The Formless One
The Formless One
[Completed Main Quest]
[! ######## ########]
With the notification that he had cleared an unknown quest still fading behind him, Aslan's thoughts churned.
He couldn't simply dismiss the visions that had flooded his mind when the Formless One's consciousness bled into him. The information was too stark, and its very rawness made its intent impossible to discern.
Nor could he tell whether the visions had been shown only to him or to the others as well.
If everyone had seen them, that would change a great many things. If they were meant for him alone, the purpose was a complete cipher. Aslan wrestled with invisible clues and answers alike.
Worse, the landscapes had been painfully familiar.
Aggressively, archetypally familiar.
A Western city. Not a place he had ever visited in person, but a common enough sight in films and video games.
Then a futuristic space-city pulled straight out of classic space opera, and a colossal tree that could only be the World Tree of stock fantasy.
There had also been a religious city whose architecture was just foreign enough to unsettle, yet stylistically recognizable — and vistas of hell that might have been lifted from Buddhist iconography.
A near-future urban sprawl where decay and technology coexisted in a trope-perfect mold.
Aslan turned every scene over in his mind. He could not fathom why Geladrion had appeared last of all.
'Why show me that?'
He couldn't begin to guess. The information was too vague.
Without a visible thread connecting any of it to an actual situation, the sheer volume of data offered no real purchase.
But one thing he could infer.
The Formless One had nothing to do with him.
It was not the entity that had dropped Aslan into Geladrion.
Rolling his right shoulder and steadying his breathing, he thought it through.
'If the Formless One were responsible, this intel is absurdly brazen.'
He had lived twelve years in Geladrion. The being that had dragged him here had watched him for every single one of them.
Twelve years. Hiding its identity. Staying undetected.
Its surveillance had hounded him through every moment. Aslan remembered all too clearly what "that entity" had done during the one brief lapse at the Sanctuary of Sorrow, when the watching eyes briefly lost him.
It had hauled in every corpse from the surrounding region and arranged them along the corridor. What he had felt then was not dread so much as a thick, forced unnaturalness. A desperate attempt to conceal itself.
Obsessive trace-hiding. Identity suppression. A being like that would not suddenly leak information that might point straight to it. Aslan judged it an impossibility.
The Ancient God's warning echoed in his memory: it would only move once the board had been overturned. That entity would never flip the board itself.
It obviously wanted to savor him. To enjoy him.
This was a creature so careful it had stayed invisible for over a decade. It wasn't the Formless One. He still didn't know its goal, but there was no way it would reveal itself so pointlessly.
Which begged the next question.
Aslan couldn't put a definition to what the Formless One actually was.
A god, certainly. But a god of what? Doing what?
Why had it been in Kardi?
How did it possess visions of so many different worlds?
'Don't tell me... a new god?'
He had fallen into Geladrion on the official launch day of Eternal Dominion.
He traced that memory and exhaled slowly.
'It's plausible.'
The game had been available in early access for money beforehand, but Aslan had never touched it until the full release. He'd started a new game on the newly added Realism difficulty, supposedly the hardest, and enabled Ironman Mode with a single save slot. The moment he did, the game hadn't launched. It had crashed in a burst of errors and shut down.
After that, Lee Hyun-woo had turned it off and gone out.
He'd been walking with friends, joking about how their CSAT prep was going, when he'd slipped on a footpath.
The spot had been a stretch of unrepaired, rusted railing. Lee Hyun-woo had fallen straight through and become Aslan.
With that in mind, the "new god" possibility was more than plausible.
Newly added content for the official launch? It fit without contradiction.
The only thing stopping him was absolute certainty.
His spiral of possibilities ground to a halt when the searing ache radiating through his shoulder flared past endurance.
"Nn."
Aslan grimaced and clamped his hand over the joint. Probing the space where his right arm used to be, he shifted his gaze. Inside his tool pouch, one scroll of Equalization remained.
'Use it?'
He pulled it out. A spell inked onto plain parchment with mana-imbued script. Activate it, and it would steal a little stamina from his entire body to regenerate the arm.
'No. Not now.'
That was the catch.
His physical reserves were already dangerously low.
If this were a game, his HP wouldn't be high right now.
Trying Equalization in this state would drain him past the breaking point.
Until his stamina recovered, the scroll had to wait.
'One-armed for a while, then.'
His left arm, at that. He grimaced at the inconvenience to come and stowed the scroll.
'Combat effectiveness will take a hit, but I have companions now. It'll be fine.'
Angie. Ereta. Even outside of combat, leaning on them a little would offset most problems.
That settled, he grabbed the crumbling rope ladder and climbed.
Hauling himself up with one arm was brutal, but his Fighting Spirit ran high. He made it back to the ground where the pillar had once stood without a single complaint.
"Ah."
"Oh, Aslan! You did it!"
The moment he surfaced, his party stopped staring at the collapsing pillar and rushed over.
"You look mostly okay... or not."
Angie had been grinning, eyes crinkling, but the smile died when she noticed the arm he'd lost was the opposite one this time. Her expression crumpled.
"What happened? Whose arm did you leave behind now? Your ear's fine, though. Your face too."
"The face is a relief."
Unlike Ereta's comment, which carried a transparent agenda, Angie pointed at the cauterized ruin of his shoulder joint with naked worry.
