Book 7 End - Chapter 664 - Checkmate

[Heat death] allowed Sofia to absorb a good chunk of mana from the dead crab, and she put it to good use. Since the cooldown for each consecutive cast of [Saintomancer’s Star] was reduced by half, the second cast came to fruition right then, and it would only be a second and then some before the next.

Sofia dumped all of her mana in minimum cost stars, spawning five more of them in an arc over her head while Pareth handled the worm. As for the spells from the jellyfish, the monster made the mistake of casting a series of cheap direct damaging spells that Sofia [Heat Death] cancelled without a second thought.

From there, there was no need to even convert the stars to spread rot. The monsters were too affected by the aberrant sunlight curse. Pareth finished the worm off as it tried to jump into the light, and the Jellyfish died from the pulses of holy damage when Sofia detonated all of the stars at once.

[You have defeated Elite monster ‘Knight of the Abyssal God - Level 300’ five seconds have been added to your survival timer.]

[You have defeated Elite monster ‘Bishop of the Abyssal God - Level 300’ five seconds have been added to your survival timer.]

Not very generous, but fifteen seconds is fifteen seconds, I’ll take it.

And now… I can’t heal and I can’t move unless I heal…

Pareth, the dagger fell on the pile of rotting fish down there during the explosion, can you get it for me please?

Pareth fetched the admin key for Sofia and she grabbed it with [Bone dominus] using the bones of her armor. Then, she ‘gently’ smashed it into herself to split her mana heart in two.

Her mind blanked out for three seconds, and she was back, fully healed and ready to go.

Still two unlife runes up.

Let’s get moving, we should go find Pestle, she thought for Pareth starting to swim down to the bottom of the strange stomach.

Rather than to follow the digestive tract, Sofia sliced her way through the lining of the stomach, and invaded the interior of the deity’s body.

Navigating between giant fleshy mounds and pulsating veins full of black liquid was relatively easy, but it was swarming with fish-like monsters. These ‘Pawns of the Abyssal God’ were just level 299 monsters and gave nothing when killed, they were just annoying, and came endlessly from the wart-like growths. Pareth could kill each of them in a few hits, never taking any damage from their physical attacks, while their cheap spells were all erased by [Heat Death].

Progress was fast and frantic down the god’s body, as each passing second was an opportunity for more Pawns to crawl out of the walls, until a ball of invisible fury came to change the balance of things.

Pestle rejoined the group, blasting through chest of the fish monsters, coming out with their mana hearts in her hands on the other side.

Pesle find heart! The fairy eagerly communicated, speaking directly in Sofia’s head. But too hard… Not kill.

The god’s heart? Does it really have something like that? Lead us there.

More and more pawns rushed through the walls to stop the group’s advances, but with Pestle there, they were even more efficient at getting rid of them, and following the path Pestle had already cleared once was significantly faster than going blindly. The group arrived to ‘the heart’ in under a minute, an army of pawns running after them.

The god’s ‘heart’ was some sort of greenish rock right about Sofia’s size with a lot of sharp edges and mind-bending geometry, covered in a healthy amount of purple eyes that stared back at any onlooker. It was sitting there, seemingly without any protection, ridiculous amounts of mana oozing from within.

Pareth, hold back the pawns. Sofia ordered as she and Pestle swam toward the heart.

Look, heart ha– Pestle started, interrupting her invisibility to point at the heart, but she stopped mid-sentence, turning around and looking at one of the walls.

Sofia looked as well. She couldn’t see anything wrong with it, but she trusted Pestle’s instincts.

Danger. Pestle warned. A horn-like spike emerged from the wall at the same time, extending dozens of meters in the blink of an eye to pierce the water toward Sofia’s mana heart. Even on her guards, Sofia was not fast enough to react.

PESTLE!

The fairy’s tiny skeleton had shattered, she decisively blocked the hit for Sofia, and had not survived. The spike retracted into the wall as fast as it had come, as if it had never been there, it had been fast, silent and deadly. 

PARETH! KEEP HOLDING THE PAWNS BACK! Sofia mentally yelled as she furiously dumped all of her mana into her signature skill.

The spike erupted from the wall again. She died. 

Death had never stopped Sofia from channeling a spell.

Just as she regained consciousness three seconds later, her skill resolved.

[You have invoked Mötek, Calamity of Bones]

‘Remaining lifetime : 53s’.

She barely had the time to see the giant destroyer of Bones start to appear and throw itself at the wall of flesh from which the spikes came from, she continued her emergency plan, ripping out her own heart now that her mana was at zero. As she bit into it, she finally activated the [Avatar of Zeus] she had been keeping ready for a long time.

A digusting monster wearing a jagged crown ripped out the flesh wall and clashed against the destroyer skeleton as Sofia’s body warped in an unfamiliar way. Spikes erupted from the monster’s body, puncturing the calamity of bones but unable to kill it or bypass it to reach Sofia.

Black lightning started pouring out from Sofia’s warping flesh as she howled in pain. She was overwhelmed by the abrupt change from the two transformations happening at once, and finally, she attained her final form, a nasty, twisted being, that was not quite an Avatar and not quite a Demon. Her mind was clouded by the godly lust and sorrow.

[Regret]

With a thunderclap, she appeared behind the crown-wearing monster that the calamity of bones struggled to pin down. Thrusting her elongated clawed hand at the monster, she pierced right through its fishy scales, sparks of electricity flying around.

[Hollow heart]

Another hole appeared in the creature’s body, replaced by a pulsating ball of lightning that seared it from the inside. Spikes appeared all over the creature’s body once again, piercing Sofia from head to toe in a hundred spots. Unluckily for the creature, despite one of the spikes hitting Sofia’s mana heart, it was not the first one, so it harmlessly bounced back due to [Singularity edict].

