Chapter One-Hundred: There Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked (Arc 4 – End)

Chapter One-Hundred: There Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked (Arc 4 – End)

Tris stood alone in a sea of darkness. The inescapable nothingness flanked her from all sides, and an outsider would have thought her to be a victim trapped in an infinite nightmare.

Except they would be wrong.

This abyss belonged to her. It wasn’t the void. It was a partitioned segment of a now infinite [Void Storage] separated from the rest to host her revenge.

“The seeds of nightmares find fertile ground in the heart of darkness, but what if we were to go beyond that elementary understanding?” she asked herself. “Darkness, alone, is uninteresting. It’s uninspiring and bland without a supporting cast to add atmosphere.” Tris manipulated her surroundings, materializing a dilapidated, two-story cabin in the inky blackness. It was like a macabre monument to decay—a place that nightmares feared to crawl.

The roof sagged under manufactured neglect, with missing shingles to expose the rotting wood. The walls bore deep scars of time. They were covered in creeping vines and moss that seemed to thieves in the decrepit darkness only Tris could form.

“Hmm... No. It’s still too clean. It must be more...” Tris waved her hand, shattered the windows, then covered them in grime. “Yes. That’s better. That’s how it looked.” She glanced her hand against the jagged edges, treating them like the teeth of a violent beast.

She rusted the door hinges so it creaked ominously with every slight movement. She entered and splintered the floorboards while altering the air to stink with the stench of decay.

Flickering candles provided no light. They existed as mere decorations, yet darkness cast darkness, creating shadows within shadows that twisted in the corners, whispering secrets of despair. Ceiling chains rattled as if moved by unseen hands.

Otherwise, the cabin was empty. But it wouldn’t be for long. This was how it looked the first time she was brought to it. It changed. It grew. It evolved to become her biggest fear.

Tris walked away from her construction. She had thought long and hard about this, and the script the Beacon of Wisdom had devised must be followed to the nth degree.

It was time to begin.

Oh, how long had she yearned for this day?

Tris focused until she held Remy’s soul in her right hand. Yes—this was Remy’s genuine soul. The one she was born with it. A moment later, an exact copy appeared in her left hand. “This cannot be done all the time. It’s a unique case since I’ve reverse-engineered every aspect of this despicable woman. It’s ironic, little Remy. Your soul is so clasped in the void that it’s easy to understand. It’s so perceivable.”

The original soul floated. Tris stepped away after storing the copy—she’d need it later for further experiments. An aspect of personification targeted the glowing orb, giving rise to one of Tris’s lord’s most despicable enemies. Those wolf-like ears twitched as she touched the ground.

Remy opened her eyes. She looked lax. “The void, huh?” She glanced around and refused to acknowledge the cabin because she couldn’t see it. Tris hadn’t granted that permission. “Yeah, it feels just like home. I guess my final warp made it after all.”

“Can you be so sure about that?”

“Eh?” Remy turned around. “Oh, it’s the bitch with the dumb hat. What? You decided to tag along with me?”

Tris laughed. Her heart quivered so anxiously at what was about to happen that she couldn’t stand it. “You don’t get it? A dullard like you gets less impressive the more I observe, but that’s par for the course for a simpleton. Aww... Poor little Remy... You don’t realize what happened, do you?”

“...”

“Death is far too gentle for a scourge like you. I’ve seen your past, wretch. I know the horrors you’ve endured and believe they could be improved. I will make you suffer.”

“How can I be dead if I’m alive? You claim to be something about wisdom, but you fucked up by letting me recover. Just wait. I’ll warp away and—”

“Oh?” Tris crossed her arms and smugly smiled. “Please. By all means. Warp away, little wolf. Return to your lord and tell her you’ve failed to kill the one that got away.”

“...” Remy’s expression slowly soured. She had this grand, overarching confidence that eroded like metal left to rust in the elements.

“What’s wrong?” taunted the overseer of this partitioned world. It was a blink and a miss moment. Tris flickered and appeared an inch away from Remy. “Can you not do something as simple as this?” Tris flickered again and appeared ten feet overhead before returning to her original location. “You realize it, don’t you? Your soul no longer carries the void’s gift.”

“... What did you do to me?!”

Tears spewed down Remy’s face. Her mouth slightly parted, and Tris feigned ignorance.

“Oh? What was that?”

“Anything... Anything but that... Please, not that! I can’t—not again! I can’t go back in there!” Remy’s trembling voice returned the wolf to the past-- when she was anything but the cruel, heartless murderer many knew her to be.

