Heavy steps shook the grounds. The fried, lobster-red face of the manticore, blind in one milky white eye scarred with cataracts, scanned the area, seeking visual confirmation of the elixir's presence, guided by his nose alone. His smell had been the last of his senses to fade.
Running out of time. the manticore thought. These injuries are fatal. Only the Backyards themselves restarted my heart with the last flare up of my fading consciousness. I must locate the Black Rain and evolve. That's the only way to cheat death now.
Blood was raining from the damaged seam of the stitching line the manticore had sewn up its own slit belly. The blood drops were like the grains of sand trickling to the bottom of the hourglass.
This was just supposed to be a test, teasing the waters to help Master Crocus gauge the children. But he lost focus in his own bloodlust and longing for a real fight, a challenge. Damn the weak, needy human side of his being! He should have just devoured every last one of them when he had the chance, picked them off one by one before they ever met. If they really were what Crocus thought they were, fate would protect them.
Now, he realized, he had no such insurance for himself.
Survival of the fittest.
-
The manticore puffed his chest out, pride unbroken despite his mangled exterior. "Time to see what this 'elixir of life' business is all about." He growls, raising his stinger tail high above his head and jutting it firmly into the ice he stood on. A crack spiderwebbed across the glassy surface, and a low rumble reverberated through the surrounding woods. A grin spread across the manticore's singed face, revealing a few missing teeth. He hauled the stinger up again, the dislodging of the barb point causing a pressurized spray of black ichor, like blood splatter from a slit vein. Great nostrils flared as the manticore caught the scent of the substance. It wasn't exactly a pleasant smell, far from it really, but something about it was alluring. Perhaps it was simply the power it promised, the manticore mused.
The next stab would shatter the veil, he knew. The stinger barb broke the sound barrier as it sunk through the ice sheet with a whip-like snap. Feeling the cold of the black rain against his stinger, the manticore shuddered. "Cutting a hole big enough to drink from will take hours. Suppose we'll have to simply draw it in." He smiled wryly. His scorpion tail was not strictly an envenomation implement and barb launcher, it could also extract blood from his foes for nourishment, or simply suck out the venom to improve the flavor of a fresh kill and replenish his stinger's supply more quickly than natural regeneration. He was content to use the handy feature as a drinking straw for the black rain.
The substance was viscous, heavy. It slunk slowly through the tail's end, making the whole extraction process all the more tantalizing for the manticore, who bared his teeth in excitement as he watched his tail engorge slightly, an orb of the rain passing slowly through it and creating enough of a bulge that he'd be able to watch it move, had his eyes not been rendered inert by the microwave burst.
The circumstances were just so that neither party noticed each other on opposite sides of the pond initially. Richie's group were completely, dreadfully engrossed in the soul-crushing waves of negativity emanating through every sense from the pond, with Freyja in particular being all but knocked clean out. The manticore, vision grayed to his immediate surroundings five feet in front of his face, didn't notice his combative prey either at first. Only Cuppy, as nonchalant about the terror factor of their given situation as per usual, happened to look up and notice the bad kitty getting a drink. He grabbed Richie's head and moved his face toward the manticore.
Richie's eyes widened. "Holly, you had one job!"
Holly gasped as she realized what Richie was talking about. I cooked that sucker's brain like a well-done steak, there's no way. I know for a fact he was inanimate meat when I turned away. What the hell is this asshole doing back up? This isn't fair!
Richie grabbed at his hair.
Shit, what were they supposed to focus on? They needed to focus and work together to clear the pond, but the manticore wasn't going to just patiently wait for them to null his new watering hole. But if they didn't, most of them would be kneecapped by their own double-edged animal instincts. The tongues of Richie's dragons flicked out. Your dream of the sun matched against the pull of the void. do you remember it?
The manticore looked up and saw the murky shapes of his enemies staring across at him. His remaining unmarked eye went manic.
"You." he growled.
Except, where was Cuppy?
The sound of wood creaking and a sudden whoosh of air wouldn't even reach the manticore's keen ears before a familiar, albeit blindness-muted flash of green passed over him. The sound of a sword being slashed through meat, however, was unmistakable. A diminutive child landed gracefully on the frozen lake surface some dozen yards ahead, bloodsoaked scissor blade in hand, every drop of warm blood falling from the shimmering surgical steel making hissing sounds as it met the ice below. The boy's face was shadowed, and his voice came grave and stern.
"No."
