Chapter 73: Under Boiling Seas.

The food had become, annoyingly persistent. Refusing to lay down and die as it should have.

It was bad enough for the collector swarms to diverge from their original orders, seeing as though all that nutritious meat would be going to waste, but for the food to try and threaten me, my children…

That was unacceptable.

‘How dare something so small and puny think itself so powerful? How could it deny me and my brood?’

It was senseless. Everyone and everything knew that the small fed the large. It was the way of things.

‘And yet these ones prove so meddlesome. So, irritating.’

That defiance had forced me to debase myself further and further as I restrained my bulk from charging. I still wanted to do it. Longing to jump off the solid seabed and swim until all of me crashed against those little hills of rock and metal the food had built. Yet I could not silence my own instincts. They screamed even now. Incessantly wailing about the incoming danger. About final death.

‘What nonsense. What a load of utterly vexing nonsense. As if I my pride could allow it. As if my position could permit it? As if all the others back home wouldn’t leap upon me and my children over our perceived weakness? No. Going back without gorging myself was impossible. As was going back without enough food to allow my children to molt and grow and thrive. I had taken the chance and there was no other way but through. Which meant this stubborn bit of food had to die. It was small. Oh, so very small. So, it should learn its place.’

I was already molting and changing my flesh. Preparing my pustules with all the pressure and biomass they’d need to generate and fling another volley. Even as the irksome nature of this fight crawled underneath my brain-matter like hungry scavengers.

My kin would assuredly laugh if they chanced to see me reduced to this. To throwing precious nutrients across vast swathes of ocean. All in order to swat some miniscule parasite.

Indeed, it was foolish. I was wasting far more energy than I would get back. Especially now that the collectors I’d spawned had been turned against me.

‘But I have no choice and that knowledge hurts me more than the loss of biomass.’

It might be eons before my pride recovers from this debacle and even longer before I can adapt a counter-measure.

‘Smaller projectiles are the obvious solution, yet that has the downsides of requiring precision. Over these ranges, the amount of force I would have to use to launch the missile would destabilize my aim. Not to mention the chances of the killing blow being dodged. Some of the critters are annoyingly fast and agile for being so small. There are the chances of it getting behind cover as well. The projectile would have to be long and hard and dense, which would mean more force in order to throw it that far, which in turn would mean my muscles would have to be hardened and stretched, just like my bones.’

The more I thought about it the more annoyed I became.

No matter how much I twisted the ideas around my mind, the cheapest solution seemed to be the one I was already preparing.

‘The food controls the projectile, no matter how much I struggle to create a hardened mind. So, the obvious solution is to make the projectile bigger, more stuffed with bile and devoid of any mind at all.’

Yet that brought on more hurdles. That amount of bile would expend more energy and it having no mind meant no wings for it to keep itself aloft, which meant I would need to expend even more energy to bolster the firing pustules.

It was a vicious cycle were every option had innumerable drawbacks and the more I tried to circumvent them, the bigger those drawbacks became.

Bitter rage swelled all over me. Through my veins and arteries. Through my muscles and tendons. Through my bones and the marrow within.

Yet I stayed true to this task. Flexing my tentacles against the seabed and jumping out of the water with an explosive force that sent tidal waves in all directions. Throwing the new assault with every expectation that it would be the last as my limbs tasted the salty air above the ocean.

Then I sank again. Probes licking the chemical sensations as the mind-ravaged collectors tried to bite and gnaw at my rugged hide.

I watched through all my senses while shrugging off the damaged pests. Forming new mouths around their frames as they came in for their foolish attempts at predation and swallowing them whole.

The missile was flying, flying, flying. Splitting the air with just the right amount of velocity.

‘Good. This one cannot be swayed. Cannot be diverted. It will finally allow me to charge and digest the rest of the diseased collectors. First, I will swallow them. Then, the rest of the little… Wrong. Wrong! WRONG!’

My entire being cringed. Muscled tightening and constricting against themselves as if to ward off some blow.

‘There is something wrong! Here! There! Everywhere! It is in me and around me! It is biting me! Biting! Tearing! Crushing! Where is it!? When did it come here!?’

My projectile had been felled. Only, it hadn’t fallen down. No, it had fallen up. Acidic juices tumbling upwards towards the empty stars in defiance of what was natural and proper and right. I felt some of my sense growing stronger. Growing more acute than they had been seconds prior and the things they saw chilled all the blood pumping throughout my massive size.

The air, no, the space, was collapsing in on itself and new things were spilling out from the cracks.

Not in the same way that my aperture had formed, but more like crimson vigor through a wound. Reality, was wounded and it was bleeding.

All my instincts rose up at once. Screaming in unison that I had to make good on my escape.

