[1% LIFESTEAL] Chapter 69 - Conflict

In the pure darkness of the night, Sophia tumbled to the ground, thrown back by the forceful blow. The flashlight that fell out of her hands clattered to the nearby soil and landed in a way that illuminated the crumpled form of the injured woman, part of the light falling on the crusted, bloody, torn armor covering Freddy’s body.

He watched her bleeding nose rapidly reconstruct itself as she burned another spark, all while doing his best to restrain himself from forcing her to use another one. “I asked you a question!” he yelled. “Are you out of your mind!?”

“I’m sorry!” she eked out. “I’m so so so so sorry!”

“Oh, you’re sorry, huh!?” he intimidated. “For what—the murder attempt you just committed!?” he screamed while gesturing behind them to the still-echoing screams of gorels looking for them. “We’ll see how the authorities feel about your apology, you crazy bitch!”

“I’m sorry!” she continued as she prostrated herself on the ground. “I didn’t mean to put you in that much danger!”

“Well what the fuck did you expect would happen when you threw me off a goddamn cliff into a horde of monsters!?”

“I expected you to know how to fight!” she yelled, getting defensive momentarily, clearly frustrated, before reverting to her apologetic prostration.

His jaw dropped beneath the mask of his helm. An incredulous grin of pure disbelief stretched his lips as he barked out a bewildered laugh. “You wha—!? That’s your excuse!? You thought I was—!” His words caught in his throat as he felt a sudden, searing pain spread through his back and stomach.

Sophia’s eyes bulged as they locked on to the pitch-black claws protruding from his torso.

He turned as fast as he could, gritting his teeth in anger at his stupidity as he faced the ghoulish form of a pale-furred deviant that had overheard their shouting. A cold, sickening feeling radiated from its claws as the creature focused, and he felt his entire body grow numb as his guts rapidly rotted away at the inpour of death-affinity essence flooding in through the attack.

With a furious growl, he reached his arm behind its back, catching the deviant off-guard as it had likely expected him to be unable to move under the paralyzing food of essence. His hand landed on the creature’s skull with a mighty grip as he pushed Hydraulic Flex to its maximum output, trying to crush its head. It wasn’t enough.

It roared with pain as it doubled down on its attack while swinging its other claw at his arm. Its clumsy, reflexive swing was blocked by the metallic bracers while he ignited both of his stars and used Flowing Strike; the force of the raging wave of water reached his hand, transferring into his grip as both the tips of his fingers and the deviant’s skull exploded under the pressure, splattering the nearby area with blood and brain matter.

His shaky arm grabbed the creature’s arm and yanked it out of his back as he collapsed to the ground, barely staying conscious. A bone-piercing cold invaded his bloodstream, and the sound of distant ringing echoed with the woman’s screams as she rushed to help him out.

“Stay away from me!” he yelled with all the will he could muster. “I don’t need your help!” He watched her face turn into an expression of awed horror as he forced himself back up to his feet. With a moment of focus, he pulled the machete out of the storage ring and started cleaving away at the nearby grass. His talent barely managed to stop his bleeding.

“You can’t simply heal this!” she yelled as she grabbed his arm. “The death essence has invaded your body, and—”

“Shut up!” he shouted stubbornly, pushing her arm away. “Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do!”

With frightened steps, she backed away, and he waddled forward, continuously swinging at the grass below his feet.

The sense of time passing grew distant as he kept swinging his machete. A constant buzzing, blurry vision, and patches of pure black made seeing straight almost impossible as he wandered into the darkness. Several times, he found himself lying on the ground, not even knowing how he made it there, but each time, he forced himself up, fighting the weakness building up in his soul, body, and mind.

There was a light. Someone was shining a flashlight before his feet. It was that lunatic. She kept trying to help him, but he pushed her away, refusing to accept assistance from someone like her.

“You spoiled brat,” he found himself speaking, feeling more like he was remembering a conversation from the past than having one in the present. “Fifteen years of martial arts training?” he asked deliriously. “What a lax life… you must have had,” he accused. “Did Daddy buy your prime, too?”

The woman said something, but it sounded like nothing but distant buzzing, like the sound of a mosquito flying around his ears.

“Shut up,” he demanded. “Just watch. This is how I’ve always done things—all by myself.” He felt the comforting sensation of tears streaming down his face. Images of happy moments from his life interspersed with the sudden realization that he was fighting gorels.

Ignoring their bites and scratches, he swung the machete at them the way he cleaved the grass, feeling intense pulses of life force flashing through his body as they brought him back from the brink of death and dispelled the pictures of his life flashing before his eyes.

