was unceremoniously ripped off the ground by one of its remaining legs. The hands all across the legs' bottom surface, clambering across his flesh and hooking into his thick clothes. Its fingers started slowly elongating, excruciatingly piercing into his flesh like growing butcher hooks. Calder screamed a wordless bellow of rage and pain as the probing fingers hooked under his collarbone and scraped dangerously across a lung.

The pain wasn't even the worst; he felt the creature trying to take root in his very being. Like it was clawing against the walls of his sanctuary, trying to pry it open and pull the soul held within out. He hacked down in two savage blows that sent fingers and hands flying off in a shower of black blood and shadows. His cloak was frozen nearly stiff against his body, and the sense of wrongness spreading inside him was getting worse. He hacked again with one hand while trying to pull himself free with the other.

His sword cut deep across the leg itself and exploded in a shower of frozen metal shards. The unnatural cold had rendered the blade laughably brittle. Calder looked in disbelief at the handle of his blade, the thin blue ribbon frozen still at the end. His eyes went wide in rage, and he jammed the broken hilt down again and again on the back of the creature's grabbing hands. He felt his feet touch the ground as it tried to release its prey. He didn't let it get away.

Calder dropped his family heirloom and grabbed the thin leg with both arms. He braced his feet into cracks in the ice coating the ground and twisted his whole body; he pushed with one arm and pulled with the other, feeling the creature's bone snap in his grasp. He didn't stop. He just grabbed higher on the leg and pulled hand over hand; the creature's face was now nearly in reach.

The claws invading him, and scraping against his sanctuary had retracted, leaving a dozen deep wounds across his upper chest that he ignored, trusting his resistances to keep him from bleeding out. The creature suddenly dropped heavly onto the frost so its awful torso was against the ground. Dectus had cut its last unharmed leg out from under it. Calder was furious over the sword, and this thing needed to die. He planted a boot directly on the maddening abomination's eye and adjusted his grip on the savaged leg.

His bloody smile met the panicked gaze of the creature from beyond. Then he ripped with all his might, pushing off the creature's face with his boot. A horrible tearing sound accompanied him ripping the beast's leg free from the body. A heartbeat later, Dectus leapt past him, landing on the creature's brow and bringing his sword tip down straight into an eye. He levered it sideways and out from the creature's cheek in a shower of bone and shadow. Everything suddenly went still.

The maddening shadows and incomprehensible figures on the edges of his vision began receding. Calder and Dectus stepped back as the abomination melted away into shadow. Only leaving behind fingers and broken chunks of bone. The fog that had crept from the beyond slowly began dispersing, losing the war against reality without a constant flow to reinforce it. The small rift itself oozed closed silently. Calder took a slow, painful breath, looking down at the bloody wounds across his body.

The bleeding had stopped almost immediately. His blood simply hadn't frozen over during the brawl. He felt the sudden flash of pure, undiluted potential rush into him and then his sanctuary as he gained his share of essence from the kill. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. [Vestige Of the Tranquil Sea Tier-1] (lvl 15) [Slain] [Essence Gained] Calder dropped heavily to one knee; his adrenaline was fading, and instead a deep, bone-weary ache permeated his being.

He held up a hand, not wanting to waste all the tranquility fading from around him. And focused on pulling it to him. It was like grabbing at water, but some small clouds wafted over and into his outstretched fingers. The vast majority simply faded away while he knelt there, hand outstretched on the blood-stained sand and icy slurry. [Grasp of the Beyond 31/100] [Gaze of the Beyond 17/100] Alright, holy fucking fuck! Learned some lessons on that one.

Firstly, gaze of the beyond does NOT need to fucking fill up for a thing to decide to come say hello! I'm going to assume it's just how noticeable I am and use it like a sliding scale of, "Will I probably die if I do this again…?" Secondly… holy shit, Calder, don't hold whatever the hell that was open that long ever again… I need to go talk to that old shrew from the church of the Void. I have so many damn questions, and she might at least be able to give me a clue as to the dangers I'm diving headlong into.

Damn, as if the Kalderans weren't bad enough, my own powers are trying to eat me too. Have to admit, though… Calder looked at the cracked ground where he had wrestled an eldritch entity to the ground. There were still small craters in the ice where he had found his footing. The powers this class offers might well be worth the drawbacks. Dectus was standing to the side, nursing a gash across his arm that was slowly healing.

He was staring straight at Calder with the most intense "I have questions" face Calder had ever seen in his life. Calder nodded apologetically and stumbled over activating Make Material as he did so. He focused on trying to just let the tranquility trickle out, only having it affect the ghost's upper half to be more efficient in his use of his Grasp. It sort of looked like it was working; the ghost's frame flickered between ethereal and more real, at least. Calder's control was still terrible.

Dectus clicked his tongue and then pointed broadly at the ruined cave.

"I have questions, a lot of questions… Let's just start with this one. What the fuck happened in the last hundred years that I have seen two soul-eating abominations inside a week, and you don't even seem surprised about it…well, I mean, sure, that one surprised the shit out of you. He gestured where the tear in reality had been.

"But you adapted a hell of a lot faster than some newbie should when faced with that kind of foe." Calder let out a deep breath and picked up his shattered sword with a deep frown and a pang of loss. It was one of the most important things he had left related to his parents. He turned back to the question at hand and sat down heavily on what was left of the driftwood log. It wasn't much a frozen chunk, not quite big enough for him to sit on comfortably, so he leaned at an odd angle.

