Logan hadn’t found her - despite his frantic searching, Iris was nowhere to be seen. Now on his lonesome, his mind had begun to swirl with the possibilities of where the beast might be, but for every suggestion his mind could conjure, his conclusion always led to the same answer… it couldn’t be anywhere in the town.
He had little choice at that point. No matter which direction he turned, he’d see those damnable Eyes staring back at him - their wide-eyed masks conveying no other emotion than what the porcelain masks portrayed. The lingering rage was beginning to cloud his judgment- meaning, he would have to relent to it. Another hour more and the city would be done for, either way - why not get some answers before that happened?
And so he found himself the only place where he imagined any answers could be found - staring down a long, bright aisle of a church filled to the brim with a lively congregation not-too-pleased to see him.
He wandered up the aisle to stare his cold porcelain at the hateful priest cursing him for his intrusions.
“What’s the meaning of this!? Get out of here - this is a House of Peace! Leave!” He shouted - his neatly done hair nearly undone by the end of his blood-boiling sermon. Logan reached over the podium to grab hold of his blue suit and dragged him over the wood to press his left gun into the preacher’s eye with a dire threat: “Where is it?”
The man yelped as the congregates stood up to shout their protests at Logan - screaming at the top of their lungs for the death of him and his Governor. A bullet through the crowd solved several problems - for one, it lowered the amount of screaming throats by two. Secondly, it cleared the rest of the congregation from the church to leave him with his prisoner.
“Where. Is. It?” Logan warned once more. He’d expected to have been swarmed by the Monstrum at that point - Smile’s recount had warned him that this man was somehow capable of interacting with the ‘Life Mother’ as he had called her. As much as he’d have liked to see this new Morphotype, he was glad to see that his horizons remained unwidened and instead dragged the priest by his greasy hair over to the back of the church, where he quickly found what he was looking for. A hatch in the floor.
The cellar was dark and musty - silent, other than from the whimpering of the priest weeping beneath his boots. Logan reached into his coat to procure the tinderbox, snapped a match and held it above his head to find a lamp nearly empty from oils. But it’d do for his quick exploration.
He knew, even before the light had begun to dance around the chamber, that he had found the heart of this dark beast. He could smell it in the air, feel it at the back of his air - that vile stench of Monstrum permeating everything up until that point.
The fire cast its lively radiance across a room covered in creep - pulsating vessels coating the furthest walls with crimson red. He winced as he saw them there, embedded in the strings of fleshy tendrils - a human brain, a set of lungs, a digestive tract - a pair of eyes… degenerated humans. Many of them - held in eternal stasis by the monster that had digested their bodies to feed its eternal machine. This was no fresh Monstrum - this was old. And by the looks of the many brains it had usurped to serve its many autonomic functions, this was but a relay-station in between its true body and the town of Cadia.
“S-She’s going to kill you for this - you and your friends! Then, she’ll move on the Citadel and tear your False God apart!” He was suddenly made aware of the Priest again. Logan turned back to sink his hands into the neatly combed hair and dragged the helpless, sprawling agent of the Monstrum over to the wall, where the Ghast quickly tossed the fiend into the writhing tentacles.
“I hear you can talk to it. Now talk.”
_______________________________________________________
Smile still stood atop the garrison, but Logan’s companions had come to join her in staring out at the dreadful congregation gathering on the streets below. White porcelain masks clad in long black coat stood on every corner while the population squirmed between them, defiantly refusing to look at the unnerving beasts.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Mara was still in pain, but Iris’ healing hands had gone a long way to still most of the burning. Next to her, clad in his green carapaced armor, her father stared down at the streets with narrowed apertures and sounded a disapproving growl at the movements of what had been supposed to be his people. But even if he didn’t approve of their choices - their ways… there was something wrong about what was about to unfold in front of his eyes. Everything about the day itself had seemed off - from the moment he’d gotten up and to the point he had made it out on the garrison’s rooftop. Something in the air - something that made his hand more twitchy than it had ever been after the Eastern Pass incident.
