Now that Iris had arrived, things were going to move quickly. Therefore, Logan had to match the pace. He wandered down the street, glancing about to see if he could remember a caravan stopping outside any of the houses in the area.
“Over here!” An insistent voice spoke into his ear. Mara - who other would dare come so close to his personal space? He turned to see her pointing down an alleyway, towards a house with a cellar embedded into the granite bricks. Now that he’d had it confirmed, he could definitely see it - there had been one there and they had dumped the parts down that hole.
Wordlessly he turned, only to realize that he was flanked by two sets of boots.
“They tried to corner me and question me… they… they were…” Jarek spoke hesitantly - his cheeks as pale as his wide eyes.
Logan nodded. “Yes, they are a disturbing bunch. That’s what happens when you spend your life crawling around shadows, listening to drunken bar conversations and breaking into people’s heads. The Eyes are the kind of people you want to avoid - good job getting out of there.” Logan murmured as they arrived by the cellar’s hatch.
Mara watched in amazement as Logan bent down to the lock and simply tore it open, deforming the metal with ease - reminding her again that he wasn’t entirely human. She bit her lower lip as Logan wandered down the stairs and into the darkness - much to the disapproval of her father.
They followed after the grim figure of porcelain and leather, closing the door in their wake before standing to observe the pile of cloth-covered packs of meat stacked tall on the floor. The granite floor had been soaked with blood, only lit by a small, blue torch manifested from inside Logan’s coat.
The Ghast grabbed one of the packs and unwrapped the crisp paper to bare what first appeared to be a brown fungus. He turned it over inside the paper, only to see that a central, blueish stem in the still mushroom dribbled with coagulated blood.
“I’ve never seen a morphotype like this. Look familiar?” Logan asked and raised it in Jarek’s direction. The Captain of the guard took a step closer to eye the dead piece of meat in the paper, instantaneously recognizing it.
“It looks like a nutrifungus. Almost identical, if not for the bleeding.” Logan nodded and threw the package back on the pile.
“This entire case unnerves me, Captain. This Hive knows what nutrifungus is and it’s tried to emulate it well. I’m guessing it’s either interfaced with this priest somehow or it’s seen the mushrooms before… This type of cognition - it’s unheard of.” Logan spoke the dire words with a scratch of his chin. The aged Captain took his place next to the Ghast and joined in the musings: “I guess it could’ve come across a mushroom or two, but there’s a lot between knowing what it is and understanding the concept of farming… it makes me wonder, too…”
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Mara bent down to rummage through some of the packs of meat. “There used to be a walled city nearby. One of the villages - it was lost before the Purge at some point. But it’s not too far away, could it have come from there?” Logan looked at the blonde bun at the back of her head as she spoke. He answered: “I suppose, but hives aren’t usually mobile. Unless-” Logan fell silent. There was one way to make sense of this insanity - a scenario he’d constructed in mindgames on the roads, but never thought to be an actual possibility.
Before he could voice his dreadful suspicion, an ear-piercing shriek preceded a violent jerk of Mara’s body- slamming her against the floor by her wrist.
“Fuck! Fuck - something’s-” She screamed as whatever held her by her hand dragged her halfway into the pile. Jarek quickly leapt atop his daughter, pinning her down while Logan got to work deconstructing the mound of flesh.
Long strings and tendrils were reaching for him like defensive serpents as he dug his way into the pile, only to finally realize that these were the same tendrils he had seen in the cellar.
Her shoulder snapped and crackled - her screams of pain grew louder by the second until finally, the vast crack in the wall became visible.
A wall of flesh writhed and squirmed deep within the crack in the granite, spurting more and more tentacular growths. Logan produced one of his silver blades and cut through a thick branch of tendrils - showering the three of them in blood.
But to his dread, the tentacles dragging her towards the crack were not amongst these - they were already deeper in, wrapping tighter and tighter around her wrist.
“L-Logan! Help! I can’t hold her!” Jarek grunted from atop his writhing, pained daughter.
The Ghast dropped down atop her in turn, wrapping his arms around her chest - still, the beast dragged her an inch further down the crack. Her lower arm had nearly entirely disappeared at that point.
Logan considered his options. With every passing second, the crack was spewing out more reinforcements to wrap her tighter and further into its source. Even if he had all the time in the world, he would not have been able to reach inside and cut the tendrils - her stretched, dislocated arm had been dragged into a tight partition of the foramen, leaving him no place at all to swing or stab.
Logan roared as he saw few remaining options. The back of his coat exploded with four long, crimson tendrils of his own. Without a second’s pause, they shot forwards and into the crevice - the sharp claw-tips slicing through the tendrils like knives to vines. But the symbiote was never meant for such a use - as much was clear by his clumsy maneuvering of the limbs. He grunted with the strain as he forced the symbiote further into submission - stealing more and more control over its stringy body to produce another two tendrils which promptly joined the others inside the crack.
“I can’t!” Logan roared.
“Unhand my daughter, you monstrous fuck!” Jarek roared in turn.
A flash of silver preceded a rarely painful experience. Logan felt the unmistakable sensation of one of his tendrils being severed - the pain shot through his entire body as if he had taken a hammer to the spinal cord. Next, he localized the pain of his fingers, only to realize that the middle and index fingers of his right hand had been cut - as had her arm, about halfway down the antebrachium.
Quickly, Logan set his fleshy appendages on the walls and with a fierce push, sent all three of them soaring through the air headed for the stairs.
Mara was in a state of stupefaction, staring down at her amputated lower arm with wide eyes of terror and disgust. Jarek, however, had his eyes set on survival and grabbed her by her remaining wrist to drag her out of Logan’s arms and back out into the bright sunlight.