The Gamer Chapter 1548 – vs the Unstable (Patreon)

Three-hundred metres of malice and serrated scales burst out of the ocean. It was a scene on par with what those afraid of the ocean could dream up. The murky bronze beast rushed upwards, its blade-like fins having accelerated it to a point that its jaws now went straight for the crystal entity that hovered like a living mountain above the Gamer.

Malot chimed in choral tones, his form folding in on itself while the titanic maw opened. Curved teeth the size of cars beset the primary maw. Needle-like hooks lined the insides of the mouth, set on a stretched-out carpet of flexible slime.

The tones grew louder, deeper, unleashed in a fractal burst of laser beams originating from the various points of the asymmetrical geometry of the arcane elemental. The forms swirled into each other, until Malot was one nearly stable, solid diamond shape.

As individual lasers or as one bundled beam of incredible energy, all the attack did was delay Dendepthr. The leviathan descended on the biblically accurate angel, making even the crystal entity look small in comparison, like a shed next to a house.

Jaws closed. A myriad of lights and choral noises flared up in protest. Layers upon layers of arcane barriers shone in fragmental, geometric glory. Glory shattered under the jaws of the beast. One layer after the other cracked and was ripped apart by nothing else than raw malicious force. For all the power that Malot possessed, he was fighting Dendepthr. A form of the Celestial Devourer, diminished in some ways to reach for the ceiling of his might in at least one aspect.


Eight thousand Strength crushed the chaotically woven defensive measures. Mana protections were erected again underneath the jaggedly closing jaws, each new layer attempting to stop the tip of the teeth, while those further above still worked against the rest of the crushing force. The nightmarish inside jaws scratched against the protections like jet streams through sandstone, leaving deep marks even if they failed to immediately break through.

The sheer size of the events made John feel like he was watching it all in slow motion, despite the enormous extinguisher elemental being more than twice his speed in reality. It only took a few seconds for Dendepthr to finally break through.

All beauty was ripped out of the choral sounds when the strongest barrier broke completely. A sound like an inner city street having every last one of its windows shattered by a progressing shockwave accompanied the androgynous scream of a myriad of voices. Blue and purple glass cracked, shattered, and was ground back to sand, between the closing jaws of Dendepthr.

Malice gleamed gleefully in the four gold-red eyes of the leviathan. For a moment, there was stillness and satisfaction. An equilibrium of forces, with naught but screams and the munching of internal slime jaws filling the silence of the barrier. Arcane rain cascaded down the dorsal spires of the creature in streams of prismatic hostility that failed to find any purchase between the metres-thick plating of its seamlessly layered scales.

Then, the weight took over.

Malot was pulled down by the sheer weight of Dendepthr still in the water. The elemental chimera of pliosaurus and crocodile only needed its back fins in the ocean to add more to that. ‘That might be a mild problem,’ John thought, looking at the titanic wave created by the various motions of the fight.

‘Just grab onto me!’ Salamander’s voice echoed in his mind, moments before the apocalypse elemental returned to her corporeal state. Hands met and John was taken on an upwards trajectory into the sky. In the motion, he also pulled the Mandala Sphere out of his inventory.

Down below, Malot’s vessel was pulled behind the geometrical form of his Unleashed state. Like a stubbornly clinging mould, it followed the giant mass of energy it projected into the outside world into the sea.

A low humming sound preceded a burst of energy that managed to crack open the grip of Dendepthr’s jaws for long enough that the arcane elemental could withdraw. Swiftly growing the distance, the true devastation of that one singular bite became apparent. A sizable chunk of the consolidated body was missing, turned into a swirling crater of prismatic grains.

An androgynous scream of panic. Dendepthr’s attempt to go for a second bite. Malot turned into a wall too big for even the extinguisher elemental’s jaws to fit around. The leviathan simply bodied into Malot, but even that wasn’t enough to deal damage this time around. Dendepthr had not been deep enough in the water again to build the necessary momentum. Some outer protections broke, but the core held and so the bronze monstrosity sunk back into the sea.

‘DROP ME!’ John ordered in a hurry, when he noticed the air around them rippling. It was the tiny, short-lived tell of dimensions about to be rent. He began to fall and Salamander made for the skies. Neither of them managed to completely dodge the variety of arcane lances that shot out of the unstable portals that opened a moment later.

