133. Squeeze (II)
The strangle-off began.
The Basilisk's coils wound over him. Its crystals shimmered, pouring out waves of essence; thick Earth Laws churned off them as the great beast squeezed tighter and tighter. Zane instantly felt it. He felt like a chunk of metal stuck deep in the bowels of the earth; some extraordinary weight pressed down on him, a suffocating, unrelenting pressure. Even with his Steel Body he was feeling the crush. His muscles began to burn.
But Zane's strangle was brutal in its own right. His was like a cattle brand, hugging tighter and tighter—the deeper it hugged, the worse it burned… the Basilisk felt lines of hot pain scalding all over it. It hissed.
Since he and the Basilisk were so tangled up, so looped around each other, in one big coiling ball, they felt double the pressure—when Zane squeezed he was strangling the Basilisk and himself underneath it. It was the same when the Basilisk tried squeezing him—squeezing over the same Chains winding up and down its body.
It was a hellish knot, and there was only one way it was unraveling. Both of them knew it. They gave it all they had.
Zane flexed hard, gritting his teeth, straining against the pressure. Trying to keep it off of him—it was no use. He tried throwing his arms and his legs up, making some wedges, but they were shoved farther and farther back… then he was flattened out. And all the pressure went straight into his body.
He groaned.
Almost at the same time, the Serpent hissed, spitting gemstones everywhere. It was hurting too. He saw its crystal scales chipping, breaking off, melting under the heat…
The question was—who would break first?
Right now they seemed about evenly matched. Zane might even be at a disadvantage since he started with a little less Health. They struggled like that for a few seconds; pain started shooting up his arms, down his belly. He could feel his organs start to compress, squish unpleasantly inside him; his whole Steel body started to fold, slowly, like a lawn chair. He let out a wheeze. This snake was like him, a power specialist; physically speaking he had no doubt it was one of the strongest creatures he'd ever fought. And it had the heaviest Element at its disposal too…
But then—
𝕊𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕘𝕖 𝔹𝕠𝕕𝕪 𝔸𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕!
ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
𝕍𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
𝕊𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕙 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
Zane grinned.
They'd been even before. But now…
25% was a lot of Strength. 25% was a lot of Vitality too. Sometimes in fights it was hard to tell precisely how much of a difference it made. But here it was immediately obvious.
They were deadlocked… and then they weren't.
Zane fought. And felt the snake give way. Flexed everything he had; and suddenly it wasn't squeezing him anymore. Suddenly he was shoving the beast back. Squishing it between his Chains and his body. It thrashed, tried fighting with all it had—it wasn't enough.
Zane turned on the gas, straining mightily—his Chains crunched in, digging hard into those Crystal scales—
And the massive Basilisk shrieked.
CRACK!
The Monster began to tremble, head to tail. CRACK! CRACK! It was being crushed segment by segment; it tried wriggling out, tried making space, but it was far too late. CRACK! The pressure just kept mounting. His flames couldn't quite catch on all that Earth Law, but it did a great job softening the Basilisk up. Making it so when Chains bore down on it, they started sinking through those crystal scales—
CRACK!
Whole chunks of it started to explode. It was just too much force for the poor beast to handle. Zane started grinning—hacking blood, but grinning.
Then came a CRACK! louder than all the rest.
And the Serpent went still. Its eyes went dull. Zane felt why—there was a giant spot of pain down the middle of its body. He'd just shattered its spine.
Then the whole thing exploded. Every crystal of it, erupting, blasted to nothing. And Zane knelt there gasping, smiling like a dummy.
His whole body sang with that pleasant soreness, the soreness of the exertion. His heart hammered in his chest; his whole body felt hot, overflowing with power, with energy. He felt good.
That was a good fight. He especially liked how physical it was. It made him work.
Just then—
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕞𝕖𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕟 ℕ𝕠𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕀𝕀𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕍
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
𝔽𝕚𝕖𝕣𝕪 ℝ𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕨𝕒𝕝 𝕀𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀𝕀
Fiery Renewal raged even hotter, burning all him; he could feel it returning Health to him by the second. In just a few minutes he'd be fully healed, he figured.
