While Narati worked his way back to the first floor with N’dari and Tulis, Karkas found himself in a different predicament, one that would put him and Narati in the present situation.
Karkas walked through the corridor without hesitation while anticipating Asran’s traps. He was spurred on by his overdue retribution, one that he had practically sold his soul for. Part of him, though, understood Narati’s attempt to dissuade him, but he was not there presently. Nobody was going to stop him.
That was his greatest mistake.
When Karkas stepped into the corridor, he half-expected an ambush, half-expected a trap. He was sure that, for the next couple of seconds, he would either fall into a pit similar to the one that caught Narati, or several Fa’ars shot him while he was in the open. Karkas knew his opponents were smart enough not to fight him head-on. No reasonable Fa’ar would want to fight a Crocodilian mage who could still fight despite of having his magic sealed.
Instead, the room was quickly filled with smoke shot from hidden nozzles out of Karkas’s view. The light in the corridor was too dim to make sense of anything beyond the illuminated areas, one that Narati would not miss.
“Poison?!” he said while holding his breath. It was for naught; the shock from the hissing sound caused by the gas pumping into the room forced Karkas to draw breath before he determined the gas's purpose.
Karkas expected his body to start limping, but nothing happened. Yet, he knew the smoke was not pumped into the room without reason. Attempting to escape the smoke, he ran through the stairs to the second floor, hoping that the smoke would not reach the next floor. When he passed through the door, he was suddenly ambushed by Fa’ars, as he expected. Since the smoke did not do anything to him, he was aware of their ambush and he grabbed one while throwing him across the room. Another Fa’ar climbed over his shoulder and tried to stab him with a rusted knife, failing miserably. Karkas retaliated by grabbing the Fa’ar.
He looked at the Fa’ar and felt great anger, as if the rat person was Asran. The anger gave way to animalistic instinct as Karkas put the Fa’ar’s throat in his maws. The Crocodilian’s strong jaws effortlessly ripped through the Fa’ar's throat, killing him instantly.
Karkas was going to eat the Fa'ar when he came to. He became horrified when he felt something warm in his maws. Unceremoniously, he threw away the maimed body, stunned by what he just did. He was not taught to fight like an animal; something in the gas must've caused him to become momentarily feral.
The other Fa’ars, instead of being terrified, started attacking Karkas with reckless abandon when they saw one of their comrades killed so violently. Karkas tried to defend himself, but found that the attackers were hardly his opponents. He effortlessly tore through his attackers, maiming and mutilating their bodies. Gore, blood, and body parts flew all over the room, caking the walls in blood as he bit through the jugular of the Fa’ars he spited.
Wait…this isn't right. That was the first thought Karkas had when he came to his senses, again horrified by the sight in front of him. The Fa’ars were all mutilated, and he found himself biting through his latest victim. He immediately spat out the taste of blood in his mouth, but found himself savoring on its taste in a mix of horror and bliss. The taste and the smell of blood were so pleasant.
“No!” he denied. “I'm not an animal! This isn't me at all! What was in that gas?”
More of them attacked him with reckless abandon. Karkas noticed white drool coming out of their mouth as they attack. Karkas surmised that whatever causing it was related to the gas he was exposed to.
“Asran," he growled. "This has gone too far."
Karkas's growing hatred towards the Fa'ar made him losing control of himself. He tried not to fight back against the Fa'ars as they could not possibly hurt him with their weapons, but his self-restrain became severely hampered by the drug he was exposed to, exacerbated by his hatred towards Asran, culminating in drawing a simple conclusion that he hated Fa'ars, regardless of who they were. Despite this, he did not want to hate Narati, but his resemblance to Asran made it difficult for Karkas to focus on the younger Fa'ar. His mind started to regress as he tasted the blood in his mouth. He must admit. Fa'ari blood tasted good….
He shook his head, trying to focus. His focus started to drift between his spite for Asran and his attempt to resist his predatory instincts. The Fa'ars attacking him started to annoy him. They were clearly exposed to the gas as Karkas did, but due to their physiology, it was far more potent on them. If Karkas could be affected, they would be instantly affected.
Karkas's patience grew thin. Finally, he snapped. He used his full strength to claw one of them, ripping the Fa'ar's face in half. The critically injured Fa’ar did not relent despite having one of his eyes dangling out of its sockets, held only by the optic nerves, and his skull exposed. He squeaked maddeningly, unable to say anything comprehensible. The sight repulsed Karkas, which proved to be a mistake. The strong scent of blood, coupled with him lowering his defense, caused him to turn feral.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Karkas lost all inhibition, letting it all go in exchange for regressing into a mindless beast, far worse than the feral crocodile his kind evolved from. He ripped and tore through the maddened Fa'ars almost effortlessly, stopping to crush their skulls. Fortunately, parts of his subconscious resisted him from eating the Fa'ars outright, though it would not last forever.
He was not aware that the whole floor was already laced with the same gas, one that caused all the Fa’ars in that room to go insane and started attacking one another. What Karkas did not realize was that most of the Fa’ars in that room were already killing each other before he came, clearly due to the effect of the gas.
