It was as if time slowed as Luna thought of what to do. Abraham and Isaac were losing the battle against the vines - the same mode of attack that had plucked her people from the waters and taken them. Marcel could join, swing his blade a few times before he, too, would be swallowed up by the flesh - uselessly, helplessly… that was not what Guy would’ve done. It was not what she would have done. This cold world needed a utilitarian approach - both Guy and Logan had proved it. Success did not come from emotions save hatred; it came from cold calculation - decisions to starve the elders to feed the young.
“Marcel! Cannons! That’s an order!” She roared and raised the rifle back up again to fire useless rounds into the orbits. As Ethel tapped her back to extend another filled magazine to her, she heard Marcel’s protests: “No! Michael!” She could not even bear to look at her fellow apprentice. The order was inhumane - no better than the monstrosity. But it was necessary… it was utility.
She aimed her rifle up to see Michael struggling against the vines, his teary eyes filled with hatred rather than fear. She briefly entertained pulling the trigger, but shook her head. In a brief moment’s silence, she heard a roar from just outside the orbit - where a head of golden hair poked out from the writhing vines.
“The cannons, Marcel!” Michael roared - his hatred for the Monstrum great enough even to shirk his terror of his looming demise.
“Fuck!” Marcel shrieked through sobs as he threw down his shield and sprang to a cannon under the protective thunderstorm of Abraham’s hands. He turned it sideways to stare the barrel into the creature’s tendrilous orbit just in time to see Michael dismemberment - his torn arms and legs disappearing into the beast a great distance from his torso.
With a forceful pull of the ignition, he nearly knocked the monster cleanly off its hold on the platform - scorching tendrils and spraying his companions in boiling blood; none of whom were in a condition to care about something so menial as pain.
That was when they felt the completion of the Monstrum’s plan - a second arm slamming into the wall, hooking it in place.
What was now but a torso and long arms had its remaining appendages locked around the wall. A wash of demoralization spread along the wall as they caught sight of its now-repositioned form.
Most of its skin had degenerated at that point, leaving only a thin, translucent membrane atop pulsating muscles. The writhing beneath its skin had nearly ceased, but the tendrils were eager to unceremoniously suture the gashes and burns. But even so, it was still the most horrific thing they had seen; clamoring to their home with every bit of force it could muster.
Luna had frozen to look at the second arm when she felt something close around her leg - something strong, powerful, wet and hot. She looked down just in time to see that a vine had crept from its orbit and down to her leg, wrapping around her with joint-crackling strength.
With a jerk of the tentacle, it slammed her back into the crate, dusting the atmosphere, her coat and her face with a thin layer of gunpowder dust from the box. Within the blink of an eye, she was already being dragged over the platform - towards her demise.
As the writhing jungle of tendrils wrapped around her arms and legs, she felt her mind wander back to Sitalii - to that aftermath of the slaughter in the corridor where her parents had met. She had been so disappointed to see it, that place of legend. Dilapidated booths, tattered cloth and crushed glass; not at all like the paradise she had been told of.
As she caught a glance at the sun, she thought whether this had been a disappointment - whether she had been a disappointment.
Alas, no. This had been a dream - a reclamation of her humanity; of all humanity. Finally, for the first time in a decade, she had felt alive.
Another inhumane roar broke through the screams and shouts atop the battlement. But it was not of the beast. It sounded like a dozen voices shouted in unison - a perversion of human speech: “Trade’s not done yet!”
She jerked her head up to see a flash of glinting silver in front of a demonic profile. Only a quarter of his mask remained, covering his left eye, but as he turned through the air she could see all she needed.
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His mouth was a jagged landscape of triangular teeth - a shark’s mouth grinning with fervorous murder. His pitch-black right eye had no sclera - she couldn’t even see his eyelids, the eye was so wide and inhumane - a dark pit in his otherwise unremarkable face. The nose, the black brow - the honey-blonde hair… the shark-tooth necklace visible through his torn shirt… she knew that man. Not as Logan, but as Guy.
Long, tendrilous growths of his own stood from his back - their tips buried in the creature’s forehead as he spun around in the air, slashing through hundreds of vines with apparent ease.
Once he slammed into the forehead, he dug the blades deep into its cranium and sank his shark-toothed grin into its flesh, tearing off a great chunk of the thin skin before kicking himself up its head.
