The patchwork bats and lizards hadn’t challenged her, but her next foe sounded like angry thunder as it stormed down the tunnels. Bel was looking forward to the fight.
Killing the bloodthirsty dhvaras or backstabbing garuda or the disturbing goose women didn’t fill her with any satisfaction. Fighting Technis and his creations? She had been born for it.
A hideous creature was illuminated by her orb as it tore down the tunnel, flinging corpses of bats and lizards as it kicked its – Bel had troubling counting them at first – six pairs of legs.
Bel’s snakes hissed as the monstrosity ground to a halt, churning through corpses and guano. She inspected the patchwork person, quickly assessing it to be as dangerous as the one who ambushed Nebamon’s group when she was being taken out of Satrap. Its body was made of three separate riding lizards stitched together, with a human’s head stitched on top of a thick lizard neck. As if its maker had gotten that far and then decided it wasn’t horrible enough, they had also attached six heads taken from the bodies of the geese women. They sprouted from its shoulders, hissing and spitting in some terrible mockery of a gorgon’s snakes.
Like all of Technis’ patchwork creations, its biology was questionable. Bel could feel three hearts heaving in its chests, and she couldn’t begin to imagine how it digested its food, or even what it could eat. It could vaporize its food and inhaled it like the strange creature from the underworld for all she cared. How it lived didn’t matter, only how it would die. It was large and dangerous and an excellent test of her new abilities.
Bel stood tall before it, her body tensed as she prepared to move at its first sign of aggression.
A pair of its thick lizard legs kicked through the guano laden ground, thickening the cloying scent of ammonia that hung heavy in the air. Bel was close enough to see the dark stains on his sharpened teeth as its human head sneered down at her from twice her height. She stared back defiantly as he spit to the side.
“So Lempo’s little doll has found her way back to us,” he snickered with a surprisingly human voice. His extra heads look around her, their eyes wide and glassy.
“But you are all alone.” His statement was echoed by hisses from his other heads. The effect would have been scary if Bel hadn’t spent time with her mother; as it was, the patchwork person was a drop of water to Lempo’s ocean of insanity.
He peered down the side passage while his extra heads craned to peer in different directions. “Or perhaps you are hiding your little friends. How many gorgons did Clark leave alive?”
“Clark?” Bel replied brightly. “Is he around?”
She jabbed her spear through the air. “If he is, I’d like to finish you off quickly so I can take care of him.”
“You dare–”
Bel pounced, aiming for the smooth wall of the wide tunnel and dodging away just as the creature struck with several spiraling drills of rapidly spinning dirt. The ability had struck without visible warning, but Bel had felt a sudden shift in the creature’s heartbeat just before it struck.
As she hurtled past, her patchwork foe swung his foreleg at her. Bel’s eyes widened at the sight of claws that carried a darkness deeper than the surrounding shadows. She twisted her body around the suspicious talons, wary of testing an unknown attack with her body. The shadows on his claws stretched out, but her slightly liquid form allowed her to curve unnaturally away from them, and an instant later she shot past the front of his body.
She struck the wall feet first, grunting with effort as she absorbed the impact with her legs as she twisted to face another direction. She pounced a second time, leaping towards the ceiling and dodging a second spray of high velocity pebbles. The stones struck the wall behind her with the sound of a hailstorm and from the corner of her eye Bel could see the air filling with dust from the instantly powdered projectiles.
As Bel’s momentum compressed her against the ceiling, the patchwork person’s long-necked heads whipped around, hissing angrily. Bel pounced a third time, aiming straight for the creature’s back. She braced her arms with her armor as she used her momentum and gravity to stab her spear into the creature’s tough hide. There was a moment of resistance when the lizard’s scales refused to yield, but the force of her attack prevailed; the tip of her spear pierced through and sank a hand span deep into her foe’s flesh.
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The long-necked heads honked with fury, but Bel wasn’t going to wait around for them to use any abilities. She retracted her liquid armor to leave her arms and legs free and activated mirror essence.
A wave of weakness rolled through her, but Bel clung to her spear, anchoring herself to her foe’s back. The heads sensed her moment of weakness and lunged towards her, but recoiled from the outflow of poisoned essence that streamed from her core. There would be no escape for them, Bel would make sure of that. She twisted her spear free, loosing a small spray of blood, and charged the heads of the thrashing creature.
