John forced himself to maintain his ground. Fear washed over him, the weirdness of how the creature approaching him felt, and he nearly ran. Since he was a boy, he was taught how to control his emotions. He had ages of practice doing so. He applied all he’d learned to calm his heart and mind. He failed more than he succeeded.
Holding on to the oath he recently swore, the one thought that kept John from running was, I will not fail my wife. He repeated it over and over again in his head as a creature burst through the building in front of him, and fear emanated off of it in thick waves.
The creature stood about twice John’s height. Its head was oblong and ridged with boney bulges. Its beady-eyed face had a wide, fang filled mouth and no obvious ears or nose. Its sickly pale-skinned body was humanish, but it had double-jointed knees, clawed hands and feet, and a line of spiked protrusions running down the back of its arms and legs.
The creature stopped as it saw John and let out a roar that sounded like the guttural bellow of a hundred red deer stags at once. It then recommenced its charge. John stood petrified by fear, a fear that increased as the creature got closer to him.
John stood still as a statue as the creature wrapped its hand around his head and bashed him into the ground.
Being bodily smashed down onto the road snapped John out of the fear he felt, but not in time for him to do anything about it as he was bashed down again.
As he was raised into the air to be smashed down a third time, John grabbed the wrist of the hand holding his head with both hands and swung his feet downward, so he’d land on his feet as the creature attempted to bash him off the ground again. His plan worked and he got his legs under him.
The creature tried to push John down forcefully, to smoosh him into the ground, or force him to his knees, as John resisted by pushing back on the wrist he held with all his strength.
John sent vital essence to strengthen himself, and then tried casting [Drain Essence]. Unbinding manifestations was delicate work, like quickly solving puzzles while dodging around blocks and trying not to touch anything else. It couldn’t be brute forced. It was done softly and strategically and deftly.
How the creature unbound John’s attempted manifestation went against all the rules. All the puzzles and blocks were smashed to dust causing physical pain in John’s dantian that resounded through his meridians.
John, while pushing up against the creature’s arm, kicked its knee. The creature roared as it stepped back and then hit John with its free hand. John blocked the blow with his left arm, but it still sent him flying into the building behind him.
As John regained his feet, he prepared to dodge another hit from the creature. The creature didn’t charge after him though. It stood in the same spot. Fear overwhelmed John again. He tried casting [Flashburst Pulse] with the same result his attempt at casting [Drain Essence] had – it was violently and painfully unbound. He tried using his plasma ring and it refused to accept essence. Something in it was broken.
John fought against the fear and attempted to cast [BB Buff]. Pain resounded through his sore dantian and meridians as the creature’s unbind destroyed the manifestation. He attempted to feel into the creature to place a clot and was rejected so violently he bit his tongue. Then he was too frightened to do anything but quake in fear as he watched the unmoving creature.
After a moment the creature walked towards John, the fear overwhelming John increasing with each of its steps. When it reached him, the creature again covered John’s head with one of its hands.
A low and throaty croaking sound came out of the creature’s unmoving mouth and was translated as, “Your scent is different but not right so you will die as all will.”
John watched helplessly as the creature’s mouth opened wide and clamped down on the whole left side of his neck and shoulder and began to bite and chew. The attack knocked John out of his fearful trance, and he lashed out at the creature with his right hand while his left attempted to go around the creature’s oblong head to hold it still.
John smashed the side of the creature’s head three times more before it released hold of his neck and shoulder. As he struggled to hold the creature’s head in place with his left hand, he noticed his claws easily dug into the creature. He assumed his body increased the strength of his claws, as most creatures near the power of the one he fought had skin his claws could never pierce. He started to tear into the creature’s face with his right hand.
The creature broke free with a roar. The dark one and John began slugging each other and fighting like wild beasts. The monster was much larger than John, but only a little stronger, and fought ferociously. John was faster and more skilled, but skill meant little in such a brutal match, rolling around and lashing out like animals, and he was still adjusting to his new body and [Stats].
John couldn’t release vital essence from strengthening him to heal so he used it to increase his speed too. His shoulder didn’t hurt too much, and he thought the fangs didn’t dig too deep. He tried feeling into the creature again with the same result as the last time.
