Swordsman of the Rift

by Brandon Varnell

  Now there was only one succubus and two more ogres.

  I glanced at Brad, who was battling against the strange monster that succubus had summoned, and I couldn’t help but grimace. Brad looked awful. His armor was missing in several places. Blood flowed freely from wounds on his arms, face, and legs. One of his arms looked like it had been rendered useless somehow. It hung limply at his side, forcing him to fight with only one hand, which hampered his fighting effectiveness.

  Then I looked at Vyra and Elric. The two of them were having an easier time than before, but it was still hard going. They dodged swings from the two ogres, and the succubus had decided to focus her attacks on Elric, who wasn’t immune to fire like Vyra seemed to be. One of the flames struck him, and he went down with a scream.

  Making another decision, I raced toward Elric and Vyra. I ran toward the nearest ogre and leapt into the air. Maybe it was because I was at a high level, but my leap took me clear above its head, and as I came down from above, I used Death by Piercing to penetrate its skull. My sword went through the back of its head and out its mouth. I pulled the blade free, leapt down from its shoulders, and landed on the ground.

  I paid no attention to the creature as it fell to the floor, but I felt how it shook the room.

  Vyra was able to take care of the other ogre. She flew into the air and clawed at its throat. Blood gushed from the wound before she plunged her claws into its eye socket as it went down. Meanwhile, Elric had finally used a spell that shot a white beam of energy from his mace, which struck the succubus and caused her to scream as her body burst into black ash.

  We glanced at each other, to confirm that all of us were okay, then joined Brad, who looked even more like shit than before. It seemed as if he had slain the monster, which had disappeared. However, the succubus who had re-appeared, as though she was done hiding, looked pristine.

  She smiled at them.

  “Oh, my. You took care of those creatures fast.” The succubus held a hand to her cheek. “I wasn’t expecting you to kill those grunts for at least another few minutes.”

  Brad wore a pained expression as he reached into his cloak and pulled out a flask of bubbling red liquid, which he downed in a single swig. My eyes widened as his wounds healed in front of me. It was like someone had reversed the flow of time, like watching a movie in rewind. His arm knit back together, his cuts disappeared, and even the blood covering his body vanished.

  “You’re outnumbered now,” Brad said. “There’s no way you can win against all of us.”

  “You think so?” The succubus grinned.

  Her confident expression unnerved me. She really was outnumbered now, and even if she had no trouble against one of us, there was no way she could defeat all of us. She had to know that. Even if she was bluffing, there should have been some hint that she was nervous. Yet as I looked at her face, I couldn’t see a single hint of worry on her succulent features.

  A loud rumbling suddenly caused the floor to shake. I thought another ogre was coming at first, but then a creature emerged from the stairway. Far larger than even the ogres had been, at least twice their size, this monstrosity was covered from head to toe in what appeared to be bone armor. It had two legs and two thick arms like tree trunks, bulging with veins. A pair of claymores was gripped within its massive hands. Gleaming red eyes glowed with malevolence from beneath an iron wrought helm that resembled a demon.

  “I knew you’d be back, so I made a playmate for you,” she said. “He takes a little while to activate, though, so I had to distract you with those grunts and a few parlor tricks. However, he is now ready to play with you. I hope you can all become good friends with him.”

  As I stared at this massive creature, so far beyond my comprehension, I wondered about how powerful it was. Surely it didn’t have the same strength as this sub-boss. However, it must have been strong. It looked strong, at least.

  I looked at Brad. His expression was pale. All the blood had drained from his face, but his eyes were hard as he gripped his scythe.

  “Anyone have any ideas?” asked Elric. None of us said anything. “Well, shit.”

  And that was when the creature charged. It moved faster than I thought possible. Brad tried to stop it, but it swung one of its claymores at him. He raised his scythe to block. However, trying to block a swing like that was impossible. While Brad wasn’t sliced in half, his body was picked up and hurtled through the air like a ragdoll before he smacked the floor. I thought he’d be out, but he sprang back to his feet surprisingly quickly and charged forward again.