"W-argh!" the manticore cringed and hissed, its tail cut off below the hilt of the barb-tipped bell. The segments beneath the stinging implement itself seemed far more costly to regrow, and elicited far more pain to sever. The opportunity to blindside the bad cat like this, and utilize one of Cuppet's new features, had come. Across the ice, Cuppet stood in a low, deep crouch from the waist down, a third leg having unfolded from his torso so that he was planted like a tripod. His upper body had bent sharply backward at an alarming angle, a great rubber band like the type fitted to Cuppy's slingshot stretched between the palms of the marionette's hands. Despite his greater speed, strength, and swordplay, Cuppy's wooden brother lacked his own ability to conjure string on his own. A multitude of brilliant ideas had cascaded through Cuppy's think lump upon the revelation that he could modify his own strings based on his diet, and also upon having sewn a part of himself into Cuppet via his root string repairs, and Cuppet's dirt-filled torso cavity. As the steampunk spurts that flew from between his joints during autopilot implied, Cuppet was essentially a mechanical organism. He could not heal or grow in the true sense of the word, but he could be modified. Cuppy had been delighted to find that he could sew an elastic length into hiding in his brother's hand for situations just like this.
Cuppy had slingshot himself across the pond, scissor blade poised. If the manticore had been anything close to full strength, he would have easily impaled Cuppy out of the air.
But he wasn't.
The tail quivered and bulged like a misshapen tumorous mass as it tried to regrow itself, even as the gulp of black rain it had swallowed moved its way down into its body proper.
Cuppy spun the second scissor blade into place and interlocked the swords, creating a giant pair of scissors once again.
"YOU AREN'T STALLING FOR MORE TIME, WE FINISH THIS RIGHT NOW!" he roar-squeaked at the monster.
He positioned his shears at the base of the manticore's tail, still spewing blood and swelling, and chopped it right off, leaving an inch-long armored stump in its absence.
This felt something akin to getting one's phallus snipped off. In two parts.
The manticore's scream echoed this analogy accordingly.
The others on the shore, as if the malign spell of the shade auras leaking up through the black ice had been displaced by this more tangible animal scream of pain, became alert again, and moved to regroup with Cuppy. They all split into pairs and went around the pond save for Richie, who used his Level 2 to blink-dash across the ice, suddenly feeling as if he had run past and over shade-kind before. Now wasn't the time to let ambient dread impede him. Not if he wanted to reach the heavens. No - beyond them. How high could he even climb in a world without limits?
He'd never know by pussing out here.
Cuppet arced to Cuppy, taking the blades apart and swapping places, and spun with them like a helicopter across the ridge of the manticore's back, chipping spinal column. Richie used his momentum to slam a reverse elbow into the manticore's snout, crushing its nose and top teeth. Holly tossed her bandolier of obsidian blades sky high, and cartwheeled into an overclocked kick to the side of the manticore's neck. Cuppy lashed his strings to the bandolier midair, pulling the macuahuitl blades free as razor whip tips, and lashed dozens of them across the manticore's body. Freyja shifted to full wolf form and boiled her blood, circulating the oxygen-retaining flow through her supercharged cardiovascular system. More oxygen meant stronger fire, as Richie's mishap had reminded her. Her enhanced hellfire spew engulfed and immolated the manticore.
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Pain. Pain was exploding from every direction.
This climaxed in a big Boom! as Richie led a withdraw from close range aside from Freyja, who cranked her ongoing flames all the way up. Once everyone was clear of the blast radius to be, Richie machine-gun fired level 1 airballs into the center of the mammalian inferno.
A crackling shockwave imbued with hellish heat spread out and scorched the surrounding trees. As the brightness dimmed, a lateral ring of smoke displaced outward from the manticore, revealing its third-degree burn covered form, little fires still burning in its mane. It swayed drunkenly on its paws, and then collapsed onto its side.
Unfortunately, this heat flash melted the ice. The skeletal, black and gooey grasping limbs of humanoid shades stretched up and out of the goo. Perhaps it was an elixir of life in that sense, if one wanted to severely stretch the definition of life to include shades. The part of Richie that never really left Tide Town shouldn't have been too surprised. He had seen the shadow of the Faceless Man pass through a fountain and corrupt it into liquid negativity with a touch, and so many of his ilk had come through the lightless web of roads made by interconnected shadows across the docks, between the waves, and in the sky. The runoff produced by the soulless could in turn produce more soulless, in sufficient, stagnant qualities. This hideously linked sweat and semen in Richie's mind.
