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The Gamer Chapter 1567 – Vengeance
🕑 Added 2023-11-21 15:13:34 +0000 UTCThe explosion of the second reactor tract had been their signal to strike.
John watched from aboard the military vessel, while the combatants among his harem descended on the blue ship. Its paint job was meant for different waters but this close up it didn’t matter anyhow.
“Ya sure ran a number on the engine,” Hailey complained jokingly.
“It did its job,” John stated. He wasn’t in the mood for joviality. The plan had worked out perfectly. Through Lorelei’s scrying, aided by the crystal Luna had given them, they had known the location of Mengele, alongside the path required to get to him. Vier giving Siena an in to sabotage the engine and escape crafts had been an additional boon, but not strictly necessary.
Perhaps it would have been better to forgo making a deal with the clone. The alternative was to take a miniscule risk, getting rid of a potential future risk in the process. In the end, John was not willing to entertain the thought. Mengele had to die.
The small ship that they had taken for this mission had a large dent in its side where Eliana had launched herself with all the strength her legs contained. Had it not been for Undine counteracting the effect, they would likely have capsized. Same was true of the ship where the fight was currently ongoing.
It was a one-sided massacre. The average soldier manning the ship was chosen for loyalty, not ability, and even if they had been picked for their individual strength, it was doubtful that they could have stopped the full might of the harem. From Rave to Nathalia, everyone was in there, even Lydia herself.
The queen had made it clear that she did this not just for Eliana but also because this mess had started under her grandfather and she saw it as a point of duty to clean it up. Nathalia and Eliana fighting was technically just as much a violation of international law as Nightingale shrouding their approach. Patron gods were not supposed to fight outside their territory.
John would not leave a witness to make this a problem. For once, he wouldn’t even give the option of surrender. He let Vier get away, but the clone was smart enough to not talk about who he was or in what way he was involved in this day. Everyone else was quite literally the most trusted aide of one of the worst people humanity had ever produced. That did not make executing them without trial right by John’s principles, but in this matter he had decided that he could let emotions reign.
On the ship remained himself, with all three of his bodies, and the non-combat members of his harem. Hailey headed back under deck, to continue working on the engine that she had given a slap-dash upgrade to over the past few days. Using it and John’s rather absurd mana supply, they had managed to reach this place before Mengele in his submarine did. It had been a matter of minutes in difference, but it had been enough.
They had him. They had him on an isolated platter, and no one was there to save him. Lee was keeping everything on lockdown and Nia was scouring the boat for any emergency exit items, disabling them if she came across any. Nathalia created an underwater volcano that soon created enough of a landmass to set the boat in place for good.
The island nearly immediately cracked under the devastating impact of Eliana upon its jagged shores. From volcanic dust and ash, the goddess rose, dispersing the veil with the power of her leap. She met Mengele up in the air, the two entities of fleshcrafted might tumbling in ascent, then in descent, when their mutual inability to fly made the yoke of gravity pull them back down.
They landed aboard the stealthy vessel that the leader of the Purest Front had wished to escape on from this gathering. Loudly, the steel hull rang under repeated impacts. Then, the voice of the butcher rang in all of its strength through the Mobile Barrier, “I am the architect of fate, the crafter of puppets, the purifier of the realm and I-“
“[Stop].”
The Babel Phrase came to an abrupt end. Sounds of breaking waves and tearing metal all were perceived as through a layer of cotton. The voice of the Blue Maiden demanded the halt of all magic and her tyranny was obeyed.
By the time the muffling effect had ended, the sounds of combat had similarly run their course. John kept staring across the divide, which now shrunk, his second body steering the ship and pushing the engine at an acceptable pace. They put down their anchor by the shore, then leapt or flew across to the stuck boat.
Blood covered the expensive alloy the ship was forged from, leaking from dozens of corpses scattered about. Twisted limbs were draped over naval batteries, sometimes still attached to their owner, often ripped off by a blast of magic or the sheer physical strength of the assailants. The rivers of ichor revealed the myriad of runes carved into the hull, less than a millimetre deep and prevented from being flattened out by accident only by the sheer strength of the Elementium alloy. The ship, for all that it had gone through in the past few minutes of heavy combat, was still mostly intact.
Of the original crew, only Mengele was still around. The butcher was pinned against a wall by Nathalia and Metra, each of them holding one of the man’s arms. Mengele was not overtly struggling, not at that moment, simply staring at everyone that surrounded him with hateful eyes, surrounded by thick black veins that rose off his tanned face like visible corruption.
