A Dwarf Attempts to Kill the Strongest Warrior in the Astral Plane Phase 2

The team was pressed for time. They could only free the souls in so much time, and there were almost fifty of them strewn across the fortress. With twelve fighters, five of whom were doing the healing, they needed to get a soul back every 10 seconds. 

They had to split up. Each team got a cat and one reliable healer. Their speed maintained efficiency, even in the face of hundreds more demons. For many, this was reliving hard and traumatic memories from a few weeks before. For others, it was their first time seeing such wretched creatures. They were strong, but they were women, and their foes were beasts with powers from the dark world. Still, they were fodder in an enclosed space. The monsters they truly feared were the behemoths, like Trinity. Ironically, in the belly of the fortress turned monster, they never felt safer.

From the head, Xim could sense the four or five things amiss with her structure and let out a weary sigh, not necessarily pushed but as if her train was running late.

“I suppose this requires my intervention,” she said. In a blink, she faced one of the teams. “Constricting field.”

For a moment, it looked like the four were about to be crushed to death by an invisible sphere, but an inaudible counterspell popped it like a bubble. Vel took the lead ahead of Fura, Swell, and Chloe. The witches faced off.

“An elf?” Xim said. “That’s a rare find. I thought that She wiped Mariglynn clean.”

“I’ll never forgive you, you bitch!” Vel crackled to life with magic. “This is for my people!”

While one team was tied up, the other two made swift progress. It helped if they assumed that the heroes could take care of themselves, and thus they started running the moment their feet hit the floor. A slash here, a tender touch there, and they were ready in a few seconds. There wasn’t a moment to waste.

Thus, when Fuuma was brought back from the pitch blackness, he was left naked and alone, the clacking of boots drifting further into the dungeon’s depths.

“Wait, come back! Don’t leave me!” Fuuma reached, but he couldn’t grasp. His body was still weak. “Dammit, even Lord Akira? It’s not fair. I hate this game!”

“Fuuma.” Tama appeared behind him. Her voice startled him. “Fuuma, get up.”

“What do you want?” he grimaced. “We’re not a team anymore, remember? You abandoned me.”

“You abandoned us.”

“I gave you a choice!” Fuuma’s voice stuttered. “And the second I did, you decided to go to Akira! Do you know how that made me feel!?”

“Yes, and I would do it again. Why?” Tama took off her mask and kneeled, making sure he got a good look at her bad side. “Because you didn’t think this was good enough! Because you never considered my feelings once!”

“What are you talking about!?” Fuuma screeched, but he was interrupted by a violent kiss on the lips.

“There! We kissed! And I’ll never let you have me again! Now give me a gun before I put you back in this conduit myself!”

Fuuma’s emotional storm swiftly morphed into sheer confusion and eventually fear. He didn’t know who to be angry at anymore, what to be upset over. He just wanted it to stop. He wanted things to go back to the way they were before, not even with the prestige and the fighting and the action. If there was a way he could go back to being a normal boy, he would, but until then, he reached into his space and gave the girl his new beam rifle. He didn’t want it anymore.

“Get some! Get some!” Dige shouted, unsure of what the phrase meant, but excited to repeat it.

Even though he was outmatched by a monster bigger than his old city, despite the millimeters and milliseconds he was constantly from instant death, he had never felt more alive. The mana powering his jets flowed wildly at full force. Everything felt so light. He was free as a bird, floating like a dragonfly and firing like an apache. Finally, he thought. The goddesses of this world have mended themselves to his vision. Killing Akira Kasuga was now a heavenly mandate. Oh, what a happy day!

If only Akira himself felt that jubilation. While he was impressed by his own metamorphosis power, it wasn’t a usual spell he used, and there was no way he ever practiced being an ocean snake before. These new muscles and brain signals were unwieldy, uncoordinated. He just wanted to crush the damn dwarf with his undeniable strength. He didn’t expect the process to be so difficult.

Was it the anti-magic doing its work? Would this have been simpler if he had taken the form of a smaller creature? He had the catalogue for it. How many greater demons would’ve done the job better? No, he was overthinking it. He was just out of practice. Everything had gotten so easy that he hadn’t honed his other skills. When was the last time he needed metamorphosis for anything? Maybe as a joke? A funny little ruse? So much potential, and he had been squandering it.

“That settles it!” Akira laughed in Serpent. “Once I’m done with you, I’ll hone all of my magical skills! I’ll go to the next world as a Kaiju! How does that sound!?”

“I don’t know what that is!” Dige yelled, dodging another tendril. “But I ain’t letting you leave this world alive!”

“Akira,” Xim said telepathically.” Some Light Worlders are freeing the hero’s souls. Can you kill them for me? I’m dealing with a group myself.”

“Not now. Not until I deal with this stupid dwarf! Ah!”

A shot from the autocannon struck Akira in the eye, and in a rage, it lurched forth, more unpredictable than his previous patterns, and the dwarf was surrounded by the leviathan’s tower-sized jaws. The dwarf barely registered as a morsel to a behemoth that large, but when his mouth snapped shut, Akira knew, and in a panic, he swallowed.

Uh oh, he thought. He just swallowed the dwarf whole. He had no idea if the act of eating him would kill him automatically, but he could imagine the scenario ahead of him. His outside skin was tough, impenetrable to Dige’s autocannon, but was that true for his insides? He didn’t fully comprehend how a leviathan's innards operated. Would the stomach acid be enough? Could he constrict his muscles and crush him with pure force? What was the correct option? If one could observe the kilometers-long serpent from the fortress walls, they'd laugh at how upset it looked.

“No,” Akira said. “Best to keep it safe. I know a beast that can handle him just fine.”

Byleth, the Unclean, was a demon of the obsidian family, a noble species from the darkest of dark worlds. If he remembered right, his body was 5 meters tall and had acid that could melt steel. He’d digest the dwarf in minutes. All he had to do was shift forms. It took a minute, a minute he was sure Xim needed dearly to stop the intruders, but it wouldn’t matter. He could dispose of the intruders in ten seconds, and the revived heroes in about fifteen. There was nothing to worry about.

All except the pain in his stomach. Was he being shot? No, just gassy. The transformation wasn’t acting well on his system, and the dwarf, he could feel his size in his belly. He was right to assume the anti-magic wouldn’t allow him to shrink with him. Actually, he felt larger than expected, a lot larger. He must’ve been 3 meters tall at this point because he was halting Akira’s transformation. Any further and he’d explode from the pressure. He was stuck at 50 meters as a half serpent, half four-armed demon. 

“I…can’t move.” Akira lurched, confused. “Do I…need to burp?”

The explosion ripped the hero clean in two, propelling him across the wall with so much force that he practically painted the place with blood. The room smelt of viscera, dust, stone, limestone, and dynamite, until the dwarf stepped out of the orerealm. Then it also smelled like sweat.

“Thank the fathers, I made extra,” Dige gasped. 

Dige stood in a position he never could’ve imagined. Neither end was moving, as far as he could tell. The blood went up to his ankles. He had to leave his autocannon in the orerealm, so he could only battle Akira now with a pistol and axe, and yet no one came to challenge him.

“Wait, I killed him? I don’t even know where his-… Yes! I am victorious! Thank you, Marine, you lovely woman! I gotta tell the others!”