  The rest of this battle became a blur to me as we attacked this creature, were repelled, and then had to dodge its counterattacks. Those heavy swings it used dug gouges in the floor. Each attack was a one-hit kill, so we had to avoid all of them. We couldn’t even afford to block, lest we get sent flying like Brad first did.

  The woman watched on, arms crossed under her breasts, a pleased smile on her face. However, she seemed to become disinterested in merely standing there and soon joined the fray. Once that happened, our situation became impossible.

  The woman herself was not a close-range fighter. She disappeared like a ghost and attacked with magic from a distance. I couldn’t tell what she specialized in, but she hit Vyra with a strange spell that made the woman drop to her knees and scream in fear. She would have died when the bone knight swung its sword at her. However, Elric and I grabbed the Dragonfolk woman and leapt back mere seconds before the sword plowed into the ground.

  “It’s no good. Damn it! Retreat!” Brad soon came to realize we weren’t strong enough to fight this monster and the succubus.

  We started running backward, but the succubus was having none of that.

  “Oh, no, no, no. You can’t leave after coming all this way to visit. At least stay for tea and cookies.”

  As she spoke, more imps, ogres, and succubi emerged from those secret passages and tried to block our way. We cut into them, but there were so many it was like wading through cement. With the monster and sub-boss behind us and these beasts in front, we were shit out of luck.

  Visions of my past played before me as the other three fought as ferociously as they could. My friends dying all around me, my hands stained red as I tried to save them. Helplessness. Coldness. Isolation. All the emotions I felt back then were coming back to me in waves, but rather than let them take me, I used them to fuel me. I knew what I had to do.

  I would not let anyone die again.

  With a roar, I jumped into the fray and activated Whirlwind Slash. Blood sprayed around me like a fine mist as several imps were cut down and an ogre lost its leg. Then I activated Fire Slash, decimating even more forces in front of us, followed by Fireball. My quick succession of attacks cleared a path for my comrades.

  “Everybody run!” I shouted.

  No one argued. They ran as I activated Death by Piercing and killed an ogre by impaling it through the throat. My cooldown time for Whirlwind Slash went down, so I used it again to kill more demons.

  By this point, my comrades had already reached the door. They pushed it open and ran out. However, Elric turned to me as I activated Fire Slash again.

  “Come on! Hurry!” he shouted at me.

  I decimated another group with Fireball, then turned around and tried to run, but the moment I took another step forward, a wave of dizziness swept over me. I blinked, then blinked again. Before I realized what was happening, I had fallen face first onto the floor. Darkness began surrounding me. I thought I heard a scream. Then my world faded away.

  Everything went black.

  Chapter 4

  It felt like someone had smacked me over the head with a hammer. As I woke up, releasing a stifled groan of pain, I wondered what the hell I’d been drinking last night to get such a bad hangover. Not only did it feel like my head had been split open and someone broke my brains apart with a jackhammer, but my arms and shoulders felt like they’d been torn from their sockets.

  A cold breeze blew o
ver my body, making me shiver, and I wondered if whoever I’d slept with last night had stolen the blanket. This was the last time I was sleeping with that—

  “Oh. I think he is finally coming to,” a voice said, causing my thoughts to freeze.

  I opened my eyes and looked around. I couldn’t see much. Everything appeared as fuzzy shapes, but as I blinked, the world eventually came into sharp focused, and I realized this was not some woman’s bedroom, there was no blanket, and I was not lying in a bed. I wasn’t even lying down.

  I was hanging from the ceiling, my arms bound in shackles. That dull ache I felt came from my arms having to carry the entire weight of my body for who knew how long.