Sofia’s hand, still in the monster’s body, closed down on its spine. As [Bone Dominus] started to shred the monster from the inside, Sofia did not stop there.

[Hollow heart]

Another lightning-filled hole appeared in the creature’s body.

[HOLLOW HEART]!

Finally, the thing was weakened enough and Pareth’s [Sanctified grounds] just activated. The calamity of bones found the strength to close its giant mandibles. Crushing the monster to bits.

[You have defeated trial-ender ‘King of the Abyssal God - Level 389’ one minute has been added to your survival timer.]

A strange sound came from the other side of the room, and both Sofia and her calamity of bone were erased from existence by a beam of dark energy. She did not even have enough mana to cancel it with [Heat Death].

When she came back to life three seconds later, still a warped abomination and with no unlife runes left, she saw the thing which had killed her. It was a taller and meaner looking copy of the monster she had just killed, with a much larger crown, and an amount of mana that wasn’t in the realm of something a level 299 could ever face. Pareth was struggling to fight it off, using all of his skills at once, be it the chains, the gravity well or the shield, Sofia could even tell he had just used [Greater Heal] on himself as his shattered bones were being mended back together. 

Mana gathered in the monster’s core. Another dark beam came.

Pareth disappeared.

[Regret] was all Sofia could do. As she was on the opposite side of the room compared to the monster, she used it to teleport and hide right behind the ‘heart’.

There was no killing that thing, so destroying the heart was the only solution.

Except, the heart was completely untouched by the even the dark beam.

The monster slowly advanced in Sofia’s direction as if to taunt her as she whipped out the admin’s key and stabbed at the giant rock full of eyes that silently looked at her every move.

The dagger hit one of the eyes and bounced back. It did not even leave a dent.

FUCK!

The monster approached slowly.

[Hollow heart]! She tried in desperation.

It did nothing.

A thousand thoughts crossed her mind in an instant, she even attempted to store the strange thing in her storage, to no avail, as it seemed her storage ring and eye could not even lock onto the massive thing.

She was out of options. A slender crab-like arm shot out from the monster’s back, its long pincers grabbing Sofia by the throat and slowly lifting her up. In contact with the pincers, Sofia felt herself lose control of her magic. She could not even fight back as another pincer clown of the strange crowned creature slowly pierced her chest reaching for her mana heart.

The monster stopped. It made weird sounds, as if cackling. His claw reached for Sofia’s heart then back again. It was toying with her, and there was nothing she could do about it. She fought back physically, as it was all she had left, and she could not get the pincers to open at all, no matter how much she strained, it did not even begin to budge.

Finally it seemed the monster had enough. In a fast motion, it ripped out Sofia’s mana heart like she had done to many of her opponents before.

[PARADIS TOYBOX]!

Sofia stopped time, miliseconds before her incoming death.

Bit off more than I could chew again?!

How much mana… Five hundred million? That was Sofia’s estimate of the monster’s mana pool, at a glance.

Since it was pointless to even try to fight that, she looked at what Pestle had called the god’s ‘heart’ instead. In the mana-only view of the stopped time flow, the heart looked just as strange as it did normally. But unlike the normal view, there was some text circling it, written in plain common language with letters shaped of pure mana that couldn’t be seen under normal circumstances.

PROP-T2Event-W3-e2 

ID=T232E6429

NAME=‘ABYSS HEART’

tag:‘INSTANCED TOYBOX CORE’

tag:‘IMMORTAL’=TRUE

tag:‘IMMOVABLE’=TRUE

/-/

DEBUG MODE=TRUE; 

USERKEY=ADMIN-ANNA; 

DEBUG PORT -> HERE <-

What… Admin Anna? Is this appearing because I hit it with the key?!

While the words all circled the heart, the mention of the debug port was the only immobile part, with two arrows pointing at the word ‘here’, which itself was written right above a tiny dot. The dot was a hole in the heart’s mana, right where she had struck it with the dagger moments before.

This gave Sofia some hope, but that was quickly dashed, she was about to die, she had no time to fiddle with a microscopic hole to try cheating the trial. Even if she had all the time in the world she still would not know what to do with that ‘Debug port’. 

Still, she used every last second she could maintain the stopped time for to get some extra time to think.

Then her control on the toybox ended. Her mana heart was violently ripped out of her chest, bloodlight tearing as it tried to follow it.

But Sofia was not dead, she had been almost full life until now. Even with the creature carefully digging in her entrails, she had no runes left, so the constant healing from [Bone dominus] had kept her above 99% health points. VPPV actived.

That’s right, I don’t die in one hit, bitch!

With the instant of extra time this gave her, Sofia stared hard at the god’s heart. She knew where the ‘debug port’ was, a tiny hole in the thing's endless mass of mana. A tiny hole she could guide her own mana through.

Sofia’s left eye flashed with a strange light, and the ‘Abyss heart’ disappeared.

The monster looked stunned, both that Sofia was alive and that the unthinkable had happened. Yet, despite their god’s heart disappearing, nothing had changed, yet.

The monster raised its claws to crush Sofia’s shining body once and for all.

Sofia beat it to the punch. Using [Bone Dominus], she crushed her own skull.

The storage eye burst open like a ripe fruit.

In the Margin pocket linked to Sofia’s eye, where the god’s heart was stored, it no longer had any connection to the physical plane. The physical reality of the trial failed.

Everything turned white.

[You have defeated trial-ender ‘Queen of the Abyssal God’ ERROR has been added to your survival timer.]

[You have murdered invuln-entity ‘ABYSSAL GOD’]