He stood atop the monstrosity, swallowed a mouthful of tissue and roared: “Cover it in gunpowder! Accelerant! Alcohol! Burn the fucker!”
None stopped to comment nor speak of his disfigurements and monstrosity - she doubted anyone had even looked at his torn shirt to see that his own skin was writhing with a life of its own; sealing a wide gash in his chest.
At his order, crates and bags of gunpowder, fluids and flasks rained down on the monstrosity’s arms and face, quickly coating it in streams of black.
He did not pause to chat nor explain himself. Instead, he began to slice into the beast with the fervor well befitting his inhumane appearance, using his blades to sever great chunks of flesh from the central mass.
“Stay away from the meat! It’ll tear you apart!” He roared at the men slashing, crushing and stabbing its arms.
The platform and Logan alike were soon covered in blood - his ceaseless movements cutting across the assailing tendrils as soon as they had appeared; using his inhumane tentacles to propel him to the people’s aid as the tendrils snatched their appendages.
“Deal with that arm!” He roared, pointing to the arm clamoring to the westernmost battlement.
“Yes, Commander!” Isaac responded from somewhere out in the chaos. In a flash of movements, Luna saw Logan’s black shirt and pants disappear to the eastern arm while Isaac’s white robe went to the western.
She, too, rose from the remnants of the box and shook the already-rotting tendrils from her body before following after the monster, grabbing a small handaxe from the battlement as she went.
The thick arm had little muscle left to speak of - answering the question as to why it had not charged the town yet. Logan moved with cruelty, pushing past his own men with powerful strikes, landing them out of the range from the tendrils he cut down on the way.
“Ready!” Abraham shouted from the west.
Logan nodded and stepped up to the pale mass of bone, skin and tendrils. “Sever them! Everyone - cut the arms!” He shouted - still with his horrifying voice. Once he had passed under the arm, he finally faced to turn Luna and froze her feet solid on the battlement. Where he had once lacked an eye, it seemed he had grown a perversion to replace it. His teeth, likewise, were always on display - sharp, sawed triangles he could barely close his lips to replace. The shark-tooth necklace hung on display, its tip seeming to have been ground down, but still with the same rope she had used to tie it around his neck a decade previous.
“I told you, you wouldn’t like it.” His voice spoke. Without warning, he raised his blades to his side, took a step back and began to hack and slash at the arm. Disgusting thumps sounded as he cut into the bone - screeching the silver blades against osseous tissue with great joy - according to the grin across his face. His maniacal black eye made her knees tremble beneath her, but seeing him unleash the devastation on the arm spurred her back into action. She raised the handaxe over her head and began to chop from her side of the appendage - cutting deeper and deeper into the spongious tissue with every powerful thunk of the ax.
When their metals finally met in the middle, the arm fell forwards, down into the town proper - slamming limply into the cobbled stones, where it remained stationary. But Logan was not done, not yet. His maniacal, monstrous grin grew wider as he felt a similar jerk of the monster’s body from the west and looked back to see that Ethel along with some of the village’s elderly men were in the process of heaving barrels of white, clear liquids onto the face. Already, Isaac had returned to mercilessly swing his arms in the air, using the winds themselves to shear through the steadily decreasing vines - defending the precious accelerants.
Logan stepped over the battlements, pressing past the tight congregation to grab a cannon with his sword-wielding right arm - gripping it by the barrel to seemingly effortlessly drag it after him.
Everyone knew how heavy the things were and if they weren’t already aware of the insanity of his existence, they were as they saw him drag the cannon across the platform to aim it squarely in the still-attached head of the Monstrum.
“Get back!” He roared with more monstrosity than ever - even if they had wished to disobey him, the Anzaines found they couldn’t. Finally, they saw his shark-toothed grin and several yelped as they gave him space.
He stood there, alone as the sparse tendrils scoured the battlement platform in search of any flesh to regenerate its body and fuel its destruction, only to find a pair of familiar boots. The tendrils crawled all over him as he calmly gripped the fuse of the cannon and spoke: “Whatever intelligence you’ve got, I hope it’s letting you feel pain. Because this is going to hurt you.”
With a jerk of his hand, a plume of fire stood up to illuminate the mountains for miles to come. Gunpowder crackled, the blue flame of Ethel’s pure ethanol scorched and his own accelerant melted flesh and turned bone to ashes in a millisecond. The head blew apart as the rain of white-hot granite tore through it and sent the remnants of the head soaring back through the air - down into the distant treelines.