33 Infestation

I stood up and walked around the block, discovering horrors around every corner. Bits of teeth, claws, blades, and puncture marks were spread across the bodies. I couldn't even imagine what could've done this. It was probably something like what Althea did that day when we first met.

At this point, I calmed down until I could form a plan. I needed a way back to Torix and company. After that, I'd tell him about this massacre. We could find out what to do from there. The steel legion's search would die down after a few hours, and I could take advantage of that. The best plan would be sitting here, waiting a day or two before charging through another part of the blockade.

As I waited, I sent a message towards Torix that mentioned the steel legion's blockade, Yawm's effect on Springfield, and me being fine. As I finished sending the message, something moved in a house several blocks down. I ignored it, set on waiting out whatever the fuck this was. That was when I glanced at the sky. There was a tiny pink petal with a black pod at the end of it.

It fluttered in the wind before landing onto the ground. Another tossed through the wind and landed into the road. It wasn't until I saw one land on a body of a middle aged man that something happened. The black pod split open, revealing a tiny, squirming insect made of dozens of legs. It wriggled into the body before drilling into the open corpse of the man. Within seconds, black veins spread from underneath his skin.

Seconds later, the corpse began twitching. First one finger, then the arm, then the eyes. More like a puppet than a man, the body contorted and writhed before claws of bone grew from his finger tips. The cheeks of the man sunk inward before they split open, revealing the human teeth underneath. Fear crept up my spine as several tubes grew from the back of the man, before swelling at their tips. They split open with a squelch of tearing meat, revealing several eyes.

They glanced around, the limbs of the man bending backwards so that the creature could move. My breathing became shallow as it turned towards me. The thing twitched before Schema recognized it.

Spawn of Yawm(lvl 200) - This is one of Yawm's new pawns. He and his entourage clear out entire populations before assimilating them into his army of mutants. This is the youngest and weakest variation you will see with Yawm's name on it. If enough of these collect together, enormous, writhing balls of moving limbs will come together into something known as grikes.

The best method of preventing this is burning the bodies of the dead, before Yawm can use them. Of course, this isn't always possible. The faster you can kill these monstrosities, the better since they rapidly evolve into more powerful variations and eventually gain sentience.

Even though this message tells you all this, little is understood about the potential of these enemies. Be wary, and most of all, be afraid.

I frowned before gritting my teeth and charging towards the creature. The back of the man split open, revealing three tentacles, each with a blade at the end of them. As I reached the thing, one of the blades whipped towards me with enough force to cleave through steel.

I moved my right arm and molded my armor, redirecting the tentacle straight into the ground. Another shot towards me before I opened my mouth and bit towards the thing. My armor followed me, the metal rending open before cleaving through the metallic blade at the end of the tentacle.

I jerked my neck, tearing the limb from the creature before stomping onto the blade that missed me. My foot crunched the dagger underfoot before the third tentacle snapped towards me. I banged the tentacle away with a quick snap of my left forearm, forcing it to swing sideways.

The tentacle redirected towards my side, but I charged forwards. The tentacle scraped my back but couldn't pierce through the metal. With a quick pivot on my heels, I launched a hook towards the center of its black veins. The flesh of the man was softer than butter under the might of my fist, but the veins were tough as wood. Still, the strike damaged the host of this monster. I didn't think it could continue on if its host was in tatters.

The monster wrapped its tentacle around my waist, trying to lift me into the air. I was far heavier than it expected. I pushed the tube of meat onto the ground before stepping onto it as I stepped forward. I kicked the creature like I was beating a door down. It flew backwards before stopping as the tentacle under my heel kept it grounded.

From the middle of my palm, I grew a jagged spike. Just like I was swinging a sword, I swung the spike towards the tentacle and ruptured the limb. Black blood gushed from the limb, the tentacle whipping through the air like a sputtering hose. The black liquid splattered onto my armor before I charged forward. I raised both my arms overhead before pulling them down with all my strength.

