Time limit? Survival? Others?
The words tangled and collided in his mind like particles in a reaction pushed to dangerous speed, thoughts boiling over, searing with urgency.
Before he could untangle a single one, the world dimmed. Not faded, but blocked.
Something was above him. Something vast. If it had been smaller, he might not have noticed, but the shadow it cast smothered the pale glow of the spirit floating nearby, covering him and the drifting carcass of the puppet shark in a cold, suffocating darkness.
He looked up, and his chest tightened.
The creature's torso was the size of a car, four wings spread from it like black velvet cushions that moved in complete silence. Droplets slid from the feathers and vanished into the sea below. The creature had no legs, no claws, only an angular head, jagged and ridged like the unholy offspring of a pterodactyl and a rhino. Where eyes should have been were black buttons, stitched into the sockets of a predator that should never have existed.
His pulse quickened.
He willed the spirit to strike upward. The spirit obeyed, lancing toward the creature's body, but the blow bounced away, skidding off the surface with a metallic crack before nearly slamming back into him. He directed the spirit again, searching for a weakness, but each strike deflected.
The spirit weaved across the creature's form, darting from place to place like a firefly, striking, rebounding, striking again. No effect.
If not for the harrowing situation, the boy might've stopped in reverie to admire the breathtaking scene that seemed to be a deadly game of pingpong played between the sky and a prehistoric abomination, the spirit serving as the ball in this blood-curdling game.
Suddenly, the creature swooped.
It moved with predatory certainty, plunging toward him as if to snatch him and carry him high above the ocean, then release him from a height that would shatter him against the water's surface.
But the creature had no claws. Where its legs should have been were deep scars and old gashes, the marks of something far older and nastier.
He did not have the luxury of wondering what monstrosity had managed to wound this amalgamation of flesh but all he could determine was that the lacerations ran deep, leaving scars that even the most skilled dermatologists wouldn't have been able to treat back on Earth. Also, he determined that he had lived because of this! If the creature still had legs, it would have undoubtedly grabbed hold of him and one more "Nameless" would have perished. Why the creature still tried to grab hold of him when its legs and claws had previously been torn off was a notion to explore later on… 'Perhaps it was relying on instinct?'
Nonetheless, with the creature failing to grab hold of him, it had flown up and was once again stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect moment to grab hold of the boy and savour the delicacy.
The puppet shark beneath the boy rocked as he stood, water lapping at his calves. The boy lowered himself into a stance, his eyes fixed on the descending creature.
The creature hovered for only a heartbeat before its head lowered, angling toward him like a spear.
'It's going to skewer me.'
He threw himself to the side. The jagged crown grazed him, tearing a strip from his shirt, before the bulk of the creature crashed into the water, sending waves surging outward.
'I need to escape!'
Standing his ground was suicide. Whatever lurked below might be worse, but death was already bearing down on him.
He slipped into the water and dove deep, his body cutting through the currents with a butterfly stroke. Every kick forced him down, but buoyancy fought back, dragging at him. His muscles screamed from exhaustion. He kept himself submerged, praying the creature would lose him.
'I-I c-can't hold on much longer…'
Just as despair greeted the boy, hope soon followed…
The spirit managed to find something! A weakness!
One of the deep lacerations across the creature's torso where one of its legs should have been had never fully healed from its previous battle.
The boy seized the chance.
The spirit hardened under his will, twisting from an incorporeal glow into a spiraling drill. It plunged into the wound, tearing through flesh, tunneling upward toward the creature's head.
The creature shrieked, a sound so sharp it rattled his teeth, but it had no defense. The drill pushed deeper.
In desperation, the creature drove itself into the water after him. The sudden surge battered his body and sprayed salt water onto the tear in his shirt, stinging his skin. He kept his eyes shut, not daring to let seawater scour his vision, yet through the spirit he could still sense the creature's silhouette, the image forming in his mind like a sixth sense.
The creature closed the distance between itself and the boy fast.
Way too fast!
