The Formless One
The Formless One
Kornil Ashuld.
He fought with everything he had, staking his life on the outcome.
He deployed every spell he knew at the best possible moment. He emptied his reserves in a single desperate torrent of magic, burning through his entire mana pool by sheer force of will.
Lightning split the warehouse's dark, damp air again and again. Formless Ones recoiled, tumbled, died. But each kill only sharpened the realization that it wasn't enough.
Lightning Arrow, Lightning Bead, Thunderbolt, Chain Lightning, Spear of Lightning—he hurled spell after spell, cutting down the Formless Ones as fast as he could shape them.
"Graaah!"
The priest holding the front line—the one buying him time to cast—lost an arm.
A tentacle punched clean through his shoulder joint. Before he could swing his flail around to sever the tendril, another pierced his forearm. The priest spat a gout of venom from his mouth, but a Formless One intercepted the acidic spray. It took down only a single creature.
Two Formless Ones wrenched their tentacles in opposite directions. The priest's arm tore apart like wet parchment.
Arm gone in an instant. Face pale as ash, he still managed to swing his flail and crush a few more before they closed in.
"Niel, hold on just a moment longer! I'm almost—"
Kornil fell back on the hollow reassurance as he hauled more mana to the surface. He forced overlapping incantations, corrected a hand seal mid-cast, and loosed another blast of lightning.
A thunderous crack. Several Formless Ones were hurled back or reduced to charred husks. The gap they left filled at once with fresh tentacles.
The priest did not take long to die. Niel died horribly. When all four of his limbs had been shattered and his screams had risen high, the Formless Ones lifted his body aloft and drove their tentacles into his abdomen in unison. The limbless superhuman convulsed, vomiting a slurry of venom and blood, and then came apart. His death cry dwindled into something pathetic as he was rent into separate chunks of meat.
Even a priest overflowing with such vitality died helplessly. Kornil Ashuld stared at the mangled corpse—swarmed and torn apart by a coordinated assault—and cast with compulsive desperation.
He hurled thunder. He improvised a wide-arcing lightning discharge from a new idea mid-battle, forcing the enemy back. In that life-or-death crucible, Kornil Ashuld grew rapidly.
But the enemy multiplied faster than his growth could keep pace.
"Graaaaaagh!"
He was gathering mana for a Lightning Discharge aimed at the nearest Formless One when his resistance finally shattered. A single lash of a tentacle smashed his arm to splinters.
Fragments of flesh scattered across the floor. Through tear-streaked vision, Kornil Ashuld managed a few more pathetic attacks. A spine-shard needle he fired punched through his own leg, his abdomen, his liver. He felt death closing in. He collapsed.
"Guh... g-guh..."
The Formless Ones picked him up. They carried him somewhere.
To the heart of the warehouse. A bone spur that jutted up like a colossal fang.
Without the faintest trace of pity or mercy, they impaled Kornil Ashuld upon it.
"Hurk— gah— hrrk— guh, guh, gaaah..."
The spike tore through his intestines, shattered his spine, and bored deeper into his body. Kornil's refined, aristocratic features twisted. He trembled uncontrollably and voided everything still inside him.
Filth spattered onto the floor, but the Formless Ones only bound his limbs tighter.
Life receded. Death drew near. Adrift in the space between—thinner than a sheet of paper—Kornil experienced a waking dream. And inside that vision, he felt something foreign bleeding in, something that had been wished into being from outside.
Memories.
Countless memories that did not belong to him.
Too long, too sprawling, too intimate to be a single human life. They tore through Kornil's mind. The pain was like having his brain devoured while he was still alive. And in the midst of it, the being that had once been Kornil Ashuld recognized one final thing.
These memories, this vision—it was the memory of the Formless One.
Tens, hundreds of towers blazing against the sky. A world where the sun never set, burning beautifully even through the night.
The moment he understood that, Kornil Ashuld's body and spirit gave out.
Kornil Ashuld was dead.
What remained was only a Priest of the Formless One.
The shell of Kornil that had been drifting through his fading consciousness vanished completely. Dead and gone.
In his place, a pillar rose.
A column of bone and flesh, laced with the last trace remains of Kornil Ashuld.
Intestines carrying that same contamination spread in every direction like tentacles. Just as a gut absorbs nourishment, those tendrils tore into the surrounding planks and corpses and fed the pillar's growth.
The pillar's purpose was clear.
To take root and devour Geladrion down to its core.
To swallow the entire world.
