Chapter 1979

Chapter 1979

Sydney watched the match with tears almost constantly streaming down her cheeks. It was impossible for her to be here without weeping. Next to her, Neveah occasionally reached over and squeezed her shoulder, but Sydney didn’t really feel it. Her skin tingled, but her body felt numb.

It didn’t feel like hers. It was a terminal, from which she could distantly view Drake’s struggles. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch.

You fool, The tears screamed at Drake on the stage as he dodged the powerful strikes of his opponent. The punches of Charlotte Wick could demolish cities, and this man wanted to stand up against them with just his body. This is exactly why you should have just lived your life without fighting. So you didn’t need to experience this pain, this constant tension. You could have stayed with me.

These were words she couldn’t say out loud, but the tears had no such qualms in making their desires known. Sydney understood that her emotions swept around her in a storm, but it was a smaller storm present in a large catastrophe. So many thousands of people, millions at home, simply sat by and watched while Drake struggled before them. A thousand different reactions

Even if hers was more potent than most, she couldn’t help but be diluted amongst so many.

Drake’s pain became entertainment. The entire world leaned forward with anticipation as he bled for them all. It made Sydney sick. Her stomach twisted into knots and hung itself from the thin bones of her ribcage.

And she just sat there in the stands, crying and feeling her dead stomach slowly turning to rot and wiggling maggots. A part of her wanted to die.

“Sydney,” Neveah whispered around the time that Charlotte got her grip on Drake’s body with those impossibly powerful hands. Sydney shrugged off her hand. Watching him squirm within her grip-

Then the shadows came and thrust more spikes into Drake’s sides. He was being tortured in front of them all. Squeezed and squeezed, pressured and ripped and draped and bled across the entire stage. And suddenly Sydney was in the past, hearing rumors about how Drake had gone mad, about he was rampaging across the Great Sea. He was more monster than man. His elemental has assumed control of his body and was slaughtering anything it met. And Sydney-

“Why won’t he let me protect him,” Sydney whispered. Neveah sighed. The two women simply sat there until all of the possibilities that Drake’s image reached for popped in a surging wave of blood.

Sydney panted, releasing so many quick breaths that she became dizzy. The buzzing movements stopped. Drake’s body cracked open. A hole burst from the middle of his chest.

The bone plate around Drake’s jaw had cracked but remained largely intact. From his trembling corpse, a shadow rose. For the first time in a while, the air on the stage began to change.

“Protect...”

At first the edges of this unfolding silhouette were blurry, but soon they sharpened into a dark cut out of a woman with long and fluttering hair. Charlotte took a step back, her image dominance weakening as she weighed the threat posed by this emergent image. The purple mist Drake had released rapidly spun together and firmed up the edges of this projection even further.

It was darkness and possibility, made solid. It was a featureless demon of violent emotions and guilt.

Its hair fluttered, just a shadow drawn on the world, standing in front of the still body of Drake. It had no mouth to speak, but its voice once again boomed out across the arena, crackling with power.

“I will protect him...”

It was Sydney’s voice. In her seat in the stands, Sydney stiffened to hear it. To hear how casual and cruel this shadow sounded, using her voice. The only two spots of color on the body of this shadow projection were her two eyes, one cobalt blue and the other neon yellow. The shade raised a hand that ended in sharpened fingers.

“You...” Charlotte’s uncertainty vanished. Her gaze flicked from the rather inert body of Drake to the projection and determined that this was still her opponent. Her eyes hardened; Drake’s body was dropped and the brown tentacles twisted around to aim at the shadow.

Sydney straightened in her seat. She could no longer breathe, but if anything, that only made her dizziness worse. Yet suddenly she found purpose. On her shoulder, her two furry elementals appeared. Her eyes began to shift as their power coursed through her body. A strange resonance began as the projection drew her own power to manifest it on the stage. For a second the real Sydney wavered, unsure of what was happening, but the sight of Drake’s trying to push himself up on the floor of the arena united her resolve. Her eyes burned with every ounce of her rusty power. She threw everything she could manage along the tenuous connection between herself and the shade.

The shade waved a hand behind it, conjuring a massive wall of ice between itself and the pursuing tentacles. The Primal Force slammed against the impediment and created deep cracks, but it bought the shade enough time to flit forward with its opposite hand raised. Electricity crackled around its long fingers.