Tris warped a mile away, although the distance paradox that was the void made her seem so close. “If you desire freedom, then run. Run from your nightmares. Run from your fate. Keep running until you’ve outlived my lord.”

Snap!

The invisible bindings restraining Remy disappeared, and she took off. It had been decades since she felt this panicked—decades since she last thought about the worst years of her life—decades since that horrible cabin occupied her unrelated thoughts.

But that hell hole was here. She had to get away. Nothing else mattered—not even her precious Holy Lord Meruria came to her mind.

Remy wouldn’t escape. The dark, vile cabin trembled as the door slammed open. Unidentifiable monsters of shadowy trauma stepped out like beings of an eldritch world. They were tall, stretchy, and large, but then they were frail, thick, and dense—forever changing—never remaining the same. There were two at first. Then four. Then eight. The number doubled every second and joined in the pursuit. They called out for Remy in a voice unidentifiable to everyone but her.

Tris watched. But why prolong this when there was more waiting for this unredeemable whelp? She snapped, and the shadowy personifications of Remy’s most horrible past launched tendrils of neglect and abuse. Some snaked through the ground. Others went high. But they all latched tightly around their target. Remy fought and screamed. She bit into the darkness and failed to maul her way out.

“NO! ANYTHING BUT THIS! PLEASE! TRIS, I’M—" A tendril plugged her mouth. She screamed, but there was no sound. Her desperation grew like a snowball rolling down a hill. She fought with everything she could muster, but it wasn’t enough. She shook her shackles, dislocated her arms, and snapped her legs, but it was for naught.

Remy could not outrun her nightmares—her efforts did not amount to anything. They returned to that horrible cabin and forced her inside.

The door slammed shut when the last shadow slipped inside. That was when the shrieking began.

Tris smiled. She knew what dark, depraved things were happening inside. “My lord’s enemies deserve the worst fate imaginable. Death is far too gentle... Who else but me can come up with a fitting punishment? I want you to suffer, Remy. Suffer... Suffer... Suffer... Suffer until the end... Suffer until you can’t go on... I’ll repair your tortured soul with the copy, and I’ll make you suffer again.”

This side project would not diminish her operating efficiency. Her evolution into [Tris, Beacon of Wisdom] increased her processing abilities, including the number of parallel subroutines she could maintain. The process was automated. Tris often split her thinking to control multiple clones and analyze incoming data, and this wasn’t that dissimilar.

The situation was different, but the core mechanics remained the same.

In either case, Tris wasn’t solely doing this to satiate her sadistic side. There were two real, genuine goals behind it. One was to acquire the ability to investigate memories. Her lord’s assimilation had flaws. Memories and other abstract qualities of a person couldn’t be assimilated on demand like other experienced chimeras. The only memories she could access were the five Soul Warriors that formed the crux of her body, except it wasn’t something she could do on demand.

A memory could be triggered by anything— a person, place, thing, color, sight, taste, or sound—but Tris wished to change things. She wanted to help bridge this error-- to categorize all the memories of everything her lord had assimilated into a database for easy indexing.

That would grant Tris far more knowledge, empowering her to further guide her lord in her revenge.

The second was to copy a soul from an assimilated being that hadn’t been cladded in the void.

The void was the only reason Remy’s soul was so crystal clear-- an ironic fact since the void was the most mysterious phenomenon in the world.

The goals were similar. Progress towards one—such as seeing Remy’s memories using [Conferment] as a stopgap—provided much knowledge to help Tris. Yes, her lord could’ve used that skill to create a copy of any soul she had assimilated, but why rely on something that necessitated lifeforce? As a chimera, her lord regained it far faster than non-chimera, but only a fool would waste it like an over-privileged child throwing away a cake because it had the wrong candle.

The finish line wouldn’t be crossed until Tris’s lord accomplished those goals without outside help.

If indulging in revenge was a byproduct of fulfilling her goal?

The Beacon of Wisdom would not complain.

The dark cabin ominously shivered as a third level was added. A basement was being built. It wouldn’t be long until it became a spiraling maze— the perfect spot for Tris to achieve her vengeance. Meruria desired to create her own Mekka—a holy city devoted to her. Likewise, this idea was similar. The cabin was to serve as Tris’s unholy city—to harbor the souls of her lord’s enemies while subjecting them to endless torment—with her as the mastermind to oversee their inevitable, infinite torture.

Tris sat in a chair she summoned. She retrieved the copy of Remy’s soul, made another replica for safekeeping, and began her experiment while relishing that the first target was crossed off the list.