Nothing

  A deafening silence covered the two platforms floating upwards in Nothing around 20 feet apart. Each platform was about 200 square feet. It was massive for anything I’d done with magic before the strange combo of mana overcharge and the abnormal metaphysics of Nothing. But with nearly two hundred people crammed on them, it was barely enough for standing room. And then something hit us. Both platforms were densely crowded, with not enough space for each person to stretch out their arms, much less swing a sword or fire a bow. Fish in a barrel was an understatement. My mana bar was now only slightly above its usual hue of blue- shining a bright aquamarine.

  “What the hell is happening?” I shouted. I expected the sound to be drowned out by the unnatural silence that had been created by the whatever it was, but my voice carried, better than it would have in normal outdoor conditions.

  “It will be one of the creatures that live in this inbetween place. I expect it shall be rather a large one,” Clarence said.

  There was a second un-roar. This time I could somehow tell a direction, and when I looked down to my left I saw it. I had expected an inky black blot of tentacles and non-euclidean shapes. I even had cause- the first eldritch horror I’d faced, the ‘extremely lesser eldritch horror’ from challenge one had been a black mass of tentacles, more or less. This was nothing like it. A prism of dark purple, reflective surfaces undulated. It didn’t look quite like a pair of building-sized gemstones, or spearheads, or perhaps shards of glass. It looked like nothing else, and describing it would have been nigh impossible even if it hadn’t been in near pitch blackness. Suffice to say it was geometric, made up of several floating components and shone with a crystalline reflection. It consisted of three or five of these crystal structures, orbiting each other in irregular patterns.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “In our experience the creatures have been exclusively hostile,” Clarence said.

  It didn’t even show up on my HUD. It wasn’t that it was too high level for me to read its status, it simply didn’t register.

  “We will need a third platform to survive this,” Adam said. His calm hadn’t broken, but I was starting to suspect that this was more a matter of his calm being impossible to break, rather than any indication of his confidence.

  “I don’t have infinite mana,” I said.

  “We cannot fight in this arrangement. It will kill everyone,” Adam said. I said “Fuck” and began casting another floating invisible barrier. I should at least have asked Adam about the details of how to get out of here, but I had just wanted to get in and out as soon as possible. Fuck.

  I cast another barrier, between our two existent ones, five feet below. Immediately people closest to that edge started dropping down and drawing weapons. It was still frustratingly tight, but I wasn’t going to use any more mana unless unavoidable.

  “Anna, I think you’re on,” I said.

  “Got it,” she said. She walked up to the edge of the platform and began casting a more major spell. And then the monster attacked.

  I felt more than saw or heard three points of vacuum behind us. I could somehow make out points on the top right of us that had become the sources of some ability of the horror, all making invisible lines to it with us in between. Then, with a sudden popping sensation these points moved.

  If I could only look with my eyes, this is what I would have seen: nothing at all, followed by three random people suddenly being pulled rapidly towards the prisms, their bodies broken and ragdolled against the platforms by the force of the impact. But I could sense something more. There was a… feeling to the points above us, almost like a sound, or an echo.

  Regardless, there were two outcomes to the brutal impacts. There were five total.

  The two luckier targets were smashed into the floor of the barrier, crushed instantly, leaving the soles of our boots wet with viscera. The other three were pulled into the creature where they unraveled. It was like they were pulled apart in noodle-shapes, even as they still screamed. Two men, both in solid quest-reward armor and an elderly woman. I hadn’t seen the targets who’d been crushed to paste in time.

  But with our first casualties the spell was broken. Everyone here could defend themselves, and many had ranged options.

  “Keep calm. You will recall that all of the ones we have faced before could be killed, even if we couldn’t see the damage we were doing,” Clarence intoned loud enough for everyone to hear. And Anna finished her spell.

  She had wisely not gone for the massive 4th tier spell- it’d leave her fully drained and might not work properly in Nothing- but the 3rd tier fireball variant was a sight to behold. A pea-sized ball of focused green-blue light flickered through Nothing and when it hit the horror, it exploded in a fireball large enough to engulf the entire creature. We all shook with a silent scream, this time loud enough to interrupt every other spellcaster’s casting. And a rain of arrows, bullets and stranger projectiles yet followed Anna’s spell.

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  Until the flames fell away it felt almost as if we had it. But when we could see the monster once again, it was nearly unharmed. There was a crack pattern on one of the gemstone surfaces, but nothing more, no impediment or pain response that we could see.

  This time its attack wasn’t a testing, brief assault, instead it began teleporting around us, again and again, each time using its strange pull ability, each time killing no fewer than a couple of people. No defense seemed to work on it, it even passed my invisible barrier when it attacked from above. And so I had to do something before more people died.

