Chương 60: 25-2.Gore, Flesh, and Organisms

The lord—no, the beast wearing a nobleman's hollowed-out skin—let out a low, rattling chuckle. Then the dungeon shook. Not with volume alone. The roar that followed was composed of layers—multiple tones biting into each other, overlapping, tearing at each other from inside the same throat, as though more than one mouth had pressed itself against a single set of vocal cords and screamed. Dust and salt crust rained from the ceiling.

The torches on the walls went into a frenzy under the blast of fetid air, throwing the chamber into a strobing sequence of light and dark. Erina hung motionless above the pool, head dropped, her breathing reduced to something you had to look for. The monster lunged.

"SHIELD WALL!" Matthews's voice hit before the creature did. Not a command—something older than commands, something that had been calcified into his bones by years of standing between living men and things that wanted them dead. One step forward. The iron-banded wooden shield came down against the stone with a concussive boom that rang through the chamber.

He dropped his weight low, shoulder driving into the shield face, chain mail and leather straps pulling taut, planting himself like a man who had decided he was a wall now. The beast's claw came down. CRACK. The sound hit like a hammer finding an anvil. The shield face erupted—wood splintering, iron fittings sheering off, debris scattering across wet stone. Matthews was driven backward, boots carving two long furrows through the salt-crusted filth, blood appearing at the corner of his mouth. He didn't give ground.

He answered with a sound that was less human voice than geological event—a grinding, tectonic snarl—and drove his shoulder back into the ruined shield.

"Cedric!" He spat blood, voice reduced to gravel.

"Go for the joints! This bastard's hide is thicker than castle walls!" I hadn't been planning to aim for the face anyway. Mostly because looking at it was already doing enough damage. While Matthews held the front, Jessi had already moved off my left. In the torchlight she was barely visible—a dark shape with a sliver of cold steel, moving fast and low. BANG. The flintlock discharged like someone had swung an iron beam through my skull.

Flash of light, wall of powder smoke, the acrid bite of black powder obliterating everything else in the air. The lead ball found the gap between chitinous plates at the creature's knee with surgical precision, punching through and detonating a spray of black-green ichor.

"Consider this my formal response to your lordship's dinner invitation!" Jessi was still grinning—that same infuriating grin—but the edge behind it had gone sharp in a way I'd never seen from her before. She didn't wait to see the result. She rolled with the recoil, cutting behind the creature's flank, and drove her blade into the wounded leg with technique that could only be described as deeply, personally vindictive. Now. I reversed my grip, took the longsword in both hands, and threw myself at the thing's chest.

I won't pretend I wasn't afraid. My heart was hitting the inside of my ribs hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth. The dungeon air—bitter salt and blood and something underneath both that I had no name for—burned going down. I locked my eyes onto the tear in its torso—where Conrad's breastplate should have been, now nothing but hanging shreds, exposing collapsed flesh and shifting dark-red tissue, as though everything that should have been contained inside a human body had been turned outward and stirred.

My hands were shaking. The blade was not.

"—TAKE THIS!" I drove every ounce of weight behind the point and plunged the sword into the writhing rot. The sword went in. But the feedback was wrong. Like plunging steel into something thick and resilient that actively contracted around the blade. The sword sank halfway and seized, followed by the screech of metal grinding against hardened bone—a sound that went straight into my teeth. The monster snapped its head down. That single clouded eye locked onto me.

"Pain..." It hissed the word first, then split its mouth open—blood and fragments of things I wasn't going to identify—into something that might have once been a grin.

"You dare make the master hurt?" Not good. I didn't even have time to yank the blade free before a blast of fetid air hit me like a physical blow. That enormous, chitin-plated claw swept across in a horizontal arc. I managed to twist my body just enough to avoid complete obliteration. The next thing I knew felt like being struck head-on by a charging bear at full sprint.

My chest went dark, my vision exploded in red, and for a heartbeat I couldn't tell whether I was airborne or if half of me had simply been erased from existence. CRACK. My back hit the salt-rock wall hard enough that I nearly coughed my lungs out along with the blood. Pain. Not localized—everywhere. Like someone had pried open my ribcage, packed it with red-hot iron filings, and slammed it shut. Something sweet and metallic surged up my throat.

I turned my head and hacked out a mouthful of blood, dark enough to look black against the pale salt floor. The longsword had left my hand, clattering somewhere several feet away. I slid down the wall into a sitting position, black rings blooming at the edges of my vision, my ears producing a high, constant whine. Wonderful. At this rate, forget heroics—I was about thirty seconds from forgetting whether tonight's dinner had been bread or structural masonry.