Toward that end, it had already disposed of the priest and his followers. Only one obstacle remained.
The fading consciousness within the column of bone and flesh whispered a name.
Aslan.
And Aslan stood across the ruptured earth, tentacles churning the ground around him, staring at that pillar with cold, flat eyes.
The thing radiated a heavy, inexplicable wrongness. Aslan swept his gaze across the surroundings. No sign of Angie or Ereta.
'Still haven't found them.'
He had sent Ereta and Angie to retrieve the items he had asked the Artifice to secure. It shouldn't have been hard to locate—he had expected them back quickly.
'I'll have to buy time.'
Without those items, the plan couldn't be completed. He needed them to lock in a hundred percent chance of victory.
The instant he decided to stall, Aslan was already charging. Beyond the collapsed warehouse wall, something like a gargantuan intestine was writhing up out of the ground.
"Hup—!"
A Formless One materialized beside it. The vanguard of the emerging swarm. It had the look of a monster with enormous gums and huge, jutting teeth.
An appearance that might make anyone else recoil. Not Aslan. He'd seen far worse. He used his momentum to swing the two-handed axe off his shoulder in a great arc.
A sickening crack.
The bisected corpse flew apart top from bottom. Aslan let the recoil redirect his movement and pivoted into a slash with his curved sword.
'Moderate body enhancement.'
His permanently raised Strength was 1. His wild magic body enhancement added another. With a combined Strength of 3, his blade carved horizontally through the head of the next charging creature. It dropped.
He let the force of that cut spin him in place. As he rotated, his axe scattered blood once more.
A Formless One that had lunged to swallow him staggered, its head pulped. Another tentacle shot in from behind. Aslan dropped to a knee mid-spin and slipped under it. A few strands of hair drifted in its wake.
'Excellent coordination. Some kind of group-level control?'
He tracked the tentacle's path, flicked his eyes to the side, and caught a glint among the swarm.
A flail.
Four heads, slick with a greenish venomous sheen.
The idea formed instantly. Still low to the ground, Aslan swept his longsword through a cluster of legs. Formless Ones toppled as their limbs split.
With multiple enemies brought low in an instant, the tentacle-throwing Formless One came into full view. A mass of serpentine tendrils where intestines should have been. Aslan tracked them with his eyes and twisted his body aside.
Thud!
"Tch."
His ear and cheek tore open. A flash of searing heat. His severed ear spun away, but he paid it no mind. The cheek wound barely qualified as a scratch.
He flipped his curved sword into a reverse grip and drove it down through the tentacle.
Crunch!
The impaled tentacle went taut. Aslan gripped his two-handed axe in both hands and hurled it.
Crack!
The spinning axe showed no mercy. The Formless One, still pinned by its own tentacle and unable to dodge, split open from crown to groin. Its halves tumbled across the floor in opposite directions, trailing limp tendrils.
Aslan ripped his curved sword free and broke into a sprint.
Before the next wave of attacks could converge, he scooped up the flail.
"Hoo..."
A heavy breath escaped him as he swung the flail lightly, setting its four heads spinning with a sharp, rattling hiss. Centrifugal force built with every rotation.
Crack!
He channeled the gathered force into a single directed strike. The four iron heads carved a death-arc through the air along the swing's trajectory. A Formless One's jaw shattered upward as if a bear had swiped it with its claws. It died before it hit the ground.
Aslan pulled his gaze from the satisfying kill and redirected the flail's momentum before its own power could turn on him and crush his skull.
Death scattered in his wake.
Heads, throats, and torsos split and pulverized under the interplay of two forces—a pure, white-edged lethality and a green-tinged, corrosive violence.
'They should be here soon.'
There were too many. He had been killing them for a while now, and the count kept mounting. He stowed the flail and curved sword. His remaining mana sat just above half.
"Advance! Defend Kardi! I'll kill the first man who runs!"
A grim command rang out. Soldiers surged forward. Figures who looked like officers began appearing, directing the push. Spears and shields formed a line and pressed the Formless Ones back.
With a sliver of breathing room, Aslan touched his cheek and ear.
The cheek was laid open—a little wider and he could have hooked a finger into his own mouth. The ear was completely gone, nothing but a ragged remnant. The hot, thrumming pain seemed to confirm the reality of his own body. He lowered his hand.
"Hey! Aslan! Aaaslan!"
A voice called out at the perfect moment. Aslan turned his head.
From the point where he had plunged in and begun the slaughter, Angie and Ereta came running with a cluster of soldiers, racing across the battlefield.
