Collide Gamer

Chapter 266 – Silent waters run deep.

In the darkness of the night, it was hard to make out details about Undine’s bloated form. A shapeless mass of dark water and black slime, thrashing through the garden. There was neither sense nor direction to her attacks. Just a blind unleashing of powers new and foreign.

The cracking of wood was only drowned out by her terrible song. A cracked echo of her beautiful voice echoed through the night, a disharmonious cacophony like shattered glass. In every note laid the invitation to step into what she had become and join what she was becoming.

‘Momo, go find Thana,’ John ordered his support. As one of the fliers, she was the most reasonable to go and try to get the blood mage back to the island.

‘Shouldn’t I stay?’ Momo asked, the reluctance to leave at such an important moment written all over her voice.

‘Nathalia is with us. There is no reason to worry. Now go!’ John did not leave any room for disagreement. As Momo obeyed his order, he turned to the thrashing mass. “Undine!” he shouted. “Are you still in there?”

The mass stopped still.

Tendrils, busy picking apart trees, hung frozen in the air. An abomination frozen in time, that is what Undine looked like at that moment, and John hated it. Strands like mycelium shifted under the surface of water that blocked John’s Observe.

The song went through a build-up, a quiet voice slowly growing in intensity until the whole mass quivered and moved once more. It all moved towards him at enormous speed. A spreading mass of sentient water, filled with rocks, splinters of wood and whole trunks.

However fast Undine’s new form was, it wasn’t faster than Nathalia. The dragoness stepped in front of John. A rumbling noise echoed through her chest, and then the wave of water was hit by a cone of fire. Hissing sounds of evaporating water and a high-pitched scream of pain filled the air. If a scalpel cutting open skin had a sound, this would be it. Clear, precise, sharp and terribly abrupt.

“Stop!” John told Nathalia, worried that she might already have gone too far. The goddess decided to grant his request, and the blinding fire was replaced with absolute darkness. Terrible moments passed by as his eyes got used to the change in lighting.

The amorphous blob had been evaporated, and now all John saw was an outline, clearly female. For a moment he dared to hope, but as the world became clear, his heart sank. Undine’s old form was gone; there was no more innocent, sundress-like exterior or melancholic beauty.

What he was faced with instead still bore the attractive form of a woman. Naked and fully on display, this shape was curvy to a degree that rivalled Nathalia, with large breasts and wide hips. Her hair didn’t even give the illusion of strands anymore, being a mass of goo that was vaguely hair shaped.

Her overall complexion had shifted. What previously had been several shades of light blue in the shape of a dressed slime now had mixed together into a single, darker shade. This new colour, a blue of oceanic depth, was nearly all her body consisted of. One exception was a pair of blunt, horn-like extensions that grew from the side of her head. They were almost black. Then there were her eyes, glowing a menacing red. One did so through the half-curtain of her gooey hair.

Last was a slick layer of black that covered her left side like a slime mould or a carpet of oil. It shifted with a will of its own, separate from the elemental it was attached to. Bits and pieces of human teeth rose to the surface occasionally, interspersed with the enormous, jagged canines of something larger.

“John.”

 Her voice, her wonderful voice. It was still the same. Despite the corruption and the change of form, her voice was as clear, as wonderful, as melodic as ever. The horrible cacophony was gone now. There was only silence and her voice.

“Why did you do this to me?” Undine asked.

“What the fuck are you talking about?!” Salamander was about ready to hold a giant, angry tirade, but John raised his hand, and the blaze elemental swallowed her anger for another day.

“I didn’t do this to you, Undine,” John clearly stated. “I just wanted you to talk to me, I wanted to help you. Hell, I still want to help you. Just-“

“LIES!” Undine threw her yet uncorrupted arm out. Slime extended into a several metre-long whip that threatened to hit John. Nathalia smacked it aside with ease. Whatever Undine was becoming, she could not compete with a goddess. “It must be lies. This can’t be my fault. The answer is in the song, the answer is in the song it-“ She stopped herself and sung more of the broken notes. John could almost see the smiles in the creeping black, as it pulsed and advanced.

“There is no saving her,” Lydia stated coldly.

“I will be the judge of that,” the Gamer decided. He said that despite himself. He had no plan, no hopeful thing that would allow him to get rid of this corruption. To free someone from such a strong infestation, one would need a healer of immense strength, someone skilled at purging curses of extreme potency. The only healer they had had was now the enemy; John doubted she would have been capable of this much either way.

“Your answer is right beside you,” Nathalia weighed in. “As long as she is only getting corrupted, the infection can be cut out.”

“I can help with that,” Nia spoke up, and John turned to look at her with wide eyes. A shimmer of hope just opened before him.

Undine just stood there muttering things to herself in a language he couldn’t understand. ‘It’s elemental speech,’ Siena informed him. ‘She is trying to speak to those in the Kingdom between… and failing. Gaia’s wards hold.”

“It won’t be pretty, but I can simply erase all parts of her that are infested… if you manage to restrain her,” the blank said. “I will need all of my power to do so. You need to fight without me.”

“Right!” John shouted out. It didn’t matter whether or not he trusted Nia right now; all that mattered was that she was his only way out of this mess.

