Book 2 Chapter 134 - At the Base of the Mountain

The portal to the Mountain of Faith parted before Zoe’s fingers. A thrill ran through her like static electricity. The feeling wasn’t invasive, but it filled her. She tasted milk and honey and felt herself falling forward, grasped by invisible hands, pulling her through with a force that had nothing to do with gravity.

The Mubilashi screamed and gnawed at her. Fangs pierced Mirrored armor. Pain flowed like the blood from her skin, but the portal pulled and the Mubilashi could not deny the Mountain. Zoe’s fingertips touched warm air, and an understanding blew through her like wind through a temple.

The Mountain of Faith chose her, it did not choose the Mubilashi. She was pulled further in, and though the newly spawned Mubilashi screamed and yanked at her, it was not yet powerful enough to deny its nature — a Mubilashi toyed with its food.

The wounds in her flesh, the gaping sores, the draining points of blood, the fractured bones, none were deadly. Zoe had passed through such crucibles of pain before and found this one no worse than any other.

Gracefully, she slipped through the Mountain portal, past her arm, past her shoulder, her head now gazing out at a peaceful meadow spotted with wildflowers and a mountain in the distance jutting up into the clouds. The Mubilashi would not — could not — follow her here. Through faith in herself, faith in her friends, and faith in the spark she clutched in her fist: she had escaped the situation.

But escape was never enough for Zoe.

She had only seconds, so she drew on the drops of Time within her. Not externally, but inside herself. One drop dissolved into her blood, her bones, her flesh, her mind, and her Insight exploded. The portal scraped against her skin as she slid through. What felt like feathers in real time, was a blade in slow motion as the white light separated her from the horrific parasite that was once her mentor. The separation was a mechanism. She couldn’t understand its cause. Even in these drawn-out seconds, there wasn’t enough time to study, but if she could feel the mechanism, then she could disrupt it.

That was what Oriz built her for, after all, to mess with portals.

She couldn’t move in this syrupy time, but she didn’t need to move. Using her hands to collapse points was a fallacy she only now understood. The brush of the Mountain portal on her skin showed this. Her Body Path wasn’t her feet or her hands or even her skin, it was her.

She could no more walk off the path than she could stop being Zoe.

So she reached through her Skein as the portal swallowed past her neck and back, and she disrupted the mechanism that blocked the Mubilashi like sediment in a sieve. A burst of power left her, and time accelerated.

She flew through and landed on the grass. A lump of writhing Mubilashi clung to her legs. The separation mechanism reactivated the second she left the portal, and it bisected the Mubilashi like a guillotine. The horror screeched on the sunlight grass as it squirmed and whipped and shredded the flowers.

Zoe breathed the air of tranquility as she stood and kicked the grasping horror from her legs. It bounced across the earth and bundled in on itself, wrapping, warping, until it formed the silhouette of Oriz once more.

The triangular portal vanished from the air — one last glimpse of an orange sky swirling as wisps of blackened tendril dissipated into the nether that birthed them — and Zoe stood alone at the base of the Mountain with the Mubilashi at her feet.

Confidence swirled through her veins, and she howled. Blood oozed from dozens of punctures across her body. She panted, but remained unbowed. Since that first day on the plane, she lived in a cage of fear, but now…

The door to the cage lay open.

She bent down and gripped the Mubilashi. She hauled it up and stared down into the eyes swimming across the midnight skin. Part of her believed this was too easy. This was all a trick. A deception to make her comfortable before the Witch pulled the rug out from underneath her.

Or maybe this Mubilashi was too young, a seed like the being trapped within the Mirror Bell Dungeon. A world of theory and rules existed beyond Zoe’s knowledge, but if she thought of what she didn’t know, the fear would return. The cage door opened both ways, and she had no desire to let anything in.

So, she gripped the Mubilashi with fingers of Mirror born from a parasite she was forced to defeat by the fear that once ruled her. A sense of lightness flowed through as the Mubilashi squirmed. Teeth sprouted along a black limb as it clawed at her like a feral cat. Gouges opened along Zoe’s arm. Her skin obeyed the laws of physics, and she bled, but it was distant. The wound, and the others, closed at a visible rate from her enhanced Vitality,

The heady scent of incense and wildflowers filled Zoe’s lungs.

“Were you always so weak?” Zoe asked the thing that looked like Oriz.

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[I am not weak]

Zoe kept one hand clenched at her side. She held the Mubilashi aloft with a single hand around its throat.

“You were my mentor before you became this horror, and I should fear you, but…”

[I am Mubilashi!]

The shadows seethed, writhed, and spilled from within Zoe’s grasp. The horror sucked in light and bloomed into darkness. Tendrils whipped out as the Mubilashi grew in size until it blotted out the sky and sun and darkness fell upon the meadow at the base of the Mountain.

Zoe gazed up at the monster. A look of sadness passed across her face. This was a person once, she thought to herself; I knew them.

But all nightmares are based in reality…

[Tremble before me!]

“No.”

