An Octohog? Another creature that Kada was unfamiliar with, but it sounded like Laurim hadn’t made it up on the spot, so she’d probably transformed into it a few times already. What exactly would it be, some kind of warthog with 8 legs? That’d just be silly, and Kada kind of wanted to see it. Or maybe it’d be something that attacked like a Freer. Kada imagined an octopus with tusks that used its tentacles to grab the enemy and pull themself close to gouge out their guts. That was a pretty scary idea, so Kada hoped it wasn’t that one.
Regardless, she’d have to wait and see what hatched out of the surprise egg. Like last time, the egg started pretty small—the equivalent of a compressed Laurim. Strangely, it didn’t grow right away. Did that mean the monster was small? Instead, it rolled around the room for a bit. While it was rolling, she tried solidifying the last foot of watery rock to trap the egg, but it was too slick and slipped right out. The egg finally stopped rolling in the dead middle of the room. Why had it sought out that spot in particular?
The egg finally started to grow. And then it continued to grow. It grew, and grew, and grew some more. Why it chose the center was starting to make more sense if it didn’t want to hit the wall in any direction. Kada was beginning to worry that it might burst through the ceiling which could be a problem, but the shell of the egg stopped just short.
Fortunately, the monster wasn’t quite as big, but it was still enormous. Purple flesh spilled out of the cracked egg shell and tentacles swarmed the room. Clearly, the octopus was the base of the monster, and a giant one at that.
But what exactly was the hog part? Kada couldn’t quite pinpoint that. There were no tusks, no snouts, hell, not even a bit of fur anywhere. What it did have were weird spots all over the Octohog’s body and running down its tentacles. They almost looked like protective padding, but that didn’t make sense for any hog she knew.
Wait, are those quills…? Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I get it now. Hedgehog! Laurim was covered in patches of hedgehog quills to serve as defensive armor. And also a weapon apparently, which Kada quickly learned when the Octohog took a sudden swing at her and batted her right in the middle of her exposed stomach. She was sent flying backwards, slamming into the wall before she could activate her Curse and mitigate the impact.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow.” Kada garbled in the liquid beneath the floor. She had to immediately sink into it to dodge the next tentacle strike. A good amount of blood was seeping from her peppering of stomach wounds, so she floated under water for a few moments longer than she needed so her regeneration would at least kick in enough to start clotting.
Just as she was about to surface, Kada heard rumbling from above and only poked her head out enough to get an idea of what was going on. Laurim was on a rampage, her tentacles were flailing everywhere, smashing into the walls and doing a surprising amount of damage. That wasn’t good. If she kept it up, the timid Fiend might even break containment. Kada could keep reforming the room around her, but that’d be a huge pain in the ass.
She had to guess that Laurim wasn’t actively thinking to destroy everything around her. Most likely, she was just trying to seek out Kada and couldn’t see her because her opponent wasn’t directly in her line of sight—flailing to find her and panicking because she couldn’t.
Kada would have to face this monster head-on and keep its attention until she was able to find another opportunity to pacify Laurim for good. The moment Kada resurfaced, she unmelted her anchor—just in time too. A tentacle came flying and Kada was just barely able to swing the heavy metal before she was batted away again.
The sharp edge of the anchor scraped against the quills, sending sparks flying into Kada’s face, but she was fortunately still wearing her goggles. Another tentacle came at her a moment later, and she barely blocked that attack too. One after another, Laurim kept striking at her with abandon and without reprieve. Fortunately, it seemed she could only really control one tentacle at a time, or Kada would be in deep zjik.
Still, it was relentless. There were no openings to counterattack, let alone for Kada to load one of her orbs of tricks into the anchor to fire it. She supposed she could just grab one and chuck them, but it wouldn’t be nearly as effective.
After blocking and getting flustered for the twentieth-something time, Kada retreated back into the wall. She knew she didn’t have long before Laurim would get annoyed and start rampaging again, so she quickly swam through the rock and up to the ceiling, dropping down on the monster. Kada managed to get a good swipe between two of the pads of quills, cutting deep into a tentacle.
It wasn’t enough to sever it—she didn’t want to maim the poor girl and didn’t know how it would affect her when she transformed back—but it was deep enough for a fountain of chartreuse blood to gush out and spray the room. The moment Kada landed on her feet, she was off of them again.
The Octohog had started wailing in pain and was flailing its tentacles around without restraint. This triggered what felt like an earthquake—the whole room shaking as if it was about to collapse. Kada wanted to retreat back to the safety of her rocky liquid, but she couldn’t touch it for long enough to focus her Curse—bouncing around from all the shaking.
Well, she didn’t have to worry about escaping anymore. That path was completely taken from her. Since it was too chaotic for Kada to be able to defend, Laurim managed to snatch her up with a tentacle, constricting around her entire body with just her head poking out.
At least that stopped the shaking. Laurim seemed placated now that she’d caught her prey, bringing the trapped woman right in front of her eyes and started squeezing the life out of her. Zjik!!!! Was all Kada could think for a few seconds. She was trying to worm her way out but eventually gave up on trying to escape the Ocotohog’s grasp. It was too tight, and her wiggling was just making it tighter, not to mention all the quills digging into her and holding her in place.
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If escape wasn’t an option, she needed to think of something else before she passed out from the pain. Kada doubted Laurim would ever kill her intentionally, but she wasn’t confident that the instincts of her monster form shared the same beliefs and delicacy. If she lost consciousness, it could mean her life.
