Bel’s body shook. First, from the lingering effects of battle and fear, but then from a growing sense of outrage.
She groaned and forced herself to sit upright. Then she used her liquid body to gently reset her dislocated shoulder. It still hurt, but she was able to move things in a mostly normal way afterwards.
After flexing her injured arm, she turned her face upwards towards the heavens. “What the hell!” she shouted. Her snakes peered around, hesitantly hissing at the open air.
“Why am I stuck doing this! Lempo, you should just crush Satrap with a mountain, what do I care!”
She hadn’t let herself fall apart into a quivering mess since her time in Technis’ prison, but she’d been sleep deprived for months and the weight of everyone’s expectations was crushing her like a bug. She had been a single snake’s attention span away from being split down the middle without even knowing it was happening.
“Why can’t someone else do this garbage? Why can’t I just forget about all this and go live my own life?” she muttered.
Bel grabbed a rock that the fight had dislodged and threw it at the wall. She felt a small amount of satisfaction when it shattered with a loud crack. She sent several more stones after it.
“Lempo should take care of her own problems, and Beth should have gotten her own revenge.”
Another few rocks smashed into the wall.
“And James should…*
Bel sucked on her lip. “Okay, James is fine. But he should forget about Satrap and just go somewhere else to enjoy life with Daran and their new baby.”
Bel paused, another rock cocked behind her head. “Unless he’s secretly hoping that I’ll find a way for him to get back to the Old World.”
That thought reminded Bel of Orseis, who was really just a kid. “I guess that she just wants to fit in somewhere. I will absolutely bring her with me if I sneak off to some quiet corner of Olympos.”
And the gorgons…
Bel frowned. “I guess that the gorgons really do need me,” she sighed.
Cress was like an idealistic, happy version of Beth; she had all the determination and resentment, but none of the bitterness and aversion to personal attachments. And then there was Manipule, who was… Well, the clingy gorgon would be upset if Bel was killed. And the rest of the gorgons were expecting her to lead them to a better world, one where they wouldn’t be persecuted for simply being gorgons.
Bel sighed and rubbed her aching body. She was scuffed up and bloody, once again, but she was fine. Manipule would probably fret over her like an overprotective mother bird, just because she’d picked up a few more scars.
The thought brought a glum smile to her face. I’d be pretty embarrassed if everyone saw me looking like this, wouldn’t I?
Abandoning them would be wrong.
She focused on her cores and tried to relax. The loose essence from the veiled man had pushed her over another pair of thresholds, and her cores sang a discordant symphony in her soul. Her unbound core bloomed like a beautiful flower, as always, but her Disorder Core and Upheaval Core were noisy and unsettling. Well, at least they’re under my control.
Bel glanced up at her snakes and she grinned. She reached up and rubbed the alert snake who had given her warning – the large one running over the center of her head – appreciatively. “Good girl,” she murmured. It flicked its tongue back in response.
“And I never even gave you a name!”
The snake retracted itself from Bel’s sight in the blink of an eye.
“What the hell,” she deadpanned. “I give great names. Right Sparky? Flora?”
Bel glanced to her right, but her other snakes had curled around to the back of her head as well.
“Well, I think they’re great,” she huffed. “You girls are living on my head you know, you should give me some respect.”
Bel chuckled to herself and slowly stood. She hissed with pain as she put weight upon her injured left leg. She looked down at the dark line that travelled from her lower thigh down to her calf, inspecting the extent of the wound. Her coagulating abilities had created a neat crust along the length of the wound that stopped her from bleeding out, but the injury was deep.
Moving around was going to continually tear it open, but sitting around waiting to be attacked would also be foolish. She would much rather catch her enemies by surprise than let the opposite happen.
Her toughened integument hadn’t been enough to repel the veiled man’s sneak attack, and it had happened too quickly for her to react with her liquid body. He really attacked without a trace, Bel thought, no scent, no heartbeat, no warning. I hope the rest are more like the swordsman.
Bel turned to look at the swordsman’s corpse. His hairy legs were matted with blood and his face was frozen in an angry scream, but he still had a perfectly serviceable dagger and short sword. Bel tapped her chest, remembering that he also had a core’s worth of essence.
Or I could try to pull an ability from him. It’s pretty obvious that having a few surprising abilities can improve my changes of survival.