"Cedric!" Jessi's voice cut through sharp enough that I briefly wondered if she'd taken a hit too. The monster didn't even acknowledge her. It had already chosen me. Whatever remained of human expression on that ruined face had been completely evacuated. What replaced it was something purer than anything Conrad had ever shown at his dinner table: appetite, undisguised, almost joyful. It dragged its injured leg toward me, each step sending blood and salt-mud spraying outward.

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"First... this one." Its voice sounded like wet rot grinding against itself.

"Meat that fights back... always tastes better." I genuinely wanted to thank it for the compliment. Unfortunately, coordinating my tongue felt like an unreasonable expenditure of energy at the moment. Matthews roared and threw himself at the creature from the side, shield-first, trying to knock it off course. The mutated duke's strength was obscene. One casual backhand sent Matthews and his already-ruined shield flying into the iron bars with a metallic screech that nearly bent the rails.

The monster raised one foot. If that came down, I could skip the carriage fare back to the royal capital entirely. In that instant, elvish words rang out from across the dungeon. Clear. Cold. The sound of thin ice parting skin. Alvira. No theatrical projection. No performer's flourish. Just syllables landing precisely, and with each one the air around us pulled tighter. The arrow flew. Not an ordinary shot.

The moment it left the string, the scattered air in the chamber was yanked into a single coherent force, wrapping around the shaft in a tight spiral that produced a sound close to a shriek. The torchlight bent backward under the pressure. The entire stone room felt like something invisible had drawn a blade across it. CRACK. The arrow detonated against the creature's raised knee joint.

The compressed wind exploded along the seams of the chitinous plating, forcing itself into the gaps with a series of sharp fractures. Black-green ichor sprayed across the floor. The creature's balance collapsed, and the stomp meant for my skull crashed down beside my ear instead, cratering the salt floor. Salt fragments and blood-mud splattered across my face. Alvira stepped back, nocked another arrow, and spoke without inflection:"Cedric." I looked up at her, my face painted with blood.

"Stand up," she said.

"Don't die in a place like this."... Her motivational technique remained as aggressively unpleasant as ever. It also worked. I gritted my teeth, planted my elbow, and started dragging myself out of that collapsing heap of pain. Every breath felt like broken glass being rearranged inside my chest. My vision was still making editorial decisions about what I got to see. But I could see. And I wasn't dead. That was enough. As I was struggling toward my sword, Lucas—silent until now—finally spoke.

"Alvira." I stopped. Because his voice was wrong. Not the usual timid, apologetic tone of someone afraid words themselves were dangerous. This was something else entirely—flat, precise, stripped of nerves and leaving only something I had never fully understood.

"Can you hold it still for a moment?" Alvira turned to look at him. One look. That was all she needed.

"Yes." She reversed her bow, took the short staff in her other hand, and drove the base into the salt-mud floor. No flash. No explosion. The ground simply moved. From cracks that should have been baked lifeless by years of salt, something iron-grey forced its way out. Tendrils the color of old bruised flesh, with an unnatural grey-green sheen, grinding and twisting as they emerged.

The moment they broke the surface, they lunged for the creature's legs with singular purpose, coiling tight and dragging that massive weight into place. The creature screamed and tore at them. Fluid burst from the vines where it grabbed. They only tightened further, as though they'd identified something in that body that didn't belong.

"Quickly," Alvira ground out.

"It's breaking free." Lucas took one step forward. Just one. But that single step changed the feeling of the entire dungeon. He didn't wave a staff or recite lengthy incantations. He simply raised one pale hand and spread his fingers toward the bound creature. His eyes, always hidden in shadow, had gone perfectly still. Then he said quietly:"Take the air away from there." At first I didn't understand what I was witnessing. No light. No fire. No wind.

The opposite—every signal that would normally announce something is happening was stripped away. The air around the creature simply receded. The torch flames flinched toward it, then snapped back. The surface of the blood pool dented inward without cause. Dust motes stopped in place as if they'd hit invisible glass. Then the creature's entire body convulsed. Its mouth opened wide. Not to roar. To inhale. Desperately. Repeatedly. Nothing came. That was when I understood what Lucas had actually done.

Not fire or lightning or any magic a layman could follow. That bastard had removed the air from a precise volume of space around the creature's head. Like someone had taken a spoon and scooped an invisible void straight out of the world. A horrible sound tore from the creature's throat—panic, pure and simple. Its chest heaved uselessly. It began to thrash wildly, limbs striking stone and iron, chitin grinding against the vines with sounds that made my skull feel thin.

