The Formless One
The Formless One
Jehaengmusang.
The most powerful tool in Aslan's arsenal.
The final perk of the Combat Art, it ignored all forms and restrictions of technique, doubling damage output at the cost of twice the durability loss.
It had never existed in the game. For Aslan, it was the driving force that let him cut down priests.
The perk was undeniably potent. It carved through priestly flesh that normal weapons could not scratch, and turned even a glancing blow into a mortal wound.
But its very power had locked Aslan into a rigid combat doctrine.
Blocking with a weapon risked shattering it, potentially costing him a decisive strike in a crucial moment. His entire approach had been forced to center around evasion and counterattack.
Now, however, things were different.
The sword, Purity, burned with a stark white flame.
A blade prepared at the cost of an Ancient God's life, it would not extinguish so long as Aslan's will held firm.
It would not break unless he acknowledged defeat.
The penalty of doubled durability loss was meaningless.
Clang!
He used the sword to parry. A tiny needle aimed at his head, a shard of flesh and bone flying with more force than any arrow—Aslan caught it on his blade and deflected it.
He absorbed the impact fully with the weapon, redirecting it so his body took no strain.
Behind the deflected projectile, countless more flesh-spikes followed in a stream. Aslan tracked them with only his right eye.
His bloodshot eye rendered the rapid motion with vivid clarity. He grasped every trajectory, then moved.
A sharp ring of metal meeting death. Aslan twisted his hips, letting a strike aimed at his plate cuirass slide past him. Death rained down on him like a storm.
A diagonal slash. He swatted two bone shards aside. He skewered the lump of flesh trailing behind them with an upward thrust, then spun his body wide to fling the clinging mass from his blade.
Left foot back, right foot forward. He torqued his waist and pivoted. The sword followed his fully committed turn, shearing through a tentacle sneaking up from behind. The blade came clean.
Crack!
A bolt of lightning descended from above. Aslan sensed it through Luck and dodged by contorting his body mid-strike. He could not outrun lightning itself, but he could read the charge before it fired and move preemptively.
His gaze snapped upward, then swept his entire surroundings. His enlarged pupil darted across the whites of his eye.
A crescent slash. He severed the tentacle shaped like the hand that had launched the lightning, then leaped lightly and flipped his body over.
[LEVEL UP]
A message flickered in the corner of his vision as he somersaulted.
'They're fighting well up there, I see. My level went up.'
Slender tentacles tipped with bone shards shot toward him from above and below. Aslan landed and hacked out twice with brutal force.
A slicing hiss. Between the severed tentacles writhing on the floor, a long bone spear flew at his head. A javelin thrown by a hand-like tentacle. Aslan perceived it through Luck alone and extended his sword.
With a grinding crunch, he thrust. He pierced, then twisted. He wrenched the blade upward through the bone. A sword that should have snapped under the strain held firm, tempered by his fighting spirit. It blazed with the will of a man who had sworn to slay a demigod with one eye and one arm.
So it did not break. The bone spear shattered instead. Before the force could transmit through his body, Aslan flipped into a rotation.
His Strength was a mere 2.
Reinforced by wild magic, it reached 3.
Jehaengmusang alone could not cut down a powerful foe.
Therefore, rotation.
What he lacked in raw power, he gained through centrifugal force, using his enemy and his own body—everything available.
A method Ereta and the other Masters could not replicate, solely Aslan's. He evaded or redirected the enemy's power, then channeled that very force into his spin.
Through supreme evasion, Combat Art, and weapon mastery, he completed a full rotation to deliver death.
A sickening crunch. Death traced a white line—a diagonal upward slash. The entrails trying to snare him from behind split cleanly in two.
The sensation was like a hot knife through butter.
A bone bolt shot through the gap between the severed intestines. Aslan, his gaze murderous, flipped his wrist.
A flurry of deflections. Downward slash, wrist-snapping upward cut, parry with the hilt, a spinning thrust to knock the bolt aside. He flicked the blade again, a micro-motion from the wrist, batting away another bolt.
In a time too brief to call an instant, bolts traced distinct trajectories through the air. Aslan's lips moved.
"Shadow Control."
His tattoo flared. Through the blue glow, his mouth opened again.
"Silence."
A wave of stillness swallowed the chamber with a low, rushing roar. Aslan moved his eyes within the oppressive quiet. The Formless One's killing intent homed in on where he stood.
Sharp fragments of bone and flesh shot through the silence.
At their center, Aslan raised his sword.
Behind him, his shadow writhed. He held Shadow Control in reserve. There was something he needed to confirm. His shadow, suppressed, screamed silently behind his back.
The space bleached white. Aslan's slashes, fueled by Acceleration and adrenaline, moved beyond the eye's ability to follow. Countless bone bolts and javelins met the white-painted air and shattered against it.
And at the center of it all, Aslan advanced. A straight line toward the heart.
Two colossal tentacles, the horrors that had burst from the wall, lunged for him. Aslan stopped, scanning them with a mere glance in the dead quiet.
