Chapter 22:Qliphothic Backlash
The sixteenth floor tunnel was a wide, damp artery of rock and darkness. The memory of the crystal trolls and his screaming arm was a raw, fresh pain. Azazel reached into the violet shimmer of his inventory tool, his fingers closing around the cool glass of a healing potion. He downed it in one bitter gulp. A wave of warmth, laced with a sharp herbal burn, washed through him. He felt the deep ache in his bones recede, the torn muscle weave itself back together, the open cuts seal into angry pink lines. The magic was a blunt fix, but it worked.
He felt almost whole again when the sound began.
Not a roar, not a stomp. A skittering. A chittering. The sound of a hundred tiny claws on stone, and beneath it, a metallic scraping.
From the shadows where the tunnel curved, they poured into the dim light. A tide of greasy, grey-brown fur and twitching pink noses. Blade-Tail Rats. Each was the size of a small dog, but their tails were not flesh. From the base of their spines erupted a foot-long, serrated blade of bone, held aloft like a scorpion's sting, scraping the tunnel ceiling with a sound that set his teeth on edge.
Dozens of beady black eyes fixed on them.
A cold, familiar rage began to boil in Azazel's gut. It wasn't just the threat. It was the type of threat.
Rats.
On Earth, a lot of homies went down because of snitches. But they learned the difference. A quote from some old-head in a prison yard echoed in his mind, clear as yesterday:
"Snitches and rats are not the same thing, let me break it down so y'all see what I mean. A 'snitch' is someone minding other folks' business, to find information they can sell for a price. A 'rat' is a traitor, a conceiver, a planner. He doesn't sell secrets for cash, he betrays the trust of his team or his family, hoping to save his own cowardly ass. The difference is, at least a snitch is human. But a rat is a fuckin' rat... period."
These things, with their blade-tails and pack mentality, weren't just monsters. They were the physical form of betrayal. The skittering, swarming, cowardly betrayal that got people killed.
The rage didn't feel hot. It felt cold. It felt deep. It pulled him down, past the surface of his thoughts, past the strategic part of his brain, down into the core of what he was—the Mythic Seed.
It wasn't a sprout or a tree. It was an ocean. A black, depthless ocean, and beneath it, an abyss that echoed with a silent, gravitational hunger. Darkness is cold. Darkness is heavy. Darkness is an ending.
The Blade-Tail Rats surged forward in a squealing, blade-clicking wave.
Azazel didn't think. He reached.
He pulled his hands together in front of his chest, palms facing. It wasn't a spell he knew. It was a demand the abyss answered.
The damp humidity in the tunnel air curdled. It coalesced, thickening from mist into a swirling, inky liquid that defied the light. From the wet stone underfoot, a violent geyser of black water erupted, swirling upward into a massive, shimmering vortex. The roar of the torrent drowned out the rats' shrieks. It was the Cataract, a spell of absolute, drowning gravity.
Rats were yanked from their feet. Their squeals were cut short as their bodies were sucked into the spinning, crushing heart of the whirlpool. Bones cracked in the terrible pressure.
Azazel held the incantation, his will the only dam holding back the ocean. The water in the vortex began to change. The temperature plummeted. The churning black liquid crystallized with a sound like a glacier breaking, forming countless jagged shards of Black Ice.
With a final, sharp flick of his wrists—a gesture of utter dismissal—he unleashed the spell's full fury.
Massive, spear-like pillars of frozen black water spiked outward from the vortex in every direction. They impaled the trapped rats mid-swirl. They shot across the tunnel, skewering the ones still charging. The remaining few, on the edge of the maelstrom, were simply flash-frozen where they stood, transformed into silent, twitching statues of opaque ice.
The vortex collapsed. It didn't splash. It fell with a heavy, wet thud, like a corpse hitting the ground. What remained was a tunnel scoured clean, coated in a thick, hoarfrost that glittered with stolen light. An eerie, absolute silence.
Azazel exhaled. His breath misted in the suddenly arctic air. Behind him, the air itself seemed to warp—a halo of inverted light, a bruised, sickly corona that darkened the space around him. A sign. Qliphothic Overload.
Then the weight hit.
It wasn't fatigue. It was gravity. A pure, vertical force slammed down onto him, not from the outside, but from within his own bones, his own marrow. It was the abyss calling its power back, with interest. His knees buckled. Every joint screamed. His vision swam with black spots. It felt like his skeleton was trying to collapse in on itself, to compact into a single, dense point of agony.
"Azazel!" Reginleif's voice cut through the ringing in his ears. She was at his side, not touching him, her eyes wide with alarm. "Your Qliphoth is overloaded! You have to calm down! I don't know your side effects, but it looks… it looks like you're in a lot of pain."
No fucking shit, he thought, the words fuzzy and distant through the pain. My whole body feels like it's being strike by God himself. The ground isn't breaking, but my body is a different story.
He tried to speak. His jaw felt welded shut. He forced a rasp. "Is this… normal?"
"Yes. And no. You used too much, too deep. Your Mythic Seed is expelling the excess Qliphothic energy. It's a backlash. If you try to use your Mythic again before it settles…" She shook her head, fear in her eyes. "I don't know what happens. Nothing good. Something breaks. Permanently."
Azazel focused on breathing. In. Out. Each breath was a mountain to move. "Okay… So I just… rest. Get my… whatever… back."
