[Welcome, (@*(#NJSD. Prepare for your final glorious battle.]
A weird voice echoed through Ceres’s head as he was enveloped by the bright white light, with him shielding his eyes instinctively.
Soon, the intensity of the light decreased, allowing him to see again. Instead of the prior never-ending darkness, he was now in a large white dome, though he could only see towering walls, filled with the same carvings that populated the initial three halls. He seemed to be in the middle of a ‘T’ junction.
“This looks suspiciously like a maze, fuck it.” The best way to solve a maze is to first get an aerial view. Ceres always scoffed when he watched old holofilms which had mazes that were easily able to be scaled. “Fuck being a maze runner, I’ll be a maze jumper!”
With his strength, scaling such a wall would be more than easy.
Ceres began to gather strength in his legs before leaping upwards, intending to scale the entire wall with one jump.
He would have succeeded too, if it wasn’t for a weird barrier that suddenly bounced him hard, slamming him to the ground face first with impunity.
[Dishonorable actions are forbidden.]
“Who the hell are you? Where is this?” Ceres asked as he tried to remove himself from the human-shaped crater he made on the floor. However, the weird voice did not reply at all.
“Okay, if I can’t jump over, I’ll just break through it!” Yet another simple solution. Ceres almost couldn’t stop praising himself for how smart he was.
He gathered his strength and punched the wall with devastating strength, but it did not budge in the slightest, instead causing Ceres’s hand to hurt as he nearly stumbled back from the reaction force.
Ceres sighed, almost depressed after his two ‘brilliant’ ideas failed, scanning around him for emotions.
Lucky for him, the towering walls did not seem to block his view, allowing him to scan within a one-kilometre radius. He noticed two groups of humans fighting towards his right, while another closer group was on his left.
“Damn it, one of the two groups fighting must be the leader of the Chosen - I have to save them!” Ceres rushed towards the right, easily moving through the maze of walls using the fighting humans as a landmark, leaving the group on his left behind.
Suddenly a large tremor started to rumble throughout the entire maze, the walls shivering.
[Commencing final boss wave. ERRO*(@U#R Final boss unavailable. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing wave 1-19]
The towering walls suddenly descended with blazing speed, as though the maze had been flattened. The stone dust was kicked up everywhere by the force, with strong winds billowing upwards. Ceres shielded his face as the walls retracted into the ground with a bang, allowing him to see the entire white dome without walls.
In the distance, he could see the two human groups who were fighting, but he could not accurately make out who was attacking whom. However, he also saw two other groups – one being the closer group he saw and the other he assumed was the original exploration team.
The maze room itself was a circular room of three-kilometre radius, so he could barely even see how the exploration team was faring.
“No time to think, I have to stop the fight first!” Ceres sprinted towards the two groups fighting. As he got closer he noticed the distinctive shaman robes the expedition member told him about. “That’s the enemy leader!” He could also see that there were people wearing the town’s protective suit being assaulted by the warriors under the command of the shaman.
The two groups noticed him as well, and instead of fighting each other, they both immediately began running away from him. “Wait, I’m here to save you!” Ceres didn’t worry about the running shaman, only interested in catching up with the attacked expedition group.
It was clear that the attacked expedition group heard him because they screamed and yelled as they ran away from Ceres.
“I’m not a monster, I’m from the town!” Ceres yelled back, but as he got closer, some external force began to infiltrate his body, altering his vision and brain.
He tried to shake off it, but when he looked back at the running expedition group with his normal vision, he instead only saw monstrosities that had tentacles and slimy bodies, their guttural mouths filled with infinite rows of teeth as they grinned at him. The screaming and yelling he heard before were suddenly changed to guttural tones and horrible screeching sounds.
“What the, where did the humans go - Is that what they are expecting me to say? Who in the world can even get confused by this stupid trick?!” Ceres kept chasing the group, who panicked even more and ran away. However, Ceres was not wearing the heavy exosuit and his speed was unmatched by his enhanced body.
He soon came face to face with the grotesque ‘monsters’ who shrieked even louder. Ceres wondered what the expedition group saw him as. “Is it the black mask I’m wearing?”
But he soon realized that the multiple eyes of the monsters were not looking at him, but at something above him.
