Chapter 375: Left Behind |
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SYSTEM ADDENDUM ADDED BY USER NAME: [EMPRESS RONA LITTAE]
ADDENDUM NOTE: 1 second after Fortune’s Folly withdraws from the Less-Than-Habitable Megadungeon.
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Specialist Cezil recognized the blue liquid woman who emerged from Arlo’s portal, but only because of the briefings she’d received. The army was adamant that their elites have working knowledge of all the big players in the world. The object of those lessons wasn’t to make people more effective at fighting them or anything that dumb. Nope. It was so they understood their options for escaping. She figured that was to give people a kind of blind comfort since there was no way any of it would work. Still dumb, just slightly less so.
Still, because of her ‘elite’ training in running away from unreasonably powerful foes, Cezil could now confidently present her professional opinion concerning her present situation, which was that she was fucked.
Cezil’s build relied on being ignored or forgotten. Her strategy of infiltrating the enemy despite staying in plain sight had always been more appealing to her than skulking in shadows or soft-stepping over dry branches. Ever since she was a pup, she’d worn whatever personality suited her environment, and after becoming a Delver had quickly learned to wear other skins as well. More often than not, becoming someone or something that could fade into the background was as easy for her as walking.
It had helped that her sister, Madel, was so casually excellent at everything she did. Her twin’s nonchalant superiority had always drawn ample attention in ways bombastic mediocrity never could. Even when Cezil made a point to draw attention to herself, the effect of her antagonism was that she was avoided like a stool made of unsanded thornwood. She was a pain in the ass, and it was every bit intentional. Why bother the surly one, when her quiet sister was so much more approachable?
After she’d become a mimic, the practice had gone from easy to instinctual. It wasn’t even something she thought about anymore unless her attention was drawn to it. If fitting in had been the thoughtless act of a peaceful stroll before, now it was a steady heartbeat in her center. The distant presence of the mimic progenitor didn’t even bother her. It was comforting, if anything.
This was one of those moments.
Cezil had been separated from her party when the avatar Anesis came crashing down from the sky. She’d been jettisoned from her sister’s back–where she’d been acting as an extra layer of armor–finding herself half splattered by the godling’s landing. Despite being rendered insensate, she’d instinctually taken the form of whatever was around her to avoid the notice of their attacker.
It wasn’t the first time she’d impersonated a pile of rubble. This was a safeguard that had served her well in the past, keeping her well-hidden in moments of catastrophe. Unfortunately, this meant she’d also been well-hidden from her comrades. Comrades who’d apparently retreated. By the time she’d awoken to find a smoking crater where the obelisk’s grove had been, her sister Madel had already left.
That was stupid. Madel should have realized Cezil was missing. Either her twin had also been knocked senseless or something else had seriously distracted her.
She pushed down the wave of frustration the thought brought with it as she subconsciously copied the unsettled bobbing motion of the infected Casuari beside her. Pressure waves ruffled her feathers and she tapped her nine-inch talons against the sandy dirt, calming herself by focusing on how to survive.
The patter of her flock’s drumming claws was a steady beat, almost rhythmic, until an alien ego emerged to derail it. While she was aware of Charl’s clumsy commands, she wasn’t beholden to them. Still, she settled down with the rest of the nearby birds and waited to die.
The world behind her was exploding. Divine spawn crawled out from the forest’s wreckage, emerging from within anything organic like they’d just finished gestating. A howl of rage pierced her eardrums, rendering her momentarily deaf. The sky twisted like it was preparing to break.
Mimicking one of Charl’s drones had been an interesting challenge at first, but only because of the novelty.
The man’s early work had seemed fumbling when he disabled creatures entirely and replaced most of their body with his own flesh. Now, he entered an organism and began eating and then replacing parts of its structure in tiny bites that left his victim none the wiser. If they did somehow realize what was happening, Charl just sped up his progress towards their brain, shutting down the parts required for executive function like he had in the beginning.
It made the process–going from infection to control–much faster. Many of the creatures he directed even possessed some portion of their own will, they just lacked the physical capability to enact it unless Charl decided otherwise. Having someone else’s muscles growing inside of her was very icky, in Cezil’s opinion, but the parts of her that were Charl revelled in it. It was this dichotomy, this conflict between natures, that had presented the challenge.
