"Jevin!! This is not the time to lie around relaxing. Get on your feet." Aditi changed the direction her shield was facing. She slid a few feet back with her heels, leaving tracks on the ground from an invisible force, "The ones Dhruva warned about have arrived already!!"
We couldn't see shit around us.
I was standing at one moment and then ragdolling at another. Losing bearing of my surroundings and watching tiny flickering fireflies in my vision wasn't a great experience.
"Get up." I mumbled to myself, "This isn't Alik! Trick your nerves, like you always do!"
Slapping my thighs and repeating my visualization technique, I somehow managed to get up, only to feel an impact on my ribs from the side.
The world started rolling again, alternating between views of the ceiling and the floor of the cave system, filled with stalactites and stalagmites.
I crashed into several of them, taking a few down with me, the air inside my lungs getting knocked out brutally. I gasped for breath and almost choked, feeling a hot liquid stuck in my airway.
An intense bloodlust was directed at me, forcing me to roll away towards my right, only to find the ground erupting from a mysterious force where I previously was.
The sights around me were gut-wrenching. We were vandalizing the natural beauty of this world... So many people wouldn't be able to see them again for a long time.
Those outgrowths must have taken thousands of years to develop into what they were till today.
Clearing my mind off useless thoughts, I charged towards the abandoned weapon Vivikta had lent me.
Disturbances in the air near me registered through my heightened senses. I ducked, yet still got hit by an impact in my right thigh. I followed a projectile motion through the air and crashed into the cave wall near Vivikta.
"This is beyond us." I heard Vivikta murmuring, "These are even more powerful than the ones who came to kidnap the children."
Disembodied footsteps rushed towards me, but I held my ground, swinging a punch at the invisible being. It traveled through the air undeterred, unable to hit its target.
In response to my actions, an enormous instantaneous force caved my stomach in, burying me back into the cave wall I had crashed into before.
I scrambled away, coughing out blood towards one of the villager uncles who had accompanied us, only to watch him getting lifted up in the air and being brought down onto the floor, right over a stalagmite.
He stopped spasming after reaching the base of the outgrowth, with a natural bloodied earth spike sticking out of his stomach.
A bloody vomit erupted from my stomach, burning my throat from the bitter bile accompanying it.
'Calm down.' I mentally prepared myself, 'You're going to see worse things from now on.'
The guy with twin sickles was still alive, continuously cutting at air and sometimes spurting out blood from his invisible enemies, smearing the floor with it.
"Jevin, catch!" Aditi called out my name, chucking the war axe I was going for in my direction.
I somehow knew an attack was coming and jumped towards the incoming weapon, successfully dodging it, evident from the gust of air that rushed past my ankles.
I caught the weapon's handle and used my heel to swing the war axe in the direction I came from. It grazed past something rough, as if chipping off a part of flesh. The weapon slowed down for a millisecond, encountering resistance, and then got freed, making a green-silver arc through the air.
"We are all over the place!! Aditi, Jevin... What the hell are you two doing? Why did you break the formation?" A panicked cry came from our mentor, Vivikta.
"But the uncles..." Aditi tried to reason while slowly getting pushed back by a series of impacts on her long rectangular shield.
"They knew what they came here for. You're a Surakshak!! You are supposed to always hold the line infront of everyone else!" Vivikta swung her Warhammer, releasing it like she did while fighting with the vine monster.
It hit one of the invisible Yeti and fell to the ground with a resounding thud.
A groan appeared from deeper into the tunnel, followed by a battle cry.
It echoed back and forth through the cave walls, collapsing a few stalactites from above.
As if a drum increasing the rhythm of its beats gradually, footsteps thundered towards Vivikta, lifting her up and slamming into the ceiling.
"Shit!" Aditi sweared out loud.
Vivikta was then dragged along the upper wall, forcing us to jump aside as we tried to dodge both the incoming invisible Yeti and the falling debris of the ceiling.
Judging Vivikta's location, I threw my war axe at the invisible ape monster, hoping to catch it off-guard from behind.
My weapon rotated through the air and ricocheted off into the cave wall, changing directions abruptly.
The air flickered for a split second, revealing a massive ape back covered with blood-red fur.
A dam collapsed, supposedly holding off the existential essence of the Being, pressing us into the ground on our knees.
The sickle man was launched off the ground and sent tumbling away from our location as if kicked by one of the enemies, disappearing into the darkness.
We watched with trembling legs—a show of true horror, as one after another, all the Yeti inside the cave disengaged their camouflages, revealing their giant blood-curling forms.
