POV: Regulus Au Nyx
"Damn you!" The roar of his voice shook the world to its core, the seething anger sending sparks out into the air. The armour he had fashioned out of the remaining bits of darkness had worn out, crumbling back into fine dust. His glaive looked like it had seen better days, the obsidian blade dull and cracked in various places.
The corpses still pursued him relentlessly, the tide of rotting flesh a breath away from drowning him in its vulgarity.
He had managed to stem the bleeding in his hand, the pain was manageable, the blood flow being stopped meant it would buy him more time.
Yes, time. He remembered, he needed more time. To think, to rest, to come up with a plan.
Rest. He wanted rest.
He was running along the side of a precarious cliff overlooking a vast ocean made of blood, the cool black stone underneath his feet trembling with the arrival of the corpses. The weight those abominations exerted on the ground was no joke, it would have been enough to shift mountains on Earth if this thing was ever let loose.
He dared a glance behind.
They had gotten closer by half an inch.
"Crap."
The sight was truly, utterly horrifying.
A mass of bodies, layered over one another in grotesque density, surged forward with unnatural cohesion. Limbs dragged, snapped, reformed. Faces—if they could still be called that—shifted and pressed against each other, as if the entire horde shared a single, suffocating existence.
He tightened his grip on the shaft of his glaive. Ignoring the sharp throb of his missing right hand, he leaned forward, pushing the last bit of his mana into his legs as he took off.
His vision was already starting to get blotted with the masses of weird darkness. His heart, which had already been overdoing it for the last few days, felt like it had finally reached its limit. The exhaustion was genuinely starting to weigh him down, Regulus felt ashamed, scared. For something he took so much pride in, his powers had failed him at the end, and he would too, most likely, be consumed by this abomination in the end.
He wondered, as he jumped over a chasm stretching deep into the darkness, about how long had it even been since he had been stuck in this dungeon.
A month? Two? He didn't know, he had stopped counting the days when the last of his comrades died.
And now it seemed that his time was over too.
He could still hear them in his ears at times. On the rare occasion where he got to catch his breath, the phantoms wouldl whisper in his ears, echoing that one word over and over again with sobering clarity.
Live.
He stumbled.
It wasn't anything big, if anything, it was barely perceptible, and Regulus had immediately corrected his rhythm. Not even letting the faltered step finish as he let the momentum carry him.
Unfortunately, his pursuers were fast enough to capitalize on that small mistake.
They closed another few inches between him, the mass of flesh trailing uncomfortably close behind him now, another mistake away from grabbing him.
His breath was starting to come in uneven, ragged gasps. His lungs felt like they were on fire, the rest of his body numb to everything else but the constant exhaustion and pain. Starved of mana and his source element, there was nothing else he could do but run, and run some more.
An unintelligible groan escaped him as he noticed the path he took narrowing down.
The path thinned, constricting into a small, uneven strip, barely wide enough for him to run through without being cut by the jagged outcroppings jutting out on random intervals.
He heard the mass of flesh clash into the stone behind, a tremor going through the earth as the thing compressed into a shape that could fit through the wall.
The disgusting squelch of flesh slithering through the crevice sent a shiver down his spine, and he shot a curse at the thing, mind furiously racking through plans for a way out of this mess.
The chances were looking grim.
He jumped when the crevice merged into one wall of stone, furiously climbing to finally emerge out in the open, on top of the mountain he had been running around.
He breathed in the air. The stench of blood wasn't as strong here, a wave of pleasure going through him when he realized that there was more oxygen this high up.
The wave of flesh emerged a moment behind him.
He had forgotten to keep moving in his ecstasy of finding air.
Regulus dodged the first strike, rolling to the left with all his strength as the flesh shot forward in a frenzy. All signs of what it once used to be was erased now, and what was left a disgusting mass of broken bones, organs, viscera and flesh.
Regulus swung his sword, slashing a clean gap through the mass as it failed to stop its momentum.
That was the entirety of the exchange.
The next moment, a chunk of stone hit the back of his head, white pain flashing through him as he momentarily lost consciousness.
"Oh.." The words escaped him weak and slowly, almost groggy from the disorientation.
He had forgotten that this thing was intelligent.
In his exhaustion, he had made another mistake.
So that was it.
His life was over.
All those sacrifices, all that struggle. All the pain he had to go through.
Amounted to nothing.
In the end, he was going to die, like the rest of his companions did.
Painful and slow.