The Formless One
The Formless One
As Aslan slipped out, the Formless One's swarm flooded the gap. So dense was the encirclement that no path of escape remained. Niel traced his slowly mending wounds and pushed himself upright.
'Too many.'
The numbers alone told the story, but it was worse than mere numbers. They had deployed like a proper army—the creatures in the vanguard were not the same as those lurking behind them.
Any beast that even looked like it possessed a ranged attack had taken position in the rear. Any creature that looked too heavily armored to die easily stood silent at the front.
They advanced a step. Niel felt the phantom tremor of the earth with each footfall.
"O Predator of all things..."
The sheer pressure of the sight drove words of prayer from his lips. Staring down foes no amount of faith or strength could overcome, Niel pulled the flail from his belt.
A metallic rustle sang out as the chains uncoiled. The flail was an oddity—four separate heads, each steeped so long in venom they had taken on a verdigris sheen.
Spinning the weapon in a lazy circle, Niel's eyes darted across the formation.
Too many. Their composition was deliberate. A gap in strength and numbers far too wide to bridge with mere muscle and poison. If even a few followers had survived to stand with him, perhaps—but there were none.
"Niel, Priest Niel!"
He was steeling himself for a final stand when the shout came from behind. He flicked a glance over his shoulder. There sat the mage—the one Aslan had dismissed as beneath notice.
Once a man of some reputation within the Kallus Empire and a servant under the War God's aegis. His magic was never truly exceptional, but it was competent enough to earn him a name. Were it not for his service under the War God, who held mages in scant regard, he would have risen to priesthood long ago.
Kornil Ashuld, hound of a defeated emperor, fixed his gleaming eyes on Niel and spoke.
"I'll help. Let me fight with you!"
Niel met the abrupt offer with open suspicion.
"What are you scheming, Kornil Ashuld?"
He took a backward step as he answered. The creatures were closing in from the shattered warehouse walls.
"Scheming? If you free me now, what do you stand to lose? Let me loose, and my magic can aid you!"
"...What magic can you use?"
"Nearly all of the Manifestation School's lightning branches. Everything short of the highest-tier formulas!"
Niel swallowed his misgivings with a low grunt. Setting Kornil Ashuld loose offered no clear downside. There was, in fact, a tangible upside. Kornil Ashuld was a pure mage—a flimsy body that had never undergone even partial priestification. He had no way through that ring of monsters on his own.
The most obvious return on freeing him was simple: Kornil Ashuld would provide magical support fire. Magic was no trivial tool. Of all the legacies the Ancient Gods had left behind, it was the most practical. It was even reasonably effective against priests and their followers. Against the Formless One's minions, it would serve just as well.
There was no time for a careful weighing of costs and benefits. If betrayal came after he was freed, Niel would merely die a little earlier. If he did nothing, nothing would change.
Decision made, Niel reached for the chains.
Snap! Snap!
He tore through them with the brute strength of a priest. The severed links clattered to the floor like a sudden downpour. Kornil gestured at his own throat.
"Hold your breath."
Niel had treated the restraint collar with venom. He let a corrosive, near-acidic toxin dribble from his lips, coated his palm, and smeared it across the collar. Acrid fumes rose as the metal dissolved, and the collar snapped apart, skittering across the floor.
Clang!
"Ahh. Now I can breathe."
Kornil massaged his throat and rose. Niel gave him a sidelong look—was it caution?—and kept his flail spinning.
"No need to stare like that. We'll have to fight together if we want to get out of here alive."
Kornil had caught the wariness in Niel's gaze, the expectation of a knife in the back. Feigning a look of mild offense, Kornil began to draw up his mana.
The mana sharpened into hand seals and an incantation. Lightning leaped between his palms in writhing threads. The dim warehouse flared with a gold-white brilliance as Kornil Ashuld spoke in a low aside.
"Do you have a plan?"
"Would I? I don't even know what you can do. We fight."
The flail sang its metallic lament as it spun. Kornil nodded.
The enemy numbered in the hundreds. Facing them: one wounded priest and a mage freshly loosed from chains. The odds were abysmal. But neither man intended to die meekly.
"Then I'll leave the flanks to you!"
Niel's cry rang out as he swung the flail into the Formless horde. From Kornil Ashuld's hands, lightning erupted.
Niel smashed the charred bodies of followers aside with the flail and fought with desperate fervor. Kornil hurled spell after spell until his mana ran dry. Even as his limbs were torn and shredded, Niel spat venom and sank his teeth into flesh.
The struggle ended about thirty minutes later.
They had wanted to live.
And so they died.
*
Outside the warehouse—where all that blood and sweat were pooling—soldiers stood in a tight cordon. Their faces were taut, their eyes flicking with unease toward the same point.
Where Aslan and his party stood.
The soldiers and the Duke had answered Aslan's summons. The offer had been sweet enough to compel them: a single operation that could sweep away the Formless One's rot from the city. Refusing had never really been an option. This was their home.
But duty and dread were separate things. The noises leaking from inside—the screams, the snapping crackle of lightning—were more than enough to fray their nerves. More than a few hands trembled on spear hafts.
At the center of the cordon, Duke Hilsinger stared at the warehouse with naked anxiety before turning his head toward Aslan. Aslan stood alone, having sent the rest of the party off on some errand.
"Is the Formless One truly in there?"