From the air, hundreds of monsters began to fall from the ceiling, landing right behind Ceres. “Fuck, how do I tell the difference between a real human and a monster now?” An epiphany hit him, making him scan for emotions, using his H.T. mode.
Sure enough, the ‘monsters’ that were human had a human-shaped outline when viewed in H.T. mode, but the other monsters that fell from the ceiling weirdly only had a single-shaped spherical core coloured in red visible. Now it was easy for Ceres to distinguish who was who.
The walls shot upwards again, but in a different pattern now. The running group was suddenly walled off into a dead end with Ceres, while the real monsters started to enter the pathway. However, Ceres stood strong in front of them, attacking the real monsters.
In normal vision, the monsters were varied and numerous, but Ceres soon found out that just by smashing wherever the spherical core was, the monster would immediately disappear. Each monster had a different location for the core, but Ceres merely had to hit it as though he was at a festival marking red targets, swinging his mace.
Soon, Ceres made quick work of the real monsters, turning to face the expedition group. The expedition group no longer shrieked or tried to escape, having witnessed Ceres defend them against other monsters. Ceres sat down instead and began to carve on the floor, seeing as the walls were practically invulnerable.
As soon as the expedition group saw Ceres carving words on the ground and the message, they realized that they had been tricked by the room. A few minutes passed before one of the smarter ‘monsters’ used a tentacle to take out a multi-terminal from their backpack, speaking into it with unfathomable guttural sounds before playing it back in a robot voice.
“I’m the expedition leader Misa, who are you? Are you from the temple?”
Ceres was shocked that the maze did not automatically try to mess with the robot’s voice. He had assumed the power of the room was to modify any human language coming into his ears as monster noises. Did that not work for voices that don’t belong biologically to those that entered the room?
He quickly took out his own multi-terminal and spoke into it as well before playing it back. Using this method of conversation, he managed to learn about what happened in the maze.
According to the expedition leader Misa, they had assumed that the teams that had entered before them had either moved on to the next room or been eaten alive by the monsters, but now they knew that some of the monsters could very well be their own expedition members.
They also did not know they were fighting the leader of the ‘Chosen’, whose name was Paska. They had already lost a few of their members to him during the previous fights.
Every hour, the walls will retract to the ground and the groups would be able to see each other, but they had always assumed they were hostile monsters. Unfortunately, it seemed that Ceres was the only one who could really tell humans apart from monsters.
“Keep your multi-terminal active and project a ‘WE ARE HUMAN’ sign. Blast a voice recording too when we run into the next group of humans.” Ceres told the ‘humans’ but he still saw them as squirmy tentacle monsters in his normal vision, who nodded in agreement.
Ceres kept his multi-terminal on as well, to project a big arrow above his head that pointed at himself with the words ‘HUMAN’. However, though they may have fixed this tiny problem, it was far more important to know how to get out of the labyrinth.
[Kill the final boss and you shall be able to reclaim your glory.]
“What?! Who are you!” Ceres was surprised to find out that the maze could read his mind. Was someone watching this all as a game? Some sort of LitRPG? A dungeon core? Soon, an hour passed when the next movement happened.
[Commencing final boss wave. Error, Final boss unavai()@(&#Nlable. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing wave 1-19]
“How the hell am I supposed to kill the final boss and get out when it’s not available?!” Ceres complained as the same sequence began again, with the walls receding again.
This time, the other groups of humans were under attack by the real monsters. Ceres immediately led Misa’s group towards another group of humans which he previously assumed was the exploration team.
It was easy enough for Misa and her group to follow Ceres, who smashed through all the monsters with ease, targeting their red cores that were way too obvious for him.
The big flashing arrow projected from his multi-terminal above his head served as a great marker, so they would never confuse Ceres for another monster as well. They also attacked the monsters that bypassed Ceres.
Soon, they reached the exploration team, whom this time looked like demons with three wings and four horns growing out of their chests, who shrieked loudly and tried to run away. Ceres rolled his eyes, as the same song and dance began all over again.
Thanks to the prominent human signs and voice recordings, live translation and proof of identity, it was a lot easier for the exploration team to be convinced that Ceres and Misa’s group were human.
One of the demons named Yan ran forward and hugged Misa, which made for a very weird sight in Ceres’s eyes. Their friendship had to be incredibly strong to hug each other despite both of them looking like monstrosities in each other eyes.
