Unlike the abyssal itself, the corruption it left in its wake was far less concerned about being discovered, leading the quartet to run into two abominable animals that had been corrupted due to the touch of the Abyss…

  “These must be the carriage pullers”

  Commented Hortus in a low tone, in front of the adventurer, two beings that resembled–And once were–Horses were feeding upon the carcass of a deer, one was ripping the animal’s hind leg off, whilst the other was crushing an antler using its teeth.

  Although they could still be recognised as horses, the corruption had already taken a heavy toll. Their manes had grown fleshy, becoming writhing tendrils, their eyes, now taking on a dark blue shade, seemed to be melting out of their sockets, and their hooves had broken and fallen apart, exposing the horrific flesh hidden underneath.

  “No signs of the abyssal nearby?”

  Asked Hilene, casually inspecting her sword, her brows furrowed as she looked at the two words engraved upon the blade.

  ‘Slayer Blade’

  She hated that nickname with a passion, but the sword was just too good to refuse the gift… And she was sure that the smith had merely wanted to be nice, but still… It was such an awful title to bear!

  ‘Hilene, The Slayer Blade’

  It sounded like something a child would call themselves whilst playing! She would rather not have any nickname at all.

  “None whatsoever”

  Replied Hortus, still keeping an eye on the two corrupted equines.

  Although less common than the already uncommon Deep-Sludge Infested Creatures, Abysally-Corrupted Creatures were not something the group was unfamiliar with. It wasn’t too uncommon for some deranged mage to attempt to communicate with the Abyss for ‘knowledge’ or ‘power’. It always ended the same way, requiring someone else to come clean up the mess and dispose of the corrupted mage.

  Thankfully, the Abyss was so aggressive that it wouldn’t wait for a proper rift to be created. It would attack and corrupt at the first occasion, so attempts by madmen to let the Abyss flood into the world always failed, ironically, thanks to the Abyss itself.

  With their experience, they knew that recently corrupted beings could still be slain using conventional means.

  “How do we proceed- And she’s already gone…”

  Hortus looked away from the horses for one second, and the next moment he looked, they lay in pieces, cleaved down by Hilene’s sword, their internal organs shredded, heads separated, and skull cleaved down the middle, leaving them absolutely no chances.

  A simple arrow through the heart would have done the job, but it was always best to be safer than sorry. You wouldn’t want to be surprised in case the corrupted creature you struck down had actually melded with the abyssal matter faster than the norm.

  Following this, the adventurers encountered a few more forest animals who had been unfortunately caught up in the path of the abyssal. Most of them lay dead upon the ground, their corpses blackened and bloated with decaying abyssal matter, but some were just like the two horses, still very much alive.

  But it was obvious that they were getting more and more recent in their corruption… Slowly but surely, the quartet was catching up to the abyssal… Until they found it.

  They had never dealt with a true being from the Abyss, but they had collected as much information as possible before accepting the quest offered to them, and typically, abyssal creatures resembled creatures people were familiar with, taking on shapes that a regular person might mistake for something else in the dark.

  Some were grotesque, but nonetheless, they were like an assemblage of recognisable things, allowing one to put their appearance into clear words. This was not the case with this. It was… Simply bizarre.

  They had heard of abyssal dragons, of masses of tendrils and tentacles, of tiger-like creatures even, and in some cases, of humanoids.

  This was definitely humanoid overall, but that was merely because it stood on two legs and had the rough shape of a person. It was best described as resembling a child’s drawing, an incredibly bare representation of a person.

  It was just standing in a clearing, staring at a lone cabin with what may be interest… Or something else entirely?

  The abyssal’s limbs and body were thin, made up of intertwined threads thinner than a man’s arm. It looked frail, gaunt and slender, standing at nearly four meters in height. A strong gust of wind looked like it would be able to fold the creature.

  But the danger was palpable.

  Its head was a sphere, only connected to the rest of the body through a single thread. With a lone abyssal blue eye, it stared ahead, seemingly lost in thought…

  The adventurers remained hidden, keeping their distance from the creature.

  They knew that the fact that the abyssal was unable to properly spread abyssal matter and had a low success rate when corrupting living beings meant that it wasn’t a powerful member of its kind. Nonetheless, an abyssal couldn’t be easily slain.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Hilene may be able to cut right through it, but the weak points of an abyssal matted far less than the weak points of a human. It may have a ‘head’, but cutting it off or destroying it would only disorient it for a few moments at best before it would adapt.

  However, like most things in life, enough firepower could solve the problem. They just needed to keep it in a single spot and rain hell upon it. That was Yeldt’s job. The elf was a strong mage. He could chain-cast powerful spells without letting his enemy time to breathe.

  And with his impressive mana reserve, if he dumped half of it right onto the abyssal, it should succeed in killing it.

  Certainly, this method was as unrefined as it could get, akin to building a giant trebuchet when many normal-sized trebuchets had failed before, but if it worked, why fix it?

