Ch 180 – Do we have a deal?
Deacon blinked at the Djinn's words, his mind struggling to process what she'd just said through the fog of exhaustion and grief clouding his thoughts, before he snapped his head toward the multilayered Earth Dome shielding the bodies of Jass and Bonehead and immediately began hobbling toward it without a second's hesitation, completely uncaring of how exhausted his body was or how his legs struggled and strained to keep functioning under the weight they were being forced to carry.
His heartbeat echoed loudly in his ears, the thundering rhythm drowning out every other sound until it was the only noise he could hear — not the crunch of his boots crushing chipped sandstone beneath them, not the wet squelch when he stomped atop antlion corpses in his path, nothing except that relentless pounding that matched the desperate prayer running through his mind on repeat.
He staggered and hobbled toward the dome with ragged breaths huffing from his damaged lungs, catching himself numerous times from slipping on debris and puddles of blood that made the platform treacherous, his balance shot to hell from injuries and blood loss and whatever the fuck that transformation had done to his body.
Please, please, let her words be true, Deacon prayed silently with every painful step forward, each word timed to the beat of his heart. Please let them be alive — please, I'll do anything, just please let them be alive.
He hit the multilayered Earth Dome with his body at full force despite his hobbling approach, the impact jarring enough to rattle his already cracked ribs, and immediately pushed himself upward and smashed his molten rock-covered arm against the barrier with as much strength as his failing body could generate.
The stone cracked but didn't break, so he did it again with his other arm — and again and again and again, each strike sending fresh waves of agony through his destroyed limbs, but he didn't care, couldn't afford to care about anything except getting through this barrier to reach his friends.
Blood trailed from his body with every impact, painting the sand-colored stone of the dome red as he shattered more and more of himself while chipping away at the barrier layer by layer, sending chunks of stone flying into the air. Yet for every layer he cracked through, there was no end — only more stone between him and whatever lay on the other side, even as his body grew weaker and weaker.
Looking at Deacon's desperate assault on the barrier, the Djinn couldn't help but let out a sigh as she watched more and more of his arms getting covered in molten rock as the flesh kept rupturing and the strange transformation kept sealing the wounds, his limbs slowly being consumed by the molten rocks as he destroyed himself trying to dig into the Earth Dome.
"How utterly foolish," she muttered to herself as she observed Deacon breaking through the first four layers while utterly destroying his arms to the point where they were nothing but elbows capped with clubs of molten rock, and when he could no longer use his arms for anything productive he resorted to kneeing and kicking and bashing his own head against the dome to break through the remaining layers to reach the two bodies within the dome, each impact producing wet thump and sharp crack sounds that echoed through the chamber along with his roars and grunts.
"...But such loyalty for others," the Djinn continued muttering to herself as a growing glint of interest filled her lavender eyes while she continued to stare at Deacon bashing his bloodied head against the barrier, watching as he fractured more and more of his own skull with each strike delivered by his failing body. "Such pure unbridled loyalty in someone so young to continue pushing past his body's limits for the sake of friendships which are less than a decade old..."
The Djinn couldn't help but lick her lips beneath her veil as desire crept into her voice, her gaze fixed on Deacon as he prepared to deliver what would clearly be a killing blow to his own skull, given how much damage it had already sustained.
She whipped her arm forward with her hand beckoning in a pulling motion, and Deacon suddenly found himself mid-motion to bash his skull against the barrier one final time, but now facing the Djinn instead, his momentum arrested and his position changed without any sensation of movement.
"You foolish Jötunung," the Djinn tutted at him while wagging her index finger at him slowly. "You were one last hit away from cracking your skull open and killing yourself. If you do that, how would you be able to help your friends? They are on the brink of death after all."
Deacon stared at her with bleary eyes that could barely focus, blood covering his face in a sheet of red as he huffed and panted for air his damaged lungs couldn't properly process, bits of his forehead now covered in molten rock where the skin had split from repeated impacts.
Unable to mutter a word through his exhaustion or unwilling to waste what little energy he had left on speaking when action was needed, Deacon simply turned his gaze back toward the multilayered Earth Dome and took a step in that direction, the movement accompanied by loud clicks and pops of his own destroyed and cracked limbs being pushed forward beyond what they should be able to endure.
The Djinn bit her lower lip at the sheer stubborn determination radiating from Deacon as he continued staggering toward the Earth Dome despite being barely able to stand, the glint in her eyes only growing larger and more intense as his left leg finally collapsed under him completely and he fell to the ground face-first, and after a moment of stillness he began dragging himself forward using just his chin to gain traction against the blood-slicked stone.
"I will heal you and your still-living friends," the Djinn spoke aloud in a voice that carried clearly across the platform despite not being particularly loud, and the words caused Deacon to stop dragging himself forward mid-pull. "For a favor I can cash in at any time."
With his lower jaw trembling along with the rest of his body from pain and exhaustion and the effort of staying conscious, Deacon closed his eyes and assessed his resource pools through force of habit, even though he already knew what he'd find.
