The Lisilese's internal temperature is fluctuating, which tells me that he's likely awake but preserving his energy as he's bleeding both blue blood and warmth from several injuries. I lower my stance to offer a smaller target for him to aim at and for me to defend.
If I can distract the Shade, or take him out, with the lightning construct... that'll give that Lizard enough of an opening to deal with Suxen. The issue is that he might truly be unconscious so attacking the Shade would give Suxen an opening since he has been restraining her as well as me.
“I can point you to Aisha but the Director isn't going anywhere.” I declare.
“Hm.” The Shade ponders but shakes his head in the negative, his eyes remain trained on me as he does. “That's alright then, we can all wait here. Without moving.”
I'm not waiting for Aisha to show up, she would turn this into an unmanageable situation. I notice through my sense that Suxen is injecting flow into the tunnel's metal veins with her feet. Shit, even if I don't make a move, she will.
I gather most of my energy in the wall to counter her, leaving myself with only enough to feed my defensive construct. Suxen notices that I intruded into what they've been calling a 'circuit' and she makes a thin smile.
I frown as her flow retreats in front of mine and decide to pull most of it back as well. I boost my lightning construct's power and decide to try to provoke her into action with it, so the Shade will shoot her instead of me. I charge the sections of the wall leading to her, and the air as well.
My provocation fails as she simply allows me, seemingly fearless even though my previous lightning construct injured her. The Shade is definitely aware that Suxen and I are making moves, but he seems content to let us fight it out.
I can't trust that, he revealed his presence by shooting the Lisilese when Suxen was about to die, that's no coincidence and neither was the fact that Aisha showed relief from the Director's survival.
My overinflated sense of self-worth blinded me from an obvious conclusion. Suxen matters a lot more to them than I do. The fact is that the Shades have been after distribution data from the beginning, confirmed by the fact that Aisha went straight for Suxen's research.
The two of them would obviously care much more about the madwoman who can gather and analyze that data than a brutish hybrid whose only skills lie in battle. The drugs Suxen created might also be of interest to them since they seemed to numb the Numbers' sense of pain.
Rumble. The tunnel shakes around us, distracting us as it disturbs our footing. I pick that moment to activate my lightning construct, deciding to bathe both Director and Shade in bolts. The bright blue-white bolts of electricity course through the veins, headed in two opposite directions.
A half-dozen things happen all at once. My scimitar is torn out of my hands, moving like it did earlier, yet this time it hovers for the split second during which the lighting storm is the most intense around me, before the bolts flash out towards the designated targets.
The weapon drops back down, landing in the exact center of the tunnel and at equal distance from Suxen and the Shade. Bolts strike Suxen from all around her but don't seem to have any effect as they simply travel down her legs and fade back into the ground.
The Shade shoots his arrow at me just before the tempest reaches him but when it does, he directly drops and starts convulsing. He'll only stay down for a little while, he's too far to sense but I can see a slight golden glow inside his clothes.
His arrow's flight is destabilized by the lightning's passage. The projectile swerves, seemingly edging to the tunnel's center, but its speed makes it smash into a wall long before that can happen. Crack. Stone actually splits around where the arrow-tip hit.
The Lisilese waits for the lightning to pass him before slithering up to his clawed toes. His movements are so discreet that I'm beyond certain that I wouldn't have noticed if not for my symbiont overly paying attention to the reptile-like being. Apparently, so has Suxen.
The Director raises both her hands towards him. I hear a sizzling sound and smoke rises up from between the Lisilese's runic collar and neck. He drops to his knees soon after. Thunk. The sound of his scales impacting the stone shakes me to my core as I realize that Ka'tchuk likely just died.
The two-meter-tall creature makes an effort to remain sitting on his clawed heel instead of falling but he fails to balance himself in time. I reflexively step up to him and catch his shoulder, stabilizing him.
His head turns towards me. I meet his red vertical iris, there is still a glimmer of life in them. But then his muzzle keeps turning and his skull keeps going, closer and closer to his shoulder until his neck splits up from the runic collar. His head hits the ground.
There is a charcoal black ring where his scales were cut, the flesh is so burnt that it's lost all color and isn't even bleeding. The last remnants of my lightning construct fade away without having achieved much.
