RAFEL WAS APPALLED. He would have retched if he had mortality in him. Only a most twisted mind would do this. The three heads were girls. He could tell from their long hairs.
Dead girls now.
They were really young; students of the academy probably, but other than that, it was impossible to tell much else since they were missing everything from the neck down. Their heads sat grotesquely in the vat of ice blocks like skewered carp.
Their families would likely think them on some long party trip on a yacht across the Cold Sea; which they'd interprete as teenage rebellion—not human meat at the bottom of a Hyde's cooling room. No! Certainly not that.
Aya inveighed. "You godless bastard!"
Seeing no other option but to kill the intruders too to silence their finding, Mr. Blu Hiddleston began to change.
His jaws dropped and cracked to a frightening dip. It fell down; his chin, touching his sternum. His lips frangled and chewed back, exposing red gums, as his blood-stained mouth stretched so wide at the corners the split hit his ears. His face was an image of the most deplorable clown.
A monster of madness—the deadliest.
His cheekbones were sunken, his hair fallen off like a victim of the death fever to only a few slimy strands. His skull was veined and elongated; a head bigger and denser: amoebic and reptilian, like some evil alien fallen from the stars.
Mr. Hiddleston grew in size, height-ward only. His middle rather remained the same, his abdomen bloating, giving off the ill vision of a child afflicted by a malady.
His gargantuan body was disproportionate: limbs sickled like sticks, elbows striped to bony sprouts, flesh but a coverlet of skin on revealed ribs, legs thinner than a pelican's—with nothing of the bird's beauty, feet to large for the body it carried. The ugliness of this morphed creature was hideous.
But then, [Hyde] monsters weren't known for their looks.
One arm was bigger and denser than the other, and trailed limply like a weighted tumor behind. The monster was just about ten feet tall; it's bony, vulture head scraped the cold room's plastic ceiling, blue veins underneath catching the light to eerily amplify the horrible pallor.
Continue your journey at m_v--novelhall.net
The Hyde was the sickest shade of green. Not the green that made one think of jade pearls and leaf sprouts, but the color of puke and tripe, and dismembered bodies, rotting in the noon heat.
The monster's limp eyes fell on Rafel, glaring something off and murderous; the mummified lips curled in a snarl.
It frothed at the mouth, lifting the lighter arm to point out with a dirty-black talon at Rafel. "Uggghl, you s-shall, s-shall die. Hyde, kill. Hyde, Kill. HYDE, KILL!" It went on salivating.
Rafel offered to Aya, "at least we know the brain inside doesn't match the head."
"Yah! Hyde, kill!" The changed creature swiped with furious rage at Rafel's head. He stepped back easily, avoiding the bony punch. The Hyde had struck out with its right arm, and now tried the heavier left. It took some effort on the monster's palm to lift. The cankerous limb sliced through the air, this time for Rafel's midriff.
It was faster than Rafel expected.
But at the last second, he too bent backward. He went down by his spine, so low the tip of his manbun brushed the back soles of his boots.
The Hyde was distracted with Rafel, and Aya maneuvered a circle to the creature's back. She slashed out her onyx claws longer, curving her fingers like a cat's about to pounce. Then she jumped on the monster's skeleton back, ripping away at the flimsy skin. She tore through sinew and red muscle, hitting dense white and bone.
Still, she kept tearing away. Like a mole, she dug her way into the Hyde's vertebrae.
The Hyde wailed, trying to shake Aya off. But she wouldn't budge. The creature was too skinny at the abdomen and she wrapped her legs tight around the bony waist.
"Hyde, angry!" The monster stamped it's leg.
It threw its body hard into the wall, flattening Aya to the steel. The back of her head connected hard with the cold iron.
"Ahh!" she yipped, blood staining the spot.
Her hold loosened and she slid down to the chrome floors. She was blacked out.
'Naamah? Naamah!' Rafel called through their mind link.
No response.
He could see the smudge of blood trailing from the pint where her head had collided with the steel to where she now rested at the foot of the wall. It was bright red under the flickering white lights. Cold seeped deep into Rafel's bones, but not just the cold of the storage house in which he was.
[Nuclear Irradiance]
[Deity: LORD SHIVA.]
A bright celestial light, cosmic as the waves of a solar flare, hot as the smelting of fission, and destroying as the might of explosion of spiritfire burst out of Rafel. He literally exploded, becoming a conduit of flames so violent and radioactive they winked out every other light in the place.
Melted every ice block and pickle in the cold room.
The waves of light flowed and ebbed, and when it finally dimmed, the Hyde was reduced to a mess of green goo splattered on the floor. The flesh streaked across the area with skin dripping like candle wax. Bone and skull was incinerated, making barbecue of brain matter.
There was not much of organism on the floors.
The lips on the creature, peeled back like flesh on a roasting goat chaffed to say something. "The b-basilisk . . . Hyde knows. Hyde kn...who s-sent it.
Hyde knows who sent basilisk."
Before Rafel could lean in to get further reply, the lips stopped moving. It was just mouth and guts now.
The steel wall behind had melted in, providing a way out. The iron still glowed red from pulsing heat. The emitted radiation made Rafel sweat. Once, the very room had been the cold of minus degrees. Rafel rushed to Aya. He cradled her head in his arms.
"Naamah?"
He was about to tear open his wrist and offer her his blood when she sniffed and opened her eyes. She looked around him to the splatter of monster on the floors. She smiled. And Rafel helped her up.
"Can you walk?"
Aya was nodding when a waitress burst in through the melted wall area.
"I heard a bang—"
She stepped in the Hyde's residual gore ignorantly and abruptly slid, falling into the sticky mess. The uniformed girl sat in it, in her apron a second, slowly lifting her hand to observe the squishy substance in her palm.
Finding it to be mortal flesh, reducing to a steaming pile of guts and blood, her eyes bulged out their sockets.
Then, she yelled.
"AHHHHH! WHAT THE FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!"
She ran, with her back to the adjacent wall, hand over her mouth and her wildly beating heart. "Is that the boss?"
"Parts of him." Rafel offered indifferently.
Only a shaven scalp and one red eyeball were intact. The rest was flimsy goo.
Before the shaken waitress could ask another question, Rafel took Aya's hand and walked out.
"Peitho, stats!"
[Ding!], came the bedroom voice he was growing quite fond of.
[QUEST COMPLETED!]
[NEW LEVEL ACHIEVED!]
[Rank: Monster Hunter.]
[Blocked attributes up to Third Infernal Ring have been unlocked!]
[ADDED REWARD: Host is the new owner of the Spinazolla restaúrant chain.]
Rafel smiled and drew Aya's head to his chest. "Let's get that pretty head of yours checked. You had quite the collision."