The flock of prisoners formed a circle around me. They were careful to maintain a good distance from me. Everyone’s eyes gleamed with awe and fear. I cleared my throat and exhaled. I balled my hands into fists, mentally preparing myself for whatever would be coming next.

“I challenge you. I challenge you. I challenge you.”

Instant agony was inflicted.

I began to feel bad. Very bad indeed, and for no reason. My heart sank and it kept on sinking, as if it were a boat with a hole in a sea of hopelessness. A sea without a bottom. Thoughts of weakness and despair chewed on my brain. I wanted to tear apart my body and come out of it. My breath was stuck in my throat and I tried to respire with my mouth to escape the suffocation. My body was burning in an internal fire that was impossible to douse. Somehow I kept on standing, even though my knees buckled. I was a corpse. A corpse with the soul trapped inside it. Only the image of Kiara in my mind was the single ray of sunshine reaching me through the dark clouds of anguish.

I could sense in my mind that she was slowly regaining consciousness, wherever the Smartians had taken her. I tried to speak to her, but she was too groggy, as though in a deep slumber that refused to let her come to a waking state.

Meanwhile, a black smoke appeared around me. As it swirled, the fear stricken prisoners embraced each other. They knew that they were doomed.

I was letting out a soft continuous moan that I was too late to notice, engaged with enduring the agony.

The smoke came together, slowly acquiring a humanoid shape. The internal torture intensified. My shoulders were drooping from the pressure. I could no longer keep my vision focused. My mind was crammed with fantastical images, vague depictions of bad things happening.

Some of these taunted me about how I had wasted my entire life in a game. In others I became old at an accelerated pace. My body wrinkled and bent and shrunk. I saw myself trying to solve problems only ending up in a mess every single time.

A voice spoke to me, and I recognized it as my own. It told me Kiara was the cause of all my misfortunes. If I hadn’t gone out on a date with her I would have never had the accident. The voice laughed at how I was a ‘king’ of mere computer generated characters in a game world. I was a nobody in the real world. I felt like there was a monstrous parasitic leech in my mind, sucking at my soul. It wanted me to give up.

Somehow I held on. My nails dug into my flesh, I was clenching my fists so hard. The small connection that I retained with Kiara’s mind somehow aided me with a flicker of common sense.

The smoke had taken the shape of a lady. A giant bald woman with a face that was a compilation of countless colourful masks bearing chequered patterns. She stood just a bit shorter than the ceiling of the dimension we were in. Something about her appearance was deeply revolting. She was ugliness personified.

“So you want to challenge me, do you?” the lady spell spoke in a maniacal screech.

The leech kept on sucking at my mind. I was near the end of my will power. Despite everything, I looked up defiantly.

“I want you gone,” I told her. My voice sounded pained and small. The voice of a man about to die.

“Then fight me,” the lady spell dared me, thumping her bosom. “And kill me if you can!”

She opened her mouth wide. Out slithered a tongue of smoke. It acquired scales, like the body of a snake. Already frail because of the mental leech, I couldn’t not even think of moving, as the serpentine tongue coiled around my body and hoisted me.

Then the squeezing began. I howled. Wait a minute, I could escape this. But how? My mind was processing things with lethargy. Thankfully, before I could be crushed to death I arrived at the decision to transform into a Littlefut. Immediately I fell out of the clutch of the constrictor.

“Ah, you do have some tricks up your sleeve, don’t you?” the lady spell said as I looked up from where I had landed on the floor. She was assaulting me not only from the outside but also from the inside, breaking me down so that even making a small movement with my body or thinking the smallest sane thought was a gargantuan task.

I was too drained, and all I wanted was to give up. But I held on. I forced myself to think.

Dharti boasted a myriad of eviluns. A unique monster drifted to my mind which might have some chance against the lady spell. I had never given much attention to that monster previously. There were very few of them left. A species on the brink of extinction. All it could do was stretch its elastic body by an astonishing degree. It would entirely cover its prey from all sides and suffocate it to death. The monster barely even had a form, and was at best like some sheet of polythene with the ends vaguely resembling limbs. It had eyes but no mouth. It didn’t require one because after killing its prey it could just absorb all the nutrients through its skin alone. This monster was called the Feelily.

One thing I had noticed about the lady spell was that she was breathing. She was made of smoke, but she was still respiring. Her chest was heaving up and down. She could indeed be dealt with the Feelily way.

“Ah, so what are you going to do by becoming that?” the lady spell mocked me after I had transformed into the paper-thin evilun. I began to stretch and enlarge myself. The lady spell just watched me with amusement until finally she realized what I was up to, and horror poured from her eyes.

To escape, she diffused her form, but in the process she loosened her grip on my mind for just a few seconds. This permitted me to think and act fast. I surrounded her from all sides with my membrane. Top, bottom and the sides. Then I shrunk myself as fast as I could. The trapped lady spell tried her best to tear through me, turning herself into needle-like shapes. But my elastic body just stretched and adjusted itself.

I kept squeezing down on her. She converted herself into a woman again, fighting to break free. For her it was like being stuck inside a giant bubble of gum. She attacked my mind furiously. I held on with determination, even though I felt like my brain would blast. As the minutes trickled away, the lady spell struggled to breathe. She slumped down. I too was spent, mentally as well as physically. I needed to hold her for only a short while. But could I do it?

The prisoners came to aid. They assisted me from all the sides, so that I could keep the lady spell under my control. The lady spell put in one final effort, but I persisted. I was at the edge of my limits when the lady spell finally perished. I reverted into a human, and dropping beside the dead lady spell, lost consciousness.

***