4 Chapter IV: Maddening Cycles

Stabbed, crushed, ground into fine paste, ripped apart while being chewed, falling off my death for the Nth time, frozen to death after being left for dead; those were all the methods by which I had died while trying to bypass the big ass skeletal monster. The unfairness of the whole situation really made me question whether some hack-Miyazaki had been involved in designing this Nightmare Trial. How the fuck am I supposed to kill something of that size?

I have lost count of how many times I died and have come back to the base of the mountain to start again. The awakened undead horde were my only companions in this damned wasteland. The voice of the Nightmare Spell rang so much in my head that I bet I developed some tinnitus.

[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial...]

[First Trial goal: Survive the undead horde and reach the top of the frozen mountain.]

Sighing for the umpteenth time, I started doing my regular cycle of collecting equipment. Over the numerous tries, I attempted to try out new equipment in hopes of it making any difference in my impossible quest.

As I was making my way around the skeletal monsters I was going to rob blind, not that they had any eyes if I'm being honest, I felt like I was shopping through a Wallmart. Leather chest armor slightly used? Yoink. Leather gloves that protects fingers from freezing into popsicles? Don't mind if I do. An old black sword that won't do shit against the big fucker upstairs? You don't have to tell me twice. Bows and arrows so old they are about to break apart but still somehow functional? Baby, you have a deal. Daggers that I may never have the opportunity to lose? Shut up and take my money.

Ah, yes, with my armor and weapons weighing on my body, I felt whole, complete, and not so naked anymore.

"That will be all John, how much do I owe you?" I asked the skeletal warrior from which I usually take the sword from. It just screamed in response.

"On the house? Why thank you John, say hi to the wife and kids for me will ya?"

With that I started my ascent up the mountain. With every attempt at this, my body got more accustomed to the exercise, my climbing technique became more refined until I started doing it like a veteran mountain climber - at least, that's what I keep telling myself.

Before long, I had reached the Fetid Imps' hunting ground which I prompty ignored and began ascending up the unforgiving craggy mountain side. I may be crazy enough to try and bypass the giant fucking bone centipede but a horde of those forsaken gremlins? Hell no!

One may ask why was I hitting my head against a wall that I knew all too well was impossible for me to bypass. Well the answer is simple, these desperate runs were the only thing keeping my fragile state of mind together. If I give up, have a nagging gut feeling that that would be when I would truly die. It's funny you know, I may have died more times that I can remember but the thought of dying once and for all still scares the shit out of me. However, fearing death is only human, isn't it?

While I was musing about my mental condition, I had finally reached the snow-laden field I like to call the Field of a Thousand Corpses. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate on the self-explanatory name.

The field itself has a serene and quiet beauty to it to be honest; that is, of course, if you ignore the titanic bug in the wall but still - silver linings. I trekked through the field like I did so many times already. During the numerous tries, I attempted every method I could think of to sneak past the monster be it either advancing while hiding in the snow, trying to go through the sides, or even dead sprinting across the field as fast as I could. The undead centipede came out of the walls each time without fail. Thus, I gave up the idea of outsmarting the creature and began channeling my inner dark souls character to try and memorize its movements and attacks.

However, unlike darksouls, this beast is alive (unalive?) and is not bound by a set of pre-coded attacks and movements. As a result, my efforts had little progress but it was all I had on my drawing board currently. Of course this has been going on for the last seven hundred or eight hundred tries or so, and I believe that I am so close to beating this motherfucker that I can taste the bonedust already on my tongue.

Just in time, the whole mountain shook as I watched apathetically with the black sword gripped tightly in my hands as the spot from which skeletal centipede always emerged erupted into the shower of broken rocks.

"Skrieeeeeeeeeeeeee!" the monstrosity opened its maws and cried to the skies before focusing its two glowing eye sockets at me.

"A good morning to you too, you skeletal asshole. Remember me?" In an attempt to remove the nuisance from its presence, the beast tried to skewer me with one of its body appendages. Snow scattered and the ground cracked with the force of the attack. Fortunately, my rolling game became on point after several hundred times and I was able to cleanly roll away from the attack to temporary safety.

Noticing that its attack didn't do the job, it tried to use something more substantial to hit me with: its tail. Thanks to thousands of hours of studying this bastard's body language - if you can even call it that - I noticed that it tried to utilize its tail so I ran to the only safe place in the whole field: inside the centepede's ribs.

Just as planned, I reached the inside of the ribs of the monster just as the tail came down. One downside to having a body this big is that movements such as this are not easily stopped by either the doer or the reciever. Thus, with a crash, the tail hit the body of the centipede resulting in the bone cracking and snapping at the site of impact.

"Skrieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" the monster cried in pain as it lost half of its body in one miscalculated move. I had no time to celebrate since I had to move out of there before the broken body fell over me.

Now with half its body disconnected the bony bug began taking things seriously as it tried to skewer me with one appendage after another. I sprinted as fast as my feet would carry me in a zig zagging motion; essentially playing a game of wack-a-mole with it until it attacked one final time with its most frontal appendage and I was nowhere to be found.

