Chapter 342: Vanquisher of Demons
The first tentacles lashed out without warning, moving with blinding speed, like whips held together by constellations and space dust. They glowed with cool blue starlight, transparent like the main body of the mutant man of war boss, making it a challenge to decipher where they began and ended. To make matters worse, instead of charging toward him, they entered smaller versions of the gateway that had transported them both to what seemed like a stage floating in space, effectively teleporting across the arena, and closing the gap with unpredictably quick intervals. Hundreds of the blueish purple gateways appeared, burning with off-color fire, each threatening with potential attacks.
Coop narrowly avoided the first strike, not ready for the quick shift in battle as a gate opened up just a dozen feet from his shoulder. The tip of the crystalline blue tentacle gouged a deep furrow in the ashen slate floor. Dust erupted from the contact, obscuring his view of the galactic pool surrounding the circular platform.
Before the debris settled, Coop rolled to the side, instinctively recognizing that a second attack would closely follow the first as another gate expanded into the size of a tunnel to accommodate a tentacle. He sprang back to his feet, his ethereal shortsword manifesting from the mists as he landed.
A third tentacle, tip thicker than his torso, slammed flat against the ground where he had rolled, and the entire platform trembled beneath the impact, hinting at yet another problem. Only Coop actually needed the ground to stand on to fight at his full potential, and it wasn’t nearly as sturdy as the actual mana well had been, almost as if the Enigma had snagged an arena straight from the Coral Forest and sent them both into the cosmos. He was reasonably confident that it was merely a domain effect, not completely dissimilar to the Void Queen’s back when he fought with the Cult of Chakyum, but that didn’t make it less of a problem.
Coop, not willing to fight without momentum, slipped between the following rotation of whipping tentacles, and darted forward toward the mass of glowing manifestations hanging beneath the exposed main body of the boss. His sword was a blur of motion, gouging chunks of transparent flesh out from the celestial tentacles, finding them equally meaty when compared to the gray skinned leathery version he had contended with at first.
When he was blocked by a portal, he simply sliced the offending tentacle in half, and leapt through. Whether or not the gate transported him or not mattered little, because either way he was making progress.
His decisive action, unburdened by fear or logic would bring him into the maw of danger, where all of the tentacles could strike him at once without the need of magical gates. He knew it would have been disorienting if he hadn’t already had the experience of mistjumping millions of times before. Instead, he took a moment to admire the abyssal world as he shifted through the portals, a simple mirror of the world of mists, then proceeded to fight as he reappeared.
His ethereal shield barely manifested in time for him to simply discard it, throwing it ahead to collide with a sweeping tentacle, shifting its trajectory enough for him to slip below, then he resummoned the round shield and threw it again, letting its edge fold an additional fleshy tentacle as he leapt over, slicing through a third that would have caught him across the chest. He splashed through a gout of lavender mana rather than blood or gore, sword already nipping at the next threat.
He didn’t find an opening so much as he forced one to exist. All it took was a fleeting moment where the creature was distracted by surprise, pain, or frustration, diverting its enormous web of mana tentacles toward the tiny but persistent opponent. With a grunt of effort, Coop raised his sword above his head, adjusting his grip to drive it down before quickswapping it for his spear in the middle of the motion, hoping that the extra length would pierce the hide of the main body more thoroughly.
Coop wasn’t sure what he expected; maybe for the man of war to deflate like a balloon pierced by a pin, but the actual creature maintained its structure, continuing to attack as he evaded and repeatedly quickswapped between weapons to continue the skirmish. A bit of deep purple energy leaked from the wound, and Coop decided it was evidence enough of progress. He would press on.
The creature roared once again, the sound more like a shrieking gurgle of gas being forced through a passage than a proper territorial challenge. Coop, in the midst of a storm of tentacles, tossed his short sword up, threw his shield forward, mistjumped into the air, stabbed and released his weapon, then mistjumped to his shield, recalled his sword, and sliced another tentacle in an effort to land a second blow on the main body.
He quickly realized that the damage he dealt to the tentacles was simply repaired. Even the ones that were completely severed fully regenerated in the same manner as his weapons when he resummoned them, but the wound in the main body continued to leak.