Chapter 48: Great Terror
Hugo was shaking violently, He suddenly lost all control over his body blocking all paths to retreat, every muscle freezing in terror as he gazed at the creature before him.
No... 'Gaze' was the wrong word. His Wildmutt form possessed no eyes and thus could not see in the conventional sense But that only made it worse...
So much worse.
Wildmutt's senses were extraordinary, extending beyond the physical into the realm of souls... And so, Hugo didn't just see the abomination, he felt it.
He felt its vastness, a depth of existence that was unlike anything he had seen before....
He felt its profound, suffocating stillness, a vacuum in the fabric of the world that drank all light, sound, and hope... Most of all, he felt its profanity, a defilement so complete it made the Crimson Terror's corruption seem like a minor stain...
The Terror had been a mere corrupted terror after all.. but this was something else.
It was the pressure of six harrowing soul cores, each displaying a perfected, refined defilement unlike no other...
The weight of it's corrupted drowned Hugo, threatening to break his already fragile mind and infect him with corruption...
'A Great Terror…'
The words felt so hollow, so bitter and so heartbreaking in his mind....
How could the spell be so cruel?
No... This wasn't the spell fault, it was his.
He had no one to blame but himself for getting into this situation...
How could he have been so foolish? Why had he not immediately fled back to the ship the moment he killed that worm? Was his loneliness and desperate need to act so powerful that it overrode the most basic survival instinct?
After all, To wander a death zone and assume he was the apex predator as a mere awakened was the height of suicidal arrogance...
The creature looked down at him, unaware of his internal panick.
It did not move. It did not even breath, instead It simply stood there gazing down at him like a fallen god...
Then, a wicked smile split its beaked visage, an action so terrifying then any scream or roar he had heard during his time in the dream realm...
"What a curious thing you are… You will be an excellent vessel..." that voice...
No it was not a voice, the abomination did not know his language, instead it simply willed it's thoughts towards Hugo...
Then Without any gesture, the Great Terror suddenly did something.
It did not rip apart his body, it did not assault him mentally and It did not even unleash a harrowing soul attack..
It simply… spread into him. .
Corruption, vile and unholy flowed from it like an invisible tide... Drowning Hugo's soul and body...
This was nothing like the corruption within the corrupted devil of nothingness, nor was it even similar to the corruption the crimson spire possessed... It simply was far greater then the two of them combined to the point it did not even feel like corruption, Instead it felt like a natural state of existence far higher then Hugo's own.
It seeped into the air Hugo's Wildmutt form breathed, into the sand beneath his claws, and directly into the fabric of his soul.
Agony, cold and unrelenting, speared through him like a wave... Making Hugo feel his very soul being torn apart...
But the worst thing was not the pain... it was the fact that He knew this sensation very well... the feeling of his very self being unraveled and rewritten by something vile and alien...
A pained roar tore from his beastly throat breaking the silence of the desert...
He thrashed violently on the sand, his own razor-sharp claws raking across his fur and hide in a futile attempt to tear out the invasive presence crawling beneath his skin.
He could feel it taking roots slowly giving birth to a seed of absolute corruption in the center of his soul sea...
He was getting violated by corruption... Again.
[Host life in danger!]
The Omnitrix's voice tore through his broken mind bringing him back to sanity before losing his mind once again in an endless cycle of despair.
[Parasitic assault detected!]
[Error! Corruption detected...]
[Activating Failsafe protocols.]
Unlike when the Corrupted Devil had invaded him, the Omnitrix was now fully Awakened posssesing five omni-cores to draw power from. The [Soul-Bound] attribute and its [Failsafe] trait were active.
Its only mission was preservation of the user life at all cost.... It would attempt to save him from anything, from a falling rock to the strike of a godly being...
And so, the omnitrix willed it's wielder to survive.
A brilliant, azure light erupted from the center of Hugo's convulsing form, saturating his broken body with omni-energy.
The light did not attack the Terror as that was not it's purpose, instead It turned inwardly.
Inside Hugo's soul sea, the nascent seed of corruption was met with an overwhelming tide of pure omni-energy.
Although something was different this time around, unlike before The energy didn't destroy the corruption through force as it lacked the sheer power to do so, instead It assimilating it and breaking it down into smaller seeds of corruption, analyzing them, and then flooding the hundreds of corruption seeds with a omni energy.