As the boy sensed the scene, he gasped in shock and horror. A fatal mistake.
Water filled his lungs. His body jerked upward, instincts dragging him toward air, towards the plunging creature!
The horn was there, close enough for him to imagine it ripping through his skin, then punching through his skull before finally piercing his brain…
And then, stillness…
The water grew calmer, slight ripples swayed around the creature before dispersing into the neverending horizon.
The angular head drifted past the boy. The body went limp.
An illusory raving then sounded in the boy's battered mind "You have slain a level 1 Nocthorn. You have leveled up."
The raving whispered into his mind as the creature's spirit drained into him, its vitality flooding his limbs. Cold faded, exhaustion bled away, and his body felt almost alive again.
For now.
The boy (Nameless 99, AKA 99) slowly appeared headfirst out of the water before his legs kicked rapidly towards the Nocthorn's desecrated corpse. Soon the boy approached the unnaturally buoyant corpse and climbed on top of it. The corpse was large enough for 5 of 99's bodies to be laid out side by side against each other. Lying there for now was 99, his arms and legs sprawled along the refreshingly chilly, velvet-like wings of the Nocthorn.
The cooling sensation from the shadow-like wings inundated the boy, giving him some much needed reprieve as his chest huffed and puffed up and down, slowly recuperating the boy's burning and aching muscle, whilst repaying the oxygen debt that his body had undertaken to engage in such strenuous physical activity.
A concoction of sweat and brine like sea water meandered across the boy's face, trickling down onto the plush, velvet wings of the Nocthorn, some of it even trickled into the boys mouth which was agape and drawing in copious volumes of oxygen before exhaling a multitude of carbon dioxide. The boy had no energy to close his mouth, doing so would only make his breathlessness worse, so the only choice he had was to let the disgustingly salty mixture drip onto his tongue, almost making him vomit which he might've if he had enough energy to contract his abdominal muscles. The concoction fell into his gullet before being swallowed into his stomach…
As the boy opened his eyes, he finally had time to analyse his surroundings and the situation he was currently in.
Above the sprawled 99 was a vast sky covered by heaps and heaps of asphalt grey thunderclouds which blocked out most light, giving the sea a melancholy and depressing ambience.
In the distance, thunder claps could be heard, resounding in an almost metronome-like rhythm, resembling an amateur drummist.
'Where am I? Why was I brought here? I was just on Earth studying for my medical school entrance exams, as I burned through the midnight essence, my eyelids fell increasingly heavy before they eventually shut and now I'm here?'
'This is all a dream?' 99 thought with a look of wondrous glee sprinkled across his soaked face.
'No, it can't be a dream… It all felt so real and I was about to die… Normally you're supposed to wake up in dreams before you get injured or are about to die… That means this is real…'
The wondrous glee quickly evaporated from the boy's face, as despair once again returned and clung to it.
'Let's recall everything from the beginning… I woke up at the bottom of the sea, sealed inside of a coffin that was nailed shut. I was able to escape at the last moment because?' The boy finally realised the abnormal power he had gained when he was on the verge of death, the strange, alien tingling sensation that felt as if something within him was awakening, this was the power that allowed him to escape?
'Yes… Even though I was clawing and banging at the coffins lid with all my might, it didn't budge, and then I was strangely able to open it with 1 decisive push when that tingling feeling inundated me? It can be concluded that something within me changed when I was courting death. Was it adrenaline? No, as someone who's been MMA since a young age, this isn't the same feeling of adrenaline I feel when I'm in sparring…'
'Is it because I almost died, whereas those situations were friendly? Mayhaps and yet I have a resounding inclination to believe that this strange, alien tingling wasn't adrenaline…'
'After all, that feeling of something awakening within me certainly couldn't have been adrenaline…'
Just as the boy finished this thought, he was left even more puzzled with even more questions squirming in his head like maggots.
But before the boy could pluck the maggots from his mind, horror painted his face…
A hundred metres away from him was a ship… It was too far away for its details to be observed for now but one thing was for certain… The ship was slowly approaching 99!