The Legend of Zelda: Dreamweaver's Shield

by Light Onthemayo

After two years of searching, Captain Link and the valiant crew of the airship Island Symphony have found Obeeta, a massive island in the sky sporting a city-like landscape. What looks to be a simple visit in a quest to locate Irleen's people soon turns into one massive living nightmare as Obeeta's nights spring surprise after surprise on the crew of the Island Symphony.

28. Illusomorph, Abebaiotephilic Archaeon

Chapter 28: Illusomorph, Abebaiotephilic Archaeon

…

Link sheathed his sword and moved to the large, bronze doors. He tested the left door with a single hand, and then he pushed both hands against the doors to force them open. A loud squeal answered as he shoved the doors aside, and he stepped forward to keep from falling on his face. He watched his feet fall on a brick walkway and raised his eyes once the doors slid out of his reach.

He stepped into a long corridor. The top half of the walls, which looked to stretch beyond even the size of Obeeta itself, was the same red brick as the floor. The bottom half of the floor and the ceiling was composed of bleached wood. Electric lights recessed in the ceiling illuminated the hallway at regular intervals, their conical guidance giving the walls the look of a blood-edged serrated blade.

Link crossed his arms. "Does it really expect me to go down a long corridor and die?" Link asked, nodding down the corridor. "Am I supposed to die of exhaustion or boredom?"

"Well, you can't die of boredom. Been there. But this is The Night; there's probably something we're not seeing."

"Like what?" Link asked as he began walking. "More traps? More monsters jumping out of things?"

Ka-CHUNG! Link immediately froze mid-step, surprise prevalent on his face.

"More storybook clichés," Janni continued. "More moments of drama triggered by ironic words."

"Great…" Link replied as he turned to look behind him.

As expected, the doors had slammed shut. However, Link wished he had seen the opposite side of the doors beforehand. Between thick bands of rusted iron, an incredible amount of machinery started turning and clicking to itself. Link thought the door was too thin to contain such a collection of gears, wires, and springs, but he was quickly learning that The Night was not going to play that fair. He backed away a step, which turned out to be a good idea. Ka-CHAK! The metal bands across the machinery sprang open to reveal that they were not only triangular, but appeared to be incredibly sharp. The hairs on the back of Link's neck stood on end when he then watched as the blades rotated horizontal and clicked into tracks running the width of the door. He backed up further as the blades then started traversing the tracks left and right.

"This can't be good," he said.

"It slices, it dices, it makes Link into flesh strips in less than five seconds!" Janni cried out in excitement as the blades became faster and faster, filling the hall with a horrible chopping sound.

"At least it doesn't move," Link said as he continued to back away.

Ka-CHUN! The entire door shuddered before it began advancing toward him.

"Aw, crap…" he uttered, quickening his pace.

"Irony has it in for you today!" Janni hollered over the racket.

"Yeah?" Link said. "Let's see how fast it goes down an endless hall—" Whump! While he spoke, Link turned and made to dash down the hallway. However, before he could get any significant distance, he ran into a wall. The rebound dumped him on the floor, and Link had to wait for his head to clear before he could comprehend what had just happened.

He looked up to find that what he had seen was not an endless hallway. Instead, it was a solid brick wall that had been painted to appear as an endless hallway. Link stared in bewilderment for a moment. Then his attention returned to the thrumming sound behind him. He rolled to one side as he twisted his neck to find the doors again. This revealed that the doors' blades took up about half the room with little more than the other half to spare before slicing Link apart. Link rushed to his feet.

"I gotta say," Janni spoke over the psychotic mechanics screeching and clacking their way toward Link. "This is probably gonna hurt."

Link had little doubt after having died two previous times. He looked left and right for some kind of hope, something that would—…

Wait a minute.

He looked left again. He almost did not notice that the bricks on the wall to his left were a shade darker. Part of the mural that had deceived him was cut off by the real wall. With little time to spare, Link skipped sideways toward the unusual wall, his back against the mural because this was going to be a close call. He could feel the breeze coming off the blades. They were too close!