This time, I listened. Moving my fins and tentacles about so as to make for the aperture. Only for every movement to bring pain.

Searing, white hot pain.

The water around me was turning to steam. All the collectors within and without bursting like volcanoes. Their wrathful suicides melting flesh from bone.

Until it wasn’t just that. There was more pain. Pain! PAIN!!!!

Never-ending and unrelenting! Coming from everywhere and nowhere! Manifesting as if it was all part of some wicked nightmare!

My body rebelled! Muscles growing against the weight of bone and weaving themselves into shapes that made them rip and tear into each other with every movement, every beat of every heart! My bones and ligaments cracked and splintered, disintegrating around the muscles in an effort to keep them together, only for the jagged edges to slice and dice into them with renewed ferocity and for them to burrow into my veins. Into my lungs.

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It! All of me! Was on fire!

The sea was on fire!

There were things in the water with me now. Pretending to be the same as the food. Yet they licked at me with forked togues longer than themselves. Their saliva corroding and melting my hide with no regard to how tough or durable it was!

‘I have to get out of here! I have to escape!’

I tried to flex against the seabed once more, but all my limbs felt clumsy and uncoordinated, and that was before the cartilage started solidifying into bone and the bone shattered and dug itself into the wailing muscles.

My mighty leap turned into a pathetic wagging of my tentacles. My own nervous system unable to get them to do anything but flail around.

I tried to suck in a breath. To process oxygen out of the salty water by force so that the buoyancy might lead me out.

And that was when I realized, that my gills were under attack. The pain had been so harrowing that I hadn’t noticed until now, but they were there too. Striking and slashing with wild abandon as they ruined the sensitive tissues.

I was asphyxiating.

Unable to rein back the wild mutations taking hold while also unable to replenish my own oxygen supply.

Yet all I could so was to keep flailing and struggling and dying.

Then, I found myself unable to do even that. My limbs seized and stopped, my lungs freezing as they tried in vain to suck in whatever meagre oxygen my damaged gills might procure.

My mind was hooked and dragged, outside of the broken shell of a body. All my thoughts and emotions being flayed from the rest of me by burning, searing blades and spines that sunk themselves beneath my hide and skin. Beneath all corporeal matters.

There were more and more hooks by the second, embedding themselves throughout all of my nerves as the being pulled and pulled and pulled. Tearing me apart in ways I could not have possibly imagined.

‘Die! Please let me die!’

The impulse was disgusting. An abandonment of all that was good and right and fair. I had children back home. Younglings waiting for sustenance beyond the hole in space. But I could not think about them. Couldn’t escape the feeling that whatever was waiting for me beyond these tortures would be worse. So much worse.

All of my eyes lost touch with reality. Drifting up into their own sockets as my perceptions and all of my brains narrowed down on one, solitary figure, standing atop the surface of the salty sea above me.

It was like the other food, but taller, longer. With gangly, stick-like limbs that seemed as though they’d snap at the slightest touch. The faintest pressure.

And atop its shoulders, were two heads, instead of one.

That should not have surprised me. I myself had grown extra heads on occasion. It was smart to have decoy brains when fighting for mates or territory. Yet I could not shake the feeling that it was deeply wrong. Unnatural to the point where matter and physics wailed in despair and were undone around it.

One of those frail-looking limbs stretched towards me. Parting the very waves of the ocean and sending innumerable amounts of water spouting up into the sky.

Then it began to descend on two pairs of bright white wings. His feathers gliding through the space between us without actually moving.

‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! That thing should not be! It should not exist! I cannot be real!’

All of my instincts screamed louder. Begging my body to die before the abomination got to me.

But I could not.

So, I continued to suffer, a clumsy, crippled thing at the bottom of a fleeing sea.

Until the horror’s digits caressed what remained of my hide and all sensations but pain, ceased forever.

The mansion was as immaculate as always. Indeed, if anything, it was even more luxuriously furnished than before. The edges of the marble tiles had been filled with perfectly placed lines of gold and the columns were now adorned with floral patterns wrought in silver and platinum.

The curtains were now intermixed shades of red and purple, fit for any royal procession, with even more golden strings interwoven within the fabric so that it made up scenes of hunt and battle.

The couches were now plusher and more comfortable looking than ever before. Seeming so soft that I feared the slightest touch would ruing their surfaces.

Sadly, I was not currently in any mood to enjoy them.

“Oh, come on!” I bellowed.

Not even having the composure to be overly surprised.

“I didn’t even go to sleep! I have to go back there! There are people waiting for me out there!”

“Relax.” A voice called out from the side.

I turned to see, me.

Wearing a (Gnome)-eating grin and the same khaki shorts and black shirt I typically favoured whenever I went out drinking with the boys.

