Mow through the rest of the tentacles

Using the wall as a support, you push to your feet. The tentacles around you seem to be looking for the best angles to attack from. There are significantly fewer tentacles than there were earlier, a sign that your efforts so far haven’t been a total waste. As you assume a battle stance, the tentacles spring into action. They come at you from all angles, but you’re able to keep up with them surprisingly well. If there had been more of them, you’re sure you wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds.

You mow your way through tentacle after tentacle while dodging every attack that comes your way. As one comes at you, you side step it and quickly follow up with a strike of your own, taking down the foul appendage. This process is repeated over and over, with the beast never seeming to learn and adapt with any new strategies. You know, you find yourself thinking, it’s kind of a shame. My first boss fight and there’s not even a second phase. As if your thoughts set a flag, you’re suddenly blindsided by a tentacle you didn’t see coming. It knocks you several steps to the side, while another tentacle rips your {if@ sword = true}sword{elseif mace = true}mace{endif} from your hand and snaps it to pieces right in front of you.

Blythe did say it wouldn’t last long. Thank you for your service, you rusty old piece of shit.

Without your weapon, this is now a completely different fight. You can only see three tentacles now, but there’s no way of telling whether or not there are more hiding in the dark. For a few minutes, you dance with the tentacles, dodging all of their attacks and observing their patterns. The one thing you notice is that they’re trying to **** you to move further away from the torch on the wall. Is it scared of the light, the fire, or does it just want me to fight where I can’t see as well? There’s no way to tell for sure. All I have to go on right now is staying as close to the torch as I can. And so you do, dodging countless attacks for several more minutes until you start to feel the fatigue of the long battle overwhelming you. Recognition of this fatigue triggers something in you, some primal thought that urges you to finish this quickly, and you suddenly change tactics.

Holding out your arms, you allow yourself to be entangled by the three tentacles, and then you immediately pull on them with everything you have. The eye, which had squinted in joy at finally catching you, is now wide with horror as you pull relentlessly at the tentacles, dragging them further and further into the torchlight. Eventually, the eye itself appears to come forward out of the darkness slightly, and it instantly rears back and lets out another earth-shaking roar.

“You like that?” you say. “This is it for you!” A part of you wishes you could come up with something clever to say, like a cheesy, heroic one-liner, but you put aside those thoughts. With one final tug, the tentacles in your grasp start to wither away into nothing. Looking at the eye, it goes wider than you’ve seen it before, then slowly closes in tandem with the rumbling roar once again giving way to silence in the corridor. As the last of the tentacles turns to dust, an object comes rolling out of the darkness towards you, which you then pick up.

In your hand is what looks like a glass eyeball, around the size of a golf ball. A mini version of you, huh? Guess I’ll keep this. It might have magical uses.

“Now,” you say to no one. “Where am I?” Turning back to the torch, you realize you must have been taken back to one of the starting areas. “It’s not where I started though,” you say as you look around. The walls are clean here, unlike the ones you left covered in burn marks in your own “Fulco riddle” section, as Lia called it.

“That is correct,” says a voice you recognize right away. “This is where I started.”