Fate Weaver’s Legacy

#101 – What? Beating up flying sharks is a classic for a first date

There were eyes all around me.

Small purple glowing ethereal eyes in clusters of eight floating here and there. They kept blinking in and out of existence, but I could swear that they were watching me.

There were also these purple bubbles clustered around the eyes. They sometimes shrunk, sometimes expanded, and sometimes they almost seemed to glitch and vanish for a split second, connect with another bubble, or teleport a few centimeters to the side.

I instinctively wanted to avoid eye contact with all of these eyes, but no matter where I looked, there were more eyes.

“C-Chat, is that you?” I asked, feeling a bit hysterical.

Jeofffff: fuckno wtf is that
RetconRanger: Fate Weaver?

Seriously? Could that really be it? Was the fucking Fate Weaver watching everything at all times or something?

Jeofffff: isnt that Tempor then?

What, so Tempor was just… the Fate Weaver? Was he spacetime itself somehow?

I screwed my eyes shut and shook my head.

I was jumping to conclusions. No need to panic. I was overthinking this. Maybe Tempor – and I was pretty sure this was Tempor – just happened to look like a bunch of eyes. A total coincidence.

I opened my eyes and yelped and jumped back at the cluster of eyes that had appeared right in front of me. I instinctively flapped my hand at them to shoo them away.

Instead of my hand passing through them, like it did with the cobwebs, though, the eyes fucking attached themselves to my hand.

I screamed as I looked at my hand and realized that they were far from the only eyes that had attached themselves to me. In fact, these eyes that kept blinking in and out seemed to be way more concentrated on my body than my surroundings.

I turned off the goggles.

I was back to seeing just the empty boss room and the steam around me.

I breathed in and then let out a long sigh.

“...Truth-seeing goggles…”

The worst part was that even though I couldn’t see it anymore, I knew now that the eyes and the cobwebs were still all around me and permeating my person. That was the most disturbing part – they would always be there, even if I wasn’t looking.

“All I wanted was to learn how to use Tempor, man…” I whined as I glanced down at my Hydroveil.

Jeofffff: well you can
Jeofffff: but its gonna be creepy

I sighed again.

“Okay, fine. Later. Let’s finish the dungeon now,” I said and took off the veil and the goggles and put them both into my backpack.

I hopped off the chest and watched as it vanished.

I briefly thought about putting the goggles on again just to see what exactly happened to the chest, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t want to see that stuff again right now.

The chest was already gone anyway.

I turned around, and finally headed out of the steam-filled room. I hopped into the fallen locker and used Featherfall to gently fall back down – even if the space warping still made the movement pretty abrupt.

From then on, I pulled out my map and began looking for the way to enter the final area. Unlike the first time, I found the entrance into it back on the first floor, literally hidden under a carpet below a table.

It was kinda odd that the dungeon had changed, but only in a superficial way. It reminded both me and chat of roguelike games, where every runthrough was different, but also ultimately the same.

I dropped straight into a tunnel filled with water, through which I simply walked with the help of my ninja sandals, then let myself experience another fall as gravity suddenly shifted and I found myself in the floor two lookalike – I still hated that fall, but at least it wasn’t as bad as the one from the secret area – following that, I went through the empty rooms resembling floor one, and then finally, I found myself before the door that led to the big indoors pool, also known as the final boss room.

By the time I got there, I had already calmed down from the disturbing sight the goggles had shown me. I still couldn’t help but think about there being eyes and cobwebs all around me – and inside me – but I managed to push these thoughts away to focus on the present.

I took a deep breath, running through the strategy against the shark we had cooked up in my head again.

“Alright, chat. Time to play Breakout again.”

I opened the door and entered. I walked in with confidence as I eyed the pool and it didn’t take long for the door to slam shut behind me. When it did, I looked up to see… myself. My reflection, clone, whatever this was. I still didn’t really know.

I felt a bit cheeky at the moment.

“Why, hello there, sexy,” I greeted my duplicate with a smile and a jaunty wave of my hand. She did the same, obviously. “You come here often? Hmm? Oh, only your second time? Me too! What a coincidence! How about we hang out today? We could do so many things together! Like let’s say… hunt some sharks! Yeah, that sounds fun!”

I grinned at my reflection and she did the same.

I also ignored the people in chat calling me a dork.

“Well, let’s get this party started then!” I exclaimed and walked forward, my eyes still locked with my reflection’s.

It didn’t take long for the water in the pool to suddenly shudder, splash, and spit out a winged shark with a cannon on its back, at the same time as the pool on the ceiling did the exact same thing.