Damn, if she only had been able to hold onto her anchor’s handle. She could melt that and then melt the room with it. What else could she use? What was she touching that could fall? All of her clothes, or lack thereof, were trapped by the tentacles too. She couldn’t count on them making it to the ground.
Wait, my shoes! Kada tried to jostle her feet, which she could barely feel at this point, to make sure her water shoes hadn’t fallen off at some point. Once she’d flexed her toes enough to confirm they were there, Kada immediately melted them.
The few drips of goo fell towards the ground. Most hit the Octohog and were worthless to her, but one or two hit the solid rock below. And that was all she’d need. Through the pain, Kada still managed to twist her mouth into a grin. Laurim must have been confused when the tips of Kada’s blue hair started to glow silver, activating her awakened Curse.
A few feet of the floor melted, and the liquid started to spin. A whirlpool formed in the middle of the room, directly underneath Laurim. The force wasn’t enough to suck her under, but it still caused her to start twirling slowly around the room.
The point of the whirlpool wasn’t to actually do any damage, it was purely for distraction. Kada needed more time to focus on her Curse, and the Octohog dealing with this crisis made her forget about squeezing her victim to death for the duration.
Kada’s Curse traveled up along the walls and into the ceiling, melting huge quantities of the rock, but leaving a cylinder solid in the middle. She’d need a lot of liquid for this, enough to act as a proper piston. Once everything was melted, she focused all her mental energy on the flowing liquid above her, even having to stop the whirlpool below.
Laurim resituated, pulling Kada in front of her face again, and was about to resume her death-squeeze. But before she could, a giant pillar of rock in the shape of a fist shot down from the ceiling and punched the Octohog square in the bulbous part of its head.
The next thing Kada knew, she was on her ass on the ground with a giant egg in front of her that was quickly shrinking. A pained Laurim popped out, rubbing her head with tears streaming down her face.
“Oh, does it hurt too much? I’m sorry!” Kada went over to console her enemy, feeling bad for hitting her so hard now.
“No. It’s. Not. That,” Laurim painstakingly stammered between sniffs. “It’s just. I. Can’t. Beat. Youuuuuuuu!” Her tears turned to full wails of agony. “They’re- They’re gonna throw me awayyyyyyyy!”
◆◆◆
“And then they said that if I didn’t do a good job, they were going to relocate me to the sanitation department for the rest of my life!” Laurim continued to cry, though she’d long run out of tears—probably on the verge of dehydration.
Not a single punch had been swung since Laurim’s bonk on the head. Kada had been sitting behind the girl, petting her hair to try and soothe her while she told her life story—working through the issues and pain that had been building up for over a decade.
It truly was a tragic life, and she hadn’t known a loving home for a long time. Laurim must have been one of the first Fiends, possibly even the third ever by Kada’s estimations.
When she was still a young girl, she’d made a monster friend in the woods. Then, being the naive child that she was, she brought the monster home. The monster then proceeded to eat her newborn baby brother. How a brand-new baby could be capable of the concept of evil was a confusing thought, but Laurim turned into a Fiend nonetheless.
She was dead to her parents after that. They gave her a choice: be abandoned to the streets or be sold to the nearby research facility. As a scared child, she of course chose the latter. That facility would then go on to be absorbed by the Central Peace shortly after its creation.
Since then, she spent the last decade as their lab rat. After they garnered as much knowledge about Fiends as they could from her, she was assigned to a single research team that studied monsters. However, the head researcher of that team mysteriously disappeared a few months ago, and the rest of the team were relocated to other fields of study.
Since none of the other research groups felt they could make enough use of Laurim to warrant taking ownership of her, she was sent off to the military to join the other Fiends. Her results since joining had been pretty low, and the higher-ups had given her an ultimatum: do well on this mission, or she’d be reassigned once more.
After hearing that, Kada couldn’t help herself from hugging the neglected girl from behind and give her some love that was long overdue. “Laurim,” Kada spoke earnestly into the girl’s ear. “If they don’t appreciate you, if they’re just going to cast you out, why don’t you come live with us?”
“Huh?!” Laurim craned her head back to look at Kada. “Really?! What?! No! I Couldn’t? But! No! That’s Wrong! That’s Defecting! But… Really? Really, you wouldn’t throw me away?!”
“Of course not!” Kada assured her. “You could stay with us forever. And we wouldn’t expect results from you, just that you try your best, like I know you’ve been doing this whole time.”
“Wuh-wuh-waaahhhhhhhhh!” Laurim spouted incoherent garble and then dove towards Kada, hugging her back, and then spent the next several minutes crying into her chest. Kada had to assume that was her way of accepting the offer.
Eventually, Laurim reeled her head back, her eyes puffed up and clearly exhausted from the ordeal and non-stop barrage of emotions. “I think, I think I’m going to take a nap for a bit,” she yawned, already halfway to nodding off. Laurim snuggled into Kada’s arms, and then murmured, probably subconsciously, “Transform: Foala.”
Foala…?! Kada was uncertain that she heard it right. Like a Fox Koala?! Is she about to turn into a Pox?! Kada watched the egg with burning eyes, far more obsessively than any of the other transformations.
What came out was certainly a Fox Koala, but it wasn’t like Pox. It was almost the inverse of him. Instead of a koala body with fox ears and tail, it was a fox body with koala ears and tail. The Foala also had much stubbier legs than the slender ones of a standard fox.
After doing a big stretch to get used to her new form, the mauve-haired Foala padded around a bit, circling a few times before it finally got settled in Kada’s lap. One last yawn, and the adorable monster fell into a deep slumber.