It was a process nearly identical to the pseudo trials within the DNA chamber, just on a larger scale.
The Great Terror, still standing motionless, suddenly had its smile faltered.
Its hollow eyes widened in shick. "W-what?!"
Before it's astonished eyes, the writhing beast on the sand was consumed by the blue radiance. In the space of a heartbeat, Hugo's corporeal, bestial form dissolved and reformed once again as the omnitrix deemed the situation dangerous enough to transform it's wielder.
Where Wildmutt had been now hovered a pale ghost-like alien. Its skin was a sickly white crisscrossed with black zig-zagging cracks that glowed with an untraul dark color. It had a gaunt, humanoid torso, but its lower body ended in a grotesque tail of ectoplasm. Sharp clawed hands twitched at its sides. Its head was dominated by a single, massive eye covered by a semi-transparent membrane.
This was his Ectonurite imprint or as he'd taken to calling it "Ghostfreak"
The transformation, forced by the Failsafe, was a clever move by the omnitrix, instead of trying to purge the corruption from his body, the divine relic simply transformed him into a creature that didn't possess a body.
In that moment, Clarity suddenly returned to Hugo broken mind filling him with terror.
In his Ghostfreak form, he willed himself upwards, flying at an incredible putting twenty, then fifty meters between himself and the abomination below.
The Great Terror's head tilted, following his ascent effortlessly.
It could still see him, despite Ghostfreak's natural invisibility to most forms of sight...
Its psychic voice brushed his mind again, now more violent and annoyed.
"One of Heart's children… how peculiar..."
Then the abomination moved for the first time since their meeting.
The creature bent it's knee gathering force, then it jumped upward causing thousands of sand grains to explode from the sheer power of its body.
A clawed, furred hand reached for hugo , moving with deceptive casual slowness that was somehow too fast for him to perceive.
Hugo poured every ounce of will into intangibility, becaming insubstantial as mist. The Terror's hand passed through his ectoplasmic form, and for a moment, he felt a cold so profound that he almost thought his soul was about to to freeze...
It did not take a genius to figure out that The creature's touch meant death.
Phasing through the air itself, hugo shot like a specter toward where he'd left the Azmuth's Ship.
Hugo reached the spot and willed the hatch to open just for him. He streamed inside, the hatch sealing shut behind him the instant he passed through.
Hugo was somehow shaking despite not having a physical form anymore...
After all how could he not? A great terror was something that threatened to wipe out the entirety of humanity even with the saints back on earth...
But for a moment, Hugo thought he was safe.
Surely a great terror could not breach a divine memory of the seventh tier... Right?
A thunderous BOOM shook the ship, rattling it violently....
On the external display, Hugo saw The Great Terror standing on the ship's hull, having found its concealed location somehow...
Not only that, but the creature was... Attacking it from below? It was latched to the lower part of the ship, sticking to it and defying all logic...
It raised a fist and brought it down once more.
The ship shuddered again, a deep gong-like sound echoing through its massive frame But luckily, there was no cracks on its interior...
The Divine memory held without a scratch, after all The difference in rank between the attacker and the Memory's defensive capabilities was simply an unbridgeable chasm.
The Terror might as well have been punching a mountain...
It paused, its beaked head looking down at the unmarked hull where it had with a frustrated expression on it's beastial head...
Hugo watched the creature in horror, his heart beating violently despite his lack of a body...
The situation was terrible yes but it wasn't that bad...
One thing was clear right now was that It couldn't get in But it was locked in the same place as him... He was trapped.
And sadly for him, the great terror could simply wait... It could follow... And It eventually find a way to rip him apart from the ship...
Hugo floated around for a moment, panicking about the situation
'What to do what to do....'
He was tired, hurt and still reeling from earlier attack but he had to do something about the great terror outside of his ship...
'What would sunny do in this situation?'
The shadowy sleeper would probably curse his luck and manage to run away somehow...
But then Hugo thought about something...
'What would nephis think....'
First she would make a small speech and say something like 'If that's my will then who dares to stop me' and then she kills the creature somehow...
'...she would nuke the creature...'
He suddenly stopped mid flight...
