Chapter 33: Nightmare
Hugo expected to find himself in the same void he always did when entering a pseudo-nightmare But this time, he was met with something else.
Instead of the endless dark void, there was a vast, infinite white space in it's place. In that space, light was all that existed denying the existence of all other things. Then as if a mockery of that law, darkness sprouted from that white void.
Hugo could barely make out the shape within that darkness but he knew exactly what it was.
It was that damn parasite.
It had followed him here, somehow.
"You just don't give up, do you..." Hugo said, a mix of frustration and hatred in voice.
Then before anything more could happen, a shimmering blue light erupted from everywhere at once, blinding him and drowning out that darkness.
Not long after, Hugo opened his eyes to find himself once again back on land, standing on his feet, naked from head to toe.
Shivering slight , he quickly summoned his [Proto-Tech Armor] and [Conqueror's Wrath] charm. Lastly, he summoned the [Black-Pearl Trident] with a wary expression on his face.
Looking around, Hugo noticed that the environment was... bizarre, to say the least.
The sky was a mix of strange blue and green colors with a sun that was morbid and too big for a regular sun, illuminating the world in a myriad of sickly hues. But the most astounding part was the ground itself, It was a bare rocky land, too harsh to sustain any green but somehow there were still plants within it.
Ones unlike anything he had ever seen before. Towering white trees erupted into the sky, their bark too smooth and clean, almost like human skin. Their leaves were wrong painted in a deep unnatural purple.
The environment itself gave Hugo a sense of terrible dread. But The silence, profound and heavy, was certainly the most harrowing part of it.
Hugo walked forward, his eyes scanning his surroundings for either the corrupted imprint he was supposed to kill or the abomination that had invaded his soul.
He found nothing. The place was incredibly vast which made Hugo contemplate just how large each pseudo-trial really was.
'Huh?!'
Hugo looked down, noticing something. He was back in his human body, no longer in the form of a Pyronite which was incredibly annoying.
He had practically lost all the advantages he previously had.
'Great. Just what I needed...'
He sighed, walking around some more. With no other direction, he decided to head west for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Hugo had not even taken ten steps when the silence was suddenly broken by a terrible screech. To his left, one of the towering, skin-smooth white trees bent at a horrifying, impossible angle. it groaned like a living thing in pain and then, From within a split in its bark, a maw of splintered, purple-veined wood lined with thorn-like protrusions suddenly lunged for him, moving with incredible speed ready to devour him whold
Hugo's body, augmented by [Anatomica] and the passive strength of [Conqueror's Wrath], reacted before his mind could fully process the threat. He threw himself into a backward roll, the maw snapping shut on empty air where his body had been a second before.
The sound was a sickening crunch.
He came up in a low crouch, the [Black-Pearl Trident] held firmly in both hands. His heart hammered against his ribs.
'shit...'
he thought, a cold clarity slowly washing over him. This is what it feels like to be just a dormant human again, Slow and Weak.
The sheer power of his awakened transformations had become a crutch and now it was forcefully looked away from him.
Hugo felt the weight of the trident, the strain in his muscles, this was a fight he couldn't win by overpowering his enemy.
The tree-creature straightened, its trunk twisting to face him again. It had no eyes but he felt the focus of its malevolent killing intent. It then lashed out again, this time a whip-like branch that shot from its side.
Hugo didn't try to block instead he relied on a small advice Nephis had thought him a while ago.
When faced against a fast and enemy you can Pierce, you should parry. And so, remembering the autistic princess advice, he parried the attack, using the tines of his trident to deflect the blow, guiding the limb past his shoulder. The force of it still rattled his arms But that didn't matter, because right as the trident touched it, the abomination felt the wrath of [Tormented] enchantment, making it undergo a terrible agony.
Just then, Hugo thrusted his trident deeper and in one violent swing, he pulled it out cutting the limb in half.
Moving backwards , Hugo circled the reeling monster watching its movements. Just then, He noticed something very important about the creature biology.
