The Tournament [A Non-Traditional Fantasy]

Doyen lanced his blade out, simultaneously ducking the scythe's sweeping arc, gold-lit eyes locked forward, his heart stilled by a punctured dagger. The artifact, though numbing his mind, empowered his body. Each passing second the burning dagger increased its influence upon him: greater might, blurrier consciousness,until he surpassed the Khan in both speed and strength—even without Iatric's blessings.

Still, the Khan refused defeat. Even without speed, it had the skill. A twist of its scythe, and Doyen's sword shattered once more. The fault didn't even register in his mind as Doyen swung again—so fast that the Khan couldn't react, so fast that the blade hadn't yet regrown fully.

The empty hilt cut across empty air.

Doyen pivoted, turning the failed strike into a shoulder tackle. He crashed into the Khan's torso, his weight useless against the massive mokoi.

The Khan struck down with its pommel—

—but Jocund was there. One arm shoving Doyen low, the other lifting his shield overhead to catch the blow. Jocund's Knees threatened to buckle, shoulder muscles tearing with the strain, but he held firm. With a sharp twist, he parried the scythe, deflecting it wide and knocking the mokoi off balance.

From under the shield, Doyen saw a gap. His sword had finally reformed.

He moved. A blur of gold and steel.

The thrust came upward.

A killing blow.

The Khan smiled.

Just before the blade struck, Doyen's vision flashed white. A roar of pain tore from his throat as the Mokoi Khan unloaded all seven of Forgo's collected bolts into his shoulder.

The attack hit like divine wrath. Doyen was ripped from his feet, launched across the grand hall, and smashed against the far wall. Stone cracked. His body cratered the masonry. Chunks of broken rock collapsed over him, burying the unconscious warrior in a heap of ruin.

In the same riposte, the whip at the end of Khan's deflected scythe curved around Jocund's shield and snapped around his dominant arm.

With a single tug, reality split, space cut open, and nothingness disappeared.

Jocund's arm wasn't severed. It was annihilated—ripped from existence, unmade without a trace. The shield—and its wielder—slumped to the floor. Blood gushed in a pulsing river from Jocund's stump. Disoriented and freezing, his body trembled violently, eyes wide with shock.

The Khan wasted no time.

It turned. Calculated. Chose.

Iatric.

In a blur, the Mokoi closed the distance, towering before the healer. Without pause, it swung—two arms driving the entire weight of its scythe down in a great executioner's arc.

The moment the Khan moved, Forgo drew her rapier and sprinted to intercept. She knew what it was planning—but she was too far. Too slow.

Faced with the angry black blade, Iatric let go.

She withdrew her divine blessings. Then, she withdrew even more.

Forgo's charge slowed to a crawl.

Jocund's breath thinned.

Ken's exhaustion overwhelmed.

From Iatric's back, a lone ethereal wing of colorless skeletal form blossomed. The entire collective might of the Saviors gathering within the dainty healer. She raised her fist, and with a rapturous cry of defiance, she punched the scythe—

—and shattered it in two.

Ken, his constitution utterly spent, collapsed to one knee. The strength in his limbs had been siphoned for Iatric's salvation—but his magic remained.

With the last dregs of his stamina, Ken unleashed the full of his essential flux into a single arcane geyser. The magic so profound the whole throne room was blinded into encompassing whiteness. The geyser rushed out as a brilliant beam of unimaginable power which ate through the Khan's extended arms shredding apart their atomic consistency. The magic's temperature, cosmic in scale, melting stone, warping air, and blasting a shockwave so fierce it hurled both Iatric and the Khan away.

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Iatric released her curse from her teammates, returning their strength. Her ghostly wing vanished, and the inhuman burden of power the spell had forced upon her mortal form dissipated. She staggered. Managed one last healing spell for herself—Then collapsed, limp and spent.

The Mokoi Khan paused, regarding the mangled remnants of its injured arms. From the stumps oozed a bright, viscous fluid. Shock twisted through its chest and soon curdled into frustration.

Its gaze snapped toward the wizard—the fragile, elderly man that had dared to mar it.

This was the first injury the Khan had suffered since the First Human-Mokoi War. The Khan thought it apt to pay in kind. With one of its five remaining arms, the Khan raised the bronze bell—small, unassuming, etched with the numeral four, and rang the catalyst. A crackling shard of nothingness burst forth, accelerating toward the downed wizard. A jagged ripple through space, reality itself shrinking away from the attack.

