“BOOM!”, the explosion broke through the side of the Bear Mountain, and away from the despaired people who all were dashing to the teleportation room at the same time, and without arms and legs, I bled until my vision went dark, and yet another thousand years of torment befell upon me, torture worse than having your members blasted away for an untold amount of time.

I had already been murdered five times at that point

“Come on, how many more times do I have to kill you before you start fighting seriously?! I thought you were unbound by those chains when you cast those spells without regard for the others, but it seems you still have fear inside of you… Embrace the battle! The war!”, the wolf spirit spoke, walking through the burned leather of the Bear Mountain.

“Huar!”, still on my knees, I extended my arm towards my opponent, and conjured an explosion right on top of the wolf.

“Yes, yes! This is starting to get fun!”, Tanka jumped away from the smoke with singed fur. “But this is not enough yet! If you want to see your friends again, you need to break all of your seals, God of Death!”, the wolf jumped towards me, and I got back up just in time to throw a kick against its snout.

My kick threw the wolf all the way back to the forest beyond the grass plain around the Bear Mountain, but I hadn’t come out of that without injuries, as his claws had slashed open my sides, going all the way to the ribs and cutting the bone. Compared to the pain I felt when I broke one of the seals, however, that was nothing: I jumped after the wolf, pulled my fist back, covered it in a huge metal glove, and got back to attacking.

Tanka bit into the metal fist, and shook his head from one side to the other, breaking many trees with my body, and then throwing me all the way to the village beyond, where I crashed through the wooden wall of half a dozen long houses.

The huge wolf didn’t give me time to get back up, however, and in an instant the creature was already back on top of me again, biting on my left arm which I raised to protect myself. I felt my left shoulder and elbow bone dislocating, and the long fangs of the wolf pierced all the way through my forearm.

I tried to conjure a spike under the wolf, but he broke my spell, and impaled me instead with another third level spell, which just its conjuration was enough to explode the heads of everyone around to look at it.

“Oh, looking at a third level spell isn’t enough to explode your head anymore? You’re almost there, God of Death… You’re almost accomplishing both our wishes!”

My vision flickered, and when I came back to myself, I was breathing hard and lying against a wall with tears running nonstop from my eyes. Every time I unmade another chain link, the duration of the memories seemed to grow longer, and they contained nothing but despair and hopelessness, and grueling and harrowing sickness.

Turning back to the wolf, I conjured a metal spike, and propelled it with a huge explosion; Tanka dodged it with incredibly fast reflexes, but I had an unlimited magical supply, and simply invested in the number of mega projectiles I could conjure: I destroyed dozens of buildings with the magic, turned earth mounds into avalanches, and felled many totems, injuring and killing who knew how many people, but managed to put a couple of shinning grey stakes into the shoulders of the wolf wearing leathery clothes with many pockets.

“YES! YES! THIS IS WHAT I LIVE FOR!”, Tanka dodged my projectiles and barked: “WOOF!”

Then, coming from the direction of the giant wolf, a series of progressively bigger closing wolf jaws came into existence, and by the time they approached me, the maw that closed on me was too big for me to escape in time.

The teeth closed right on my stomach, and I coughed blood as I was once more almost torn in half. I couldn’t feel my lower half, and I felt myself losing blood too quickly. I would die in seconds, and then I would go through that darkness once more, and I would lose another part of myself.

But if I didn’t do anything, Mari, Aspen, Dust, and Splash could suffer the same destiny as Spruce and Ike.

So, instead of dying and coming back as something slightly different, I answered the call from inside the chain links. And I unmade exactly half of the chain tattoos that marked my body.

Fifty of the original one hundred links had been broken.