Chapter 967: In Another Life, Part 3
Amanda had to turn the volume way down.
Between the feral shrieks of malformed beasts and demons, buildings crumbling atop bloodied streets in a shower of burning rubble, the violent crescendo of violent strings and battered drums echoing rampant throughout the whole disastrous affair of a world, of a realm, a game reaching its decisive end…
Yeah, I wouldn't want to bug my next-door neighbors with that kind of drama either.
"Astra's destruction. It's much louder than I remembered," Mom said, offering her great insight to history in the un-making. But she wasn't interested in any of that, looking past the death and destruction, searching the screen eagerly. "So when do we get to see me?"
"Further up," said Amanda, taking reins of a seriously decked-out Leonardo, his gleaming dragonscale armor glowing mystically with what seemed to be like a hundred different buffs simultaneously. "You took over the castle and headed for the forbidden levels; the Chamber of Creation. You'll be there."
And so, for the time being, it was a waiting game; the three of us with varying levels of interest while Amanda wailed endlessly away at a horde of the Demon Queen's minions trying to keep her at bay. It was a mindless, manic slaughterfest, and as far as video game climaxes go, it was a pretty entertaining power trip.
Leonardo could send ripples and shockwaves across the ground with just a single bash of his shield, conjure firestorms and blistering gales with a wave of a hand. His bare punches had the entire screen shaking like the epicenter of an earthquake each time it made contact with some poor demon's jaw.
At one point, an oppressing swarm of reinforcements had pushed him onto the defensive, but then Amanda made some quick inputs, flicked the left thumbstick around—and a split-second later, all before him lay dead in a mess of disemboweled guts and severed limbs, the once shimmering blade in Leonardo's grip cascading with the blood of the countless.
The longer the battle went, the more I felt my eyes veer to the slouched, dwelling figure on Amanda's right. His sturdy hands, his bulky fingers, the things he did, the things he could do. The calluses engraved across his palms; I used to think he got them from plowing the fields all day long… y'know, just the signs, the effects of the simple life he lived.
Cornsacks resting over his shoulder. Crates of a ripe summer harvest piled on the back of his truck ready to be driven to the marketplace. Pounding nails on every loose fence in sight… the person that did all that, the person I was seeing, was as far as he could be from the man slaying demons on the television screen.
"Made it," Amanda said, marching Leonardo up the castle steps and reaching the doors. She let out a breath heavy with adrenaline, wiping the sweat off her brow. "I think that was the fastest I've ever beaten that segment."
"Yet you were still much faster than that, weren't you dear?" Mom said, turning to the very man himself to affirm her anecdote. "Made it through everything I threw at you without so much as breaking a sweat. You've been downplayed. Weaken you for the sake of having a semblance of a challenge. What a shame."
"It doesn't matter," Dad responded curtly. "The ending. How close are we to it?"
"Pretty close. Just the final fight left," Amanda tapped a button on the controller and the screen faded to black. "But… first the cutscene. It's unskippable, so…"
The scene slowly opened up to a haunting view of the castle's interior; the main hall, as wide as it was vast, robbed of all its gold-coated extravagance and silvery splendor by the long trail of corpses that led Leonardo even deeper inwards.
The rest of his party eventually showed up, or at least the handful that had managed to survive the decimation still transpiring outside the castle walls.
The chieftain of the Reno, Hrungar tended to his wounds, while Sestus the Blue did his best to cleanse the blood that had splattered all over his magnificent blue cloak. Riona, the Princess Warrior, on the other hand, was a more silent, sullen figure; the impending notion of her kingdom's total demise gnawing away at her with every step through the many rooms and chambers of her once pristine home.
Last but not least, crashing unceremoniously through many layers of garnished masonry aboard the broken wings and mangled body of a large flying beast, Eshwlyn the Elf-Knight made her entrance, filling up the final party slot of the would-be heroes to go head-to-head against the Demon Queen once and for all.
I barely had the chance to soak in every little aspect of Ash's pixel-perfect counterpart before a bigger, grander figure stole the entirety of the limelight with a single sound.
An echoing laugh.
And it really, seriously couldn't have been any more pitch-perfect copy of the real thing.
"My…" Mom said, giggling right back. "...so that's how that sounds like."
The quintet stepped into a final room, or what clearly used to be a room. What was left of the foundations, tiles and pillars, just seemed to ebb away into the nothingness—a boundless unending abyss of faraway swirls and pinpricks of light made up the rest of the empty space. Like a ravenous night sky consuming all of existence.
