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Final Boss Best Friends [Horror Apocalypse LitRPG]
Book 2 Chapter 57 - Wheedling and Whitling

Book 2 Chapter 57 - Wheedling and Whitling

Oriz lingered as she walked away from the camp. More than anything, she wanted to speak with the Four-Hearted Wasp. What were the odds of encountering another demon capable of speech and rationality? She still recalled — though fondly — the sense of superiority the One-Eyed Crow felt over the crowlings.

But before Oriz left, she oversaw the beginnings of the surgery.

If only to satisfy her fascination.

Anton lay as calmly as he could on the floor as Zoe started cutting. His breathing sharpened but otherwise remained steady. He clenched his fists and closed his eyes, but remained there, awake, alert to the knife in his flesh.

Zoe calmed him with her technique, reaching into his heart to still the pumping until blood barely flowed. His breathing slowed to a faint whistling and his eyes grew glassy. Blood pooled on his chest as Zoe’s chains moved independently. They slithered in and out of Anton’s chest, tiny psychokinetic needles on their tips plucking and sewing Skein and arteries into an elaborate display.

Gripped in one of her chains, the eye of the Earth System awaited implantation. It watched everything. So obvious it was alive, just like the flesh digesting in her stomach. Was this how they treated gods on Earth? There was something… horrific… about these humans. They laughed, and they fought with violence seething beneath their skin. Nothing like the madness of one like Trinch, but something more akin to the Gambler’s stage.

Oriz still couldn’t believe what Bella said about the Gambler. Of course, she felt differently now — how couldn’t she fall for that brave and reckless woman, always throwing up a laugh to hide how deeply, how rawly everything scoured her heart?

But still, they ate their God in the belly of the Gambler’s Hell and now they were speaking of moving on. Speaking of their next move.

As though nothing happened at all.

Anton let out a hiss as Zoe placed the eye into his wound.

“Now begins the tricky part,” Zoe said as her eyes narrowed with focus. Her heart technique pulsed with Skein, but there was an extra connection there, a harmony that thrummed through the technique settled over Oriz’s heart.

It was faint since Oriz only felt the echoes, but it was calming. A call of symbiosis.

Anton smiled where he lay.

“I’m losing consciousness, boss. I walk with the wild things now…”

Zoe didn’t answer. The two humans sank deeper into their private moment of transformative vivisection, and Oriz turned away. Maybe they worshipped in their own ways? It must be hard, to grow up on a world and not even know about the System. Fortunately, Bella and the others were the last generation to suffer such profane ignorance.

She reached the cage in question. It was tall, grimy, and a waspish demon huddled in the corner, feeding upon two malnourished but eternal souls. Its jaw worked at the flesh, and its tongue slithered into the wound. A fat and hairy wasp crawled from a hole in the shoulder — a whispery sound from the papery flesh inside the hive — and flew over toward Oriz.

It landed on a bar and the chitinous limbs clicked like knife tips against the steel.

“My liege is indisposed.”

The narrow bars prevented it from climbing out, and Oriz matched its stare.

“Get him.”

“He must nurture his wrathful hunger. I can take a message, and may act on with his authority in certain matters,” the wasp's head twitched before it leaned closer and whispered. “He’s been in this cage a thousand years, and I think it’s wearing him down a little. You know how it is? Anyway,” the wasp’s voice returned to normal. “What can I help you with?”

Oriz already felt her patience being tested. Even without her Skein, she could kill this thing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t powerful.

Demonic deals were just the System’s way of cheating itself. This was fine. She had to be careful, but this was fine. Her first time in Hell had proven a temptation, but she resisted the One-Eyed Crow. In truth, it never offered to make a deal, rather only to drink and discuss.

She had congratulated herself on reaching the Gambler’s Green Room. She resisted temptation, her soul withstood the fire, but now…

“I want to make a deal.”

The wasp made a show of casually cleaning its antennas.

“We might arrange something.”

Oriz almost rolled her eyes.

“You offered to show my disciple where an angel was contained but…”

“We can show you instead if that’s what you want. Leave the others to rot, I’m sure they deserve it. Maybe they’ll enjoy the inside of a cage for a millennium or two?”

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“No, I want you to show us all,” as mad as the humans were, Oriz would follow them if it meant she would see an angel in the flesh. “But that is just directions.”

“Directions?” the wasp buzzed. “We will guide you through a network of doors and overlapping pockets of Hell. Do you think that is as easy as drawing a map and sending you on your merry way?”

Oriz smirked.

“I’ve been in Hell before. I know my way around.”

“The words you speak are utter foolishness, but…” the wasp twitched its antennae. “This is not your first swim in the infernal.”

“No, it’s not, and if you want your freedom, you need to offer something sweeter than the flesh of an angel.”

The wasp remained silent. The cage was silent, as the demon ceased eating. It licked its lips.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to give me back my Skein.”

It smiled.

“A true Deal, after all this long. Has the Gambler died? Or am I simply the luckiest demon in existence?”

“The Gambler is dead.”

“Ha!”

The wasp danced into the air and was joined by its siblings as they bobbed around the demon’s head in murderous joy.

“For that news alone,” the demon said. “I will show you where the angel is located. Its containment is probably breaking, so we’ll take a shortcut… but that all depends on you freeing me. You want your Skein back?”

The demon in the corner flickered.