Iatric had returned Ken's energy, but he was still only a man.

Too old. Too slow.

He could not outrun oblivion.

The nothingness streaked out to its target but halted as Forgo shoved the elder out of the way, taking the strike herself.

The tear of disreality twisted into her shoulder.

Her whole body fell into itself. Her body bent, warping impossibly. Her breast writhed in her elbow, ear losing itself somewhere between the notches of her spine. Bones turned traitor. Flesh lost its map. Anguished screams contorting as her lungs slowly melded into her esophagus.

Forgo reached out for Ken—pleading, desperate—that he pull her out from this hell, but her fingers shrank deeper into her hands and found themselves through her neck. She cried with whatever she could as her uterus swam out of her eyes. Her limbs curled inward, shrinking and warping, folding together into a single collapsing point.

With a final brittle snap of her femur, she was removed from reality. No body. No blood.

The only thing that remained of the valiant Forgo was the last sound of her torment, distorted into a fading moan by the echoes of the great hall.

…The room was silent.

Iatric screamed, voice shredding her throat, tears blinding her vision. "FORGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Ken grasped at empty air, reaching for what wasn't there. His mind refused to register his friend's absolute demise. A quivering wetness drooled from his incoherent lips as he muttered broken cries to a woman not present.

Iatric tried to rise, releasing her self-healing blessing. But the instant her legs locked, her body collapsed again, still too weak and wounded.

Ken looked across the battlefield:

Doyen buried in rubble.

Jocund pale and bleeding, barely breathing.

Iatric screaming at her own body to move.

He was the last.

The Khan stared him down. And he, it.

The Mokoi raised its bell. Ken raised his hands.

They fired.

Ken's bolt fizzled only a few feet forward—no essential flux left to power it and he watched his death approach again.

A flung sword intercepted the Khan's spell. The weapon vanished on contact, obliterated by the collision along with the disreality bolt.

The Khan's head snapped toward the source. It saw a man, concussed and insensate, eyes glowing a brilliant gold, one arm extended, empty from the throw.

Now disarmed, Doyen reached into his chest. Fingers slipped effortlessly through his flesh. He gripped a small, blunt dagger—its glass pommel swirling with blood half-full—and tore it free from his spongy sinew.

The wound screamed, a bubbling cancer growing lips from the injury and howling with agony. The distorted flesh oozed out from the newformed mouth, overtaking Doyen's body, the fetid vitriol consuming him. As the throbbing cancer reached his shoulder, it dislodged Forgo's buried bolts, venomous tips clattered to the floor, and a creeping puss expunged the lingering poison from out the gaping wound. The mass grew—bloating, congealing—until it encased him in a grotesque, organic armour. His mind was lost, his consciousness replaced by a comatose hunger.

The rest of the Saviors, too weak to move, could only gawk in terror at the defilement that twisted their once ally into something unrecognizable.

Then the abomination that had once been Doyen hurtled toward the Mokoi Khan.

The Khan, stripped of its scythe, launched a desperate barrage of raw magic. But even with its monstrous catalyst, each blast of unreality fizzled uselessly against the abomination's warped form—and whatever shallow wounds it managed to carve, the misshapen body regenerated in seconds.

Panic crept in. The Mokoi's attacks grew frantic, erratic. It shifted tactics—arcane bolts fired in an incessant onslaught from its five remaining arms, raining magic across the chamber. Dust plumed. Stone cracked. A storm of light and force engulfed the hall. But still, the thing charged. Unflinching. Unstoppable.

The grotesque mass that had once been Doyen bulldozed forward through the assault, accepting every strike without hindrance. Its steps unbroken until it stood before the Khan. Even eyeless, the Khan's terror was unmistakable. The Khan struck down at the hero with its claws, that same warbling nothingness evident on its tips, but the attack never landed.

A tendril of flesh burst from the abomination's body, whipped forward, and wrapped the Khan's arm in a vice of muscle and rot. Then, with no hesitation, the hero plunged its red dagger into the Mokoi Khan's chest.

There was no scream. No struggle. Just silence—as the blade drank its fill:

And together they died.