The two groups got together and began to move together when the walls resurfaced. The exploration team had been here the longest, having entered more than 17 hours before Misa did. The team had already lost half of their original members, leaving only five of them surviving.
According to Yan and Misa, almost every other leader other than them had already died here.
Ceres managed to glean some interesting observations from them.
“First, the monsters fall from the sky, which means there must be some sort of opening at the top of the ceiling. We did a few tests with some equipment and noticed that when the walls resurface again, the equipment placed on the top of the wall is able to bypass the barrier for a short instance. However, I’m not sure if living beings are able to do that as well. If anything goes wrong, the human might be completely squashed.” The demon Yan spoke through her multi-terminal.
Ceres wanted to give it a try, but he too was afraid of being squashed by the barrier. He had already tried jumping out on his own, so he did not have confidence. However, they did not have time, as the real monsters began to fall from the sky, this time more numerous in number.
“The number of monsters attacking continuously increases in number over time, eventually we will be swarmed to hell,” Misa exclaimed.
Ceres and the others fought off as many monsters as they could, but even the increased number was too much for Ceres, especially when he tried to protect everyone. Suddenly, as Ceres was fighting the monsters, he spotted a red human outline attack him from the side.
He quickly dodged the attack, before leaping backwards, noticing that there were close to fifteen human outlines embedded amongst the real monster horde.
Based on the shape of the human outlines, he surmised that they were the enemy warriors from the Chosen.
For some unknown reason they were able to blend in with the monsters and attack him in tandem.
Ceres immediately knew he could not handle the stealth attacks of smart humans as well as the rush of monsters while protecting the others, so he indicated for Misa and Yan’s group to retreat.
“You… how is it possible that you’re working with the monsters!” Ceres grumbled as he fought desperately against the waves, smashing the cores with fury.
“Fool, we are the ‘Chosen’. Why would our god put us through a trial?! Instead, you have been marked for death, doomed to fight a losing battle to your very end. And the temple has given me the best chance to end your miserable life!” A monster suddenly visually transformed into a white robed shaman holding a staff as he approached Ceres. The tattooed ‘Y’ on his forehead glowed brightly blue.
“You’re Paska?!” Ceres asked as he continued fending off the attacks. He assumed that a normal ‘Chosen’ warrior would not be able to put him on guard like this.
“And I assume you’re the exosuit that wiped out my warriors. Seeing you wear parts of Uron’s combat armour means you must have massacred all my warriors outside this maze. But it does not matter, for your heresy will be judged by me!” Paska grinned as he stabbed forward with his staff in rapid jabs.
Ceres was surprised to see that Paska could attack with such speed far beyond anything he had seen so far underground, but Ceres still barely managed to parry each of the attacks with his own spiked mace. Paska’s eyes squinted as he rolled out of the way, avoiding a devastating swing of the spiked mace.
“You… who gave you the enhancers? Or do you have muscle implants? How the hell are you lifting that mace? Who is your surface sponsor?!” Paska warily asked as he paused his attack, circling warily.
“I should be asking you that – how are you moving so fast? Are you a cyborg? Is that why you can see through the illusions and target me?” Ceres too panted hard, catching his breath. He eyed the other fourteen warriors who merely stood behind Paska, watching them duel.
Paska only smiled, lifting his hand and motioning to his men.
The warriors suddenly ran forward around Ceres, targeting the fleeing expedition group.
“Fuck you!” Ceres tried to rush forward but Paska suddenly appeared in front of him and blocked his path, forcing Ceres to defend.
“Please don’t disturb their party, it will be better if the adults stay here.” Paska aggressively attacked Ceres with impeccable staff attacks, forcing Ceres to dodge quickly and parry it with his spiked mace. One of the staff hits landed directly on Ceres’s body, denting his armour plate slightly and sending him flying.
“Hah, this is the ‘humanoid monster’ everyone had been worrying about? I guess it is a good thing you culled the warriors. When I take over the underground, I can finally groom warriors and followers who will remain loyal to me.” Paska laughed as he didn’t relent even when Ceres was knocked down, attacking with the intent to kill. Ceres rolled out of the way, recovering into a fighting position before lunging again.
Ceres roared, pushing his arm to the limit as he swung the mace with fury at Paska’s head, who easily dodged it, smirking at him.