  “Good morning,” a woman said to me. She had a face that was pleasing to look at. Her soft nose was small and cute, and her full, sensuous lips were pursed as they curled into a smile that made me tempted to lean down and kiss them. Seductively narrowed eyes that glowed a soft blue stared at me from a pink face—as in a face that was literally pink and not just blushing. What’s more, her eyes were not just blue. The iris, sclera, and even her pupil were all one uniform color. Also, she had horns on her head.

  Which just brought another point home.

  This woman wasn’t human.

  “What… what is…?”

  I tried to ask “What the hell is going on?” but couldn’t. My throat felt thick, like something was clogging it, and that made it hard to talk.

  “I wouldn’t try to speak just yet.” The woman smiled, though it wasn’t a very kind smile. It was more amused than anything. “You ended up expanding all your mana and suffered from what we call Mind Down. It happens when you use up every ounce of mana you have. Your mind shuts down temporarily until your mana recovers.” She paused, her smile widening. “You know, you are quite lucky my mistress is so magnanimous. When she saw you pass out, she decided to take you captive rather than kill you. Aren’t you fortunate?”

  While she said that like I should consider myself lucky, the fact that she said I was being held captive caused me to remember what happened to me. I remembered accepting a job, traveling into this not-virtual reality world, fighting through a horde of monsters, and battling against this succubus creature and her minions. Nothing after that though. It was like there was a blank space in my memories, likely caused by that Mind Down thing this demon lady just mentioned.

  “What… do you plan on doing with me?” I asked.

  The succubus’s smile widened. “Good question. You see, my mistress actually wants to know about your world, and she has given me the savory—I mean, the honorable task of prying that information from your lips.”

  “So you mean to interrogate me,” I said.

  “Correct.”

  There were a lot of things I could have said and done in response to that. I could have told her I’d never say anything, could have spat in her face, could have told her to suck my dick—which admittedly was a thought. I didn’t, however. No, it was more like I couldn’t.

  The succubus woman stared at me, the glow in her eyes brightening, and she suddenly looked ten—no, a hundred times more attractive than before. I realized only now that she wasn’t wearing any clothing. Her completely naked body was bared before me, inch after inch of supple flesh that I just wanted to grab. Perky tits that were large and seemed to completely defy gravity made me wish I could lean forward and take her nipples into my mouth. In this moment, the woman before me was a beauty unlike any other. It felt like I was falling in love.

  “Tell me what you know about your world,” the woman said. Her voice contained a seductive overtone that made me want to tell her. “What’s it like? What are the people like? Is there a military infrastructure we need to be aware of?”

  I opened my mouth to answer her. It was an unconscious gesture, but then I quickly snapped it shut. I closed my eyes to block out the sight of this woman. Even though I was trapped within a haze of lust, I realized, however belatedly, that she was doing something to my mind, making me so horny and enamored with her that I wanted to reveal all my secrets.

  “Come on now.” Something grabbed my eyelids and pried them open. I tried to close them, but I couldn’t. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”

  The woman gave me this reassuring smile, as if everything would be all right if I told her what I knew, that telling her what I knew would make everything better. It felt like an incredible pressure was welling up inside of my mind. All of my mental energy, everything I could dredge up, was being used to resist that smile.

  In a last ditch effort to resist this compulsion, I gathered the saliva in my mouth and spat in the woman’s face.

  The compulsion disappeared. The smile on the woman’s face was gone.

  “Ungrateful bastard!” she screeched. “I tried to be nice! I tried to do this the easy way, the pleasant way, but it seems like more drastic measures will be needed!”

  At these words, the woman raised her hand, and I noticed that she had some incredibly long nails. Sharp. Pointed. Those things were no joke. Of course, I only realized what they were going to be used for as she brought her hand down and raked those nails against my flesh.

  I bit my lip to keep from screaming in pain, though I couldn’t stop myself from whimpering. Blood welled up along my skin as the woman’s nails tore into me. Four ragged gashes appeared on my chest, the blood dripping down my naked body.