That meant digging around through his core while she was being hunted. Any distraction would result in her breaking the core and losing out on his abilities and essence. And there wasn’t any guarantee that she could even use or understand any of his abilities…
She spent a few more precious moments considering her options, but finally decided that the chance at a rare ability from a powerful opponent was worth more than a few thresholds in her cores.
Bel hobbled over to his corpse and pulled his weapons out of his cold, dead grasp. Then she set them aside and searched his body for anything else she could use. She was relieved when she found several cleaning cloths tied to his waist that hadn’t been soaked in blood.
Maybe I can take care of these weapons instead of fighting with rocks, she thought.
Bel looked around, searching for any surprises. The faint whiff of crimes against nature was still in the air, but it wasn’t growing stronger. She listened to the heartbeats of the small creatures that had been piped into the enclosure, but she didn’t detect anything suspicious. After taking a deep breath, Bel touched her hands to the dead swordsman and closed her eyes so she could concentrate on his abilities.
Her jaw clenched as she carefully worked through them.
As she had feared, most of the patterns were incomprehensible to her, too different from her known abilities for her mind to intuit their meaning. They were either abilities granted by an unfamiliar deity or that required some insights into the swordsman’s path that she didn’t possess. She did find his ability to run silently, but Bel didn’t think that was worth the trouble. Much more interesting were a few inexpensive abilities to improve flexibility, improve hearing, increase her general muscle strength, and to rapidly mend her muscles.
Healing more quickly would be wonderful. Just rapidly recuperating from a hard day of hiking would be fantastic. Neither of those would keep her alive though.
Being slightly stronger wasn’t likely to make a large difference, but it could push her over the edge if her strength was closely matched with an opponent. Due to living on the surface with its higher gravity, her strength compared favorably to most Underworld dwellers, but once she returned to Satrap she was going to lose that edge. So Bel squeezed her eyes shut with concentration and slowly etched out the dead man’s ability onto her own core.
The force of her concentration cracked and shattered his core, and by the time she finished copying the eight-stroke ability only the last wisps of essence remained for her to absorb.
Bel opened her eyes and was surprised to see a small, furry creature staring back at her. From the long snout and bald tail Bel tentatively identified it as a rat.
“What are you–” she began with a friendly tone, but then the rat opened its mouth and bit her in the hand. Bel swatted it instinctively and it furry body was sent spinning through the air with an indignant squeak.
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“Lempo curse this stupid place and the stupid people who decided to put stupid rats inside,” she yelled after it. She looked at the small gouges in her flesh and wondered how a simple creature had managed to break through her ability-enhanced skin. She clicked her tongue angrily and used degrade pathogen to clear out any diseases, just in case. James was always terrified of getting sick, and he would never let her hear the end of it if she came down with a disease when she had the means to prevent it.
Angrily shaking her head, Bel stood and retrieved her opponent’s weapons. Freshly armed with her new short sword and dagger, and strengthened from her new ability, Bel squared her back and took a step.
She hissed with pain and stumbled as her injuries screamed for attention.
Maybe going directly to the next fight would be stupid.
Bel sucked on her lips and looked to her snakes for suggestions. They flicked their tongues back. Then her stomach gurgled.
“Yeah, maybe I’ll go back to that nice pond and see if there are any tasty fish.”
Bel turned around and took a careful step. She slipped the thumb of her right hand into her purloined sword belt to reduce the stress on her aching shoulder and took small, cautious steps to avoid jarring her ribs.
As she walked, she realized that the scent of crimes against nature was waxing and waning. She didn’t have enough experience with Kjar’s ability to understand what that meant.
Was someone actively committing crimes against nature? Would that make the caustic smell worse? Did it fade with time? Or was Bel actually getting closer to the perpetrator?
She inspected the nearby rock walls with suspicious. What if another one of the objectors is wandering around on the other side?
She tapped her metallic nails together with irritation as she thought about it. Then she felt heart drop from the ceiling above her.
Bel quickly stepped to the side, her pain of her injuries drowned out by a surge of adrenaline. She snapped her arm up to intercept her attacker, reflexively forcing a liquid shockwave into them the moment her fingers made contact.
A small, furry creature burst into a spray of blood and liquified innards. Bel blinked, trying to figure out what had happened.