"What the hell is going on? And what is that thing? Are you okay? Shit, you're bleeding. Just—just stay still, okay? I brought herbs and—"
"Calm down. It's nothing."
Aslan reached out a hand to steady her as Angie's words tumbled out in a flustered rush, but the moment she saw the blood coating his fingers, she scanned his face with open worry.
"Nothing? Your face is cut! And where the hell did your ear go?"
"Probably lying somewhere back there."
"Oh, you think if I find it we could stick it back on?"
Hygienic concerns aside, given the number of soldiers who had just poured into the melee, the ear was far more likely to be stuck to somebody's boot sole.
"It's fine. The situation right now matters more than my ear."
The situation. At that, Angie pressed him for an explanation—then what happened?—while Ereta, who had already pieced it together, regarded Aslan with narrowed eyes before reaching out.
Her fingers brushed his face, the touch tinged with something like sorrow. Aslan let the gesture pass without pulling away and focused on his report.
"A priest of the Formless One has appeared. The thing in front of us—that's the priest. It's trying to put down roots. I can't say exactly what it's doing, but if we leave it alone, I'm certain the situation will spread to Kardi."
Fortunately, Ereta and Angie had brought everything the Artifice had prepared. Bundles of scrolls and a suit of armor. Aslan nodded at the sight.
"But if we deal with it now, we can end this entire engagement and the subjugation in one stroke."
"Yeah? Then let's smash it right now! What do you need me to do?"
Unlike Angie, who pumped a fist with full confidence, Ereta listened to the brief account and kept her gaze fixed quietly on Aslan.
He accepted her silence and met her eyes.
Only after the soldiers had drawn far enough away and a brief stillness settled between them did she speak.
"You intend to fight?"
"Huh?"
"I mean, why not run?"
Angie blinked in confusion, and Ereta glanced her way.
"Run? Why would we run? We said we'd handle this."
"And that's the only reason you won't flee?"
While Angie stared with a serious expression, Ereta added calmly,
"Does this have anything to do with your goal of killing a god?"
Aslan remained silent, and Angie, seeing even him hold his tongue, shifted her eyes between them with mounting unease.
She clearly had no idea where this was going.
"We don't know which priest this is. We don't know what power it possesses. Even its objective—we're only guessing. Is it really the right move to fight it here and now? If we're going to deal with it, wouldn't it make more sense to gather more information first?"
The words were delivered with a disarmingly light smile.
Angie, who had plainly never considered such a line of reasoning, could only manage a flustered series of stammers.
"You carry a mission to kill a god. Is there any reason you should waste time and lives in a place like this? This was never our fight to begin with."
Aslan heard her out and let his eyes close briefly before opening them again.
She wasn't wrong.
Aslan had accelerated the process, but this priestification would have happened regardless of his intervention—sooner or later.
In a sense, his work here was already done. He had cleared the approach route for the soldiers, giving them a chance to prepare, and his immediate objective was complete.
Had he done nothing, the Formless Ones would have inflicted unavoidable damage on the city. The soldiers would have had no time to brace themselves. When the priest finally emerged, no one would have been in any position to respond.
Because Aslan had acted, the threat was met before the situation could turn catastrophic. He had alerted the Artifice and got the soldiers ready. That alone had fulfilled his role, and he bore no further obligation.
There was no compelling reason to risk his life beyond that.
This city belonged to these soldiers and to the Artifice—not to Aslan.
Ereta made the point with a light, needling tone, as though she were reading his own thoughts back to him.
"You were asked to help, and you were promised compensation. But all you've actually received are these tools for the subjugation, haven't you? Nothing in hand yet. Unless you're particularly close to the Artifice? Close enough that you'd take on a request like this without hesitation?"
"No, we're not that close."
"Then all the more reason there's nothing tying you to this fight. Or is there some other reason? A convincing one?"
She smiled as she said it, a faint psychological glint in her eyes, and Aslan let out a dry laugh.
She already knew the answer. That made the question land with a peculiar, cheeky charm.
Only Angie remained completely lost, her head swiveling between them—What? What?—utterly uncomprehending.
Aslan took the bundle of scrolls Ereta offered and drew out the eight scrolls inside.
Adrenaline, Acceleration, Pain Removal, Equalization, Fireball, Lightning Arrow, Shadow Control, Silence.
Spells from every school of magic. Aslan loaded them according to purpose—some into his mana tattoos, others into his tool pouch. Fireball, Lightning Arrow, Shadow Control, and Silence sank into the tattoos as he spoke.