I pull lion's step up to my scimitar, grimacing in pain because of my injured left knee. I lean down to grab the weapon, take a breath, and kick the ground with another lion's step to propel myself at the Director. I hear a whistling sound. My symbiont lets go of my weapon to swipe at the arrow flying at my back.
I notice, or rather feel, that it won't make it so I use of my strengthening construct to twist my trunk, so abruptly that I almost pull my back muscles. My left hand hits the shaft.
The arrow shatters entirely, shredding bandages, splitting rubbery brown skin, severing string-like muscles up to the wrist. The thin black bones are exposed and several articulations visibly disjointed.
My symbiont lashes out in pain, swiping at Suxen which propels large drops of viscous blood all around us and towards her. She raises her forearm to block it with one of her golden barriers.
I struggle to bring my scimitar back with only my right hand but do manage to deliver a quick swipe towards her leg, aiming to distract her while I try to send flow into the blood since some of it landed near her throat. She blocks my blade with another barrier.
I lose my link to the energy I sent to my symbiont's viscous sap. I notice the runes on this section of the tunnel activate. Suxen's constructs shatter so I push my weight on my blade to cut into her leg but it only results in a superficial cut.
Suxen retreats, panicked like her plan went sideways. My sense isn't providing me with many details, the Shade is too far but I doubt he did this anyway. I try to seize my scimitar with both hands to quickly dispatch of the Director but my left hand is too damaged to grip anything, it's barely in shape to hit with.
I pass my symbiont around the handle to settle it in the pit of my left elbow, making it easier to raise it and giving me a platform to strike from. I don't waste time. I abruptly extend my left arm, which jerks the blade up, and launch a single-handed lion strike at her neck.
I hear Aisha's voice but, with my symbiont's fury and my own anger towards Suxen, I simply choose not to hear whatever she'll use to force me to spare the Director. Suxen suddenly splits in two, the blurry warm image my sense gives me steps to the left while what my eyes see remains.
I try to forcefully follow but my right arm just isn't strong enough to do so safely or even accurately so I abort before breaking a bone, giving Suxen the time she needs to put some distance between us.
“Aisha!” I growl.
“I'm sorry, Elizabeth.” She replies.
I hesitate, if I keep pursuing Suxen while ignoring Aisha's constructs, there isn't any guarantee I'll get her since I would have missed whether the Shade intervened or not and it'll inform them that the illusions don't work on me.
If I try to use a lightning construct or an air-blade, she'll activate the disruption construct again. Not to mention that the other Shade will keep launching arrows at me and it'll be hard to dodge while limping.
I inspect him, finding that he's up on one knee, another arrow knocked with the bow pulled tautly. Aisha is carrying a large bag on her shoulder and making her way over to Suxen. The Director is visibly rattled and decides to get closer to the Shade.
I send flow underground, directing it towards my symbiont's brown blood on Suxen's mostly blue blouse from the warbeast's blood. I start weaving a blood-blade but the tunnel's runes flicker and I lose my link before I can finish it. Aisha is intermittently activating the disruption effect.
Control yourself. I take a few quick breaths and shift my weight over to my right leg. I quickly analyze my chances. Aisha has no doubt burned a lot of flow to make that illusion, however briefly, and she has to control the runic construct in the tunnel. What are my options to attack?
None, I don't have the flow to deal with the two Shades and Suxen. My left knee isn't in a good shape, my left arm isn't either, my symbiont's sense is straining to keep up at the moment. Fuck me.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
“There's no need for you to act, Director.” Aisha declares, keeping watch over me. “You'll be safe in our custody.”
“So this is it?” I ask, looking at the bag. “You used me to get the data, now you're taking Suxen and her research regardless of what she did.”
“Cetyz is at the end of this tunnel.” She replies with a sad look, pointing at the one to the right. “You should go.”
“If you want my help, then get the Specimen back under your control and bring it along.” Suxen demands calmly, reaching to the veined wall.
Aisha throws a silent glare at Suxen. I notice only now that Aisha is no longer wearing an illusion over her face. She's back to how she looked when I first met her except for her black eyes and short hair. She throws a gaze at the other Shade over my shoulder.
This is when she betrays me. How foolish of me to think that I would be able to retain the upper hand, she would obviously pick my weakest moment to turn on me. Aisha turns back to Suxen and nods. She got her answer.
