Nightmare

Rethys stood, his knee creaking and cracking like an old wooden chair, it was healed but still wrong somehow. Still, that was the best-case scenario

The stone the legionnaire threw at him could've crushed his skull or chopped his leg off, yet he was still alive and standing.

'For how long though.' He wondered, looking at the legionnaire staring intently back at him, eyes full of nothing but loathing.

It was taking its time, completely confident that it could end him any time it wanted and wanting to prolong his suffering.

He searched himself with his senses, finding that he had nothing on him except for the clothes on his skin. His water flask, healing etherstones, and nifty red dagger were all destroyed.

'Great...'

He tensed his body and limbs, body brimming with the strength of infusion and Blood. Like a heavy, strung bow, its string drawn taut, he was ready to spring into explosive motion at any moment.

The legionnaire walked toward him, its chains clattering, its bones rattling, its mass rumbling the earth with each forceful step it took.

Sevi can't save him, the ancient or whatever books she seemed to put the entirety of her faith into were nothing but a pile of ash in some random hallway. Her hope for escape, the mages of Suthanis, were probably already gone by now unless the legionnaire's spell doomed them too, it was a done deal.

Rethys focused his senses on the daemon's ether, that of its souls, bones, and enchanted chains. He knew he couldn't beat it, it was simply impossible, but he had a plan.

Then it lunged, throwing its weight forwards into a fearsome charge, two fists barreling towards him at terrifying speeds.

He ducked, moving between the creature's legs. It kicked at him in response, and he swerved away just barely enough to not get crushed.

The legionnaire spun around; its bony mass almost rotating to send two more claws towards him. They grazed him, cutting apart his flimsy cloak, but he was already underneath the legionnaire again.

It couldn't maneuver its huge body fast enough when he was right on it, and he counted on that to survive.

It kicked at him again, but he saw it coming and moved out of the way. He then saw an opportunity, grabbing one of its leg chains, and sent into it as much Origin ether as he could muster.

The creature shuddered and fell. Success. Now all he had to do was run. Yet before he could let go, the chain quickly coiled around his hand and pressed, crushing it. He tried to pull his hand out, but at first couldn't, eventually only succeeding because it had deformed enough.

As he ran away, he looked at his right hand, only to see a mess of red and white, protruding bone all over. He wasn't fast enough.

He didn't feel any pain yet knew that his hand was completely useless now.

Yet before he even turned a corner, the legionnaire was already hurtling toward him like a missile at terrifying speeds.

He didn't have time to react, much less wonder how it recovered so fast, before it slammed into a wall right next to him, it had missed its charge.

He continued to run as it dislodged itself from the wall and performed another magical charge. It was poorly aimed and slower than usual, yet still too fast to dodge.

The legionnaire slammed into him, and Rethys felt his vision and mind spin as his body was launched toward and then crashed into a distant wall. Amazingly, he was still alive.

He didn't have time to think about what happened, and quickly forced himself to stand and run. The daemon seemed to have been disabled momentarily, but he barely paid it mind as he ran away as fast as his legs could take him.

And as he ran, bit by bit his body recovered until he could sprint properly, or as properly as he could with just one arm. He was dazed and barely able to see before him, relying entirely on his magical senses to push him forward.

"Sevi..." He muttered thinking of what to say to rouse her of her defeated stupor.

But his tired mind couldn't come up with anything convincing or noble or whatever any of that drivel meant, so he just yelled the first thing that came to mind.

"Sevi... what's THE FUCKING PLAN!!" He screamed.

"We... we must find the mages before it is too late." She stammered out, tangibly frightened.

It was funny, downright comical really. He had a companion with supposedly godlike powers that picked this specific moment to be needlessly useless. He'd laugh, but though he understood the hilarity of it all, he didn't at all feel amused, his element made sure of it.

"It's too late!" He answered. "They're gone!"

He had become able to read the interconnected enchantments of the tower, and how each affected the rest, this flow told him that no room registered their presence. The mages either exited the tower toward the city, which was suicide, or had somehow successfully left.

There might've been a teleporter somewhere around, yet it would take days to comb through the entirety of the expansive tower to find it, and the legionnaire guaranteed that they did not have that kind of time. And even if the teleporter still worked, by the time they found it, it'd most assuredly lead to death.

Freedom had been so close, almost within grasp, yet it escaped right from their hands at the last second.

And the one responsible for their failures was still on their trail.

Sevi didn't reply to Rethys' reveal, it was unclear whether it knocked her back into complete silence or didn't faze her at all after what had already happened.

Not that he cared, he was busy running away into some semblance of safety, before realizing that it was pointless to stay in the tower now and started trying to find a new way down again, the path that led them here was caved in after all.

