The fire illuminated the room lovingly, expressing said love through the warm flames that danced far into the pitch-black darkness of the tall room. The flames lightly kissed the walls of the rather small room exposing the hidden stories of the snake for the first time in a very long time. The fire watched the jailed snake wiggle and writhe in discomfort, trying to capture the living prey it had wanted since it found itself in this wasteland of forgetting memories. Its scars continued to churn in the center of its forehead while glowing that same discomforting green with that same glazed-over expression in its eye, staring down its first live meal in years.
The duo of living and deceased stood still in the draftless underground, faces hidden behind the long shadows of the vertically large room. The armored warrior clutched his blade tightly, waiting for his opponent –whose hands were still lit a not-so-comforting orange– to make the first move, which is exactly what the fire-wielding foe did.
With trained grace, the skeleton threw small fireballs out of its bony hands at a fast rate, but they traveled to the knight even quicker. The large frame of the knight was luckily able to evade a good number of the fireballs, yet not all of them were as clear cut. In the dozen or so flares, only three had managed to graze him, being on the right shoulder, abdomen, and left forearm. The glowing metal rubbed against his skin, leaving small, but noticeable burns across his skin, beneath the armor. He let loose a hiss in discomfort at the heat, before sucking in his lips and charging towards his undead target, skillfully evading the numerous waves of fireballs with relative ease all while raising his blade above his head, ready for a single downward strike.
He brought the instrument of war down in a cruelly strong single strike, ready to end this as quickly as possible, but said strike was made useless as the controller of the elements pivoted expertly to the right, before blasting the man with a never-ending single stream of white-hot fire which both pushed the knight back to his former starting position, in a much worse condition then what they started their skirmish in, and nearly melted the metal man into a puddle. The sword clutched by the unnamed knight was launched into the nearby wall when the fire blast made contact, landing directly and deeply into the head of an inscribed image of a young snake slithering around the land of the dead, trying to find food. He tried planting himself on the stone floor by pushing his feet into the stone but was being pushed back at too quick a pace to steady himself in the ferocious heat. He could feel the molting metal weakening the expensive armor, as it started to meld into itself and conform with the being it was trying to protect. The joints were the first to combine into a single piece of raw metal. The unbearable heat of the flames and the agonizing feeling of metal rubbing not so lovingly against his skin, likely charring said skin. His movements were slowly being encumbered by the weight of the molten metal. Though it felt like he was weighting through wet concrete, he quickly was able to move his arms into an X-formation in front of his torso, the place where the beam of fire had mostly connected. In the moment, it felt so much more drawn out than it truly was, as the flamethrower had only been active for a few minutes, but it felt closer to half an hour than that.
Sweating profusely, a single knee fell to the ground, while smoke poured out of his body like a fountain without gravity. The crass burns across his upper body were healing rapidly while the armor seemingly started cooling instantaneously. Letting go of a large breath a single thought reverberated throughout the front of his mind, 'I should've just used that squeamish shield from the start.' Grunting, he moved his left arm towards the center of his chest plate, ready to fix his gear and turn the tide of this battle to his favor with the mumbling shield. He wasn't given the time to do so as the permanently grinning figure manipulated the fire in his hand in a fraction of a second, it quickly formed into the shape of a bladed polearm made completely of the blaze of warm and hot colors. Gripping the Guando as tightly as its skeletal hand could. Fiercely, it swung towards the still recuperating knight from the right, slightly distorting the shape of the magic flame in the lightning-fast attack towards the man's unguarded head. Though the strike could be counted as something far beyond human reaction time, the knight was able to block the strike of enormous power with his right forearm, creating a dent in the quickly solidifying churning metal that once resembled that of armor. The heat radiating off the weapon –now lodged deep into the warrior's arm– made the man grit his teeth behind the helmet, nevertheless, his left hand made it to its objective: the center of his chest, allowing the metal to reform as the cloud enshrouded him.