Crystalline needles, often a metre thick, filled the air with a dense network of sharp points. Several of them connected with John, despite his attempts to use Magus Step to get away. Bit for bit, his mana was decreased by the attacks. A few seconds after the attacks, the portals they came out of closed, taking the needles with them.

John had no idea if this was a variation of the Chains of Babylon spell or some other spell. It didn’t matter either; he just had to keep dodging while Dendepthr continued to do its thing. What mattered was solely that he survived so the extinguisher elemental could continue to assert its supreme power.

Malot knew the same. His crystal form flew upwards, the vessel still dangling from the bottom. John was tempted to snipe at it, but he saw neither opportunity nor reason to get between the leviathan and its prey. Blue and purple shapes sprouted and collapsed into themselves around the exposed innards of sand. Below, Dendepthr circled, a bronze shadow under the surface of the sea, his fins and gargantuan tail keeping it moving.

The extinguisher elemental dived deeper, until the ocean obscured the last of its form.

John and Salamander were engaged in a deadly dance. A waltz to the rhythm of protesting choral tones and portals tearing open. They engaged and disengaged, the many hands of the apocalypse elemental being the Gamer’s ticket to aerial manoeuvrability. They used each other’s power and weight to adjust their course, minimizing damage all the while.

To minimize, however, was not to avoid.

“SHIT!” Salamander cussed. One of the spikes had penetrated her armour and locked her in place. The first hindrance was that John was now in freefall, the second was that she could not dodge when a myriad of other spikes descended on her in punishment. Like an iron maiden, the needles tore into her, turning her into dissipating elemental essence.

John clicked his tongue. Her loss stung, like the ‘deaths’ of his elementals always stung. ‘Could have done a proper Fateweaving on this barrier,’ he cursed at the architect not putting the addition of familiars into the programming.

Gnome manifested next to him in the tiny break she found. Mana was poured into her, to help her erect an earthen cocoon around them, then fuelled only by her own magic. It was a plain and temporary defensive measure, making them subject to all Malot could do from a distance, but it was the best they could do at the time. The Mandala Sphere continued to offer John a view of the outside.

Now that he was an unmoving target, Malot was concentrating all of his energy on him. His form first turned into a variety of pyramidic spikes, before all of them flowed towards and into each other. Whether they melded or overlapped wasn’t entirely clear, only that the energy was blending on the inside. The air itself was filled with arcane residue so thick, the stone capsule’s surface was set ablaze with mana fire.

Then Dendepthr struck again.

The ocean cratered around the leviathan, the might of its fins driving the waves apart with their beats. The flat tail displaced water until the final possible moment, catapulting the long body of the monstrosity upwards far further than anyone ever wanted a crocodile to jump.

This time, Malot was prepared. A myriad of voices rose individually. Separated tones approximated one another, and when all were in unison, a titanic rift opened up in space. Dendepthr sailed right through, re-emerging elsewhere in the barrier. He fell back into the water, diving head-first, while John and Gnome were struck by the blast of energy.

The energy beam broke on the surface, scattering outwards like a stream of dust hitting a hard and smooth object. That state of affairs lasted for only a short time, the stone disintegrating faster than Gnome could repair it.

“Sorry about this,” John muttered in the confines of their waning barrier.

Gnome gently put a hand on the side of his face and kissed him. “I didn’t know what I signed up for when you contracted me,” she said quietly, “but I’m happy to choose it again each and every day.”

Those words only made what happened next worse to witness. Gnome kicked him with all her might, sending him and the remains of the cocoon flying towards the ocean surface. She herself stayed behind and in the pathway of the cataclysmic laser. She managed to halt it for another four seconds, before she too was utterly undone.

Dendepthr was displeased.

John could sense the frustration of the distance between it and its prey and the hatred towards its decreasing time. Ten minutes were almost up and so the Unleashed extinguisher elemental went for one last action.

The moment the Gamer hit the water, he was pulled into the draft. A pull asserting itself on the entire ocean encompassed him. It was a blessing in the first moment, dragging him away from the laser still beaming after him like an orbital projectile. However, it did get him ever closer to the jaws of his very own elemental.

