There had always been the idea that things could go wrong, of course there was no avoiding such in war. The best laid plans were reduced to so much rubble and waste so often, one wonders why anyone bothers to try at all. But this was no mere disaster.
Aunt Cinnabar screamed as her face split down the middle revealing a throbbing tumour of brain-matter, tongues and teeth, black blood trailing down her remaining eye, immediately causing a hundred or so foes around her to violently explode into mist at her now unfiltered psychic force. Her father had totally abandoned his human form, now a fifteen feet long beast of scale and tooth devouring all it could find in its path with the half dozen jaws on his distended form. Explosions echoed across formerly peaceful plains, now pockmarked with craters still warm with si and blood. It would be one thing of course if amidst all this chaos they were at least confident of victory, but even with all the stops pulled that had not been the case with the arrival of that monster in the shape of a man.
The sky itself trembled as the thing overhead roared, letting out a mile long beam of death which cleaved through those too slow to jump out of the way and spat enough si to probably cause cultivation deviations in many of those present. It clipped the tail of her father, who compared to the mighty sovereign of the skies above him was like a mere insect, and immediately sliced off a section of flesh the size of a tall man which had been durable enough to shrug off cannonballs possibly nearing a ton in weight a few minutes previous.
She could still taste the blood and ichor in her mouth, tender flesh between her sharpened fangs, the rush of stolen power in her core. She couldn’t even say that it disgusted her, or that she struggled with the feeling, if not for the animal panic filling her mind at the rest of the chaos around her Cobalt would have undoubtedly nigh lost herself in the feeling of rightness achieved in cementing her position as a predator. It was a small mercy indeed that she had no time to dwell on such things at all right now, no time to think about how the men had screamed when she tore into them like a feral animal from what must have seemed like thin air from their perspective, their fear seeping into the taste of their flesh as instinct took over and a ravenous hunger she did not even know she had was awakened in its entirety. The look of dread, disgust and hatred in rapidly dying eyes before she silenced the judgement of the dead with a few quick chomps of her maw.
How had things come to this?
----------------------------------------
Three hours ago
It was apparent quickly that the force they were to face in battle was no ordinary roving warband, even from a great distance the psychic agents of the Lead Cave could detect a great miasma on the horizon corresponding to quite possibly multiple Abberant level cultivators, or more likely tens of thousands of mortals and nuclear powered war-relics. This was far from an ideal scenario, but it made their mission all the more important. The protective formations of the Sect would buy months of time against even foes in the upper steps of the Abberant Realm, but with all the civilians with no easy place to evacuate within a lengthy siege would likely starve them out. It could not come to that, this Cobalt knew in her heart.
Her stomach growled in displeasure. Her father had insisted that she march to battle on an empty stomach, in his own words. “Little better motivation than hunger, besides you will be eating plenty.”
She didn’t think too hard about that. He said it like it was already decided.
“Smoke on the horizon!” A scout with strange tube-like eyes yelled out. Her senses were sharpened far beyond mortal limits yet she probably would have missed the sight had she continued to be lost in thought as she was. It was a faint thing, yet unmistakable, dark as storm clouds against the otherwise clear blue sky.
“Do you see anything else? Are you getting anything from the eyes?” Her father asked, referring to the plucked out eyes of Elder Aurelium that the expedition had borrowed for the mission.
“A little… it seems to be the worst case scenario. A large machine force aided by at least two Abberants…” The scout said with a shudder as he held up the slimy organ. The lens shining with a strange psychic light as internal formations worked overtime.
“I see, that complicates matters but it isn’t anything we haven’t dealt with before.” Her father responded matter-of-factly.
“That last time we have faced foes of this caliber was the fucking rebellion! The same rebellion in which, may I remind you, your father and first Sectmaster was slaughtered in! And you have brought your daughter with you as well!” Aunt Cinnabar practically screamed.
“Do you propose we sit still then? There is no time to call in additional reinforcements, with this many forces and powerful cultivators this is no ordinary petty raiding party. My daughter is a capable fighter, even beyond her blood, I will not let petty nepotism deprive us of a capable warrior when we need every last man.” Agamemnon snarled. “Besides, you have the teleportation formation prepared right?”
“Some circuits have been damaged since the last use and my reserves are too exhausted to use effectively, the closest safe location I can get to is the Lead Cave, but yes.” Aunt Cinnabar replied, stiffening her posture. “Though I do not think we should rely on this to save our hide.”
“It will have to do.” Her father grunted. “After the rebellion I have taken the liberty of expanding some natural cave and ruin systems nearby, there should be one such entrance a mile or so south. It is the most ideal location I could imagine to set up an ambush from. While we are at it, have the men set up some basic traps and ditches, it won’t stop the march of the war machines if it is anything like two hundred years ago, but it will be a start.”
Obeying the command of her father one and all began to move with renewed purpose, a vigour belonging only for those fighting for survival and crucially convinced they could win.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
She extended the grip of her body to the fibres woven into her robes and shimmered out of sight almost reflexively. For some reason she had a very, very bad feeling about this.
