The Hyper Confrontation 3 – Crack [Aclysia POV]

“In a strange way, I am thankful to you.”

The sentence caught Samantha off-guard enough that she stopped barking at the lake. She stared at Aclysia, blinking so quickly that one of her contact lenses shifted, giving a glimpse of the blue eyes behind. “What do you mean?!” she asked, a bit screechy.

Aclysia did not answer immediately. She reached behind her head, making sure to reinforce her ponytail with a ring of Black Ice. The magical material covered most of her body, from the toes, over the clawed fingers, all the way up to the sides of her face. She shifted her weight to the cracking and snapping of frozen connections between scale-like shards. The blue gem embedded in her chest gleamed softly with power.

“WHAT DO YO MEAN, MEAN GUUURRRRRRRL?!!” Samantha asked, twitching left to right, clearly bothered by the passage of every second.

Aclysia could empathize. She, too, was bothered by every moment away from her Master. “You and your ilk **** me to consider what my stance should be towards those that would beset my Master’s hearth and home out of a justified but poorly defined sense of infatuation. You, especially, showed me that there are those that love him for the wrong reasons. It attuned my senses to the one that I find agreeable.”

Samantha’s face darkened, then suddenly lightened up. “Whatev’rrrrrr,” she drawled. “I got the better man now.”

Anger surged through Aclysia’s core, followed by a wave of **** relaxation. She gave the lesser woman a disgusted glare, growing deeper when Samantha returned to meowing like a cat, giggling between the animalistic noises. She only stopped to devour yet more of her pills. Like a child gorging itself, she poured them into her mouth, swallowing without chewing.

That was all Aclysia cared to take.

Marice let out a singular, prolonged note, like a glockenspiel hit with too much ****. The claymore’s prismatic spine shone through the Black Ice that covered its grey blade. Sharp and terrible, the Fusional weapon headed for the head of the unworthy stalker.

The shape of her head exploded into a colourful spread. It was as if Aclysia had hit a bucket of unmixed paints. Blotches of colour flew, then turned thin, as they curved around Aclysia in the shape of a giant hand. Words in the palm spelled out threats to John and sexual fantasies. Aclysia swung her sword a second time, in an attempt to disperse the magic. She caught nothing, then was herself caught in the vice grip. She was crushed, and the next thing she knew, she was on her back in the frozen grass.

Samantha’s giggle tore her mind back to the surface.

“You are so stupid,” Samantha said, chewing on more pills. “I guess that was to be expected from the walking real doll!”

Aclysia sent a glacial breath in the direction of the voice. What her aura had not already frozen, the cone of cold swiftly did. Grass, branches, and trees all turned into rigid, crystal structures. The flash cooling caused some of the trees to shatter, now too brittle to support the weight properly.

Swirls of colour emerged from the mist of frozen moisture. They hardened into needles that aimed at Aclysia. Curious, she let it happen. A moment later, she snapped back up from the ground, feeling sore all over. She had taken damage both times, yet there was a gap in her perception.

“You normie really do not get it, you never did, that’s why you don’t know what true love is!”

Aclysia ignored the unimportant chatter of the worthless meat. The only reason to even look at her was that she was looking for signs of pain. Courtesy of her Master’s wise decisions, she had the Mental Backlash Attribute and that meant that any attempt to control her would have been retaliated with damage.

Either this was not happening or Samantha was too high on narcotics to be bothered by that backlash. However, since Aclysia should have gotten a magical ping regarding the pill-muncher’s position after every attempt, the former was more likely.

Aclysia charged forwards, her sword carving through Samantha’s body yet again. Colour spread and gripped her. She blacked out for a moment, found herself on the ground, once more in pain. She swiftly rose, then struck the ground next to her. The Glacial Strike exploded into Black Ice particles.

The effect had not gone on cooldown. She had not successfully struck Samantha the moment before.

‘Unless…’ Aclysia charged again at the Chosen of the Pills the moment she made herself known. There were some syllables that left her mouth, but the first maid had no care for them. She cut through, then let the hand of colours take hold of her again. She went down and struck the ground with her weapon.