  I cast a third mage hand, and now had three to control. With the Mind stat I had when I entered this Tower a mere ten days ago, I would have perhaps been able to awkwardly move the platforms one at a time, but now I could actually sense the incoming attacks and move them out of the way. All at the same time, we re-directed attacks, as I twisted the platforms around like an erratic ferris wheel. I couldn’t protect everyone, but instead of several people dying each barrage, it was now one person every other.

  Then the creature made what I could only explain as a tactical blunder. It crashed several of the gemstone components of its body together, creating a resonant sound, and then it teleported into the space right between the platforms. It began crackling, frazzling with arcane (no, not arcane, I didn’t know what it was, but it was not arcane) power, building up to an explosion.

  But we were all survivors of the Tower for nearly two weeks. Certain death wasn’t something most of us as much as flinched at. So that when the creature was in a crossfire deadzone in between all of us, everyone unleashed hell on it. Several people even jumped with melee weapons held high from one platform to another, slicing, stabbing and bludgeoning it.

  One did not make it, falling forever. At least they had a blade with them when they fell.

  But our frantic assault had the effect that we had hoped for. While there was a spray of telekinetic pull attacks that the monster threw out in what I assumed was defensive desperation, it couldn’t overcome the sheer volume of attacks we made against it, its every surface cracking, and a plane of crystal facing Anna’s section shattered completely.

  Which would have been for nothing if it blew us all up as it clearly planned to. But when I thought it was about to blow, I shot the platforms in opposite directions as fast as I could. There was an explosion of purplish lightning-like energy, but it hit none of us.

  And with that, it was done playing with us. The void rippled as it drew itself together, the reflections sharpening into edges. It arranged itself in a spear-head pattern, a sharp, jagged point of its strange body pointing forwards and began to move in rapid dashing patterns. It came to our platform, put itself together as dense as possible and flew towards us. It was going to kill every person on this platform. Even if it had been just made out of rocks, the mass and speed would create enough energy to smash us. But it was made of who knew what and moved with purpose. I had to stop it.

  No time for another barrier, but the shield spell would work better anyways. But I had to cover dozens of impact points in half as many seconds. I couldn’t do it, unless- I focused, remembering that desperate moment when facing the hag. I’d spoken in two voices then, the presence in my mind splitting the effort of spell-casting with me. I didn’t have the time to question it, I just did it.

  “Pha-,” I said, as the second layer of my voice completed the conjuration. “-Ack” I said, completing two shields at once, blocking two of the largest incoming, as I moved the platform aside. I cast the spells twice as quickly as was possible for a human tongue and I did it while moving the platform and focusing the shields on an intercept course. And as soon as they were momentarily stopped by the shields, the people on the platform attacked. Finally, the first shield expired and the main body of the monster hit the platform, but much slowed and with time enough for people to get out of the way. And everyone began hacking at it on the blood-soaked barrier. Until-

  Crack

  It broke apart. A cheer went up around me, and I couldn’t help but join. We’d done it. We’d-

  Lurch.

  Barf.

  Fuck.

  I threw up blood. Time had run out. I was out of mana. I was casting from hitpoints. A lot.

  Anna was first to notice. But she couldn’t do anything. We were fucked. There was simply nothing.

  “Health potions, mana potions, healing spells, anything, on Alex, NOW!” she shouted and people stopped cheering and responded after a moment of stunned silence. I had a health potion pushed down my mouth and I swallowed it, it knitting up my rupturing insides as quickly as they were splitting apart. Several others, some mana, some health, each buying seconds. This was a bandaid on an arterial wound. I had to do something, now. I tried to think through the pain, but everything was so much. Didn’t I have some advantage? Some card still up my sleeve.

  And it came to me. I didn’t have a card, but I did have a chip. Bleeding out of my every orifice and pore, and pulling the barriers back together with the last of my focus, I fished through my robe pockets until I found a circular wooden token. The description had said that it would adapt to any circumstances in order to work. Well, it was time to see just how true that would be. I could sense the item activation ability like a switch in my head. I flipped it, and threw my token of Mage Tower onto the edge of the invisible barrier.

  The whole world flickered, like something that wasn’t supposed to happen had happened. And then, out of the token gray granite blocks began to spring. Rapidly it turned into a circle, a hundred feet across. And then, a wizard’s tower from any fantasy cartoon sprung into Nothing, with several important differences that I chose to ignore, so that I could have enough blood inside me by the time I got in there.

  “Everyone,” I shouted, then started coughing more blood, which was replaced by some form of injected healing potion.

  “Get in the fucking tower, dumb-dumbs!” Chum shouted.