"Agh!" Kr-sca—REEEEEEECH! Machine met brick in a spectacular cascade of sound. The first impact caused the blades to twist. However, the doors continued pressing until the blades, unable to bend anymore, bit chunks out of the brick wall. Then, in the space of a second, the machine itself slammed into the wall and succumbed to the force of its own blades jamming its gears until they flew off, rending the air with a horrifying screech.

Link lay on his stomach in a small alcove in the wall. His hands, in addition to the Dreamweaver's Shield, covered his head until the vile sound finally died. Then he rolled to one side to check the carnage near his feet. And, well, to make sure his feet were still there.

"Aaaw," Janni moaned. "It's a nice mess, but you spoiled the fun. You okay?"

"Not quite," Link said with a grunt, pushing up from the floor. He rolled onto his bottom and sat up to examine his legs. A blade had sliced into the front of his boot just above his ankle. Just as the throbbing in his leg and the red staining the boot indicated, the gash was deeper than it looked. "Damn… this isn't good."

"Does this mean you get a peg-leg now?" Link turned an annoyed eye to the little ball of green darkness hovering over his head. "What? You're the one wandering around talking in that stupid pirate accent."

"I'm a cargo hauler, not a pirate," Link argued. "And would you take this seriously? If I run into another trap, I'm finished! I can't screw this up!"

"Why? Is Leynne gonna ground you to your cabin?" Janni teased.

"You're not being funny," Link told her as he pulled his trouser leg from his boot.

"I think you are," Janni said, moving closer to watch him carefully pull his boot off. "For a captain, you sure worry about your first officer being your babysitter a lot."

"Leynne has orders to get the crew out of here if I start to put them in danger," Link said, pulling the rigging knife from its sheath. "If I can't get any further in these dreams, he's gonna take command from me."

"You doing nothing puts your crew in danger?" Janni asked with an air of skepticism.

"Just staying here puts the crew in danger," Link replied before using the rigging knife to cut open more of his undersuit around his ankle. "But if I run out of ideas, or if I can't get us the supplies we need by removing The Night, Leynne'll take his chances in the storm." Link paused to shake off the Dreamweaver's Shield. Then he gripped his right sleeve between his teeth so that he could cut the sleeve about halfway up his forearm. After nearly nicking himself with the knife, he tugged the sleeve to tear it the rest of the way off. "Leynne can make that call," he continued as he sliced the sleeve open. "Page one of the rulebook. Friend of the crew."

"I thought he said it was page seventeen."

Link was silent as he wrapped the torn sleeve around his leg wound. The thick material seemed to hold back the bleeding, so he tied it tight and pulled his boot back on. Then he replaced the rigging knife, retrieved the shield, and slowly stood up with a hand bracing himself on a nearby wall. He sucked in a pained breath as he leaned on the wounded ankle.

Then he told Janni, "This is probably as good as it gets."

"Maybe you should let The Night get you," Janni suggested. "Start over fresh tomorrow night."

Link shook his head and turned around, careful about stepping on his right foot. He discovered that the alcove was a little deeper than he had first thought. He angled his head to see that there was a corner further in. He started walking as he put his right arm through the shield, his pace slow to reduce his need to hobble.

Around the corner, the short hallway opened into a larger room made of stone walls and a brick floor decorated with a single, narrow carpet. The ceiling was also stone with wooden beams providing support. A single truss in the middle of the ceiling held up a silver chandelier decorated with about two dozen candles and an uncountable amount of glass beads strung together between and dangling from its arms. The carpet stretched from the doorway to a raised platform against the opposite wall, flanked by a pair of statues. The statues looked like knight armor bronzed and posed with their swords planted in their own pedestals with their hands resting on top.

On the center pedestal was a chest. As Link walked across the room with an alert eye on the walls around him, he made out more and more details of the chest. Although it had a brass latch on the front, Link could tell that it was naturally "grown" simply because the chest had roots anchoring it to the pedestal. The chest was also distinctly oval in shape, looking like someone had molded a tree stump to vaguely resemble a chest.

Stopping within arm's reach, Link looked up at Janni and said, "I recognize this. I-I didn't get a very good look in the other technoworks, but this is like the chest I found this sword in. It looks like it was made by the Sorians."

"You're right," Janni said. "As I recall, they were left down here before the Sorians started turning into Obeetans. There should be a few more in some of the other technoworks."

