Chapter 56 – A Fight Against Inevitability

The treasure chest mimic shut its lid down around my head, as I felt its razor sharp teeth sink into my neck, which was not armored at all against that kind of assault. 

It hurt. 

So bad. 

It hurt so fucking bad. Like someone took a pair of scissors and started cutting at my neck. 

This wasn’t something graceful like a clean sword cut. This was just a pair of scissors, with its short ass blades, hacking and snipping away at my throat with the grace of a toddler aggressively finger painting. Making a mess everywhere. Just smacking its small hands onto the canvas, smearing paint all over the place with drool running down its baby cheeks. Or was that drool running down my cheeks, from the mimic’s slimy tongue? 

Rosalia screamed in fear as she watched on from the other side of the wall crack. This was like a fucked up horror movie jump scare, except instead of just getting a black screen, I was literally experiencing death. 

This was a sensation I never wanted to relive. Nothing in my entire life so far could describe just how painful, how sudden, and how violently this all happened. You never really consider what it feels like to have your head torn off. You never think about how a monster’s teeth can just pierce right through your throat, stopping only at the spinal cord bone holding your head up, and then start tugging back up, bringing your entire head off your bone like a fucking meat lollipop. 

It wasn’t a glamorous death. It just kind of happened, suddenly. With no warning at all. No build up. No long winded speech combined with a noble sacrifice. 

I died simply because I wasn’t fast enough to squeeze my body through a crack in the wall. I died inconsequentially and unceremoniously. Like a dog that fell into a gutter. 

I died simply because I failed to evaluate the riddle of the room properly. Now that I thought about it, of course a resident of the room itself, a mimic chest, was not the elusive visitor figure. It seemed ambiguous at the time, but in hindsight, it was really, really obvious that the mimic was not the visitor. 

-721 health

HP: -2/864

[You have been beheaded.] 

[You have died.] 

…

[Angel of Luxuria has casted Reraise on you.]

Strange. I simultaneously died and received the reraise buff at basically the same millisecond. In a situation like this, was the buff considered to be applied in time? 

We just had to wait and see I guess. 

…

My body began to glow in a strange light. 

[You have been revived. Reraise status has been removed.] 

Landing on the ground from a glowing levitated state, I opened my eyes and took in the situation. Right in front of my feet, I could see my own decapitated body. What a surreal, out of body sensation this was, seeing the aftermath of my own death. 

Behind me, on the safety of the other side of the wall crack, Rosalia had collapsed onto her knees and was sweating profusely from exertion from casting [Reraise]. As she mentioned earlier, that particular spell costed a ton of divine energy as well as mana, although the cast time itself was near instantaneous. 

The treasure chest head mimic, which was busy gnawing on my severed head just a moment ago, looked back in surprise and saw an entirely different version of myself, as if I was cloned from my own dead body. 

It rose up to its feet, standing at full two meter length once again with its slimy appendages covered in my own body’s blood, before sinking onto all fours and crawling towards me.

“Spoon, run!!” Rosalia shouted.

She didn’t have to tell me twice. I glanced back at the crack in the wall. It would take me about a minute to get through there, and as I found out last time, a minute was enough for the mimic to kill me. 

I had no choice but to fight. 

“Dimension ripper, activate.”

With a black void covering my entire left arm and my adamantite poleaxe in my right arm, I warily watched the mimic approach me. 

Realistically, I had no shot at beating this thing. It was so much higher level than me that 999 times out of 1000 tries, I’d probably get killed in a duel against it. 

Whatever. Even a 0.1% chance of victory was still a chance. When push came to shove, I wasn’t going to just be paralyzed in fear. I was going to fight. And at the very least, if I went down again, I’d go down fighting this time, and not just running away. 

Right as the mimic was about to lunge at me from its squatted position, I outstretched my arm.

“Love whip, restrain!” 

My whip control level and main level were nowhere near high enough to successfully restrain this extremely dangerous, high level treasure chest head mimic with a red-black name above its head, but at the very least it could distract him for a precious few seconds.

As the demonic summoned weapon coiled itself around the mimic’s arms and torso, I swung the adamantite poleaxe at the mimic’s left arm. 

The poleaxe dug into the mimic’s arm on impact, and a bit of green goo dripped down its arm. 

[32 damage]

Looking up at the treasure chest mimic’s health bar, I almost gagged. 32 damage was so insignificant that it was already getting healed back up from the monster’s base passive health regeneration. 

It looked hurt, though, despite the damage not being reflected on the health bar at all. Without thinking too much about it, I continued my combination attack with a left handed thrust of my void covered arm. 

Dimension ripper sank into the mimic’s torso for just a few millimeters, before the black void covering my arm began to blink out of existence, returning my arm back to normal. 

Mana: 631/1213 

Mana: 127/1213

Mana: 0/1213

My mana bar got depleted instantly from trying to penetrate the mimic’s torso with dimension ripper. This was the absurd difference in our levels. This was what it meant to fight a reddish-black named NPC. 