“What use is your strength when you have no skill? Seems like my previous warriors were truly useless to lose to someone like you!” Paska pressured Ceres hard, somehow able to dodge and counterattack at every move, putting Ceres on the defensive.
Paska was right. Ceres knew that despite receiving the enhancements, he had not practiced enough on fighting truly skilled opponents. He himself could not even land a hit on Captain Kai during their spar. It truly showed that Ceres was literally a newbie wasting his expensive ‘equipment’.
“Come on - this can’t be your true strength, ‘monster’. If you don’t fight back hard enough, you might just die here forgotten and alone!” Paska mocked as he landed jab after jab on Ceres’s body, causing Ceres to cough up black blood. The sight of the black blood led Paska to assume that Ceres was a mutant.
Paska immediately sped up his attacks, intending to finish Ceres off before any weird mutations could get in. For all his mocking, he was not one to take his opponent lightly.
Ceres received even more and more blows, bleeding from multiple points and his left arm already fractured from blocking.
Just as Paska delivered what he intended to be a final downward swing to smash Ceres’s head, a black-scale armoured claw reached out and grabbed the staff. Paska tried to pull it back, but the claw gripped firmly.
The black blood that had been spilt out of Ceres body began to recede towards him as Paska let go of the staff and threw a devastating kick at Ceres’s head. “Think I’m going to let you transform, you freak?!”
But instead of caving Ceres’s skull in, the same black-scale armour quickly enveloped Ceres’s hair and blocked the kick.
Paska limped backwards in pain from the collision and let go of the staff, retrieving a machete from his waist hidden under the shaman’s robes.
The black goo continued to surge towards Ceres, forming a full body black scale armour with Ceres’s black mask still over his face.
He was rooted to the spot as he watched Ceres stand up, an air of menacing pressure emitting from the pitch-black scale armour. Ceres turned, his pure blackened eyes staring through the black mask’s eye slits as he wielded Paska’s staff in one hand and the spiked mace in the other. The blood crescent stroke that embellished the mask somehow enhanced the pressure.
For the first time since he was born, Paska felt a new emotion he had never felt before in his entire life of being the strongest, grabbing his own wrist to stop himself from trembling.
“You wanted a monster?”
[Welcome, (@*(#NJSD. Prepare for your final glorious battle.]
A weird voice echoed through Ceres’s head as he was enveloped by the bright white light, with him shielding his eyes instinctively.
Soon, the intensity of the light decreased, allowing him to see again. Instead of the prior never-ending darkness, he was now in a large white dome, though he could only see towering walls, filled with the same carvings that populated the initial three halls. He seemed to be in the middle of a ‘T’ junction.
“This looks suspiciously like a maze, fuck it.” The best way to solve a maze is to first get an aerial view. Ceres always scoffed when he watched old holofilms which had mazes that were easily able to be scaled. “Fuck being a maze runner, I’ll be a maze jumper!”
With his strength, scaling such a wall would be more than easy.
Ceres began to gather strength in his legs before leaping upwards, intending to scale the entire wall with one jump.
He would have succeeded too, if it wasn’t for a weird barrier that suddenly bounced him hard, slamming him to the ground face first with impunity.
[Dishonorable actions are forbidden.]
“Who the hell are you? Where is this?” Ceres asked as he tried to remove himself from the human-shaped crater he made on the floor. However, the weird voice did not reply at all.
“Okay, if I can’t jump over, I’ll just break through it!” Yet another simple solution. Ceres almost couldn’t stop praising himself for how smart he was.
He gathered his strength and punched the wall with devastating strength, but it did not budge in the slightest, instead causing Ceres’s hand to hurt as he nearly stumbled back from the reaction force.
Ceres sighed, almost depressed after his two ‘brilliant’ ideas failed, scanning around him for emotions.
Lucky for him, the towering walls did not seem to block his view, allowing him to scan within a one-kilometre radius. He noticed two groups of humans fighting towards his right, while another closer group was on his left.
“Damn it, one of the two groups fighting must be the leader of the Chosen - I have to save them!” Ceres rushed towards the right, easily moving through the maze of walls using the fighting humans as a landmark, leaving the group on his left behind.
Suddenly a large tremor started to rumble throughout the entire maze, the walls shivering.