Kink. Kink.

"Any idea why?" Link asked.

"You got me," Janni replied. "I never saw what went in them. Didn't really care at the time, either."

Kink. Kink.

Link frowned and glanced up at the nearby statues. Then he looked over his shoulder. "What's that sound?" he asked.

"I don't know," Janni said, glancing in the same direction. "I think it's coming from that machine from before." Both of them fell silent, ears searching for so much as a whisper. After a moment, Janni sighed. "Guess it was just our imaginations."

Link gave her a skeptical look. "The both of us?"

"Could be," she answered with a giggle. "For all you know, you're imagining that I'm imagining it, too."

"I don't think I'm that out there," Link argued as he turned back to the chest.

"Yet."

Link stepped closer and fit the fingers of his left hand in between the lid. It felt light, so Link lifted it with a light toss meant to force the lid to fall back on its hinge. Link failed to realize how difficult it was to put a hinge on an oval-shaped chest and cringed when the lid—ki—KA-KLONK!—fell onto the floor. Janni snorted, earning her a cross look. Link then reached inside.

His fingers met something that felt like leather, and he tugged it out. He held up a pair of goggles by their strap, which, now that he was looking at it, appeared to be made of flax. Thicker bundles of stems and leaves held two glass lenses each about the size of Link's palm. One lens, which would fit over the left eye, was marked by a blue-colored stamp of an eye with six eyelashes: two on top and two protruding from either corner of the eye with a second jutting out from below, each pair pointing down and away from the eye.

Link raised an eyebrow. "Goggles?"

"Sorian flight goggles," Janni told him. "It's not like it was easy to look into the wind when a Sorian's flying, at least not for any great length of time."

"What are they doing down here?" Link asked as he looked them over. "And what's this symbol on the lens?"

"The symbol is a Sapphire Eye. It's the symbol of a Sorian mystic."

Kink. Kink.

"Like the Greys?" Link asked.

"The Greys were more like engineers, craftsmen. They deal with controlling the living, like the technoworks. A mystic deals with magic."

Kink. Kink.

"So, like the Dreamweaver, then?"

"The Dreamweaver was a mage, not a mystic. Mystics prefer looking for truth through magic, kind of like the truth of life, the truth of—" Kink. "—Yeah, I hear it, too."

Link had turned to look over his shoulder again in response to the clank. "Does it seem like it's getting louder?" he asked.

"You know, I can't really tell," Janni said with a hint of intrigue in her voice. "It's weird."

"We should probably get moving," Link told her. Then he looked down at the goggles in his hand. "You know, with some of the things I've been running into, these might help protect my face."

"I'm not sure The Night can be that precise."

Kink. Kink.

Link slipped the goggles onto his head and pulled his hat through the band so that he could position the goggles on his face. He discovered that very little of his vision was impaired by the frames due to the goggles' lenses being much too large for his eyes. He looked up at Janni again. "How do I—"

His face instantly paled upon discovering something twice his size holding a large axe over its head in Janni's place.

Link threw himself aside just as the axe started coming down. KANG! the axe rang against the floor. Link hit the floor hard enough that the steel adjuster on his cloth sword-belt jabbed him hard in the chest. Even worse, falling to his right had guaranteed a fresh shock of pain from his injured ankle, being the ultimate reason he cried out. His adrenaline pumping now, he shoved himself off the floor and used his good foot to press him forward to get away from his attacker.

Kink kink. Link spun with his hand on the Sorian whitesword. He did not get a chance to attack, however, because he had to duck beneath the axe bit now leveled to take off his head at eye-level! Link looked back up to find a yellowed skeleton of a creature very nearby, its back exposed by its follow-through. He pulled the Sorian sword with urgency not felt since Autumn Island during Cunimincus' rampage. In fact, he did not wait until the blade was completely clear to begin his attack. The point of the sword snagged in the scabbard's throat, causing Link's arm to snap forward once it was free. The errant swing caught the creature's lower back mainly with the flat of the blade, chipping off a bit of bone. Link took a step forward just as the creature aimed an elbow much too high for Link's head. He also swung backhanded in a horizontal arc. The blade found a leg bone to slice through, toppling the creature. Link then spun and backed away to gauge his opponent's next move, shield ready to take another blow.

