V – 00003.1 – Preparation.
Runes began twisting together, and black metal grew from the ominous glowing red symbols, forming new chains. The new section of chain I visualized within my core both looked and felt different, with barbed links and spikes weaved into their connections.
My infernal mana for the first time truly felt evil, as if it was attempting to communicate its purpose to me, and its sole reason for existence was so it could create misery and feed off the suffering of others.
I watched the malignant attribute as it contorted, chains folded over, twisted, and wrapped around themselves, forming a massive, foreboding ohm shape. The new branch of malicious chains held that shape, holding almost perfectly still aside from the occasional shudder and flash of red, just waiting to be put to use.
This reminds me a lot of when I managed to first get the ice aspect out of death… Maybe this is another aspect of infernal?
Staring inwardly at the attributes of my infernal mana did nothing; clearly, awkward third-eye contact was not a viable strategy for the advancement of magic.
Shit... Maybe it interacts with the soul in some way? After all, the first time this stubborn attribute ever did anything was to eat some asshole’s soul.
Runes flared and twisted as I directed my will into the chains; they rattled and unfurled with more and more of the runes that seemed to form some kind of sentence beginning to convert to the strange spiky ohm symbol that the mana coiled itself into when left idle.
The infernal chains raced across my core. Not unlike a pit bull near an elementary school. Came a juvenile thought as I watched the ominous chains that seemed forged for the express purpose of torture wrap themselves around the ghostly bound figure.
Metal coiled up the soul's limbs as the spiked chains bit into the spectral being; the barbs and spikes disappeared into his skin as soft rays of teal light bled out of the fresh wounds caused by the horrific chains. His mouth opened wide, and I felt him screaming.
No sounds escaped his haunting visage, yet I felt his wails echoing through the rattling chains that dug into his soul; I felt his soul bleeding into my chains.
For the first time I truly felt all the infernal mana I had at my disposal. It felt connected to me, closer than ever before, similar to my death mana. It was as if I had taken a necessary step down a road to make this energy a part of me and not just present within me.
Soon, however, a new sensation began to course through me; my heart throbbed and began to beat harder and harder in my chest. I felt liquid metal filling my veins; a flaming pain coated my arteries like a thousand shots of epi to the chest, and under the eviscerated, blood-soaked shirt, I saw a glowing ohm shining like an evil smile over my core.
My eyes flicked open, and my vision narrowed to pinpricks. I could instantly feel how wrong and out of sync my perspective was; the world seemed to stutter in my vision, moving like the image on a camera when you pause between frames.
I rose to my feet with inhuman alacrity, my entire body flowing upwards like liquid as the terrible pain of strain hammered my joints. As I stood, I felt the feeling of fire in my blood stutter off for a moment. One second I was halfway up from a sitting position, and the next I was standing straight up, the change in perspective coming so fast I felt my balls in my throat.
My attention was drawn to my core again, where I saw the dread-inducing chains digging further into the soul; his legs were covered in cracks and puncture marks where no more light was coming from. My chains snaked up his body and cut into him, and I could feel his torture as his spark was slowly being drained into my chains, powering the insane enchantment that granted me such monstrous speed a moment ago.
I pulled on my infernal mana, mentally ripping the torturous chains away from the quickly fading and disintegrating soul until they were just barely clinging onto his form.
“Fuck me, ok note to self, infernal mana is a hungry motherfucker… But fuck me if it’s not worth it; enough souls to power it, and I could probably pull some Matrix shit.”
“Dream fucking on, you almost dislocated your knees just standing up that fast. If you try to dodge a bullet, you’ll be the coolest guy in your nursing home,” said a taunting voice.
“Firstly, blow me. Secondly, I’m certain that we can find a more controlled release of this… Torture chain. That said, I really hope the soul can recover afterwards; it would suck if they were basically batteries, extremely short-lived ones at that.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
I hung my head low and pressed my hand to my face as I heard one of the voices say. “Not sure about all the other shit he said, but I second the blowing.”
There is a fucking circus in my skull and no more therapists. I thought, taking a few steps forward around my hut, pacing back and forth until eventually I noticed I was walking, entirely unaided.
Looking my body over, I was still covered in minor flesh wounds, massive bruises, and swollen muscle; frankly, I resembled a corpse who’d been beaten with a stick post mortem, yet aside from the chilling pain that was haunting me, I felt mostly fine, and feeling for the energies in my body, I felt soft teals mixed with bloody reds pumping through my body like magical blood.
No fucking idea how I can feel color.
Malicious infernal mana, bound soul energy, like a compound, as tiny amounts of it were distributed everywhere in my body. Curious, I decided to cut the flow of my infernal energy and silence the Ohm symbol in my core, and with no extra warning, I felt my legs suddenly drop underneath me, the repaired parts of my body suddenly nowhere near strong enough to make up for how much strength I was missing.