And from the third floor, watching in glee from a glass window, was the Fa’ar Karkas dedicated half a decade of his life to hunt: Asran Taburan. The Fa’ar checked on the floor, surprised by the level of carnage caused by his gas trap, but was also glad it worked. He had tested it against Crocodilians before, but they still managed to resist it.
The new and improved gas, coupled with a dampener field, worked wonders to stop intruders while also weeding out the people, most of which Fa’ars. They served their purposes and were no longer useful for him, so they became the testers for the new and improved ‘Feral gas’, one that caused their animalistic instincts to go haywire and they became crazed animals. It was most effective against Fa’ars and other beast people. He wasn’t so sure against humans or elves, so he might want to start working on that.
What surprised him, however, was the presence of the one Crocodilian that was persistent enough to keep hunting him for the past five years. Asran would not mistake Karkas as he was the only tribeless Crocodilian who wore priestly wraparound that he was acquainted with. He dealt with Crocodilians, but mostly with them as slaves. Karkas, however, was different. He was willing to work with him on the basis that he was already rejected by his people, so he had nothing to lose.
Which made it easier for Asran to manipulate. Nothing was easier than a Croc who readily abandoned his morals to survive. The Fa’ar was sure there were others with the same mindset; he avoided them, chiefly because they would only react with violence instead of reason like Karkas did.
Too bad he ended up like everyone else.
“Oh well. At least he’s just as vulnerable,” commented Asran, who walked away from the carnage to address a more pressing issue.
Due to the dampening field, Asran relied solely on ancient pre-war technologies that were reconfigured to run on a different power source instead of mana. The two-way radio he installed in his personal home was the best he could find in the Desert Wasteland. He wanted to install surveillance cameras, but alas, none of them worked. He had limited engineering skills, one helped by his kind’s natural skills at them. Even that would not help him understand the works of the mana extractor in the basement, one that was somehow still working after a thousand years. He felt the irony on how machines used for nefarious purposes were well-preserved while those that were more useful to make the world a better place were no longer functional. That irony could be related to his Makers, a fact that he hated to this day.
But he did not need to hate them. The Makers were gone. Defeated. They may have had the last laugh by leaving the world in ruins, but it was still a pyrrhic victory, for they could not savor it. A thousand years later, they were proven to be the losers, as Fa'ars were not the rulers of the broken world There was no point in worshipping them, even if Fa’ars were created by them. Asran never liked the exclaim ‘by the Maker’, which only reinforced the fact that they were still under the servitude of a defeated faction in the war to end all wars.
Asran shook his head. He let his mind drift again. He promptly returned to the pressing issue at hand when he heard the audible alarm of the mana extractor blared loudly in his office/living space. The black-furred Fa’ar let out an exasperated, but controlled, sigh. He never expected the Fa’ar grunts he hired to be effective against a fighter. He had anticipated the possibility of someone with considerable skills to do just that, though he was mildly infuriated by it.
He deduced that Karkas must’ve worked with someone who fell into the trap on the ground floor. Since the person was not immediately incapacitated, that person must have been a Dark Race. Asran only knew two races that fell into this category, one of which would be too monstrous for Karkas to even consider them an ally. Karkas could have reluctantly join forces with another Fa’ar despite his notoriety as a Fa’ar hunter, but Asran doubt that he would be willing to work with Mygaleans. Even he was reluctant to work with the spiders; not only were they so different when compared to other races due to their arachnid physiology, but they were also hard to work with as they could not be easily manipulated, being manipulators themselves. Assigning a hardened, no-nonsense Mygalian in Tulis to work with him was part of this manipulation. He really shouldn’t have asked them to be his ‘sweeper’.
“When this has been dealt with,” thought Asran. “I will have to test my discovery on them.”
But as a test, he could use it to deal with the other intruder, provided they survived Karkas’s rampage. He could tell that, when he returned to the window, of the carnage that Karkas was involved in when the rooms on the second floor, once a manufacturing facility converted into office space that also turned into a death trap, plunged into darkness. Karkas was winning against the rampaging Fa’ars due to his thick hide and natural predatory skills. Soon, he would be the monster in the labyrinth.
The intruder would not stand a chance. If they somehow did…well, they would have to go through him next.
Knowing there was a chance this would happen, Asran readied himself. He put his right hand into the machine. Green aura flowed into him, empowering him unnaturally. It was vile. Gloriously vile. Truly, this was the knowledge lost in time to prevent the Fa'ars from ruling the world in their Makers' name. He was eager to test his new and improved self, though he must understand his own limits. He wouldn't want to repeat the same mistakes the Nuremnians did; destroying themselves to win. Asran did not intend to die before he could enjoy his victory.
The power he absorbed was more than just mana. It was something more, something deadlier. Something that ended everything. Something horrific, yet beautiful at the same time.
And when this present problem was over, he would show it to the world, to show them that Fa’ars were not slaves to them nor to the Nuremnians, but a true Dark Race that would rule the world over the corpses of the people that defeated them the first time.
He would usher in the future for the true Fa'ars.