As they rolled and clawed and kicked and punched, landing mighty and savage blows, twice John managed to bite through skin, but his suckling was always ended soon after by the creature tearing away.
Once again, John was sent flying into a building by a powerful hit. He was then frozen with fear that increased as the creature moved in closer. The creature didn’t speak. It just chomped down on John’s head when it reached him.
The fangs broke through the skin of John’s face and lips and ears. The creature let go and howled in pain or anger from its fangs breaking on John’s skull.
John, no longer in the fear trance, gave battle again, digging his fingers deep into the creature’s neck and swinging himself onto the dark one’s back. John’s own fangs replaced his fingers in the neck, and he began to drain as he held on to the monster’s oblong and ridged head and under and around its arm, with a grip and hold too good for the creature to remove him.
The vital essence John took in tasted strange, but he didn’t care, and took more in as the creature thrashed and flailed about in its attempts to remove John from its back. He managed to strengthen himself twice before he felt something else. A new thing was approaching. Something that felt even stranger than the creature he fought.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The new thing felt extremely weird but didn’t cause any unreasonable fear in John. It only caused him a reasonable amount of fear appropriate for something that felt so weird to his senses. He gave up draining the creature he was fighting and instead tried to kill it by digging the fingers of his left hand far into its neck.
John found out the creature’s anatomy wasn’t like that of a human at all, as neither his fingers going deep into its neck killed it, nor did grabbing onto some tendons or arteries and pulling them out. As he attempted to snap the creature’s neck, the weirder-feeling thing that approached disappeared from his senses and reappeared right behind him.
The new thing was not human looking at all. John thought it looked like a giant, hovering, purple placenta with a million eyes poking out all over its skin. Before he could even react, sand grabbed him and ripped him from the back of the creature he was trying to kill and pinned him on the ground.
The sand continued to crawl over John as the fear-trance of the creature he thought of as Ridge-head overwhelmed him again. His face was covered in sand, but his orb-eye couldn’t be, and he watched as he shook with fear, too frightened to do anything but accept his fate.
A purple tube extended out of the hovering-placenta and painfully pierced John’s chest. The attack didn’t end the fear-trance like the other attacks that landed on him had. The placenta began to feed on him. His mind continued to be numb with the worst kind of fear as Ridge-head stood close to him.
A very high mooing-like sound exited the hovering-placenta. It translated as, “You have gone as high as you can, sibling. I can go higher still. Ignore the scent of the dream on our prey as I feast.”
John didn’t even attempt to come up with a plan to escape or fight back. He hardly noticed a strange wooden-man growing out of the dirt surrounding one of the nearby trees lining the sidewalk, knocking the tree over. The wooden-man’s arms grew long and kept on growing until the right hand punched Ridge-head in the face and its left hand smashed into the hovering-placenta.
The fear-trance ended, and John forced his arms out of the sand and ripped the tube from his chest.
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The three dark walkers brought to Terra were newly formed. They shed low level dark ones. Wood, Copper, and Bronze. How dark ones ascended was set. What John named specter-hands merged into giant bee-flies which merged into rock-monsters. Then stopped.
Louvre dolls merged into hooded-women which merged into spider-heads. Then stopped.
A Copper-tiered dark one unknown to John merged into fire-birds which merged into mock-men. Then stopped.
Flesh-blobs, being Dimensional Abominations, fed until they ascended, changing into bat-men. Then stopped.
That’s how it worked. Dark walkers shed dark ones as it walked. Those dark ones attacked magals and merged as they were meant to. They then stood or flew around the same small area, waiting to attack new targets they sensed. Depending on the tier, after about a couple weeks, they’d start to dissipate.
A short cycle. Most knew to never let dark ones crowd together because strange stuff happened when they did. The rock-monsters didn’t want to merge. They resisted it the longest, but crowded together as they were near the thump-ritual, they eventually couldn’t help it. They merged into a rare Silver also unknown to John. All those Silvers eventually all merged into a full-Greater, somewhat Gold tier, but more, the thing John named Ridge-head.
