Serpentine opened his eyes to find himself in a dark, lightless cave. Not that he couldn't see in the dark, so that wasn't a problem. The only issue was the stench that wafted about – a peculiar stench that Serpentine could only compare to a particularly acidic vomit. It was hell to breathe.
The stench seemed to be rising from cracks in the midnight navy rocks and black stone that made up the flooring, alongside a strange heat from beneath. As Serpentine looked around to gauge the environment, he realised he was in a large, spherical cavern, one that he could sense was particularly deep and dense by abusing a feature of his Dimensional Travel.
Before Serpentine could scout further, however, a sudden rumbling shook the caverns. A powerful earthquake knocked him to his knees, but he forced himself back onto his feet quickly, using an equilibrium of Chronic Grace and Dimensional Travel to keep balance, as well as swiftly dodge as my falling rubble, which seemed to only grow more frequent and dense as time went on, until the source of the chaos made itself known.
The cavern trembled as a monstrous catfish tore through the ground, its dark blue scales glistening faintly in the sparse light. Yellow whiskers the size of tree trunks lashed out, their movements slicing through the heavy, damp air. The floor beneath Serpentine's feet shuddered, jagged black rocks splintering and rising like waves around the gaping chasm. Dust and stone filled the air, choking his lungs and stinging his eyes. He could evade the larger shards that shot at him like bullets, but he was helpless against the finer particles.
The creature loomed before him, a titanic predator that smelled of brine, petrichor, rot and urine. At the very least, Serpentine had now found the source of the acidic vomit-like stench.
A system prompt flashed before him in jagged red letters, the words almost mocking in their simplicity:
[Defeat The Big Bad Evil Guy or watch cities fall.]
'What cities?' Serpentine complained about the lack of flavour text. As if on cue, his query was answered.
[Defeat The Big Bad Evil Guy, lest it escapes the cavern and tramples nations once more, for this land-dwelling catfish didn't just crush people and structure beneath its weight, but also caused earthquakes with every leap, and weakened the ground through which it burrowed.]
'That's more like it.' Serpentine hummed in approval, ducking under another large shard of rubble.
Abruptlt, his instincts kicked in as a deep, and a guttural sound began to build. The cavern trembled, the vibrations intensifying with each passing second. His sharp senses caught the subtle shift in the air.
The catfish loomed before him, its enormous body rippling with unrestrained power – likely a being of almost pure muscular mass, much like the land tank that went by hippopotamus. Its whiskers twitched as if tasting the atmosphere, and its enormous maw began to open, the movement slow and deliberate. The stench intensified, a pungent cocktail of a tangy brine and acidic decay that clung to Serpentine's senses like a barnacle.
The low rumble soon evolved into a deafening roar, reverberating through the cavern with a force that seemed to peel the air apart. Dust and loose stones came apart and rained down, the walls screaming in protest as if the cavern itself could barely contain the sound. Serpentine staggered, his balance faltering, but a pair of cursed hands rose from the earth, pushing his hips to ensure a recovery, while his hands covered his ears.
Dimension magic intertwined with temporal activity, dampening the sound that would otherwise rupture his eardrums and organs, leading both to failure.
The roar felt alive, like a sentient force clawing at his resolve. For a brief moment, it threatened to drown out everything else – his thoughts, his instincts, and his focus.
But Serpentine was no stranger to chaos. If anything, he was among the most well-versed in it.
Well, maybe aside from Chaos himself, but did he really count?
As the echoes faded into an ominous silence, he narrowed his eyes at the creature, a smile dancing on his lips, as playful as a cloud. "Alright, you big fish," he teased, flexing his fingers as he steadied himself. "You've had your dramatic entrance. Let's see how well you handle mine."
The catfish cared naught for his words, and leapt into the air with its colossal figure, aiming to harm him by the rubble launched upon its descent, but Serpentine activated Chrono Grace in quick succession. The world around him slowed, the grinding roar of stone and the catfish's monstrous growls stretching into a low, distorted wail.
He moved, faster than gravity could pull him, his boots skimming the rock face as if the cavern walls were a dance floor. He vaulted, twisted, and spun, each motion more precise from the last, his body starting to remember the feeling of combat, defying the chaos erupting around him. The wind howled past his ears, a sharp contrast to the muffled booms of debris, now a distorted thud, striking the ground far below.
