Chương 16: Eldarion, The Lord of Antitheses

Three more chambers later there was a door. A real door. A big ass door. Stone. Twice as tall as Ben and three times as wide. There were carvings on the door, but the carvings had been carved over with rougher carvings, with violent ones, with the work of a hand that did not care about the original work and had been actively trying to obliterate the shit out of it. And in front of the door, scattered on the stone floor, were skeletons. A lot of skeletons. Maybe a dozen.

All of them adult-sized, all of them in various stages of decay, several of them still in armor that had rusted into the bone. Ben stopped.

"... cringe," he said.

"Okay."

"Boss room."

"The skeletons are a tell."

"Definitely one of the most obvious tell of all time."

"It's kinda creepy."

"A little." They stood in front of the door for a minute.

"Drink your potion," Ben said.

"I already drank my potion."

"Drink it again."

"I'm at x4."

"Drink it AGAIN." She drank it again. [Energized x5.] [Effect: +250% damage output.] [Maddy! Please consult a healer if symptoms persist!]"Symptoms," she said.

"What symptoms."

"I think it means like…death. From drinking too much."

"Right."

"Are you feeling any symptoms?"

"I'm feeling like I can fight god."

"That's a symptom."

"Cool." She put a hand on the door. She pushed. The door swung open. The boss room was a circle. A circular chamber, maybe sixty feet across, with a high domed ceiling and the same green-blue torches on the walls and a stone floor that had been carved with concentric rings, like an archery target, with something at the center. The something at the center was a dude. Well. Had been a dude.

The thing standing in the middle of the room was eight feet tall and broad, like a guy who had been a normal-sized guy and had then been inflated by a process that had not been gentle. Its skin was the same grey-green as the goblins out in the hallways but darker, the color of a houseplant a college student had forgotten to water for two months. It had a long pointed face with tusks coming out of the lower jaw at an angle Ben recognized from the goblins but bigger, more pronounced, more architectural.

It was wearing a tunic that hung off it in long ragged strips and looked, to Ben's eye, exactly like the tunic of a man on East 125th Street who had been having a hard year. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! It had a mace. The mace was made of skeletons. The mace was a long shaft with the bones of at least three small humanoids wired together at the end, in a cluster that the thing held in one hand like how a man might hold a fucking tennis racket.

It was disgusting. It was over-designed. It was some bullshit weapon an edgy thirteen-year-old would draw on the back of his social studies notebook. It looked at them. A panel slid in. The panel slid in big. It slid in across half the room. It darkened. It commanded attention. It centered. [CUTSCENE BEGINNING] [UNSKIPPABLE]"OH FUCK YOU," Ben yelled. The Hobgoblin's mouth opened. It opened slowly, theatrically, like a stage actor who had been waiting for his line for an hour. The Hobgoblin took a deep breath.

The room dimmed slightly, because of course it did, because the system had decided that boss monologues required mood lighting. The Hobgoblin spoke.

"I…have tried…to become stronger." It was a gargle. It was a wet rocky gargle, the voice of a thing whose throat was not a throat anymore, whose vocal cords had been repurposed for something the system had not fully thought through.

"I…have…studied. I have…fed. I have given…my body to the rite. I have…given my mind…to the rite." It paused. It looked at its own hand.

"And… look… what I have… become." The hand was a hand and was not a hand. There were too many fingers. The fingers ended in claws. The skin was scaled where the skin of a hand should have been skin. The Hobgoblin stared at the hand like a man staring at the wreckage of a car he had been driving after twelve beers. Ben stared. Ben stared because every single beat of this had been beat-for-beat the worst possible version of a tragic backstory. The pause. The gargle. The look what I have become. The hand.

The slow-dimming light. The fucking unskippable cutscene panel. This was a sentence the system had generated by feeding write me a sad transformed-mage boss monologue into a prompt window and not changing the first suggestion. He was furious.

He was furious in a very specific I am being made to consume slop while I am inside the slop way that he had been furious on the metro, the way he had been furious in the field of pink grass, the way he had been furious every time the system sparkled at him, and the fury was now compounded by the fact that he could not leave the lecture hall, he could not swipe to a different app, he could not even close his fucking eyes because the panel was inside his eyes. He pulled out the wax knife.

He looked at the mouthpiece on the pommel. He thought about Thorin's words. A warrior's high. He brought the mouthpiece to his lips. He hit it. He hit the wax pen for the first time as a wax knife, with the same gesture, the same draw, the same hold-it-in-too-long because he was thinking about something else, and the thing happened that always happened, the world went sideways in that specific way, except this time the world did not go sideways for half a second and then resume, it went sideways and stayed there.

A panel slid in for him. [TRANCE STATE ACTIVATED.] [STAT BOOST: +100%.] [VISION: -20%.] [PAIN REGISTRATION: -50%.] [DURATION: 3 MINUTES.] The panel was the only thing in his vision he could see clearly. His peripheral was… gone, mostly. The edges of his sight had dimmed and softened, similar to a real blinker, except now it was a feature, the system was rendering it as a feature, the system had decided that what he was experiencing was a mechanic. The Hobgoblin in the center of his vision was extremely sharp.

The walls were not. The skeletons in the doorway behind him were not. His body felt… different. It felt buzzy. It felt like he had just hit a real wax pen, except more, except cleaner, except with the specific I am very calm right now and also I could lift a car feeling that he had heard described by people who had done cocaine but had never actually felt himself. Okay he did cocaine. Whatever. He felt the wax knife in his hand. He felt every individual finger gripping the wax knife.

He felt powerful and stupid and calm and ready.

"Ben?" Maddy's voice, behind him.

"…I'm good."

"You hit the—""Yeah."

"You're trancing."

"Yeah."

"Be careful."

"Yeah." The Hobgoblin was still mid-gargle. The cutscene had paused, somehow, while Ben hit his blinker, the system had given him space, the same way a cutscene in a game paused while the player checked their menu. The Hobgoblin's mouth was half-open. Its hand was still in front of its face. The mood lighting was still dim. [CUTSCENE RESUMING.]"…I am no longer…the man I was. I am no longer…a man. I am…the consequence."

"OH FUCK YOUR ANTITHESIS," Ben said. He charged. He charged with the wax knife in his right hand and the trance buzzing in his bones and the narrow vision making the Antithesis Hobgoblin into the only thing in the world, and he covered the sixty feet of the boss chamber in what felt like four steps, the floor seeming to compress under him, and he raised the wax knife to swing— And the entire room turned white.