Cezil thought that Charl was more similar to a hive mind with some willful outliers than a mage with too many Dominate spells going at once. There was even an unusual psychic network that had emerged between the creatures, although Cezil doubted the United realized it. The natural abilities and habits of some of his assimilated victims had become background flavors to the man’s personality soup.
Half of this she knew from Arlo and his cleric teammate, the other half she knew from becoming one of Charl’s creatures.
Cezil still had full control of her faculties, but her mimicry was on a level that it was indistinguishable from reality. She was an infected Casuari, just as she was a growth of Charl cells at the stem of her brain and spread throughout her nervous system. She was also Cezil, a Littan infiltration specialist, and the latter identity overrode any undesirable conflicts of control from the former two.
That part kept confusing the analysts, but Cezil had no idea what was confusing about it. Of course, they wanted her to use scientific terms to explain something that was completely natural to her. Imagine if she went up to someone with a pulse and demanded they explain the cardiovascular system.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Stupid.
To be clear, it’s not like Cezil thought she was any smarter than all the knuckleheads she was constantly being forced to interact with, she was just clever enough to realize that she, too, was dumb as a rock. That being said, she was probably the smartest rock in existence whenever she chose to become one.
Cezil refocused on her situation again. Having a bird brain was always trouble for concentration.
Two avatars. One Dragon. A mountain of infected meat.
Shit.
Charl’s presence in the forest was so ubiquitous that she’d been shifting in and out of his drones for most of the time since awakening to find herself abandoned. Fooling the United into thinking he had control of her had been a sprinkle of tricky business, but she’d quickly learned to allow the man’s will to trickle through his mimicked cells, then did what he was asking. While the man was everywhere, it didn’t seem like he had the mental capacity to keep up with everything he had going on, despite his nature. So many things in so many places and only one man to mind them.
She’d drifted into his masses, making her home within the gaps created by the man’s lapsing attention. The biggest downside was that this required her to participate in the man’s psychic network, and kept her from remaining part of the one created by Earworm. She didn’t think it mattered much. The Littan network had been blocked last she knew of it, and being a part of Charl’s brain had its own advantages. One of them was knowing where to go if she wanted out of the Labyrinth. That seemed like something worth doing, since the place was about to explode or… something like that.
Cezil had found her way to Charl’s mountain of flesh, but she’d been too late. Fortune’s Folly activated the platform before she could find a way to signal them, and, for whatever reason, the group had summoned an elder dragon as they departed.
The woman was speaking down at Mount Charl when Cezil’s hearing returned.
“You are one of the United,” said Cerulean. Her voice parted the raging noise of the approaching avatars like an axe. It felt as though the woman had clamped a hand around the world’s balls, and the air itself had gone stiff from fear. Cezil noticed her mana beginning to drain.
The many faces of Charl looked up at the dragon ruler, the more human among them adopting a respectful countenance. “I am, and my name is Charl, Madam, although I fear I do not know your own.”
“You are not worthy of hearing it.”
Charl frowned, but the pair’s conversation was interrupted as the sky fell. The churning storm above began to shatter, its form broken by fractal webs of spatial distortion. A blue sky, sunny and free, poked through the gloom like glowing cracks in reality. Razor-thin sheets of dimensional force fell down from each, sundering the ground and shredding anything they touched. One descended several hundred feet from Cezil, and the force of it releasing its spatial compression sent her flying for hundreds more. The closest of Charl’s drones were obliterated, being rendered down to wet paste and scattered.
As Cezil clawed at the ground to right herself, she felt Cerulean’s grip on their surroundings tighten. A shining dome appeared over them, extending at least a mile in every direction. She couldn’t help but gape up at the display of power as the dome was battered by the onslaught of spatial tears without a single shudder, ripple, or shimmer. The world-shaking forces were beneath its notice.
Unfortunately, the barrier only dealt with the least of their problems.
