ALL NOVEL Ch.71 – Ascension (Pt.3)
POV: Aradra
This place was familiar to Aradra as well, another fragment of a memory, the echo of an event that had marked her because it was the first of her life as a salamander-like monster. The nature surrounding her now seemed calm and peaceful, as she was calm enough to study it instead of panicking like she did when she first woke up as a monster. The copy of herself she had spoken with earlier had vanished along with her house, lost in the memories of a life long past.
‘Maybe now that giant cat-monster will appear?’ She wondered, raising her right hand to study it with her own gaze. She opened and closed it a few times, ‘now that I think about it… how do my powers work in this world? Are they still here?’
Aradra tried to channel her Mana as she did when using [Obsidian Defense], focusing it on the point from which she wanted sharp obsidian needles to emerge from her skin. To her surprise, her skin reacted exactly as it would in her monster form: a long, black spike grew from the palm of her hand, and oddly, she wasn’t feeling her Mana being consumed.
‘Maybe it’s the nature of this place, it’s a place inside me, so I am using and not using my powers at the same time,’ she thought, ‘I wonder if I can do something like…’
Reshaping the flow of Mana with her thoughts, Aradra began to sculpt the obsidian spike in the palm of her hand. First, she curved it, then extended it, trying to make it resemble a sword… she wasn’t sure if what she was doing was only possible in that sort of dream, since in her monster form such a thing would be of no use, but within a few minutes, she managed to control her Mana enough to form a sword entirely made of [Obsidian Defense].
‘Not bad for a magical ability that should have purely defensive effects,’ Aradra thought with a chuckle, moving the sword. She wasn’t a swordswoman, but she believed she had a rough idea of how to use it after all the battles she had fought, ‘after all, attack is the best defense!’
A rustling of leaves made Aradra’s shoulders tense, and with a quick, instinctive motion, she raised the sword created with [Obsidian Defense] in the direction of the noise. The sword wasn’t a separate object from her body, and if someone looked closely, they would notice that the skin of her hand transformed into the sword where it touched it… a convenient way to avoid being disarmed.
“Come out, whoever you are,” she said, her voice carrying a hint of threat. She had been humiliated by Dyenna, but her experiences before and after that crushing defeat had helped her realize she was no longer a trembling little monster who had to fear every shadow.
“O-okay, I-I’m sorry if I’ve scared you…” stammered the creature hiding in the foliage. The creature had a very young and high-pitched voice, like that of a young girl.
The creature emerged from the vegetation: it was… or rather, it appeared to be a little girl, a small figure no more than a meter tall that resembled a three-dimensional shadow tracing a humanoid form.
“What are you doing here?” Aradra asked. Curiously, having taken this bizarre world with its strange appearance and rules as part of her ascension, a journey she had to undertake anyway, without too many questions about its nature, made her not investigate too much what was the little shadow-child.
“I was hiding,” whispered the shadow-child in a low voice, “there are bad monsters after me.”
“Oh! And are your parents far from here? Where is your home? I can take you there if you want,” Aradra smiled, causing the sword to sink back into the skin of her hand.
“I-I don’t know… I think… I think I’m lost,” the shadow-child covered her eyes with her hands.
“Then maybe you can walk with me for a bit, and when we reach the first village, you’ll figure out where you are, and from there, you might be able to find your way home!”
“Really, can I??” Aradra couldn’t quite tell since the shadow didn’t have eyes, but the movement of the head and the change in the tone of voice gave her the idea that the shadow-girl was looking at her with hope.
Aradra nodded a few times.
“Thank you, ma’am!”
The shadow-girl walked beside Aradra along the path that, according to Aradra, led to Stanbroodge, though she wasn’t certain. But since she had found herself along the road to her house earlier, this could very well be the vegetation lining the banks of the Velenara River.
In that case, the question was: who was the young girl? Because in her memory of the time spent by the river, there had been no child…
Could she be a representation of Velen?
Aradra was still pondering what this representation of her past could be when the shadow-girl froze in her tracks, trembling, “the… the m-monsters, they’re coming!”
Though she hadn’t noticed anything yet, Aradra quickly moved to shield the shadow-girl, regenerating her magical obsidian sword. She looked around cautiously until she noticed three small shadowy figures emerge and separate from the shadows of some trees; they too had humanoid shapes, but where their mouths should have been, there were wide, white crescent-shaped slits resembling sinister smiles.
“Are those the monsters?” Aradra asked the shadow-girl.
“Yes!” The shadow-girl hid better behind her protector; something about that creature felt familiar to Aradra, though she couldn’t quite place what.
Aradra was confident: at her level and with her combat experience, there were few enemies that could challenge her, whether on Tala or in some world inside her head… what she hadn’t considered was that the world inside her head didn’t necessarily adapt to what she wanted. One of the three shadowy figures launched an attack so fast that Aradra barely had time to flinch and slash her sword between herself and the shadow attacking her, only managing to make it retreat and leaving an opening for the other two shadows to wound her stomach and thigh with their claw-like fingers.
Aradra used [Obsidian Defense] to absorb the damage rather than just endure it and opened her mouth to use [Acid Spit], but nothing came out. She was sure she had followed the correct procedure, so something must have changed with her entirely human form.
‘Probably I don’t have the acid gland anymore, so there are two options,’ with two swift movements of her sword, she managed to wound one of the small shadows attacking her, eliciting a squeal of pain that distorted the evil grin for only a few moments before the wound she caused quickly healed, ‘either I’ve lost that power, or it works differently in this body.’
There was something else troubling her too—the fact that the few injuries she had managed to inflict on her enemies were regenerating quickly. Perhaps she needed to deal more decisive damage than mere cuts, perhaps finding a way to harm them in such a way that they couldn’t regenerate.
