“You can head down first, Kada,” Alk was oddly considerate.
“No no, ladies first. I insist,” Kada matched with chivalry, though her reasons were probably a bit more pure.
“Are you saying you’re not a lady?” Alk took a moment to poke a hole in her logic.
“Nope, just wanted to call you a lady!” Kada was direct and this caused her opponent to recoil in fluster. “I get the feeling that you don’t really think of yourself as one, so I wanted to try teasing you with it. Guess it didn’t really work.”
“That’s not… whatever,” Alk dropped that part of the conversation entirely. “My methods will be very dangerous and effective, so I wanted to give you a chance to get started first.”
“Now I’m getting the feeling there’s a reason you don’t want to fight these things,” Kada did her best to read between the lines. “Oh, are you one of those people who are like super dark and brooding on the outside but actually secretly love cute things when no one is looking?!”
“Uhhh… not really,” Alk found it an odd leap in logic. “First of all, I wouldn’t even call these things cute. Sure they have fluffy fluffy rabbit ears, but anything with gropey limbs like that could never be cute. And second, I have no problem whatsoever killing these things.”
“Then what’s the holdup?!” Kada was really pushing now.
“Fine. There’s just no place to stand, alright?!” she finally admitted. “I sure as zjik am not jumping into a pile of those wiggly bastards. I was hoping you’d go first and clear the way for me.”
“Oh, well I can make you places to stand. That’s no problem!” Kada slid her hands into the dirt. Nothing happened for a few seconds but then several geysers suddenly erupted in the middle of the fault. The laced liquid hardened into Kada’s now almost iconic shape: cones. They were upside down, so the smooth flat surface was on the top, creating several platforms around the area that were a few inches taller than the highest peak of Starbits.
“Now, then, ladies first,” Kada repeated, elaborately gesturing her arms.
Alk didn’t fight it this time, and jumped straight into the fault, landing on a newly created stepping stone. She bent down and grabbed the nearest Starbit. Within seconds, she already had several needles of concoctions sticking into it like a pin cushion. Once she was satisfied with the brew, the unlicensed doctor siphoned out the new disease she’d made.
The Fiend made sure to observe the Starbit she was holding, wanting to confirm it’d undergo the changes she’d set forth. The Starbit started vibrating wildly, and Alk smiled, having reached the result she wanted—not that the grin could be seen beneath her mask. She chucked the Starbit back into the pile, but kept observing, albeit a bit more cautiously—laying on the cone’s surface while peeking over the edge.
The Starbit started vibrating with more and more fervor. Eventually, it must have sensed that something was wrong, and chose to multiply. All of its arms except for one split off from its main body and slithered away. This had been the exact result Alk had been hoping for, since it looked like it’d play out as she anticipated.
Each of the new Starbits started vibrating too the moment they were fully formed, so the reproduction process began again. So far, she’d only succeeded in making more Starbits—the exact opposite of their goal.
But then the first Starbit exploded.
It exploded into a mass of guts and goo, coating all of its fellows within reach. Strangely, unlike the typical murky red colored blood, the insides were a blend of purple and green. That blood then began to seep into the Starbits it had touched, infecting them. They then started to vibrate as well.
Before any of those could explode, all the reproductions of the original Starbit exploded, but only after reproducing again themselves. Their tainted blood would now infect anything it touched, making them panic and forcing them to reproduce into more infected Starbits.
What Alk had done was create a living bomb, but not just a single bomb. It was a bomb whose inclination was to self-reproduce as much as possible. But that only made more bombs with the same instincts. It was a never-ending chain reaction of death, but nothing was ever really never-ending.
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Unfortunately, with each new generation bred, and each time the disease was transferred externally, it grew weaker. Eventually, the disease died out and the explosions stopped completely, though some Starbits were still vibrating, as they would for the rest of their short lives. Thankfully, the disease was short-lived enough through their reproduction cycle that they didn’t get the chance to develop an immunity, or that could entirely ruin Alk’s strategy.
She bent down and grabbed an armful of Starbits. After adjusting the dosage and potency slightly of her exploding disease, she injected them all, and then hurled them each in different directions. That would set off more deadly chain-reactions while covering the most ground. When those were done, she’d rinse and repeat until there were none left.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for her to do while the reactions were happening. She could try to throw some needles into the endless void of starbits and hope one hit and injected properly, but she didn’t want to waste her precious new concoction on a gamble.