The blackening body squished under the force, along with the ground underneath him. Before it could recover, I pummeled the body of the man to mush. One strike after the other, my hands turned into meat grinders. The man's deformed body turned into a red and black oatmeal with bits of bone it in. As I leaned upwards, I hadn't even noticed the other bodies around me morphing along with them.

Dozens of corpses squirmed, each of them shivering violently as the black veins grew underneath them. It was a surreal scene. In the middle of a blood soaked suburb, a graceful shower of pink petals landed like a cherry blossoming festival in japan. As the petals became denser, the number of corpses thinned and the number of shambling freaks thickened.

I heaved a few breaths before charging into the nearest freak. They could try to kill me, but I wouldn't go down without a fight. The body of a child had folded backwards, walking with it's stomach bulging towards the sky. As I reached it, the stomach bursted in a cloud of red mist. Two arms with hands made out of the girl's ribcage swung towards me. I grit my teeth as I let them crash straight into my shoulders as I shot my hand into the spawn's chest.

I grabbed the densest cluster of black veins and ripped out. The skin stretched and split as I pulled out one of the writhing bugs. The wings had spread outwards into two thin films of muscle. They latched the creature into the body while the numerous black legs of the bug had grown into the black limbs of the creature. The abdomen of the creature had turned into a heart, beating the black blood throughout the corpse.

Disgusted, I threw the abomination onto the ground before heel stomping it into oblivion. It was like a hollow ball of wood under my heel, odd and unnatural for something like that. I shot towards a decapitated corpse of a woman. She'd been walking on the road before having her head sliced clean off. Now scales grew out of her skin, forming plates of armor as her chest split open into a gaping mouth with spiked teeth. The mouth had no cheeks and was long, like a crocodile's.

I stomped the mouth into the ground, breaking the new jaw of the fucked up abomination. One of the arms whipped towards me, the arm's bone breaking in the process. The dull snap was muffled by the muscle and skin as the scales shot out towards me. They dug into my armor before I hammer fisted the creature's gut into the ground. The woman's spine snapped, caving the monster in. The upper and lower body of the woman squirmed like a cockroach pinched in the middle.

I stomped the monster into the ground before grabbing its leg. I howled as I pulled with my limbs screaming from effort. The muscle and bone snapped as I tore the limb from it's body. The other parts of it scrambled for escape, but I kept it down and on the ground. I growled as I used the leg as a spear, piercing the black bug with the femur of the woman.

Glancing around, I found two bodies mushing together into a mass of meat. I bolted towards the aberration, crushing numerous bones before forcing it onto the ground. As I pulled myself upward, the skin of the creature latched onto me. Like a malignant infection, it tried to dig into the cracks of my armor. It found none. Since fighting Althea, I'd practiced turning my armor into an airtight seal. While it didn't give me more than two or three minutes to escape, that was often times more than enough.

This was one of those times. Jerking myself from it, the skin of the creature split with a sickening pop. Torrents of red and black blood pumped from the creature before I smashed it into pieces, preventing it from forming into a grike. I turned, finding the head of the decapitated woman chewing on one of the leftover bodies I left behind.

It had grown a pair of six pus covered legs. I grimaced as veins grew from out of the mother's mouth and pumped the meat of the body into its head. As it did so, the skull ballooned outwards until the scalp and cheeks of the mother split. The pumping ebbed a nauseating squelch.

I couldn't handle it. It was like I had stumbled out of a fire and into hell. I thought BloodHollow was bad? Well it was nothing compared with this. Everywhere around me, the bodies wretched and contorted and warped into disgusting aberrations of organs and skin. Some were collections of hands and jaws and teeth. Others were turning into winged thralls with their intestines hanging like a jellyfish's tentacles.