[Commencing final boss wave. ERRO*(@U#R Final boss unavailable. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing wave 1-19]
The towering walls suddenly descended with blazing speed, as though the maze had been flattened. The stone dust was kicked up everywhere by the force, with strong winds billowing upwards. Ceres shielded his face as the walls retracted into the ground with a bang, allowing him to see the entire white dome without walls.
In the distance, he could see the two human groups who were fighting, but he could not accurately make out who was attacking whom. However, he also saw two other groups – one being the closer group he saw and the other he assumed was the original exploration team.
The maze room itself was a circular room of three-kilometre radius, so he could barely even see how the exploration team was faring.
“No time to think, I have to stop the fight first!” Ceres sprinted towards the two groups fighting. As he got closer he noticed the distinctive shaman robes the expedition member told him about. “That’s the enemy leader!” He could also see that there were people wearing the town’s protective suit being assaulted by the warriors under the command of the shaman.
The two groups noticed him as well, and instead of fighting each other, they both immediately began running away from him. “Wait, I’m here to save you!” Ceres didn’t worry about the running shaman, only interested in catching up with the attacked expedition group.
It was clear that the attacked expedition group heard him because they screamed and yelled as they ran away from Ceres.
“I’m not a monster, I’m from the town!” Ceres yelled back, but as he got closer, some external force began to infiltrate his body, altering his vision and brain.
He tried to shake off it, but when he looked back at the running expedition group with his normal vision, he instead only saw monstrosities that had tentacles and slimy bodies, their guttural mouths filled with infinite rows of teeth as they grinned at him. The screaming and yelling he heard before were suddenly changed to guttural tones and horrible screeching sounds.
“What the, where did the humans go - Is that what they are expecting me to say? Who in the world can even get confused by this stupid trick?!” Ceres kept chasing the group, who panicked even more and ran away. However, Ceres was not wearing the heavy exosuit and his speed was unmatched by his enhanced body.
He soon came face to face with the grotesque ‘monsters’ who shrieked even louder. Ceres wondered what the expedition group saw him as. “Is it the black mask I’m wearing?”
But he soon realized that the multiple eyes of the monsters were not looking at him, but at something above him.
From the air, hundreds of monsters began to fall from the ceiling, landing right behind Ceres. “Fuck, how do I tell the difference between a real human and a monster now?” An epiphany hit him, making him scan for emotions, using his H.T. mode.
Sure enough, the ‘monsters’ that were human had a human-shaped outline when viewed in H.T. mode, but the other monsters that fell from the ceiling weirdly only had a single-shaped spherical core coloured in red visible. Now it was easy for Ceres to distinguish who was who.
The walls shot upwards again, but in a different pattern now. The running group was suddenly walled off into a dead end with Ceres, while the real monsters started to enter the pathway. However, Ceres stood strong in front of them, attacking the real monsters.
In normal vision, the monsters were varied and numerous, but Ceres soon found out that just by smashing wherever the spherical core was, the monster would immediately disappear. Each monster had a different location for the core, but Ceres merely had to hit it as though he was at a festival marking red targets, swinging his mace.
Soon, Ceres made quick work of the real monsters, turning to face the expedition group. The expedition group no longer shrieked or tried to escape, having witnessed Ceres defend them against other monsters. Ceres sat down instead and began to carve on the floor, seeing as the walls were practically invulnerable.
As soon as the expedition group saw Ceres carving words on the ground and the message, they realized that they had been tricked by the room. A few minutes passed before one of the smarter ‘monsters’ used a tentacle to take out a multi-terminal from their backpack, speaking into it with unfathomable guttural sounds before playing it back in a robot voice.
“I’m the expedition leader Misa, who are you? Are you from the temple?”
Ceres was shocked that the maze did not automatically try to mess with the robot’s voice. He had assumed the power of the room was to modify any human language coming into his ears as monster noises. Did that not work for voices that don’t belong biologically to those that entered the room?
He quickly took out his own multi-terminal and spoke into it as well before playing it back. Using this method of conversation, he managed to learn about what happened in the maze.
According to the expedition leader Misa, they had assumed that the teams that had entered before them had either moved on to the next room or been eaten alive by the monsters, but now they knew that some of the monsters could very well be their own expedition members.
They also did not know they were fighting the leader of the ‘Chosen’, whose name was Paska. They had already lost a few of their members to him during the previous fights.