'As I thought.'
He had his confirmation. The moment he stopped, the shadow writhing at his back shot forward.
It was a duplicate of himself. The shadow, now solid, sprinted swiftly toward the heart.
Instantly, the tentacles hammered down—not on Aslan, but on the shadow. Only the crushed shadow was distinct in the silence.
'No sight. Its sensory method is tactile.'
All that flesh and those walls of meat filling the chamber. He had wondered how the eyeless Formless Ones perceived the world. It was touch.
With certainty replacing doubt, Aslan ran, claiming the ground his mangled shadow had sacrificed. The massive tentacles that had lain draped across the floor convulsed as Aslan, who should have been dead, moved again.
'Its regeneration is focused on the pillar. I'm sure of it.'
The tentacles Aslan had severed showed no signs of regrowth. His right eye, burning with fierce light, fixed on the giant tentacles as he ran.
He reinforced his legs with mana and drove them hard against the floor.
'Thunder Call.'
As his legs misted with pale energy, Aslan drew back the arm holding the sword and touched the blade to the stump of his left shoulder.
'Moon Splitting.'
An ordinary slash would not sever even one of those giant tentacles. To cut both, he needed a strike of equal scale.
And in this situation, the most fitting technique was Moon Splitting.
The next moment, Aslan launched himself forward with a silent thunderclap.
His surroundings warped and blurred into a smeared haze. Yet even in that distorted view, Aslan could perceive objects perfectly. A side effect of cognition enhanced by Acceleration magic.
And that enhanced cognition charted a flawless trajectory. A path drawn by twelve years of experience, thousands of battles, hundreds of brushes with death, and a life spent straddling life and death itself. Aslan's sword swept along that path.
The trajectory stretched. It elongated impossibly. The blade itself remained the same length, but the white arc it traced extended far into space, embroidering the air.
Then sound returned.
A thunderous crash as the severed tentacles collapsed. Aslan's eyes blazed through the chaos as he raised his sword.
Just a little further. He fixed his gaze on the pulsating heart and once more touched the blade to his left shoulder stump.
Sensing this through touch alone, the Formless One panicked.
It could not regenerate. The pillar was too endangered. Directly above the ventricle where Aslan fought, a girl and a woman struggled fiercely, tearing at the pillar, cutting it, and holding their ground.
A moment's distraction, and the pillar would be severed. It could not divert its full regeneration to the ventricle alone.
It could not sacrifice the pillar just to catch a single dying human.
Nor could it give up its own heart. Caught between two fronts, it was unused to such a dilemma.
So the priest resorted to another measure. The grayish membrane encasing the heart's surface bulged.
It swelled and transformed. As it expanded and contracted repeatedly, its surface grew spines.
The entire process lasted only an instant. Aslan saw it, his eyes widening, his dilated pupils tracking every movement.
A burst like a machine gun on full auto. Countless spines launched toward Aslan.
Malignant killing intent rushed to pierce his head, his pelvis, his waist, his chest, his legs, his arms. That intent would reach nearly every part of him almost simultaneously.
He could not block them all. They were too close. Aslan's mind raced, rapidly sorting what to abandon, what to deflect, and what he absolutely had to stop.
Sparks flew. Aslan moved in a blur. He swung his sword, deflected with his armor, and twisted his body just before the spikes could skewer his legs, shedding their force.
Among them all, the one he could not counter—the one he did not need to—was a single bolt.
A shot that would punch through his eye socket and destroy his right eye.
Aslan knew instinctively it was meant to rob him of sight completely.
'Fine. I'll play along.'
A twisted smirk crossed his face, an unmistakable sneer. He closed his eye.
With his eye shut, he pulled up the system window and drew a long breath.
Crunch.
His skull around the eye socket shattered, and the eye was crushed. But the system window shone starkly in the sudden, horrifying darkness.
It was always like this. He could see it with his eyes closed, even in a lightless cave.
Now, even with his eyeball completely destroyed, it remained crisp and clear.
His body, still racing from Acceleration, moved swiftly. Feeling the spine grind to a halt after smashing his nasal cavity, Aslan quickly tapped his own name.
[Aslan]
[Strength 2] [Agility ■] [Constitution ■]
[Mana 6] [Fighting Spirit 7] [Luck 8]
Three ability points from the level up. He poured them all into Luck.
Then he gripped his curved sword tight.
An uncanny sense, something he could only call a sixth sense. From beyond his darkened vision, it slithered in, feeding him information he should not have been able to know.
Thus blinded in both eyes, blood streaming from his sockets, Aslan moved.
'Incoming.'
A sharp, ringing clang.
A crisis hurtling toward him. Clear, vivid death. A tentacle descending to crush his head. Aslan swung his curved sword and batted it aside.
A second later, sharp bone fragments flew at him. The same pattern. An almost tiresomely dogged approach—it reminded him of Kornil Ashuld. Aslan dropped his left knee and spun.
Amid the ricocheting bone shards, he felt the Formless One's bafflement.