He took several steps back, ejecting the fire jammed in his armor while also summoning his blade back into his hand with a single motion of his thumb. The force the skeleton exerted onto the arm suddenly had nothing to push on, forcing the skeleton forward without any way to stop. Its masked skull moved towards the knight and stared the visor in the eyes, the small eye holes in the porcelain mask looked almost relieved at this turn of events. Though no real emotion was present, the knight started the skeleton as it fell forward toward the cold ground. Through the cloud of hazy mist a single well-built, armored leg swiftly made itself known as the knight kicked the skeleton's head with force, unlike anything he had done previously since becoming a free man. The skull of the enemy promptly shattered into tiny shards of bone while the neck fell to the ground and disassembled itself creating a prompt cloud of dust to appear and cover the rest of the remains. Before the leg was even swung, the knight's right hand was ready to press down on the back of the junction between his neck and the torso and summon the defense, but it didn't look to be necessary anymore.
The battle was only a few minutes long and looked to end quicker than it began as it only took the knight a single hit to incapacitate the enemy. He stood unmoving while the armor remolded itself and reshaped into the form it had before the heated battle. The wounds that marred the skin of the knight underneath the protective shell closed, the blisters receded, and the blotchy skin returned to its previous color. Sighing in contentment, he moved to the nearby wall –which was opposite the jailed snake– and placed his back against it, allowing himself a break. With his sword still clenched in his left hand, he dropped his right arm back to its resting position and sighed in contentment, even so, the pair of brown eyes hidden behind the shadow of the helmet gazed through the visor directly into the cunning eyes of the serpent locked beneath the surface, hooked into a staring contact.
Yellow eyes stared hatefully, while its large body squirmed in its spot, wanting now more than ever to be free, just to eat the wight in front of it. It bashed its large head against the large metal pipes –which were keeping the snake tied down to its current position– with great force, even slightly bending them outward, but to no avail in the end. It hissed in disappointment as the slits in its eyes constricted even further while the thrumming of its body against the stone grew even louder and the lines in the center of its twin horns continued to change into various shapes with the seven lines that were placed on the crown of its head. The thrumming could be compared to that of someone lightly smacking the rim of a drum layered over itself a thousand times all while continuing without pause. The already low vibrations that were present in the room intensified greatly as the tremors grew in activity causing great shaking in the vertically enormous room. The tables shook violently while the stacks of empty books fell to the floor and off their vantage points, clattering on whatever surface they fell onto. The brilliant fire in the center of the room, seemed to also feel the tremors as the flames were nudged from one position to another, swaying like a leaf in the wind.
The knight knew something bigger was going to come, something stronger and much more difficult to defeat was on its way. It took a few long moments, but his theory was only proven to be true when a crash could be heard from the infinite black depths of the unknown ceiling. Chunks of stone fell from the black sea above and was followed by a dust cloud housing the highest visible points. Then, abruptly, like a crack of thunder, something fell through the dust and fell to the ground in a single eardrum-shattering boom. Everything was thrown into disarray once the unknown humanoid fell to the ground, The papers flew past the barrier of being visible vertically. The shells that were once books were thrown everywhere at fast speeds, some even got stuck in the walls of the temple-turned laboratory while others hit the bars of the snake cage, but the most lethal part of this entrance were the large, splintered rocks from the surface jetted in all directions, crashing sporadically throughout the room and in various sizes as well, some chucks even reaching the size of the small boulders. From the right of the knight, one of these larger pieces was directly heading for him, but he was already prepared for the excruciatingly fast rock. He handed the weapon to his non-dominate hand, and without a moment's notice, sliced the boulder in two without blinking.
As the boulder fell limply at his feet, the man observed the great cloud of dust with caution. If the masked foe had been less clumsy on his feet, they would likely have been fighting for far longer than they had been skirmishing, and this thing –whatever it was– was likely to be much stronger than the other pile of bones at his feet.