"Three reasons."
"Ooh, three reasons."
She was playing along despite obviously having guessed. Aslan smiled slightly.
"First, this fight is a chance for me and Angie to grow through combat experience. We'll gain more tools that can serve us in a fight against a god, and Angie will grow stronger in a direct sense."
He couldn't use terms like experience points or level, so he fudged the wording, but Ereta—who had once been a high priest and had witnessed Angie's strength firsthand—accepted it without difficulty. She nodded, and Aslan turned his gaze back to her.
"Second, I saw this as an opportunity to probe for information about a god we'll eventually have to face—under favorable circumstances, with support available."
Information about the Formless One was almost nonexistent across all of Geladrion. That scarcity made this moment, with reinforcements present and supplies in hand, the best possible chance to learn.
"Third... well, this one's barely even a reason."
He began to don the armor Angie had been holding—a breastplate of solid plate—with the practiced ease of long habit.
He stripped off the old, worn leather cuirass he had been wearing and settled the plate into place over him. As he did, he spoke.
"That Formless One appeared in Kardi, and a lot of people died."
Even people who had simply been caught up in the chaos—many of them had died.
But that wasn't all.
"I saw a child whose mind broke as she watched her own mother transform into a Formless One right in front of her. And a man whose son turned into a Formless One and slaughtered his entire family—he was left with nowhere to direct his grief, just twisting in agony."
Over the plate, Aslan layered the leather armor he had dropped on the ground earlier. The thin monster-hide cuirass, even worn over the plate, didn't restrict his movement much.
He slapped a palm against his now slightly bulkier chest and smiled, the expression carrying a trace of bitterness.
"When I think about that... could I really just walk away?"
Ereta didn't seem to fully understand—but she smiled as if she found it profoundly interesting.
Aslan finished securing the gear she had brought, then wrenched his two-handed axe from among the corpses where he had hurled it earlier. He tucked the flail into his belt and took the axe back into his left hand.
The battlefield was chaos. The soldiers, seemingly heartened by Aslan's desperate efforts, were still holding the line—but there was no guarantee that their fragile equilibrium would last.
Priests were never meant to be fought by ordinary humans.
Aslan took in the sight of them and said,
"They aren't my people, and this isn't my fight. But they're still people."
He had shaped a favorable battlefield, but that didn't mean people wouldn't die. From this point on, casualties were inevitable. To minimize the losses, to keep as many of them alive as possible, Aslan would have to fight that much harder himself.
"There's something to gain from it, and my heart's in it too. No reason to back down."
The words came out flat and matter-of-fact. Ereta smiled, feeling the same emotion she had felt back in that nameless forest.
"You really are an interesting person. In that case, I'll..."
Her eyes glinted with intrigue, and then she stepped up behind Aslan and wrapped her arms around him from the back. Her hands settled over his chest plate, and she pressed her face against his spine, a flicker of regret crossing her features—she couldn't feel a thing through the plate. Even so, she nuzzled against his back.
The leather cuirass Aslan wore over the armor still carried his scent, deep and familiar. Mingled with the smell of blood, it was heady. Ereta buried her face in it, drew a long breath, and only then let go.
"That was all I needed. I'll fight with you."
Not that she'd ever needed a reason to fight alongside him.
She added it with a smile, her pink eyes gleaming with a quiet, private hunger.
Angie, meanwhile, had watched the whole display of skinship with her eyes blown wide. For a long moment she just blinked before finally blurting out, flustered,
"I was going to fight even without a shameless reward like that!"
The fact that she said it unprompted suggested she'd been wanting one herself.
"Yeah. Thank you."
Aslan's soft smile made Angie scratch her cheek self-consciously, and Ereta lifted her head without a word to study the pillar of bone and flesh—the priest.
"What's the plan?"
From the pillar, countless entrails coiled like tentacles and pressed down into the earth. The ground shuddered under the weight. Low, booming concussions rippled outward. Soldiers who had pushed in too deep were scrambling back out in a frantic rush.
Muscle and bone bored through the soil and spread like a carpet across the ground, and as the sight unfolded, Aslan spoke.
"I'm going to find out right now."
His cold gaze fixed once more on the pillar.
'Whether you're the one who called me into this world... or not. I'll know soon enough.'
At that moment, an indescribable sound rippled out from the pillar. It was like a bestial howl, like a scream, like the wail of a newborn child.
Aslan cut through the savage cry and advanced.