On a whim, I decided to Appraise the shark, just because I could now.

War Shark Reflection
An imitation of a War Shark anchored to the local warped space.
This is the dungeon’s final boss.

Huh. Anchored to the local warped space? That probably referred to the doppelganger thing… Well, good thing to know that this was indeed just warped space and not clones.

With that out of the way, I steeled myself for the upcoming fight. I already had my Key Sword in one hand and my pan in the other one, waiting for my opponent to charge me.

Sure, I could have thrown the sword again to attack it earlier, but I was afraid of somehow hitting myself with it because of the space warping nonsense. It was better to wait till the shark got into melee range.

And so I waited. The shark did his roar and dance before charging his lasers and firing them at me.

But after dealing with so many much faster enemies, an attack this telegraphed was just too easy for me to sidestep without even looking away from the shark. Just like last time, after the laser hit, the shark flapped its wings and proceeded to go in for a charge bite.

Now, having a giant flying shark with its mouth open charge at me was still fucking scary, but not scary enough for me to start panicking. After all, I had plenty of tricks to deal with this now.

I bent my knees and then kicked off while feeding Ether into my ninja sandals, which allowed me to jump over the shark’s attack and land straight on his back. Just as I landed, I fired off Rend – hey, I should see how it looks with the goggles – and fed Ether into my Key Sword before mercilessly slashing into the mechanism on the shark’s back.

The shark staggered from my mental attack and then again as my black fire-powered blade sliced through its laser cannon. As soon as he recovered, he jerked violently, throwing me off of its back.

But I was used to getting tossed around nowadays and recovered in record time. Just quickly enough to see him retreating back toward the pool.

I didn’t let him.

Another use of Rend had it shudder mid-air and crash down just short of the pool. It gave me enough time to rush at him, feed my Key Sword more Ether, and take a swing at his right wing, now that his shielding device wasn’t protecting him.

To my surprise, my weapon didn’t manage to cut all the way through the wing and got stuck midway through.

Unfortunately, it looked like I hadn’t cut anything important, since he retaliated with a wild swing of its wing, hitting me in the face, and knocking me back.

“Gah!”

Just as I recovered, I heard a splash of water and swore to myself. Looking up confirmed exactly what I had thought – the shark had successfully retreated back into the pool.

Dammit. Well, my plan to bumrush him as soon as it was in melee range had failed, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. I just had to try harder the next time he charged me.

The room shuddered, making me tense up in preparation for what was coming, and soon enough, there were two more pools on the walls of the room, along with two more of my doppelgangers. A moment later, four sharks emerged from the pools and flew around each other in the middle. There were rocket arrays attached to their backs now.

Interestingly enough, their right wings still had a cut in them.

One moment of silence and a subsequent roar later and I was dodging rockets. Again, it was much easier than it had been my first time around, even if half-way through the barrage, rockets from the sharks swapped targets between me and my doppelgangers.

Soon enough, one of the sharks charged down at me as expected.

It really showed that this was indeed just a mindless mob rather than an intelligent beast as it made exactly the same mistake as last time and I capitalized it in exactly the same way.

Jump. Slash. Rend.

This time though, rather than keep my feet on its scales and get shaken off, I immediately jumped, trying to align it with the shark’s trajectory. I was a little off, but it didn’t matter. As gravity brought me back down on the shark, I swung the Key Sword wreathed in black flames and lightning as hard as I could straight into the shark’s back, cutting through him like butter.

Another Rend to distract him as I landed on him.

And then quickly, before he could shake me off, I switched gears, filled the other Ether pathways of my Key Sword, and ripped it out of its back, creating a burst of crystal from inside the wound.

The shark finally managed to throw me to the side, but it was too late for him. One final roar of pain later echoed through the surroundings and then silence.

I still scrambled up to stand after being tossed and watched as the shark finished skidding across the ground, stopped, and didn’t move again until he dissipated orange smoke, leaving behind only the big boss chest with a skull on it.

I breathed out to let the adrenaline drain out of me.

“Alright! Skipped a phase! I wanted to skip both, but oh well! Still pretty good if I do say so myself,” I said with a satisfied nod.

Then I furrowed my brows and took a fighting stance again.

“Now then… The only thing left is dealing with this very obvious mimic!”

Jeofffff: not even gonna say anything
Jeofffff: just gonna leave and come back later

Hey, come on! Trolling Jeoff was the reason why I had been doing this in the first place!

Oh, well… Not like I could admit that out loud or it would ruin the joke.

I huffed.

How dare he ruin the best part of getting loot – trolling him?