Eliana’s face, in turn, was covered by the bone-white mask of her carapace. Bloodshot eyes stared like shattered amethyst back at her creator. The two were locked in silence, while John and the rest of the harem joined the rest of the onlookers.
“And here I thought you fancied yourself a champion of fairness and equality,” Mengele mocked, once John had taken his place in the back row. “Yet here you are, ganging up on me like a spineless coward.”
The Gamer did not care about Mengele’s words, or the man himself. As a student of history, he held a hatred for Mengele that was impersonal. It was the same kind of hatred that religious zealots had for their opponents in faith or humans had for bedbugs and other such common parasites. A simple hatred, if it could even be called that, a distaste, a shudder, a wish to clean this unwelcome thing away, to make sure the world as he wanted it remained.
It was the same hatred that Mengele had for the rest of the world. John would have liked to think himself above such emotions, but he was not. All he could claim was better control.
What was above his hatred for Mengele was his care for Eliana. He was here because she had been wronged by him, had been deeply hurt by him, had been traumatized by him in a way that could never be fully mended. This was the personal hatred that John had for Mengele, but it wasn’t his to live out.
Everyone besides the butcher understood that and looked to Eliana instead. The small woman stood there, covered in bone plates sturdier than nearly all forged armour in existence. Her fists were clenched, claws digging into her palms, squeezing out blood that joined the various streams that flowed between carapace and skin.
A tiny nod was all it took for Nathalia and Metra to let go.
The butcher dropped forward, surprised by having been released. He caught himself before he could fall. He straightened up, fixed his tie, and ran his hands over his gelled black hair. All of the haremettes took several steps back. Elementals and goddesses weaved their might together to bend the ship deck into an arena. It was far from anything they had fought in in the last few days, but it would do.
Mengele, only then, under the wordless gazes of Eliana's loves, turned his brown eyes to the goddess. “A wager, then?” the butcher pushed. “I defeat my failed creation and you will do the honourable thing of letting me go?” He rolled his shoulders, as if his request had already been accepted.
“Sure,” Eliana answered.
The butcher’s eyes moved up to John again. “I want the word of someone wor-“
Mengele was interrupted mid-sentence, when Eliana’s fist buried itself into his stomach. Bending forwards, the leader of the Purest Front let out a rattling sound. Then he clenched his teeth and slammed his fist into Eliana’s face.
The mask cracked; Eliana flew backwards, slamming into the tall metal wall. In the space created, Mengele pulled a large cylinder from his pocket dimension and dropped it to the ground. “I am the architect of fate, the crafter of puppets, the purifier of the realm and I will not be stopped by the slaves!” Mengele’s chant echoed through the barrier. “Essenceburn!”
His body was enveloped by a chrysalis of blackened ichor, flowing out of the cylinder. It crept up from his feet, reached the head, and then parted into four jagged wings. They were attached to his upper and middle back, making two pairs. The upper pair was larger, the lower pair smaller, and together they resembled a butterfly in shape. The patterns upon them, created by crackling lines of crystallized blue upon a black backdrop, however, had nothing of the beauty of a butterfly to them. If there was any sense to the asymmetrical patterns, then it was an ever distorting, human skull.
The transformation did not end at the wings. Mengele’s hair had turned a gold blonde, his eyes a striking blue, and his face the chiselled perfection of a human being. His figure had been morphed to resemble the most finely crafted of da Vinci’s anatomical paintings. He was the perfect man – as far as physical properties were concerned.
Mengele wiped a bit of spittle off his chin. “I should thank you for this chance to take out the trash,” the leader of the Purest Front stated. “I’m surrounded by a frozen ocean of ineptitude, treacherous sharks dwelling underneath. A purge is in order.”
“Ya know, ya can stop waving around that ‘I’m evil and I deserve what’s coming next’ sign,” Rave said from atop her perch.
Mengele shot her an arrogant smile. “You cannot believe the failure can win against me.”
“I hate you.” Eliana’s voice was as much chant as it was heartfelt confession. “When I close my eyes, I see you, bowing over me. Face of the greatest pain, avatar of human suffering, I will end you, monster, because that is what I am.” The goddess pushed herself off the wall, slinking forwards with her head lowered. “I whisper these words, because to scream them would be a waste. Burn with me. Burn and incinerate in the fires you stoked. You-”
Returning the earlier favour, Mengele charged forwards and delivered a punch to Eliana’s head. Her neck twisted leftwards, while the rest of her body remained in place. Mengele grinned for a moment, while shards of bone clattered to the ground.
Eliana suddenly stared up. A few last chunks of mask fell off her features. A near perfect split, leaving half of her face an abrasive surface of bone, a human eye within, and the other half human, her skin the same white as her carapace.