Every hour, the walls will retract to the ground and the groups would be able to see each other, but they had always assumed they were hostile monsters. Unfortunately, it seemed that Ceres was the only one who could really tell humans apart from monsters.
“Keep your multi-terminal active and project a ‘WE ARE HUMAN’ sign. Blast a voice recording too when we run into the next group of humans.” Ceres told the ‘humans’ but he still saw them as squirmy tentacle monsters in his normal vision, who nodded in agreement.
Ceres kept his multi-terminal on as well, to project a big arrow above his head that pointed at himself with the words ‘HUMAN’. However, though they may have fixed this tiny problem, it was far more important to know how to get out of the labyrinth.
[Kill the final boss and you shall be able to reclaim your glory.]
“What?! Who are you!” Ceres was surprised to find out that the maze could read his mind. Was someone watching this all as a game? Some sort of LitRPG? A dungeon core? Soon, an hour passed when the next movement happened.
[Commencing final boss wave. Error, Final boss unavai()@(&#Nlable. Initiating countermeasures. Commencing wave 1-19]
“How the hell am I supposed to kill the final boss and get out when it’s not available?!” Ceres complained as the same sequence began again, with the walls receding again.
This time, the other groups of humans were under attack by the real monsters. Ceres immediately led Misa’s group towards another group of humans which he previously assumed was the exploration team.
It was easy enough for Misa and her group to follow Ceres, who smashed through all the monsters with ease, targeting their red cores that were way too obvious for him.
The big flashing arrow projected from his multi-terminal above his head served as a great marker, so they would never confuse Ceres for another monster as well. They also attacked the monsters that bypassed Ceres.
Soon, they reached the exploration team, whom this time looked like demons with three wings and four horns growing out of their chests, who shrieked loudly and tried to run away. Ceres rolled his eyes, as the same song and dance began all over again.
Thanks to the prominent human signs and voice recordings, live translation and proof of identity, it was a lot easier for the exploration team to be convinced that Ceres and Misa’s group were human.
One of the demons named Yan ran forward and hugged Misa, which made for a very weird sight in Ceres’s eyes. Their friendship had to be incredibly strong to hug each other despite both of them looking like monstrosities in each other eyes.
The two groups got together and began to move together when the walls resurfaced. The exploration team had been here the longest, having entered more than 17 hours before Misa did. The team had already lost half of their original members, leaving only five of them surviving.
According to Yan and Misa, almost every other leader other than them had already died here.
Ceres managed to glean some interesting observations from them.
“First, the monsters fall from the sky, which means there must be some sort of opening at the top of the ceiling. We did a few tests with some equipment and noticed that when the walls resurface again, the equipment placed on the top of the wall is able to bypass the barrier for a short instance. However, I’m not sure if living beings are able to do that as well. If anything goes wrong, the human might be completely squashed.” The demon Yan spoke through her multi-terminal.
Ceres wanted to give it a try, but he too was afraid of being squashed by the barrier. He had already tried jumping out on his own, so he did not have confidence. However, they did not have time, as the real monsters began to fall from the sky, this time more numerous in number.
“The number of monsters attacking continuously increases in number over time, eventually we will be swarmed to hell,” Misa exclaimed.
Ceres and the others fought off as many monsters as they could, but even the increased number was too much for Ceres, especially when he tried to protect everyone. Suddenly, as Ceres was fighting the monsters, he spotted a red human outline attack him from the side.
He quickly dodged the attack, before leaping backwards, noticing that there were close to fifteen human outlines embedded amongst the real monster horde.
Based on the shape of the human outlines, he surmised that they were the enemy warriors from the Chosen.
For some unknown reason they were able to blend in with the monsters and attack him in tandem.
Ceres immediately knew he could not handle the stealth attacks of smart humans as well as the rush of monsters while protecting the others, so he indicated for Misa and Yan’s group to retreat.
“You… how is it possible that you’re working with the monsters!” Ceres grumbled as he fought desperately against the waves, smashing the cores with fury.
“Fool, we are the ‘Chosen’. Why would our god put us through a trial?! Instead, you have been marked for death, doomed to fight a losing battle to your very end. And the temple has given me the best chance to end your miserable life!” A monster suddenly visually transformed into a white robed shaman holding a staff as he approached Ceres. The tattooed ‘Y’ on his forehead glowed brightly blue.