Its face contorted further beyond human geometry as oxygen deprivation and rage competed for control. Lucas stood where he was, arm still raised. His fingertips were trembling. Finely. Almost imperceptibly. I only caught it because I happened to look. So that was it. Not that he couldn't do this. This technique simply wasn't something you deployed casually. The creature's thrashing intensified, but that invisible pocket of absence stayed locked around its skull—a weightless, suffocating mask.

The torn mouth worked uselessly, producing only thick, strangled sounds.

"My... castle..." The voice shifted—one moment Conrad, the next something else.

"My... throne..." Now. I have no idea where the strength came from. Rage, probably. Or sheer refusal to die in a dungeon that smelled like this. I grabbed the longsword, my chest screaming, and moved. This time I didn't shout. There was no point. I locked my eyes on that neck—thrown back, exposed, straining against nothing—took the sword in both hands, and swung. The feedback was vile. Like cutting through half-rotten timber with bone inside it.

But Lucas's technique had disrupted its strength, and Alvira's vines held it fast. One stroke wasn't enough. I bore down and drove the blade through with everything I had left. Thud. The misshapen head rolled free in a spray of black-green ichor, bouncing twice before it stopped. The headless body continued to convulse. More than convulse. In the split cavity of its chest, something was still moving. Like a heart that had grown wrong, armored in shell and sprouting grasping limbs, trying to crawl out.

The moment I saw it, I knew: Conrad was already finished. This was what needed killing. Alvira didn't give it a second chance. She stepped forward in one fluid motion, reversed her staff, and drove the tip into the writhing core. As she did, she whispered something in old Elvish—not a chant, but a verdict. The light at the staff's tip wasn't bright. It was the color of ash that had been cold for a long time. The instant it touched the thing, all movement stopped. No explosion. No scream.

It simply shuddered once and crumbled into blackened powder. The headless carcass lost its last support and crashed forward into the blood-mud, sending up a wave of filth before going still. Silence fell like a weight. Only our ragged breathing and the faint clink of chains above the blood pool. I braced my hands on my knees and coughed twice, spitting more blood onto the stone. Good. Still producing blood meant still alive.

Jessi had dropped to the floor, flintlock still in her hand, face the color of old candle wax.

"I take it back," she croaked.

"This dinner party was significantly worse than advertised."

"The fact that you can still deliver terrible jokes means we haven't hit rock bottom."

"That's technically you delivering the terrible joke."

"Which proves I'm in marginally better shape than you."

"Bullshit, you were about to become floor decoration—""Enough." Matthews cut across us, breathing hard.

"We're not done." Right. We weren't done. Because the severed head had just moved. A small, involuntary twitch. All of us turned. The grotesque mask of its features was changing. Not reverting—but the wild green madness in that clouded eye was receding like a tide. What remained was murky, exhausted, faintly bewildered. Conrad's gaze. Recognizably human. He opened his mouth. A wet cough came first, carrying blood. Then, with visible effort:"... Water." His voice was dry enough to crack. I frowned and didn't move.

Not from lack of sympathy. But transitioning from intended entrée to attentive caregiver in five seconds was asking more psychological flexibility than I currently had available. Conrad seemed aware of how absurd his request was. His eye found the remains of his own body, and his mouth pulled into something that might have been a smile in better circumstances.

"So... this is what it looked like..." He tried to laugh. Produced blood instead.

"I could hear them... outside... crying... always heard them... the salt flats... beyond the walls... in the hall..." Each word cost him something he couldn't get back.

"I thought... if I just built higher... got more... I could keep it down..." His eye lost focus, then dragged itself back to me. What was in it now had nothing of hunger or aristocratic arrogance. Just fear—the kind that arrives too late to matter.

"That wasn't... a throne..." His throat worked, pulling up what was left.

"It was bait." Something cold settled in my chest. Conrad's eye trembled, looking at us and perhaps at something else entirely.

"In the lake... there's still..." A pause.

"... living shadows..." The last words were barely sound. Then the light in his eye—the last human light—went out. This time it was final. I stared at the head for two seconds before exhaling slowly. Perfect. One cannibal lord. One parasite that had been wearing him from inside. And a dying declaration that sounded nothing like good news. Tonight's haul was truly fucking spectacular. I was about to speak when chains clinked overhead. Erina. I'd nearly—no.

I hadn't let myself look at her for long, because every time I did, I remembered what I'd said last night in the spire. She was still suspended above the blood pool. Wonderful. Apparently tonight came with complimentary moral evaluation.