No Black Ice explosion that time. The cooldown was not yet finished. Whenever she went down, she only did so for a few seconds at most. Either that or Samantha’s manipulation was intricate.

‘Not impossible, but unlikely,’ Aclysia thought and just stood still.

“Awww, did you shut down? No idea what to do while I slowly break your brain?” Samantha mocked.

Aclysia listened to the words this time, if only to try and work out what this power was. Blackouts were fundamentally alarming to Aclysia. Had she been a less experienced Artificial Spirit, the concept of her mind shutting down even for a few seconds might have put her into a panic. Her enemy certainly believed that would be her reaction.

“Your angry glare is so brutish – I’ll wipe your face from my reality next time.”

“I see,” Aclysia said out loud. “Reality manipulation fuelled by **** consumption. An echo of your sponsor’s power. Predictable.”

“Oooooh, you got me.” Samantha put a hand on her chest and sighed theatrically. Then, she swallowed some more pills. “As long as **** Master 6969 is on the high of highs, I have endless pills to gobble down. His ecstasy makes me invincible. This is true love!”

Aclysia put a hand to her forehead, then sighed. “This will be a waste of time. May I request you die immediately?”

“What are you talking about? I’ll just kill you bit by bit!”

Calmly, Aclysia put a claw on her own chest. She pushed, until the ice cracked and the metal skin behind gave. From shoulder to stomach she carved herself open, stopping just shy of the symbol of her Master on her body. By the time her hand rose, the groove was already mending, the material knitting back together without a single sign of injury.

“You cannot kill me,” Aclysia said. “As long as the tempo of this combat is dictated by my aggression, you will not find me undercutting my regeneration. You will die of starvation long before you make any progress.”

“Eh, then I will keep you away from John, so I win!”

A delusional interpretation of events, but Aclysia was done conversing for now. Her health bar approached the maximum and there was one more thing she could try to put the terms of engagement into her favour. If the Spellslicer in her weapon did not quite do it, there was another enchantment on it to deal with these sorts of things.

She snapped forwards. Samanatha continued to chow down on stimulants right up until the moment Aclysia drove her sword through the woman. Like before, she turned into swirls of colour, which then manifested into a huge hand of mixing blurs and written words. Just as the fingers clenched around Aclysia, she activated the Reality Shatter.

Usually, the experience of this spell was one of distance. Washed out colours and translucent shapes, indicating that she was in another place. Yet, this time, the Reality Shatter brought her to an absurdist realm of moving lines, overinterpreted colours, and kittens meowing at lakes of hate.

Samanatha was an angel with a halo of faces, Hypercrush and John’s both, melding and separating from each other in an endless kaleidoscope. The body shape of the woman was visibly different, her hips wider, her thighs more pronounced, and a pair of draconic horns swinging from her head. It disgusted Aclysia. That was exactly why she was unworthy. Unlike Layla, the Chosen of the Pills and all the other stalkers had only ever wanted to graft themselves onto what others had built, to wear their relationship like a skinsuit. There was not even the potential of introspection there, no purity of intent.

Aclysia twisted the remaining energy of the swing into the momentum for a spinning kick. Her heel slammed straight into Samantha’s stomach. A surprised wheeze escaped her, the only sound she could make while the air was driven from her lungs. Before the impact could fling her away, Aclysia’s black ice tail gripped her by the leg and slammed her to the ground.

A hastily created barrier made of fused dogs took the impact of Marice. Aclysia swiped with her claws next, activating the Glacial Scourge of the weapon to increase her speed. That spike gave her what she needed to close out her three second window with a scratch on Samantha’s chest.

Aclysia returned to regular reality. She was kneeling in the grass. ‘No blackout this time,’ she realized. Either her mind had been reeling from the experience each time or removing part of her memory had been part of Samantha’s strategy.

It hardly mattered now.

Aclysia deactivated the Glacial Scourge, rammed Marice into the ground, and simply waited. Her claws had made contact. The Black Ice would grow. Her victory was now inevitable.

She scanned her surroundings. Slit pupils in emerald eyes widened to keep her vision from tunnelling. Her tail hit something in its constant motions. She spun on her axis, blade flying.