“You’re Paska?!” Ceres asked as he continued fending off the attacks. He assumed that a normal ‘Chosen’ warrior would not be able to put him on guard like this.
“And I assume you’re the exosuit that wiped out my warriors. Seeing you wear parts of Uron’s combat armour means you must have massacred all my warriors outside this maze. But it does not matter, for your heresy will be judged by me!” Paska grinned as he stabbed forward with his staff in rapid jabs.
Ceres was surprised to see that Paska could attack with such speed far beyond anything he had seen so far underground, but Ceres still barely managed to parry each of the attacks with his own spiked mace. Paska’s eyes squinted as he rolled out of the way, avoiding a devastating swing of the spiked mace.
“You… who gave you the enhancers? Or do you have muscle implants? How the hell are you lifting that mace? Who is your surface sponsor?!” Paska warily asked as he paused his attack, circling warily.
“I should be asking you that – how are you moving so fast? Are you a cyborg? Is that why you can see through the illusions and target me?” Ceres too panted hard, catching his breath. He eyed the other fourteen warriors who merely stood behind Paska, watching them duel.
Paska only smiled, lifting his hand and motioning to his men.
The warriors suddenly ran forward around Ceres, targeting the fleeing expedition group.
“Fuck you!” Ceres tried to rush forward but Paska suddenly appeared in front of him and blocked his path, forcing Ceres to defend.
“Please don’t disturb their party, it will be better if the adults stay here.” Paska aggressively attacked Ceres with impeccable staff attacks, forcing Ceres to dodge quickly and parry it with his spiked mace. One of the staff hits landed directly on Ceres’s body, denting his armour plate slightly and sending him flying.
“Hah, this is the ‘humanoid monster’ everyone had been worrying about? I guess it is a good thing you culled the warriors. When I take over the underground, I can finally groom warriors and followers who will remain loyal to me.” Paska laughed as he didn’t relent even when Ceres was knocked down, attacking with the intent to kill. Ceres rolled out of the way, recovering into a fighting position before lunging again.
Ceres roared, pushing his arm to the limit as he swung the mace with fury at Paska’s head, who easily dodged it, smirking at him.
“What use is your strength when you have no skill? Seems like my previous warriors were truly useless to lose to someone like you!” Paska pressured Ceres hard, somehow able to dodge and counterattack at every move, putting Ceres on the defensive.
Paska was right. Ceres knew that despite receiving the enhancements, he had not practiced enough on fighting truly skilled opponents. He himself could not even land a hit on Captain Kai during their spar. It truly showed that Ceres was literally a newbie wasting his expensive ‘equipment’.
“Come on - this can’t be your true strength, ‘monster’. If you don’t fight back hard enough, you might just die here forgotten and alone!” Paska mocked as he landed jab after jab on Ceres’s body, causing Ceres to cough up black blood. The sight of the black blood led Paska to assume that Ceres was a mutant.
Paska immediately sped up his attacks, intending to finish Ceres off before any weird mutations could get in. For all his mocking, he was not one to take his opponent lightly.
Ceres received even more and more blows, bleeding from multiple points and his left arm already fractured from blocking.
Just as Paska delivered what he intended to be a final downward swing to smash Ceres’s head, a black-scale armoured claw reached out and grabbed the staff. Paska tried to pull it back, but the claw gripped firmly.
The black blood that had been spilt out of Ceres body began to recede towards him as Paska let go of the staff and threw a devastating kick at Ceres’s head. “Think I’m going to let you transform, you freak?!”
But instead of caving Ceres’s skull in, the same black-scale armour quickly enveloped Ceres’s hair and blocked the kick.
Paska limped backwards in pain from the collision and let go of the staff, retrieving a machete from his waist hidden under the shaman’s robes.
The black goo continued to surge towards Ceres, forming a full body black scale armour with Ceres’s black mask still over his face.
He was rooted to the spot as he watched Ceres stand up, an air of menacing pressure emitting from the pitch-black scale armour. Ceres turned, his pure blackened eyes staring through the black mask’s eye slits as he wielded Paska’s staff in one hand and the spiked mace in the other. The blood crescent stroke that embellished the mask somehow enhanced the pressure.
For the first time since he was born, Paska felt a new emotion he had never felt before in his entire life of being the strongest, grabbing his own wrist to stop himself from trembling.
“You wanted a monster?”