Dendepthr took gulp after gulp of the ocean. At this point, the amount of water displaced and disintegrated by the combat created an utterly inexplicable phenomenon. A kilometre away, where the edges of the Illusion Barrier lay, the water sloped upwards, remaining liquid yet not flowing in, as if gravity and pressure in this space were different. It was a most interesting sight.

Belly filled with seawater, the extinguisher elemental raised its scaled head. Malot realized what was about to happen and directed his efforts to the leviathan instead.

Dendepthr expelled the gathered water in a stream that was so much more than just high pressure liquid. The ocean was a medium, a carrier for the might of this entity of light and water, infused with shadow and wind. The jet was a spiralling mass of slicing shadows and winds coiled around a ray of light enveloped in saltwater, all of it moving at the speed of sound.

All elementals derived the might of their spells from their main attributes. Yet, this was not Dendepthr’s speciality. The two beams clashed in a moment of struggle, creating a zone of devastation where they met. John managed to Magus Step onto the scales of Dendepthr, standing in the relative safety of the serrated ridges. The Mandala Sphere was blown off to the side, incapable of keeping itself anchored anywhere.

The outcome of the attacks would have been in question, had it not been for the damage Malot had already sustained. The energy beam weakened and Dendepthr’s breath attack gained ground rapidly. Ultimately, the torrent of elemental energy blew a hole through Malot’s core, which had him cry out in a cascade of androgynous voices once more. This scream, however, was cut short by Dendepthr directing the rest of the attack downwards, slicing ever closer towards the vessel at the bottom – until Malot simply vanished.

Victory was theirs.

John grinned and gave the bronze scale underneath him two approving pats. If Dendepthr felt that, he did not give any reaction to it. All the creature felt was disappointment that nothing was left to fight. Luckily, John did not have to contend with the aggressive ego of the creature for long. What was underneath him soon glowed bright and turned into four comparably tiny entities.

They all fell into the water.

‘Well, this is going to complicate the way back,’ John thought, amused. The islands had been utterly destroyed during the combat, meaning there was no place to put the exit teleporters. The ocean had been much diminished, but it was still way too deep to stand. ‘Good job, everyone.’

‘I really don’t like being that thing,’ Stirwin lamented. ‘It’s like becoming my worst instincts made manifest.’

‘Sometimes that is useful,’ Undine said.

‘You’re correct, of course, but that doesn’t mean I like it.’ The Celestial Devourer busied himself by swimming in the expansive waters while he had the chance. Sylph was flying donuts. Siena hissed.

‘This is unbecoming of us,’ she complained, while she and John floated there.

‘Broadly, I agree, but victory is victory,’ John answered.

They eventually did return to the arena to massive fanfare. As with all that had come before, the three dimensional reconstruction of the footage was still playing at decelerated speed. It was notably further along than previous entries, owing to John and Malot simply not being as fast as those that came before.

The thing was paused, so he could be hit by the adoration of the masses, or at least their begrudging respect. Even if he was soaked to the bone, he loved to hear it. Grinning, he made his way back, investing mana all the while to get Gnome and Salamander back online.

“Ya did pretty good.” Rave greeted him with a friendly punch to the shoulder.

“The terrain gave me an advantage. Not sure if it would have worked as well otherwise,” the Gamer confessed. Claire waited for him with a towel. The vampire maid stood at the edge of the shade provided by the overhang of their watching area. John did her the favour of crossing the distance. Reaching out, Claire was about to start towelling him off when he took it from her. “Not in public,” he chided her, laughter under his stern tone.

“But Masteeeeeer, I want to pamper youuuuu,” Claire complained, dragging him a little further into the shadow. She pouted, all the way until she got to hug him and press a kiss on his cheek. “Hmmm, I like you with less salt. Not that you ever taste bad.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” John chuckled and looked around. “Aclysia and Hailey left?”

“Yup,” Claire answered.

“Look over here, hot stuff,” Delicia whistled, presenting John with a replacement golem.

“You got thirty minutes to possess it,” Claire hissed, when he attempted to pull away. “I want to cuddle you, my supreme Master. I want to kiss you, my beloved John. I want to reward you, my love, because I want more, so much more of you than you are giving me right now!”

‘Don’t reward the crazy,’ John tried to caution himself.

But he was already kissing her.