It was rooted into the ground, ts mobility limited to the reach of its branches and the bending of its trunk. Its attacks were powerful but telegraphed, watering down a series of lunges and sweeps.
Hygo waited for his moment, letting it overcommit on a furious lunge.
CRASH
the rock exploded upward As the maw buried itself in the rocky ground, Hugo was fast enough to avoid that lung then he surged forward.
He went for the joint where the attacking branch met the main body, deciding it was most likely the weak spot of thr creature.
With a grunt of effort, he drove the trident down in a savage thrust. The enchanted pearl tip sheared through the smooth bark with a wet tearing sound and a viscous, clear sap bubbled forth. The severed branch thrashed on the ground before going still.
The tree let out a high-pitched, airy shriek. It recoiled but Hugo pressed his advantage further, He darted in, low and fast stabbing at the other primary limb, essentialy crippling its offensive capabilities.
Finally, as it reared back for one last, desperate bite, he lunged forward and thrust the trident deep into the central maw, pushing until the points erupted from the back of its "head."
The tree shuddered violently, then froze, its purple leaves wilting instantly. It slowly hardened then shrunk down in size turning into a brittle gray statue of itself
Hugo stood there, breathing heavily as sweat formed on his face. He waited for the familiar voice of the Spell.
Nothing.
Only the oppressive silence. A cold realization appeared in his mind like an explosion...
The creatures here... the trees, the very environment... they weren't real. Not in the way Nightmare Creatures were and certainly not in the way creatures in nightmares were.
Unlike the omnipotent nightmare spell, the Omnitrix could not generate real soul —or whatever the spell uses as fuel for nightmares—, the Creatures here were merely part of the trial's backdrop, simply Illusions with teeth.
In other words, they were Nothing.
Shaken, hugo wiped his face and pressed on, his senses on a razor's edge from recent confrontation.
The landscape stretched on, a gallery of silent, watchful horrors that he barely managed to avoid.
He moved from the cover of one petrified rock formation to another, the feeling of being a mouse in a cage growing with every step, a feeling that reminded him of his first nightmare, further fueling his dark resolve.
Then, he heard it. A sound so immense it felt like the sky was tearing itself in two. A titanic clash of forces rolling over the hills further west.
Cursing his curiosity, Hugo scrambled towards the source of the noise, eventually finding himself on the edge of a large cliff.
He peered down examining the source of the clashes.
Down below, In a wide devastated plain, a battle was raging on between a grove of the white trees, larger than any of the ones he had ever seen, their limbs moving in perfect coordinatatio.
On the other was... a thing.
It was a nightmare rendition of speed itself, the creature stood on two reverse-articulated legs, its body a sleek, black carapace that seemed to drink the strange light. Its head was elongated encased in a blue helmet with a sharp visored face and from its back extended a long, segmented tail. But alas, it was not a Nobel creature, it was corrupted.
Cracks of sickly green energy pulsed across its chassis and its claws, elongated and wickedly sharp dripped with the same vile luminescence. It moved not like a living thing, but instead a blur of motion and death.
Hugo's mind struggled to keep up. It wasn't just fast, it was beyond that. The creature was thinking just as fast as it was moving.
He could almost feel the hyper-accelerated calculations behind its movements. It didn't attack mindlessly instead it dodged attacks that could harm it and calculated the right moment where it could strike. The creature would zip in, a claw flashing out to sever three branches at their base then be twenty feet away in the space of a heartbeat, it would circld and find a new angle of attack before the trees could even react.
It was a butcher operating on a timescale the world couldn't comprehend reducing the grove to splinters and leaking sap in mere moments.
Hugo gulped, his eyes narrowing as he realized the terrible mistake he made by entering this specific pseudo nightmare...
Then, Just as the speedster delivered a fatel final, destroying the last of the tees, a shivering terrifying presence drowned the world.
Hugo immediately recognized it's scent, having felt nothing but it for a long time now...
The fog.
It poured over the hills like a tidal wave, silent and inexorable. The being of nothing flowed across the plain engulfing the shattered remains of the trees which dissolved into motes of light within its depths, disappearing entirely.