Taloned, ghoulish hands grabbed Richie, Holly, Freyja, and the Cuppy Bros from the pond, extending like warped shadows under the shifting light of the setting sun. The touch was colder than death and deeper than clinical depression where it clamped them tight - Richie around the waist, Holly by the throat, each Cuppy Bro around the chest and shoulders, and Freyja, still in wolf form, by the back. They screamed as they were dragged toward the corroded pond of death, lights fading and growing dimmer, vision and all senses falling into the bottomless darkness. Richie again saw his dream vision of that great Void, infinite like space and inescapable like a black hole.
Absolute gravity, the limitless sheer weight of total despair.
A zigzag of Arctic blue crisscrossed the pond, depositing Chikita on the bank with the others, Yukihana clicking back into his sheath.
The arms and wrists of the forming shades reaching out of the pond were frozen over and cracked, then shattered altogether.
"Blizzard Fang!" Chikita declared.
The severed hand clutching Richie and the others evaporated and blew away as inky black vapor.
"Nap done, kick ass now." Chikita gave a manic, wolf-like grin.
"Look out!" Holly cried.
A flurry of more shade arms burst out at Chikita, and were dispatched in a blink. Richie counted at least seven different streaks of silver at distinct angles.
"Siphon the fucking shithole!" Chikita growled at Cuppy. "Get to it!"
A scorpion tail exploded at them from where the manticore lay, the ruined beast regaining consciousness yet again, against all seeming laws of nature.
"FUCKING STAY DOWN ALREADY!" Richie gaped, getting tired of the stubborn brutes nine lives.
Chikita slashed a flying wave of blue razor wind at the tail, bisecting the barb and bell, and pushing the tail back.
Not deep enough! she tutted. An ankle drew too close to the pond, and a shade hand creeped up to grab her around the ankle like a vice. A microwave shot scattered it and made the pond hiss as though the entire vat of demonic liquid was writhing in pain. Meanwhile, Freyja noticed part of Chikita's air blade keep going past the tail and sever a tree branch.
That gave her an idea.
Also meanwhile, it was time for Cup and Pup to filter the pond.
Richie positioned himself right in the Manticore's face, staring it right in its cloudy, bruised eyes. He charged up a finisher, every muscle tensed and his dragon tats lunging off his forearms, rolling plumes of azure flame unfurling from each maw. His fists coated themselves in scales and superheated, a brilliant azure orb forming around them that expanded and sparked until reaching a flashpoint. "SUNCORE!" Richie shouted, plunging a fist into each of the Manticore's eye sockets. The massive orb engulfed the manticore entirely, and the entire neighborhood flashed in a neon glow that could be seen for dozens of miles. For three long seconds, it was like morning had come early, the cloudless night sky utterly filled with vibrant blue.
Beneath the ice below Richie's feet, the black rain hissed and screamed like a gutted banshee at the sheer intensity, trying in vain to recoil away. Great clouds of inky smoke spewed through the perforations in the ice as the black rain began evaporating from the heat, the icy shell blanketing it beginning to dissolve into slush.
Chikita leaped high into a tree branch, feeling the rolling heat of the azure sun distort the wood and crinkle back the leaves. She had to cringe back, eyes closed from the tremendous brightness.
I'm not taking any chances with this thing. Even if you somehow get back up from this, we'll be long gone.
Chikita scurried up to the top of the tree, perching there on the flexible, swaying summit, so much like a tall reed in the wind.
"God what a great view." she purred. From here, it was an endless sea of trees steeped in crimson sunset. She felt a flood of cuddly nostalgia for the inverse of the majestic rising sun for which her country was named. She pictured the vista flipping over, and the sun circling the planet to birth itself from the morning sea's horizon once again.
Since they were at a static threshold of the Backyards, she could open the way to her dreamscape territory if only she could clear her mind of the urgency and the danger. She needed to smell grilling meat and frying takoyaki, to hear the splashing of koi through the babbling brooks of a vibrant garden, to see the shape of Kyoko on her mat behind a paper wall, illuminated by a deep red lantern's glow. She smiled vacantly.
Below, a fissure began to happen beside the burning manticore. Destabilized, scorched ground caved in and gave way to an icy crevice, deep and dark like the throat of a giant. The lion's back paws began to lose ground, clogs of dirt crumbling beneath them and tumbling down, ricocheting into the freezing darkness. The earth groaned as it began to open its jaws wider.