  The pain was so much it almost overwhelmed me. I had already accepted that this wasn’t a simulation, but if I hadn’t accepted it back then, I would have been forced to accept it now. No simulation could ever create simulated pain that felt this real, this intense. It was like every nerve in my body had convulsed in agony.

  “Tell me what you know about your world!” the succubus woman demanded.

  Despite the pain, I managed to chuckle. “Fuck you.”

  The woman’s face contorted with rage, but that only made the pain I felt worth it. However, every action had consequences, and I found out what mine were when she grabbed me by the face. An outpouring of flames were released from her hand. I couldn’t stop the scream from escaping this time. My face was burnt. I could feel the fire burning my skin, melting my flesh, and eating away at my bones. It hurt! Fuck dammit, it hurt! I screamed and cried and tried to struggle, but it was no use. The pain wouldn’t stop. It didn’t stop.

  I think I must have blacked out. When I came to again, I was lying on something cold and hard, and two people were standing over me.

  Well, I called them people, but they clearly weren’t human. One of them was a beautiful woman with pale skin, golden hair, and pure white wings with beautiful and soft-looking feathers, like those of an angel. I wondered what an angel was doing here. The other woman was definitely a succubus like the one who tortured me, but she was the most human one I’d seen of the lot so far. Her skin was pink, but it was lighter than the others, more of a pale pink. She lacked the horns of most succubus, and she didn’t have wings or even a spaded tail.

  “Hurry… p…”

  “D… ush…!”

  They were saying something. I tried to listen more closely, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. However, my body wasn’t in as much pain as before. The angel-like creature’s hands were also glowing a bright golden color. That must be… some kind of healing magic? Maybe? I couldn’t tell, and I ended up falling asleep again.

  When I woke up next, I was back with the succubus woman, who was not nearly as kind this time as she tried to interrogate me again. However, it was specifically because she wasn’t as nice that I had an easier time resisting. As a Marine, I’d been trained extensively in how to resist interrogation, so even though she whipped me, broke my bones, tore off my fingernails, and ripped apart my flesh, I never answered any of her questions.

  I didn’t know how much time was passing, whether it was hours, days, weeks, or even years. My life became a routine. I would wake up, be tortured, pass out from pain, wake up as I was being healed, and then the process would re
peat itself. It was not what I would call a pleasant experience. However, this did remind me of a situation where I’d been taken prisoner during a mission gone wrong. I’d been tortured repeatedly for information until ultimately being rescued by my best friend.

  My best friend who was now dead.

  This process repeated itself until, one day, I woke up not hanging from shackles or lying on a bed. When I woke up this time, it was in a prison cell. I looked around at the gray stone walls, floor, and ceiling. There was literally nothing here except for the bars that kept me from traveling into the hallway beyond. Through the bars, more cells revealed themselves to me.

  One of them was occupied.

  I sat up, trying to stifle my cry of agony as I scooted over to the bars and leaned against them. They were cold, but I was already cold… and naked, so it wasn’t a problem.

  I looked into the other cell across from me, where a woman was sitting. It was… I’m pretty sure it was the angel lady who’d been healing me. Now that I was getting a good look at her, I could see that she wasn’t in the best of shape either. Her golden hair, while pristine, was in disarray, and her toga-like robes were covered in stains and dirt. Likewise, her sandals appeared to be threadbare and on the verge of breaking.

  At the same time, despite the dirt and grime covering her body and clothes, she was still breathtakingly beautiful.

  Her hair was long like a shimmering waterfall and looked as though it had been made from threads of silk. She had pale skin and vibrant green eyes that were wide and appeared innocent. Her small nose was perfectly straight and she had small pink lips. She had a rounded face, like there was still some baby fat leftover from when she had been a teenager, but that just gave her a youthful attractiveness. Her body, what I could see of it, was perfect. Large breasts. Wide hips. A thin waist. Legs that went on forever. That was a paradox because they ended in a pair of small, cute feet. She would have knocked out any competition if she’d taken part in a beauty pageant back on Earth.