"You don't get it back," she said, her voice low and serious. "You survive it. And you wait. Your Mythicseed is fighting its own battle now. Until it done, you're just… a man with a knife And the handicap of Qliphoth overload"
A man with a knife, a body full of shattered gravity, in a dungeon full of blades and teeth.
He looked at the tunnel ahead, now silent and glazed with his own terrible power. The victory was absolute. The cost was still being tallied, etched in pain across every nerve.
---
Azazel rested, his body a silent battlefield. The crushing, internal gravity of the Qliphothic Overload slowly receded, leaving behind a deep-seated ache and a profound emptiness where his connection to the Darkness Mythic had been. It wasn't just dormant; it felt absent, like a severed limb. He was, as Reginleif had said, just a man with a knife.
To keep his hands busy and his mind off the void within, he focused on the immediate. He built a small, contained fire from the last of their dungeon fungus and skewered the remaining cuts of elemental rabbit meat. The simple, methodical task was a anchor in the unnatural silence of the cleared tunnel.
Meanwhile, Reginleif moved. With Azazel out of commission, the duty of securing their rest area and scouting the immediate perimeter fell to her. She slipped down the tunnel, a shadow among the frost-coated stone he'd left behind.
She didn't get far.
Another skittering chitter echoed from a side passage she hadn't checked—a second, smaller warren of Blade-Tail Rats, drawn by the scent of blood and magic. A dozen sets of beady eyes gleamed in the dark, their bladed tails rising in unison.
Reginleif didn't hesitate. She couldn't afford a protracted fight that might draw more, or risk leading them back to a defenseless Azazel. She needed to end it. Fast. Brutally. And without the space for her usual darting precision.
She sheathed her daggers.
The rats surged.
Reginleif took a single, deep breath, centering herself. She wasn't just a knife-fighter; she was an environmental fighter. Her Mythic wasn't just for projectiles. It was for pressure, for vectors, for understanding the flow of force in a confined space.
As the first rat leapt, she moved. But not away. She stepped into the charge, her body a coiled spring. Her foot lashed out, not at the rat, but at the tunnel wall. A sharp, controlled burst of wind from the sole of her boot cracked against the stone. Using the rebound force, she changed direction in mid-air, spinning over the rodent tide.
She landed, not in a stance, but already in motion. She pushed off the opposite wall, another gust amplifying her speed, turning her into a human pinball in the narrow space. She didn't attack the rats directly. She attacked the environment.
A dagger, flung not for killing but for angles, struck a protruding rock with a sharp ping and ricocheted, embedding itself in a rat's flank. A kicked stone, infused with a compressed pocket of air, became a shotgun blast of fragments. She used every surface—wall, ceiling, floor—as a launchpad and a deflector, her movements a chaotic, acrobatic calculus of angles and rebounds.
The rats, programmed for straightforward swarm-and-stab, were bewildered. They lunged at where she was, only to find she'd already used the force of their own pack-mate's lunge to redirect herself elsewhere, her elbow or heel striking a pressure point on the stone to send a shockwave through the ground that unbalanced them.
Finally, she saw her opening. The pack was clustered, disoriented. She planted her feet in the center of the tunnel, dropped low, and extended both arms.
"Gale Burst: Omnidirectional Pin."
It was not a cutting attack. It was a cage. She released her held breath in a short, explosive pulse of wind in every direction at once. The air in the tunnel solidified for an instant into a crushing, spherical pressure front. It hit the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and bounced back inward with concentrated force.
The effect was instantaneous and total. Every rat in the radius was simultaneously slammed against the nearest hard surface with enough force to shatter bone and rupture organs. A single, unified crunch echoed, followed by the soft thuds of small bodies falling. Silence returned, deeper than before.
Breathing heavily from the concentrated output, Reginleif retrieved her dagger, wiped it clean, and made her way back to their makeshift camp.
She found Azazel by the small fire, turning skewers of sizzling, strangely-glowing rabbit meat. The smell was gamey and rich.
"Are you hungry right now?" she asked, her voice a bit rough from exertion.
Azazel didn't look up from the fire. "Come on. Take a bite with me."
She sat on a nearby rock, the fatigue of the fight and the constant tension settling in. "Do we eat like... a few floors up?"
"Yep," he said, pulling a skewer off the fire and handing it to her. "Fighting and moving that much burns energy. Your body's running on adrenaline and fear-juice right now. It masks the hunger. Give it thirty minutes. You'll be starving."
---
She took the meat, the warmth seeping into her hands. He was right. As she forced herself to eat, the first pangs of true, ravenous hunger began to cut through the numbness. They ate in silence, the simple act a necessary fuel stop in their descent.
After a period of rest long enough for the food to settle and the edge to come off their exhaustion, they prepared to move. Azazel gestured, and the remaining cooking supplies vanished into the violet shimmer of his cube. Reginleif checked the straps on her bracers and daggers, her own storage bracelet secure on her wrist. There were no packs to shoulder, no bedrolls to tie. They were unburdened by everything but their weapons and the void where Azazel's power had been.
He moved carefully, his movements lacking their usual lethal grace, but he was upright. He tested his grip on his kukri. It was just a piece of sharpened steel now. No shadow would answer his call.
He looked at the dark mouth of the tunnel leading downward. The seventeenth floor awaited.
Without a word, they stepped away from the ashes of their small fire and began the walk towards the next descent.