“You’re the writer of this song of damnation.”
The six wings appeared behind Eliana’s back. Pillars of blood-fire and crystal, twisted branches of souls turned into arteries, nerves, woods, and leaves, and skeletal fingers of wings like mantis claws stretched while Mengele went to hurl the next punch.
Aura ignited, Eliana caught the cataclysmic attack. A visible shockwave rippled through the air where the limbs of the titans met. The taller, much taller, man immediately went to ram his knee up Eliana’s face.
Inertia ended in that very moment.
Eliana pushed the knee aside, using barely any force at all. Mengele lost his balance, giving Eliana the opportunity to rip her claws across his torso. The suit tore; the muscles underneath were sliced open, oozing artificial, blue fluids from yellowy fibres.
Mengele hissed in pain. “You’ll pay for tha-“ he started, but his megalomania was swiftly put in check by an elbow to the gut. Where words had no place, the butcher aimed to let violence speak. He put his hands together and swung them like a hammer – heavy, threatening and slow.
Side-stepping, Eliana put both her hands on Mengele’s shoulder and ripped down his left arm. Humanity’s Bane stripped the impressive veneer of perfection from the butcher like a wallpaper. Chunks of gore fell to the ground, bio and soul mass liquifying moments later. A second layer of skin was exposed underneath, partly shredded by the tips of Eliana’s claws, bleeding honest crimson.
Mengele twisted into a roundhouse kick. His leg flew over the ducking blood mage’s head. In an effort to create distance, the butcher turned the motion into an almost dancing series of steps.
Eliana had none of it. She charged straight in, overwhelming Mengele with the swiftness of that first motion and those that followed. Over and over again, Eliana’s knuckles and claws connected with Mengele’s torso. More of the false flesh was torn from him, removed by the sheer force of the bludgeoning.
Every attempt to stop her, the blood mage weaved through with ease. Her half-exposed face and mask became splattered in blood. First, the blue blood of his appropriated mass, then the red that lay underneath.
With a roar of pure rage, Mengele went for a tackle. He missed. His feet were swiped away from under him. He fell. Eliana was upon his back. Her hands gripped the bases of the mockery of her own wings and tore them, taking the majority of the perfect physique clinging to Mengele’s back with them.
The appearance Mengele had crafted for himself was, by now, more of a nightmarish blood of red and blue oozing from various unhealing trenches. The butcher began to say something, but Eliana had dug her fingers into the back of his head before he could get a single syllable out. She slammed his face into the deck, denting the war plate under the impact.
“No one should have claimed this Faith!” Again, Mengele’s head was slammed into the deck. “No one should have seen their faces!” Slam. “We shouldn’t have been this!” Tears cut two rivers of clarity into the sheen of crimson. “No one should suffer this!”
One last time, Eliana slammed Mengele’s face into the deck. The layer of bio-engineered ascension sloughed off his true face, too damaged to stick, and revealed bloodied and swelling features. Eliana let go of the sprawled out man. Heavily breathing, least of all from exhaustion, the mixture of traumatized souls positioned herself in front of her creator.
“Kneel before your goddess.”
Mengele whimpered. Any bravado was gone. The miserable pile of flesh pulled himself together into a ball, before shifting his position just enough that it looked like he was kneeling before her. The failed goddess put her foot on his bloodied head. For a few moments, she grinded him into the metal. Then, she raised her foot.
“W-would killing me change anything?” Mengele stammered. He raised his head, tears of terror rolling down his destroyed features. He eyed the foot that was dangling above his head like the sword of Damocles. “Do you n-not stand for mercy? Will reve-revenge make you feel better?”
“Yes,” Eliana answered.
The Seismic Step splattered the head of the butcher. Bone shards and grey matter bounced off the metal walls of the arena or fell through the hole the impact of the attack punched into the hull. In one moment, it was all over.
Eliana tilted her head back and looked at the blue sky. Sunrays dried the blood of her torturer on her. The crack of the mask and her lips both curled into a smile. She wept and she laughed. She laughed from the depth of her being. A crazy laughter, a satisfied laughter, a laughter of relief so deep-seated that it made her curl as it continued past the point of being painful.
Climbing down from the wall, John walked to the failed goddess. He did not hesitate to wrap his arms around her, to stroke her hair, and hold her while laughter and sobs equally made her tremble. “He’s dead….” she choked out between grief and glee. “No one else will…”
She did not get further than that before losing herself to her emotions.
Comments
Larry
Thanks
gordianTangle
I feel like we are about to get a second long-standing quest resolved in the same day