----------------------------------------
Magni was no stranger to bad feelings, healthy paranoia is how you kept yourself alive in the gutters during the Great Famine after all. When starved flesh was the most abundant resource and the number of nameless orphans was so great people ceased to bother counting them. But since getting his psychic senses the vague feelings he had gotten every now and then became a lot more pressing, threatening to consume his mind with half-comprehended images flashing from threads of tainted purple. At first he had believed it to be a normal conceit of the mutation, but if it was surely someone else would have talked about it if it was this bad?
From the moment he awoke on his medical bed with a throbbing headache he was filled with nothing more than the unidentifiable need to leave. He had practically doubled over once the first waves of that indescribable feeling washed over him in fact, so potent had it been, a sense of wrongness that had wormed its way into his bones and made him practically physically ill. Aiming to ground himself he looked at the wall, the familiar presence of the warding formations threaded through the entire structure of the sect.
But the formations… there was something wrong… it was subtle and nearly invisible but the more he looked at it the more he was certain. His vision split, dozens of perspectives fracturing and converging on a single answer.
The arena?
With unsteady, stumbling legs he ran as fast as he could, pushing past every single door and falling nearly flat upon his face several times. It was like being chased by gangers again in the corpse-middens of the city, a primal need to move that was nearly as overwhelming as the need to breathe.
There was a shimmering wrongness behind him and before he could even stop to think about it his body moved, smashing a fist into reinforced concrete which should have broken even his strengthened fist, but instead formed a small spiderweb of cracks upon it at the impact. Before his eyes Carrion phased into existence, moving with a limp and tired eyes focused on where Magni’s fist nearly slammed into his face.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” He growled, still feeling the deep unease twisting in his gut.
“I am not your enemy… originally I wanted to simply apologise.” Roan said, far more quiet than Magni expected, throwing the albino boy for a loop. “But I saw you moving with such panic and I felt the need to investigate.”
Magni focused all of his eyes into tracking the body language of the living hole in memory, and upon detecting not even a single hint of a lie related slightly. He supposed if Roan wanted to attack or stop him he could have well done so already. “Fine… I accept your apology… but I have a bad feeling I need to investigate and I cannot afford to slow down.”
“Very well… but are you really going alone?” Roan asked.
Magni scoffed. “I don’t need your condensation after I beat your sorry ass!”
Roan let out a small noise of irritation before continuing. “You truly haven’t magically matured after all. But in any case, in the event of an investigation, I am quite familiar with my own internal formation, I can replicate and even modify it to cover more people. If you would allow me, I could help you.”
Tentatively Magni nodded. Letting out a shaky breath he decided to take a gamble. “Yeah that makes sense… I don’t know you too well but I don’t think you are involved with the strange fuckery going on in any case so I think it is fine to tell you. I think we may have traitors in the Sect…”
Roan’s eyes widened. “Then we have no time to waste. Stay still.”
Silently Roan’s wrist blades exposed themselves with no small amount of blood. WIth carefully practised movements the Wolf Creek disciple took a piece of Magni’s cloth and drawed a strange pattern on it with the practice that only comes from years of study. Watching the movements Magni realised that he probably first tried to learn a technique to turn off a technique before modifying that in order to replicate it in another. The implications of which…
“And I thought I had it bad. I cannot imagine what it must have been like.” He spoke before the words coming out of his mouth reached his brain.
Roan paused momentarily before continuing the drawing, adding two large loops connecting what was now a blurry mess of lines and angles. “It… I have had time to adjust to it. And it is not so bad now.”
With that the formation was complete, and with a push of psychic power Magni could feel himself cutting off from the world, the streams of information leaving his body deleting in the air hardly a foot beyond him. A pale imitation of Roan’s natural mutation, but more than sufficient. It seemed at least though Roan could still see him, as he responded to Magni’s awed gazes with a scoff. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to hurry? Come on and use those big eyes of yours, lead the way.”
Rolling his many many eyes Magni decided not to waste time with a snarky reply as usual and instead began to continue his sprint towards the arena. As the distance closed the feelings of unease only grew until he reached the locked entrance to the basement leading to the cells beneath the arena. The place the refugees were presently being held until a more permanent arrangement if memory served him correctly.
“In here?” Roan asked, suddenly reminding Magni of his companion’s presence. Magni shook off his surprise and nodded, at which point Roan took his blades and picked open the lock swinging the metal gates wide open. There was a psychic stench hanging in the air down there, a miasma tinged with distinctly disgusting psychic power hidden beneath the usual quagmire of confused emotions and pain. Whatever happened here was likely the source of everything, and despite knowing his presence was unlikely to be detected by all but the best cultivators in the entire province he felt his muscles tense as the scent of blood reached his nose.
Wordlessly the duo made their way down the unlit tunnels to the cells, taking a look into the cells that once held various beasts or contestants. It took a lot to disturb Magni, but what he saw certainly was enough.
Instead of mostly healthy mortal survivors the floors were covered with arranged bodies. It looked as though they had smashed their heads in and fallen over specifically to smear their blood in a certain pattern, upon closer inspection that was likely the case. Only a few of them even seemed to be breathing, and those who had broken open their skulls completely revealed long tendrils of spider-web-like substance glowing with a dense nearly black malice in his psychic senses. It seared its way into the stone, following the trail of blood and bodies, creating insidious reversal formations that ate their way through the defensive networks of the sect from within.
Using all the strength he had Magni broadcast a frantic telepathic message to Elder Aurelium. He did not know what manner of enemy they were facing, but this… this was something else entirely…