"Skreeee?" it made a curious sound as it lifted the appendage in an attempt to see my destroyed body. However, the area was clean save for the gaping hole in the ground that resulted from the attack. Its glowing ruby eyes scanned the whole field in search for the intruder - yours truly.

Meanwhile, I successfully made it onto the upper back of the undead centipede to finish this song and dance once and for all.

How did I reach this place so high up in the air?

Well, I'm glad you asked voices-in-my-head-that-may-make-me-question-my-sanity-in-any-other-situation. It is quite simple if you have a good understanding of the bug's nature and are a good climber. When the appendage was brought down to smash me into goop, I rolled out of the way and then jumped at the appendage and used the two daggers I carry with me as handles to attach myself to it. Then, when it brought back the appendage near its body, I just dropped down and hanged on to one of the bones covering its body.

What am I doing climbing up this monster's back rather than escaping?

Well, safe to say that after being killed by something near a thousand times, you may develop a tiny grudge. Just enough that you may want to skin it alive then make it watch you wear it. Unfortunately, this monster has no skin so I am forced to compromise with just killing it.

How is little ol' me going to kill the big bad bone monster?

You see, I believe it was two hundred or three hundred cycles ago that I may have come upon this creature's weakness. You see, I had both my legs crushed at that run with only the bow remaining in one of my hands while the other holding the final arrow. The monster thought that my pitiful form was funny, so it brought its head down to chow down on the meal. Joke's in it, I don't know what fueled the next thing I did - maybe desperation, maybe spite, most probably sheer madness. I pulled back on the bow with the last arrow I had and in a lat-ditched attack.

I didn't aim when notching the bow since my vision was blurry due to the bloodloss. However, as luck would have it, the arrow flew into one of the eye sockets of the monster and even with my blurry vision, I saw one of the two red glowing lights go out.

For the first time since I found myself in this goddamned place, I heard the wretched bug screech in pain. It sounded like music to my near-deaf ears. I would've made it my phone's ringtone if I could just to listen to it every time I get a call. Anyways, what followed after was business as usual: it killed me, I revived, I climbed back up, and I died again, etc.

However, from that time I got a tiny spark of hope lit inside me to kill the motherfucker. All I needed was a plan. A plan hundreds of cycles in the making. The scent given off by my soul still seemed to permeate the cold air as the monster was still searching the whole field for me.

Bit by grueling bit I ascended the spinal cord of the creature, my body covered in numerous wounds due to getting scratched by the sharp bones. It is maybe the adrenaline in my blood or the effect of my [Adaptive] attribute gradually increasing my pain tolerance over time, I never felt pain from the wounds as I have a single minded focus to kill this nightmare creature once and for all.

Finally, I had reached the skull of the creature which in turn was made of various smaller skills with only the frontal skull being much bigger than the rest with a maw and the eye sockets. Making every second count, I tightly gripped onto the human-sized skulls and used them as leverage to reach the eye sockets.

Suddenly, I had a sudden feeling of being watched; when I raised my head, I saw all of the smaller skulls having their eye sockets trained at me. The next second, a piercing cry erupted from them alerting the the monster itself and nearly causing me to lose my handling especially when my target was only a few feet away.

I felt something liquid trickle out of my ears, my ear drums probably got ruptured; yet, I had no time to care about my auditory health as my target was just in reach. Unfortunately, the monster getting alerted to my prescence didn't make my efforts any easier. It thrashed around frantically in an attempt to throw me off. Thankfully, its bony appendages don't have full rotational capabilities.

It was a hugely difficult task to just keep myself from falling off the creature's back. Gritting my teeth, I continued my way to the goal all the while stopping for a short while to not get thrown off my the creature's frantic shaking.

Seconds stretched into minutes and minutes stretched into hours, my arms burned with the inhumane exertion as I moved on fueled by sheer spite. However, one way or another, I had reached my target. With one final pull, I climbed into the eye socket of the undead centipede. Inside was a wide, egg-shaped open room - large enough to fit a group of ten people easily - filled with wierd carving and markings.

Yet, I paid no notice to those things as my eyes were trained onto the two big, red crystals that were sticking into the back wall. Unsheathing the black sword from the hand-made scabbard I made from the tattered cape of a skeleton.

"Time to pay you overgrown bug."

I didn't wait a second for the monster to remove me from the inside of its head before charging at the crystals.

The sword pierced through the first crystal with abnormal ease. Multitude of cracks emerged from crystal and the next moment, it disintegrated into red dust. Severe vibration shook the room as the creature writhed in pain for having one of its weakpoints attacked. Unfortunately, my ears were too fucked up for me to hear the sweet melody of its suffering.

"It doesn't feel too good, does it? There's more from where that came from," I yelled with manic delight right before piercing through the second crystal.

Just like the first crystal, cracks erupted from the site of insertion before it crumbled into dust. Immediately, the voice of the Nightmare Spell resounded in my head.

[You have slain a Fallen Devil, Bone Centipede.]

[You have received a memory: Osseous Exoarmor.]

Before I could bask in the feeling of hard-earned victory, I suddenly felt like I was floating in air. It was then I realized that I was in a skull hanging twenty meters in air whose owner I just killed and now, I was free falling. Not long after, I got pancaked to the floor of the skull as the whole monster crashed onto the snowy field.