Instead, the creature lay motionless on the floor. Link was stymied by the creature's appearance. The fragments near the base of its neck indicated that its skull had been broken in its fall, as had a number of its ribs. Link thought it looked gangly for a human skeleton. Then he saw that the closer arm was nothing like what he knew of human skeletons, the elbow being more like a ball joint and its upper arm being composed of two bones. Its pelvis was segmented and flat, like its spine simply melded into this shape rather than be a separate formation. Its leg bent the wrong way. And its foot, made of too many segments of long bones, curled backwards. Only one toe sported any sort of metal, and Link realized with horror that, if the thing walked on the front of its foot, it should not have been making that tapping noise.

"Link, what's going on?" Janni asked.

Link looked up only to realize that he could not see her. "Where are you?" he asked.

"Are you kidding?" Janni asked. "I'm right in front of you."

Link slipped the goggles onto his forehead and located Janni hovering at eye level with the chest behind her. Then he looked down to see that the skeleton was now missing. "Where'd it go?" he asked.

"What?" Janni asked. "Where'd what go?"

"There was a large skeleton thing here," Link said, pointing with the sword. Then he had an idea and pulled the goggles over his eyes. At the same time the skeleton reappeared, not moving from its prone position, Janni disappeared. "I can only see it with the goggles." Then he looked at about where Janni had been hovering. "But I can't see you with them."

"Neat trick," Janni said in a flat voice.

Link glanced down at the skeleton. When he judged it safe, he replaced the sword. "You said the Sorian mystics looked for truths, right? Is it possible that they put their magic into these goggles?"

"I suppose, for a certain sort of truth," Janni said. "Whatever you're seeing must still be part of the dream, just invisible to the naked eye. Otherwise, you'd probably see the technoworks instead."

"What about you, though? Why can't I see you?"

"That's not too hard to imagine; I'm not really here."

Link gave the space where she should have been a confused look. "Huh?"

"Link, you know that I can cause illusions in this dreamscape. I'm always in the Dreamweaver's Shield. When you see me, you're actually looking at another illusion."

"Oh. Okay, I think I get it." He looked back down at the skeleton. Then he glanced at the room's entrance. "Oh, you're kidding…"

"What now?"

Link pointed toward the doorway. "Those pedestals," he said. "There's another statue sitting on the left, but the right is empty."

"They both look empty to me."

Link nodded. "I probably walked right… past…" He could not finish vocalizing his thought and had to end with a shiver crawling up his spine.

"Wow. The Night sure missed that opportunity."

"Yeah, sure," Link croaked, his left hand rubbing his throat. "If it meant to."

"Priorities must be a little different when you're a deranged, dream-eating creature."

Link glanced around and located a doorway to the left of the chest. "Let's get moving," Link said as he locked eyes back on the skeleton creature.

"Don't tell me you're gonna walk all the way to the door like that," Janni said as Link started wandering toward the doorway.

"Do you really trust anything in here? You can't even see what I was fighting."

"Yeah, but you're about to hit—"

Thunk. "Ow!" Link held onto his left elbow and turned to find that he had backed into the treasure chest. "Oh." He twisted to find the door and started backing toward it again. Even as he was moving into the other room, he made sure that the creature stayed down and none of the other statues came to life.

Then he turned to see the next room. Much to his relief, the room was constructed of brick with a single lantern overhead. It was much smaller than expected, but Link recognized this as the usual case with rooms that led below. In the middle of the room was a hole with a metal ladder awaiting use.

Link looked over the room once more before pulling the goggles down off his face. He used the back of his hand to wipe sweat from around his eyes. "Whew," he breathed.

"You okay?" Janni asked.

"I got sweat in my eyes," Link said. He sighed and wiped his brow with his bare forearm, careful not to clock himself with the shield. "Wow, I'm really sweating."

"I think you started when you smacked into the wall," Janni said.

"Yeah, and that skeleton… thing didn't help."

"Is someone up there?"

Link gave Janni a blank look, surprised to hear another female voice. "That isn't me," Janni said. "Honest."

"Hello?" the voice called. Link glanced down into the hole.