The catfish continued to thrash about, its massive body slamming violently into walls and ceiling alike, sending a tidal wave of stalactites raining down. Serpentine barely evaded a particularly jagged shard, its edge slicing a thin line across his cheek, a cut so clean that it was only moments after that the warmth of blood dripped down, mingling with the salty tang of sweat as he phased through a boulder with Dimensional Travel, emerging just in time to see the creature coil for another leap.
"Now you don't," Serpentine hissed.
With a sweep of his hand, he summoned his cursed energy, dark tendrils stretching out from the shattered earth. The tendrils snaked toward the beast, forming massive, clawed hands that clamped onto its thrashing body. Immediately, the catfish bellowed in rage, its golden eyes burning with feral fury as it fought against the hands that drained its vitality.
The air grew heavier, suffused with the acrid scent of burnt magic as the cursed energy worked its way into the creature's pungent flesh. But the catfish refused to be subdued.
It twisted violently, the sheer force of its movements enough to tear apart the cursed hands. It launched itself skyward, colliding with the cavern roof. The impact shattered stone into deadly fragments, each piece whistling through the air like a bullet.
Serpentine ducked, rolled, and phased again, but the relentless storm of debris forced him to retreat momentarily. His lungs burned with every breath, the dust coating his throat like sandpaper.
'This won't work... I need a better curse. I need a– screw it, I'll invent one myself.' Serpentine grumbled internally, a hand of cursed energy erupting from the ground to push his coughing body out of a boulder's trajectory.
His memories were horrifically distorted, dampening his mastery of combat, weapons, and magic by several magnitudes, but his body was still engraved with aeons of experience. The mind forgot, but the flesh still remembered. And it was time to put that to the rest.
He closed his eyes, relying solely on the spatial awareness provided by his years experience with dimensional to dodge the debris, his body moving instinctually.
'Curse. I need more cursed energy.'
With picture perfect grace, he dodged every shard of broken stone that flew in his direction, phasing and dancing in quick succession with his eyes closed, as if it were a ballet. He didn't waste his energy breathing, his mind fully focused, and the dust now useless, but soon, it was not the shards he had to worry about, but the titanic catfish looming above him, threatening to crush him with its fall.
'Denser. They need to be denser, unbreaking.'
His body phased between timeframes and dimensions alike, the world all but slowing down except for him, each of his steps covering distance worth tens. Gravity itself failed to catch up to his speed, as he rushed directly up the broken, jagged wall to his side, phasing straight past the falling catfish as he ran.
'Flexibility is good, but I need rigidity to bind it. Chains will do.'
As the catfish slammed harmlessly onto the shattered crust of black, a tsunami of pellets and shards of rocks shot like bullets in a wave, harmlessly spreading out around it, completely missing Serpentine who was above, releasing his phase as he took a deep breath, and fell back onto the earth. Towards the catfish's back.
'I need to weaken the fish; vitality drain will do. Or I could drain its kinetic energy too, with energy drain.
As he continued to fall, he spread out his his arms, mobilising cursed energy again, this time channeling centuries of experience into refining the technique. The lumisncent purple energy didn't go for the catfish, instead spreading out to every jagged corner of this abused and broken cavern, as if planting seeds for a future calamity, each glowing with a violent hue.
'I need the chains to be self-healing. Maestrolysis and manaplating work, with the energy sapped as fuel source.'
From the countless seeds rose a pair of cursed hands each, the dark purple limbs coiling around each other into a helix as the combined mass twisted and morphed, moulding into chains – thick, barbed, and pulsating with a malevolent will of their own.
As Serpentine landed, he pressed his palm against the catfish's back, a violent, blinding purple flash illuminating the entire lightless cavern for a single moment, a shrill, ringing sound echoing behind it as if a flashbang. He let the inertia die down, he gracefully flipped towards the beast's side, revealing a purple brand beneath his palm, burnt on the creature's flesh.
The catfish felt the presence on its back, and leapt into the air once more, attempting to crush the demon under its heavy weight, or bury it beneath the shattered cavern.
That was a mistake.
Every single cursed chain immediately shot out into the skies, extending endlessly from the seeds that planted them, the cracks in earth glowing a bright purple hue as the links ripped their way through it, as if hiding violet magma underneath.