Rares and Greaters were outside the usual tier-system. Rares were far more normal. Greaters didn’t feel correct, and they didn’t operate correctly. They had strange abilities. They could be both much stronger and weaker than their tier would indicate, and they were usually a mix of tiers.
Spider-heads merged into the rare snake-women and had far more intelligence than usual for dark ones. They completely resisted the urge to merge beyond the peak of what they were, and that peak was very weak for the somewhat Silvers and Golds they were.
The mock-men merged into the rare shadows, also somewhat Golds. The shadows didn’t resist merging at all since they could easily unmerge. They merged into the low-Greater big black blob, also somewhat Gold, but also somewhat Platinum.
The bat-men fed on all the humans they sensed on the way to the thump-ritual while John was fighting near the ritual. One ascended to the rare fungus moth-man, somewhat Silver but mostly Gold tiered.
Once the search of the city began at the direction of snake-women, many bat-men fed enough and ascended to fungus moth-men, and one fed enough during the night of searching to ascend to the low-Greater hovering-placenta, somewhat Silver and Gold but also somewhat Platinum tiered. The hovering-placenta then fed enough to be mid-Greater, and then again to be full-Greater. It was curious to see if it could go higher.
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The hand that hit the hovering-placenta started to quickly retract back towards the wooden-man, the goo that connected the wooden hand to the wooden shoulder somehow pulling it. As the wooden hand passed by John it grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the sand and onto his feet.
The wooden-man lashed the goo of its right arm like a whip, and a wave was sent down the whole extended arm. The right hand flew up and grabbed a metal pole that held an artificial light over the street, and the wooden-man retracted himself to the right hand as its left arm snaked back up to his shoulder.
On the way to the metal pole the wooden-man’s right hand held, he kicked Ridge-head in the chest. John expected Ridge-head to go flying backwards, but it barely moved at all. Ridge-head grabbed the wooden-man and smashed him into the ground.
John jumped towards Ridge-head but sand grabbed him in the air. He spun to slap away a tube that tried to impale him. He tried casting a manifestation but was unbound in the normal, pain-free way by the placenta. His orb-eye watched the wooden-man get thrown or hit towards a building, and the wooden-man’s arms snaked out and swung him back to kick Ridge-head with both feet again, not even moving the creature an inch backwards.
Since the wooden-man arrived John had twice been overwhelmed with fear for a moment. Not enough time to freeze him in fear completely, but it let him know Ridge-head being attacked also broke the trance. The wooden-man seemed to be completely immune to the fear-trance.
John then focused all his attention on the hovering-placenta as he fought out of the sand and batted away another tube. He wished the wooden-man luck.
As new sand grabbed at John, he sent essence to power his armor’s essence shield. He wanted to get one manifestation off, even if it wasn’t his own. He could tell the hovering-placenta tried to unbind it. He could feel the creature’s attempt do nothing at all since imbuing items can’t be unbound, and the tube that was coming out of the creature started to retract and the sand in the air started to fall to the ground when the creature made the unbind attempt.
John felt into the hovering-placenta and was violently rejected. He tried unbinding whatever the creature was doing to control the sand and couldn’t feel anything. There was no manifestation to unbind, not that he could figure out.
John grabbed the next tube the hovering-placenta sent at him with the goal of using it to pull the creature to him or pull himself to the creature. He yanked mightily on the tube and fell backwards into the sand. The creature either released the tube or the tube could easily be ripped from its body.
As John struggled to release himself from the sand, the wooden-man flew right over him and whacked into the hovering placenta.
Fear-gripped John’s heart again, and for long enough to freeze him in place. With his orb-eye he watched sand cover the wooden-man.
John was too filled with fear to think about much else. He did see some sort of gummy, thick substance exit the sand and pull an armless and legless wooden-man from it. The gummy substance then flowed into the wooden-man, giving it both arms and legs back.
The wooden-man stood on those legs and ran by John, once again pulling John out of the sand with one arm and setting him on his feet as its other arm shot at and stretched towards Ridge-head, hitting the creature right in the face and knocking John out of the fear-trance just in time for John to slap away a new tube trying to pierce him.
As John jumped at the hovering-placenta, he promised if he survived this battle, he would sing the praises of the strange wooden-man to all.