All Alk could do for the time being was sit around and let her eyes wander, but they sure wandered to something interesting. What the mawhg is she doing…?
The woman found Kada not doing much of anything along one of the fault’s walls. She wasn’t hanging from the wall or anything. No, she was embedded into it. Her entire front half was sticking out of the rock face with her limbs spread slightly, while the back half was locked tightly into the rock itself. Kada also had her eyes closed. Was she taking a nap?
Whatever she was doing, Alk couldn’t let it go unchastised. She began hopping from cone to cone, doing her best to avoid the Starbit explosions as they detonated beneath her feet. If some of the deadly disease did touch her, she’d merely strip it of all potency, but it still wasn’t pleasant.
“What the mawhg are you doing?” Alk’s external monologue had very little filter compared to her inner one. “Trying to be a lazy sack of zjik in an artsy way?”
“Ah dang it, you made me lose my concentration!” Kada whined awake from her trance. “Now Mr. Chompers is going hungry until I can get him going again.”
“You’re right. It was my mistake to talk to someone so delusional,” Alk turned around, ready to skip as far away as she could.
“Mr. Chompers is what I’m calling my death machine to try to make it sound less barbaric,” Kada deigned to explain. “Hold on, I’ll show you.”
Some of the nearby wall melted, creating a rocky river that pushed away a few layers of Starbits. Then Alk could see it, but she didn’t know whether to giggle at how silly it was or sigh at how stupid Kada was for making it.
Now plastered into the rock’s face was a… face. Did it really need to be a full face for what it was accomplishing? But Alk wasn’t exactly dealing with a normal person here. There were eyes, a nose, and a mouth all carved into the wall, and were all moving for some reason. It made sense for the mouth, but the rest was just aesthetics that no one could actually see.
The mouth itself was the main attraction, and more square in shape than a mouth had any right to be. Mr. Chompers was actually pretty simple overall. He was just a chomping mouth. Starbits went into the mouth and then they didn’t come out—chewed to death.
It was surprisingly effective, despite its simplicity. Since monster corpses rapidly decayed, there’d be nothing left shortly after they died, making more room for further Starbits to be shoved in.
Fake hands were doing the shoving. Using her Curse, Kada was having lumps of mud that were vaguely hand-shaped sprout out of the ground and push the Starbits gently into Mr. Chompers’ mouth. That part was pretty ingenious, Alk didn’t want to admit. Since they were being casually moved, no more than the swarm would move them just by existing, they weren’t on high alert and trying to rapidly reproduce.
“Oh, I think Mr. Chompers’ mouth is getting a bit gunky. Time to clean it out.” Kada muttered suddenly. The chomping operation came to a brief stop, and a bunch of unpleasant bile dribbled out of his mouth at the start. Then the remainder was vomited out as Kada forced the rest by pushing from the back wall.
This certainly was a problem with monster cleanup. It was undeniably convenient how they would mostly dispose of themselves, except for large bones and rigid materials, but those were mostly useful. Starbits really didn’t have any of that, except for some teeth and a tiny skeleton, but Mr. Chompers had no issue grinding those to dust.
The issue was the blood and guts. If they were still on the inside, they rotted away with the rest of the monster corpse. However, if they were removed in any fashion before death, they forever remained unless disposed of in some other way. Sadly, it was hard to chomp without things being squished out in one way or another. Kada made the ground beneath the guts turn into a whirlpool that sucked the juices away and out of sight.
“Mr. Chompers has been eating too much. I think he’s going to get a tummy ache,” Alk snidely remarked as she grabbed a Starbit. After it had been injected, she tossed it directly into the path of the grabbing hands. Before Kada could do anything to stop it, the Starbit had already been pulled inside the mouth and chomping had commenced.
It didn’t take long for the rumbling to start—a chain reaction of explosions inside the rocky mouth. “Wahhhh, that’s so mean!” Kada sobbed when the rumbling started shaking her as well. She didn’t appear to be in any real pain, but seemed to be experiencing mild discomfort at least.
“You fiend!” her distress towards Alk continued. “And I don’t mean Fiend in the current way. I mean it in the old adjective sense before it was used to denote a new species after the Cosmic Boon!” In retaliation, Kada made the cone beneath Alk’s feet vanish so that she was dropped straight into the pile of wiggling, grabby Starbits.