“Looks to me more like a dead rotting leviathan with a madwoman standing in front of it,” responded Dantes as he took inventory of everything around them to prepare the best wand and strategy for that moment.
“Dantes is right Serpica. You must see how mad all of this is,” said Traizen, his voice anguished. He looked around with a look of anger and disgust on his face. “You are using the gifts that she gave you to corrupt the Mother’s children. To act against her will. The suffering you are causing...”
“The suffering I am causing!?” she asked, her voice trembling a bit. “I have seen suffering. My locus was a battlefield. I watched as the ‘civilized’ races tore one another to shreds. I watched villages pillaged, their elders beheaded and their women raped. I’ve watched forests cut down to build machines of war, and the land salted to keep the enemy from ever growing new crops.” She shook her head. I once tried to force peace. I made my locus a den of horror and death to stop them from fighting over it. Poisonous plants blossomed across all of it, and brambles with thorns the size of daggers covered it all. For some time the fighting ceased, and things were...peaceful. Then one of them found a single nugget of gold in a river just outside of my locus. That was all it took for the fighting to begin again, for my locus to suffer. I still remember when the last river was torn to shreds after that war ended. I remember seeing a man smiling as he watched, a golden smile. The despair I felt.”
Traizen stepped forward. “You never told us Serpica. You never came to us for help. We could’ve done so much for you. There was no reason to bear all of that suffering alone.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t alone, and I’ll never be alone again.” She peeled the mask from her face, it came away along with a thick coating of pus and pieces of her skin. Her face was rotted, her flesh coated with pustules and sores, her eyes half eaten away, and exposed bone peeking through her jaw. “I carry life within myself now. The largest source of life that was left in my locus. Disease, plague, that is the gift the Mother gave me. She trusted me with the life of her most numerous children within myself. With it, I will end the civilizations that destroy the world for shiny rocks and foolish notions of honor. Starting here.”
Traizen began to cry, tears streaming down his cheeks. “That is not the Mother that granted you that. I cannot imagine how painful it is to be without her love. Its absence has damaged you beyond all reason.”
“I am closer to the Mother than the rest of you ever were.”
Traizen shook his head. “I’m afraid the only god there is left for you is the Father. I hope he welcomes you with love when I send you to meet him.”
Serpica screeched and launched herself at Traizen.
Traizen touched the bearmark across his heart and charged her as he wept, becoming a massive white bear as he ran toward her on all fours before they slammed into one another.
Every other creature in the room began to move the second Serpica screeched. Dantes and Jacopo tensed, expecting them to charge them, but instead they all swarmed toward the corpse of the leviathan. Dantes changed his target to Serpica and began moving toward her struggle with Traizen, but as he aimed his pistol at her, one of the writhing masses of flesh on the Leviathan sent out a fleshy appendage toward him like a whip. Dantes’s new cat-like reflexes saved him as he leapt backwards before he even realized what was happening.
The lump actually began to move toward him, crawling forward on a mix of cat, rat, and dog legs as it dragged itself forward with tendrils covered in motley combinations of fur and teeth, and tipped with points of bone.
Dantes aimed his pistol and fired at it, causing it to spray a thick vile ichor.
It ignored the wound and sent more tendrils at him. Dantes dropped his pistol, and dodge backward, throwing Jacopo into the air where he shifted into his two-leg form before landing on top of the lump.
Before the mass of flesh could react, Jacopo began to raise his gauntleted hand, each finger pointed in a sharpened blade, and began to tear at the flesh of the thing, rending it and sending chunks of it flying in every direction. They’d commissioned his new weapon after their encounter with Godfrey on the boat, and its use had come quite naturally to him.
It screamed, sounding like the horrendous combination of a dog whining and a group of rats being burned alive.
Dantes shoved his wooden hand into one of the openings and sent a blast of flame through it. The smell nearly made him vomit, but he held on.
As he did that Mor-Gan-May and her raccoon began throwing more vials into it, burning away at its flesh and sealing it.
Traizen was still struggling with Serpica. He was covered in wounds, blood dripping off of his snow white fur. Serpica had lost both of her actual legs, and one of her arms, but continued to strike out with her remaining diseased skin and wooden bone appendages. A look of pure madness on her face.
Traizen roared, and a kind of pulse of frost emanated from him, pushing Serpica back and causing her skin to become covered in small icicles.
She seemed to fall back, her remaining limbs bending, then she dissipated into a cloud of flies and moved toward the leviathan corpse, what parts hadn’t yet been destroyed.
Thing and Fizz chose that moment to reveal themselves. Their skin shifted from the same gray shade as the walls, into a rich green, revealing two massive versions of the strange lizard-like creature that Thing had been in the form of earlier. They sent out massive tongues like whips and devoured hundreds of the flies that made up Serpica in an instant.
She changed back into herself, and what was left of her landed on top of the back half of the leviathan’s corpse. She raised up her remaining hand and a half dozen diseased pieces of flesh exploded out of the body and began to wrap themselves around her.
The druids all turned their attention to her, and began to move to stop her from whatever new horror she had planned for them.
The pile of sickened skin and viscera started to rise, with only Serpica’s head protruding from the top of it, the only part of her that still seemed whole.
“I would have granted you all, this city, the slow death that it was giving to the Mother, but it seems I will need to take all of the life of it into myself in order to finish this!”
As everyone approached her, readying different attacks, she rose at the top of the fleshy pyramid, cackling wildly as she rose into the air.
There was a gunshot, and Serpica’s head jerked backwards. The rising mountain of flesh ceased growing, and started to slowly tilt backwards.
Everyone looked at Dantes, expecting to see his pistol in his hands, but his attention was turned toward the glass ceiling. A dwarf wielding a massively long rifle that had been slipped through the glass gave him a small wave, and then began to retrieve his gun.
Dantes smiled at him, wiping some of his blood from the back of his neck with the back of his hand.
“That’s Lead in the Chamber. I thought since I’d missed last time, I’d have someone else try to take the shot.”