  The four adventurers silently nodded to one another.

  They moved, and in the next instant, a simple mana bullet struck the abyssal in the back of the head, dealing very little damage, but it was effective in getting its attention. The creature suddenly arched backwards, planting all four limbs upon the ground as its singular eye locked directly onto the elven mage.

  But from the side, something moved right up to it, and all four of its limbs were slashed, making it fall to the ground.

  One of the hacked limbs surged forward like a snake at the mage, but was interrupted as Gontra got in the way, smacking it back to where it came from with a swing of her shield, whilst the other limbs were pelted with arrows, pinned against the ground.

  The abyssal’s eye narrowed as the elf completed his first spell, invoking an enormous bolt of lightning from above, then another, then another, then another… The elf switched between lighting and fire, the two most destructive elements he had access to, but soon, something was flung away from the abyssal’s position, and its head, alongside what would be called its neck, landed a distance away, bearing clear marks of damage.

  “How did it do that?”

  Yeldt asked a question, but he didn’t stop massacring the creature’s body. A lone head couldn’t do much, so the plan was still in effect as his three fellows diverted their attention to a rather unimpressive sphere standing upon a ridiculously thin thread.

  The creature looked like an exceptionally ugly flower in this state, its eye still narrowed with what looked like contempt.

  Its eye teared open, turning into a maw.

  A scream rang out across the forest. The adventurers covered their ears, expecting an attack, but nothing happened to them. The abyssal was merely… Screaming.

  “What the hell is it do-”

  The elf turned his head to look at the situation of his three fellows, but he stopped himself as he met the gaze of someone he definitely did not know, a young-looking girl with short blonde hair arranged with ringlets… Her blue eyes seemed to be staring into his soul.

  She lunged with a guttural choke, sounding as though she was drowning as black blood seeped from her mouth. The blonde phased right through the elf’s body without dealing direct damage, but the harm was already done.

  The feeling of shock he had felt, only for a split moment before gathering himself, was amplified many times, made to last for several more seconds, enough to create a gap in his chain casting.

  That moment of inattention was all it took for a dismembered limb to surge forth, hitting him in the side, breaking an arm and several ribs before flinging the mage into the distance, sending him rolling across the forest ground.

  Freed from the onslaught of spells, the rest of the abyssal’s body put itself back together, rushing at the three other adventurers.

  Gontra’s face turned ugly, and Hortus’s eyes went wide, but Hilene merely stared at the two separated pieces of the abyssal with only a slight change in her expression.

  “Gontra, Hortus… Handle Yeldt’s defence”

  Then, she moved.

  The abyssal’s head closed back up, regaining its eye, and it was wide open, darting all over the place in an attempt to find the swordswoman. It just couldn’t follow her at all.

  Uncertain of where to strike, the abyssal’s body unfurled. Each individual thread went loose, striking blindly all around itself. None of them hit their target, and instead, the threads began shortening as they were relentlessly slashed into small pieces.

  Confusion filled the abyssal. It knew that Hilene was the one striking it, but it could not see it happen. She was gone from his sight, and threads on all sides seemed to be getting slashed at the exact same time.

  Within thirty seconds, it had been shredded into minuscule pieces, so small that they couldn’t do anything to move on their own, and only then did Hilene seem to reappear, not even appearing the slightest bit winded by what she had just done.

  “It’s my bad that you managed to hit Yeldt, I thought you would be stronger”

  She said to the abyssal’s head. Had she known that it was so weak, she would have just shredded it into pieces to begin with instead of trying to pin it down using spells.

  The abyssal’s head was hacked into pieces just like the rest of its body.

  “Is Yeldt unconscious?”

  “Completely knocked out’

  “Shit, that thing is still writhing, we need to hurry to get him healed to finish that monster off”

  And just like that, the four adventurers took off into the distance, leaving the abyssal to remain in place as several thousand little pieces.

  It could only contemplate its own existence as it slowly perished. Even if they did not come back, the separation of its body so thoroughly was leading to the rot of its abyssal matter. Abyss could no longer course through its body at all.

  Footsteps approached it.

  Were the adventurers back? Its sense of time was unrefined, so it couldn’t tell how long it had been…

  “W–Well, aren’t you in a b–b–bad shape, Buddy?”

  “Y O U A RE…”

  “Wh–at?”

  “...T H E ON E I W A S S E N S I N G, A P O S T L E…”

  “What the h–hell are you talking ab–about? Delusional m–much?”

  “Y O U H A V E T H E E Y E S, Y O U H O L D T H E C O L O U R”

  “Buddy, you're going to–to have to be more specific than this cryptic bullshit, explain yourself”

  “I A M NO T L O N G F O R…”

  “Can you not regrow if your pieces are b–brought together?”

  “I–I’ll just fix you back up a bit, and we’ll have a good dis–discussion, alright? My little sister tells me that you–you-you and I–I–I can be allies”

  “W H A T I S A S I S T E R?”

  “A–An ally that al–always has your back…”