The cursed brand on the beast's flesh seemed to expand, scarring its whole body with a patterned purple, a circle and a cross, before they disappeared. And the chains only got faster, wrapping around the catfish the moment the mark faded.
They coiled and wrapped around the beast, one chain at a time, and before long, the immensely heavy creature was suspended in the air, neither the chains nor their source exhibiting the slightest hint of a fracture, dense and rigid as they bound, prompting the creature to try and thrash like a fish out of water.
'The irony.'
One by one, more chains wrapped around the catfish, and each link sapped energy from the catfish, slowing its frantic movements Just as the cursed hands, the chains too drained the creature of its stamina, life force, and mental energy, but in addition, they also feed on the kinetic energy of its thrashing.
The creature continued to try and thrash, the chains tightening with every struggle, more than simply absorbing the catfish's energy, as they used what they sapped to grow stronger, and coil tighter. The links continued to tighten as it thrashed, blood dripping down like water colours as the chains dug into the flesh of the beast, tearing into its muscle fibres.
'Bingo.' Serpentine could see the effects of his newfound spell almost immediately.
The catfish's range of motion grew shorter, and its thrashes weaker. Its once-blazing yellow eyes dulled as blood seeped from where the chains cut into its flesh. But still, it fought, each movement shaking the cavern with seismic force. The walls around and the ground beneath Serpentine were not affected, but the cursemancer himself was threatening to collapse entirely.
Pain lanced through his body as he forced the chains tighter. His vision blurred, his head pounding like a drum. He clenched his jaw hard enough that he could hear his teeth crack. And his efforts bore fruit, as the chains dug deeper, through layers of tough, slimy skin, past the dense muscles, and into the creature's bones.
The bones too cracked, and the chains bore into them all the same. More than just the pain and injury, the links sapped away the life force and stamina directly its flesh, blood, and bone marrow. Every last pint of energy was drained, even the flow of blood losing its kinetic energy, and even the neural pathways starting to be sapped shut.
The catfish let out a final, shuddering roar, before its mouth too was shut by yet another chain, as its massive body was hoisted into the air by the cursed links. A chain threated to pull its skull upwards, while yet another link fought to drag its jaw to the floor. But its mouth was shut by numerous chains, so the links dug into its gums and tongue, instead, slitting through them as the beast hung there, suspended like a grotesque marionette, its swollen form twitching weakly.
One of the chains abruptly wrapped around its bulging eyes, tightening until they burst in a sickening spray of ichor. The stench of blood and ruptured flesh filled the cavern, miring with the acrid stench of urine and acidic vomit, making Serpentine gag. He tasted bile at the back of his throat, but swallowed it back down.
"It's... over... bitch...," he rasped, though every fiber of his being screamed to stop. His body protested, muscles screaming, lungs burning as he surged forward in a blur of motion, but he simply pushed past the pain and the protest of his body.
No more phasing. No more dimensional leaps. And no need to summon his void scythe, though the pain of the process was likely miniscule compared to his current situation.
No matter, for it really was over.
Moments later, the catfish's body exploded into minced flesh as the chains ripped straight through its mutilated body, the tension having reached its apex. Blood, marrow, and viscera sprayed in all directions, coating Serpentine in a warm, sticky film, the powdered bones of the creatures sticking to him. Fragments of bones, torn-off flesh, and ruptured organs rained all around the cavern, slumping down where they landed.
For a moment, there was silence, broken only by Serpentine's ragged breathing. He collapsed to one knee, his vision swimming, the taste of blood and bile lingering on his tongue. The chains rang like a bell as they slammed against each other, the catfish between them gone, the sonata eerily reminiscent of Fate's ultimate.
Serpentine wiped his face with a trembling hand, smearing blood, slime and sweat across his cheek.
"Big... bad... evil... guy?" He forced the words out of his throat, his eyelids twitching incessantly as random muscles spasmed, "More... like... big... bad... pain... in... the arse."
Serpentine collapsed into a weary chuckle, momentarily wondering if he should consume one of the pulses of Kickstarter Energy to heal himself, but decided against it.
They had only reached five goals after all, and one of the pulses had already been used in his resurrection. Of course, he'd have more if they had more backers, but people were either stingy, or their audience underage.
As the world around him started to crack, revealing a white light from beyond as it unravelled, Serpentine sighed.
'All that for a damned root beer.'