"Go on."
Aslan's lips moved. The sound touched the wall of flesh, reaching the Formless One as tactile information. The priest raged, flailing tentacles and launching a dense volley of bone shards. They blanketed Aslan like a wall of blades, forming a sphere around him.
At the center, Aslan extended his sword.
'I can feel it.'
The sixth sense was not a superpower.
It was the aggregate of experience and unparsed sensory data—an answer derived like an automatic calculation.
Aslan had accumulated countless experiences, and his senses were acutely alive. Though he had lost his sight, his other senses remained.
His hearing caught the rush of wind. His sense of smell picked up the foul reek of the bone shards. The clammy, stifling wind brushing his exposed skin and the raw flesh of his head provided touch.
A being without eyes normally cannot fight. Sight is paramount in combat.
Replacing it required more than just heightened senses. It demanded that all gathered sensory input be forged into a conclusion by sharply honed 'sixth sense' and 'experience.' Aslan merely overlaid his sword strokes onto that conclusion.
'Here I go.'
Aslan moved.
Tap.
The texture of a bone shard catching on the tip of his blade. Aslan did not fight the sensation. Even with the double durability penalty gone, his body was accustomed to evasion.
In a situation where a single wrong answer meant death, Aslan's instincts—his experience—told him to rely on what he knew best.
He deflected the bone bolt, using its force to twist his blade. His hips absorbed the recoil while mana kept his stance firm. Rooted, he did not hesitate.
Attacks ricocheted off the trajectory of the life-or-death slash he had drawn. Aslan flipped his wrist and accepted the rebound with his hips again. He whirled, keeping his sword tucked close to his body.
A milky-white slash painted a circle in the air. It overlaid the ivory-colored death. Pushing through the pallor, Aslan's fighting spirit blazed. Countless projectiles collapsed from the air like falling leaves.
At their very center, Aslan had not retreated a single step.
He was laughing through the cascade of killing intent. His grip was soaked in sweat and blood that streamed like rain, his head swimming from severe blood loss.
The Acceleration had already faded, and the adrenaline backlash was setting in.
Dying on his feet, Aslan grinned. "Is this all you've got?"
A taunt. That flick of mockery kindled a flame in what little ego remained.
Rage is a powerful emotion. Still undiluted, the remnants of 'Kornil Ashuld' were lured by that sneering tone and unsheathed its longest, toughest tentacle.
Its strongest, fastest attack. A thrust. The very strike that had already taken Aslan's left eye and arm. Forcibly limiting its own regeneration to produce this monstrous weapon, the priest launched it straight at Aslan.
A devastating blow that a blind, one-armed, dying man—his Acceleration even extinguished—could never hope to evade. An attack it had husbanded until this very moment.
Aslan felt it through Luck, and his lips parted.
"Equalization."
His tattoo flared blue. In that instant, the tentacle struck.
Boom!
A cloud of dust erupted. The force, strong enough to split its own inner walls, slammed into the stone wall of the basement, shattering it into the earth. Amid the thick dust cloud, a light flashed.
"You fool."
Aslan burst through the dust.
He was drenched in blood from head to toe, clearly far from unscathed.
But he had all four limbs, and both eyes intact.
A powerful attack always leaves an opening. Aslan had aimed for that opening. He had stalled, provoked, and pressured the priest until it grew desperate enough to launch such a strike.
He had waited for that desperation to bloom within whatever ego remained.
Now it had flowered—into a glaring mistake. Within that mistake, Aslan had used Equalization and dodged.
The attack had stabbed too deep to be retracted. Aslan sprinted over the tentacle, leveling his blade at the heart.
Remaining mana: 10. Remaining fighting spirit: 2. Spells left: two. One scroll.
His options were few, but he had seized the killing stroke.
In twelve years of wandering, Aslan had never once let a winning opening slip.
Tentacles belatedly surged to block his path.
"Lightning Arrow."
Crackle!
Aslan thrust his hand out, and electricity flooded the ventricle, rendering the obstruction meaningless. Leaving the tentacles twisting in agony from the shock, he leaped forward.
Thump, thump, thump, thump.
The giant heart pulsed. The priest had no final defense left. Aslan gritted his teeth, inhaled deeply, and gripped his sword. The moment he reached striking distance, the shadow flickering at his feet vanished.
'Shadow Flip.'
An X-shaped gash tore across the heart. Thick, viscous blood erupted. Aslan drove his right hand into the opening.
A wet crack echoed. His magically reinforced arm plunged into the scored heart. The spongy flesh recoiled around the intrusion, but it was already too late.
Aslan unclenched his jaw.
This spell was the very symbol of the Manifestation School, the first name to arise in any discussion of offensive magic.
Its principle was simple. Its method was direct. Compressed flame detonated to incinerate the target. Simple, yet overwhelmingly destructive.
That spell ignited in Aslan's right hand.
"Fireball."
The moment his tattoo pulsed blue, an enormous detonation of flame erupted from within the heart.