How would one go about constraining a slime though? The only idea John had was to confine her. “Nathalia, stay back. With your power, you are more likely to accidentally kill her than to restrain her,” John threw out quick orders. “Nia, please stay ready for when you think you can jump in and do whatever you need to do. Lydia… at least don’t interfere.”

The princess narrowed her eyes at the lack of trust, but given her display of murderous intent, John did not care.

“Let’s go then!” The moment John moved his foot to face the ocean elemental, she stopped rambling to herself and sent a wave of water his way.

Gnome managed to block that one with an earthen wall. Salty water crashed into the wall and splashed around it in a harmless shower, halted in its momentum. Then John stepped around the wall and cast a Mana Ray.

Undine knew him and his skillset well enough to know what came after the obvious display of him raising his hand. A bubble wrapped around her main body blocked the attack by its simple existence. This was the major drawback of how Mana Ray functioned: the fact that it only hit whatever it struck first, only ever searing through armour, meant that it could be stopped by as much as a big drop of water.

The bubble stayed in place, and Undine, without ever moving her head, formed tentacles out of it that assaulted Salamander and Sylph, flying in circles around her. She was too slow to hit either of them, but her defensive power made this a stalemate. One where John’s victory condition creeped further and further away, as the infestation took deeper and deeper root within Undine.

Eventually there would be nothing left to purge but the elemental herself. An outcome that was utterly unacceptable. Spikes of earth shot from the ground and broke upon impact with the bubble. In a short engagement, the Tier 4 elemental could hold her own against her less evolved sisters.

This Undine knew all of their tricks, and they knew nothing of what she was capable of. Shadowy edges ripped through the ground, and Siena finally entered the battlefield in an attack desperate to penetrate that protective bubble. Uselessly they scratched over the surface.

Inside the bubble, Undine was expressionless; the black tar was about to reach her eyes. ‘I need a weak point,’ John thought, ‘something, anything, just…’

‘She is blind!’ Siena shouted out.

‘WHAT?!’ he could barely repress his anger; ‘How much shit have you two been keeping from me, Siena?’

‘You have found out just about everything now,’ she hissed back; ‘This is not the time.’

To that John could agree. If she was blind, that meant that she was getting her information from her other senses. Vibrations, sounds, smells, what John needed was an attack that was both strong enough to penetrate through that hull and invisible to countermeasures.

There was a way.

‘Aclysia, take Jane and distract her!’ John thought. He would have given the command to Rave directly, but he feared Undine might take unpredictable action if she heard that something was up. Following a wave from Aclysia, the two of them engaged in battle.

Fists, light, and blade cut through the air, slamming into Undine’s defences. Even where the two managed to cut through the outer bubble, any damage they delivered was quickly mended by the liquid nature of their target.

‘Sylph, Siena, I need you to work together right now!’ John called back these two. They were vital to his plan. It was a combination of their strengths that would provide the attack that was going to end this battle.

‘You think Undine is going to survive that?! I don’t want her to die, we can’t have her die, she hasn’t had enough fizzy pills yet!’ Sylph exclaimed. Even she understood that his plan here was a gamble, one that relied on Undine’s regenerative powers being simultaneously extreme and not extreme enough.

‘Her Endurance is high, and we have no other choice!’ John told her. ‘Just do it!’

‘I am ready,’ Siena said with numbing earnestness. The tempest elemental hesitated for a moment, she did not feel well using something this powerful against her sister, but she had no other choice when thousands of points of mana, from John and Momo, flowed into the two of them.

Shadow and air combined between their outstretched hands and formed a knife without a handle, crackling with power in complete silence. That knife killed all sound around it, all vibrations of the air, even the radiation of its heat. No eyes would have missed it, the brightness of a lightning strike, but eyes were of no concern here.

The corrupted water spirit knew something was about to happen and slowly ebbed backwards. Before she could find a place to retreat to, Aclysia and Rave redoubled their offensive efforts. Too busy concentrating on her healing, Undine was kept in place for long enough for Sylph and Siena to finish their preparations.

With the sound of absolute silence and the speed of lightning, it rushed through the air. Undine had no indication of it coming for her, knew only that something was going on. No matter how strong her defences were, her Agility was still on the lower side; what little time she had to react was not enough.

The knife cut through her weakened defences and her body entirely, ripping a melon sized hole through the barrier. A gaping nothing remained where Undine’s head had been. The mass of slime lost stability, but not cohesion, quivering as it slouched. “Now!” John exclaimed.

Nia was already on the move.

The gamble here was twofold. The hope was that this attack didn’t kill Undine and that she needed her head enough to be blindsided and defenceless. John knew that much about her previous way of operating, at least.

Nia reached into the hole caused by the attack and grasped at the corruption. Two liquids of pure black, similar in appearance but violently different in nature, clashed as Nia used her powers to eradicate whatever sort of corruption she could.

John had no idea how successful this endeavour was, neither did he know how it worked. His only clue was a visual one and it appeared hopeful. Like a base coming into contact with acid, the two powers neutralized each other, becoming fully eliminated where they met.

Parts of Undine’s head reformed. A stump of a neck was enough for the slime to scream. The torture was evident in every passing second, sending chills down John’s spine. The layer of tar and mould struggled, made her struggle, but there was still something inside Undine that knew reason and it was going stronger.

The screams stayed, the struggle faded.