Aslan accepted her concern with a sheepish smile.
"Not a big deal. In a fight, you just..."
"The hell it isn't! I'm dumb, but I'm not too dumb to notice your arms switched sides, okay? Losing an arm isn't the same as scraping a knee..."
The girl's face scrunched up hard as she snapped at him. He smiled, a little awkwardly.
"I just 'spent' the arm. To make sure."
As the words left his mouth, the voice of his old teacher surfaced in his memory.
Through the remembering, the girl kept talking.
'Use everything you can — your body, your mind. Remember, you...'
"Who even 'spends' an arm? Seriously."
Angie's expression hovered between worry and disbelief.
The emotion layered thick in her gaze wasn't hard to parse.
Angie wore her feelings on her sleeve.
"I understand. If you can end a fight by giving up one arm, why wouldn't you? Right?"
Ereta, meanwhile, showed little concern. She walked up and wrapped herself around him, apparently judging that his missing shoulder joint would make it hard to peel her off. She pressed her face into his chest and rubbed.
"And you're sympathizing with that dogshit sentiment?"
"Angie just doesn't get it."
Ereta lifted her face from his chest. Her pink eyes swam with something so thick that Aslan felt a mild pressure behind his ribs and looked away — meeting Angie's eyes instead.
"Don't 'get' what? I'm the one with the broken arm here, remember?"
Her arm was indeed broken, elbow swollen at a telling angle. Aslan let out an "Ah," and opened the status window.
He tapped the entry labeled Angela Tail and pressed Health three times.
Angie's body gave a small jolt at each press.
[Angela Tail]
[Strength 7] [Agility 4] [Health 10]
[Mana ■] [Fighting Spirit ■] [Luck ■]
Through the floating pane, Angie spoke.
"That magic again?"
"Yeah. You said your arm was broken. It should heal fast now."
"...Huh. I think it actually feels better."
She smiled. "Thanks."
Aslan smiled back, and Ereta watched the two of them.
"Aren't you going to thank me?"
"...For what?"
"I protected her. Hard. Got my stomach cut open for it. Lost a lot of blood, you know?"
"You two are even now. Don't start thinking you deserve thanks yet."
Ereta curved one corner of her lips in a sulky little pout and pressed her cheek back against his chest. Angie snorted at the sight.
Ereta blinked her large eyes.
"Even? What did I do?"
"You beat me up with an axe and your knees and fists. Don't think I'll forget. This Lady Angie does not forget debts."
Aslan let out a soft, involuntary laugh. Ereta just looked blank.
"Lately you were being so shameless with Aslan that I was debating whether to forgive you. I'm calling it even since you fought well this time."
"Mm. Fine. Let's call it that."
Ereta's reply was nonchalant, but Angie planted her hands on her hips with blatant satisfaction.
When Ereta finally pulled her face off his chest, her complexion was alarmingly pale.
"Mm. My stomach hurts."
Aslan's gaze dipped. Ereta caught his eyes and smiled a subtle, pleased smile — until she registered that he was looking at the torn cloth of her habit, not her face. Her lips flattened.
"Hn. That wound really is bad."
"Let's go rest for the day. The Duke should give us a decent room if we ask..."
Aslan didn't like what he saw. Ereta's condition was not good.
Her skin was always pale, but now it had gone waxy. The gash across her stomach was no minor cut.
He'd lost so much stamina himself that using Equalization was off the table. By all logic, Ereta was right: they needed rest.
"No. We're leaving Kardi right now."
"...What?"
"Huh?"
They couldn't stay.
The next main quest might trigger at any moment.
If it hit them now, he had no way to respond. Better to pull out. Fewer variables.
"What about the wounds? Yours are bad..."
"Mine can wait until my stamina comes back. Equalization will handle it. Angie will be fine soon. And yours..."
He glanced at Ereta's stomach. The clean laceration across her smooth abdomen could be sutured without much trouble. From the softness he'd felt where she'd been pressed against him, now that she was human, treatment would be straightforward.
'If she were still a priest, her skin would probably try to digest the needle and regenerate mid-stitch.'
Human made it easy.
"I'll close it for you."
"Oh my. You can do that?"
"After a fashion."
Ereta made a small humming noise and rubbed a thumb over her bandaged stomach. A smear of blood came away on her white fingers.
"Will it hurt?"
"...A little?"
Her eyes, still narrowed, held an odd anticipation as she stepped back. Aslan read the emotion swimming there and sighed inwardly.
Of course.
The fact that she was looking forward to the pain was absurd.
Krrrk-krrrrr!
The pillar finished its collapse. The wall of flesh sealing off the other end of the warehouse crumbled, revealing a clear breach to the outside.
"Good timing. We slip out here. I'll stitch you up once we're out."
"Okay."
"Wait, hold on. What about the pay?"
Aslan and Ereta were already moving when Angie asked. He looked back, met her eyes, and cocked a slight grin.
"The advance was plenty. As for the rest... I consider taking down a priest like that with full support its own reward. Next time, I can do it even faster."
He smiled wide.
Angie, apparently deciding that if Aslan said so it must be fine, shrugged without complaint.
"Let's move before we get tangled in something annoying."
He pushed them onward, and the party slipped out.
Less than an hour later, they were gone from Kardi.
By the time the Duke came looking, there was no one left to find.