Health: 7/2392
Mana: 5/700
Stamina: 8/1782
His arms were destroyed beyond any use, reduced to stumps of molten rock, his legs were just as bad and could no longer support his weight at all, more of his body was covered in this mysterious molten rock substance than actual flesh at this point, he could feel blood flooding into his lungs from where his ribs had cracked when he fell and at least three had punctured into his bottom right lung — and worst of all, he still hadn't gotten to his friends to make sure if they were alright.
“Do we have a deal?” the Djinn asked.
Health: 6/2392
Mana: 4/700
Stamina: 6/1782
He was going to die here on this platform without ever knowing if saving them had even been possible.
"...acc-…"
Health: 5/2392
Mana: 3/700
Stamina: 3/1782
He was going to fail his friends again, fail them one last time, and there was nothing he could do to stop it because his body had finally reached the absolute limit of what it could endure.
His vision began to shrink and darken at the edges as he managed to lift his head slightly to stare at the Earth Dome that still separated him from Jass and Bonehead, the barrier swimming in and out of focus.
"I...acc.." he tried again to get the words out.
Health: 3/2392
Mana: 2/700
Stamina: 2/1782
He was going to—
"I accept," Deacon rasped in such a low register that even he himself could barely hear his own words, the sound more felt than heard as it scraped up through his ruined throat, yet somehow those two syllables carried across the distance to the Floor Guardian as loud and crystal clear as if he'd shouted them.
Not a fraction of a second later, a loud clap echoed throughout the underground temple as the Djinn brought her hands together sharply, an expressionless smirk hidden behind her veil, though satisfaction radiated from her posture.
Within that same fraction of a second, just before Deacon's heart gave its final beat and stopped entirely, a basin filled with golden liquid that had been hidden far below in the deepest underground chambers of Solomon's Hidden Temple swapped positions with the section of platform beneath Deacon's dying body through some magic he didn't understand and suddenly couldn't think about because he was submerged in liquid.
As Deacon's body sank beneath the surface of the golden liquid and bubbles began forming and rising to obscure his form from view, the Djinn waved her hand dismissively toward the multilayered Earth Dome — cracked and almost completely destroyed, with only eight remaining layers of the original fourteen that had made it up—and it simply vanished as though it had never existed.
The barrier's disappearance revealed what lay within: the growing cold corpse of Jasmine Vanir Pines, her chest still caved inward and her skin taking on the waxy pallor of death, and beside her was approximately a quarter of a humanoid skeleton's skull with a dull purple core nestled in the left eye socket, the only part that remained intact, surrounded by what looked like ground bone dust that had once been the rest of Bennett Hades Graves's upper torso.
Wisps of shadow-flame stubbornly clung to existence within that single remaining eye socket, flickering weakly but refusing to go out entirely.
Wordlessly, the quarter skull still attached to its dark purple core lifted from the ground and flew across the platform directly into the Djinn's waiting hand, and immediately, countless ethereal chains appeared wrapped around her body, constricting and binding her in response to this direct contact with one of the Tower's inhabitants.
However, the Djinn did not seem bothered by the chains in the slightest, having already expected such retaliation from the Tower's protection systems for touching an inhabitant directly, and she simply ignored the bindings as they constricted her form.
Within seconds, Bonehead's skull began regenerating seemingly out of thin air, bone materialising from nothing to rebuild what had been lost, but the process stopped abruptly when it had formed the front half of his skull and was just about to create a lower jaw.
Gently letting the half-skull float slowly down to rest on the platform, the Djinn appeared in front of Esmerelda's cold corpse in the next instant without seeming to cross the distance between, and she reached into thin air beside her as though opening an invisible drawer.
After a few seconds of rummaging through whatever space she was accessing, she pulled out a stout, empty glass bottle with a thick cork.
Simultaneously, back in the golden basin, Deacon suddenly lurched upward out of the liquid with a loud gasping breath that filled his fully healed lungs, breaking the surface nude as the day he'd been born and completely unblemished, every injury he'd sustained over the years erased as though they'd never existed, though the dark red markings still traced patterns across his skin.
His back, now bare to all, displayed a massive scaled snake coiled in a circle with its tail gripped in its mouth.
Taking the cork off the bottle with one hand while supporting Esmerelda's head with the other, the Djinn lowered herself and pressed the opened bottle flush against Esmerelda's blue-tinged lips.
Huffing in shock and confusion as his mind tried to catch up with what had just happened, Deacon looked toward where the Earth Dome should have been and saw Jass's body lying motionless and what looked like ground bone scattered around her, but as he was midway through vaulting over the edge of the basin with one arm, completely uncaring of his nudity, a familiar groan echoed across the platform and caused him to whip his head toward the source of the sound.
On the ground, a few feet away from the basin lay a half-skull with two shadow-flame eyes flickering within its sockets — Bonehead.
"What happened?" Bonehead muttered in a confused voice as he blinked up at the ceiling, apparently unable to move his body or even turn his head. "Why can't I... where's the rest of me?"