Chương 180: The Joy of Mayhem

Nyxala sat between piles of valuables she dare not touch. Small candles burned hot pink around a bloody pentagram. The skin of her elbow hovered above the ritual, with wisps of flame flowing from the candles to cradle her offered sacrifice for consumption. The dual-tone whispered hymn flowing from her mouth was not one she knew well, but the nonsensical lyrics came to her with the ease of someone who had repeated this process a thousand times.

Euphoria had left his mark on her, so she knew exactly the chant to summon him. If Nyxala was normal, then this ritual would fail. The runes were a hundred times too small, she didn't have ten or more voices chanting in symphony, and the pitiful offering of a scrap of skin off her arm all would have combined to prevent any chance of the god listening to this summoning. He likely wouldn't even notice. Burning candles and glowing blood should die out without any result besides the loss of what she sacrificed.

But she wasn't normal. It had been drilled into her head how out of the norm her body was, and so she hoped that the combination of her blood and skin — paltry a slice as it may be — would overcome the inadequacies. Euphoria had, after all, invaded another creature's summoning to get a hold of her flesh. And it seemed he remained interested. In a repeat of the previous ritual, the pink flames — the mundane colour, not that of her inner mutation — suffocated.

Each of the dead candles wafted with thick, black smoke that spiralled together, converging on the sacrificial skin. Like a crack of lightning, the first chuckle ripped through the Tributary. A flash of white in the dark cloud. A thunderous giggle quaked her bones, bubbled in her guts, and her throat mirrored the laugh. She felt her chest heave with the power of uncontrollable joy as the nearby piles quivered and crumbled.

Nyxala found the tumbling mass of wealth absolutely hilarious and descended into a fit of giggles… until she realised the sinister touch on her mind. She snapped out of it, pushing back the joyous thoughts that weren't her own. Lysyra was not so fortunate. The girl was curled up at her side, clutching her chest in a poor attempt to hold in her giggles while staring up in bliss-tainted fear at the electric grin of Euphoria. Idiot. Nyxala clicked her tongue. I told you to leave before he got here.

She stomped her foot on the girl's head, shattering the replica and hopefully severing her from the god's influence.

"My, my." His voice struck with another wave assaulting her chest, urging her to embrace the hilarity of the situation.

"If I were capable of it, I'd feel insulted you didn't want me to meet your little friend." Euphoria's white grin manifested on the ever-expanding dark cloud, as countless smaller grins flashed into existence for the briefest moments. They unleashed a chorus of ethereal childish tittering to enunciate his every word.

"Lovely to see you, as ever." The smile tilted towards her floating flesh.

"How long has it been? A few million years? Shall I assume your name is N̪ỷx̱̽ala this time?" A glowing white claw came into existence in the absence of dark cloud, and pierced her elbow skin. Euphoria's grin widened, a loud cackle knocking over another mountain of valuables. Nyxala glanced to the side, and as she should have expected, the machines and their Worshippers were already in a chaotic frenzy.

"You have learnt to hold yourself back, I see." His bodiless talon flicked the small lump of skin casually as a booming laugh rolled through the Tributary. Despite all but dismissing the severed chunk, she noticed how little the entire chamber of valuable sacrifices and materials failed to catch his attention in the slightest.

"So what are the terms of this contract?" She leaned back as the god's formless grin shifted closer.

"Two things." Nyxala didn't have the time to waste chatting with this being that even as she stood here, tried to instil its sinister fervor into her mind.

"First, you are welcome to take anything in this chamber, so long as it isn't something I intend to take, and don't get in my way." The bodiless grin held stead. It neither looked around or altered its shape. If Nyxala had to guess, Euphoria wasn't all that excited at the prospect.

"Second," she said reluctantly, knowing so much could go wrong with this permission.

"Cause havoc." Nyxala expected the roaring laugh. She was ready for the rumbling, child-like cackles. Even knowing it was coming, the flash of a thousand eerie smiles struck her mind like a infection. It desperately sought to force a laugh out of her. She fought it off well, but there was only so much she could do against the eagerness driving her own. Her sceptre was within her reach.

"I knew I would like you." The jubilant thunderstorm rose above her, spreading to fill the massive chamber.

"Now don't let me hold you back from your own ecstasy." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. And with that, the storm erupted. Euphoria consumed every source of light, replacing it with nothing but the brilliant flashes of his own guffaws and giggles. Everything descended into laughter. Whether they reasonably should be able to find humour… that didn't matter to the god. Nyxala flew. The strobing lights of lightning grins lit the way.

