Threads of the Soul

Time stretched itself into infinity during those panicked few seconds. Every fraction of a second feeling like it lasted for hours, every moment that she hadn't reached her comrade, that she could still see that sword plunging towards his forehead, was another moment wasted.

Yet the few feet that she had to cross, such a miserably small distance, was a canyon compared to the distance the sword had to swing.

But she had to try.

She knew her movement wasn't going to be enough, her legs had no muscles that she could train to propel her faster. She had dissolved them, turning them into a single column of slime that connected to her at the waist, yet even that had to obey some form of physics.

So as she flowed across the ground like a living tidal wave, Cynthia acted out of pure instinct.

With time crawling by, as if she was moving through a giant vat of molasses, Cynthia stretched out her arm and thrust her sword forward. Of course, when she stretched out her arm, this was not to the human standard. For she was beyond the confines of petty human biology now, so why bother living within their rigid standards? She was made to be more flexible.

When she thrust her sword forward, her arm began to elongate. Stretching outwards and onwards, diving through the air with no sign of stopping, but it had to eventually, as must all things. The longer her arm became, the thinner it got.

Closer and closer, thinner and thinner. Her body followed behind the ever elongating arm to give it just enough distance to fill the quickly shrinking gap between the glinting edge of the sword and the sweat glistening forehead of Erik.

As she watched it inch ever so closer, she knew deep down that she wasn't going to make it. She was just a second too slow. A second faster and she could stop that blade from splitting his head in two.

A second less spent on gloating and showboating while others were in danger.

But as she was in the middle of beating herself up, she saw a glimmer of hope. Erik's eyes, for the briefest moment, fluttered open.

***

Internally wincing at the pain, Erik stirred from his slumber. His head was ringing worse than his phone after he called his girlfriend the wrong name over text. He was trying to piece together what had happened, his mind moving through fracture and blurred memories, all whilst trying to drown out that irritating, incessant whining coming from his ears.

He remembered… standing there, arguing with Cynthia over his shortcut, then the next minute he was… flying? That couldn't be right, he couldn't fly. He was the water-boy, not the fly boy. But as much as he wanted to put it down to delusion, he had definitely flown. But what happened after was a complete blank.

Clearly, he thought, someone had cracked open his skull and pulled out his brain, before proceeding to play an entire game of basketball using his squishy cerebrum as the ball. Or perhaps it was football they played. Yes… He definitely felt like he had been kicked in the head a few times. That made more sense.

Just as his mind began to wander again, before it could be drowned in the delusion of what the score of the brain-ball game was, a single sound cut through the perpetual ringing in his ears.

"SWORD!"

Sword? Like the fish?

Yes, that was definitely what it had said. It kind of sounded like that irritating little blob that kept slapping him. Honestly, why was she disturbing his peaceful sleep to tell him about her favourite type of fish?

With great effort, he forced open the vault doors that were his eyelids and let the searing light pour in. Even before his strained eyes could adjust to the light, when everything was still blurred figures and fuzzy blobs, Erik could make out the sight of the sword plunging towards his face like the executioner's blade.

Perhaps it was an intrinsic part of human nature, a survival instinct, to always be able to recognise immediate danger so that they could react to it on time. Like waking up to a saber-toothed tiger attack in caveman times.

Perhaps it was because he had spent the past few weeks tirelessly training with his own blade, eager to finally give his life some purpose and become the knight he had always read about in storybooks, that he recognised that it was his own blade plunging towards him. He even felt the position of his arms, knowing that it was falling by his own hand.

Or perhaps, it was simply because the thing was so damn close to his face that he could practically taste it. With it literally between his eyes, about to carve into his flesh, there wasn't much adjustment his eyes needed to be able to identify such a thing.

The executioner's blade suddenly halted in the air, trembling in Erik's grasp as he put everything he had into stopping it from moving even a few more centimetres forward. He ignored the feeling of it biting into his flesh and the warm trickles of blood crawling down his face, focusing entirely on using his newfound strength to push against the foreign control.

The muscles in his arms bulged and screamed as they pushed against his armour, which rattled and creaked under the increased strain, but neither refused to budge. Locked in a duel of strength that meant life or death.

But thankfully, he wasn't alone.