“Little one, do you know how I can kill these monsters?” Aradra asked to the shadow-child she was protecting, who had in the meanwhile ran to hide behind some bushes.
“I-I don’t know! Maybe you have to cut them deep enough to separate their parts!” the shadow-girl cried out with a trembling voice.
“Cut deep enough… let’s try that,” Aradra feigned an opening to trick one of the three little shadow-monsters into thinking it had broken through her guard, and when the distance and position were right, she transformed the fingers of her left hand into obsidian blades and used them to slice off the shadow-monster’s humanoid head entirely.
The monster stopped attacking as its shadowy head fell to the ground and rolled for a meter. It stood still with its arms hanging at its sides, then collapsed onto the black grass.
‘It does seem to work.’
From there, the battle became easier: as Aradra began to understand her enemies’ patterns, and with the knowledge of how to strike to kill them, the second of the monsters found itself first with an arm amputated and then sliced in half by Aradra’s magical obsidian blade. The other monster, seeing that the situation was turning against it, retreated, glancing at its fallen companions, then let out a chilling cry as the two mutilated bodies lifted off the ground and flew towards the third and last remaining monster, fusing with it and growing in size and appearance until it became a shadowy wolf with a wicked white grin and red eyes of fury.
“They’ve never done that before!” exclaimed the shadow-child, “be careful!”
Her warning came too late: the newly formed shadow-monster lunged at Aradra with such speed that it took her a moment to realize her arm had been caught in the dark jaws of the beast. Aradra tried to free herself, but the shadow-monster’s teeth were deeply embedded in her flesh.
Aradra then channeled her Mana again, transforming the areas of her skin inside the monster’s mouth into a multitude of sharp spikes; she had pumped enough mana to pierce through the monster entirely, but for some reason, the spikes stopped as if they had hit a wall too hard to penetrate.
The monster, however, howled and decided to release its grip on her arm, shaking its head and flinging her with force against a tree several meters behind her before pouncing again, this time using the powerful claws of its paws to try to tear open Aradra’s chest. She was once again forced into a quick defense with [Obsidian Defense]. This didn’t change the situation much, though, as the monster had pinned her to the ground, forcing her to stay on the defensive, with its claws and teeth still strong enough to surpass her magical obsidian armor,
‘I must find a solution, I must manage to use the acid!’
She tried not to force the Mana to follow a specific path within her when she attempted to use [Acid Spit] again, instead she tried to sense where the Mana was going…
‘Towards the hands?’
Aradra raised a hand towards the shadowy monster's face and pushed the Mana through her palm and fingers, projecting a green jet that hit her opponent, making it wail in pain and anger. The monster backed off, trying to move away from the acid stream, but Aradra didn’t let it: in this world, the limitation she usually had with her Mana wasn’t present, so she kept it going, pushing it to maximum power, until all that was left of the monster was a puddle on the ground.
“Thank you, ma’am! You saved me!” exclaimed the little girl as she came out of her hiding place, running towards Aradra and offering a hand to help her up. “Are you okay??”
“Y-yes... more or less,” she replied, accepting the help. Aradra had to fight more than she initially expected, but she won, and without ending up near death! That was definitely a plus!
However, the feeling of satisfaction and victory didn’t last: when she looked again at the puddle staining the ground, she realized it had split into three humanoid shapes. The shadows covering their bodies dissipated, revealing the bullies who had tormented her so much at school. Aradra quickly turned her head towards the shadow-child she had saved, discovering that the sense of familiarity was due to the fact that… the shadow-child was her, as a young girl.
Aradra's eyes widened. ‘No! Wait! This is a dream! This isn’t real, I didn’t actually kill anyone!’ she exclaimed in her own head, horrified.
“True, these corpses aren’t theirs,” the version of herself that had appeared in the first phase of this strange dream reappeared suddenly, arms crossed, leaning against a tree. “But isn’t it something that, if you had the power, you would have wanted to do? How long did they torment you? If no one else wanted to make them pay, why not take matters into your own hands?”
“I’m not a murderer!” Aradra retorted, pulling the small version of herself behind her. “I don’t kill people if there’s another way!”
“And what’s the difference between people and monsters?” asked her adult copy, moving away from the tree with her hands on her hips. “Tell me, would you feel as guilty and remorseful if these bullies had remained an unrecognizable puddle instead of taking their original form after you killed them?”
Aradra opened her mouth, but everything her brain produced was dismissed because she realized that she wasn’t coming up with answers, only excuses.
“See? The only reason you don’t have an issue with killing a monster but killing a person seems like a big deal is just because of your different perception. When you kill, you kill. The shape of the creature you’ve killed is irrelevant.”
“That’s not true!” exclaimed the small version of Aradra. “Death is part of life, but there’s a difference between killing a fly and killing another animal!”
The adult copy gave a small smile, her yellow eyes locking onto her with almost predatory attention. “Like what? Little girl, if we’re here instead of killing Dyenna, it’s because of you!”
“I won’t abandon the morals I’ve set for myself just because you don’t see any difference in killing,” Aradra interjected. “If I did, the difference between me and the person I’m trying to stop to save my friends would cease to exist.”
“Aradra…” Her adult copy sighed. “If you want to kill a monster, you have to become a monster. Why are you refusing to understand it?”
“There must be another way,” Aradra replied, her tone unwavering.
“Then we’ll be here for a long time.”
The world surrounding the three Aradra distorted and crumpled like a piece of paper ready to be discarded, an incomplete or poorly done painting that needed to be replaced with a new landscape, a new world into which all three of them arrived together.