Emerging from the dust was at first what he assumed to be a regular, yet naked skeleton, but quickly his assumptions were killed off. The build of the creature was unlike anything he had seen before: for one, the being of darkness had a pitch-black body. The arms of the beast were huge, the bones were robustly built, easily reaching down to its ankles as it stood tall in the dimly lit room. The dead wight was easily taller than the knight, by at least a couple heads, even while also supporting itself with the large arms; walking on both its feet and the knuckles of its hands. Its tiny legs, which were only tiny relative to the rest of the body, stood strong; one of which was propped on a boulder that didn't launch away, only to crush it easily under the strength held in the powerfully built creature. The skull was what seemed to light something in the man's stomach: it was a human skull. This specimen before him, was not a monster or a long-extinct animal. This was a human that had been completely transfigured into some type of abomination. It made him sick to his stomach. The head of the beast surveyed its surroundings until its endless voids in the place of eyes landed on the knight. The sight was chilling; in the scarce light of the fire in the center of the room, the black chassis of a human seemed to absorb all the light that bent towards it from the flame, as its permanently grinning visage stared lifelessly without a single emotion being present in the place where its eyes would've resided in life. It cocked its head to the right while moving its built right arm and raising it till it was eye level, with a single ebony bony finger pointing towards the knight. In that exact moment, not even half an inch of light began to radiate off of the pitch-black silhouette, highlighting it in the shadows that it was partially hidden in, yet the light did not cover any part of the head, the empty black eye sockets remain that, empty black eye sockets, free of all emotion and all morality.
Bathed completely in the light of the fire, the knight was not given time to analyze his opponent any further as in the blink of an eye, a large, brutish fist, encased in three or four additional inches of light, was already centimeters away from crashing into the right side of his helmet and caving in the man's skull. However, the knight was able to retaliate in not even a fraction of a second before the man-made-atrocity appeared in his vision with an upward arc of his sword, but, unfortunately, the sword passed through the imposing figure of the enemy without any resistance or a lick of damage inflicted on the horror. The eyes behind the helmet widened to the size of dinner plates as the fist came crashing into him, launching him across the room and deeply rooting him into the wall leftward of the snake. Blood poured profusely out of many crevices of the armor, but mostly out of the cratered helmet, allowing for blood to leave the visor like a fountain, with large chunks of skull bone and brain matter creatively painting the armor a new shade of red with speckles of white and a pinkish color down, pooling at the flood beneath his current resting place in the wall. Weakly, he moved his hand, to restart the process of restoring his armor. The feeling of the weight of the world on his head.
'H-how did it do that… Am I really t-that weak thes–…' He couldn't finish his thought as the thumb connected itself to the center of the chest plate, while the hulking beast slowly approached its master's prey, the light around it shrinking as it went beyond the fire. The restoration of the helmet didn't take even half a second, allowing the deadly head wound to cleanse itself, reassemble the brain, and the protective layer on the outside. He could feel the large gashes on his back –created on impact– begin closing themselves, which in his own opinion, needed to be faster, as the giant was still approaching, and the wound wasn't getting better. He could feel himself slipping away, in the enormous pain his head was currently in. He couldn't even describe the pain if he tried, it was just inexplicably painful. The thinking power of his once sharp intellect felt like it was slowing, and began hurting when he thought, so he laid there, looking at the enemy, but even that felt like it was destroying his entire head and nothing he could do would save himself any shred of pain, it was all-encompassing, and all he could do was wait it out.
He wanted so desperately to fall asleep and never wake up, but that wouldn't help him, as he would likely find himself in the gut of the snake, with no way out, except through the same entrance he would enter through, and he would rather not do that, so he remained away, even though the black spots and the fleeting white light at the very center of his vision. He fought back. He watched defiantly, as the large former human grabbed him rough in both arms, pulled him out of the stone with ease, and began dragging the nearly lifeless body towards the caged deity-like animal. He stared at the ground, still unable to activate his limbs as he faded in and out of consciousness through the bleary vision.
'Weakness… weakness… the layer of light…' The strange thoughts of the knight finally clicked together, the weakness was not super obvious, but was still easy enough for him to pick up on fairly quickly. He finally fell completely into darkness as the glowing skeleton dragged him to the hungry snake, readying itself for its first meal in centuries.