Then he climbed onto the ladder. "You're not even gonna entertain the idea it might be a trap?" Janni asked.

"Trap or not," Link replied, "I gotta go down eventually."

"You mean you just gotta see who the pretty voice is," Janni said as they both started to descend.

There was little light below, mostly caused by some body of water reflecting onto the surrounding walls. The top half of the walls, as well as the ceiling, were square tiles with low-relief curls and waves designed on the edge of each tile. Beneath those, spanning the remaining length to the floor, were larger panels of stone with rough-faced backgrounds and larger forms of the same relief design as the square tiles. Each panel was framed by a bluer, smoother material which looked like it could be either rock or steel. At the center of each wall was a gold panel depicting two pairs of spiraling tentacles rising out of a wavy plain. The floor was ceramic tile divided into large squares of cyan surrounded by a layer of blue and divided from each other by navy-colored pieces, the corner insets sporting a square off-color from the blue layer. This floor covered half of a long room; the other half was a large pool of water which seemed to cast its own glow. This was hardly unusual to Link since the last time he was in the waterworks area under an island, there was only a thin layer of transparent technoworks blocks between the open sky below and himself and the full-plate Stalarmor that had attacked him.

He stepped down onto the floor and turned to find the source of the voice huddled against the gold panel just to the side of the ladder. She had a slight tan complexion and long hair that could have been light blond or white. Her eyes were bright green, almost aglow in the room's poor lighting. She looked to be about Link's age, and there was something familiar about her face that Link just could not quite figure out. She wore a sleeveless dress with a bodice of white and a skirt of deep blue.

"Hello?" Link asked. "What are you doing down here?"

"I-I don't know," the girl replied, trying to shrink against the wall. "I-I've been down here for quite a while now."

Link glanced to one side to see her pointed ears protruding from her hair. "You're Hylian?" he asked.

"Y-yeah, I guess."

"Are you one of the settlers that came to this island?"

"N-no. I was born here."

"What's your name?" At this, the girl fell silent and turned her eyes down to the floor. Link took it as a lack of trust and decided to switch tactics. "Do you want to get out of here?" The girl nodded. "Okay. C'mon, I'll take you back up."

"N-no, not yet," the girl quickly said, looking up at him.

"Why not?"

"My sister's still down here."

Link glanced around the room. "Where is she?"

The girl pointed to a doorway at the end of the room. "In there."

"Why?"

The girl looked down at the floor again, sorrow prevalent in her eyes. "We have been fighting. She will not come to the door."

"You two can't stay down here," Link said.

"I do not know what else to do."

Link indicated the doorway. "We'll both go get her. If you're gonna fight, you can do it outside where it's safer."

She appeared to hesitate, and then she gave a nod. Link started for the doorway, and she quickly took up stride beside him. He glanced at her twice as they crossed the room, still trying to figure out where he had seen her before. He knew that he did not know any of the residents on the island, but this made him a little hopeful. If there were residents still alive like this girl and (with luck) her sister, then maybe there was a chance the other residents could be saved.

The other room proved to be a duplicate of the previous room, except there was no ladder out nor was there any other doorway. This probably explained why the lone figure in the room remained where she was, leaning against the wall on the far side. Link was about to call out when the girl with him suddenly ran forward, audibly sobbing. Link decided to jog closer, not wanting to interrupt should they decide to make amends. That, and his ankle was starting to throb with pain again.

The first girl tackled her sister into a hug, which the taller girl returned with a much cooler demeanor. Once Link was close enough, she looked up in response. Astoundingly, she also appeared to be about his age, with long, bright red hair tied into a single tail draped over the shoulder her sister was not crying on. She wore a green, one-piece dress with no sleeves, revealing her spindly arms. Her dark eyes looked on him with a gentle word of gratitude.

Link, however, switched from a friendly grin to dawning realization and ended with a glare and a firm jaw. And he only said one thing with such venom that the taller sister reacted with surprise.

"Meilont."

Link was finished with this illusion. He did not know the other girl's face, but he recognized the face of a friend that he had not seen for two years and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt could not be up here, let alone on an island no one had visited for decades. The Night was toying with him again, for whatever perverse pleasure it gained from imitating two faces from his past. He gripped the goggles around his neck and slowly raised them to his face.