At some point, daytime blinked the night away. Either it had come back surprisingly quickly, or he had been wandering in that state far longer than he was aware. The woman was also gone.

Be it grass or stray monsters, he kept cleaving and healing, feeling himself avoiding what he was sure should have been an unescapable death. Eventually, as if he’d suddenly woken up, the delirium dispelled, clearing his mind.

He couldn’t help but snicker. “I didn’t pass out this time,” he said proudly.

Although his body was in one piece, the death essence hadn’t been expelled from his body. He felt cold, and the feeling of sickness and weakness didn’t go away even as he healed back to effectively perfect health.

He still felt tired, and his mind felt foggy. Despite that, he forced himself to walk onward, willing his feet to take him down a path leading back to the passage. Although he was entirely lucid, he kept blanking out, as if he was failing to commit new experiences to memory.

Eventually, he made it to the second floor of the lobby. But he had no recollection of how he got there. Making his way into the stripping booth, he removed the loose pieces of armor that still clung to his bloody form and put them over the counter. They were so ragged and torn that most of them were garbage, but he wasn’t thinking about that.

As he waited for it to be repaired, he sat down on the bench in the stripping booth right before the mirror showing his reflection. His skin was deathly pale and sagging—his eyes were sunken, and his hair looked flat, almost as if it had thinned.

“Maybe I could take a short nap…” his words trailed off as his eyes slammed shut, and he fell asleep.

***

Freddy woke up and opened his eyes. The cold ceiling of the infirmary welcomed him, its grey, joyless luster perfectly reflecting how he felt.

Looking around, he spotted the few dozen beds reserved for those who returned injured from a delve, roughly half of them filled with other recovering delvers.

He sighed. So much for not losing conciousness. Even if they hadn’t treated him for anything, the mere fact that he was there meant he would be slammed by a hefty bill.

But he just couldn’t muster the energy to feel angry at that for some reason. No, he merely felt tired.

He moved his arm out of the thin blanket, revealing his pale limb partly covered by the loose sleeve of a hospital gown. His hand looked ghastly and deflated, and his nails appeared purple. He felt as if his entire body was sagging, like meat that had been tenderized.

A nurse walked into the room and spotted that he was awake. The woman told him that he was in a stable condition and allowed to leave if he wanted. He was handed a paper detailing the medical examination and… a bill, of course. But it wasn’t what he expected to see.

The total cost was $34,586. Only around fifteen thousand was the hospital bill, the most considerable cost of which was the extensive tests they had put him through to see what was wrong with him, while the rest was the price of the armor repair. He didn’t necessarily need to pay for the latter, but if he didn’t, his equipment would be auctioned off to cover the cost, with excess money being returned to him.

Again, he faced something that should have infuriated him, but he couldn’t muster the energy to feel that way. He merely signed the form and authorized the payment, then waited for his equipment to arrive. Once it did, it looked battered as hell.

The helmet looked as if it had been hammered back into shape after getting crushed, the jacket and pants had dozens of patches on it, and one of the bracers was just new, likely having to be replaced entirely. His footwear was mostly fine, though, proving its value once again.

Sighing deeply, he put the armor back on, replaced the hospital gown, and stepped back outside.

Once he left the room, he found himself in the second-floor lobby. There, he saw the lunatic who was guilty of all this sleeping on a nearby bench. This time, he could muster the energy to feel angry.

He marched over to her and flicked her forehead to wake her up.

“Ouch!” she yelled. “What the—!?” she started as she turned and came face to face with him. “Oh… Hi?”

“Don’t you ‘hi’ me,” he spat. “We’re going to report what you did. Either you cooperate, or I get my due myself. Your choice,” he threatened.

“Before that, can I—?”

“No,” he denied.

“Just hear me out!”

“Get up and—” his words caught in his throat as the woman raised her hand and, with a puff of air, summoned a pitch-black prime vestige.

His eyes narrowed. “Where did you get that?”

“It manifested when you killed the deviant,” she said as she raised her arm and handed it over to him.

“Are you trying to buy my forgiveness?” he asked teasingly. “This belongs to me anyway, you know?”

“I just want you to hear me out,” she said.

He snatched the prime out of her hand. Looking at the prime’s cat-like, black eyes, he asked, “What are your affinities?”

“Dark and death,” it said, cackling with a shifty undertone to its voice.

“What talent do you hold?”

“If you accept me into your soul,” it started the explanation, “you will be granted the power of haste upon slaying a foe.”

‘On-kill speed boost,’ he mused internally. ‘Double affinity and a combat talent…’ He had read about the value of primes and how it was usually calculated. With these characteristics, it would sell for between one and three million dollars.

