Haeros Dungeon - Chapter 29 preview (Patreon)

I trained for decades to control my emotions, my body’s response to imminent danger. I had spent the last year throwing myself into ever more dangerous situations. There was a thin line between daring and death. This last year, I had walked that line over and over again, and I had ended up on the side of dead once before.

So, it was with some degree of knowledge that things could be worse, but the “worst” thing that could happen wasn’t so bad to stop me dashing forwards. Even so, my heart beat like a dozen drums, playing “Fire and Flames” in my chest as I crossed the narrowing slip of rock towards the stone imp.

It stepped forward one last time, a pair of fractal mirrors tearing slices off the creature’s leg. The limb was no taller than a foot and a half now, massive and sufficient to hold its weight but significantly shrunk through Sophia’s efforts and its own skill.

As I neared, the boss did not need to rear itself up to strike at me – did not even telegraph its swing beyond the slightest shifting of its weight. Instead, it rotated, arm swinging forth and covering nearly all of the space where my body would have been.

Rather than be there, I slid underneath the arm, tucking in close to the earth and feeling the grazing puff of fair above me. The smell of obsidian and dust threatened to send me into a choking fit, even as the tinge of sulfur and the warmth of the wisps flew past me, impacting the creature one after the other.

The wisps had no physical body; they could not move the creature. The splash of flame their impacts created did, however, blind it, as the flooding of fire chi through the surroundings left it unable to see.

At the same time, slivers of stone left behind began to slam into its back, one after the other. Brand’s focus was entirely on lifting and casting these smaller stones at the imp, slinging them forward with all the speed that he could muster.

It wasn’t a lot, but the new impacts were confusing the monster, especially as it tried to keep track of me – and not miss, for example – the new mirror shards that blocked its arm from swinging down. Not without leaving a large portion of its body behind, at least.

All of that happened in seconds; long enough for me to get close to the body. Long enough for me to push up, shift my weight to my legs and then tackle the monster with my shield. All that running, that slide, all of it had been boosted by momentum as it flung me through space at ever faster speeds.

My own impact shoved the stored force into my arms and body, and through my form into the creature’s now smaller leg. I shattered the first layer, a second, a third, each moment breaking it apart further as its appendage cracked.

Not the only thing that broke at that moment, however, as my own body began to come apart, as my momentum vault added to speed, building into an impossible force such that I was crushed between it and an unyielding object.

I had known that that was a factor, the risk. It was why I wanted the shield, and why I killed the vault after a moment. I had worried that we would not have done enough damage, and so once beneath the creature, I started swinging. Yorrick’s shield had always been edged with metal, reinforcing it so that it would not bend or break as fast. I was putting it to the test, as my momentum slammed it into the imp, over and over again.

I only had moments to work, and, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time.

A massive fist came crashing down, nearly squished me. Only the awkward angle of the creature’s bulk on my body blocked its way. Even so, it clipped my head, ringing echoes through my ears and crushing one shoulder. Good news, it was the wrong shoulder, since I was still wielding the shield in my left hand. That just meant I could come up swinging.

Thing was, have you ever tried swinging with only one shoulder? A punch comes from the hips, from the legs, from the shoulder and arms. You swing both back and forth, channeling the energy from both sides. And one of my sides was completely broken.

Even with my health vault open, it would take long minutes before I was fixed. I didn’t even have the focus to direct the energy of my healing so that I could speed up my shoulder. Every movement, every jarring action, sent lances of agony through my body.

Here’s the thing about pain resistance. For those of us who have dealt with  a failing body, who have suffered true chronic pain, as we get older, as things break and never really heal properly, suffering becomes a constant companion. It grows to the point where we have to embrace it, accept it for what it is, and to exist within the limits of our new lives. None of that is to say that the pain that we feel is any less present. Any less real. It just meant that we knew how to handle it, so that it didn’t take up the entirety of our existence.

The pain was still there, and it still hurt. It still left scars on our psyche, brought tears to our eyes and made us groan internally, even if we might never say a thing to others. It drained us, day by day, but it didn’t leave us with a superpower.

The ability to say screw it and keep moving.

I kicked out hard, utilizing both my feet. The hard soles of an adventurer’s boots, meant to walk over the worst type of ground imaginable, struck the granite leg. It shattered another couple of layers, as momentum helped drive my attack harder and faster than should have been possible. It also broke a couple of bones within my legs themselves, leaving me slightly crippled, but that was somewhat the least of my problems, as the stone man leaned back, lifted its weakened leg, and brought it down to reposition itself so that it could swing its arm down fully onto my body.

That repositioning was its downfall. Quite literally, in this case. It was possible that the shield attacks by themselves might have been sufficient for me to have caused it to fall, when it lifted and brought its leg down again. But the new stress, the weight of its entire body coming down on the shattered and much shrunken limb, caused the entire thing to break apart. It shattered as suddenly as a gunshot ringing out in a convenience store. As sudden as a heart attack on a twenty year old.

It leaned over, one arm swatting from side to side. Desperate to save itself, unable to do so. It did, however, manage to hit me hard enough that I flew through the air, off that narrow bridge, to join the monster on its deep plunge to the earth beneath.

That was definitely not part of the plan.