The light drizzle further accentuated the sense of wrongness - so rarely had Cadia seen rain, but now that it lightly sprinkled the bricks of stone and tapped against the wood, it raised the particulate smells of dirt and pollen; an unnatural scenery for the town of Cadia.
“Did Logan say anything about where he was going?” Mara spoke, rubbing the bandaged nub of her hand. Smile shook her head and spoke over her shoulder: “No. But he’ll be fine - he won’t be touched by the-”
“Governor’s bitch!” A roar sounded from below as a man down the street raised a flashing silver pistol at the closest form of black and porcelain.
A split second later, the interior of the man’s head painted the red bricks next to him as another one of the Ghasts let loose a high-caliber round.
The man’s body remained stationary for but a second, but it was long enough for the parasite in his throat to shoot its hooked tendrils outwards - striking the walls of the surrounding buildings and, harshly, through the chest of a shrieking woman.
As the hook bored through her flesh, she fell deathly silent. One might’ve been mistaken for thinking that it was the first parasite’s tentacle that reached into her and spread her gore outwards into another shower of bony hooks. Alas… no.
A chain-reaction followed, where the death of one citizen activated the parasite in another- then another- then another. In the first minute, a hundred bodies exploded in rains of viscera. In the next minute, the speed had increased drastically. In front of the trio’s eyes, the streets of Cadia were colored red with blood, tendrils and torn flesh - the deathly wave leaving nothing in its wake save limp bodies suspended in the streets.
Screams rippled through the streets as the survivors sought shelter from the rain of razor-sharp tentacles, but it was already too late. The ones who succeeded in dodging the bursts of blood, only bought themselves another second of life - time enough to run into the tentacles, only to be ensnared in their brutal, constricting, crushing tendrils.
______________________________
Below the streets themselves, Logan watched as the Priest surrendered to the ‘life mother’s’ writhing tentacles with a wide grin - stepping into the nest of growing tendrils, only to see the familiarly sickening sight of the beast wrapping its many tentacles around his entire body.
As promised, the red vines pierced the skin of his neck and face to toy around in his subcutis.
“M-Mother! T-This sinner… this despicable beast has come to disrupt our work - him and his ilk have nearly claimed our city-...”
His eyes rolled to the back of his head as whatever madness had gripped him began to dig deeper and deeper. With the same orgasmic euphoria that Smile had spoken of, he began to moan and whine - begging for a sickening release.
Logan grunted with discomfort at the sight and pocketed his hands, only then feeling the rolled-up paper crinkling against the stubs of his fingers. Even without having seen it, he knew what it was - he’d carried the burden of those very same papers far too many times before.
Had it not been for his momentary lapse of concentration, he might’ve missed the tendril approaching from the right-hand wall.
As soon as he turned, the vine lunged for him. He barely had time to backstep the damn thing before it flew past his face and crashed into an entire volley of similar tendrils.
In his fascination and disgust with the scene, he’d missed the lurking appendages that had, since his arrival, begun to seep through the walls - all of them. Everywhere he turned, they sprouted from between the bricks, cracking the stones and pushing them aside to reveal a solid wall of flesh behind the priest’s moaning outline.
Realizing he had little time to act, he took a series of steps backwards to dodge, narrowly missing them with every maneuver. He had to arm himself with the blades and slash his way through a rapidly forming barrier to escape the basement and returned upstairs to find that, as expected, the two corpses in the pews had exploded in his absence.
He sliced his way past the tentacular growths pinning the two dead bodies to the walls, only to find that the town outside the tall doors had undergone a similar transformation.
Every way he turned, he saw the same thing - bodies suspended on barbed tendrils extending from necks, groins, chests and abdomens. He couldn’t see down any street in any direction for the gore covering the otherwise lively time - now reduced to a landscape of crimson giblets of flesh.
As opposed to a functional hive, the gene-seeded newborns had to be handled with care. One missed step could easily lead to his ensnarement in the hostile bulbs of flesh and, under the right circumstances, they could easily tear a man apart with the might of those tentacles.
Time, however, was not on his side - as signaled by the humming of the paved street. Down below his feet, he could already feel something moving - something large… something hungry.
“Well, fuck.”