He’d expected a city, but what he saw was unlike any city he’d known in his past life or on Ayther.
The warrens of each building stretched upward, nearly uniform arcs supporting a lattice of interconnected roofs, all made of weathered, grey stone. Everywhere he looked at his level, the floor was covered in fine blue sand out of which ruined shapes and dunes jutted.
A cool wind blew, gently enough that he could hear the resonance of the gastructure he was standing in as he climbed onto the floor.
"Wow. This place is big... but pretty boring," Stella said, returning to her normal form as she investigated a small mound of sand with a poke of her tail.
"I think whoever built this place lived on top," Kir said. "But I don’t see any stairs or signs of elevators..."
"Uhh... I don’t think they needed any," Stella said. She lifted her tail, the end of which was inside the rough eye socket of an avian skull. So of the sand had crystallized onto it, holding it together enough for Stella to pluck it and show Kir.
In Kir’s hands, it felt fragile.
He dinsionally stored it, thinking Kordia might enjoy analyzing it, assuming he made it out. After the pain passed, he spread his wings and flew with Stella toward the nearest opening in the ceiling.
As they crested the top of the structure, a subtle but rancid sll beca too obvious to ignore. Looking down, he saw that the rooftops contained what looked like self-contained, swampy pools. Most were dried out, little more than bowls of ancient dust, but there was a line of dots with darker soil that led off into the distance, sothing dark connecting them.
"Ugh, what is that?" Stella asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Kir answered as he began to circle the area with Stella.
In the dark, with only the glimr of maybe-starlight above, it was hard to see, but Kir thought he saw sothing further out. A mound of so kind, with little glowing spots. He couldn’t help but notice the dark pools led toward it.
"Stella, you see that?" Kir pointed.
"Hmm... Barely. Looks like a blob to ," she said.
"It might be the way out," Kir said as he altered course toward it.
"Whatever it is, I got a bad feeling about this." Stella followed, wrinkling her nose as the sll grew stronger.
The closer they got, the more Kir noticed that there were larger gaps between the structures. Massive breaks where collapses had occurred, down which descended dark tendrils like the one they were following.
The thicker the tendrils got, the more obvious it was that they were made of so sort of strange, dark flesh that pulsed with a sickly yellow color where portions of it seed thin enough to make out movent within the appendages.
"Do we even know what we’re looking for?" Stella asked as they began to overfly structures that were becoming far more organic than Kir was comfortable with.
Then Kir saw it. "That’s the exit," he pointed.
A fleshy maw surrounded what looked like a gap in the air, on the other side of which was a room marginally lighter than the one they were in.
All Kir could see through it were shapes and more of the tendrils... because the grotesque creature had a web of fleshy red tentacles with luminescent yellow bulbs extending into the hole in reality.
"I think I’m going to be sick," Stella suddenly declared. "Those aren’t... those aren’t teeth, are they?"
Kir followed her gaze. Inside the ring of flesh beneath the portal was what looked like a circular maw surrounded by teeth in layers extending down and down...
Only as he neared, he saw the teeth for what they were...
Heads.
Rotten-eyed, gaping heads of so bird-like race, no sign of plumage on their dark, saggy flesh. They bit at the air and sotis at the flesh of the maw, chewing, ripping, but ever confined. And they called out. Even without eyes, Kir could feel them looking at him.
They saw him and called out, a gibbering madness in a tongue Kir could not understand. In a thousand voices that sickened him to the very core to hear.
"Kir look out!"
He almost didn’t see the tentacle as it tried to swat him down.
He rolled away, drawing Kangetsu as another tentacle swept in his direction, itself covered in spikes made from the heads of whatever people had once lived here.
Holding Kangetsu at a side angle, Kir shifted his body so that the tentacle cut itself against his blade. It fell away in two parts, and he saw in horror that even severed, the heads of the top part continued to babble, eyeless sockets staring into him accusingly as they fell.
A flash of pain drew Kir’s attention down, and he saw that another tentacle had wound its way up beneath him. Only the fact that a head and stretched its neck to bite his leg with its beak gave him enough warning to cut away the appendage before it could wrap around his leg fully.
He sliced through both the head and the fleshy arm beneath it, freeing himself. To his disgust he saw that the inside of the bird-like skull was filled with a yellow mass. Congealed, half-rotted brain matter and so glowy, mbraneous blob leaked out like the yolk of an egg as the head fell away, no longer moving its beak.
