Chapter 243 A Cataclysmal Playground [Part 1]
When the first questing appendage lashed out, a slithering tendril of corded muscle tipped with a claw-fringed maw, Northern was already moving.
He flowed around the probing attack with liquid grace, the crimson lance a cunning feint in his hands.
As the appendage surged past where he'd been standing, over-extended by the momentum of its lunge, Northern struck.
The crimson lance of flames slammed into the offending limb just above its gnashing tip, instantly cauterizing the flesh in an explosion of red, withering energy.
A shockwave detonated outwards with enough concussive force to splinter nearby tree trunks.
The severed, smoking length of tentacle ragdolled away, crashing through the tortured earth until it finally lay twitching in rapidly dissolving ruin.
But it was just another opening salvo.
No sooner had that first limb been neutralized than two more surged forth from the horror's pulsing form - a pair of whip-like tendrils that lashed towards Northern from opposite angles, their tips dripping with some foul ichor that sizzled when it struck the ground.
Releasing a strained groaning, Northern rabbited low and then exploded upwards in a soaring leap, twisting his body into a corkscrew flip that carried him through the narrowest of openings between the snapping attacks.
As he reached the apex of his gravity-defying arc, he lashed out with another lance in mid-revolution.
Twin detonations of force ripped through the air, atomizing the questing tendrils in rapid succession.
Northern landed in a semi-crouch, momentum carrying him into a shoulder roll that flowed seamlessly back to his feet - already moving to engage the abomination's next strike.
On and on the exchange raged, a lethal dance where even the slightest misstep, the barest hesitation carried a cost too horrific to comprehend.
Time seemed to simultaneously slow to a crawl and accelerate wildly as Northern matched the horror's onslaught, countering each nightmarish attack with increasingly savage reprisals of Koll's own with his clones on standby for when they will be needed.
Yet no matter how much of its mass he severed, rended and detonated, more kept surging forth to take its place.
A kaleidoscopic array of gnashing jaws, slashing talons, whip-like tendrils and any other manner of grotesque permutations assailed him in a remorseless, ceaseless torrent of violence.
Despite the sheer scope of the entity's virulent biomass, despite the overwhelming aura of wrongness it radiated, Northern showed no hint of fear or trepidation.
If anything, his expression was one of faint excitement and a detached analysis as he sized up this latest challenge.
As the horror seemed to sense thi, a susurrant reverberation akin to glass eroding slithered through that amalgamated form, tunneling mouths gnashing in what could have been anticipation or amusement.
This foe's power resonated on a different stratum, one that strayed perilously close to the ineffable cosmic boundaries it straddled.
No matter.
Insignificant sparks would be extinguished just like all the others.
Defiance was an illusion mortality clung to before the embrace of oblivion.
It would break this one as it had countless people before him.
With a sound like a black hole's event horizon rupturing, tendrils thicker than redwoods lashed out in an obscene cadence.
They twisted into jagged lances, hooks, blades - any manner of punishing configuration capable of skewering, shredding, impaling this insignificant speck that dared raise itself against the sublime.
But Northern was already a flash, a blurring red contrail in his wake as he flowed around the first containment attack with seamless ease.
In the same motion, his palm sliced out, fingers splayed as if in benediction.
Crimson lightning danced between his fingertips, rapidly concentrating into a searing sphere of annihilating force.
With a subtle flick of his wrist, the compact singularity of energy essence detonated outwards, unleashing a roaring tsunami of power that crashed against the horror's probing tendrils.
They disintegrated instantly under the overwhelming onslaught, cauterized to the very last atom in a blinding haze of thermonuclear energies.
The shockwave ripped outwards, scouring the surrounding landscape into a broad impact crater littered with debris and upended trees.
But Northern didn't pause, twisting into a whirling dervish as he redirected that torrent of destruction in a spiraling helix.
This time, when the lightning-wreathed turbulence detonated, it unleashed countless razor-thin lances of crimson plasma that streaked outwards in an omni-directional barrage.
Everywhere they struck, the abomination's questing tendrils were severed, blown apart, sheared through with the relativistic fury of a dozen atmospheric re-entries compressed into single pinpoint impacts.
