Burn Away

It took him nearly five minutes to find where the "wash" the unconscious doctor had told him he stashed his clothes in actually was. Fishing them out of the localized whirlpool the man called a wash had taken a further three minutes. Stitching them into a relatively usable state had taken fifteen. Getting dressed one handed had taken another six.

By the time he was finished getting dressed the northern edges of the room were already starting to turn grey, testifying to just how bad things had gotten.

He spared a glance at the still unconscious illegitimate surgeon that had cut away the rot and burns from his flesh. He didn't have the time to bring him to a safe location even if he had one, nor would he be able to carry him and defend himself in his state. He didn't need to glance at the spreading veins of grey overtaking the wall behind him to know leaving him here was tantamount to handing him over to the Blight.

He barely spent a moment considering it before granting the man the ashen peace; a boot to the head and a flame to limp flesh sent his soul to the welcoming arms of what demons found it, safe from the grasping hunger of the Great Grey. He wasn't a religious man, but he sent a silent prayer to what burning things would hear that the man made it safely to Hell even in such proximity to the Enemy.

The thought that he could have tried just waking the man up only entered his mind as he set the building on fire on his way out the door. He stared at the roaring fire for a brief moment before shrugging and moving on; one civilian is hardly that great a loss.

Besides, being unconscious for that long probably meant something was seriously wrong anyway. He would just report it as putting down an infected when he got back to the Order.

He couldn’t say he was truly surprised at the sight that met him when he reached the end of the small alley the bonesaw’s “shop” was hidden in; people running to and from nowhere with wild panic written in their every move and the colourless forms of those that succumbed to the Blight following after. No great shock, honestly; from the moment he’d pushed open the dumpster the entrance was hidden inside, the familiar sound of panicked screams and the genial chuckling of the Blighted had assaulted his ears.

He would never get that insufferable sound from his mind, that unending fucking laughter that pervaded the infected. Lands filled with the Blight were always near dead silent, the only exception being the merry sounds of those given over to the grey; laughter, cheers, whistles, and even occasional wordless song filled the still air around the Blighted wherever they went.

But every cheerful sound oozed misery and despair; they laughed at the same pace as one genuinely pleased, but every laugh felt like a half choked cry. Their cheers held the same resonance as one encouraging and pleased, but struck the ear like screams of agony and hopelessness. Their whistling carries a tune, but sounds like a shrill shriek. Their songs were filled with cheery notes, but sounded like sobbing.

Even after so many years dealing with it, the dissonance still drew a shudder from him. There was no experience quite like standing before a charging mass of Blighted as they gibbered their viscerally contrasting mournful glee.

Speaking of, the second thing to meet his gaze was a mass of grey bodies charging past the entrance. The horde of Blighted didn’t even seem to notice him as they streamed down the street like a grey river, not so much as glancing down the alleyway.

They certainly noticed the massive gout of flame he sent their way, igniting everything remotely flammable throughout the entire alley and turning nearly two dozen Blighted to ash in an instant.

The ash hadn’t even settled before the horde turned its attention to him, dozens of badly burned Blighted rushing him with mournful cries of glee. The ground shattered beneath his feet as an explosion beneath his boots threw him into the air, propelling him twenty feet up and away from the horde. His boots glowed with intense flame before he kicked the wall, the searing heat turning the stone molten on contact and allowing him enough traction to run straight up it.

The horde below didn’t pause a moment, climbing over themselves and digging broken fingers into stone that turned grey and soft on contact as they dragged themselves up towards the fleeing Crow. He spared them a glance before picking up the pace, the sea of luridly smiling faces was gaining on him a bit more rapidly than he’d like; apparently whatever twisted impulse drove the creatures saw him as a greater prize than whatever scattered survivors could be found in this nearly wholly corrupted section of the city.

As he ran flames flickered around the stump of his right arm for a moment, then geysered out wildly before he molded the inferno into an arm of pure flame. Orange fingers flexed as he got a feel for controlling the pyrokinetic prosthetic, the arm twisting about in unnatural ways that nothing of flesh and bone ever could.

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The ravening horde beneath him was not inclined to let him practise, swarming up the side of the increasingly tainted building after him. He spared them a glance as he kept running, watching the ever shifting leader of the pack use his molten footprints as hand holds with no regard for how the still glowing stone seared their fingers to the bone.

Through the cracks in the eyes of his mask he watched ashen fingers crack apart and send the fastest of the Blighted tumbling down over their comrade’s backs to splatter on the ground. Not one of its comrades even spared the creature a glance, let alone try to save them. He sent a sneer their way, snapping his flaming arm down like a whip; the conflagrant apendage burning through a half dozen of them and sending dozens more plummeting to the closest thing to death these things can ever know.

He personally didn’t consider them alive enough to ever truly die. The experience he gained begged to differ, but he elected to ignore that.

Reaching the roof of the building he was sprinting up left him with nowhere to run. Any normal man would have been terrified at that, but Zildan was not a normal man; he had spent far too many years training and fighting to be frightened by a few hundred basic Blighted.

