I pushed off the floor the instant I landed. I charged forward, barely shifting my body to avoid the gusts of black wind. With another push, I managed to reach a larger bundle of tentacles at the spot where they seemed to be merging into the main body. While carefully paying the attention to its movements, I transferred all my mass and speed to the partizan as I used it to stab into the dark, murky body.

This time, I barely managed to twitch in an attempt to move but was still blown away by the counter. The attack came diagonally from below, so now I was hurled up and found myself embedded into the ceiling. I barely noticed a blotch of shadow revealing a now familiar figure that was apparently unaffected by the gravity, before I dropped back down towards the already approaching tentacles.

I adjusted my body and tried to cushion the impact with the shaft, but the masses and speeds involved were way too overwhelming. So I was sent flying again, towards the different part of the ceiling. I tried to get hold of the stonework, but it was crumbling with whole chunks of it falling off, dragging me into the process.

I had fallen ten or so meters, before another whiplash hurled me once again into the ceiling. That masonry was already becoming way too familiar for my taste, especially due to its close proximity to my face. In the rain of pebbles, sand and shards I kept bouncing up and down, unable to escape. Even if I managed to land a hit, that extradimensional flesh lightly bounced, dispersing the power behind the strike. And each time, for a brief stationary moment at the apex of my flight, I noticed the presence of the figure in her shadowy outfit.

---

The supersonic impacts kept accumulating, and I felt how their force began to penetrate into my body after passing through the armor. While I had no real need in organs, the thinner parts of my ribs cracked, piercing into the lung and stomach substitutes. Even the spine, that I had designed to be flexible, ended up distorted. There, the individual vertebrae were dislocated in a fashion that would make any neurosurgeon fall into despair.

“Never expected to feel the knot in my stomach this way.” - I had the leisure to think, happy that I had altered the structure of my pain signals.

Meanwhile, I had had enough of substituting a bouncy ball, and invested my full attention into altering my armor. The next second, when I crashed into the ceiling again, the thin, almost half a meter long needles on my body armor stabbed deep into the layers of brick. While briefly wondering, why a deep cave needed its ceiling to be laid with brick and stone, I prompted the armor needles to contract. As the needles became thicker, they acted as anchors bolts and gave me the urgently needed moment of stability.

I pushed out with my hands and legs, forcing my limbs into stone, thus securing myself into place. And again, a shadow flickered nearby and there she was sitting again.

“Hmmm,” - she hummed, looking at me.

I controlled my back muscles, forcing the backbone to reassemble itself. The audible cracking sounded from my back. Then I looked at her, while internally debating if I should remove the visor to let her show my annoyed face.

Just in case, I decided to remain cautious, especially since while I felt that her energy was completely different from any other, the atmosphere around her seemed to be somewhat familiar.

So I rather dryly said: “Missy, and who might you be?”.

I immediately regretted speaking, as when I breathed in, the air escaping through the perforated lungs into the chest cavity resulted in pneumothorax. The collapsing lungs caused me to wheeze, and only the fact that I was not foaming and spitting out blood allowed me to retain some dignity. An annoying tingling feeling behind my ears hinted that I better keep my prestige high enough, as only that would allow me to keep my interaction casual with that shady missy. And I would probably not like the alternative.

She cocked her head: “Hmm, a lot of red, blood? No, can’t be that, Tarakhepa should be the one now. Some weapon, then?” - she was silent a moment, thoughtfully flicking her thin, white fingers: “But Tarakhepa, wasn’t he killed in nineteen thirty-nine? Hey, boyo, feel anything when you say words like ‘blood’ or name some weapons?”

The extradimensional entity was raging and waving its tentacles below us. But for some reason, it did not stretch out to try to grab me, as there seemed to be some sort of boundary at ten meters below us. I pointed at it with my partizan.

“Not really, a bit busy now. Missy, still, who are you?” - I still wanted some answers, and managed to squeeze out enough air to keep speaking.

“Mmmm.” - she was again covered by her shadows, preparing to disappear. But then, for a second the shadows froze and I heard her faint voice: “It is a weakest intruder agglomeration, but basic instincts and no actual mind of its own.”

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I thought about her words and quickly arranged the information I had. It appeared to be as she had said, as the extradimensional being was simply trying to squeeze through the portal while swatting away all interferences. It did not seem to attack proactively, at least for now.

---

And as if I just had to jinx it, a commotion rose in the middle of the rest of the group. Two ex-captives suddenly rolled up their eyes and started shrieking while clawing at their own heads, ripping open deep, bloody gashes with their nails. Then, with sickening squishy sounds, oily tentacles burst out from their orifices. Eyes and noses burst, cheeks were shredded open and teeth scattered across the floor like a handful of dry beans.