'Nuke...'
Hugo immediately summoned the ship's runes remmebring something.
Armory] enchantment description: [this memory's Weapons to match its station.]
The enchantment was an active one capable of unleashing the weapons within this ship...
It was an attack of divine quality, in theory, it could kill an unholy god...
Without delay Hugo activated the enchantment.
And instantly regretted it.
From within his injured soul, all of the soul essence stored within his cores was instantly drained away, forcfully detransfomring Hugo into his vilgax form and causing him to fall on the ground with a sharp thud.
Outside, A part of the ship's bridge suddenly opened then A hexagonal plate of the iridescent metal, no larger than a dinner plate, appeared from the tip, facing the abomination directly.
Gasping for air, Hugo spoke to the ship system
"Kill the entity on the hull..."
The ship's intelligence responded with a small bright lgiht, then The small cannon suddenly started to gather light within it's tip.
The light then condensed, the air around it heating up and fluctuating strangly as if the space of the dream realm was snapping around the energy.
The emerald light grew even more dense becoming as luminous as a star, yet as small as an ant...
Then, without warning, The emitter fired.
Surprisingly, There was no colossal roar or sound from the beam.
After all, how could sound keep up with something as fast as a star?
But what was more mind bending was the fact that there was no visible beam of energy lancing out.
From an external point of view, the space in front of the small cannon simply… displaced.
A line of perfect, emerald pierced reality, connecting the emitter to the Great Terror standing on the hull...
One moment it was there, and then it wasn't.
The great terror, upon seeing the beam did the only thing it could.
It ran away.
The abomination had time to turn, its single step having carried it a kilometer away in the of an eyes the moment it sensed the danger of the blast.
Then the terror its hands as if trying to block the incoming blast....
Or at least that's what it would've seemed like from Hugo perspective.
The creature was actually shrouding itself using it's unholy will which have been accumulating for centuries.
Slowly and steadily, the world itself started to shift towards the great terr favor, the distance between the abomination and the blast growing larger and larger out of nowhere...
But It did not matter.
The difference in rank between the weapon and the creature was simply too vast.
A great terror could never hope to survive a divine attack, no matter how much will it possessed.
And so The emerald line touched the Terror's reality-negation field causing the space between them to simply cease...
The field was simply destroyed by the blast It as was the space it occupied and then the Terror's arms followed, and then the Terror's torso crumbled as well.
The entity had no time to scream or flee. One moment it was a Great Terror, a sovereign of its ancient desolate domain. The next, the upper half of its body was simply gone vaporized by a principle of energy so far beyond its comprehension it might as well have the will of the dead gods.
The remains—the lower half and legs—stood for a surreal moment before collapsing into a pile of ash.
Unfortunately... The attack did not stop at destroying the creature physical body.
The emerald line, having passed through its target, continued downward and struck the white desert.
Then, silence... For a fraction of a second, nothing happened...
Then nothing ended and The world detonated.
The point of impact was not an explosion in the traditional sense, instead the land simply wasn't.
The emerald energy, no longer constrained in one form expanded in a wave of violent energy disintegrating the sand at an atomic level.
The white dunes suddenly vanished, replaced by a rapidly growing bowl of glowing glass-smooth emerald energy.
The wave continued to expand at an alarming speed, One kilometer. Ten, Fifty and then it spiked reaching hundreds to thousands and eventually settling in the millions...
The distant black ruins were suddenly engulfed, dissolving into motes of light that were then extinguished as well.
The very air in the sphere was purified, then erased as well creating a dangerous vacuum in it's place...
A continent-sized crater was being carved into the face of the Dream Realm.
Hugo, paralyzd from exhausting his essence titled his head to the side watching the explosion...
He was a speck witnessing the wrath of a god's tool...
The crater grew to a size that dwarfed the entirety of the Forgotten Shore...
Hugo was mortified... Such a blast could destroy earth entirely...
The only reasoning the 'planet' they were in wasn't destroyed was because the dream realm was too Bizzare and didn't possess layers of ground like earth did, otherwise Hugo would have been drifting in space right now.
The energy from the explosion stretched to the horizon in every direction, the heat from its creation causing the remaining desert beyond to crack and blaze.