The world dissolved.
A new world faded in.
This was how he imagined an ant saw a garden. Lots of very colorful, exotic-looking plants all around him—almost all of them were as big as him. Several much bigger. A few tree-trunk stems curved up to giant bulbs oozing sap. There were sunflowers with petals big as umbrellas. Tulips the size of trees.
He stood there waiting for the Monsters to come. He expected giant bugs or something. He'd never been scared of bugs. But as he looked around scratching his head, nothing happened.
…Where were the Monsters?
He started down a grassy lane, flanked on either side by giant flowers. He didn't make it five steps.
Suddenly red dots flashed up on either side of him. The flowers came alive.
He'd thought they were tulips at first. Then their heads unfurled, showing maws glistening with thorn-teeth and pollen.
𝕄𝕒𝕟-𝔼𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕞𝕝𝕚𝕟𝕘
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟙𝟙𝟘
Uhh—
They blasted him.
Before he even knew what was going on he was washed in a cloud of yellow spores.
He yawned.
He felt a little sleepy. He blinked. The flowers turned their massive heads to one another, as though baffled.
… He got the feeling that blast were supposed to do a little more. It was just… well…
Zane got out his Chains. And Smashed them.
BOOM!
This time there was no resistance—his Stormfire blazed so high they nearly touched the clouds. A dark silhouettes of giant flowers spasmed within; there was a high-pitched hissing. The silhouettes shrank, whittled away. Became nothing.
By the time the fires died down, Zane stood in a smoking crater. And all the Monsters were gone.
He blinked.
…That easy?
The ground started to tremble. Red dots popped up on his mini-map; new Man-Eaters cropped up all around him, bursting up through the ashes; their jaws unhinged—
He smashed them again. And again they hissed, and thrashed, and went up in smoke. One Smash wiped the bunch of them off the face of the earth.
Zane was surprised at first, but he supposed it made sense. There was a saying back in his fighting days—styles make fights. Grass against fire was just a very bad type matchup.
This Level was meant to be harder than the last, he was pretty sure. And maybe it was for most people. But for him, he just kept whacking. And they kept dying, struggling to get at him, struggling to throw their Skills—but nothing they chucked made it out of the flames. They went up in smoke. It was almost funny.
A few waves later…
THUMP.
Zane blinked.
THUMP.
It was coming from the end of the lane. A blotch of red on his mini-map. Zane turned, and saw it.
It looked like a dragon whose body had been taken over by one of those mind-control fungi. Its green body oozed sap. Two heads popped out of its heaving turgid body, and when it bared its teeth, it showed maws lined with razor-sharp thorns. Its droopy eyes stared listlessly.
𝔽𝕝𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕠𝕟, 𝔽𝕝𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣 ℍ𝕪𝕕𝕣𝕒 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟙𝟚𝟘
It let out a cry that sounded like leaves rustling. Then it charged him, spewing a weird pollen-breath—
Zane Smashed it.
It wasn't even the smash that did the most damage this time, but the aftermath. Stormfire was a voracious, destructive thing. And here it showed in full. The Boss tried throwing out its vines—Smashed. It tried a wooden shield. Crushed. It tried planting roots, regenerating its quickly dwindling health. But those roots burned up too.
It was incredible to the end that it could barely mount a defense. Sometimes you were just hard countered, Zane supposed. In that last layer, Earth had been a pretty bad matchup for him—not as bad as this one, though. This one was brutal. He nodded, satisfied.
In the end, it did get a couple of shots through—it spat some poison-tipped thorns at him. And Zane just ignored them and kept on smashing.
By now Wish Upon a Star was fully loaded. He had it in his back pocket. He didn't even need it.
𝕊𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕦𝕡!
𝔸𝕡𝕠𝕔𝕒𝕝𝕪𝕡𝕤𝕖 𝕊𝕞𝕒𝕤𝕙 𝕀𝕀 -> 𝕀𝕀𝕀
His Skills just kept shooting up in here. He was feeling that 4x Skill Leveling rate at work—it felt like every Layer at least two Skills got a Level.
