Chapter 252: Fogged Bloodbath |
I faced down that disgusting creature, the old revulsion for rampant mutation rising within me again. A feral snarl escaped my maw as I circled it, disjointed and obscene, a mass of power with no focus or design.
In the back of my third brain, I could feel the irony and a vague frustration. This distaste for the Font's mark, for Ether running wild and warping life, is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I cannot resist it. I can control everything except this instinct, this disgust for random, uncontrolled mutation.
I reshaped my upper arms into a pair of curved blades. Not my usual mantis claws; these were heavier, longer, cleaver-like, built for brutal carving.
The creature circled me in turn, its lopsided face twitching. It had torn through my hive soldiers with ease; even a Fiend lay dead in the distance. Yet this time, it was cautious. Feral or not, all creatures know fear.
It lunged fast, and I answered with a burst of corrupting flame. The thing shrieked as fire engulfed its head. Almost immediately, its skin began to bubble and reform. One side of its face had two eyes, and when the flesh sealed again, they fused into a single, swollen orb. An ugly, misshapen thing, but an eye nonetheless.
The creature moved first. I coiled and let it close the distance. Its weight shifted forward, centre exposed. I twisted, redirecting the charge, and drove a bone blade through its side. The impact carried through its body with a satisfying crack.
It recovered faster than expected, spinning with a wild slash. I pulled my torso back, the strike cutting empty air. My tail snapped back, shifting my balance, and I answered with a clean horizontal cut across its ribs. Boiling, flaming blood leaked out, bright and volatile.
It lunged again. I slid around it, and struck twice more. Each blow landed where regeneration was weakest. I pressed closer, cutting with mechanical precision. Neck. Shoulder. Abdomen. It tried to flee, dragging itself across the ground, but I caught it with my tail and pulled it back.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I said with a chuckle.
I ignored it. The teeth glanced off harmlessly as I twisted the blade upward. The chest opened with minimal effort, in a spray of flaming, ether-infused blood and scattering ribs.
The heart was still beating. Larger than normal, deformed by parasitic growths that pulsed out of rhythm. Filaments of flesh coiled around it like roots strangling a tree. Normally, this would be the part I enjoyed. The heart carried the last imprint of the hunt, the taste of the life itself.
But this one was wrong. The smell was wrong, the texture uneven, as if the organ had forgotten what it was supposed to be. I drove the blade straight through it. The muscle ruptured, spraying fluid thick with Ether residue. The body seized once, then fell slack. No regeneration. No heartbeat. Done.
I released the tail hold and let the carcass drop.
Steam rose from the blood, leaving a faint metallic taste in the air.
I took a moment to carve it open and examine the body. The structure was consistent with other mutated creatures, rapid growth in some areas, necrosis in others, the usual pattern of unstable Ether exposure.
“Gross,” I muttered, and turned my attention outward.
Right on cue, the Queen erupted from the ground. She bowed, chitin plates clattering in sequence. “Well fought, my king.”
“Get this thing below ground and start picking it apart. Not every day we get samples like this,” I said, reshaping my arms back into the standard mantis claws.
“It shall be done,” the Queen replied, before burrowing down again with the carcass.
I ran a quick scan across the battlefield. The hive was still engaged, the noise of combat carrying faintly through the link. Casualties were higher than expected, but within tolerance. The enemy’s physiology was crude, all muscle and impulse, no strategy. Effective at first contact, but unsustainable against organised pressure.
Attrition works. My hive never tires. The drones can pin-cushion these things with venom until the toxins do their work. Eventually, even mutation runs out of options.
“Continue sweep and recovery,” I murmured across the link. “Collect viable tissue, discard the rest.”
Acknowledgement rippled back through the network. I turned away from the battlefield and started moving toward the next major target. Something else was stirring there, stronger. I could almost taste the Ether field bleeding from it.
I lifted off, wings spreading wide as I rose through the haze. Ether distortion rippled across the landscape, the currents pulled unnaturally toward a single source. The air grew thicker as I closed in, visibility warping at the edges.