I tense, preparing to block another arrow, getting ready to break my body to kill these two women before dying under a barrage of projectiles. Aisha's left hand moves slowly, reaching to the dagger behind her back.
I rest my scimitar's spike flat against my elbow to leverage the weapon up to my shoulder. Meanwhile, I let my symbiont hang to my side, resting and slowly healing. It's slowly bleeding and looks disabled, which isn't far from the truth.
Aisha takes a single step forward towards me, placing her right next to Suxen. If she takes one more step, I won't be able to take both down in one strike. I lean forward, threatening to attack if Aisha advances any more.
“It didn't have to come to this. You should have just listened to me.” Aisha utters coldly.
Her eyes are empty of emotion, ruthless. She pulls her dagger out. Something's off, her first resort shouldn't be to engage me in melee range, especially since that's making it easier for me to get to her with my injured knee.
On cue with my suspicion, I detect a thin spinning arrow headed straight for me. I lion's step aside, avoiding both the projectile and Aisha's attac... not? She is stabbing up with her dagger but not at me, at Suxen.
The arrow releases an intense flash of light just as it reaches me, blinding me and the Director both. Aisha's dagger pierces through the bottom of Suxen's jaw, I detect that it stops only when it hits the palate. The madwoman's tongue is now literally hanging by two threads.
Aisha pulls her dagger out in a cascade of bright red blood. Suxen reaches up to her jaw, gargling and trying to pressure the injury with little to no success as too many layers were cut. She has a panicked look in her eyes as she weaves a construct.
Aisha stands aside and lets the woman heal herself, keeping her eyes on me. Her words from before were aimed at the Director, but I have no doubt that the threat holds for me.
“I can't let you leave with her. Even if she wasn't a danger to me, she kidnapped people and caused the war, there are too many reasons that call for her death.” I declare, struggling to remain calm.
“You cannot afford to fight us.” Aisha denies. “You are barely strong enough to even reach the cell, and with the fire upstai...” Crack. The sound of something breaking all the way up reaches us even all the way down here. “With the fire upstairs, you have even less time to act than you realize.”
“I would win.” I lie confidently.
“You likely would.” Aisha acknowledges. “Please don't make me fight you. I'm sorry about this but Suxen will be under a tight leash, she won't be allowed to pursue the research she has begun here.”
I know I should back down, that freeing Cetyz must be my priority, but the memory of those pregnant women chained to a wall prevents me. Suxen tries to inhale but chokes on her own blood. Yet, she doesn't let that distract her from the equations she's weaving in flow to mend her flesh.
I take stock of my flow, finding that I still have a half-dozen portions. It's enough to put up a fight. I prepare myself, assembling a lightning-armor-piercing construct and a lion strike.
Oath or not, Suxen cannot be allowed to leave alive. I might even survive. I feel my symbiont disagreeing, hanging weakly from my side, it has strong feelings about oaths and is basically informing me that we won't be able to take another one of those arrows, much less two.
I could grab Turpin, use him as a shield... No. Aisha is watching me too closely, she won't let me. I could grapple her into submission even in this state, I have no doubt. But Suxen is bleeding a lot less even if she's far from healed, she would be able to intervene.
I need to make a move. My symbiont, almost directly responding to my thought, stops injecting me with its cool substance to start bringing its torn flesh and muscles back together.
The pain coming from my injuries, especially my stomach wound, and our burnt flesh grows by several degrees. My symbiont is unsubtle in reminding me that we're not in shape to get into unnecessary fights, that the consequences of doing that could be severe.
“Suxen.” I seethe, glaring.
“Elizabeth.” Aisha tells me softly. “Think of it like she's sentenced to slavery, she will not see daylight ever again.”
I throw a quick glance over my shoulder. The other Shade has an arrow ready and isn't showing any signs of fatigue from keeping his huge bow taut. I groan but, with my symbiont in such a bad shape, know I'll be very likely to lose.
“Give me her book.” I demand both as a test of Aisha's intentions towards the Director's research and because it might help me in the near future. “And her tongue.”
“Done.” Aisha nods.
“Blrr!” Suxen exclaims, trying to protest.
The Shade takes advantage of the fact that the Director has to hold her own flesh together and maintain her healing construct to pull the expensive leather covered paper book out of the blouse. There are blood stains from three species on its cover and edge.