[670 damage]

It was not inconsequential, though. Several millimeters worth of flesh right in front of where the mimic’s heart could be, ripped off into the void and leaving a nasty, nasty gash spilling out green goo blood, was nothing to scoff at. The mimic’s health bar dropped by about an eighth. Meaning, if I managed to do that just about eight times I could take it down. Or maybe less, if I could land a critical hit. Crazy. It did show that even despite a huge level difference, miracles were possible in this game if you had enough skill to pull it off. 

But my miracles had run out, though. 

Mana: 17/1213

Although my mana was regenerating at a pretty high rate, it was nowhere near fast enough when a fight like this was decided within a two minute time frame. Hell, I didn’t even consider using thunderbolt, because the three second cast time it took to set up and fire the magic circle was all the time the mimic needed to rip off my head again, and crack my skull open to eat the insides of my brain. 

[Love whip has failed to restrain its target. Target’s level is too high.]

Restrain has risen to level 4. 

In the span of thirty seconds, the mimic tanked an unarmored thrust to the chest from dimension ripper, and broke free of love whip’s restraint. 

In the span of thirty seconds, my entire offensive arsenal was depleted. 

Although, I guess not everything. Even with no mana, I could still hold my own in physical combat, armed with the adamantite poleaxe with its ridiculous +500 strength modifier, as well as the numerous strength buffs I got from achievements and the goddess bath buff. 

And that wasn’t even counting my high base dexterity, or the fact that I felt my senses were noticeably more acute since my transformation into an incomplete demi-human with vampire blood. In the future, it was probably prudent to invest a bit more into my physical combat ability via training and equipment, for situations just like this. After all, I was a melee class. Even my mana-costing abilities were mostly focused on melee range with the sole exception of thunderbolt. 

Holding my adamantite poleaxe with an iron grip in my hands, knowing that a single hand slip would cost me my life, I swung at the mimic, slashing its arm, and then thrusted forward at its chest once again. 

[32 damage.]

The mimic was gashed by the first swing, but dodged the thrust by sinking to the ground once again, squatting with its long spidery legs that were a disgustingly slimy skinless pink, and lunged forwards towards me with its claw arms outstretched and jaw unhinged, revealing that enormous set of teeth that already fatally swallowed me once before. 

Learning from the adult spinosaurus fight, my body reacted on instinct. I raised my poleaxe just in time, and pointed it straight into the mimic’s mouth. There was no need to push the poleaxe forward, because the inertia from the treasure chest mimic’s own lunge would deal the brunt of the damage to itself. 

Sshk. 

I felt a bump as the tip of the poleaxe hit the back of the mimic’s treasure chest mouth, as the mimic was mid air. I felt the poleaxe tearing through the soft tissue in the mimic’s mouth, including its tongue and its gums, right before it reached the back of the chest itself. 

[270 damage, critical hit!]

But the back of the treasure chest was solid wood, or metal, or some inorganically hard material. After all, a mimic by definition was an organic being disguising itself as an inorganic inanimate object. It wasn’t surprising that the chest head itself was not just made of pure flesh. 

Unable to pierce the back of the treasure chest, the momentum from the mimic’s lunge pushed my poleaxe’s shaft back into me, knocking me down onto the floor. The mimic eyed me hungrily as it sat on top of my stomach, pressing me down as my poleaxe fell to the side and I watched saliva and blood and brain matter from my own dead body drip from the mimic’s drooling mouth and tongue, splattering all over my face. It dug its long clawed fingers into my face, hitting my bone with its sharp fingernails. 

-72 health. 

[You are bleeding.] 

The mimic dug deeper into my face with its fingers. 

At that moment… 

Shwoon. 

A fat beam of light accompanied by an exasperated moan smited the mimic right on its face, knocking the chest to the side for a brief moment and causing it to roar in pain. That had to be Rosalia, who rushed to cast her light magic and was probably more than halfway through her divine energy and mana reserves, not to mention her physical stamina. 

[300 damage.]

The mimic’s health was now at around five-eighths or six-eighths health. We were actually doing a significant amount of damage to it. 

A wooden box got chucked from the crack towards the mimic, hitting the mimic on its treasure chest mouth before bouncing to the side. I recognized it immediately as one of Bjorn’s traps. A moment later, the wooden box detonated into a spike trap. It missed both me and the mimic, unfortunately. 

Next came his hand made machete, tossed with relatively good precision at the mimic’s mouth. 

The mimic’s tongue and gums were beginning to bleed rather significantly from all of the physical damage that they took, but it managed to shrug off. 

I could hear Rosalia preparing another magic circle to cast her light magic, but it was going to take a minute or two before she could fire. 

Mana: 72/1213

I reactivated dimension ripper and swiped back up with the remaining 72 mana I had left, which caused a very slight sizzling mark on the mimic’s hip where my hand touched it. 

None of this was enough, though. 

With a screech, the mimic dove down with its treasure chest mouth and bit straight into my shoulder, taking off several fistfuls of flesh from the side of my body. 

-580 health.

[You have taken severe damage. Seek medical assistance immediately.] 

Health: 214/864

It raised its head once more, and bit down once again on the same side of my body, ripping out another treasure chest mouthful of flesh. 

Health: -172/864

[You have been fatally wounded.] 

[You have died.]