Oh, wait, that was another rat. That’s why I didn’t notice it until it attacked, it’s just another one of the small hearts scuttling around here.
Bel pulled out a cleaning cloth and wiped her finger. Two rats in a row though? Whoever designed this really didn’t want us taking naps.
----------------------------------------
Bel glared at the rat, stopping it before it could charge her. She huffed angrily as she strode up to it and stabbed it through the skull with her sharpened nails.
She turned it around, examining the creature for signs of unnatural alteration. It wouldn’t surprise her if Clark had modified a forest full of creatures to hunt her down, but she didn’t see any obvious signs of his meddling.
Bel clicked her tongue after a thorough investigation. “No little wires, no bits of metal, no pieces of other creatures.”
She shook it and watched some of its blood drip down her hand. It was so dark as to be nearly black. It looked unnatural, but Bel had seen strangely colored blood from different sea creatures. For all she knew, this was natural for Underworld rats.
She sighed and flicked the dead creature away from her.
She’d encountered more than a dozen of the spiteful things on her way back to the large pond, and with each one the caustic tang of lawlessness grew more offensive. There was no way that the rats were normal, but if they weren’t from Clark then Bel couldn’t guess who was sending them after her.
And if she couldn’t guess when the instigator would attack, she decided that she would rather deal with them on a full stomach.
Bel paused before the opening into the room with the lake, checking for suspicious heartbeats. Then she stepped onto the ledge that overlooked the pond and liquified handholds into the rock so she could descend into the water. The pond went up to her knees, but the rocky floor was rippled from the flow of cooling lava and the water was clear and pristine as rainwater. The current emptied through a large, vertical crack on the opposite side of the room from Bel, and entered through several pipes near the ceiling. Occasionally a fish would flow through with the water, a colorful blur that quickly disappeared when it hit the surface of the pond.
Bel licked her lips with anticipation as she watched the fish swimming through the water. With practiced ease, she stilled her motions and waited for a potential meal to swim her way. A particularly fat specimen soon obliged, and Bel thrust her hands into the water to grab it.
She realized two things from the exercise. First, her body still her, and the rapid motion didn’t help. Second, the stupid fish has an ability that let it zip away through the water faster than Bel’s hands could close around it.
Bel hissed with frustration, then doubled her volume when she saw another rat swimming towards her, full of angry determination. She waited for it to get close before she plucked it from the water’s surface. It gnashed it teeth at her, but was powerless to do anything.
“Where’s your master?” she demanded of the small beast. Its only response was the angry clacking of its sharp teeth.
Bel was about to snap its neck when she sensed the swarm of tiny hearts massing around her. She looked up to see a thick crowd of the small creatures along the banks of pond. Her snakes’ agitation drew her eyes upwards to the ridge above them where more scurried from the passage where Bel had entered the room. Even more rats spilled from the water pipes, until she was surrounded by what felt like a thousand pairs of angry little eyes.
The rat pack paused like a drawn breath, filled with hunger and expectation. Even the one in a Bel’s hand ceased its wriggling, instead staring at her with its hateful little eyes. Then, as one, they gnashed their teeth and charged into the water.
Individually, they were weak. As a mass of flesh and teeth, they were a threat. But as a mass of essence? Weak.
Bel reached out to the swarm and liberated their essence. The entire swarm dropped dead. She dropped the one in her hand and it sank with a plop, like all the rest.
The room was eerily quiet, until a shadow dropped from one of the water pipes and disappeared, with barely a splash, into the water below.
Bel was too hungry and irritated to feel fear. Instead, she was annoyed that her opponent wasn’t facing her directly.
“I hope you’re not a bigger, fatter rat,” Bel called out.
Silence answered. Then the water turned a dark, inky black. The colorful fish bobbed to the surface, one by one, belly-up and obviously dead.
Bel ran some extra energy through her ability to degrade pathogens, just in case.
After a long, frustrating minute wherein Bel realized that she wouldn’t get to eat any time soon, her attacker finally revealed herself. A large, lumpy cloaked figure stood and water dripped down from her clothing. She reached up with a short, stubby hand and ripped her cloak from her body. After discarding their clothing, the stranger splashed back onto all-fours in the water, but kept their snout above the water line.