“No, no, no, no, no!” shrieked a gluttonous voice from afar, albeit still within the dome. The bulbous visage of Orexis led the avatar’s approach from the ruined forest. His upper hands grasped at the air while his middle ones glowed with sinister magicks. His lower two each held a spear, bloodied and dripping.
Around him was a jittering swarm; divine spawn clawing and leaping their way out of anything organic. As he passed by they rallied around him, and as he continued forward he revealed an army in his wake. The world shook as another eruption sounded from just behind him, and his sister’s smokey form tore out from the mushroom cloud to land among her spawn, each a miniaturized version of herself. While she smoked and trumpeted, her creatures glowed hotly and whined like a boiler on the verge of failure.
“Our daughter,” Orexis said, pointing at Charl. “Where has she gone?!”
A hundred confused faces blinked and considered the avatar’s request.
“Who?” Charl asked.
Anesis bellowed and disappeared. A wave rippled through Charl’s entire mountainous form as the avatar tore a titanic hole through his center. Blood and viscera became vapor, filling the air with mist. The United’s faces, those that remained, showed a mix of pain and rage as half of his mass was eradicated. The resulting shockwave sent Cezil flying again, although she was far enough from the epicenter to avoid any real harm.
She had little time to appreciate her luck before she noticed that her landing had placed her much too close to the legions of spawn. Where Charl was a rapidly spreading plague, Anesis was a flood.
They swarmed in from as far as she could see, carrying out a one-sided war against all the creatures under Charl’s control. While many of the mana monsters were powerful by most measures she knew, those that could put up a fight were quickly overwhelmed by numbers. The contest of clones was no contest at all, and Cezil was forced to flee back towards the ruined body of Charl, her taloned feet kicking up sprays of dirt.
A line of death ran across what remained of Charl, cutting him in half and reducing countless suborned beasts to dust. Cezil’s pulse drilled into her head as she turned and fled in a different direction. A hot chill ran down her center. The edges of her vision blurred and swam.
A million points of blue light filled the air, divided into two clusters, then rode down on the avatars from above. The ground quaked and her beak cracked as something struck it, moving faster than she could see. Both avatars were gone. Everything behind them was gone. There were holes in her chest, but no pain. Not yet.
Cezil couldn’t think. She only ran, recognizing the panic as it set in but with no power to resist it. She sprinted blindly in whatever direction seemed least deadly. Her front was wet and slick. The world turned on its side, struck her left, crushed a wing, and sent her soaring upwards. Below her was mayhem she couldn’t begin to interpret.
Light and dust and detonations. Figures too fast to see, stuttering in and out until the land was a stretch of barren craters. Time dilated as Cezil stared down at her imminent doom, barely able to comprehend the devastation that had been wrought in a fraction of second. Her interface flashed as she received a buff. Shielding. So many digits. A force drove her down, erasing most of it before she could process how much of it she’d been given.
The storm broke. The sun shone. A forest of fungus erupted. It was on her skin, inside of her mouth, her organs. All mana was purged from it and sucked away, leaving dessicated mushrooms falling from the holes in her body. Throughout it all she kept receiving Shielding, barely keeping her alive despite the forces casting her about.
Somehow she ended up in a pile of what remained of Charl, the United still alive and watching the titanic forces unravel the universe around them. He still thought she was a part of him, and she realized this mass had its own smaller dome surrounding it.
“Is she… protecting me?” he asked with a dozen mouths. “Why?” Cezil heard the words, but had neither the capacity nor the time to consider them.
Then the sun disappeared again as everything above became blue, glistening scales. A roar commanded her mana to flee, dropping her pool down to zero. The center of the forest, the most mana-dense environment known outside of the Delves, was drained in its entirety. Orexis cast a spell and Cerulean seized it. The avatar wailed in frustration until his presence swelled to dwarf that of the sky-filling dragon. Another spell followed, this one asserting itself as a fundamental truth of reality.
Blue scales were scattered into atoms. Cerulean’s roar of pain split Cezil’s ears again. A reptilian hand filled her vision as it fell from above, large enough to grasp everything that was left of the mountainous Charl, including her.
And then, darkness.
[END ADDENDUM]