Both girls disappeared from sight. In their place were two masses of water vaguely holding their shapes.

A wave from the pool on his left dashed across the girls, leaving nothing as it then receded back into the pool like a person withdrawing a hand. Link immediately pulled the Sorian sword and turned to the pool.

Three thick arches of water rose from the surface. Link watched as a red sphere stopped at the top of the closest arch. It rotated to show Link a large, black spot like the iris of an eye. For a moment, they stared at each other, Link waiting the first move.

Then he noticed the water at his feet.

Once he looked down, a column of water shot up from the floor and hit him in the face. It was not a spray of water; the creature had turned the water into something as solid as a fist and struck him between the eyes. Link reeled backwards as if to fall over. But when he did not, he looked down to realize with only a moment's worth of clarity that he was chest-deep in a column of water which held him with the force of a clenched fist. Then he felt himself shaken violently from side to side. His grip on the Sorian sword failed, and the Dreamweaver's Shield threatened to rip his arm off if it wasn't released. He attempted to brace himself on the water only to find his arm would simply pass through. When it stopped, the best Link could tell was that he was rising, his mind spinning and his body heavy. He recovered soon enough to find the creature's eye nearby, staring at him through the safety of its other tentacle. It angled Link left and right as if examining him, even turning him backward as if to investigate the soles of his boots.

Then, without warning, Link found himself falling away from the eye. The tentacle holding him struck the floor hard, and Link's back registered pain before his head whipped onto the tile. The ensuing lapse in awareness left him numb to the two following strikes against the ground, all three occurring in such rapid succession that he might as well have been a doll for a temperamental toddler. He also did not realize when he had been thrown, his limbs lifeless as he sailed through the air. He saw the room spinning around him before hitting the floor again. It felt like a while before he had enough conscious thought to realize that he had been chucked into the corner next to the doorway. Finding movement in his limbs was like waking up after a long night. He untwisted himself and used a nearby wall to stand up again. He felt nauseous and wobbly, not at all helped by a fresh reminder of his injured ankle. He looked up at his foe to find that it had shifted the arch its eye occupied so that one end rested on the floor.

Link quickly reached behind his back and grabbed his boomerang out. Once he had one arm in his fingers, he twisted backward. His injured ankle made pivoting painful, and his aim was thrown by the surge of pain and subsequent stumble. He had to lean more weight onto the wall to keep from falling over.

When he looked up at the enemy again, he saw that, in spite of his bad aim, the creature had caught his boomerang with another tentacle. The eye glanced at the boomerang, and then it turned to Link. Although it had no expressions, Link could feel the creature's malice as it crushed the boomerang in the tentacle. He quickly turned to go for the doorway.

He found his feet locked to the ground by the water.

Then the water climbed up his legs. He swayed as the new tentacle picked him up. Then he watched with horror as the tentacle turned him upside-down over the pool. He only had a split-second to take in a breath, and then the creature dunked him into and out of the water several times. Each time, the force felt like when he had smacked into the wall earlier with the additional pain in his neck as his head was forced to twist at different angles. When it pulled him back out, he thought he was going to lose all of his equipment, his clothes, and his skin. He accidentally inhaled water at one point, confused by the trauma and unable to judge when he was out of the water. Once again, he felt his consciousness slipping.

Then the creature slammed him back onto the floor. It left him lying on his back, which only lasted as long as it took for Link to begin coughing up water. He rolled onto one side and expectorated until his throat burned. The creature hovered nearby, still safe inside its arch. Link slowly stood up and glanced down at himself. He still had the scabbard for the sword and the shield. He also had his gun belt, but a number of shells had been pulled from their slots. His trousers, although sopping wet, still remained in place, although he felt around his hips to find that the pockets' contents had been lost.

He looked up to see the creature observing those contents in the tentacle that had held him. This included his rigging knife, he realized with one hand where he had clipped it to his gun belt. The creature formed another tentacle from the thin layer of water on the floor.

