The eldritch half of my body screamed in protest the moment I resolved not to use the splinter to fight against the water elemental. It hurt. It felt like I was betraying every value I should stand for. Hope. Justice. Belief in a better tomorrow. The willingness to spend everything trying to carve out that better future. It was like half of my body was literally fighting me. I felt a jab of pain lance through my body, as if all of my organs had been stuck in a blender for a few moments.
I gritted my teeth, pushed the pain down, and glared at the water elemental.
The water elemental didn’t wait for me to finish dealing with my internal issues. It glared at the first ship, before it created a water whip and tried to tear into the nearest vessel.
I opened the largest portal I could. {Void Mastery} lent me the ability to widen the portal a little bit. I tried to lean into the power of hope as well, to further enlarge the portal - and groaned in pain. The power of hope rebelled against my actions, and for a fraction of a second, I outright lost control of the portal. I gasped in pain, and then let the original portal collapse ,before immediately creating a new one, this time without the power of hope. As my essence coursed through my body, the eldritch half of me quivered in pain, as if I was trying to lift something up with a broken arm.
It hurt.
Despite my pain, I still managed to widen the portal to a large enough size to catch the water whip. In a flash of inspiration, the moment the water whip slipped through the portal’s opening, I slammed it shut.
The water elemental groaned in pain as the portal tried to close with half of its limb still caught inside. Then, to my surprise, I realized that the portal hadn’t snapped shut. It was caught in a half-open, half closed state - like a shredder with a block of wood jammed in the middle of it. The creature tried to pull its tendril back, while my essence surged into the portal and tried to force the whole thing closed. For a brief moment, I felt another wave of heart-rending pain surge through my body - this time, accompanied by the feeling of something quivering in pain within my essence pool.
I had a sneaking suspicion that I had just injured my essence pool, and that if I survived this battle, I would need to take some time off from spellcasting. But right now, I had bigger problems to worry about. The water elemental yanked its water-whip back one more time, and then, with a horrible tearing sound, part of the water whip that had been jammed in the portal started to tear itself to pieces as the water elemental struggled. To my surprise, I saw the creature’s life force weaken slightly. I blinked in shock.
Tearing away some of the water in its body had actually injured it?
However, my hope only lasted a moment.
Even if I had technically hurt it, it was like poking a giant with an embroidery needle. The damage was nowhere near large enough for it to be seriously hurt - it was just slightly injured.
The rest of the water whip collapsed, accompanied by the awful sound of nails on a chalkboard mixed with stones grinding against each other. The portal finally snapped shut. And along with it, something else broke. Space itself collapsed, in a way I had never seen before and had no way to process or understand. It was as if space itself had become fragmented and diluted.
I had no idea what the long term implications of that were, but I didn’t care. We needed to survive this encounter, and I had a sneaking suspicion this world was doomed anyway. The Universal Tree’s roots would probably reach down and scoop this world up sooner or later. A bit of spatial tearing was a drop in the ocean compared to the problems this world would soon be facing.
After the water elemental’s limb was torn apart by the power of space, I felt an intense prickling at the back of my neck. Even though the water elemental had no eyes, I instinctively knew.
It had locked onto me. It knew I had just shredded one of its limbs.
And it was not happy.
I said.
said Anise. A moment later, three new water whips materialized within the water elemental’s body, before they sprang towards my boat like hungry vipers. I opened three enlarged portals, and tried to push the water whips through it - but the water elemental was smarter this time. Right as I slammed shut the portals, I realized that there was no tearing sensation at all - instead, the portals simply closed.
I blinked in surprise, and looked at the ‘ruined limbs’ of the water elemental, before I realized something was wrong.
These weren’t real limbs of the water elemental at all! It was just a regular string of magically controlled water! The previous chunk of water had somehow been connected to the main body of the water elemental, like a limb - but this time, my attack was worthless.
I saw Sallia activate her {Star Core}, leap above the boat, and then swing at something with a {Timewinder’s Slice}.
I had no time to see what she had cut before I felt something invisible slam into me with the weight of a meteor.
I died.
But not completely.
As I sank into the darkness of death, and felt the Market’s pull on my soul, I realized that unlike in previous worlds, I was both dead and not dead. The physical half of me was thoroughly crushed into soup - but the eldritch half of me was alive, even if it had been injured by my refusal to use the {Splinter of Annihilation} to help the clan survive this crisis. Hope hadn’t yet faded, even if it was weaker than before.
