The Fusionist Book 4 -- Chapter 58

Chapter 58

As the oppressive shadows enfolded him in its embrace, Larek was left unable to see anything as he quickly left behind any source of light around him. He wasn’t sure if he should be thankful or not, but his eventual landing through the darkness was cushioned when he crushed something underneath him that yelped out in pain before it cut off abruptly. At the same time, the abrupt obstacle sent him flipping over and over, his arms and legs flailing as he quickly lost any sense of up and down, until he finally hit the ground on his left side, slightly injuring his arm from the impact. A quick activation of his Healing Surge Fusion helped to remove the injury as well as what was apparently hundreds of smaller cuts and bites that he had endured from the monsters after his Automatic Ice Repulsion Field ran out of ambient Mana.

Fortunately, as he quickly got to his feet, a look at the current Mana density using his Magical Detection Skill showed that it was much more prevalent wherever he had landed, which made him wonder how far he had actually flown. It had to have been quite a ways since he could no longer see any hint of a glowing Adjustable Illumination stone nearby, which put him in a bad position if he was suddenly attacked by more monsters that he couldn’t even see.

Magical Detection has reached Level 37!

Unfortunately, even though he could see the strands of energetic Mana around him, they did absolutely nothing to illuminate the area. He reached into his belt pocket to grab another stone—

What? Empty? What happened?

He frantically checked all of the other pockets on his belt for anything at all, only to find that they were all empty. Panicking, he looked around himself, and using his newly increased Magical Detection Skill, was able to see something by his foot. He immediately identified it as one of his Fusions, one of his Weaken ones to be exact, and he suddenly realized that during his uncontrolled flailing in the air, all of his stones had fallen out since they had all been partially opened for easier access.

As he bent to pick it up, he looked out and saw more stones further away, showing up to his senses like stars in the night sky. It was the only thing that was visible nearby in the absolute void of nothingness, which helped to alleviate some of the panic that set in as he remembered being swallowed up by the attack of the Warped Void Hunters back in the Kingdom—

As his fingers brushed the top of the Weaken stone, he froze in place as he suddenly realized something.

It was completely quiet. He could literally hear the beating of his heart and the blood pumping through his head, it was so quiet. The last thing he had heard that wasn’t himself was the yelp of pain when he hit something while he was flying through the air… followed by the sound of his Fusion stones impacting the floor, now that he thought about it. But now there was nothing at all.

Where are the monsters? Better questions: What happened to the screams of rage coming from the Demons? Did they leave?

As he stood back up after quickly snatching the Weaken stone into the palm of his hand, he quickly learned the answer to those latter questions.

They had never left. The Umbral Demons were just preparing to attack him with an overwhelming horde of shadowy forms similar to what they had just experienced with the physical monsters.

They had him trapped in the darkness and at their mercy, ready to be the next victim of their possession and soul replacement assaults. With their numbers, he stood no chance against them, and he should just give up now. There was no point in struggling, as it would only cause unnecessary pain and stress, so letting his new friends take and use his body was the ideal solution—

NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

The insidious thoughts that pushed against him came from dozens, if not hundreds of different sources, and it was all he could do to keep his very sanity intact as he felt his knees crack on the floor. His physical strength had been sapped as soon as the mental assault began, the Umbral Demons staying out of range after having learned from his previous demonstration that he could hurt and kill them… somehow. The details of that were more than a little fuzzy to him at the moment, but it seemed as though the enemy wasn’t taking any chances and were doing everything they could to wear him down until he had no more resistance to their soul-replacing attacks.

As he struggled against the mental pressure wearing at his mind, his left hand rolled the Weaken stone around and around with his fingers, the thought that he could simply end it all by activating it and crushing it like a clump of dirt played around in his mind. It would be the easy way out, after all, a different result than the Umbral Demons wanted, but he would completely mitigate the risk that they would take over his body and use it for their own ends.

But that wasn’t who Larek was.  As much as he might appreciate the easy way out of a problem, this “easy” solution wasn’t something that he needed to contemplate for more than a second to realize that it would never happen. He hadn’t come this far to give up now, and he wouldn’t give the Demons the satisfaction of seeing him throw it all away without a fight.