A massive, lumbering structure of flesh, dragging itself forward in uneven intervals. Its body tore and rebuilt itself with each movement. On its back, cratered holes opened and closed like breathing wounds. Within each, a fleshy sac swelled with fluid, pulsing in slow sync. When full, the sac ruptured, ejecting a clutch of spawn onto the ground. Regeneration began immediately after. Dozens of sacs, continuous output with no downtime, just a pulsating flow of mutated flesh.
Above the body, seven necks craned outward, each ending in a malformed head. Some were alert, snapping at the air. Others hung lifeless, or convulsed at random. The heads moved independently, reacting with delay, confused but aggressive at nothing in particular. It actually looked like some heads had killed other heads.
The entire thing was drawing Ether from the air. I watched as strands of energy bled toward it in slow, deliberate motion, pulled from the ambient field and funneled into its mass. It had turned itself into a self-contained ecosystem. The surrounding land was already beginning to blister under the constant drain.
Below, my hive was losing momentum. The creature was holding well, it had too much mass, and its clutches of spawn were a good counter against my hive’s wave tactics. Yes it was taking damage but this one had uncannily powerful regeneration.
I hovered higher, adjusted my spectrum, and began to map the creature’s patterns. Sacs ruptured every ten seconds. Head rotation showed blind zones. Plenty of openings, plenty of ways to take this thing apart. I watched for a few more seconds, letting the rhythm settle into memory. Primitive execution. But tactically, the concept had legs.
A self-sustaining combat form that produced spawn continuously, using ambient Ether to generate pressure on the field. Crude, but it worked, my hive lines were stalled. Not from strength, but from volume. The enemy wasn’t trying to win. It was trying to bury us under bodies.
I zoomed in on the sacs again. The timing was consistent. Spawn emerged with minimal structure, no variation worth tracking, no intelligence. Just mass and motion. That was fine. Not every unit needs a mind.
The real value was the delivery system. No birthing chambers or external infrastructure, just a lump of meat, tethered to nothing, dumping bodies directly into the fight. It was inefficient, yes. Raw Ether draw always is. But internal energy stores could cover that. Run the process hot and short, burn fast, then die.
I began sketching the framework in my mind. Small aerial units, low biomass and complexity. Spawned in fixed templates, no randomness. Equipped with minimal navigation, short-range wings or gliding membranes. One job: reach the target and detonate.
Not precision weapons, distractions. Enough of them and the enemy would be forced to redirect fire, split formations and waste resources. They wouldn’t kill much, but they’d make the field messy. The idea had promise. The Queen could work with this. Strip the mutation, replace it with structure, and scale it clean.
I coiled in the air and dropped.
I landed on its back only long enough to drive my blades in. The surface rippled under me, hot and unstable. No structure. No anchor. Not a place worth staying.
I pushed off. Dropped to the ground in a tight spiral, tail absorbing the landing.
The hydra shifted, several heads tracking my descent. One moved first, a snap downward, wide sweep. I slid under it, then lunged up and caught it under the jaw with both blades. The edges sank halfway before bone slowed me. I tore out sideways and let the momentum carry me back.
Another head lunged from the left. I twisted, caught the teeth on my forearm, and responded with a thrust straight into the soft tissue below the eye. The blade stuck, pulsing with resistance. I leaned into it, felt the twitching jaw go slack.
A clawed limb came around next, low and heavy. I raised my tail and coiled up to deflect, then pivoted hard, slipping around the limb’s arc. The tip of my blade kissed the inside of the elbow as I passed. Not enough to drop it. Enough to weaken the next swing.
Spawn swarmed out from under the main body, spilling from the sacs in irregular clusters. I caught one mid-charge, skewered it clean. Another jumped. I caught it in my lower arm and snapped it. The third got close enough to rake my side. It died a second later, but not before leaving a line of blood that closed immediately.
I moved, circling the creature’s flanks, cutting into joints and soft gaps as they opened. The heads followed, but slowly, each on its own rhythm, overlapping signals that made the whole body sluggish.
I slipped behind a forelimb, then coiled and surged upward, stabbing into the armpit with both blades. One caught something critical. The limb buckled. I dropped away before the other came down.