Some of the bodies grew into the ground, holes appearing in the skin of the person before the pink petal puffed out of them. Even worse, other's just swelled in the bodies before slugs covered in sacks would crawl out from the skin. As they neared the barrier, they slammed into an electric fence, vaporizing to ash. If this was what a fringe world was like, I don't know if I could handle it.

I'd never imagined things would turn out this bad. How could I? I'd never seen anything even remotely similar. Sure, Baldag-Ruhl was disgusting, but he was only one person. He was not an entire city that was turning into a moving corpse. Even with all my steeled resolve, I couldn't comprehend all that was going on around me. That was when I realized something.

I didn't have to.

I opened my status screen, seeing 17 levels gained from killing the creatures. I poured all my points into endurance before riling up every piece of rage and anger and hatred that was in me. Instead of thinking, I would become a beast. I would be like a vulture chewing corpses in a battlefield. This was my reality. This was my new home. No normal person could handle it. I had to become something else besides normal. I had to become something much more primal.

I stopped fighting the urge to battle. I wallowed in the bloodlust, my hands shaking in my fervor. If this world was going insane, then so would I.

I dashed into another monster, ready for war. I stomped and struck like lightning. I roared and raged like thunder. I let loose all inhibitions, turning into a animal. Everything blurred as instinct took over. Blood became my paint, and the world my canvas. I tore into the living corpses like a butcher chopping into his meat with a cleaver. Blood splattered across my skin, sinking into my armor and boots and gloves.

I chomped into the monsters, devouring them. My armor savoured the flavor of their flesh, sweet as sugar and enticing as water in a dessert. I lost all understanding as my fingers became claws and mouth curved up into a smile. There was a laughing in my head. A long, maddening laughter that bore into my skull like a tungsten tipped drill. It beat on my mind with its steady, monotonous rhythm.

It grew in volume, becoming a symphony in the blood and black and horror. It did not fight the sounds of guts slapping the ground or bones breaking. It harmonized with it, echoing the dread and the trembling in my hands. It was like a coming tide, unstoppable and boundless. It poured over me, becoming my battlecry. For some reason, I was more afraid of that sound than the horrors around me.

The reason was simple. That eerie, haunting laughter, it was my own. Something had taken a hold in me, like a seed sprouting inside my chest. That hysteria and lunacy, it carried me through the insanity of the situation. Hours later, I finally came back to myself.

I was leaning over a pile of corpses. Bodies were splayed out in every direction. Horns, teeth, and spikes were impaled through several parts of me. My armor was in tatters, chunks of my skin torn off. My armor was smiling, gorging on the horrors around me. I was gorging on the bodies.

I reeled backwards, repulsed at myself. My armor almost fought me to continue feasting, but I crushed the greed with my will. I wouldn't choose to be a cannibal.

The petals had stopped falling, though many of them were lying all around me. A few of them even crawled towards the heap of carcasses at the center of the road near me. As stared at the heap of bloody bodies, I was hungry. No, ravenous. There was sudden compulsion to continue, to scrape and gnaw and devour until nothing was left.

I slapped myself in the face, terrified at myself. What the fuck was wrong with me? I didn't know at the time. One of the petals reached the pile of bodies and started reforming. That was when I realized why I'd been able to survive.

My armor had been eating the corpses of the creatures after I killed them. If it hadn't done so, then the petals would keep reanimating the flesh into more abominations. I could stop the petals from creating more fuckers to kill and give myself ambient mana at the same time. It was a very efficient and pragmatic solution to my current predicament.

It was easier said than done. Looking at a torn up human being was hard. Just the thought of eating while near one, let alone eating the actual body was disgusting. It was like I was being forced between choosing to live on as a monster or die as a human. In the end, my choice was obvious.

I walked over and ripped the petal bug from the corpse, preventing it from reanimating the host. I crushed the creature in my hand before leaning over, and sighing long and hard. Not all hard things were painful, just like not all painful things were hard.

