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The Gamer Chapter 1702 – Serpent’s Graveyard 4 – The Creature [Singed POV]
🕑 Added 2024-06-18 15:59:25 +0000 UTC
Singed tried to resist the urge to inspect his arms.
Under the armoured exterior of this form were new bones. The plates of Mithril and Orkosite clattered softly while Singed turned his arm. New sand moved underneath them, the lifeblood of this new form. Singed barely even remembered flesh. There were the memories of his life, for certain, muddled with the faint influence of all those that had lived in the Azure Tribe whose souls had not survived to individuality until the process had given them physical form once more.
A friendly hit on his shoulder made him turn. With a sisterly smile, Karia looked up at him. “Singed, you’re looking at your arm again.”
“Can’t even marvel at myself around here,” Singed returned in a jovial tone.
“What do you have to marvel at, you’re all covered up.”
“Do I have to Unleash to enjoy my pecs?”
“Do not,” Liakan weighed in. The demigoddess did not look back as she spoke to them. “It would be a tremendous waste of energy.”
“For you it would be,” Singed disagreed. “You go all over the place. My Unleash is pretty easy on and off.”
“You still explode,” Liakan stated drily, now tilting her head back. The front of her head was mostly smooth, but there was a friendly teasing in those eyes.
Singed still desired her. The protector of the city had been a challenge in life. Then she had been a specific kind of gorgeous, covered in black and blue scales that accentuated her slender features and high cheekbones. Any man would have wanted her. No man would have wanted what she was now. However, he was no man anymore. Things were different now, skewed and still correct.
The arcane warrior did not like to dwell on such things. This was his lot now and he was in no position, either mentally or in the hierarchy of the tribe, to make decisions. “What do you think?” Singed asked one of the soldiers that followed them through the tunnels. “Should I Unleash to flex a bit?”
The soldier saluted. His voice, muffled by the heavy mask on his face, had the swing of comradery to it. “Sir, I think that’s a terrible idea. The platoon will most likely not survive. May I suggest you use your human disguise instead?”
“That’s not even half as fun.” Singed waved off. “Karia, you’re looking at your legs again?”
The Harashka froze for a moment first, before straightening up and giving him a dry smile. “And who would blame me?” she asked and gave the tight black leather covering her long leg a smack. The thigh underneath jiggled a bit.
Singed also still found her attractive. Objectively speaking anyway. Personally, the idea of starting anything with Karia was… weird.
The conversation came to a sudden halt when Liakan raised her hand. Arkan and Karia gripped constructs of mana, swiftly conjured from the energies that made up their very being. The soldiers, already in three rows, dropped into a layered formation. Kneeling, crouching, and standing, they extended their hands forward in a flawless firing line.
Individually they were fairly harmless, but as a drilled collective, the group was capable of holding even Singed back for a while – maybe they could even win, if they were willing to sacrifice 90% of their number in the process. Mengele had been thorough in crafting his elite troops. Granted, getting them back into formation after removing the mental inhibitors had been quite difficult.
“Why are we stopping?” Singed asked, when nothing happened for several seconds. “The ants already gave us passage, we don’t need to-“
“Can you seriously not feel her?” Karia hissed.
Singed shut his gob and focused. He focused and he felt it. He felt it slowly creep in. Loud, much louder than the sound actually was, footsteps of naked soles on naked stone reverberated in his head. The bio-engineered super soldiers behind him started to quiver. They must have felt the grafting lines ache at her presence.
The Creature turned the corner. Unassuming, she appeared before them, a woman in a nothing dress, her hair blonde and flowing. Her form twitched inside Singed’s mind, his eyes almost incapable of recording her existence. She blurred around the edges. He could see her eldritch form superimposed on this skinsuit she wore. A wavering mass of… what, exactly? Tendrils? Beaks? The bloated, rotting carcass of reason?
The one-eyed abomination tilted her head. Blue, the half-human ocular rose from the paleness of her face. On the other side of her face, the eyepatch sat like an isle of normality. Singed focused on it and felt a headache he didn’t even know he was still capable of having recede.
“Hello,” the Creature greeted, awkwardly raising one hand.
It would have made Singed laugh, had the motion not made his eyes flick to the hand. He hurried back to the patch, before he could try to start to understand the swirling lines that surrounded the Creature like an aura of abnormality.