The creature roared. Several heads thrashed at once, teeth grinding over soil and bone. One struck the ground a meter from me, sending up a plume of dirt and meat. I flowed around it, struck once, then again, each hit calculated, intending to cripple rather than kill.
It was trying to cover too many directions at once. I didn’t need to overpower it. Just stay ahead of its reflexes. I stabbed into the understructure, no sac, no brain, just meat. But even meat had limits. The creature buckled again. Not from pain, from failure. I felt a rising ecstasy swell in my chest. It started as a hum, then pushed higher, sharper. I let out a laugh, low, unrestrained, as my blades flashed forward, no longer just tools but extensions of the hunger itself.
Blood from the hunt. It’s been too long since I had a good kill.
I carved upward in wide arcs, blades moving with precision and violence. Flesh split clean. Connective mass tore apart. Heads thrashed above, useless now, snapping at empty air or hanging limp.
The creature collapsed around me, massive limbs falling without command, its form breaking down into twitching muscle and spasming organs. A final wave of spawn spilled out and scattered, leaderless, aimless. I didn’t even look at them. They were irrelevant now.
I kept cutting until the twitching slowed. Until the spasms faded. Until nothing moved but the pooled blood steaming in the dirt.
Damn that felt good…
I let out a roar, loud, raw, from the deepest part of me, not a warning, not a call. Just release. The sound tore up through my chest and out into the sky, all feral fury and broken restraint. A signal to the world, to the hive, to whatever still crawled nearby.
Ah, that was fun… now what is that doing over there?
Sounds like a chicken, a sneaky chicken…
◦◦,`°.✽✦✽.♚.✽✦✽.°`,◦◦
“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK…” Nally cursed, voice ragged as he tore through the fog, boots slipping over sand and shale. His lungs burned under his protective mask, and his cloak thrashed in the wind, flaring out behind him like a damn flag, telling the monsters exactly where to find him.
He was a Fog Scaver. One of the mad bastards desperate enough to comb the Mists for old-world relics, scraps of forgotten tech, shards of lost magical artifacts, anything with value. It was a job for lunatics and people with no other options. And Nally was definitely the second kind. He didn’t do this for glory. He did this because his family was one week from getting kicked off the city ledger, and once you were off the ledger, you were gone.
He’d only come out to poke around and scout. Just a light run. Maybe spot some ruins. The fog was oddly quiet, no skittering, none of the usual horrors.
That should’ve been the warning.
He climbed the next dune on all fours, panting, paranoid, gut twisted in dread. Something was wrong. Deeply wrong.
Then he saw it. Through a tear in the fog, something moved. He yanked his spyglass to his eye, fingers trembling. What he saw made his blood freeze.
A creature, gold-feathered and sleek like a blade carved from light, stood over the corpse of a nightmare, some hulking brute now reduced to twitching limbs and steaming meat. Nally almost dropped the glass.
His knees gave out, and he barely caught himself. His mouth was dry. His heart was slamming so hard he thought he might pass out. He was supposed to be alone out here. He wasn’t even that deep. Nothing like that was supposed to be this close.
He turned and ran. No plan. No grace. Just raw terror. Slipping, stumbling, clawing his way back over the dunes like a man half-blind.
“Fuck the rent,” he panted, lungs on fire. “Fuck the fucking rent, this isn’t about rent anymore!”
That thing wasn’t a beast. It wasn’t some territorial horror you could scare off with fire or some fancy explosives. If it kept moving, it would wander toward the city. Then it wouldn’t matter who could pay rent or who couldn’t. He had to get back; he had to warn them.
Because if that thing came knocking, there wouldn’t be a city left to get kicked out of.
Then he felt a gust of wind, and a massive shadow flew over him. He looked up just in time to see that beast land in front of him. It was this enormous gold-feathered creature, still covered in blood and bile, its maw wide and filled with serrated teeth, smiling down at him. In his gut, he knew it… he was going to die…
The beast opened its mouth, and he knew the next moment would be its jaws closing around him like a midday snack.
Hi there, you seem a bit… irrational…
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