Book 5: Chapter 40

Book 5: Chapter 40

Kay lunged forward, the spearing tip of his halberd lashing out in a line at the woman whose face was reforming from a melted looking black good into false skin. Her face had lost any semblance of expression after Kay had spotted her, even Eleniah’s completely still expression while Alahna had counter-monologued at Karmondur had more life to it than this. The spray of blood Kay had launched at her coated the wall and floor as the unknown eldritch enemy leapt to the side. Kay’s weapon traced a pattern in the air as the false woman dodged around it.

Lauren let loose an arrow into the chaotic crowd. It pierced through the shoulder of one of the fleeing guests who froze in place. They didn’t react like a normal person who’d just been shot, instead they froze. Their clothing and flesh around where the arrow had hit them flickered like dying pixels and sluggishly trickled away from the wound. Their expression froze into an identical blank mask as the woman Kay was fighting. Before they could react, Lauren threw her arm out, clenched her fist, and pulled back toward her. The shoulder with the arrow in it was yanked forward and the not-person was dragged out of the crowd of innocents trying to escape into a clear section of the room.

The attackers after Alahna were being overwhelmed, but the tides of battle began to shift as the infiltrators were revealed. The goo covered metal skeletons weren’t among either the attackers or Alahna’s people, but mixed among everyone else. Guards, merchants, spouses, and entertainers all stopped as their faces went slack. Even those that hadn’t been injured began to show themselves through their behavior. People fleeing out of the ballroom began bouncing off of still forms standing in their way. One large man panicking and running from danger almost bowled over a thin woman in a luxurious dress. The accidental tackle fueled by fear must have crossed some threshold to determine what was an attack or not, because the woman’s arm stretched out into a black blade that gouged out a chunk of the man’s flesh.

The screaming and distraught running jumped up several levels as a new threat became known. The still figures began lashing out at anything near them, striking evacuating noncombatants and people still fighting. The third faction joining in caused several fronts to devolve as Alahna’s guards suddenly had to defend against a new set of enemies and the traitors had to deal with people they were ignoring or what they believed were reinforcements suddenly stab them in the back. The already chaotic scrum intensified as confusion and violence ran rampant.

A wave of flickering black sludge rolled across the arms of the woman Kay was dealing with and metal bones stood out where her skin pulled away. The roiling substance solidified into a pair of serrated hooks that swung around like a demented weed whacker. Kay was forced on the defensive by an unending series of attacks that completely ignored any potential threats other than Kay.

His greatest ally dashed in to help him. Eleniah punched once, turning the whirling blades trying to decapitate him into black mist. The creature pretending to be a woman paused for a second, staring down at the jagged and broken remains of one of its metallic bones. The shining silver bone began to melt into the same dark colored goop before the sludge erupted upward into a massive needle-like spear. The arm that the remaining edged scythe blade was on lost all of its human shape and became an elongated whip.

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The sudden rush of attackers at Kay followed by a wave of blood and those same attackers transforming into a shifting mass of black goo that grew bladed insectile arms distracted almost everyone still in the room. Almost. A rolling wave of thunder echoed around, bouncing off the walls and buffeting everyone as Alahna let lose with a series of lightning blasts, taking down everyone still standing that was against her. Bodies collapsed to the ground, smoking, as people died left and right.

Shifting targets without pause she gathered a crackling ball of energy that grew until it looked like it was engulfing her entire body. Spreading her arms apart she unleashed a lightning bolt as thick as a truck. It slammed into the blob and burned away portions of its surface. A chunk of the thing melted at the edges and dropped toward the blood coating the floor. The monster struck the falling piece of itself with three simultaneous blows from tentacle-like limbs and sent it rocketing back toward Alahna. A spinning tornado of wind spun up around her and sent the impromptu projectile flying away form her.

Kay decided that it was time to end things and took simultaneous control over the entire lake of blood. He grew a massive cylinder upward from the surface, surrounding the monster on all sides. He took a moment to drill through the ceiling and create a plate of blood above it so it couldn’t escape. Then he flooded the cylinder. A swirling column of blood dissolved the entire eldritch thing as it thrashed about and tried to escape. It tried to fling portions of itself out of the trap, but Kay just caught them and enveloped them in their own prisons. It tried to dig away, but Kay had already seen that coming.

After a few moments of insane struggles, the thing seemed to die, dissolving completely into inert goo. Kay left it suspended for a bit longer, until he was sure it wasn’t trying to get away by playing dead. When he was sure it’d been long enough he solidified a sphere around the remains and drained away the rest of the blood just in case. He let it float gently to the ground before turning to take in the torn apart ballroom.

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A few miles away, buried beneath the surface of the island in a place that very few visited, a black sphere sat motionless. At the same time that a blob of unknown origins tried to massacre a dance after being revealed as being a series of impostors, the sphere received a signal. A packet of data sent by simple radio waves reached a nearby signal repeater. The information was bounced from disguised and hidden repeaters, one to the next, until it reached the sphere. The intelligence contained in the shiny black ball considered the information, then sent out another pulse of radio waves destined for farther away.

After passing on the information, it settled back in to wait. The intelligence inside wasn’t in charge of the level of decision necessary after that report, but it was sure what the response would be. An actual threat to the intelligence and its ilk had been found after so long since the last one. The threat was able to end the intelligence in a way that it couldn’t understand, which only increased the urgency. Threats existed to be destroyed. Unknown threats existed to be destroyed sooner rather than later.