That firm resolve was like a jolt to his mind as he very deliberately placed the stone back in one of his empty belt pockets, taking his hand away as he concentrated on fighting against the pressure threatening to snuff out his consciousness. Thinking was hard, however, as everything seemed to slow down around him, but the jolt of his mind was enough to push him into the same hyper-focused state he utilized when creating Fusions.

The instant his focused state snapped into place, his thoughts now seemingly segmented into a section outside of the Demons’ influence, he understood what they were doing. Not only were they trying to snuff out his mind from a distance, their numbers amplifying the effects until he could barely think straight, but it also somehow suppressed his knowledge of how to fight against them. He had completely forgotten that he could use his Pattern to hurt them, as it was part of the very soul they were trying to replace for their own purposes; now that he could finally think clearer, he knew what he had to do.

An unbidden chuckle escaped from his mouth, which only prompted more laughter as he continued to struggle against the pressure rallied against him. By the time full-throated cackling emerged from the Combat Fusionist as the monstrous hilarity of the situation occurred to him, he could sense that the Umbral Demons were edging closer to him, bit by bit.

They likely thought his mind was finally cracking, succumbing to their attacks, but that wasn’t it at all. Instead, Larek was laughing at the pure audacity and hubris that the Demons were displaying toward him, unsuspecting that their plan to force him to give up had been their undoing. They might be experts in dominating those people who couldn’t resist them, whose souls were easy pickings because they didn’t have any defenses, but the unique Combat Fusionist was certainly not one those people. His Pattern Cohesion, and therefore his soul, was strong and powerful enough to not only resist their attempts, but to fight back like nothing they had ever seen before.

The Umbral Demons had made a mistake.

They should have let the monsters kill him rather than try and trap him with their mental attacks with the intention of taking over his body. Their greed was their folly, and as he prepared his own response to their assault, he smiled grimly as he looked out into the complete darkness of the tunnel, letting his laughter subside.

The Demons were going to learn that he wasn’t trapped by their insidious attacks, stuck in the darkness of the tunnel; rather, they were the ones trapped in the suffocating darkness with him.

Sending his mind within himself, he grasped his Pattern Cohesion and started to form it into the shape that he wanted. This time, it wasn’t the form of a familiar axe; while that would’ve been ideal against a few Umbral Demons as they closed in on his position, he could now sense what had to be thousands of them all congregating around, amplifying their mental pressure against him to the point where any other person would’ve lost their mind almost immediately. No, an axe wouldn’t cut it.

He had to think bigger, of a way that he could hurt them all without having to hunt them down simultaneously. He remembered what he had learned from the one that had temporarily shared his mind, and how the Demons abhorred the light, as it hurt them severely – but rarely ever permanently damaged or killed them. It just didn’t have the strength behind it to do more than injure them like Larek’s skin would be burned if he stood too close to a fire.

But what if that light was created from his Pattern, his soul?

That was the question he wanted an answer to. Thankfully, his understanding of his Pattern Manipulation Skill had improved enough that he was fairly sure he already knew the answer to that.

With a flex of his will, he directed 1% of his Pattern Cohesion – a total of 360 – to form an invisible bubble around his head, with the thought behind it designed to block out any form of mental intrusion. As soon as it snapped into place, every bit of pressure that had been pushing into his mind vanished, freeing up the rest of his consciousness to focus on what he did next. Even as he sensed the Demons suddenly stopping their advancement toward him, and even beginning to retreat at the sudden nullification of their mental attacks, Larek formed another 9% of his into a ball that hovered outside of his body.

At first, it was simply just a glowing ball of largely transparent blue light, but it quickly changed as his focus on it transformed it into something that gave off light, heat, and life: a sun.  As suddenly as if he had activated one of his Adjustable Illumination stones, the transparent blue light became substantial and overwhelmingly bright – for anyone but Larek. For him, it didn’t affect him more than acknowledging it was there, because it was his Pattern; it couldn’t hurt him unless he wanted it to, and that wasn’t in its function.

That function was revealed a split-second later as it surged to life, sending out an incredibly bright and blinding blast of light into the tunnel, illuminating everything within sight. The shadowy darkness was instantly banished all around him, the light completely shredding it to pieces in less than a second, revealing a few things to him immediately. First, he could finally look back and see where the Illumination stones were, approximately 100 feet ahead of him; second, he could see thousands of monsters pushed back up the tunnel and around those stones, frozen completely still as if they were waiting for orders to attack.