The Mubilashi crashed toward her with a scream. A single sea of night condensed into a tsunami of teeth and fangs. Zoe stepped forward in the stance of the Grasping Vine. Her Mirrored hand came up in a sweeping strike, and as it did it lengthened into a chain slung like a liquid blade. The chain extended out from Zoe, Moth unspooling across the length, as Zoe took another step to meet the Mubilashi crashing toward her head. The thin reflective line slipped into the starlit mass, and portals opened along the edge. Lightning crashed from the sky above and flowed down to strike Zoe as she continued to sweep her hand up in a perfect strike.

[Black Star Sword]

The length of the chain became a single point that collapsed. This ravenous black hole whipped up through the Mubilashi and devoured the fangs and eyes and darkness. Light spilled down through the wound growing up the Mubilashi’s length,

[You can’t…]

The blade flashed through what remained of a head and the amorphous mass split in two.

[Mubilashi can’t be…]

The half-dead monstrosity floated above Zoe. The crashing wave had become smoke to drift apart. She stepped forward again and brought her chain down. The long whiplike blade swept through the creature once more. What were two halves became four. A wind blew down from the Mountain and spun the dark mass into eddies that spun apart. The air around Zoe cleared, and she stood amongst sunlit flowers in a meadow unbroken and peaceful. She breathed the air as the last of the shadow faded.

“You always thought the world was ironclad,” Zoe whispered. “You never saw a way out of the cage.”

The long whip retracted into her hand. Emotion welled within her, and Zoe fell to her knees amongst the flowers. Cold passed over her, and through her, and she knelt as the experience within her climbed. The gulf toward level 50 closed, but she had not quite crossed it, not yet. She dipped her head as the silence of the meadow filled her. Was this a moment of prayer? Of farewell? Of regret? Of peace?

She couldn’t answer, for the weight slipping from her shoulders took with it the weight from her mind. After a while, she couldn’t know how long, she stood. A pale white robe hung from her body with a corded knot as her belt. Soft sandals adorned her feet. A thin footworn path led away from where she stood, across the field of flowers, toward the mountain where it became carved steps leading up into the clouds.

The soft air slowly danced down the slopes toward her. Peace and pollen swelled around her like molasses. The Mountain waited, beckoned, and she knew the journey ahead contained danger, but she also knew she could conquer whatever lay beyond the clouds.

She had faith.

But right now…

She had no desire to step along the path laid out before her. Turning her back on the Mountain, Zoe opened up her clenched fist. A tiny pink spark remained fixed to her palm. It flickered like a dying ember as Zoe brought it up to her lips. She blew air and life back into the spark and it billowed out before her into a pink slice in the world.

“I’ll return,” she said to the Mountain before she stepped through the swirling portal and vanished.

###

Anton sent an eye out through the crack in the wooden planks. It skimmed low across the undulating dunes, but he saw nobody out there on the small island of sand. A reef surrounded the island, the bright colors of the coral reflecting the swirling skies above, but the seabed lay dry, as though a low tide had dragged the ocean away to some unfathomable point.

“Do you see anything?” Bella asked.

“Nothing,” Anton said. “Well, nobody, at least. There’s some movement in the reef, but it’s not human.”

“Any idea of what shot at us?” Skidmark said as she toyed with an arrow.

Anton, Skidmark, Bella, and the two dozen survivors huddled in a beach shack that might once have been a bar. Sand piled in the corners, and the wooden walls let in more light than they kept out, but it provided a sense of cover.

An arrow thunked into the wall, and the survivors in the center of the room flinched.

“Calm down,” Skidmark said. “We kept you safe, didn’t we?”

“This will never end,” one survivor moaned. “We’re doomed to an endless string of hells. Doomed, I say!”

Bella ran a hand down her face.

“I don’t think I can handle much more of this,” she muttered. “You really don’t see anyone, Anton? Nobody I can stab?”

Anton slipped another two eyes through the cracks in the walls. They sped off in different directions.

“Not yet.”

Two more arrows thunked into the walls.

“At least they aren’t doing major damage,” Skidmark said.

Wood cracked and splintered as a harpoon shot through and slammed into the opposing wall. It shuddered for a moment, a long rope hanging from its tip. The rope snapped taut, and the harpoon shot out through the entry wound in the wall, banging loose another plank as it did.

“Oh,” Skidmark said. “Me and my big mouth.”

“What are we going to do!” the survivors wailed. “We’re doomed!”

Bella sighed.

“I think I need to go out there.”

Anton glanced at her.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s… it’s what Zoe would do.”

“We should wait for the boss.”

“We don’t even know if she’ll —”

Pink light splashed across the room. Bella turned, eyes wide as her sword hummed.

A portal tore itself open and Zoe tumbled out. She landed on her feet inside the rickety bar. Her robe billowed like a ghostly monk as she surveyed the situation.

“Hey everyone, what’s up?”

Bella stepped forward, but Anton beat her to it as he clasped Zoe’s hand.

“I knew you’d make it, boss.”

“What happened?” Skidmark asked.

“No time,” Bella said despite her growing smile. “Some pricks are shooting arrows at us.”

“Oh,” Zoe said as a wild grin stretched her scarred lips. “Let’s go teach them some manners.”

With a flex of her legs, she leaped through the hole made by the harpoon as sunlight flashed from her Mirrored fist.