The Man Who Feared To Die

Nicole Taylor

*Continued from the previous mission*

“It became a bit hard to navigate, with all the winding flesh corridors, but luckily Voormas was lighting his location up like a Christmas tree.”

“Some serious Ojas flying around, yes.”

“What? Oh, Primal Energy… yeah. There was one obvious path towards the ritual site. There was some strange haze in the area though. I’m pretty sure it was some weird stuff that was able to hold post-life entities in place…”

“Right…”

“But when we entered, after a short while, we found ourselves in, well, the fields of the Great War. Well, the spectral Great War. It was some sort of vision of the future. A possible future, anyway – we had four in total…”

“I’m pretty sure those were Harrowings”, Senex chuckled.

“Oh," Nicole said sheepishly, “I probably should have realized that sooner.”

“That’s okay. Sometimes I forget how young and inexperienced you all are.”

“So those were all just random hallucinations?”

“Well, not necessarily. Especially in here, they seem to have some higher insight into reality, so there’s probably some kernel of truth in their visions. But you should certainly not take them at face value.”

“Right. Well, good to know. Anyway, we got through them without any issue. Once we did, we found Amanda again – she was separated from us during the Harrowings – and she was pretty shook up from what she saw. Patricia found the newly found ‘intel’ important enough – stop laughing – to send Amanda back, in case we weren’t able to get out.”

“You did get closer to the ritual in the end, yes?”

“That we did. There was one more encounter, though – we found a room with Shiva in it.”

“Really now?” Senex said, perking up.

“Yup. Turns out he had his own little vendetta with Voormas going. He needed Shiva’s spear for the ritual he was doing, so Shiva was hiding out here to keep it safe. He questioned us a bit – about us and Voormas both wanting to ‘save the world’ in our own ways – but I guess we convinced him we weren’t about to use the same methods. He even offered us his spear to use against Voormas, but we figured it’d be a bad idea to take the only thing he still needed to him. Now that I think about it, that might have been a final test…”

“You think?”

“He did give us a shortcut – a less explosive one, this time, straight to Voormas’ ritual site. So, we did our last-minute preparations, and dropped in. You were there for the rest, I guess…”

“True, but I was also unconscious for half of it and still a bit dazed for the rest. So I would certainly appreciate your recollections of events.”

“Very well. He started out chatty, actually – I’m not sure if he actually expected us to turn to his side, but hey, it gave us time to get our bearings. It didn’t take too long for Franklin to lose his patience, though, and he figured he’d shoot the altar out from under you.”

“Ah, that explains those bruises.”

“I’m sure he’s very sorry. So, I was first on the draw after that. I figured our best shot was to get you back in the game, so I quickly overlapped our locations and created a bubble of null-space around us – basically making it so we were separated from the room that the rest was in. Didn’t work quite as well as I expected, but it held long enough…”

“Neat trick”

Wasn’t immediately necessary though, because Voormas took his sweet time with that freaky hundred-hands-splitting-in-four thing…”

“*The Avatars of Shiva*”

Really? He must’ve been pissed… Anyway, that gave Patricia the time to get you to wake up and patch you up a bit. Franklin did what he does best and nearly blew one of them straight away, and I spend a bit more time beefing you up for the fight…”

“’Beefing me up’?”

“Right. That’s okay, sometimes I forget how old you are. Strengthen you a bit. Well, just in time, too, because that’s when Voormas did his crazy death wave thing…”

“*Entropic Sludge*.”

“That’s… a surprisingly normal name. Anyway, we were pretty well shielded – I think Patricia and Franklin managed to just hold on thanks to the armor suits.”

“I think we got lucky there – he seemed a bit drained from the ritual. That should have been a lot more devastating”.

“Well good for us then. Franklin and Patricia didn’t take any chances with that after that – they both set up to disrupt his primal energy fields to make any future procedures harder to do.”

“Exploiting the numerical advantage in Awakened minds, smart”, Senex nodded.

“I figured I’d throw down some fire too. My sidearm was packing quite the punch, and I got lucky enough to line up a shot where I could hit three of the copies in their weak spots…”

“Right, lucky. That wasn’t a correspondence spell at all, of course.”

“Of course; there’s no such thing”, Nicole winked. “Turns out Voormas noticed the disadvantage in the Enlightenment department, so he got out four big hunking swords and closed in. Patricia had her ‘I’m not here’ trick active, and Franklin’s armor was a bit harder than Voormas anticipated. You got dinged by one of them, if I recall…”

“One of the flesh wounds from earlier.”

“And meanwhile Voormas seemed to have misjudged my position in all the commotion, so he swung about a meter high. And short. The sword hit seemed to have woken you up a bit more, because that’s when you did your freaky death bolt…”

“The ancient rote of *Debt of Ages*”

“That one, yeah, and finished the one Franklin dinged earlier off. I’m not exactly sure what Patricia did, after that – she was moving kind of in a blur – but I think she did some kind of Mental assault, because they all seemed like they had quite the headache after that.”

“Smart move. Four bodies, but all with the same mind to attack.”

“Right. It gave enough of an opening for Franklin to blow a second one away, too. After that, I think Voormas panicked a bit – I think he tried to escape with a spatial procedure. Whatever he tried, it failed hard, and that’s when that grim reaper appeared.”

“A fitting punishment for his hubris.”

“Quite. Well, I guess the personality dossiers on Voormas were right about the death phobia, because the one copy that was left was reduced to a frightened wreck.”

“And that’s when I delivered the Good Death.”

“Good death, sure. And that was it.”

“Good thing no one tried to use Entropy so all the Spectres there weren’t able to help him more.”

“Right, all the Specters. That was good indeed.”

“And thus ended Voormas, Grand Harvester of Souls, and his plot to plunge the world into eternal night.”

“Well said.”