Kir saw Stella flying faster and with more purpose than he’d ever seen her fly, and as more appendages reached for him he turned himself away from the monstrous entity and flew toward her.
"We need to get so distance!" he shouted as he neared.
"No shit!" Stella answered back before noticing his leg. "Oh shit! You’re bleeding!"
"It’s just a flesh wound. Keep going," Kir said.
They flew for what felt like a kiloter before Kir felt safe enough to land.
"The fuck was that thing?" Stella asked as she caught her breath.
"My guess would be a ’grotesque’," Kir said as he inspected his wounded left foot. The cuts had a ragged edge, as if the beak had been very slightly serrated.
He considered himself lucky, in a way, because he’d reacted fast enough to keep it from getting a proper bite. Otherwise, he’d be losing a lot more blood.
Thinking about first aid, he rembered that at so point he’d stored a length of rope in one of his dinsional tattoos. He hadn’t known what he’d need it for but so part of him just felt that having rope was useful.
His newest set of uniform pants were self-repairing, and so after rolling them back down all he had to do was reach into his dinsional storage. Cutting a small amount of rope, he tightened the leg of his pants around the wound to keep pressure on it.
"Hate to break it to you Kir but those tentacles are coming closer," Stella warned, right as Kir finished dressing his wound.
Kir looked up to see that that indeed was the case, but there was still a significant distance between them and the grotesque.
"That thing was clogging the portal," Kir said as he stood. "The first rule of speedrunning is that there are no rules..."
"Okay, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about," Stella said.
Kir raised a hand. "I’m about to cheese the boss," he said, a vicious grin widening on his face. "Just be ready for when the seals put on my back. This is going to be a big one." He stowed his wings and braced himself.
Stella started to voice so complaints but Kir shut her out.
Around the ti Kir had developed his Nova Blast, he’d thought up a different sort of bombardnt magic.
At the core of each atom were protons, neutrons, and electrons. Nova Blast worked by utilizing fission-fusion reactions of the most basic chemical elent, hydrogen. But he knew that, in a proper universe, subatomic particles would be everywhere. Particularly that which did not interact often with the matter in the universe.
Thus, Kir recalled that, within every cubic ter, there would be up to about 1.2*10^20 neutrons passing through at any given mont. The attack he was about to perform would gather those neutrons; because magic was one force he’d discovered could interact with them, provided soone had the will and ability to envision a fundantal particle.
The number of people who could do that was, barely, two; he and his mother, Bridget.
As soon as he reached out with magic, the pain inside his body increased many-fold.
A dull, red glow began to suffused the air in front of him as the sphere of neutrons took shape, edged with the blue force of the magic holding them together.
Kir did his best to ignore his body as he gathered and gathered, aiming his arm at the creature.
Even reduced by the loss of one seal, the pain was rapidly becoming unbearable, but he needed more neutrons, or all he would do was piss the grotesque off. He broke out in a sweat. His vision got blurry.
"Stella!" Kir called out. "Can you see?"
She stopped her complaining. "What? Of course I can! Those things hurt you more than now, and that’s just because I’m putting everything I got into feeling it as pleasure! I’m wetter than a fucking sli."
Trying not to get distracted by her lewdness in a life-threatening situation, Kir said, "I need you... to... aim my arm!"
"What!?" she shrieked.
"Just do it! I can’t see!" His eyes had begun to bleed, and unbeknownst to him, his sweat had transitioned from water to blood.
His bracing posture had one knee forward. He felt as Stella climbed up, wrapping both hands along the bottom of his elbow.
How many neutrons had he gathered?
He couldn’t tell. He’d only perford this spell one ti, on a tree in secret, reducing it to a dust beyond even ashes and scouring a line of death through the forest north of Darlbridge.
But he knew that, if the seals were proportional to the magic being perford, than this was the highest level of magic he could perform with the lowest mana requirent. He hadn’t attempted to hold a spell this long since being sealed.
"Stella... am I aiming at... the grotesque?"
"Yeah," she said, shuddering. "The pain’s getting pretty bad."
"What does... my spell look like?" Kir asked.
"It’s a red ball... like a little sun," Stella said. "Whatever you’re doing, hurry, because those things are getting close."
Kir rembered the ominous look his spell had taken when he first created it. It was ready.
"If I don’t make it-"
"Shut the fuck up and kill that thing!" Stella shouted.
Kir unleashed the spell, using magic to fire it out as a cone of deadly radiation.
He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Reviews
All reviews (0)