Aisha hands it over, entirely ignoring that I even made the other demand. I take it and leave, rushing towards the tunnel to the right, caring none about how Aisha tenses when I go past her and actually take some pleasure when I detect her expression falling. It's too blurry to tell what kind of face she's wearing out of my sight but I can tell she's far from proud of herself.
As I limp through the tunnel, I decide to dismantle my constructs, even the strengthening one sustaining my heart. I might need the energy to free Cetyz but even if I don't, I'll need it to heal myself.
Before I even make it two dozen meters, the other Shade manages to cross fifty meters to join Aisha. They take hold of the Director and start dragging her away. With any luck, Suxen will die of blood loss or I'll catch them on the way back. My symbiont shivers in agreement.
At the end of the tunnel, I find a large double door made entirely of the dark veined metal. There are runes all over the surface and each of those is brimming with flow.
I stand there and observe for a minute since my symbiont is still putting itself back together, specifically the hand articulations, which means I can't act yet. As far as I can see, or detect, there isn't any energy resupplying this runic construct which means that it is losing power, but too slowly for me to wait it out.
I would try to sense inside but the metal seems much too thick and I don't want to place my hand on it before assessing that it's safe to do so. I take a few minutes to memorize the pattern, specifically the single equation running around the more classical runes' circumference.
I take Suxen's booklet out, searching through it to find out whether she has notes about it or not. I stop when I find myself, drawn naked and in detail with a thin quill. There are notes from both Suxen and Francis.
It's easy to tell which is which not only because of the handwriting but because the man was so disgusted with me he actually kept his distance from even a drawing. There are mostly numbers about my height and observations about my health.
It hurts to find that, according to Suxen, I won't live to be thirty. I could even fall within months if the parasite... My symbiont pulls on one of my ribs in annoyance at me thinking the word... if my symbiont keeps straining my body to its limits.
The madwoman covered the next page in ideas of where to cut to force the parasite, symbiont, to integrate with my reproductive organs. Even more terrifying is that she planned to get me pregnant from one of her Numbers before that to see if my symbiont affects the fetus and to have a second test subject if the, apparently successful, merging of our two species is only possible because I'm special in some way that could be transmissible.
Another page with a naked drawing of me but this time focused on me and my symbiont's inner workings. I learn only now that it has no organs, not even a brain, but an insanely complex nervous system with a large number of nodes that Suxen suggests could fill the same function as a brain but spread out to be less vulnerable to injury.
I swiftly go through the pages, finding a large number of equations with bare-bone explanations on mathematical concepts unknown to me but I can tell that it's mostly about flow access.
I go back to the beginning of the book, remembering that I caught sight of a diagram that vaguely resembled a Princess but that I dismissed because of the crisscrossing lines and blots that I now know depict a nervous system from seeing my symbiont and me on the same drawing.
Apparently, Princesses are rather close to my symbiont, or it's the other way around considering it was partly created in their image. Suxen notes here her observations on the Rykz and the fact that it isn't capable of reproduction on its own, that she would need to turn it into a Queen to study the process with which they modify drones.
I go through the book front to back but find no reference to the runic construct in front of me. I do find two things of interest to me, and one that worries me. First the veins in the wall are made of metal like I've assumed which means that my lightning construct interacting with metal does weird things to Vuskyt.
Second, I find the detailed equations she used to make the helix-shaped construct that she activated in conjunction with the array to extract the data. I'll have to go through that to see if I can recreate the time slowing effect, I did manage to copy the field it created with unstructured flow.
The heavy book contains a lot more than I've seen and, even if most of it is madness, some might be of help. But apparently not for what matters the most, freeing Cetyz. What worries me is that it feels incomplete, that Suxen developed her ideas a lot more but not on this book that she carried at all times.
I put the book away and reach out to my symbiont, wondering how it's doing. It responds back with a small whine, seemingly apologizing about how slowly it's healing despite the fact that it's already stopped the bleeding and is in the process of mending the hand's string-like muscles to then pop its root-like fingers' articulations back into place.
It feels my impatience and worry. I caress my own left wrist, soothing it because while we're in a hurry, we cannot afford to be hasty. I could possibly go around this metal door's construct by breaking the wall with an air-blade but I doubt Suxen would have left such an obvious loophole.