Squinting in the vibrant light, Freyja took note of Chikita's seeming plan. "Looks like the cat needs a little persuasion to get in the timeout hole." She growled to herself, sprinting for the nearest tree. She filled her lupine lungs with air and exhaled inferno, the powerful red-orange glare meeting the stunning azure of Richie's Suncore attack, and cutting deep into the trunk of the sizeable oak she stood in front of. With a strong kick of her front paws, she cracked the tall trunk from its stump, and sent the oak tilting down, its shadow falling squarely over the manticore's spine.
The thunder of the cracking, collapsing tree cut through the roar of the flare, and the manticore looked up to see the great mass that was about to plunge him into the depths. He saw it only as a dark black shape contrasted against shades of gray. The tree caught him under the neck and chest, his own shifted posture being his undoing as the freezing pit behind him expanded, revealing a great Arctic sea at the bottom, thousands of feet below. A ribbon of aurora borealis reflected off and up from the ice panes, like glass, and rising tendrils of icy mist. The manticore's back feet lost traction as the tremendous weight of the fallen tree carried it and him over the edge and into the wintry maw.
Not again... he thought gloomily.
-
A high crag, somewhere in Persia. A dark, cloudy night tense with the promise of thunder and rain. A thousand memories of being crowded out by litter mates from latching onto the milk-giving humanoid breasts lining the underside of the lioness's belly. Being kicked around and gnawed on like a chewtoy. Being weak. Being insignificant.
Then, the furious roar of a new alpha male, and a bloody pride takeover. Male cubs culled and eaten, females kept as breeding stock. Rival manticore alphas bent the knee or were torn apart. And the runt, not even worth devouring, was punted off the edge of the high cliff, overlooking a deep, rocky gorge.
His blood soaked the chasm floor, a fading demihuman beast with glazing eyes, milky like they are now. Survival of the fittest...
-
Something woke up in him. Something that wouldn't let him die. Anger, hatred, vengeance - the fury that was a salve on pain, and buried the fragile cracks in the heart. He saw the stars in the hood of Lord Crocus, who offered his pale hand.
"What do you want?" he asked the dying cub.
Rattling breaths, forcing words up from collapsed, rib-punctured lungs.
"...to be king..."
-
The full grown manticore climbed back up that cliff and took his pound of flesh.
He never stopped taking.
-
"DON'T YOU DARE ASSUME THIS WILL KILL ME!" he bellowed rage up the reverberating walls of the ice crevice as he and the tree that weighed him down plunged as if from the sky into the subzero sea. A tremendous splash, like that in the wake of a great landslide, sent rain up from the misting cavern even as the crevice began to slide closed again and seal itself up. The sides met and became a single blue line that shrank. Shrank. Shrank.
Gone.
Dark smoke puffed from Freyja's lips, her adrenaline-boosted breaths coming fast and ragged in the otherwise eerily silent soundscape. Richie's suncore orb dissipated like a desert mirage, and he fell to a knee with a grunt, recuperating his stamina as well. Cuppy rolled his shoulders, knuckles white as he gripped his half of the scissor blade, its shimmering surface wobbling slightly as his hands shook. A crow cawed in the distance. All three cast glances at each other. "We should...probably deal with the lake." Freyja's voice came, sounding somewhat hoarse.
Cuppy nodded wordlessly, approaching Richie and propping the older boy's arm around his shoulders, guiding him off of the partially melted ice. Cuppet jogged over to assist, his wooden feet clicking against the ice as he took Richie's other arm. Once all friendlies were off of the inky lake and on dry ground, Cuppy mustered his focus, an almost alarming amount of strings pouring forth from every pore of the boy's skin, arcing skyward as they began to knit themselves into an enormous, finely-woven net. A strainer. "Frey, if you'd be so kind." Richie said wearily, motioning to the thinned out ice sheet.
The black wolf nodded, nostrils flaring as she sent wide bursts of flame over the lake, slowly melting away the remaining ice. The smell of death and hatred was almost overwhelming, and Freyja half stumbled, her canid nose threatening sensory overload from the stench. Once nothing but the dark liquid remained, Cuppy brought his hands downward, like a music conductor cuing the start of a song. His net encircled the edges of the lake, longer strands of thicker rope that crisscrossed the net wrapping themselves around nearby trees for structural support as the bulk of it disappeared beneath the darkness. Cuppy shuddered at the unexpected coldness transferring through his strings, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. "Something's...in there." he said, voice shaky.