And Link watched with his breathing arrested as the second tentacle took the form of the knife's blade almost twenty times larger. The tentacle then charged at Link. Link braced himself behind the Dreamweaver's Shield. The impact nearly resulted in Link's skull being split open if he had not raised the shield a little higher at the last moment. The full weight on him caused his right ankle to scream in agony, and he tried to shift so that his left leg was holding back more force. He heard motion to one side and watched as an additional tentacle rose from the pool, already formed into a blade. In a flash of understanding brought on by all of the adrenaline pushing his body to respond, he realized what this second blade was about to do. So he allowed his right shoulder to drop while he shifted to his left. The first blade struck the floor with an audible pang. He did not wait for the second blade to advance, instead turning with the intention of fleeing the room.

He did not see the blade change angles. Just two steps into his run, the blade advanced horizontally and skimmed over the floor. Link cried out in pain as the blade struck him mid-step, and he fell to the floor while the blade splashed out of existence against the nearby wall. He had just put all of his weight on his right ankle, so he flipped onto his back and sat up to examine the damage.

His right foot, up to just above his original injury, was missing. The fresh stump it had left behind was bleeding into the water, dying it almost black in this poor lighting.

The creature formed another tentacle to capture the blood and brought it closer to its eye to examine it. It pressed the blood into the same arch as its eye. Link watched as the blood soaked into the eye. The eye shivered as it looked up. Link could feel his body grow even number, although it was a toss-up whether it was dread or bleeding out. He did not have an opportunity to act as the creature then caught his right arm in one tentacle and his right leg in another. It raised him off the ground and brought him close. Link felt a crushing force on his leg and writhed in pain. He felt around with his free hand for something, anything to fight back.

He found the flare gun still tucked into its holster. He pulled it out and fit the barrel between his teeth so that he could open the breach. His hand, slick from contact with the creature, fumbled two shells before yanking a third and shoving it into the breach. He did not have time to see what it was, consigning himself to this last act before the creature crushed him to death for his blood. He nearly dropped the gun hollering out as the bones in his legs snapped multiple times. He saved it by clutching it to his chest and closed the breach. He used the gun belt to pull the hammer back. Then he took aim at the eye.

FZZZZZZK! The eye flinched as the shell lodged into its arch. Link felt the pressure lighten on his leg as the creature now took interest in the mysterious object.

Then it reared up as the shell began spewing dark smoke into the arch. The tentacles holding Link suddenly lost their grip, and Link dropped hard onto his stomach. He looked up as the eye retreated for the floor just ahead of him. Although full of pain and weary from all the trauma, Link looked around for the sword. The eye was too busy trying to escape the smoke trapped within its body, now using its other tentacles to draw away the smoke toward the pool.

There! He had fallen not too far from where the sword had landed, sitting in the corner almost under the gold panel on this side of the room. Link used his elbows and uninjured knee to crawl across the floor toward it. He threw off the shield so that it was not making noise. He had to hurry; there was no telling when that smoke shell would die. Water splashed in his face.

The creature continued to flail about, now pressing the arch against the ceiling while more tentacles continued to pull the smoke out. Although the smoke was being drawn into the pool or one of the other arches, the amount released by Link's shell built quickly. The eye was so close to the floor that it could almost touch it. It swiped and swiped at the smoke, trying to reduce the volume before it dared move itself from the arch and risk taking the smoke with it.

Then the shell finally stopped spewing smoke. The creature frantically drew the smoke into another tentacle. Then it produced a tentacle so that it could transition out of the contaminated arch. It slid into the tentacle, just barely daring to touch the air.

And it skewered itself. It had not noticed the blade already in the tentacle since its attention was on the smoke still in its arch. It might not have noticed at all if not for the glowing, lime-green liquid swimming in the tentacle with it. So it aimed its iris toward the wound. This turned out to be an even bigger mistake because the iris was subsequently sliced on the blade, adding black to its body liquids.

It only had a few moments to see that Link, leaning on the wall, had positioned his sword opposite the arch so that he could stab without much movement. The eye shook for a moment. And then it simply popped, leaving a mass of red, green, and black liquids suspended in its tentacles before all of the water in the room submitted to gravity.

Link dropped the sword and fell backward onto the floor. In the final grips of exsanguination, he watched as the ceiling above turned yellow-orange. He knew he had won, but what would be the price this time? He could not take the time to assess the amount of punishment he had taken, his consciousness already gone before he could list a single thing.