I opened my mouth, and my armor responded in kind. With a quick bite, I clamped my teeth into the corpse before swallowing a chunk of meat whole. It didn't taste like anything. My armor was absorbing the chunks. I wasn't actually eating this disgusting shit.

Sighing with a sudden and massive relief, I leaned my head into my palm. I laughed for a moment before my throat burned a little. My eyes burned as a tear or two leaked down my face. I was just glad I wasn't a cannibal. I was glad that I was still human.

Having said that, it was time to clean up this mess. I chomped into the pile of corpses for at least an hour before only a massive clot of coagulated blood was left. At this point, I checked out my levels. I had gained 55 levels over the whole battle, and nearly five million ambient mana. It made sense in the end.

While I had been level 105, I hadn't had the same type of scaling as a normal person. I had twice the attributes, along with extra leveling perks and my armor. It made me tougher than most level 250s. Still, I hadn't even thought about stats and all that for weeks. I'd been trying to expand my pool of skills for months now, so my level had stagnated. If anything, I was way overdue for a burst of levels.

I glanced at my perks and tree bonuses for the first time in a long while. What I noticed was that endurance was by far the most efficient stat to invest into. It got a 50% bonus, it fed 20% of its total into willpower which also got a bonus, and the health was very effective since I had super high damage reduction. I kept things simple and invested until it was a total over 200. 201 to be exact.

I had thirteen points left after that. Whatever the level 100 perk was, I figured strength would be the next best perk for me. A few extra points in it wouldn't hurt regardless. With that handled, the perk screen came up. The perks blew me away.

[Unbroken(Endurance of 100 or more. Note - Only three level 100 perks may be chosen for three different attributes. Choose wisely.) - You are time's unending march, unbroken and unending. Lifespan doubled once more. Yet another 1/10th of endurance is added to willpower. Another 5 health and stamina per point in endurance(20 in total, excluding multipliers). Leveling bonuses for endurance are doubled. You no longer need sleep or rest.]

[Paragon of Will(Willpower of 100 or more. Note - Only three level 100 perks may be chosen for three different attributes. Choose wisely.) - You find more in yourself than can be found in others. Doubles internal motivation once more. Yet another 1/10th of willpower is added to intelligence. Another .1 mana(health) regen from each point in willpower. Doubles the leveling bonuses gained from willpower. Doubles current affinity for augmentation. Increases mythical skill cap by 1(2 total).]

Endurance was my best attribute by a wide margin, so choosing it didn't take much thought. Willpower, on the other hand, was a little messier. Sure, the bonuses matched up pretty well with my build so far, but I'd be cutting out either strength or constitution.

After a few seconds of thought, I finalized the selection of the willpower perk. Whatever bonus that constitution offered, my armor likely already gave something similar. Hell, it was probably better. Augmentation magic would be multiplicative with strength as well. I could use that to my advantage.

I finalized the perks and attributes, a wave of clarity rushed over me. I had been exhausted. The moment I finalized the perks, that exhaustion vaporized in an instant. The refreshed feeling of being well rested washed over me. It was like I just slept eight full hours for a week in a row. The thing is, everything else came into focus too. The extra attribute points in endurance leaked over into other attributes due to perks, making me smarter as well.

It felt like I was the eye of a hurricane. No matter what was going on around me, I could control myself. A perfect example was a brimming excitement to use augmentation magic to test the doubled affinity. I crushed that want with ease. It took hardly a thought, and the temptation sunk like a rock out in the ocean.

With that handled, I opened my status screen for the first time in several weeks. The obliterator tree and other tree bonuses were adding up rather nicely to say the least. In fact, this was the largest jump in stats I'd ever gotten. That's what 110 attribute points will do with bonuses from trees and perks.