My eldritch half pumped pure concepts into my soul, searching for the correct shape for my body, brain, and internal organs. Hope withered further, as my eldritch half pulled on a concept it had been absorbing and improving for most of my life in this world. Hope withered a little bit, as resources were absorbed and consumed.
And then I was alive again.
My body, which had been crushed into nothing, grew back from thin air. In that moment, I realized how the ‘revival’ mechanism for my eldritch half worked.
It didn’t matter how damaged my original body was. It didn’t matter how I died. It didn’t matter whether I had a complete corpse to facilitate my revival or not. I was now a half-conceptual being. Thus, as long as the conceptual half of me remained strong enough, I could rebuild my body from scratch. My eldritch half could literally create a new body from thin air, as long as I had the resources to fuel it.
In that moment, I felt as if I had realized something.
I had chosen to avoid using the splinter of annihilation in this life. I had chosen to abandon these people to their fate. Thus, hope had weakened. But it wasn’t yet gone.
Because I hadn’t given up.
Even if the splinter wasn’t going to be used, the essence of hope was persistence. Even when things were at their worst, I had to keep going, until the very last chance faded into nothing. That was the meaning of hope - the meaning that I had come to. So long as I honored that, my eldritch half wouldn’t completely rebel, even if it still didn’t like the fact that I refused to use the splinter.
I coughed, and then lurched towards the surface of the water.
yelled Sallia, right as I took in a few gulps of air and reassessed the battlefield.
asked Anise.
said Sallia.
yelled Anise into the bracelet.
A moment later, from the unbroken half of the ship I had been standing on, I saw Anise start launching beams of light at the water elemental. They didn’t seem to do much damage, but they certainly annoyed the creature.
I started swimming away from the ship as fast as I could - and at the same time, I prodded the creature with a very weak extinguish.
I wasn’t trying to hurt it. I knew that was hopeless.
I just wanted to annoy it.
The water elemental locked back onto me instantly, and another water tendril crashed down on me.
I died.
I revived again.
Hope grew weaker. I vaguely sensed that I could revive two or three more times, before I returned to the Market.
I teleported a bit further away. Then, I poked the water elemental with another weak extinguish.
The creature lost its mind and started shrieking in incoherent rage. I had its full attention now.
Eight different water tendrils crashed towards the spot I was swimming in.
I teleported away. A giant wave of water nearly threw me into the distance, and I started coughing out water like a drowned rat. Then, I poked the water elemental with another extinguish.
The creature started shrieking in total madness, and began swimming towards me. It no longer seemed to care about the fleet at all - I had annoyed it, and it was determined to finally kill me.
Not so coincidentally, it also started swimming towards Sallia, as she made her way towards the creature.
Yelled Sallia.
A moment later, a giant fireball appeared in the sky, right above the water elemental. It was larger than our ships. Larger than a building. For a very brief moment, it felt as if a sun had appeared right in the middle of the underground ocean. I poured all of the hope and alteration essence in my body into the fireball, to amplify the effects even further. I saw Anise launch her own wave of fireballs at the water elemental a moment later, while Felix threw a few wooden spheres at the monster that exploded like grenades.
A giant wave of fire crashed into the creature.
A moment later, the other [Fire Mages] of the clan joined in, and a giant wave of attacks crashed onto the water elemental.
Then, Sallia’s fireball ended. A moment later, my essence and my hope both ran out, and I collapsed into the water like a spent candle.
I glanced at the creature using my soul sight.
It had taken some damage… but not much. If I had to estimate it, the all out attack of every single survivor, plus Sallia’s fireball and my hope-based amplification, had maybe dropped its life force by two or three percent.
The water elemental slapped Sallia out of the sky.
She died.
A water tendril crashed onto me.
I died. This time, there was no hope left to sustain my revival. My eldritch half was exhausted, and there was nothing left. Before I even had time to look at my System notifications, I saw a few more death-related notifications, followed by one final notification.
All members of your registered group of friends have been detected to be dead.
Since I had no mouth left, I couldn’t sigh. Still, I mentally sighed as I realized that there were no surviving members of our group left. The clan had likely been annihilated. We had failed to save anyone, and all we could do now was return to the Market.
My time in this world had come to an end.
Author’s Note:
I need to double check a few smaller numbers that might have gotten away from me with the death statistics, so I’ma go back, double check those, and add the death statistics report to chapter 546 instead of this one. Ahem.
Join my Discord! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)