𝕊𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕙 𝕃𝕒𝕪𝕖𝕣, 𝔾𝕒𝕣𝕕𝕖𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕠𝕕𝕤, 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
***
The nice thing about that last floor was he got a little breather. His new Level III Fiery Renewal had done work. He was over eighty percent Health by the time he stepped through to the Eighth floor. He was still pretty ragged, but he was doing pretty solid.
He was getting close now. Just two more layers to go…
He blinked, looked around. Another bog layer. Just muddy and gunky—it went up almost to his waist. Just wading around was a hassle. He scanned around him—the mud flats just went on and on, a flat plane stretching into the horizon. There was no dry land as far as he could tell.
The air was heavy with moisture, the sky a sheet of dull gray. He saw swirling muddy whirlpools here and there, going down to who knew where. Pools of black tar were scattered about, bubbling softly.
Frowning, he tried a light Volt Blitz. Even then, he could barely move; Elemental Earth just swallowed his electricity whole. He frowned at it. Hmm.
Then Monsters started rising out of the mud.
They looked like just more mud, just molded into oozing shapes. Boulders and tree branches jutted out of them at random. They waded toward him, moaning, featureless—all they had was holes for eyes and holes for mouths. That, and a lot of Law. They were thick, sturdy mounds of Elemental Earth, all slicked over with Water Law.
𝔹𝕠𝕘 𝔻𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕟 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟙𝟙𝟜
Zane gave the nearest one a good ol' Apocalypse Smash.
Its upper half was walloped off, splashing out. It stopped for all of a second. Then the eye-holes and mouth-holes re-emerged on the lower half, and the thing just kept coming for him. Stormfire crowned its head, trying to find purchase. It was melting the Demon, but slowly—it was having a hard time breaking through that Water-Earth combo.
Even the bog—which had been blasted wide open—was quickly filling back up…his Stormfire was sputtering. Water smothered Fire. Earth smothered both Fire and Electricity. Raw Elemental Fire would've gone out hard here, but his Stormfire made a fight of it. Still... not great.
Zane blinked.
He could feel his Smash had gotten a good deal stronger after that Skill-up. It was just—
Water and Earth.
It seemed like it was his turn to be type-countered. It spoke to just how much oomph Apocalypse Smash now had that it could still blast off half its body.
He scratched his head, watching the Demons draw near. Then—eh.
He couldn't do much about it now. It wasn't like he had other offensive Elements. He'd make the best of what he had.
He chucked an Apocalypse Smash, then another. They did a good job splashing the mud about, making new smoking sinkholes, but it felt like more mud just took its place.
Three more Smashes took out the first squad of Bog Monsters. But more kept coming. The problem was the reload time. He decked a few with another Smash, swung around, and blasted another—
Then the things were on him. It was hard to get out of the way in all this muck; one of them sent up a wave of muddy water. He hardly threw it off before another came up behind him, slugging a monstrous fist. But he felt its soul, felt its intent, and rolled with it, turned with it. The fist grazed his cheek.
Then he socked the thing with a Stormfire Punch, and it went flying a good twenty feet. He turned, ducked a muddy haymaker, whacked the thing so hard it went tumbling, splashing over itself. Mud splashed up in waves.
He felt a third Bog Demon looming up behind. But he was too late to dodge. He just braced, turned, and took it as best he could. And grunted.
The fist dug hard into his gut. Hard enough to drive the wind out of him, hard enough to rattle his insides, pouring force through the deepest parts of him. That damned Earth Law.
Zane's counter sent the thing rolling.
His punches did a lot less than his Smashes. Even now, the Monsters were regrouping, shambling at him again. More were joining them. Twenty, thirty, more, all shambling at him…
He could use Wish Upon a Star here. But he was hoping to save it for the last Layer, the one Eze died on. That one could be trouble. He had to ration his powers and Health here, make it out without taking too much damage.
Change of strategy—again.
Time to dust off another old trick.
He raised his hands.
And his meteor hammers switched to giant axe-heads, blazing Stormfire.