"Guys..." Vivikta, still in the hands of the blood-red Yeti, whimpered, "We can't win against this."
On both sides of the tunnel were dozens and dozens of Yeti, all having patched fur like tigers—with white backgrounds and red stripes.
"Alpen lollipops!" Aditi gasped, drowning in nostalgia. She pursed her lips, realizing it was not a good time to blurt out those words.
"Exotic and Horrifying." I muttered, and we both shook our heads, getting rid of our intrusive thoughts.
The blood-red yeti turned towards us and held up Vivikta like a trophy by her waist.
"We need young sacrifices. Not a vessel about to expire." The Red Yeti's eyes shone with greed.
Oh no. Vivikta is going to be angry hearing that.
He slammed Vivikta on the ground, bouncing her off it and kicking her away in the direction we came from, where Sickle Man had also disappeared.
"I'll get you back for that insult!!" Vivikta's weakened voice didn't seem threatening at all, as she cartwheeled involuntarily through the air towards an unknown destination.
The Yeti in that area parted, making way for her exit, leaving me, Aditi and two more uncles sandwiched between the two groups of monsters.
"And we thought there were seven monsters." Aditi sighed, putting up a brave smile as all the Yeti started converging on us.
"Seven triplets, to be fair. But we need to make sure these two go back safe." I said, examining the determined expressions of the uncles.
The blood red variant and two triplets of Yeti were blocking the direction Vivikta disappeared, while five triplets blocked the entry that led into the deeper areas of the cave system.
"Isn't the Boss supposed to wait until we deal with all his subordinates?" Aditi was frustrated, resigning to her fate, "Everytime I'm in a team with him, horrible things keep happening..."
The next few seconds were a flurry of red, white, and steel. Without the war axe, I fended off the attacks from the yeti for a while with my bare arms, only to get pinned to the ground, my arms and legs crushed to pieces under their feet.
Aditi was in a much worse situation than I was, her hands torn off from her body, leaving bleeding stumps on her shoulders.
She kept groaning but didn't break down crying out loud under the torture she was enduring.
Unlike me.
My throat was burning. My eardrums stretched to their limits, couldn't process my own sound anymore. The fear of losing something again broke my mind. I didn't want to lose it too, in this world.
My body spasmed, wanting to vomit out my entails, but nothing came out. What remained was the pain from my ribs contracting and expanding in a broken rhythm.
Without Vivikta holding the front, we were as fragile as a house of cards.
As my cry died down to whimpers, I felt the pressure on my knees getting weaker. One of the yeti lifted me off the ground and slammed my waist on his shoulders, breaking my back.
I lost all sensation in my lower body—summoning a trauma that had been ailing me since my childhood. It assaulted me like a cannon, blowing apart my mental barriers and bringing out tears from my eyes. They trickled down my forehead, streaming across my scalp.
"Take care of the old ones and bring these young ones to her." The red Yeti ordered his subordinates, his sound registering as a mess of thousands of noises strung together, "I don't know how the timing of their invasion matched up with our ritual, but it worked out well for us."
"Should we send some of us to check what's happening in that village? We need two more sacrifices to make it one hundred and eight." One of the subordinate Yeti asked as if they were having a meeting right in front of us.
"If it gets too late, sacrifice a couple of our own. The ritual needs to be completed at any cost." Hearing the blood yeti's suggestions brought out frowned expressions on the faces of the subordinate yeti.
"She'll be angry if we present two of them at once. You already know how she demanded we bring only one young vessel a year from that village." The Yeti carrying me right now started arguing with the blood Yeti. Their voices were still muddled. It took me quite an effort to understand what they were saying.
"I have talked with her about Narada's warnings. She's onboard with it. Don't worry." The blood-red Yeti ended the conversation and started walking towards the tunnel where Vivikta had been kicked off to.
After their meeting ended, the two yeti carrying me and Aditi walked away from our battlefield while the rest stayed behind to end the lives of Vivikta and Sickle uncle.
The rest of the villagers were now immobile bodies strewn across the floor in weird positions.
How useless have I been throughout this whole pilgrimage...
I lost a little kid to the Lakeh, was unable to protect the uncles, Vivikta or Aditi.
The Yeti played around with me, and now, I'm being sacrificed for a ritual or something. Was my father right all along? Synchronizing with Kalpa did cure me technically, but inside, I was still a weak human, no matter how much I trained my body.
A brain fog kept disrupting my thoughts, bringing over sleep to my eyes.
If I die, it's better to resurrect back at the Ashrama and stay put. Like I did in Alik, running away from my problems as always.
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