Maroon energy gathered around her hammer blow toward the back of Drake’s head. But he ripped sideways, just shredding the leech tentacles as he made a beeline for his sword. In the past, he had definitely had the superior emotional affect, but it was a small thing. It was like possessing a gleaming switchblade as Charlotte sat within a sturdy log how with a mounted wooden ballista.

Sure, his material was theoretically superior. But her other advantages outweighed the difference. Yet suddenly, as he stopped above his discarded bastard sword and seized the handle, that emotional advantage began to gather some impactful momentum. On his left hand, a small bulging Aether construct appeared; Drake’s Fate.

Significance darkened Randidly’s awareness; the sky was alive with energy pushing itself into his every pour. Drake put both hands on the hilt of the blade. Inexplicably, Drake’s Fate began to morph and change. Randidly’s eyes widened. His Fate didn’t just go from its base form to its solidified form, but it became somehow part of the bastard sword. The protrusion became a bond and built a bridge.

Although he didn’t like doing it very often, Randidly changed his perspective in a different way; he went into the Aether constructs that he had created for the Pantheon. There, he found the Patron of Blades and the Ancient Weaver, both speaking very quickly as they tried to keep up with the shifts that came over Drake.

Randidly nodded to the two of them and checked the notifications that Drake was receiving.

Congratulations! Your Fate The Implacable Protector’s Gauntlet is evolving! Weaknesses in your Fate detected. Dangerous flaws have emerged! Warning, proceeding without sufficient energy will result in sickness and death. Please proceed to your closest village spirit-

Recalculating...

Congratulations! A new phenomenon is being born! Your Fate has morphed into a Chimeric Fate! A special trait available only within the Alpha Cosmos. Unable to generate a suitable description at the moment. Based on the context, your Fate has developed the ability to shift its physical form to match the situation!

Your Chimeric Fate has been renamed Chivalrous Vow!

Your Chimeric Fate has morphed into your weapon! Your Chimeric Fate has taken on the form of Dead Man’s Last Wish!

Chivalrous Vow: Dead Man’s Last Wish- A powerful form of the newly discovered Chimeric Fate! Only possible due to the presence of both Aether and Nether in the user. Upon the Path they had chosen, no one is willing to sacrifice more than a Dead Man. At this point, they have nothing left to lose. Dead Man’s Last Wish greatly increases the performance of the weapon in which it has morphed. Also serves as an image magnifier, increasing the strength of the user. Reaction and Perception are greatly boosted. Wounds heal abnormally quickly. The heavier the duty weighs upon the user, the higher the benefits will be.

On the stage, Drake pulled his sword from the stone. The blade hummed with gleaming waves of white power. Emotional force and the strange boost of his transformed Fate had left the weapon unrecognizable.

Again, Drake licked his lips as he pivoted on his heels and looked at Charlotte Wick. His sword had become incandescent, hosting his new Chimeric Fate. Randidly was torn between a sense of awe at how he had influenced Expira to a confusion of what this meant when Drake spoke again. “I... am her Knight. I can... fail. But I can never fail to come home. That is... my vow.”

Randidly’s expression became solemn, looking from one fighter to another. Drake stood proudly, his body still vaguely purple and muscled, but looking much more human than he had in the past. His features were thrown into stark relief by the light rolling off his sword. Opposite him, Charlotte Wick stood with a sea of wiggling brown tentacles behind her, the rotting combination of life and death churning at her back. Her Primal Force had almost latched onto the ground, becoming some sort of monstrous plant rather than an animal. Its ribcage continued to rise and fall, but otherwise, its main body was entirely still.

The crowd finally seemed to catch up with the action. From somewhere, a chant began to rise.

“Drake!”

“Drake! Drake! Drake!”

Comparing to the two foes, it was easy to spot which would be the crowd's favorite to win. With his gleaming sword, one looked like a hero. A hero who had been tortured by his foe, but now finally found his perfect weapon. That small metal switchblade had become a solid ax, which he could now use to demolish Charlotte’s wooden defenses.

Drake sprinted forward with his sword raised. A hundred tentacles lanced out in response, crashing through the remnants of the stage and attempting to impale Drake as they fell like rain. He continued to jitter, accelerating during his approach.

However, Randidly simply watched the significance, which had begun to flow back around Charlotte. A new possibility was being born. Her eyes began to redden as loss and frustration warred across her face.

In the end, Drake had made an inadvertent mistake.

He had used the word Knight.