“I am not hostile… I hope?” the one-eyed abomination glanced aside for a moment. Everyone took a breath of relief, then exhaled sharply when she focused on them again. “I apologize. Me saying that makes no difference.”
“What do you want?!” Liakan growled.
“Velka ear scratches.”
Singed had to look over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t the only one confused.
“Ah, sorry again… you meant what I want from you.” The Creature pushed her fingers together. The gesture did not match the emotionless stare from her face. Slowly, her lips curled into a halfway presentable smile. “I start to forget how to express myself when I stay away from the others for days on end. I just want to know what agreement you have with the locals.”
“Why did you have to blabber on about us having passage?” Karia hissed at Singed.
“Don’t blame him, I have been tailing you for three hours.” The crawling, humanoid shape’s announcement shocked all of them. “Since you used the portal,” she clarified. “I was behind you… That does not calm you down. I apologize. Maybe I should stop trying.”
The instinctive hatred for Nia decreased a bit and in its place stepped pure confusion. Why did he hate her so much in the first place? She was weird, but she was trying to talk normally, right?
The hatred swept back in a moment later. All it took was for her to shift her weight to another leg for him to raise his weapon a little higher. She was their antithesis. That was why he hated her. That was enough.
“I understand you have a deal with the locals, but I would like to know what that deal is. Tell me and I will inform John about it.”
“How would that be to our advantage?” Liakan asked.
The one eye of the pariah narrowed ever so slightly. The smile dropped. Her shoulders pulled back. Singed and Karia assumed a defensive stance. Liakan, too, now conjured her weapon. The spear laid in her hand, the tip raised at the Creature.
“If you refuse to answer, I must assume that the answer is to our detriment,” answered the horror.
Singed could hear something. His ears turned it into a high-pitched static. He knew it was not a high-pitched static. The fusion lines in his arms pulsed. The soldiers’ hands quivered, but they held their line. Singed refused to take even a step back, for their sake.
“…Allies…” Liakan pressed out and the alien aura receded until it was just a faint, constant scratching against Singed’s skull.
‘How is that a “just” thing?’ he thought and suppressed a disgusted shiver.
“We have found that Mengele was in contact with the being behind the ants. We are here to scout out prospective allies to my cause.”
The Creature tilted her head. It stopped at a natural angle. Singed would have preferred it if it had continued until the joint snapped. “Your cause? Not Arkan’s cause?”
There was no reason not to answer. There was no reason not to discuss this calmly. There was no reason for Liakan to react as she did, but Singed understood. From the deepest pit of his being, he understood. “We’ve given you enough, Creature. Singed, keep her busy!”
Unquestioningly, the arcane warrior obeyed.
There was no flash, no satisfying tactile feedback, just the sensation of his sword cutting through the air. The weirdness was his compass, letting him twist to the right. That time, his weapon did connect. Arcane blue and purple clashed against the colourless void of the Creature’s weapon.
The struggle for supremacy was short. Signed pushed forwards and she gave, twirling out of the way like a dancer in a waltz. A moment of beauty, before the black sword swung towards Singed’s side – and missed.
‘I can do this!’ Singed thought to himself. ‘Liakan was right, for all of her power against us, her physical prowess is lacking!’
Emboldened, Singed pushed forwards. The mana sword vibrated audibly with every strike. The Creature was pushed back, steadily kept on the backfoot. Gradually, he pushed her towards a side corridor. “Now!” Liakan ordered behind him. Their forces got moving, hurrying past the battlefield. “Do what must be done, Singed!”
“I will, Lia!” he roared back.
The Creature raised her blade in defence. A split second of contact was enough for the edge of the mana blade to disintegrate into mocking laughter of thirsting un-things. Had the helmet that was his face had the necessary features, Signed would have scowled.
“You are stronger,” Nia said as she gave ground. Like a fluid, she twisted out of the way. It was as if someone had drowned a cat in mercury and then reanimated the tainted liquid.
“Stop slipping away!”
“Would that be in my tactical interest?” the blonde asked.
Singed grit his teeth, just as they started to form. “LET THE ROAR OF BATTLE BE HEARD IN THIS ARCANE DOMINION!”