Appropriately, this apparition also looked like it was (Gnome)-faced drunk, completing the ensemble with a bottle of rum on one hand as he staggered forward on a pair of unsteady feet.

“Everything is fine. The guys have got it covered and our followers are currently making short work of whatever fishes are left. As for the kaiju…”

He belched.

“I have a feeling that it really, really wishes it was dead right now. So, there’s no need to be so glum.”

I stared at it with open contempt. Leering as if I was seconds away from developing laser-vision and smiting it where it stood.

“Ha. Ha. Ha.” I intoned as dryly as possible. “Nice prank Drake. So, you figured out how to drag me here against my will. Good for you. Now send me back before the Tall Man shows up again.”

The other me bent over laughing.

“Hooo boy. You could not be more wrong about that bucko. There is no Drake around these parts. Well, not the nice ones anyway. No sir. I am you. Also, you shouldn’t be afraid of the Tall Man. Everyone else should be (Gnome)ing their pants, but not you or me or any other version of me. We are the only ones it will never harm.”

I looked him up and down again.

“Is that so? Well good for us then. Now send me back.”

He giggled like a toddler and began wagging a few fingers.

“Now now. None of that now. This is your ability, remember? You can only go back if you want to go back and right now, only half of you wants to go back.”

I, had to stop. To take a few more calming breaths before I lost my (Gnome) again.

“Okay. I’m calm. I am calm and under control. Now, listen.”

I approached him slowly, but with purpose. My feet hardly making a sound over the marble floors.

“I have been trying to become a hero for some time. Working very, very hard to make sure I was ready for whatever surprises might be waiting for me. I have saved hundreds of thousands so far. Maybe millions, I honestly lost count. But there is still a kaiju out there that needs to die before the people of Hong Kong are safe. Now, you say that it has been taken care of, but you’re also not me while pretending to be me. You will stop this nonsense and you will let me go back or I promise that you’ll regret any lives that were lost due to this…”

I struggled to find the words for a moment. Wrath and stress dulling my cognition.

“Distraction.” I said finally.

The impostor smiled a sad smile. As if he were the one looking at a cheap copy that made no sense.

“Yeah. I guess I can’t really delay it much longer.”

“No. You cannot.” Yet another voice said. Interposed with the faint buzz of static.

I turned, heart beating faster and more raucously than before, to see him again.

The organs floating in the goop looked about as well as one could have expected them to look. Forever locked inside their metal sarcophagus as pointy metal legs skittered about.

He, the first one, took a massive swig of the bottle. Emptying it before shifting his head to stare at me.

“Sorry champ. I, don’t really know how to soften the blow. He…” He pointed at the coffin. “Is our future. I am your past. All of your past. All that you remembered back at the lodge with Granny Golden and then some. All the memories of that (Gnome)ing year, rolled into one.”

I, couldn’t form the right words for a few seconds. My brain misfiring in obvious confusion as it tried to make sense of this madness.

Then, that confusion was replaced by white-hot fury as I sensed their deceptions at work.

“I already made peace with what happened at the community center.” I bit back. “Whatever you are. Whatever you’re trying to do, it won’t work.”

The sad smile the drunkard was wearing turned even sadder then.

“I’m glad you’ve made some kind of peace. I sure haven’t been able to. Not completely. But, in all honesty, I think this little trick of ours helped. You, really do look much healthier than I feel right now. I hope we’ll only get better, once Sarcophagus Sully and I have finished with our business.”

“Enough talk.” The electronic, buzzing voice hissed through his speakers. “The Drake is done and the choice awaits. Meld with him so we can be done with this farce.”

The Drunk’s smile turned vicious. His cold eyes seeming to lower the room’s temperature as they narrowed.

“Yes.” He spat. “We will be done with this farce. And with you.”

The speakers tried to roar with laughter, but only ended up scratching the inside of my ears. The sounds being so high-pitched that they almost sent me reeling down unto the floor.

“You believe that to be a threat? Fool. I have suffered enough for a million lifetimes. Nothing would please me more than the two of you banishing my mistakes. Now quit your whining and get to it already. He is right that there are people waiting. The world will not fix itself.”

I was about to ask what he meant, when the drunken version of me splintered in half, bloody crimson tentacles revealing themselves from between the side of his open skull.

I reeled backwards. Making to draw upon Psy to strike him down, but finding that my own abilities seemed to be flowing from him, rather than from me.

I opened my mouth to scream, and found that there was nothing there. That my body was dissolving into hooked tentacles that the drunken thing had attached to my exposed skin.

Even then, I struggled. Fighting and clawing against the thing with all the desperation I could muster.

Until the memory began taking over my mind.

Not the one with the community center or the crabs, but rather, what happened afterwards.

And all the uncountable horrors that transpired since.