Finally, the wave of destruction spent itself, leaving behind a perfectly smooth, shallow basin hundreds of kilometers across, glowing faintly from radiation...
The silence that followed was deeper than any Hugo had ever known.
He stared silently for a moment waiting as if waiting for something...
He waited for the Spell's announcement of a kill...
Nothing.
No notification came...
His eyes suddenly twitched, he knew for certain he didn't miss the spell notification which meant only one thing...
The great terror was still alive.
'How? How could anything survive that?!'
Not only was the great terror alive, but the spell hadn't announced the death of any abomination.
It simply made no sense, how could such an attack not kill anything?
Then a terrible thought suddenly presented itself to Hugo...
The Terror's words: "You will be an excellent vessel."
The phrasing was not something that Hugo had missed despite his fear at the moment.
Its method of attacks was also strange, not the reality bending part but the type of attacks it used was parasitic in nature...
So far all the parasitic abominations Hugo had came across had a stable form and was only able to parasitize a single body at a time but then again, this was a great terror...
Humanity might have faced great abominations before but they did not know the extent of their unholy power, well, Hugo surely didn't...
The Divine beam might have annihilated the vessel but the consciousness of the Great Terror might have already fled, or worse, it could have another vessel elsewhere...
That still didn't explain why he got no kill notification from other creatures in the era but that wasn't the main concern right now...
The great terror was still out there And it was now very interested in him.
Or there maybe the spell simply hadn't credited him with the kill... But Hugo refused to believe this.
It was the dream realm after all, it was safer to expect the worse option as the Reality of his situation...
Hugo stared at the ship's ceiling with a tired expression...
He was hurt, hungry, thirsty, scared and did not want to be here anymore...
What did he do to deserve such a fate? And why was it always him to be put in these types of situations?
The unfairness of it all was simply too much for him, he wanted to scream and curse the spell, curse the day he got the omnitrix and curse everything else in this godforsaken land...
But then again, what was the point of screaming?
No one would hear him, his friends were gone and his family was all but dead...
Even the gods were dead...
Strangely, no tear appeared in his eyes... This was due to the strange biology of the chimera sui generis... Or perhaps it was due to the strange hybride like state he was in right now...
In the end it did not matter...
"Ship, resume the destination back to primus..."
As he said that, Hugo sent a mental command to the omnitrix to activate [Primus] trait, which pointed west.
Azmuth's Ship hummed slightly —somehow connecting with the divine relic— before it resumed it's journey at a moderate speed moving west.
A large part of the region had been destroyed by the blast —with the crater already beginning to fill with the unnatural sand— but that did not mean the entire region was destroyed.
Hugo did not know how big this place but it was gigantic, to the point this gigantic crater might not even be a quarter of it.
Whatever the case was, it did not matter much, The only thing that mattered right now was getting the hell out of this place.
———
Two days have passed...
The endless desert simply knew no bound, Hugo had long passed the area where the crater was and was met with the same sand...
Not only that, he had seen night.
Due to the long time spent on the forgotten shore, he had forgotten that there was such a cycle.
Just like the coast, the desert had its own harrowing phenomenon during the night.
Once the sun sets and the Moon rise... The dead rise from the dead with it.
Ancient skeletons, hundreds of thousands, if not millions all rise from the ground, each with different sizes.
Some were giant, some were smaller then infants, some belonged to bizzare Nobel creatures, all rose from the sand and started fighting each other...
They clashed with a horrifying intensity resuming a long gone war.
Hugo had found out why he hadn't gotten any notification from other creatures...
It was because these skeletons were immortal, they simply refused to stay dead no matter what you throw at them.
He saw some abominations get disintegrated by pure force and then rise again from the ashes...
Hugo had always thought that the adults were overreacting about how terrifying the dream realm was... But he was wrong... So wrong.
The dream realm was hell...
———
[Five days later]
Hugo sat on a crystal chair in diamondhead form watching the great expanses of the great desert. Now that his essence was replinished, he could transform into other Nobel creatures to forget about his hunger and thirst for a short while...
Not to mention that he had found his friends again!
"Hey sunny! Where are you hiding!"
Hugo got up from his chair and went to the back of the ship, finding a short crystal minion wearing a robe resembling puppeteer shroud, near it was two other crystal minions, one having short crystal hair while the other had long hair and a blind fold made of crystals...