He looked back down to the woman. His anger slipped through his fingers like a wet bar of soap. As much as he wanted to maintain his righteous indignation, the overwhelming fatigue mixing with the bubbling joy building in the back of his mind made him deflate as he breathed out.

“I’m not forgiving you for your insane actions,” he declared. “But I guess I could hear you out.”

She looked back up at him and then down, her shoulders visibly relaxing as she released a breath. “Thank you,” she said.

“You have nothing to thank me for,” he stated as he slowly sat beside her, his actions resembling those of an aged mortal trying to take a seat. “I’ll still report what you’ve done after our conversation.”

“What!?” she yelled. “But—?”

“But what?” he interrupted, turning his head to face her, the two holes in his helm revealing the tired, ghoulish eyes beneath. “Are you trying to insinuate that not stealing my prime counts as repayment?” He sneered. “Hurry up and speak. I want to go home and sleep. The fact that I nearly died because of you,” he intoned slowly, “made me rather exhausted.”

She bit her lip as she looked away, her hands clenching the hem of her filthy, torn shirt.

For a few long minutes, the two of them sat there in silence. He wanted to tell her to just hurry up and speak, but the fatigue dominating his body made even opening his mouth exhausting.

Finally, she spoke, “I don’t understand.”

“Huh?” he spluttered. Sighing, he asked, “What exactly?”

“Why are you so cowardly?” she asked.

He chortled at that one. “Fuck off.”

“When I threw you off the cliff, I wasn’t expecting you to be so… inexperienced.”

“Let me ask you a question before you continue,” he said, “is your explanation just going to be you insulting me?”

She made eye contact with him through the slits in his armor. Her mouth opened, but the tired, dead look in his eyes shut her right up. She took a deep breath instead and slapped her cheeks. “Okay,” she said. “I know that anything I say will sound like an excuse, but—”

“I don’t care,” he said. “If you want to make excuses, make excuses; if you want to insult me, insult me; just please get it over with.”

Taking another deep breath, she nodded. “Alright,” she said. “When I threw you off the cliff, I wasn’t trying to kill you.”

“I’m sure you weren’t.”

She winced at that. “Yeah… Things went quite differently in my head.”

“Mhmmm,” he kept responding sarcastically.

“I thought that, right, you are super strong, but for some reason, you seemed overly cautious,” she rambled. “Then I realized that, right, duh—you only saw me as a beginner! Maybe you felt responsible for my safety, so I wanted to prove that you have nothing to fear!”

His eyebrow raised beneath the helmet.

She continued. “My plan was to show my skills off and prove that we can take anything on! Even if we mess something up, we can recover perfectly if we don’t die instantly. If you think about it, the synergy between our talents makes it only logical to take risks since the actual danger is minimal, relatively speaking, of course, but still.”

The longer he listened to this woman speak, the stronger his headache became.

“When I saw you get surrounded…” she continued. “How are you so bad at fighting?” she asked.

He snorted. “That’s none of your business.”

“Look,” she said. “I… I can help you! I know a ton about martial arts, and if you let me mmmmh—!”

Finally, he could no longer tolerate listening to her. His right arm shot out, and he slammed her mouth shut. “Please stop talking.” He sighed.

She looked at him, and her eyes opened wide. Likely believing that she had failed, she flailed her arms and tried to remove his hand, which was closed in a steel grip around her mouth.

“Don’t worry,” he placated. “I’m not going to report you.”

She froze. Her piercing eyes turned to him with a ‘really?’ shining in them like a star.

He rolled his eyes as he leaned his helmet on his hand. Now that his fury had worn off, the longer he listened to her ramble, the more obvious it became—she wasn’t malicious; she was just stupid.

“But,” he said, “our little party isn’t going to work out.”

Malicious or not, she was a massive liability. Delving with her after the stunt she pulled was out of the question. However—

“That doesn’t mean we can’t still cooperate.” There was still a use for this woman.

He removed the hand from her mouth, and she immediately shouted, “Really!?”

Although her reasoning was silly, she wasn’t wrong. He was horrible at fighting. It was his greatest weakness. All he had focused on until that point was growing his power, but his ability to use it was lacking, to say the least.

His mind flashed over the details she mentioned. Indeed, he had royally messed that fight up. While she pushed forward, making her way into the mass of monsters before it could descend upon her like an avalanche, he froze until he was literally buried beneath a pile of bodies.

He leaned forward, resting his chin on his crossed arms. “Our talents synergize. Also, you can—”

“That’s right!” she yelled, smacking her hands together as she seemed to remember something. She turned her piercing purple eyes at him with a gleaming madness shining through as she declared, “I think I can make us immortal!”