Flipping onto the roof with a flourish his master would have bitched him out for if he saw, he didn’t waste a moment before allowing the flames around his legs to engulf his body. To say it was uncomfortable to have fire capable of reducing flesh to ash on contact centimeters from his already raw skin was a massive understatement, but he hadn’t made a pact with the Lord Of Hellfire for nothing; it would take more than just indirect exposure to intense flame to scald his flesh.

The coarse concrete beneath his feet began to heat up as the soulless dead poured over the wall, small stones mixed in by careless or simply cheap workers melting at different rates to the base material. He barely spared the horde a glance, concentrating on twisting the flames engulfing him into a small tornado of fire. The sounds of their wailing cheers and jubilant sobs faded away as his mind turned to that dark part of his soul that wasn’t wholly his, the flames around him turning a dark crimson as infernal power leaked into them.

They had almost reached him -the closest bursting into flames from the sheer ambient heat radiating from the increasingly dark fire around him- when the whirlwind of incarnadine flame exploded off him. Those caught in the blaze were reduced to less than ash in an instant, even the twisted remnants of their soul that had faded into the great grey igniting in their ruined plane.

The Blight as a whole seemed to scream, an ethereal sound of such rage and, perhaps even more disturbing, disappointment that battered at his very soul as the vast curse railed against the unholy fire leaking into its realm for the brief moment it took to snuff it out nearly drove him to his knees. He couldn’t allow that though, he knew from long experience that the Blight would not be so much as slowed even when harmed on the spiritual level.

His breath came in deep gasps, the effort of channeling such immense and decidedly hazardous energy taking more out of him than he would like to admit. He could feel what little intact skin he had left blister at the intense heat he produced, the exposed muscle directly contacting his armour sticking and tearing as he moved. Still, he couldn’t keep the smirk from his face as he felt the glowing orange roof beneath his feet begin to sag and watched Blighted wreathed in flame sink fingers seared to the bone into molten stone.

A moment passed as a grey face, half melted and half simply gone, peeked over the lip of the rooftop, its single remaining eye peeking out through dripping flesh. A distant (and likely delirious) part of his mind noted how darkly comical an expression of hesitant curiosity looked on the vector’s ruined visage, though his saner side told him that said expression was purely in his head.

Most of his mind, however, was focused on the sense of victory that suffused him as the faint magic vainly attempting to hold the lump of lava below him together finally gave up the ghost and sent several tons of molten stone collapsing in on on itself; swallowing him, the horde that came to infect him, and dozens of buildings around him in a tidal wave of fire and molten stone.

Were he not too busy trying not to literally drown in liquid fire, he would have been laughing uproariously at the grimace that he would later swear up and down he saw on that Blighted’s face when the building came down.

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I had just about found a good place to hunker down and evolve when a rush of hot air that shattered every window in sight blasted me off my feet. On the one hand, it blew me into the cover I was seeking; even going so far as to collapse the entrance behind me for total concealment as I had planned.

On the other, it slammed me head first into a stone wall.

HP -1

I grumbled irritably, decidedly less than pleased to be injured out of nowhere. I have no evidence, but I blame Kurzebald for this; somehow, someway, that bastard is behind this.

Normally, I’d be more than slightly concerned with the weight of a half collapsed building being barely kept from crushing my body to nothing by a pile of debris and a handful of sandbags; given I was trying to make myself securely hidden enough to evolve before my battered body actually gave up on me, I was willing to accept the risk for a hideout no one was likely to check.

Giving my temporary domicile one more cautious glance to be sure it wasn’t going to actually collapse any time soon, I accepted the prompt to evolve once more with more than a hint of giddiness.

The list of potential evolutions I was given this time wasn’t much larger than the previous, perhaps even slightly smaller. A few esoteric options drew my gaze, but each had some unacceptable and glaring weakness I simply couldn’t ignore.

As cool as it would be to be a rat made of living darkness, that one little detail about evaporating under direct light was a bit of a deal breaker.

Given recent events, my decision to play it stealthy was vindicated to some extent; seeing exactly how dangerous the Blight is however, shows I might need a bit more actual killing power on my side. It takes thirty seconds of unbroken focus to summon up the Blight and actually using it to kill unleashes an uncontrollable plague that I only get limited rewards from!

Not to mention, if I accidentally kill everything I won’t have anything to kill in the future. No killing means no experience means no leveling means no evolving, all things I’m not inclined to give up any time soon.

I scanned the list over, finding untenable issues or incompatible lifestyles with most of the interesting ones. Being a glowing rat ever cast in comforting sunlight sounds amusing and potentially powerful later on, but being a light mage (not to mention probably never being able to hide in shadow) is not exactly useful for keeping myself alive right now. The list didn’t even seem to be organised in any way I could see, weird evolutions sandwiched between stock standard shite.

It was one such sandwiched path that caught my gaze near the bottom of the list. On the surface, it was nothing special really; another step down a stealthy rogue path without the tiny bits of mostly hazardous magic presented by other options. The sheer utility of it towards my current needs however made the flashy shit some of the other evolutions presented pale in comparison.

With a faint grin, I checked over the other options a few more times just to be sure, and made my choice.