Samantha was a cobbled together monster of exposed muscle fibres, teeth and eyes in wrong places, and the laughter from comedy skits. She had a dozen faces, all screaming out in terror and rage. Shards of black jutted out of the ever-shifting creature of indiscernible size. A mono-colour spire among a sea of fleshy madness.

“BITCH! BITCH! BITCH! BITCH! BITCH!” Samantha’s voice echoed from kaleidoscope wings. Several arms blocked Aclysia’s strike. “WHY CAN’T YOU LET ME BE HAPPY! BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITCH!”

Aclysia deflected several strikes from split arms. She could not make visual sense of the situation, so she trusted in her simple instincts. Step by step, she gave, focusing only on her defences. There was no need whatsoever for her to exert herself at this stage.

The addled creature pulled a comically large funnel out of nowhere and rammed the point down a horizontal mouth the size of a door. Two enormous bags of pills were pulled out and turned around. Thousands of capsules were poured down the gullet of what Samantha had chosen to be seen as. Exaggerated gulping sounds underlined the rhythm of their exchange.

The cracking of Black Ice joined this eventually.

Despite the constant motions and bending of her reality, the crystals stuck to Samantha. The curse, or whatever it could be classified as, was too strong. It was only the foremost of the detriments that being in melee with Aclysia created. Each block of her sword, each scratch of her claws, left more of the Black Ice, while the winds around her howled with icy wrath.

Samantha’s motions got slower and slower, reaching the point that Aclysia no longer bothered to block. The punches no longer had the **** to even crack her frozen armour. Indeed, it was the many fists that broke instead, shattering on her body without leaving any impact.

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” The hysteric screech was the prologue to Samantha’s end. She threw herself, all of herself, at Aclysia in a final gambit. A hundred arms wrapped around her, tried to pull her again into that dimension of nonsense, somehow attuned to the same level of immateriality as Aclysia’s sword – an enchantment whose cooldown had concluded a while ago.

The Reality Shatter moved the first maid across to the other realm on her terms. The pile of horrific nonsense in front of her was replaced with the pseudo-angelic form of the Chosen of the Pills again. She was carpeted in Black Ice.

Aclysia grabbed Samantha by the head and slammed her into the floor. She flailed impotently, even after both of them returned to regular space. The distorted form was gone. Left behind was only a woman with ice crystals on pale skin. She flailed, impotently bashing Aclysia’s arm and chin. She did not do as much as flinch, only upped the pressure on the woman’s skull.

“You were never worthy,” Aclysia said, allowing her even, graceful cadence to give voice to the churning, angry thoughts within. “You could never be worthy. You are not Layla.”

“La—y---laaaaaaa?” Samantha spat, the clarity and hatred in her eyes spelling out that she understood what that meant. That it was not some universal principle that had kept her out, but Aclysia’s choice that she was inadequate. Of course, that manifested in yet more externalized hatred. There was no internalizing of lessons to be found for her.

“You are just another obstacle in my Master’s path, a worthless pebble not even to be kicked down the road.” Hair flaked under Aclysia’s claws. The ground was white with frost. Samantha glared, the side of her face becoming one with the hardened ground. “You have deluded yourself to completion. You are obstructing his vision with lesser numbers and lesser power. All you have managed to do is ruin our day. For that… I will keep this slow.”

Aclysia kept the power that kept Samantha down steady. Less and less was needed as the woman turned to ice. She was barely even breathing anymore, yet still found the power to growl. Even as her eyes turned into solid blocks, the hatred in them was complete. No sign of pain. Not even when the weight of the first maid finally turned out to be too much.

The solidly frozen skull shattered into a hundred pieces. Hot steam rose from a core of still warm brain matter, before it too was permeated by the cold.

Aclysia scraped bits of skin from her palm. “Vexing until the end,” she complained and rose to her feet. She rammed her sword into the corpse for good measure, shattering the spinal column in the process. If Samantha had a way to come back from that, maybe Aclysia would fight seriously next time.

‘Back to Master,’ she thought, leaving behind her cold victory.