One of them was lucky, or unlucky enough to swipe her new tentacles at one of the weres nearby. The massive man who still had his hands transformed into huge paws with rakelike claws, reacted instantly by swiping the possessed attacker’s head off her shoulders. The head, surrounded by still moving feelers, met the wall and shattered like a ripe melon, leaving behind a boiling, rapidly evaporating puddle of murky dark goo.

Another one was a student of the Akadem, and due to the proximity, his tentacles immediately found another student nearby. Possibly a friend who had tried to help his screaming companion. With a sickening slurp, the unfortunate helper began to dissolve starting from the places the tentacles had latched on to. Ear-piercing scream of pain was abruptly cut off, as another feeler coiled around the throat, separating the head in a bare moment.

From my position, I could observe Arthur, whose face was contorted from anger while the air surrounding his hands seethed, blurring the image. He moved, trying to establish a clear line of sight to deal with the turned student. Unfortunately, the rest of the students were panicking, scrambling to get away from the horror that had appeared in their midst. Instead, from the side of SAS, the man called Birch ran forward. He had been nearby, patrolling the area. Now he approached, while simultaneously unsheathing his tactical blade.

He hacked down at the tentacle that was still holding the shoulder of the decapitated corpse. The blade was effective, slicing off the creepy appendage, but the brave soldier did not have the knowledge or training to expect the spray of goo that burst from the wound. Birch barely managed to raise his free hand in an attempt to tear off the rapidly-dissolving high-tech visor from his face before he began convulsing, and powerlessly dropped backwards.

But his sacrifice had bought enough time for Arthur, who by then had managed to push the panicking students aside and arrive on scene. With a swatting motion of his palm, Arthur brought down a mass of invisible force that smashed the infected student onto the ground, where he also dissolved into the murky, lightly fuming goo. Arthur dropped on his knees next to Birch. However, I could observe the loss of the latter’s energy, signifying his death. But Arthur still checked the vitals, before sighing. He shook his head as Aitan and the rest of SAS rushed to him. Due to the commotion going on, I could not hear what they talked about. I only saw Arthur giving a deep bow to Aitan, who returned it and finally they exchanged a handshake. Apparently, they had reached some agreement.

---

I would be an idiot and wasting my mental capabilities if I had not realized the relationship between the extradimensional invader and these two, what I could call, ‘hatchlings’.

The mysterious gravity-defying miss had said that this invader had no ability to think. That allowed me to come up with following theories: first, it could be the aura, affecting living organisms in the similar way as the matter around the portal, where everything was slowly being twisted under different natural laws. Second, as the being could somehow affect the summoning by hijacking the ride across the Veil, it might also worm into the weaker-minded people in a way similar to possession. The third option was the one I did not like the most - a nasty infection, with people being incubators involved in the life cycle familiar from the Alien franchise.

It seemed that Albert and Philip needed more time, and I felt an urgent need to do something before the random tentacle-mutations turned our relatively well-organized group into a frenzied, panicking mob.

Now, if the creature had no mind and moved by instinctively reacting to its surroundings, then what if I tried to make use of that feature? I absorbed the anchor spikes that had fixed me to the ceiling and pushed myself sideways. The sideways push put heavy stress on the structure of the ceiling and several tons of displaced brick and stone showered down like a small avalanche. Most of it got annihilated by the random gusts of black winds on its way down, while the rest shrouded the portal and the creature by a thick cloud of dust. I, however, landed on the floor way out of the invader’s reach, after narrowly avoiding a column on my way down.

---

Finally back on my two feet, I took a moment to stretch. The displaced parts returned to their positions, and damaged pieces of ribs got dissolved back into my energy. With a few slow, but strong muscle contractions, most of the air was expelled from my thorax and the lungs were roughly patched up. A tiny part of my attention was dedicated to fixing the damages, but it was going to take quite a bit of time to finish. I adjusted the grip on the partizan and resolutely moved forward, hoping to regain some of my dignity I had lost after being used as a ping pong ball.

Dull thuds from my footsteps merged into low rumbling as I accelerated towards the portal. Moving in zigzags, I reached another tentacle that had stretched out more than others. Considering the speeds involved, I was wary of uncontrolled skidding due to considerable inertia. Thus I forcefully pushed the side of my soles into the ground, crushing the sandstone bedrock and shifting my path to be in parallel with the tentacle.

Having picked the optimal moment, I stabbed my partizan into the tentacle, using the momentum to help the weapon to tear the wound open. Without waiting for the being’s reaction, I immediately dropped down, relying on the smooth surface of my armor to slide forwards.

That turned out to be a good move. By the moment I detected the counterattack, the sharp clap above my head had already pierced through the space I had been in less than a millisecond ago.