Seeing that he was safe, at least for the moment, Cynthia moved into action against the perpetrator. The column of slime that was her legs still carried her forwards as she redirected her elongated arm, her Khopesh blade whistling passed Erik's head as it snaked through the air. The curved blade acted like the fang of a coil viper as it lashed out, striking towards the floating fishbowl.

SCCRRTT!

The tip of her blade scraped uselessly across the uneven surface of the sudden shield, a wall of golden chain-mail that had quickly woven itself together out of the garish chains that it had under its control. But even as her assassination attempt missed its mark, Cynthia was not disheartened. She had spent enough time with Seth to know that concentration was a big deal to creatures like this. They couldn't control everything at once.

Just like she had hoped, the moment the shield went up, the pressure on Erik's armour decreased. It didn't disappear entirely, but it was more than enough for him to force the trembling blade away from his forehead, leaving only a shallow gash in his flesh.

"Ditch the armour, Now!"

He didn't bother to question her order or argue, the thought of doing so didn't cross his mind for even a second. They might bicker sometimes, but this was life or death. It would always be different.

The next moment he dismissed his armour, the pressure disappearing as soon as it began to melt into the golden liquid. For whatever reason, that seemed immune to the creature's control. His arms, now free of the burden they were under, shot forward and buried his sword into the ground from his accidental full strength swing.

Trying to pull the sword out of the floor would be a waste of time, and would leave his back open to the enemy he had yet to see, so he didn't try. Leaving the sword pulling to Arthur, he simply dismissed the blade, letting it dissolve into ink, before immediately reforming it in his hand. As he was waiting for his weapon to reform, he quickly rolled forward, tumbling over himself, until he was now facing his opponent.

Raising his blade, he stood with his entire water glistening, cerulean body on display as he wore nothing but a pair of bright pink, striped boxer shorts that left little to the imagination.

"A goldfish? Really?"

He sighed, finally laying eyes on the beast that had been literal inches away from killing him. He could only imagine the embarrassment of dying to the world's worst fish.

"Can you control the water and get it out the fish bowl?"

"No, you know that. I've already told everyone that I can only make water, I can't control it."

"Yeah… I know, I was just hoping that the knock to the head might have shifted something inside and fixed that clear oversight of nature."

Erik rolled his eyes, slashing his sword in front of him to cut apart a pair of chains sent forward in an attempt to restrain him before raising his blade up next to his head, just in time to intercept a golden bullet that was fired at his head.

As the bullet, formally a golden ring that was spun up like it was wringing the water out of a rag, sparked off of his blade, Erik took a few steps back and risked a glance towards Cynthia.

"We have to water balloon it."

"Ugh, You know how much I hate that, right?"

"Just do it. The others need it too."

Despite her protests, Cynthia rushed over to Erik and placed herself in front of him. While the semi solid slime girl made for a terrible meat shield, she still wielded her Khopeshes in defence of them both.

Erik himself, the naked knight, was not cowering behind her or idle as she defended him. With his eyes clenched closed in concentration, his hands placed firmly on her back as he channelled his abilities.

The energy churned inside of his core like a raging whirlpool before surging out, rushing through his veins like a great typhoon. All of it culminated in tiny droplets of water forming on his fingertips, droplets that were forced inside Cynthia's body by the pressure of his hands.

Forcing his energy to flow faster, more and more droplets were generated by the moment until there were hundreds being produced every second, until in the span of just 30 seconds he had produced enough to fill a backyard swimming pool.

Yet despite that time he spent focusing entirely on producing water, he didn't have to worry a single bit about injury from the fish's deadly attacks. Not that they had relented, in fact it was the complete opposite. As he had been working, the fish had increased the intensity of its golden barrage ten fold. But not one sliver of gold could get past Cynthia.

Every single droplet of water he had produced had gone into the viscous body of the slime girl, but it had not been devoured or absorbed. Instead, it had filled her body and ballooned out her mass, until she filled half of the room with just her body alone. No matter how hard the goldfish tried, no matter how many projectiles it sent. It could never hope to bypass the mass of dozens of flailing tentacles. A flailing mass of eldritch slime that was mentally singing the theme tune to an old magical girl anime while shouting over and over in her mind.

'CYNTHIA, OCTO TITAN FORM! ORAORAORAORA!'