The scraping of metal rubbing against the slightly rough stone of the temple flooring. The shrill sound reverberated louder as the sound traveled further up the man-made chasm. The knight had blacked out, but a few moments earlier, his eyes were still open behind the inky darkness covering them, adding a strange eeriness to the blank expression plastered behind the headgear. The imposing figure of the one who had knocked him unconscious was dragging the limp, yet heavy body across the floor by the wrist of his right arm, while the left still clung to the blade like a lifeline, gripping it even tighter now than he had when he was still in the real world. The trauma his brain had received was slowly fading as the brain itself rebuilt itself, while the protective skull created new bone to encase the vital organ. Blood still dribbled from the open parts of the armor, leaving small streams that fell like waterfalls to the vast river of blood left as a trail from where he was previously and the lake of blood that surrounded his feet while he was in the crater of his creation.
It wasn't long before the monster arrived at its destination: the jailed snake. Dropping the hand it was holding onto, it returned to its normal state, which was using both of its hands to balance while knuckle-walking. The gorilla-like human skeleton thereafter balanced on its legs and used both of its hands, placing each of them on the metal bars, which were tailored to fit perfectly around the snake, tightly, and with all of its mighty strength, it pulled the solid steel beams apart, as if they were toothpicks it its mighty hands. They contorted under its grip, faltering under the pure power displayed by the human experiment, and were torn to shreds in a matter of seconds. It disemboweled the rods with a cruel ease, ripping the dozens of pipes out of walls one by one, and throwing them to the side without a care to continue its work like a zealot. The obnoxious sounds of metal clashing with stone filled the entire space, while the rest of the room seemed to quiet on its own, the fire dimmed ever so lightly –the shroud of light around the black skeleton followed suit by dimming on its own–, the crackling of the fire, and the already quiet winds in the nearly draftless room went as close to silent as seemed to be probable, until finally, not a single collection of pipes jailed the serpentine, freeing its head of the bonds it had been in for so, so long.
The thing took a few steps back, reentering its standard formation, allowing the snake a moment to readjust to freedom. Eyes locked onto the silent body of the knight, it stretched its mouth, allowing the gummed fangs to expand its range while also exposing the light pink flesh of the mouth that consumed the remains of thousands in its long life.
Once it finished stretching, the head of the snake turned to observe the knight's body, and gleefully opened its mouth, ready for a lightning-quick attack on the carcass-like wight. Just like that, the snake shot for the knight, maw wide, small rows of serrated teeth pleasantly lining the edges of its mouth, and without a hint of remorse or hesitation, grabbed the knight, falling right for his trap.
Though the knight had fallen to the deep dark at one point, the loud clanking and clinging of steel beams attacking the stone floor had awoken him; his head wound was still healing, but he was at least able to think straight now. He was face-first on the ground, so he relied entirely on his keen sense of hearing to detect when it was the right moment to launch his surprise attack on the snake. This action came much faster than he thought it would. The sounds of air displacing itself during the snake's lightning-fast strike were very loud to his well attuned hearing; akin to that of a blaring siren. The nameless knight was faster to move; however, his left hand quickly assumed the position directly above him. The sword in its hand stood straight, pointed directly at the top of the snake's wide maw. The snake was already committed to the strike, and was unable to dodge the deep incision into the top of its head, exiting out of its right nostril with a level of ease that wouldn't have happened at the crown of its sandy, yet well-protected snout.
A small shower of red escaped the wound, while the snake recoiled back in agony. Its large head swung back and forth with terrible speed, causing much of the air to kick up into blistering winds that pushed against much of the walls, causing a not-so-subtle tremor to rattle the entire underground tower. The knight had gotten up from his compromised position without his weapon, which was lodged deep into the snake's face as it writhed in hideous agony and hatred. It wasn't long after he had gotten back onto his feet –perhaps a fraction of a second– that the large, imposing figure of the experiment of a corpse was in front of him, ready to strike with a furious expression somehow etched into its skull despite the emotionless grin still being plastered across empty braincase. Luckily, he was prepared for the wild, yet extremely powerful strike to his face. With a short pivot to the right, he watched in slow motion while a fist larger than his skull flew by in slow motion and collided carelessly into the stone wall directly behind him. The strength behind the punch was large; in contact with the carved stone, the entire wall seemed to fold into itself, and large chunks of the gray stone flew outward at an astoundingly fast rate. Its large, dead hand was stuck to its shoulder into the once intricate rock. Once tremors, the thumping of the world only seemed to worsen with that strike, making the feeling of the shaking earth the illuminating effect surrounding the skeleton dampened, drowned out by the black shadows that surrounded the vile abomination. He wasn't able to react fast enough to attack the incapacitated enemy, as it removed its arm from the wall in a single harsh motion, while also using the weight of the fist to turn the rest of its body towards the knight. This single action allowed the dead creature to launch another outraged attack nearly instantaneously. Lashing out with a brutal swing of its right fist, the lost knight swiftly pivoted a hair's distance from the volatile attack while the light grew brighter around the black skeleton as it stumbled past the knight and closer to the fire. The more the barbaric skeleton misplaced its feet, the closer it drew to the fire, and the more radiant the skeleton grew, contrasting the darkness of its actual being blindingly. The knight stared at his opponent with a form of bleak amusement, it wasn't everyday you saw a creature of this magnitude of strength clumsily misplace its feet after a failed attack you know, but he stood alert, readying his blade in a defensive stance, while also priming his other hand on his back, ready to summon his shield at a moments notice.
