Jarek and Mara were left staring at what had once been their peaceful town - now turned into the most horrific scene they’d ever laid their eyes on. The newborn hives had all stood mid-air for a good few minutes before they’d begun to lash out at one-another - sinking their lethal, sharp tendrils into neighboring balls of flesh to tear and claw at the crimson mess raging in the streets.
An endless, wet slapping echoed between the buildings and now that the light drizzle had ceased, the sickening sounds of tearing flesh and ligaments were all they could hear.
“Smile!” A determined, feminine voice spoke from the direction of the door further down the battlement.
A group of Ghasts pressed past the pale, nauseous mechanics to take their places along the half-wall to stare down at the messy scenery.
It had been a frantic few minutes - chaos hadn’t even had time to take root before it had all been over and Smile, more than anyone, had been captivated by the cascade of gore. Now that things had begun to calm, however, her mind had begun to clear.
“Logan - where’s Logan?” She turned to question the steadily arriving Ghasts - glancing across the arrived, only to find that they all wore the masks of the Eyes.
“The Commander - where’s Commander Behemoth-Bane!?” She shouted, surprising every one of her colleagues with the outburst of emotion.
Behind her, Mara was the one who would breathe a sigh of relief as she saw a black shape propel himself upwards from the bloody vines, soaring through the air to land safely atop the church’s roof.
Smile heard mumbles of surprise and disgust in the congregation of the two-dozen Ghasts with her atop the roof as they saw the tendrils withdraw back under his coat, but none saw it fit to question her… not that she minded. She’d rather not get into that discussion at that point in time.
“Behemoth-Bane!” A shrill shout sounded from atop the garrison’s roof. Logan turned to see that the bastarding woman had survived the slaughter and had likely seen his use of the symbiote to propel himself from the lethal battlefield on the street. Still… judging by the lack of a gun trained on him, that meant he would have to consider that challenge at a later time.
He raised a greeting blade to the air and shouted back: “Found it. It’s not a Behemoth, but it’s big-”
As if the Life Mother herself sprung to life to underline his observation, the ground’s rumbles gave way for shooting brambles of red, writhing vines bleeding out from every crack in the street, every gap in every floor; every open door.
He quickly spun around to climb atop the belltower, elevating himself nearly up to the same point that his companions were at.
He only hoped it’d be enough…
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As he had hoped, Logan found that his newfound elevation had been enough - but barely. The few meters he had gained by moving to his new position had landed him barely outside the tentacles’ reach, but he was yet to feel particularly confident that he wouldn’t be torn apart at any moment.
“Logan! Hey - Logan!” A woman’s shout sounded from the garrison. There, Mara held her stubbed arm up above her head.
“What!?” He shouted back, far less irritated than he’d thought he’d be at the major inconvenience.
“Can you get over here!?” She returned.
It was a good question. He imagined he probably could, if he were to leap and use his own tentacles with astounding precision. But moving further up would bring him into their bothersome midst when he needed time to think and space to observe.
“No!” He shouted back and leaned over the ledge to eye the streets below to a most unusual sight.
Nothing was as damaging, yet self-enhancing as the competition between hives. Sometimes, they’d complement each other by specializing into different morphotypes, but more often that not, he’d found them bitter enemies. In the rare, few cases where he’d seen two infected burst at the same time, the two newborns would be quick to turn on one-another, wasting no time in finding who the more adapted monstrosity was. But this - this was unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was as if they were connecting, one by one, growing looser endothelial vessels into one-another, while the tentacles were slowly being resorbed back into the core.
The unexpectedness of it filled him with both dread and excitement - dread with the implications of what this new form of communal life could mean for the future of Cradle, but equally excited to see something new and unexplored… notably, how he would kill it.
“Do you have incendiary shells up there!?” He shouted up at them before returning to gaze at the distant rooftop.
“Yeah!” She returned with a raised thumb in his direction.
“What the hell are you waiting for, then!? Start shooting - burn the buildings!”
The eerily still forms next to Mara and Jarek might as well have been painted on the gloomy clouds - their outlines not even moving to breathe. If it hadn’t been for the breeze, he might’ve thought that they had perished in the cascade of explosions and left behind true Ghasts, had he not known that this was their primary mode of being.