The tendrils of fog played around for a moment before rushing towards the corrupted, speedy imprint.
The blur-creature didn't falter for a second, It became a pinprick of frantic motion. The fog creature, for all its overwhelming power seemed... sluggish in comparison.
It's misty tendrils lashed out but the imprint was simply never there leaving the fog to clutch at empty air. It was embarrassing to watch, seeing such a powerful abomination being outmatched this much against an awakened rank creature...
Hugo held his breath, pressed against the cool stone. 'Just kill each other already '
he thought, a desperate hope kindling in his chest as he watched the two abominations.
The two entities circled each other in a macabre dance—one of impossible speed and the other of suffocating, inevitable presence. The fog coalesced, trying to form a cage around the speedy lizard but the imprint zipped through it's closing gaps, escaping before the cage could even form.
It was during one of these high-speed maneuvers that something else happened. The blur-creature having evaded another grasping tendril skidded to a halt for a fraction of a second, its head tilting as if intrigued by something.
It looked Not towards the fog but directly towards the edge of the cliff where Hugo was hiding.
The green visor like a sliver of poisoned emerald locked onto his position with a deadly killing intent.
A cold that had nothing to do with the fog seized Hugo's heart.
It had seen him
——
"SHIT!" Hugo scrambled backward, his heart hammering against his ribs as he desperately tried to put distance between himself and approchit abomination.
He had clung to the hope that his trident's [Silent Stalker] enchantment would cloak his presence well enough, but he had been fatally wrong. Now, That single miscalculation was about to cost him everything.
The very air around him twisted as if the world itself held it's breath, then a blur of motion shot up the cliff face, scaling the sheer rock in an instant only to vanish into the sky. A moment later, it landed with a ground-shaking thud, the deadly Imprint already there. Its sleek, green visor scanned the area in a fraction of a second, instantly locking onto Hugo's fleeing form.
With a soundless, predatory grace, the creature lunged forward with a terrifying speed, its terrible claws aimed to pierce through his back and tear out his spine.
SCREECH!
The claws skated across his [Proto-Tech Armor] with a sound of shattering glass, not leaving a dent but snapping against the memory which was empowered by [Polymorphic Crystal].
The creature hesitated, it's confusion evident by its body language, that moment lasted long enough for it to not process the four-spiked silver trident which had just materialized inside its stomach.
In a last, desperate gamble, Hugo had dismissed and resummoned his weapon in a position where the trident would impale the creature the moment it materialized, and so He drove the trident deeper, a guttural roar tearing from his throat hoping the internal devastation would be enough to kill it.
It wasn't.
Enraged, the Imprint raised its shattered limbs and unleashed a barrage of blows against Hugo's armored form. While the superior memory held firm, it did nothing to dampen the concussive force behind each strike. Each impact was like being struck by a literal train, rattling his bones and jarring his teeths in.
One particularly vicious blow sent him flying backwards, the force wrenching the trident from his grasp and leaving it lodged in the creature's abdomen.
'you little shit!' Hugo rolled on the ground looking at the abomination with hatred burning in his eyes.
But he knew he couldn't engage it in a fight especially now that his weapon was not with him.
So Hugo had another idea.
He turned backwards and ran away as fast as he could.
To anyone else this would've seemed like suicide especially when fighting such an abomination...
But there was currently another set of harrowing beings within the pseudo nightmare...
The white tree abominations...
And Hugo was currently running towards one of them.
Suddenly, a white sharp root shot forward towards his running figure at an incredible speed, ready to Pierce his body.
'not yet...'
'not yet...'
The root was a foot away from his body, but just as it was about to impale him Hugo turned to the side and let the root pass through him.
Making it launch towards the corrupted imprint behind him —which was still suffering from [tormented] enchantment—, the root scraped against the metallic skin of the creature impaling its shoulder in a violent speed.
The terrible abomination shrieked violently, it's voice contorted and wrong as it's broken claws grabbed the root and cut it before it could do any further damage.