It wasn't but a few moments before one of the great beings who once walked the earth returned to the fight, reinvigorated with a blazing hatred in its cold, emotionless, infinitely black sockets which once held eyes. Its permanent grin looked to grow malicious as the reanimated abomination stared at the knight. Its luminous aura surrounding its black frame grew vast as the fire burned brightly behind the fiend. The fire looked to do nothing to warm the corridor, the trio of human, skeleton & serpent at all. The temperature only dropped as the two opposing forces stared at each other, while the snake continued to writhe in agony without a care for the repercussions. While the world around them trembled under the snake encased by the weight of the dead of the entire planet, its chosen champion faced off with the knight, and within a fraction of a second, the pair flashed towards each other, prepared to end it all in a single strike.
Of course, it didn't end in a single strike. The knight swung with all his force towards the sack of bones' skull while said sack of bones stretched its right arm once again, aimed to crush the knight's skull with a single blow. Neither of them hit their mark however, the knight leaded back every so slightly, allowing the arm of his enemy to over extend, therefore not hitting him directly, and because of that the sword, which would've fazed through the unguarded skull, but instead the blade grazed the zygomatic bone leaving a short and shallow scar.
Swerving in his place slightly, the knight abandoned his weapon by releasing it from his grip, while backing away from the large fist now jetting perpendicularly to the direction he was facing. The winds blindly and aimlessly displaced themselves while the light escaped from the adversary with every inch the first invaded the darkness of the shadowy corners of the slightly spacious room. In no more than a few seconds, the knight reached forward with both his arms and grabbed hold of the skeleton's fist with both hands and crushed the robust, yet ancient bones with the full force of his grasp. Shrapnel of black bone exploded in all directions, leaving small craters in every place the bone fragments landed. Luckily, the shards avoided the visor of the warrior, allowing him to keep his eyes trained on the grinning visage of the agitated dead beast. Even though its dominant hand was no longer there, the beast remained aggressive as it was previously, likely even more so than it was previously. It moved its now stump of a right are in a jab, trying to pierce the man in the gut, but was swiftly stopped by both of the knights hands grabbing both the Ulna and Radius and with strength that far surpassed that of a regular human, he twisted his body behind him and launched the much larger enemy over his shoulder and into the empty wall adjacent to both the wall they were fighting against and the wall of the floundering snake. On impact, the room quaked greatly. A spider web of cracks traced that entire section of the wall, stretching eerily close to the snake's body. Along with this, on impact, the body of the skeleton wasn't just shattered, it was closer to say that the enemy shining in light was eviscerated. A crater a few sizes bigger than the skeleton itself surrounded the downed enemy, the light no longer permeating off of its dead form, and the second life it was given looked to have been snatched from its hands, entirely leaving the bones to rot on their own.
The knight gazed at his former opponent with an unidentifiable emotion in the eyes clouded by the darkness of the visor of his headgear, but that was only for a few moments, as there was still a much bigger enemy in front of him: the necromancer. The necromancer, with the help of the large cracks strewn around a single side of its tunnel-like jail, broke free of the tunnel that had trapped it for more than two thousand years. The world was now not just quaking lightly, it was thrashing horribly as the snake left its place beneath the dead. With every bit of its body that slithered out of the hole in the wall, its coldness and hatefulness held in its golden, slitted gaze never wavered, and only grew as it stared at the human that had annihilated so many of its best puppets. Then suddenly, it lunged forward upward like a crack of thunder, towards the surface, while the world around the knight crashed and imploded. The temple was collapsing onto itself.
Large fragments of the stone walls were splintering off the whole hidden temple and cascading recklessly to the ground like a waterfall of debris, while being expertly avoided by the knight on the ground floor. These events were quickly adding up. The cracks in the walls started to not just be in a particular part of the corridor, but instead they were traveling far and wide, encompassing the whole of the small domain, while continuing to be stretched to max capacity by the desert-sized snake. The violent shaking of his vision while a jailbreak was taking place. All of these factors added together were only further enhanced by the ground itself splitting under the weight of the snake, at least only a few sizes smaller than the giants, much farther beneath the surface. But that is neither here nor there, he would've allowed his eyes to wander around the gargantuan creation's tan scales while it made its way to the surface, but was stopped not just by the falling debris. This wasn't very far off from the training he had to endure to acquire his position back when he still worked directly underneath the king, so it wasn't particularly difficult to tap dance around the chunks of stone larger than his body. However, it wasn't long after dodging a piece of rubble the size of his torso that a sudden, blisteringly loud boom shrouded his ears and at that very moment of the earth-shattering crash, fainting rays of sunshine poured from what previously looked to be a large spill of ink blacker than the darkest shadows only pierced by the body of the snake, but it was now not just pieced by that snake, it was being turned into a pincushion by the lazy rays of the morning sun.
The sight of the light rays gave the man pause, before hesitantly grabbing hold of the snake's body as it marched its way to the surface, a single thought shining like the brightness above, just as one illuminated his body, the other illuminated his mind: 'A new day, a new battle…'
I got a few chapters ready and lined up for weekly drops