Logan raised his hands to his mouth and returned: “Are you sure!? That seems like it’d be detrimental to your health!” Well, he couldn’t argue. But so was standing in the middle of a hungry forest of Monstrum growths…
Jarek didn’t like the order, but if anyone knew how Logan’s insane plans might work out, it’d be him. He had signaled for one of his men to aim for the squirming tavern’s center - its every door and window filled to the point of cracking by the squeezing ocean of slithering red. As the mechanic rolled the stationary wheels around their axis, Jarek was briefly taken back to that night - to the last time he’d been anywhere close to artillery-fire and felt his stomach churn with unrest.
When he finally saw the back of the guard’s green helmet and verified that the cannon had been set to aim at the tavern, he shouted at Logan: “We’re ready, Commander!”. As he turned, he caught sight of the twenty-plus wide eyes staring at him from all over the rooftop - reminding him of when he’d inadvertently fallen into an owl’s nest when he’d barely been old enough to remember those terrifying eyes. He shuddered, saw the raised hand of his own Ghast and upon seeing the chopping motion, pulled the ignition - sparking the loud, projectile propelling explosion.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Logan felt a grin of satisfaction spread across his lips as the projectile struck through the window - immediately setting the building alight in a fiery expulsion of heat, light and sound.
The tendrils all reared in perfect synchronicity and Logan enjoyed imagining that it felt a smidgen of fear for its burning flesh.
“Don’t let up! Keep firing - there’s still plenty of buildings!” Logan shouted and holstered his right blade.
The men were quick to heed the order - turning the other shellers in the direction of the town while the rest of the loyal soldiers went to work servicing and loading the powerful weapons and beholding them was the silent, hesitantly glaring Smile.
She knew better than to yell at Logan and she found it surprising he hadn’t thought the better of it. As far as she was concerned, the only reason they hadn’t been torn apart and consumed yet was due to the fact the monster simply didn’t know where they were. Once it did… she imagined they’d be in a far worse situation.
“Ghast Smile - what was that?” Smile froze as she heard the snarky, nasal voice from behind. The calm bootsteps could only mean one thing - that Iris had seen Logan’s weird anatomy and that she did not approve of it.
Smile turned to see the fearsome form of Iris approaching with her hood drawn low over her face and with a hand resting threateningly atop the short-blade at her hip.
“Respectfully, Commander, you’ll have to ask him. I-”
Mara hadn’t even seen the flash of movement other than in a lingering reflex of silver that slowly died on her retina. But in an instant, the Commander had produced a short, straight silver sword that she proceeded to press against Smile’s bared neck.
“That was not a request, Ghast. Was this his doing? Is he in league with the Spawn? Is he the architect of this destruction?” It was unusual for anyone to hear Commander Iris’ voice convey any emotion save for her usual snark, but as she held the blade up to Smile’s neck there was an undeniably tremble of fury to her voice.
Smile raised her arms and shook her head as Iris’ invasion began- drilling a psychic lance into her mind to seek out Logan’s secrets.
Logan only saw Smile collapse to her knees to clutch her head and shriek with pain as her mind was torn open to be explored by whatever trickery Iris unleashed on her. In addition to the monsters on the streets, it seemed he’d have a second, more tangible threat on his hands - if there could be such a thing.
“Drop it! Let her go!” Jarek’s commanding voice boomed through the town, carried by his long-untouched telepathic communications.
Logan didn’t see him at first - not until he looked back at the reloading cannons. Finally, he saw the glint of a reflective lens trained on Iris’ porcelain face.
His green carapace armor reflected the dim lights of the cloudy skies as he hunched over and rested the sleek, black barrel on the artillery.
“I’m not gonna tell you again, Ghast.” He threatened. Iris looked up from her wincing victim to stare at the concealed gunman - her men’s pistols already trained to fire a returning salvo should he finish the shot.
Mara sprang to Smile’s side and grabbed her stupefied form to pull her further down the battlement - down on the wood platform outside the madwoman’s view.
Jarek could feel Iris’ manipulations of the electrical fields surrounding his brain - an attack she was building to fry him, no doubt. “You can kill me, but chances are my finger’s gonna squeeze as soon as you do it. I wouldn’t, but that’s up to you.” He warned.
She scoffed through her nose. If it hadn’t been for the mask, he was fairly certain she’d have spat on his beautiful garrison, so at least the mechanics spared themselves the evening scrubbin’.
