A World without Misery (now with images!)

Chapter 14 - The Array of Black Fire (part 3)

"It didn't work," Hatasuko grumbled as he climbed to his feet. The golden symbol remained on the edge of his sword. Even after slicing through the foot of the shadow demon, the array had not been triggered. Hatasuko wondered if this meant that the symbol could only function because of his hold on the tempest. However, he soon dismissed this idea since it would mean that only a person touched by the darkness could ever become an Astrodeus.

"I'm out of quintessence again. Tempest of lost souls, please hear me and please know-"

But before Hatasuko could finish, the levitating monster attacked with the first weapon of the Interfectus. Its shadow sword slashed so swiftly through the sky that Hatasuko could not even grab his shield; he merely spun around so that the shadow blade struck the shield on his back. The clash was startlingly loud, and the impact threw him forward and slammed him onto his knees at a high speed. He skidded so quickly that the dirt street destroyed the fabric on his black pants and skinned his knees, but at the end of the skid, he somersaulted forward and dashed away from the Interfectus. He could hear the whoosh of the shadow sword slashing at him once again, but without any quintessence, he had no way to fight back. Right before his shins would have been ripped from his body, Hatasuko jumped up and over the slashing sword of shadows; it instead tore through a home on the left side of the street.

"I can't recharge if I can't stand still," Hatasuko exclaimed, but he began to suspect that the Interfectus had figured this out last time.

The Interfectus transformed its right arm into a shadow claw and suddenly attacked again. Hatasuko jumped away from it and spun as he jumped so that he could block the claw with his shield. But the claw blades were curved, so two of them reached around his shield and tore gashes in his stomach. He let out a startled shout as two scraps of bloody skin fell to the ashy street, but he also knew that this wound was inconsequential. When he landed on the ground with a stumble, he glared at the outstretched arm of the Interfectus and tried to force the tempest to recharge his power. However, he was too slow; the monster's shadow claw lunged at him again. This time, the entire weapon struck his shield with enough impact to throw him into the door of a smoke-stained home on his right side.

Hatasuko struck the door so quickly that it blew open from the force of his collision. He fell onto his bloody knees on the hardwood floor, wishing that the array of black fire would appear beneath his body, but there was no time. The Interfectus slammed its left foot upon the city streets elsewhere in the city. Everything shook from the shockwaves; Hatasuko was thrown off the ground before he could even catch his breath. As the whole house shook from the reverberating tremors, Hatasuko saw that another person stood in this room. A middle-aged man clenched the wooden table in the middle of the room with both hands.

Since the Interfectus knew exactly where Hatasuko was hiding, it unleashed another attack with its deadly sword of shadows. Hatasuko knew that the nightmare demon would try to attack him again, but he could not see through the wooden walls of the crumbling house. With a desperate dive, he threw himself to the floor since he anticipated a giant eruption of blue fire, but he was wrong. The high-speed sword of shadows sliced swiftly through the wooden walls without slowing down at all. It tore through the air right above Hatasuko's head and then tore through the stomach of the middle-aged man. Just the wind from this attack launched the table and the man's bottom half into the far wall of the house.

"The Interfectus will surely strike again to finish the job. I need quintessence, and I need it right now. But there's no time! The roof is collapsing; I'll die if I stay."

Hatasuko suddenly remembered that Madeline had specified that quintessence comes from the spirits of the dead. He could not access the lost souls in the tempest because he could not stand still, so he realized that he only had one choice. He would have to use the spirit of a person at the edge of the afterlife. There was no time to think about it. With countless screams roaring on in the abyss, Hatasuko charged forward, barely dodged the falling roof, and tore his sword swiftly through the top half of the middle-aged man's body.