Some of them had adjusted to her poisoned essence and snapped at her, but Bel planted her feet and stopped just short of their wicked teeth. Beth had never drilled her with a spear, so in the sudden flurry of battle Bel fell back upon her staff training, planting her feet carefully as she swung her spear in wide arcs, battering and slashing the ability-deprived heads rather than dispatching them with precise jabs.
Her awkward form didn’t matter. She had the advantage now.
The patchwork creature wasn’t natural, bound together as it was with thread and abilities. It was never meant to function without a constant application of essence. Blood poured from the eyes of the monster’s heads ever before Bel struck them, and seeped through the seams between its parts as its body thrashed. Its human head howled in frustration as it attempted to buck her off, but the stitched-together lizard bodies struggled to move in tandem, rocking her back and forth rather than tossing her.
When the last of the six extra heads flopped weakly against the beast’s side it panicked and rolled its entire body. Bel ran in the opposite direction, leaping from its back before it could crush her. She rolled along the gritty, guano-thickened ground, her responses made awkward from the lack of abilities. Her mirrored essence was thickest around her own cores, and she felt a gut churning sense of vertigo as she tumbled.
Her body complained, but she still had work to do. Bel scrambled over the ground, forcing herself back to her feet.
She couldn’t afford to let the patchwork beast get away from her. Bel guessed that prolonged exposure to her ability would kill it, but it could recover at a distance. And even if it’s death was inevitable, it could still take her down with some long-ranged ability, so Bel forced her straining muscles back to work and charged the overturned beast.
She could hear its human head cursing her as it struggled to right itself, but its back section had bumped into the edge of the tunnel and wedged itself against the wall. While it managed to turn its front section upright, its segments were twisted and the belly of its midsection was lifted slightly, exposing its vulnerable underside. Bel charged for the white underbelly of the middle segment.
She dodged around a flailing foot, steering clear of its heavy claws. She positioned herself near its rib cage and jabbed her spear into its body with all of her strength.
Her knowledge of lizard anatomy proved lacking and the spear glanced off of a bone rather than piercing through flesh, drawing only blood and howl’s of rage. Bel dropped the spear as she ducked under a flailing limb, drawing her dagger as she eyed the vulnerable belly. The short blade made the close-in work simple, and Bel repeatedly stabbed it through the gaps in the creature’s ribs, stabbing until she was certain that she’d hit something important. Then, for good measure, she moved to the abdomen and split it open, spilling guts and blood onto the floor.
Without the feeling of the essence around her, Bel couldn’t tell if the creature had expired. Rather than wildly stabbing a corpse, she picked up her spear and carefully marched around to its head to investigate. She was surprised to see that the face was still moving, gasping for breath like a fish on land.
“How could you even breath in enough air for this big body?” Bel looked at the dead heads hanging limply from the creature’s shoulders. “Ah, is that why you had all the extras?”
The face swelled with anger, but the patchwork person didn’t have the strength to respond. Bel considered for a moment releasing her ability before killing him, but Beth had trained her too well to avoid those kinds of stupid risks. Instead, she quickly finished him by slashing with her knife, cutting through his neck. After waiting for enough blood to flow that she was certain of his demise she finally released her ability.
Her body twitched as her abilities reactivated. She stumbled a few steps as her legs cramped up, she sighed with relief as her cores recovered to their healthy states. Then Bel rushed forward to be certain that her patchwork foe was as dead as he looked. A quick brush of her hand against one of the lizard legs confirmed the truth. She pulled the essence that leaked from his shattered core and was momentarily stunned at the volume of it. It easily filled another of her own thresholds, even after so much essence had leaked away from the core’s destruction under her corrupted essence.
The patchwork being was stronger than the time manipulator she’d fought to get into the Pillar, probably stronger than anyone she had fought.
I’m glad that I got stronger before I came back, she muttered. I wonder if Technis sent someone this strong to watch every entry point?
Bel shook some of cramping out of her legs as she hobbled back to her companions.
“Hey,” she shouted down the opening, “everything’s dead. If we’re lucky, Technis will only know about me.”
She looked around the room and blinked to clear the tears forming in her eyes from the thick scent of guano. The addition of a barrel of blood to the mix wasn’t helping with the smell.
“Ori, I don’t think you’re going to want to eat any of this,” she added.