The Beginning Of A Five Year Agony-Chapter 55: I killed a Hydra, but now I have to face something more worst

With a burst of essence, Samuel launched himself directly into the edge of the whirlpool, using its own momentum to propel himself towards the center. The forces were immense, threatening to rip his limbs off, but he held firm, his muscles screaming in intense pain. As he got closer to the center, the Hydra’s central head lunged, a quick, precise strike aimed at stopping him...

It bit down on Samuel, trying to close its mouth, but he held onto its jaws, stopping them from fully closing... The bite force was too much for Samuel, pressing agonizingly against his own grip...

His mind raced for any quick ideas. Then it came to him... to attack the Hydra from inside its body. So, Samuel released its jaws and jumped into the Hydra’s throat...

As Samuel fell, he used "Aegirion" to slow his descent... However, it didn’t fully prevent the impact when he landed in the stomach acids. The moment he landed, his skin began to sting from the corrosive liquid... He immediately used his blade to cut deep into the Hydra’s stomach lining and started dragging his blade, running around inside, searching for its internal organs.

Samuel slashed open its intestines and continued slashing, inflicting heavy damage on the Hydra’s stomach. Still, the creature was regenerating, though at a very slow rate because Samuel had already cut the "arcane essence" flow in its body, which powered its regeneration...

"It is ready," Aegirion spoke to Samuel in his mind. "’ASH To All’ is ready."

Samuel’s eyes widened. He then started running frantically inside the Hydra’s stomach. He needed to find a major organ...

After running for a while, his skin was visibly melting from the heat and the stomach acids. Finally, Samuel reached the Hydra’s heart, which was still beating in front of him... He walked a little closer and touched it. A deep vibration, a roar, erupted from outside. The Hydra had sensed that he had touched its heart...

"Activate... ’ASH To All’." Samuel uttered...

In an instant, the entire body of the Hydra exploded outwards. Skin, flesh, and bones blasted apart. The whole underwater chamber boiled from the intense heat of the explosion...

Minutes later, Samuel opened his eyes. He was still in the water, but it was boiling. Meat, intestines, bones, and flesh sank all around him... Then, in front of him, the walls split open, pulling him in.

Before he fully realized what was happening, he was in another chamber...

The water from the underwater chamber was still all around Samuel’s body, but this time there was no enemy to fight... it was like a resting area...

He tried to stand up from the floor, but vomited blood. He had severely injured his internal organs during his fight with the Hydra. Still cautious, he walked over to what looked like a bed in the chamber and lay down on it. His eyes were heavy, but he also noticed that this chamber was smaller than the previous ones. While he was thinking, he fell asleep for the third time...

After a long period of rest, Samuel’s eyes slowly widened. He woke up to the sound of blue fire burning in the lamps around the room. He got up, holding his head...

"How did I fall asleep again?" he questioned his own actions. Then he remembered that he could only fall asleep if he had completely exhausted his "divine essence" and if he was in a god’s domain...

He slowly stood up and began looking around. As he did, the entire room went dark, and in front of him, a hologram appeared, playing a war video beside him...

Samuel turned in the darkness. The light from the hologram was the only visible light...

"What is this?" Samuel questioned, walking forward.

The video showed True-blooded Giants, Gods, and Lesser Gods fighting...

The video stopped playing. A man in his late 50s emerged from the hologram and walked over to a small tub. He then stabbed himself before fading away, showing Samuel what to do next...

Samuel swallowed and imitated the man, walking over to the small tub. A blue knife appeared out of thin air. Samuel grabbed it and then slashed his wrist. His blood poured into the tub, but nothing happened...

Samuel narrowed his eyes, then slashed his wrist wider this time. The chamber shook. A massive door opened from the wall...Then his wound began to heal... 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The entrance of the door was black, not merely dark, but a form of darkness that seemed alive...

Then the hologram of the old man reappeared, showing Samuel what to do... Samuel followed the old man’s movements. He took a lamp with blue flames and then entered the dark door that had opened...

Samuel plunged into the absolute blackness of the newly opened doorway, the blue flame of the lamp in his hand providing the only faint illumination. The darkness ahead was not merely an absence of light; it was a dense, palpable void that seemed to absorb sound and sensation. He felt a chilling cold seep into his bones, far colder than the underwater chamber he had just escaped. The air, if it could be called air, felt heavy, ancient, and filled with an unsettling stillness....

He took a step, then another, his boots making no sound on whatever surface lay beneath him...

The blue flame of the lamp flickered, casting a long, distorted shadow that moves around him, transforming the inky blackness into a shifting landscape of imagined terrors...

The old man’s hologram had shown him to simply walk in, but Samuel’s instincts screamed caution.... This was no ordinary passageway. This was something... else. The blackness pulsed with a subtle energy, an underlying hum that resonated deep within his mind, it felt like the gateway to another realm, or perhaps a place suspended outside conventional space and time...

Samuel kept walking, and after a while, he started hearing voices all around the vicinity...

But he ignored them and continued forward. Then, he looked down at his boots and saw a black, slimy liquid. Samuel bent down and touched it, then smelled it. His eyes widened...

"Corpse," he muttered because of the endless fights he had been in; he could clearly tell the scent of a dead person... He looked up, and to his surprise, faces began to emerge from the ground, along with hands that grabbed at Samuel, trying to drag him down. Some hands specifically reached for the blue flame lamp he held, clearly intending to make him drop it or break it.

Samuel instinctively started attacking their heads...

"Aegirion," he called out, and his blade appeared in his hand. He began cutting down the hands, making sure to keep a firm grip on the blue flame lamp. It was clear to him that their main goal was either to break the lamp or pull him under, and based on their movements, the lamp was their primary target...

The ground around him churned, and more faces and hands surfaced, their numbers increasing with each step he took... The voices grew louder, a cacophony of whispers and guttural moans from the dark faces that clawed at the edges of his sanity... He focused, channeling his essence into Aegirion, making his strikes faster and more precise. The blade moved in a dark green blur, severing limbs with each swing, but for every hand he cut, two more seemed to rise from the slimy blackness... The atmosphere grew thick with the stench of decay, making it hard to breathe...