[DEVILICH] Chapter 3 - Invincibility

As soon as the creature turned its head to face me, I ducked back into the cave, taking cover. This time, I felt the fear quite clearly, and the fact that my life was in grave danger was hammered in even deeper when the giant sword flew into the cave, slamming into the stone wall and sending cracks spreading all around. 

Not long after, I heard the sound of thundering footsteps closing in on me. I kept my mouth shut and immediately turned back, sprinting as fast as possible. The creature outside was quite massive, but it wasn’t big enough not to be able to fit into the cave. 

At first, I thought my legs were carrying me as fast as I could go. But—

After I had passed the awkward turns and entered a straight section, I broke out into a real sprint… and just kept accelerating. The ground beneath my feet vanished far faster than I could keep up with, and before long, I tripped and tumbled down the path, rolling for quite a while. I suffered no injuries from the fall, and as I got up, I didn’t feel even slightly disoriented.

I had no time to consider the absurdity of my physical capabilities, so as soon as I was up, I continued moving.

After a few minutes of running, I slowed down and looked back, trying to see whether that thing was chasing after me. For a while, I heard nothing, but as I strained my ears, I noticed the faint sound of distant smashing. The noise was getting closer.

I continued, and soon enough, I reached the fork. I bit my lip as I eyed the two paths. One of them I knew was a dead end. I still couldn’t hear the thing chasing after me, but rather than wasting any more time, I immediately ran down the third path, the one I hadn’t taken yet. 

At first, it was much like the rest of the cave, with dry, flat ground and rocky, uneven walls. But then, it slowly started to change. It took on a vaguely square shape, with clear signs of having been artificially created.

I felt a strange… comfort. Almost as if I was walking into a warm home while escaping a blizzard. But it was weird. There was an eeriness to it, like I was walking into a warm house, yes, but one where a cannibal was waiting to kill and eat me. I didn’t have the luxury of turning back around, so I kept running.

Eventually, the cave suddenly opened up. I froze.

The room I entered was paved with stone blocks, and on the other side, a thirty-metre door stood. It was made of a metallic, red substance with intricate carvings of strange symbols. I tried observing them closer, but rather than seeing a shape, I started hearing… singing. When the melodic voice suddenly turned to screaming, I tore my gaze away, finding my body covered in sweat and my heart beating out of my chest. 

Yeah. Whatever the hell was on the other side of that door, it wasn’t safety. 

I heard the faint sound of smashing behind me. My jaw clenched, and my fists tightened. That creature was gaining on me. 

I had to hide. 

My eyes scoured the room, but I found no hiding spot. 

I rushed to conjure anything vaguely resembling a plan. Panic swelled in the back of my mind, but it subsided relatively quickly. 

Rather than feel my thoughts unravel as the unfathomable horror of the scenario I found myself in tore my mind apart bit by bit, I felt… calm. Too calm. I felt calm to the point where it should terrify me, making me wonder whether I was even the same person, but I felt no such response. 

The sound behind me got louder and louder, and, feeling like I was out of options, I hid just to the right of the room's entrance. Although it could hardly be called a plan, I intended to slip behind this thing when it ran into the room and run back into the cave. 

Where would I go from there? Probably out into the horde of zombies, where I would pray that I can maneuver around them long enough to reach safety… wherever that may be. 

I stood just to the right of the entrance and calmed myself, rapidly feeling all thoughts of anything other than my plan sink into the back of my mind. 

The footsteps grew louder. I could hear the scraping of the massive sword as the creature dragged it behind itself, running through the cave with the momentum of a truck on legs. 

The sound grew closer, and before long—

Rather than the sight of an armored giant, I was greeted by the massive sword penetrating through the cave wall and stabbing right into my stomach.

The creature pulled its weapon back, and I stumbled, clutching my torso as an incredible feeling of agony shot through my body. I looked down, witnessing my blood flowing down my naked legs as a part of my guts spilled out. 

A second later, the giant stepped into the room and swung its sword horizontally, striking me down with such force that I was sure it would slice me in half, but it instead knocked me back, leaving me with a massive gash across my chest and right arm as I slammed into the other side of the room, bouncing off the wall like a rubber ball.

Before I could even get up, the armored skeleton threw its sword, piercing through my heart with pinpoint accuracy and nearly splitting me in half. Then it ran forward and drop-kicked me, smashing its giant boots of pure metal into my face and popping my head like a balloon. But rather than everything going dark as the sweet embrace of death washed over me, I felt like I was still awake, and I could still discern the pain coursing through me.

A moment later, an insane itch enveloped the damaged parts of my body, making me feel as if my head, chest, and arms were on fire. A few seconds later, once the feeling subsided… I found myself fully healed as if nothing at all had happened. 

My body was only intact for roughly half a second as a massive fist slammed down on me, pushing my head into my torso and crushing my body into a meat paste. This time, I got to see my mangled flesh put itself back together at impossible speed, chunks of meat and drops of blood flying back as if magnetically attracted to one another before they started reconstructing themselves. 

Before I was fully healed again, the creature stomped down at me with its foot. 

The pain was intolerable, easily the worst thing I had ever experienced in my life, but I found it effortless to ignore it as my mind remained clear, still able to think and focus as if everything else that was happening to me was just a movie I was watching in the background.

Whatever the fuck was happening, whatever the hell I had become, and wherever on Earth I was didn’t matter because, although the unbelievable properties of my body were akin to invincibility, I could instinctively feel that, if this continued, I would eventually die.

But punch after kick after sword slash kept tearing me to pieces, leaving me no time to gather myself, figuratively or literally. 

The giant swung its sword horizontally again, and this time, it managed to cut me apart at the waist. But I still felt my legs. I reflexively moved my left leg, only to find that, despite them being utterly detached from my body, I could still manipulate my limbs. 

As the creature prepared itself to turn the upper half of my body into paste again, I focused on my legs and forced them to run just as the metal gauntlet crushed my upper body. 

I couldn’t feel anything except the cold stone tiles beneath my feet, but I still made my legs run away. 

The itch crawled through my body again, and soon enough, my upper body was reconstructed, just in time to see the armored figure trying to cleave my legs apart. But as it lifted its sword, I stopped running, making my legs drop lifelessly to the ground just in time to make the blade miss.

It wasn’t deterred, raising its right leg to crush my lower body, but in the next instant, as if pulled by an invisible rope, my legs started dragging toward me, eventually reaching my other half and fusing back together. 

The skeleton knight was already rushing at me, and I wasn’t planning on waiting for it to catch up. I instantly started running toward the exit, but as I did, the skeleton raised its weapon.

A moment later, the giant sword was flying at me with pinpoint accuracy, too fast for me to dodge.