Aslan did not even turn his head at the doubt-laced question.
"Yes. It is inside. The fighting should be over by now. All that remains is to mop up whatever remnants crawl out. A simple matter."
The words landed with unshakable conviction—so matter-of-fact they radiated confidence. The Duke clutched the hilt of his curved sword in his left hand and swallowed a groan.
"...I don't doubt you, but how can you be so certain?"
The Duke was a man of considerable guile. But his guile lay in backroom dealings and the administration of his domain. In matters of violence, he had never been particularly shrewd. He was a ruler. The things he could not do himself, he delegated. Finding the right man was usually enough.
That right man had died leading the subjugation of the Formless One. Now the Duke stood uneasily amid the siege line, trying to hide his misgivings, burdened by the fear that some unforeseen disaster might claim his life as well.
"Because it always has been this way," Aslan said.
He answered with an ease that suggested he felt no fear at all—the way a woodcutter speaks of felling trees, or a farmer of tending crops. Routine.
Aslan was a Master of Combat. No one in this world surpassed him in the arts of battle and victory. He was confident events would unfold according to his design. Inside that warehouse, he had expected a priest of the Formless One to be born.
As if to confirm his prediction, the ground began to tremble.
Rumble.
A scream—or something like one—rang through the tremor. Over the howls came the sound of something breaking apart.
"Ah—ahhh...!"
A soldier went wide-eyed, pointing at the warehouse. Something erupted through the roof, punching through timber and tile.
A pillar.
A column of flesh climbing toward the sky. It was woven of bone and muscle and viscera—gristle that would have turned a stomach even at a smaller scale. Now it twisted and stretched heavenward with a wet, pulsing motion.
"Aaaagh!"
The shattered roof planks rained down. Soldiers flinched and sucked in sharp breaths as debris hammered the ground around them. They screamed at the sight of the rising pillar. Terror rippled through the ranks like a contagion.
Amid the despair and the shouting, Aslan looked up at the column.
'As expected.'
He was faintly surprised that the priest's form matched the descriptions he had heard. The names and appearances of gods in Geladrion were often inventions of the local populace—creative liberties that rarely aligned with reality. Priests were described with the same casual inaccuracy. So when Aslan had learned of the Formless One's priest, he had not put much stock in the details.
Yet the thing before him matched those details exactly. Where other gods were misremembered even in their basic silhouette, this one alone was true to the tales.
'Perhaps the information about its main body is accurate as well.'
A colossal planet-type lifeform. Aslan turned the image over in his mind as he drew the axe from his back.
"What—how is this... Aslan! What in the world are you planning to—"
The Duke's voice hitched as he watched the horror unfold. Aslan kept his gaze on the warehouse.
"This is the way it must be done. If we mean to root them out, this is the only way."
"What do you mean...?"
The Duke pressed for an explanation. Aslan, already sketching the coming fight in his head, returned to the logic he had worked out earlier.
The Formless One's objective was to extend its influence. For that, it needed a priest. But a priest of the Formless One was weak—weak enough that two enemy priests could dispatch it with ease. So it deployed hordes of followers to clear out more dangerous priests and their flocks. It spent followers in droves, yet never abandoned its goal, sending wave after wave.
Watching that pattern, Aslan had understood one thing: so long as the Formless One refused to relent, every countermeasure was futile. Every fight, every stratagem, would be rendered meaningless.
It was a god, after all. Its power bordered on the infinite. In a war of attrition against a being of infinite power, Aslan knew he could not guarantee his own victory.
So he sought a faster, more certain path.
He focused on one detail: the Formless One was clearing the city of Kardi in order to create a priest. Its power was infinite—logically, it could spawn priests without limit. But it did not.
Whatever the reason, there had to be a constraint. And that suggested a simple way to force its hand.
Let it make its priest. Then smash it. If it refused to give up, smash the next one. And the next.
To make it abandon the effort entirely, Aslan had deliberately nudged the Formless One's plan forward.
He had only needed the right raw materials. It could not be someone who was already a priest or had been one. Nor could it be someone whose death as a priest would cause widespread collateral damage—no one tied to an active quest or major consequence. It had to be someone whose quests were already exhausted, someone disposable.
And the subject needed prior knowledge of the Formless One—someone who had seen or heard enough to handle the 'audience.'
That person had been inside the warehouse.
Neither priest nor follower. A man with only two sub-quests left to his name.
Kornil Ashuld.
He had served under the War God, had witnessed and dealt with many priests. His mind, Aslan wagered, would not shatter during the Formless One's 'contact link.'
Fortune had favored the plan. Kornil Ashuld became a priest of the Formless One. He had grasped the power he so craved and undergone the transformation. Whether it was the shape he had imagined for himself, Aslan neither knew nor cared. Hiding a thin, bitter smile, he drew his axe and then reached to the Duke's waist, pulling the curved sword from its sheath.
The Duke startled as the blade left his side.
"Wha—you...!"
"I'm borrowing this."
A well-made curved blade. Aslan studied it a moment, then pressed the flat of the sword to his forehead.
One thing remained.
Kill the priest.
It was what he had always done.
'Purity.'
He opened his eyes and spoke the word inside his skull. White fire kindled along the steel.
Through the shimmer of that flame, writhing characters crept into Aslan's vision: the Formless One's swarm. Countless shapes pressing in. He fixed his stare on them and leveled the curved sword.