Might exploded outwards from Singed. A wave of force of pure arcane, followed by a secondary wave of prismatic mana. The Creature disappeared from sight as Singed’s form reclaimed the shape, although not the colour, of his human life. Tall, toned, long hair waving blue in the winds of magic. Even in this form, one of his eyes remained eternally closed, marked by a long scar, the other glowed with arcane might.
‘Why did I Unleash already?’ Singed clicked his tongue. ‘Fuck, it’s so hard to think about anything besides – KILLING HER!’ The two words surfaced with renewed strength when the pariah re-appeared in front of him. There was a translucency to her, a disgusting lack of tangibility that was barely notable and yet clearly there.
Five fingers touched Singed’s chest.
Distorted, senseless syllables spilled from his mouth as if it was a broken speaker.
He could not move.
“I apologize for what comes next.”
No.
The Creature slipped up her eyepatch.
No. no. no. no. no. no. no.
Disgust overwhelmed everything. There was only one impulse, only one remedy. The hatred willed the mind to move. The body remained still, but Singed was not bound to one body. His consciousness shattered into three, all minds equally focused on the Creature. One shard shaped itself into a double. A hurled fist slammed into the cheek of the pariah.
Singed felt something snap. The blonde did not just fall, she collapsed, like a puppet with her strings cut. Nia Fae laid dead on the ground and-
-Stood in front of Singed, three metres away.
“””What the fuck are you, I just broke your neck!””” Singed screamed with three mouths.
“I disagreed,” answered the Creature.
Singed put a hand on his chest. Where the pariah had touched him, the self-replicating sand that his very essence was soaked in had turned into grains of plain quartz. “You do not just disagree with reality!”
“I do,” stated the heterochromia abomination and Singed knew that she was right.
His heads pounded, pounded, pounded with that fact. Still struck by that realization, he did not move again until she did. She was charging at him – no, trying to get past him. ‘Let her pass!’ screamed his disgust.
Duty moved his swords.
At the very last second, he caught the wrist of the pariah. The arm of the double he used for this went numb. Barely, he managed to toss her back down the tunnel. Then, a swing from her accursed un-weapon turned that entire arm into dispersing mana particles.
Singed’s mana surged through the invisible connection between him and the double. A new limb of mana formed. The hand gripped the long heft of the copy of his great sword. The second double similarly redoubled his grip. All three of his shattered minds assumed a different combat stance. The doubles, flanking the original, advanced first.
“Do you really want to make neutralizing you my most effective option?”
It was difficult to even register the question as coming from a person. All of the Creature’s existence swirled around the nexus of that hole. Fractal patterns surrounded the left side of her face. Tendrils and shapes that hopefully were tendrils turned the air into a cesspit of headache and mind vomit.
There was no response to be given. From the very start, the only option had been to kill her. Everything else was playing pretend.
‘I can take her!’ Singed thought, sending the left double forwards.
The exchange of blows that followed once more reinforced that thought. He let his vision blur, to watch only her shape, not what she was, to follow her as if she was any other combatant he had fought before. She was fast, fast enough to slip away at times, but not fast enough to end his pursuit now that he was Unleashed.
Definitely not fast enough to handle two of him while relying on her movement alone.
Singed’s second double charged into the fray. Self-coordinated motions forced the pariah into a corner. One sword rammed into the stone, the other stabbed at her the moment she had teleported to another place. Singed did not know the limits of her powers but there were limits! If he kept exhausting her, she would Fade to the plane of abominations where she belonged!
“[Begone]”
The word was etched in negative into his ears. The double that had been stabbing at Nia collapsed into a pile of plain sand. Not even a shred of mana remained, just rock dust and grains. A deliberate motion of her eyes sent the unmaking gaze of the Creature to the second double. It resisted for a short moment, before collapsing all the same.
Singed tried to feed fresh mana to the shards of his personality. They were still there, but the spell… the spell did not work. It was like trying to lift a paralyzed arm. There was only numbness and needle stings.
Opaque, the pariah closed the otherworld’s eye and pulled the patch back into place. Immediately, the disgust Singed felt diminished to an almost tolerable level. Still, his sword remained raised. “My order is to keep you busy,” he growled.
“I see… mind if we just keep standing like this then?”
“Didn’t you want to neutralize me?”
“Yes, we will be neutral forces in this situation.”
Singed just stared. “Then… I guess I’ll just… stand here and keep you monster occupied?”
“This would be most effective. Do you play cards?”
What the fuck was wrong with their nemesis?
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