Bel shook her head at the pointless waste of a perfectly good set of clothes and examined the figure. They were probably some kind of lizard, although their scaled skin was bumpy rather than smooth. Different blues mixed together across their body: a pale underbelly and lips and a vibrant cerulean ran along the top of their snout and trailed down their back. Even more eye catching than the lizard’s color was its muscular form: every muscle swelled with hard edges, as though the creature had been made of bricks.
Bel clicked her tongue with frustration when she saw that the lizard wore a small pair of shaded stones over her eyes, already prepared for Bel’s gaze.
The lizard’s jaws parted, and Bel was surprised when it spoke in the language of the Golden Plains. “Although rats are the traditional heralds of Pestilence, my venerable patron has determined that I am more suited for removing you from Olympos.”
Her short, powerful tail smashed into the water, spraying a cloud of dark liquid into the air. “I shall rot the marrow of your bones, spoil the blood in your veins, and putrefy the air in your breath. I will destroy your disgusting form as punishment for destroying a plague of incredible beauty.”
The voice was rough and gravelly, but distinctly feminine. It also oozed with crazy.
Bel rolled her eyes, but decided that she could stand to gather more information. “So you’re a follower of some deity named Pestilence? That can’t be very popular, right? And what plague are you even talking about?”
The lizard-woman yawned her mouth wide, showing off the impressive set of jagged teeth that protruded from her scaled lips. She exhaled and a dark fog billowed forth, like smoke from a fire. “A disease that eats bones themselves! How wonderful! How exquisite!”
The woman clapped her hands together with excitement, but then her yellow eyes narrowed angrily. “Technis could not contain the clever disease, and he unwittingly unleashed the beautiful pandemic into Olympos! But alas! Your mother’s priests destroyed it before it could wipe the foul humans from our world.”
Bel fanned her hand in front of her face, doing her best to dissipate the woman’s foul breath. “I didn’t really have anything to do with that, though. Just my mother’s priests.”
The woman reared up on her back legs and stared down her long snout at Bel. She pointed a clawed hand accusingly in her direction. “Your mother has offended Pestilence, and now she shall pay with the loss of her mortal child! I will–”
“Oh, shut up,” Bel interrupted. “What’s all this talk for anyway? Are you hoping that I’ll die of boredom?”
The lizard clacked her jaws together loudly. “I see you are using the same unnatural ability that allowed your people to clear the bone melting disease in the first place.”
Bel’s lips twitched and she looked down at the black-stained water and the foul cloud spreading from the lizard. Then she glanced at the bodies of the rats, still lining the shore. Has she been trying to infect me with something me this whole time? I wonder if my mom made me immune to that? Or maybe this little ability to degrade pathogens is actually really good.
The woman reached down to a flask that hung at her waist. She pulled it from her belt and crushed it between her paws, spilling a green and black sludge into the water.
She’s even rougher on her belongings than I am, Bel marvelled.
The lizard laughed deeply as she pointed in Bel’s direction. “Kill her,” she commanded.
The sludge spun in place, then formed into a spiny eel and thrashed in Bel’s direction. Bel caught it before it could do whatever it intended, using her liquid body to flow her flesh around the impaling spines that lined its spiny body.
“You’re a spirit, aren’t you?” Bel mused. “If she’s using you to attack, then you must be something powerful, right?”
Bel focused her energy through her ability to mix spirits. As her ability flowed into the spiny spirit, its form melted like butter left in the desert sun. It thrashed and struggled, obviously unwilling to be subsumed, but Bel doubled the energy in her ability and it finally succumbed.
Bel scooped up the limp spirit and pushed it onto the last remaining open space on her head. She felt an odd sensation as the creature unwillingly conformed to her demands, slowly forming into a bright green and black snake as it replaced her final missing serpent. It hissed angrily and opened it mouth wide to bite her, but Bel’s other snakes wrapped around it, pinning the unwilling snake into a braid that draped down Bel’s back.
“That was another really bad move,” Bel mocked. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the rats?”
Bel tensed, ready for the woman’s next attack, but then the water in the room pulled back, lifting the lizard woman in an enormous pillar of water. She stared murder at Bel from her lofty position, and Bel’s innards tensed as she saw the raw power the woman possessed.
So she’s actually a water manipulator? What was with all the diseased stuff then? Was she just playing with me?