In the middle of the room were the hulking stone effigies of seven prominent beings, and at its epicenter stood the eight. Terestra the Vile slowly turned to face the survivors, her entirety comprised of the infinite black, the void swallowing all.
Appearance-wise, she hardly resembled Mom at all. Much older, and possessing an air of overt malevolence that didn't seem to fit with what I know of her. But that demeanor, that subtle curve to her lips, it's almost uncanny. And at the sight of Leonardo, her eyes emitted a familiar rousing glimmer.
"Here you are," She said, her voice, in the walls, in the floor, resounding from everything and everywhere engulfed in her darkness. "But was there ever any doubt of that? It's fate. Predestined. As the Divines ordained. All these senseless torture and suffering of souls too… years and years of it… all as they've decreed. All to try and stop me."
None from the opposing side muttered a single word back. Leonardo took the first step forward, unsheathing his sword and holding firm. Hrungar let out a low growl from his pointed snout. Sestus flicked his wrist, an old blue book swaying before him at his command. Riona drew back her bow, her piercing gaze brimming with determined fury. And in a blinding glow of ethereal white, Eshwlyn raised her blade right alongside Leonardo's.
In response, Terestra laughed once more.
"Well, go on. Do what you've come here to do and try," she goaded them, the blanket of black encompassing all rippling with hostility. "It's really all you can do, after all."
The scene then shifted, another sonorous ensemble of instruments began to swell, and a health bar stretching as wide and long as Amanda's flatscreen would allow appeared on the very top. Then a chime rang out, a final objective flashing on the upper right to top it all off.
<<Survive>>
"Ooo," Mom fidgeted in her seat, her hands clasped together with her fingers squirming intertwined. "This should be fun."
Whenever I stopped to imagine how Mom single-handedly wiped out an entire existence, 'fun' was one of the last things I'd use to describe the nightmares I'd weave up.
But slap an HP bar on it, back it up with a choir of trumpets, and with a controller on hand, then I can see how the end of the world could be pretty fun.
Instead of just watching out of some morbid curiosity, I found myself engaged with the stakes that had been set up. The cries of Leonardo's comrades as they charge forward undaunted in a barrage of skill and magic.
I was ready to see some epic combat, a display of Amanda's prowess honed from dozens of playthroughs, something epic at least. Instead, Amanda tilted the thumbstick at an angle, and rather than leading his comrades at the front, Leonardo decided the best course of action was to circle around the edge of the arena avoiding the fight entirely.
"Amanda," I said, deciding to speak up the moment I saw her spamming the jump button, causing a helpless Leonardo to slam himself up against one of the statues in the arena over and over again. "Care to explain?"
"I told you—I'm going to cheese this," Amanda said, too focused on the game to notice everyone else's gazes at her. "It's faster like this."
"Faster…" Dad muttered, looking just a little abash on how much of an idiot she was making him look. "Faster how?"
"This statue of Yulia, here… well, she's on her knees, praying as always, so you see how there's that tiny bit of space on her pedestal because of that?" Amanda bounced in sync with Leonardo, failing and slamming his face against the bare feet of Yulia once again. She clicked her tongue, positioning Leonardo for another attempt. All the while, some sort of scuffle was still going on somewhere in the background. Probably nothing, though. "If you jump at just the right angle, you're able to climb to that little spot. And since all of Terestra's attacks in this fight are ground-based, that means—GOT IT!"
Before my very eyes, going against all forms of logic, Amanda got it—Leonardo reached it. Jumping a jump that should have missed, landing awkwardly on an edge that practically didn't exist. After gathering himself, Amanda had him spew out a stream of flames that burned away a good fraction of Terestra's health.
Of course, the Demon Queen wasn't just gonna take such insolence, so she turned to him, gazing up at him on his lofty pedestal of all but five feet… and did absolutely nothing.
Leonardo splashed her with another douse of flames, chipping away at another good chunk of health, and all Terestra could do was stand there and pout.
"See?" Amanda said. "All of her attacks are ground-based, and I'm too high up for her to do anything to me. Because of that, the final boss is pretty much the easiest part of any playthrough."
"This is not how normally beaten, am I?" Mom asked her.
"Well, no, but..." Amanda pulled a face. "...every since this was discovered, this is how most players beat you. I've seen newcomers do it all the time."
"Is that so?" Mom gave her unmoving counterpart a long blank stare, breathing in deep. "In that case, maybe you should've climbed a tree, dear. You would have beaten me a long time ago."
"Who's being downplayed now?" Dad muttered softly under his breath, one that vaguely resembled the quiver of a chuckle. "What a shame."