He went through corridors and halls and stairs, looking for even the smallest crumb of a clue.

But that never lasted long, he would only make it so far before the legionnaire showed its ugly faces again, using its uncanny ability to track them down. It had already picked up their scent and was not about to let go, ever. He engaged it again, and again, but it always ended the same way, with him running away, and it later finding him again.

Sevi helped these times around, but could only do so much with Rethys maintaining his infusion magic. He refused to disable it after her bouts of unhelpfulness, and wouldn't budge. She couldn't just kill the damned thing anyway; it had no blood to speak of for her magic to take hold of and was also too durable. A bad match for her powers.

And so, he continued to search the tower for any way down that didn't involve first going through the ruined city outside, all the while the legionnaire continued to hound him.

Both him and the creature moved fast and fought fast, and they'd come to blows every few minutes during which it'd break a dozen of his bones before he used however much energy he had to disable it and run away.

Time passed at a feverishly slow pace, filled with only brutal brawls and Rethys repeatedly coming far too close to death's embrace. The legionnaire remained terrifyingly powerful, needing but a single good hit to take him out, and had become dangerously serious, now putting its all into killing him. It was succeeding, but it wasn't doing it fast enough, his body fixed itself faster than the daemon could break the whole thing.

Eventually the fights began to last longer. Rethys was becoming better at not having his body parts twisted to unnatural angles, and Sevi was recovering from the shock of having the entirety of her hopes and plans annihilated in a single moment. The two had begun acclimating to this torturous game of cat and mouse with a dangerous creature neither of them had the means to deal with.

Eventually a day passed, a full day filled with nothing but endless running and relentless, pointless fighting. Then another day passed, then more as time passed unfathomably slowly and Rethys felt himself slipping into some delirious nightmare of chains, bones, and broken limbs. It was insanity.

Sevi tried her best to find some way back down to the lower waterways, steering him here and there, but they never got time to examine things before the daemon found them, or before they found it waiting for them. It was rarely out of Rethys' senses, and they were seemingly never out of its senses. They couldn't get anything done in time.

And just as the duo was growing more used to the routine of suffering and madness, so too was the legionnaire growing increasingly troublesome. It moved faster, getting more used to fighting in unarmed combat, and its chains were fixing themselves, undoing the damage it did to itself all that time ago.

They couldn't hope to get rid of it, it was already fixing itself and the threat of it regaining its blades at some point in the future was unthinkable. They couldn't allow this to last.

If that weren't enough, they were out of water and food, which Rethys desperately needed. His thrice-enhanced constitution of Blood, infusion magic and just simply being a mage afforded him the ability to go a while without those necessities, yet there was a limit.

They were running out of time.

"Left... now right." Sevi repeated directions with a tired voice.

She wasn't the one running around like a rabid hound and tussling with a too-powerful daemon, yet the whole ordeal had already begun wearing her out long ago.

Yet it was infinitely worse for Rethys, for regardless of his ability to withstand the stresses of this place for as long as he had, and his belief in his indomitable will, he was still a normal boy, and he had reached his limit.

"Yeah." He grunted absentmindedly.

His mind was cold, not the usual kind of focused cold he would experience due to his element, but rather a dull, muffled, and wintery cold. He felt no pain or exhaustion, yet his thoughts ran slow, and the thirst didn't help.

The expedition from outside, Sevi's sought-after knowledge, the tower's beauty and Rethys' fascination with it, all of it melted away into a distant dream smothered entirely by the legionnaire's hateful, never-ending violence. There was only the struggle now, and it only ever intensified.

His eyes were useless, too vulnerable, often wounded, bruised or smeared with blood, or even outright crushed, forcing him to entirely rely on his magical senses to get by. The world had then changed again, from a mess of white halls and corridors to a sea of dark blue.

Time lost meaning, there were no hours or days or weeks, there were only fights and more fights, then more running.

At some point he forgot why he was doing any of this, what the point of it all was, what the end goal was supposed to be. In a world of blue was not but ether; he was ether, and moved with ether, and that was all there was. His mind had turned blank, his name was nothing.

The only semblance of order and sanity in this... whatever it was... was a voice always lurking in the back of his head. It told him where to go and what to do, and though he barely registered any of it, it animated him and kept him moving.

And so, he moved and moved before eventually falling once and for all, on dark stone upon which was a glowing circle of purple.

His body was limp and broken, it couldn't run or dodge or punch anymore, all it could do was pant heavily in protest to the strain its wielder uncaringly put it through. His mind was equally broken, the only thing functioning in it being the blind will to constantly search his surroundings, frantically looking for that one horrible light that kept chasing him.

He didn't, or couldn't notice the ether around him humming, the voice quieting, and the world around him twisting and unhinging its jaws before swallowing him whole.