Right then another figure descended upon it.
Hugo fist slammed right into the abomination face, sending it reeling backwards, then like a madman, the Paragon of purity launched towards the imprint lower body, tackling it to the ground violently.
Hugo grabbed it's head and locked it within a head choke grappling the creature as he attempted to snap it's neck.
When that failed he did the next best thing, he brought it's fists down it's visor.
Once
Twice
Thrice
Hugo punched again and again, his ascended tier armor dealing most of the damage, untill eventually, the imprints visor cracks and gave away, revealing it's hideous face.
A blue skinned creature with a terrible blood shot eyes looked at Hugo as it tried to escape his grasp.
But he didn't give it the chance.
Immediately after the visor cracked, Hugo drive his fingers inside piercing abomination eyes.
Hugo eyes contorted into an ugly expression behind his own visor as he drove his finger even further, his eyes filled with bloodlust.
"DIE YOU MISERABLE PIECE OF SHIT, YOU CURSED WRETCH, YOU DON'T EVEN MATTER, JUST DIE ALREADY "
He screamed, his mind blurring a little...
But in that moment, he made another fatel mistake...
In his madness, he stopped choking the creature and used both hands to Pierce it's eyes, essentially leaving The abomination's arms free.
And so with one desperate punch of a broken claw, Hugo was sent flying, his jaw breaking the moment the creature fist came in contact with it.
THUD
Hugo hit the ground violently, his bone shattering at the impact as he felt agony flarre through every nerve of his being.
He choked a little, attempting to draw air but he only breathed in the blood pool inside his closed off visor.
"I need to get up..." he mummuered His voice weak and drowsy as he tried to get up.
His body screamed in protest, broken and battered from the punishment. Through a blurry, blood-smeared visor, he saw the abomination rise. With a violent, sickening tear, it ripped the broken trident from its own body and snapped it in two.
[Your memory has been destroyed]
The spell spoke in his mind carrying no warmth in it's sweat voice.
A fresh wave of despair washed over him. He was disarmed, broken and utterly spent.
The creature staggered a little, having lost it's vision it was obviously in a bad state but it's prey was in a worse shape.
And do, the creature became a blur again, closing the distance for the final blow. But as it surged forward, it was suddenly arrested in mid-air by something...
No...
It was arrested by nothing.
The mist had returned.
Tendrils of grey fog coiled around the Imprint's neck lifting it like a grotesque trophy. The corrupted creature thrashed wildly, a terrible, piercing screech ripping from its throat as it fought against the inexorable hold. The mist pulled, stretching its limbs with impossible strength until, with a final, wet SCCRRR-IPPT, the body violently erupted into a shower of gore and blue blood...
[Corruption purged.]
[DNA sample purified.]
[You have acquired an Essence Imprint.]
[Wake up, Paragon of Purity…]
The Omnitrix's cold metallic voice was a promise of salvation, making a small victorious smile appere on his face for a moment...
But just like the promise his mother made for him ten years ago, this one was broken as well.
The creature of nothing, released the dissipating form of the corrupted imprint and flowed toward Hugo's broken body.
In an instant He felt it —a vile, freezing filthiness slithering past his armor, past his flesh and into the very core of his being, his soul.
It invaded him, a seed of something unexplainabley vial taking root in the cracks of his broken spirit. His eyes widened in utter horror but he was powerless to move, to scream, to even whimper. He was just a wretch, a plaything for the vile creature, forever incapable of changing his fate.
——
Hugo opened his eyes to the familiar, terrifying expanse of the pristine white void. But horror was a distant memory now, drowned out by a cacophony of sensations that had shattered his mind.
"Hahha…. Haha….. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" he screamed, a raw, deranged laughter that held no joy in it, only the echoes of his breaking sanity. He clawed at his own skin trying desperately to tear away the filth festering within his soul. But he couldn't reach it.
The vile parasite was inside him, a core of absolute profanity that was forcefully and violently remaking him into its unholy host.
