FINAL CORE - Chapter 138 (Patreon)

I wanted to change, I really did.

I set such big goals and worked my butt off.

I went outside, I exercised, I practiced talking and speaking, whether to people alone or in groups, I earned money, I made friends, and I lived life.

But I didn’t change.

As I stand here now, looking at my reflection, the same eyes stare back at me now that had stared back at me a decade ago. The man is one and the same. The trappings covering him are different, the looking glass is a different one, the season is different; but that man there — that bastard looking back at me — he’s the same piece of shit as back then.

I did everything to change, and in doing so, my life changed in every single definable aspect, but somehow, through all of this, the body that I inhabit and the character of my personality, these remain… untouched.

Sure, I learned a lesson here or there and I picked up one or two scars, but when I look into his eyes, all I see is questioning unfulfillment.

I did everything. I did everything that a man should do in life, and that god-damned bastard never changes the way he looks at me.

What the hell does he want?! What is it going to take to finally make him happy?

I don’t think I’ll ever know.

~ Rambling thoughts of an actually very happy man who is unaware that he is afflicted by a minor, very specific curse that always makes his own reflection look grim. It does nothing other than that.

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Perchta, the Blackwater Fountain

???

Location: The Crisis Zone

The howls of the crisis fill the vibrating air, resounding around the conflict-zone in conjoined tremors, causing great bursts of energy to churn out through the air — the powerful shock waves traveling around the world, causing violent cascades of blackwater from her body to splash and fly with every passing second.

Perchta, the thing that she has become, screams a scream that never stops as she lurches, swiping with an uncountable number of appendages, each wave acting as an arm, each streak of poison water a finger, as she hunts the thing that caused all of this, the thing that stole everything from her.

The witch screams, tidal waves crashing against the sideways turning white toward, painting its lower half black as the rumbling island sinks deeper and deeper down towards the abyss of her totality.

Every time she swipes, that cretin, that monstrosity wearing white, eludes her. It slips from her grasp like crumbling grains of sand. She hates it. She hates it so much. She hates it like she hates humans.

They all did this to her. They all stole her homes, her friends, and her life. They’re all beasts, too mindless and violent in their base nature for the idea of anything such as a quiet, simple life for people like her to have ever been a possibility. She just wanted to be left alone. They made her into this. They made her do this.

Perchta, the thing that she has become, an avatar of unnatural poison water that has no place on the surface of the world, stemming from the foul starlight of a distant aeon, cracks whips of water out in all directions.

“I HATE YOU!” screams her voice a thousand times over, as her eyes track the creature, weaving in between two other disruptions.

— Flameless explosions ring out above her head as the warped crusader and some beastly dragon belonging to the tower fight one another.

She’s going to kill everything here, starting with the bird.

Then, she’s going to kill everything that isn’t here.

Then, she’s going to kill anything that’s left.

AND THEN —

Perchta screams, the entire ocean churning and twisting together into a spiral of raging whatever that shoots up into the air.

AND THEN.

Needles of a thousand-shades of lightlessness stab into the air.

And then… Maybe… One day… Maybe she can just be happy again.

But first, everything has to die. It’s not just what she wants; it’s what the stars want. It’s what the water wants.

Everything has to go.

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Isaiah

The sword cuts through the water endlessly, but the fruitlessness of the exercise is obvious as it simply splashes down into the wetness below only to reform again as a new mass. One cannot cut water.

But this is just a way to buy time.

Isaiah shoots past another rocky island, grazing it with its talon as it had done with so many others before this, spinning to avoid a mass of tendrils that shoots past it.

It lifts its gaze, realizing that Perchta had aimed them elsewhere.

Ten-thousand threads of black launch up towards the sky as if pushed by the needle of a seamstress and cut straight through the armored body of the great wyrm, piercing through an old, dislodged scale. The wyrm screams, writhing, its cry filling the world as it is unable to fly away — held aloft as if atop the lance of a dragonslayer of old.

— Isaiah cuts through the poison, causing the construct to collapse, with all of it falling down back toward the ocean like rain.

However, from the one gap come a hundred more such movements. The air is filled with pillars of ink, as if Isaiah were inside a great temple of olden days, with their masses surrounding it on all sides as if to make corridors that all lead to death, and high up above its head, they converge to cut through the wyrm, hammering at its belly until they can bore through like worms burrowing into a corpse.

It writhes and screams, Isaiah not being able to cut the threads fast enough as they come.

“I can’t catch you,” says Perchta’s voice from all around it. “But I can catch everything else,” says the witch, gleefully, as the overpowering hammering of the clock tower sends out bursts of wind with every strike, the broken mechanism still spinning and pressing through the water for moments as it rotates like a water wheel in the ocean.

Isaiah looks on in horror as the ancient beast struggles and then, starts to stop doing so; its body, perhaps as long as the tower itself, slowly starts to slack, drooping over the needles. Its massive golden eyes, the size of the sun in the sky, tremble and begin to close, looking toward Isaiah’s reaching claw.

“Oh, wait,” whispers a voice in its ear from behind.

Isaiah’s body lurches as a black, elongated needle pierces through its chest from behind.

A rotting face leans over its shoulder, looking at it from up close.

“I guess I can,” says Witch Perchta.