Hugo beamed when he saw them.
"Nephis, Cassie! You two are here as well!"
The crystal minions, confused nodded to their master.
"Oh you guys managed to reach the forgotten shore and came to this desert to save me!? Ohhhh that's so sweet! You shouldn't have!"
He grabbed the three crystal minions and hugged them tightly
"I knew you guys would come for me! I never doubted it! Now comon let's eat!"
Hugo lead His friends to a large crystal table filled with crystallized food and drinks.
"comon eat to your heart content! I worked hard to preaper the food!"
The trio gobbled up the food at an incredible speed, all while they chatted about various topics like what they have been doing in the last three months.
Apparently, they conquered the second nightmare only a month after their awakening becoming masters! Not only that, they challenged the third nightmare right after! And became saints! Then they crossed the hollow mountains with the help of Cassie's new seer abilities and found him!
Now they could teleport him out of this hell!
"Ah that was good, now guys, let go, staying in here any longer would drive me crazy! Could you imagine? Me, mentally unstable? Ridiculous!" he laughed as he grabbed sunny shoulder.
"Alright sunny, teleport me!"
"Sunny" stared at him in confusion, not understanding what he was supposed to do.
"Oh comon! Stop goofing around, you're a saint ! You can take people in and out of the dream realm!"
Sunny simply shrugged, explaining how he couldn't..
"you're so annoying you know!" Hugo said in a agigated tone "Fine nephis and Cassie will take me!"
He strided to them angrily and told them to teleport him, but just like sunny, Nephis and Cassie simply stared at him in confusion
"Guys this isn't funny!" He screamed at the trio in anger "Pulling a prank like this isn't cool!"
He grabbed them in his hands and shook them a little
"Comon! Take me back to the waking world "
The trio stared at him in Silence.
Hugo gritted his teeths "I said TAKE ME OUT"
He lunged at sunny, punching him to the wall of the ship then grabbed nephis and tossed her at Cassie.
He stopped forward and started punching sunny at an incredible speed
"Is this what you wanted?! Why do you have to be so difficult! You piece of shit!"
He punched and punched, untill suddenly, sunny broke and Hugo felt a minor amount of essence flow back into him.
"Sunny?.... You're a saint! I shouldn't have been able to injured you seriously!"
"sunny" suddenly crumbled into crystal shards In his hands...
In anger he materialized a crystal spear and threw it at Nephis and Cassie, killing his friends.
He felt the same amount of essence enter his soul when they died.
"No no no no! Why ! " he held their crystals in his hand "It wasn't supposed to go like this!"
He suddenly started crying tears of crystals, holding the remains of his friends...
In his anger and sadness, Hugo barely noticed a peculiar sight in the nightmare desert...
In the endless expand of sand, on one particular hill, a tree suddenly appeared on the vast plain...
Wiping his tears, Hugo suddenly got up, throwing the remains of his friends and getting closer to the translucent hull of the ship.
He summoned [Emerald spyglass] and used it to see the distance...
just beneath the tree, was a strange reflectied light...
His eyes widened as he realized what that was
"Water! It's water!" he shouted and smiled to the remains of his friends.
Hugo opened the ship's hull and jumped out, ignoring the paranoia that has been saving him for a while now.
He landed violently on the sand before slapping the omnitrix on his chest, causing blue light to engulf him.
He transformed into XLR8 and activated his ability, rushing towards the tree at an incredible speed.
In mere moments he was Infront of the puddle.
"It's real! Oh god it's real!" He shouted with a wide grinn on his face not noticing the two skeletons hanged on the tree.
Without delay Hugo jumped into the water, drinking greedily and showering at the same time which was quite disgusting to say the least...
One of the skeleton on the tree titled their head looking at it's pair
"eurys, do you see this shit?"
The Skelton besides it lifted it's head and said:
"Yes I do, it seems Nobel creatures of the modern era aren't so Nobel after all..."
Hugo suddenly paused, looking at the skeletons.
"Sunny is that you?"
One of The skeletons raised it's non-existent eyebrow
"And it's also crazy, great..."
While the other one simply chuckled
"Well, it is quite sunny in this place..."