It pressed its body against the bars in front of Oriz’s face. Grinding, almost, grinning, as it reached her. Bony fingers flexed into an open hand outstretched in an invitation to shake.

Oriz recoiled from the trembling fingers, from the smell, and from the overwhelming eagerness.

“Don’t worry,” said the Four-Hearted Wasp. “It will only hurt in the most pleasurable ways as my power sings through your veins. Venom devours only the weak flesh, the crumbling threads, and leaves behind a land as smooth as glass,” it ran a palm over its smooth, chitinous head. “Though for such a complicated, life-altering Deal, I will need something from you in return.”

“I won’t bargain my soul.”

The demon smiled and stepped back from the bars.

“Then I suppose I have nothing you can buy except some directions. Please, open the cage, and let us be on our way.”

It waited, patiently, as the wasps crawled back into their hive through the hexagonal holes in his side. Flesh whispered as the insects vanished.

Oriz glanced back toward the camp. Zoe continued working on integrating the eye with Anton. She had come far in the applications of her techniques, and Oriz knew this was only the beginning.

Could Zoe heal her injuries? A surgeon of Skein seemed a perfect solution to her problem… though she didn’t know what needed to be cut inside her… cutting grass helped nothing if the grass never grew.

And the grass in her soul remained grazed down to the nubs, devoured in its entirety by the Black Star Dungeon.

Could she wait for Zoe to get the skill to fix her? Or should she take the easy way now? The easy way… the brutal way… the payment she could never reclaim…

A life without a soul would make it harder to have a life with Bella, but she also wanted her Skein so she could protect those dear to her. Skein would let her train Zoe. Skein would let her make an impact in this alignment of fate and horror that was falling upon the universe.

When she fell into the Black Star system, she never imagined such a convergence of events would pull her out. Was there really a fourth being in the Crimson Armada pulling the strings?

She shuddered free of her reverie as the demon waited for her to answer…or leave…

She matched its eyes, opened her mouth, breathed, the words caught on her tongue, and she looked away.

“I’ll free you if you promise to show us the safest and fastest way to the angel.”

“And what of your Skein?”

“My disciple will heal me, in time.”

“Ah, so that one is your disciple? She reeks of parasites, of the unholy filth trapped outside Heaven and Hell, truly you are brave to trust the state of your Skein to one such as her…”

“A demon would call someone unholy?”

“It is not the things between Heaven and Hell that one should fear, but those beyond such constraints… I digress…” he thrust his hand through the bars. “Free me from this cage and I will take you to the angel as fast as possible.”

“And as safe as possible.”

The demon grinned.

“Of course.”

Two hands, pale, and alien, met on the outside of the bars. Lit only by the flames of Hell, they shook and sealed fate.

Their hands slipped apart, and Oriz felt as though she balanced on the edge of a cliff. The cage bars wobbled, and the demon pushed its way through them.

“So wonderful to feel freedom once more,” it grinned as wasps crawled out and flew away into the environment. “And of course, dear Oriz, you just let me know if you want to make another deal.”

She wouldn't.

“I won't,” she said.

Of course, she wouldn't…

###

With the care of a mother, Bella set her runeblade down on the ground beside the runespear. With Skidmark’s help, she cleared a space on the floor free of rusted chain links, broken weapons, and scattered bones. Part of her wondered what had left the space covered in such detritus, but another wondered if the Gambler hadn’t created it to look this way out of sheer theatrics.

Skidmark sat on a small cage with wire mesh walls that housed a curled-up creature somewhere between a shaved house cat and a prepubescent boy. Bella had inspected the cage, but lethargic eyes met her’s before it flopped over and faced away. Did she want to know what it was or what it did to enter that cage?

“Should we…” it was hard to think beyond the two weapons in front of her. “Should we try to free the people in these cages?”

“What makes you think they’re people?” Skidmark replied as she swung her heels against the cage. “Your friends said that the other one was a demon, right? Maybe these are all like, the worst of the worst, the most horrible demons? Maybe they deserve to be locked up in Hell for whatever they did to the Gambler?”

Bella cocked an eyebrow.

“You’re a Gambler apologist, now?”

“He was a prick, but maybe we’re surrounded by pricks. You and I both know it’s not best to let pricks get too close.”

“And what does that mean?”

“You and… Oriz, was it? I mean, she’s fine, I get it. Like, I really get it if you get what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“Like if you ever wanted a third, you know…?”

“We don’t.”

“Because I’ve never been with an alien before…”

Skidmark grinned as she drummed her heels against the cage. Bella smiled but decided not to engage. She had better things to focus on.

The runic weapons pulled at her like a magnet. She should be naked for this. Blood should cover her skin while she carved matching runes into her flesh. This should happen on a battlefield as the sky burned and the living screamed…

Both weapons looked up at her as she shuddered. There would be no nudity, no blood, no carving of flesh…

She knelt before them, and Skidmark let out a lewd whistle.

“Do you want me to leave? Or should I get naked too?”

Bella’s eyes widened slightly as she looked down. She was nude. Her clothes discarded. The sword pulsed inside her grip as the tip of the blade angled toward her skin. So this is how it was?

Barbed cables churned inside her veins as her eyes paled, and her soul opened.

“Strip down,” a metallic voice grated from Bella’s throat. “Skyclad and bloody we must be, before the true feast begins.”