Level 160 Attribute Totals

Strength - Increases carrying weight, maximum speed, and physical power 44.2

Constitution - Increases hardness, density, and weight of your body 36.3

Endurance - Increases regeneration of stamina, health, and their totals 201

Dexterity - Increases ease of movement, flexibility, and reflexes 32.8

Willpower - Increases internal motivation, mana regen, and Mental Res 105.5

Intelligence - Increases memory, critical thinking, and total mana pool 55.5

Charisma - Increases likeability, persuasion, and decreases prices at shops 36

Luck - Increases money found, odds in your favor, and chance of rare events 35.1

Perception - Increases comprehension, the five senses, and awareness 30.5

Daniel Hillside Totals Regen Buffs/Debuffs

Health 7838/7838 1293/min Oppression Damage- 8000+25%hp/min

Stamina 1720/1720 63/sec Elemental Res - 97%

Harbinger of Cataclysm 5,953,456/16,000,000 0/per min Plasma Res - 97%

Phys Dam Reduction - 97% Rad Res - 97%

Phys Dam Bonus - 481% Mental Res - 97%

I doubled my health in one go. Literally doubled it. I'd over doubled my health regen too, which doubled my mana regen too thanks to arcane blood. I clasped my hands, eager to test what was new.

That's when I remembered my situation. I needed to get out of there. Gaining so many levels would let me do that with far greater ease than before, so I headed towards the barricade. I walked into one of the houses near the road. I sat inside it, beside the front window as I readied myself to charge through. That was when the ground rumbled.

I turned, glancing out towards the street. There was a robed figure walking with a calm, composed steps. Each time one of his feet landed on the ground, the ground would quake. It was like he carried an entire stampede in each of his steps. From his back sprouted a single wing of white from his right side. It was at least ten feet(3 meters) long, stretching taller than him. As he stretched it outwards, a gentle breeze followed that tossed a storm of pink petals into the sky.

I couldn't deny it. For just a fragment of a second, the robed figure looked holy, like a reincarnated saint. Schema recognized why.

Elijah Joan, the Fallen Seraph(lvl 3243) - One of the four followers of Yawm, Elijah is a powerful fighter with tremendous healing abilities. It's rumored that he carries a mountain in each of his boots, and the burdens he carries weigh him down. While this is unlikely, his constitution is unbelievable, along with his strength.

Little is known about Elijah, but one thing is clear. He is a monster in his own right, and you would do well to avoid him at any and all costs.

As I finished reading the message, my stomach sank. It was like there was no limit to the level these guys had. One of Yawm's followers outleveled Kessiah by over a thousand. He glanced around, his face black from under his hood. From his winged side, he outstretched a pale hand that was remarkably human. He said,

"I know you are here. You've done well with saving yourself from Yawm's holy wrath. You may join us, and receive his holy blessing."

I lowered my head, leaning against the wall. He wouldn't call out if he already knew where I was. It was the same story with his bullshit about being rewarded. I'd already seen what he did to the people here. It would take a total moron to trust him at this point.

He continued, his voice calm as a crystal clear sea, "Please, do not be afraid my child. We will cleanse you. If you have sinned, he will embody that sin from within. He will bring it out, and use it as your power. Do you not wish to be cleansed?"

I held my breath, a bead of cold sweat pouring from my head. His steps beat against the ground, one at a time as he moved towards me. He continued, "You will grow in ways you cannot imagine. Yawm will unlock your inner potential. All you must do is embrace the new flesh."

At the end of room was a mirror that faced outside. Elijah had pulled up the robe from his unwinged side, revealing a twisted arm of intestines and long, thin hairs. The limb shivered and pulsed as he said,

"Yawm will show you the true side of yourself. He will open you and reveal what is within to the world."

My skin crawled as he stepped another step towards my house. He said as he stared off into the distance,

"Come...Even if you do not believe, the new flesh will consume you and make you new."

His words were like a toxic honey, almost impossible to ignore. I almost stood without thinking. With an explosion of will, I forced the urge down and tightened my control. I wasn't about to be taken over by some dickface with a lot of charisma.

Elijah sighed before saying like screeching metal,

"I can see you. Come out, little one."