The Captain of the guard spoke: “This isn’t the time for in-fighting. We’re in a bit of a pickle and whatever just killed every man, woman and child in Cadia’s still down there. Are we gonna be civilized or are we gonna kill each other without involving the Monstrum at all?” Upon hearing the term, she sneered.
“Logoric filth- I should’ve known Behemoth-Bane’s poisonous teachings would corrupt the peripheries. Am I to take you, too, to be so perversely fascinated by the Hellspawn? I’ve half a mind to take the bullet…”
As the standstill atop the garrison remained frozen, Logan realized he’d have to move. If they were to have any chance of surviving against the red forest of butchery down below, they’d need as many firing guns as possible and in-fighting was the last thing they needed.
He wasn’t happy about it. Just getting over would be hard enough and by the time he’d arrived, he’d already have risked the firing squad’s line of sight for long enough to get his associates killed. But as the eager tendrils crawling up the sides of the buildings were all-too-willing to remind him, time was already not on their side.
It was just a question of time before the freshly added biomass of the dead down below would be put to use elongating those lethal vines to swipe at him and he’d rather be atop the heavy granite construct when that time came.
“For fuck’s sake…” He muttered as he took a single step back to leap off of the building.
It was peaceful, in a sense, soaring through the air, headed into a bloody battlefield. It felt almost homely - like a fish returning to water. But, fortunately, his grip on the symbiote remained stalwart and at his behest, the winged tendrils shot from his back, crept over his shoulders and finally, shot forth to pierce the wooden wall of a nearby building.
He hadn’t expected the monstrosities to be so reactive, but as soon as his feet touched the grass-grown rooftop, he watched the tunneling horrors shoot across the substrate - headed directly for his sprinting form.
In a flash of silver and a series of jumps, he avoided all of them, but silently thanked lady luck they weren’t anywhere close to as dense as on the street itself.
“Don’t move, Behemoth-Bane!” Iris roared from atop the garrison as she watched the black lightning form swing from building-to-building, cautious to avoid or slice across the vines reaching for him.
“Same goes for you, commander.” Jarek reminded her.
Logan’s energy had drained substantially by the time he slammed head-first through one of the windows of the top floor of the garrison and tumbled across the floor. Briefly, he regretted not grabbing the priest’s head for a restituting lunch, but crying over spilt blood made little sense in his current predicament.
Grumbling, he pressed past the doors and stepped out into the hallway to find that the tendrils had already begun to crawl along the wall, headed for the rooftop perch were it would inevitably find them soon enough.
Though he doubted it made little difference at that point, the tentacles slithered back beneath his skin as he wandered out onto the rooftop to see that nothing had changed in the tense scenery.
The mechanics had their rifles trained on the Ghasts and, likewise, Iris’ people had the Guard and Jarek in their sights.
“I always knew you were an idiot, Iris, but this… haven’t you noticed that we’re surrounded by Spawn?” Logan spat as his boots thunked over the wooden dressing of the rooftop.
Iris’ mask rose as if she attempted to look down the ridge of her nose at him and asked: “Is this some heretical ploy for your kin to consume the Governor’s finest? It wasn’t enough to steal away the body of his most loyal servant?” Logan stopped and cocked his head for Iris to continue:
“I knew something was off about you the second I walked into town - you’re different from Behemoth-Bane. I should’ve shot you on sight.” Logan holstered his blades and drew back his hood to fully display the shake of his head.
“You think whatever the fuck you want. Now isn’t the time to be lining shots on each other - put your weapons down.” He attempted, only to find that both sides remained at a standstill - staring one-another down.
“This Monstrum isn’t like anything anyone’s ever seen before - I can’t make sense of it at all. Listen to me!” He demanded - finally, earning him Iris’ attention back.
“I will not listen to your lies, Spawn infiltrate!” Every second with the detestable bitch reminded him with increasing clarity why he hated those damnable, wide-eyed masks.
Down the length of Jarek’s gun, the veteran spoke:
“I’m sorry, Logan. But I trust her about as far as I can throw her and a fat dumper like that, I wouldn’t be too hopeful. She’s still got me pinned with her trickery. If I move my finger, I’m sure she’ll kill me.”
“Damnit, Iris! We’ve got an hour - at most unless we start doing some damage to this thing! It’s almost on the rooftop already!” He demanded, but could already tell that his pleas were falling on deaf ears.