"The Kalderans happened. They got a new king about fifty years after you died. Twenty years after that they invaded." Calder was just sharing rote history; at this point, everyone who was alive knew why their country was slowly being eroded.

"Wait, wait. How the fuck did the Nancy pants ass Kalderans become the boogeyman? When I was around, they barely had a military; it was a bunch of herdsmen and goat humpers. The only decent thing they had was some cavalry." Dectus seemed genuinely confused. Calder reiterated.

"New fucking king. Scary bastard who specialized in magic that bound souls and immaterial entities. He proceeded to spend twenty years founding schools for that style of magic and then started waging a fucking war that was based around it. Remember the monster in the tomb. In case you didn't notice, that guy wasn't even a high-level mage; he was probably fresh out of their academies and already had a monster stronger than him at his beck and call." Dectus looked thoughtful.

"Ohhkay... I can see how that would make mages at least less fucking useless up close, but how is a whole war focused around it?"

"Because they don't fight it like a normal fucking war. They pick a spot on the edges of our kingdom and wage war there, forcing us to send all our defenders or lose a city. While we are gummed up with that, they send out small elite parties to conquer smaller towns, villages, or whatever they can get ahold of, like damn tendrils of darkness. Grabbing enough over the years to choke off the nearest cities until they are practically or literally behind Kalderan lines." Dectus interrupted, "So fucking what?

Send an elite squad to grab it back." Calder threw up his hands in frustration.

"The fuck do you think they try to do? The bastards have a fucked-up way of locking them down that turns even taking a minor town back into a meat grinder that needs specialized forces!"

"They can't have that many elites to leave dotted around bumfuck towns. The rate of second-tier warriors was like 1 in 500 when I died…" Dectus looked intrigued, almost like he was itching to fight a second-tier enemy. Calder tempered his slight frustration, it wasn't fair to expect a damn ghost to know any of this.

"We call them Totems Of Woe." Dectus raised an eyebrow.

"Every time they conquer a town, they do two things as fast as they can. They shuffle in settlers from the Kalderan empire and construct a totem. Even the smallest bumfuck, as you put it, village gets one." Calder's voice took on a grave, almost sad tinge as he continued.

"The totem has a…entity…bound to it. They are all different, some invisible, some spectral, some nearly fully material. But they share two traits no matter what. They are utterly deadly and bound to a mage hiding among the new settlers."

"Oh shit… That's fucking ingenious but fucked…" Dectus looked impressed.

"Yeah, it is to both…and worse, breaking the totem or killing the mage doesn't dispel the entity…it just, just frees it. Sometimes they leave, rushing off to God knows where. But more often than not, it will ravage the town and any liberators before just haunting the dead town, waiting for any more of our forces to come try and slay it or a Kalderan mage to come by and…collect their wayward weapon." Dectus gave a thoughtful nod, pacing back and forth and connecting dots.

"And if it's anything like what we fought in the tomb…your average ground pounder might as well be swinging his dick through the air trying to slay it with a normal soldier's skillset." Calder frowned at the disrespectful way he put it, but he wasn't wrong.

"Yes, essentially. Specially enchanted blades or spellcasters are needed, especially if it's invisible. And just because normal soldiers can't touch it very much doesn't mean it can't reach out and touch them."

"Huh…you guys are right fucked, aren't you…needing specialized forces literally everywhere is just untenable." Calder just nodded grimly, glad he at least understood the gravity of the enemy they faced. Dectus walked closer and gave him an almost patronizing pat on the shoulder. Then gestured at the broken blade in his hands.

"We should get you a real fucking sword. If I'm going to be training you, we should at least do it right." Calder pulled the hilt back and put it into the sheath at his side next to Dectus's broken blade.

"I was going to get it fixed; it has sentimental value. He said, his voice tinged with genuine emotion. The specter scoffed, "Fuck your sentimentality; it won't stop you from getting gutted like a pig!" Calder started to protest, but Dectus waved his words off.

"First that sword is way too fucking small for you, you were born a fucking monster. Use it. Secondly, the cold thing… whatever the hell your powers do besides letting you tickle ghosts, normal metal isn't going to cut it; you need something better. Thirdly... well, I don't have a third one, but the first two are good enough. Now to a blacksmith? This poedunk-ass fishing town has a blacksmith, right?"

Calder shook his head in equal parts frustration and acceptance; it didn't help that everything Dectus said was right. He untied the blue strip of cloth from the hilt of his sword and carefully tucked it away in a pocket. He could just put it on the hilt of his next sword.

"Yeah, we have a blacksmith, an awnry bastard, but we are on good terms. He's early second tier, too. Came out to our…very quaint fishing village to retire." Calder stressed quaint to show his displeasure at Dectus's comments Dectus's face lit up.

"Ho ho! Lead the way, apprentice; that's a boon I hadn't even dared hope for. The stronger we get you, the longer you live, and thus the longer I get to keep fighting." He actually waved his hands to usher Calder from the cave.

"Ahh, one…little caveat. I was planning to have him make my equipment from Darksteel." Calder said almost meekly. Dectus's eye twitched.

"Are you actually fucking stupid? Or is there a plan in there somewhere?" Calder gestured at Dectus and then himself.

"We. Can cleanse it."

"Oh fuck me, I'm going to die a second time, aren't I…" Dectus said, although he had a twinkle in his eyes that said he wasn't opposed to the idea.