A soft chuckle escaped my lips. “Holy shit, either these legacy attributes are all insane, or I picked some of the most kickass ones possible.”
No shit. Viktor, you literally chose these attributes because you were certain they would be the best choice for causing as much terror and damage as possible.
“Please shut up. Can’t a man just talk to himself without his delusions thinking they’re a part of it?”
Let’s try not to rely on that torturous aspect of infernal mana until I know more, unless it’s an emergency; this seems like a pretty good bullshit card to pull in dire situations. I thought as I simultaneously called out to my shades, who were standing stock-still, creepy statues outside my hut.
“Go bring me some more shit to eat and make sure it’s still alive when you bring it to me.” The shadows needed no more instruction and took off into the woods to, assumedly, scour it for a meal.
Several hours flew by with dark specters ravaging the local fauna to heal their vile overlord, until finally…
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you narrating us sitting in a forest waiting to be fed?” No response came from the voice in my head as I reached out towards one of my returning shades and grabbed the raccoon out of its hands by the head; my teeth snapped over the creature’s throat, ending it quickly.
I gave a swift end to all the beasts that my shades offered, until finally I felt the last pieces of my shattered anatomy stitch themselves back together, the last vestiges of pain retreating from my body.
I rose again at a much more controlled pace this time and planted my feet firmly. Taking a quick glance at my stocks, I noticed they had barely increased by a couple of pounds in each category. “Well, that fucking sucks.” I said to myself as I reached out and flexed my will, pulling on the connection I felt to the shades.
The dense black bodies of death lost their form, turning into wisps of energy that flowed into the tattoos on the backs of my hands before reforming into people-shaped shades in my core.
I fell back into my previous rhythm. I spent my days gathering wood and fashioning it into lumber, a process which the shades sped up greatly, and hunting; unlike before, though, the manual labor didn’t distract me from my anger. They did nothing to lessen my loss; if anything, they time to myself only intensified my black moods. I felt the forges that held my seething rage growing hotter by the day.
Raising my hands high, I slammed the stone blade of my axe into a stump near my home and stared into my freshly built log cabin; the walls were rough and rife with gaps, and the door was nothing more than a few large pieces of wood lashed together that I had carved a groove into to make lifting it in and out of place easier.
My roof was made up of sticks and tied-together grass, plant fiber, and smaller planks to give it more weight. I allowed a moment of satisfaction to creep up my spine as I settled the ill-fitting door in place, enclosing me in darkness and finally granting me sanctuary from the elements after weeks.
Pulling up the list of common mutations I’d had my eye on, I glanced over at my stocks for a moment, double-checking my math before hitting accept.
[Hyper Mobile Joints – Common, Dense Skeleton – Common, Dense Tendons – Common, Enhanced Night Vision – Common, Thick Skin – Common. Acquired, please stand by stocks are being drained.]
[Musculature: 21]
[Bone: 8]
[Blood: 26]
[Viscera: 12]
[Free Attribute points: 0]
[Skill Points: 3]
[Legacy Perk: 1]
[Spell: 1]
[Core: 1]
[Soul: 1]
[Shade: 2]
[General Perk: 1]
I watched my stocks tick down rapidly as the Ikarus Protocol ate away at hundreds of pounds of bone and muscle, blood and gore, in mere moments, and once they were fully drained into barely the double digits, I felt my body collapsing under me, my bones softened like an ooze or heated metal, and the rest of my body soon followed.
My skin started to dry and crack and flake away, and shortly after I went completely blind as a horrible burning sensation took root deep within my eyeballs. I lay in horror-inducing agony, constantly forced to question my choice of accepting so many mutations simultaneously, yet every time I questioned my decision, my mind hit a will of steel that responded. “It is worth it. Their time is up, and I won’t grant them another second.”
It must have been hours until my sight came back; the pitch-black interior of my home was illuminated in greyscale. And crawling out of my cabin, I saw the sky was dyed red with the sun bleeding out into the horizon; I stretched my body and felt how different everything was. The first thing that struck me was my weight; I was significantly heavier than before.
My movements came easily, yet I had this strange awareness of how much force I was using to lift my massive arm, covered in packed muscle that had been thickened, which was in turn wrapped around massively dense bones.
The skin of my palms was no longer rubbery with soft callouses, but instead my hands felt hard, needing significant force to push inwards, and prodding the rest of my body felt the same; my skin had the texture and resistance of extremely thick rubber with a rough outer layer, and the extremely thick muscle and bone underneath the skin only further increased the durability of my body. Dragging a claw against my inner forearm softly did little more than leave a faint line of dead skin cells.
I stretched and felt the relief of my joints snapping in place as I reached my arms out, spreading my incredibly broad shoulders, and slowly I lowered my hands to my hips and began grabbing everything I believed I would need.
“Let’s make it your last night.” I whispered softly as I stalked towards the city.