The forest around them rapidly transformed into an apocalyptic killzone as that storm of annihilation systematically neutralized any semblance of biomatter daring to exist within its boundaries.
At the vortex's luminescent core, Northern hung suspended for a moment - his body wreathed in a burning aurore of power as his gaze met the horror's billion-fold regard.
There was no anger there, no triumph or taunt.
Only the barest hint of exertion reflected the level of force he had unleashed.
Using Koll's ability seemed inherent, something he just knew how to do.
Perhaps that was because his soul was in a perfect synergy with Northern's entirety.
It was because he had such a massive grasp on Koll's powers that he also knew that the Maelstrom had definitely not given its all in their last confrontation.
Maybe all Koll was doing was playing around and then he got ambushed by Night Terror and Northern's attacks.
Northern fully realized in this moment, that they never got to see the Maelstrom's full.power unleashed.
And that was a good thing because he could see the rate at which he desecrated the horror's limbs.
He wouldn't survive being at the other end of his attacks.
He knew that much.
Northern sighed, breathing away tiredness.
He raised his eyes to the horror.
Then blinked out of existence once more, a thundering hurricane of energy essence winking out as if it had never been.
For a split-second, there was only silence and the settling dust of near-total desolation.
The next, Northern rematerialized amidst the ruin, barely ten paces from where the abomination's pulsating, regenerating mass reasserted itself.
His palm sliced out once more, this time with all five fingertips glowing like newborn suns of blood.
"Sim-Ursa Quintatic," he intoned with conversational calm.
This time, when those focused beams of power detonated, they lanced forth as muscular javelins of force - five brilliant lances of nuclear fury that streaked through the devastated landscape like shooting stars of annihilation.
They smashed into the horror's surging form in rapid succession, detonating against that shapeshifting, ever-
regenerating mass with the fury of cyclonic firestorms compressed into pinpoint impacts.
Eruptions of plasma and scorched, vitric matter geysered outwards with each thunderous detonation.
It was as if the entity itself had stumbled into the surface of a newborn sun, such was the scaled devastation those attacks inflicted.
Still, Northern did not let up, unleashing full-power volley after full-power volley as he systematically seared away its burgeoning tendrils and questing limbs with strategic, precision strikes.
No wasted motion.
No bravado or grandstanding.
Just a focused, relentless series of neutralizing attacks as he countered each of the horror's assaults with remorseless, inevitable force.
If it lashed out with whipping cords of musculature, Northern's palms transformed into roaring cannons of plasma that blasted them from existence.
Grasping claws and cavernous maws surged forth only to be sundered instantly by those needle-thin lances of energy essence that speared through any defense with surgical accuracy.
At one point, the entire bulk of the horror surged forwards as a looming wavefront of mayhem, promising to crush Northern beneath sheer ruthless mass.
He simply blinked out of this reality, his deadly form reappearing a scant few meters away as that tsunami of aberrant flesh crashed against the space he'd previously occupied.
Without even shifting his expression, Northern re-engaged - peripheral crimson beams of power gouging furrows into the heaving, vitric slurry left by the monster's passage.
On and on the battle raged, Northern's indomitable form withering the horror's every attempt at advancement with calculated, precision strikes.
Craters opened in its Wake, the woodland gouged away to reveal only a scorched, vitrified hellscape more akin to the surface of an airless moon.
Yet the entity itself seemed as implacable and fecund as ever, regenerating each sheared away portion of its mass as swiftly as it was excised.
It flowed and reshaped, tested the boundaries of this new threat with mutative strikes and assaults that combined into macro formations of terror.
But no matter what malformed, sanity-sundering configurations it birthed from its virulent womb, Northern matched them all with the mathematical precision of a grandmaster playing multidimensional dejarik.
Attacks that should have been able to scour away entire continents detonated against infinitely adaptable screens of force.
Obscenities designed to liquefy the mind and render existence itself asunder found not the slightest purchase against Northern's seemingly impervious psyche.
He was the immovable bastion around which this primordial tide broke, unyielding, untouchable, unflappable.
Until at long last, after what seemed an eternity of that remorseless exchange of annihilating force, something within the horror's frenzied calculations finally began to prioritize preservation over aggression…