Lastly, he could see the veritable legion of Umbral Demons surrounding him, packed so thick that he was barely able to look past them in places, and it was only when they moved in response to the sun that allowed him to see past a few of them to see his stones and the monsters nearby them.

Just as he could see them, they could see the miniature sun that he had created out of his Pattern. Instead of rays of light and heat being transferred from it, which the sun up in the sky did, it instead sent out rays of pure Pattern that passed through everything, as even solid material couldn’t stop it from its function.

In order to accomplish this, Larek had to keep feeding his Pattern Cohesion into the sun he had created at a rate of 5% of his maximum per second, but it was worth it. Just like he would funnel his Mana into a Fusion, he funneled his Cohesion into the brightly glowing orb in front of him, but unlike when his Mana left his body, the depletion of his Pattern rapidly drained his strength. He was suddenly thankful that he had fallen to his knees earlier, as he didn’t have the physical energy to get to his feet.

But the effort was worth it. As the rays of his Pattern flashed through the Umbral Demons, they began to get ripped apart piece by piece even as they attempted to flee. Unfortunately for them, their normal method of traveling quickly to escape such an attack was to slip into a nearby shadow, even if it was only a sliver of one, and use it to teleport itself to another shadow; with the sun illuminating everything with nothing physical stopping its progress, there wasn’t a single shadow to be seen within at least 500 feet of his location, if not farther.

Their screams as they were ripped apart as they attempted to flee, only for there not being any refuge for them, created a cacophony that physically hurt Larek to the point where his ears started to bleed and his bubble protecting him from mental intrusion was stressed almost to the point of breaking. As they died by the dozens and then by the hundreds over the next few seconds, the screams faded away as their owners were completely shredded by his Pattern-based sun, wiped from existence as easily as they possessed the bodies of the unwilling.

Some of the strongest Demons lasted a little over a dozen seconds before they, too, were ripped apart from the overwhelming power of his Pattern, and only when the last of the screams faded and the shadowy forms of the Demons disappeared did Larek absorb the sun he had created, regaining the thousands of Pattern Cohesion he had infused in its creation. The additional Cohesion he had sent into the sun was lost, used by his creation to reach the farthest Demons and destroy them, but it was a necessary sacrifice.

Pattern Manipulation has reached Level 23!

…..

Pattern Manipulation has reached Level 26!

His body didn’t think so, of course, as the loss of a little over 25,000 Pattern Cohesion over a short period of time made him want to collapse into a puddle on the floor of the tunnel.  Thankfully, he managed to stay conscious and even used his Healing Surge briefly to heal his ears, while at the same time artificially bolstering his energy enough to stand up and look around. He felt extremely drained still, but there were still monsters—

A glance back at monsters he had seen before, surrounding the glowing stones he and his group had placed, showed that they were still there… but they were still frozen in place. It was only when he looked around to see that the tunnel had lost its oppressive darkness that he considered what might have happened.

Did I kill all the Demons? Are they going to wait there forever until something kills them or gives them an order?

He didn’t know, but he didn’t want to waste any time finding out. He needed to get moving, even being exhausted as he was, because there were things he still had to do. The Aperture still needed to be closed, after all, but more importantly, nowhere in his view were there any signs of his Drekkin groupmates. They had obviously been dragged away somewhere after being knocked unconscious, but they were nowhere in view.

Looking back at the glowing stones, he spotted his dropped staff under the feet of a frozen horse ape and debated retrieving it, but he didn’t want to trigger another fight inadvertently. At the moment, they were leaving him alone, but who knew how long that would last if he was right there in front of them? With a resigned sigh, he elected to abandon it where it was, as over the next minute he quickly picked up as many of the nearby stones with his Fusions that he'd dropped earlier. In the end, all he could find were a half-dozen stones with Adjustable Illumination on them, as well as an additional 9 Weaken Fusions that joined the one he already had in his belt pocket. The offensive Fusions such as Frozen Zone and Binding Thorns were stuck in the middle of the monster horde somewhere, so he was forced to leave them behind as well.

With very little offensive firepower other than his Weaken stones and his axe with the Variable Elemental Gust Sphere Fusion on it, Larek left the site of the glowing stones and the monster horde behind, pushing himself further down the tunnel and to where he hoped to find his newest companions…

…and free them from whatever had them in thrall.