Hugo felt Everything—the cold, infinite hunger of the void, the frantic, skittering thoughts of a thousand nightmares And at the same time, he felt Nothing—the emptiness where his humanity was being erased and the emptiness that came from the creature of nothing.
This was not the source of his madness, though. The true agony came from the war raging within his soul and mind.
The last flickering ember of his divinity, the dormant flames of divinity that had once burned so brigh now raged against the invading corruption.
His eternal soul was now a battlefield with two absolute forces—the path of Ascension and the path of Profanity—tearing him apart in their struggle for dominion. He could feel them both, their natures etched into his being yet he was powerless to choose which one to follow .
Thought itself slowly became a fragmented, impossible thing that a wretch like him was incapable of.
And amidst all of this chaos, A new sensation pierced Him, the golden strings of the Nightmare Spell. The bonds it had woven around his soul were fraying, snapping one by one.
After all A nightmare creature was not fit to be a carrier of the spell and so He was being cast aside by it.
But as the final string began to part, a network of brilliant, blue ethereal weaves shot out from his Omni Core, lashing around the golden thread and holding it fast. They would not let him go.
Deep within his soul, something ancient and mechanical ignited.
The Omnitrix had not abandoned him.
And now that the creature of nothingness was no longer assaulting it's inner mechanics, it could focus on its main task.
Saving it's host.
[Host has been corrupted…]
[Failsafe 7, 10, 11 have failed.]
[Activating Failsafe 1.]
[Forcefully awakening the host…]
In the heart of his madness, a new emotion bloomed—cruel, desperate and deranged émotion.
Hope.
A power he had never felt before, external and overwhelmingly potent erupted from his Omni Core. It was an ethereal, blazing heat that circulated through his shattered soul, not with gentle guidance but with a violent purposeful force. It was tearing him apart to rebuild him, forcibly reconstructing his very essence to resist the vile profanity within him.
The Omnitrix, however was not the omnipotent nightmare spell and so it could not recreate whatever process the spell used to awaken it's carriers.
It required fuel and so, Its desperate dedicated strings found the source: the parasitic creature of nothing that had become a part of him.
The Omnitrix deemed the creature as a part of him and in this situation, it was not afraid to destroy a part of him to save him.
So It latched onto the invader and began to burn it to empower his awakening.
Hugo felt it all. He felt the parasite's desperate, hopeless struggle as the Omnitrix siphoned its essence, unmooring it from his soul. He felt its alien consciousness scream in silent futile terror as it was systematically unmade and consumed. The sensation was a horrific cocktail of vengeful satisfaction and sympathetic agony, an impossible contradiction that made Hugo go mad once again.
[You have slain a Corrupted Devil.]
[You have received a Memory.]
As the parasite died, its energy flooded him, no longer corrupted as it embraced death.
The divine flames, now supercharged, delivered a final, purifying blow to the last remnants of the corruption shattering it completely.
The agony was transcendent, a pain of creation and destruction happening simultaneously deep inside of him.
And then, Within the violent inferno, he felt four new points of incredible pressure condense within his soul—four nascent Cores, crystalline and potent, spinning into existence as his being expanded forged in the crucible of the forced evolution.
[Your Omnitrix is overflowing with power!]
[Your Omnitrix is overflowing with power!]
[Your Omnitrix is overflowing with power!]
[The second seal is broken.]
[You have acquired a new Aspect Ability.]
[Your Omnitrix is complete]
[Your ascension is complete]
The spell's voice was a distant bell, assaulting Hugo injured mind.
He was left reeling, his mind and soul wounded terribly by the chain of impossible events that happened to him.
The corruption was gone. The violent awakening that destroyed his soul and reshaped it forcfully was over, But the memory of the pain—an impossible, soul-deep memory no human should possess—remained. He remembered every nanosecond of the war inside him, every shred of agony as his soul was nearly torn in two.
He clutched his head, a petrified, broken whimper escaping his lips as he was violently expelled from the white void, landing back in the DNA room, his body whole but his spirit scarred left to tremble in the devastating, silent aftermath of his salvation...
He had won...