She tried not to focus too much on Euphoria's insane laughter and the creatures he infected as it made the mental pressure more difficult to fend off, but when even nonliving objects began to join the chorus of cackles, that task became impossible. A human heart, installed into a machine, burst a tube as its rhythm hitched and took on a squeaky sound she wasn't sure where breathless laughs, or a heart-attack. Lysyra's spiral dagger had not been unaffected.

It had somehow found its way onto the shrine of a long dead arachnoangel and carved a smile into its inhuman shell. The machine, supposedly inactive, squirmed on the ground as if life had returned to it only to make it suffer unceasing, voiceless, laughter. Nyxala swooped, and snatched the dagger. Euphoria's manipulations ceased immediately, just as contracted. As she snapped up the scroll she'd wanted, Nxyala gave a tentative glance at the edges she could see of the steelfae.

It had charged into the centre of the Tributary, only to stumble and get caught in endless, gut-wrenching laughter along with the rest of the present machines and Worshippers. Further back, through the hall she expected to be the main entrance, an army was already forming. They weren't yet incapacitated, but she could tell the unnatural humour was getting to some. The Worshippers, weak in mind, fell first. Nyxala reached the massive door of her target — the deepest part of the Tributary — unbothered.

It was unguarded. Not only that, there was a jagged rend through the door in the shape of a grin. Euphoria had been kind enough to open the way for her. Or maybe this was simply him playing on her wording of 'stay out of her way'. It worked out for Nyxala, so she didn't question it further. Her wings snapped to her side and she slipped through at speed. What she found behind those doors… well, if she didn't already hate the Worshippers of the Machine God, this would have ignited her animosity. Children.

Hundreds of them. Bolted to metal contraptions that pierced the sides of their chests with large, electrode spikes, the kids were so tightly integrated that it was hard to imagine extracting their bodies. Their throats had been removed to facilitate the installation of a tube. Little care had been taken when they healed; the scarring around the protruding pipe was disgusting spiderweb of skin, muscle, and gangrene. Nyxala stepped past one of the devices, only for the young boy's eyes to snap open. He was feral.

Barely seemed to see her through the pain. Those glassy eyes spoke of no memory besides agony. They were alive. They were conscious, and subjected to constant torture. She slipped past the boy half her age. There were many just like him. Some opened their eyes sensing her presence, while most remained miserably absent from their own bodies. Older children sat in the torture machines further from the door. As she continued deeper, she found it wasn't limited to kids.

Adults were bound to the same mechanism, yet their bodies were so malformed it was difficult to see them as human. No muscle at all. Their legs and spine were short and stumpy, with terrible kinks that contorted the skin. The torture racks had been too small to hold them, yet their bodies never stopped growing. While they were technically still alive, there was no life to these people. Their eyelids didn't flutter with the horrific nightmares rout by endless pain. They didn't awaken at her presence.

No, their minds were no more conscious than if someone had scooped out their brain. Nyxala found her sceptre. It was leaned against the wall along with countless other relics. There was no shrine here. Despite the power they likely all wielded, the relics were all discarded to the side to make way for the spotlight of this grand hall. Sitting alone, centre-piece of the Tributary, were three glass spheres suspended in place by a hundred mechanical arms.

There was the shimmer of liquid inside, but that was secondary to the people held within. Three young adults. Each with a cursed mutation. They looked frozen in time. Imprisoned the moment they'd hit their ideal sacrificial age, then left here for decades. The woman on the left's face had been savaged, but there was a slight tinge of white discolouring to the damaged skin. Her mutation had been destroyed, and she was now a hideous, faceless monstrosity for it.

The boy to the right, the youngest of the three, lacked legs at all. Severed where they joined at the hip. But compared to the other two, it was the man in the centre who caught her eye. He had two mutations. A crown of sawn-off horns and an enlarged chest and shoulders that looked like it fit a man twice his size. Clearly, getting rid of that one would have killed him.

From what Nyxala knew, it was impossible to find kids with cursed mutations — besides herself — that didn't descend into Madness and lose themselves to the mutation. Especially not one with two mutations. Where had the Worshippers gotten these three? How had they brought them to adulthood alive? Nyxala stepped away from the three, not sure what to think. She grabbed her sceptre. It immediately responded, recognising its legitimate master, by blasting everything nearby in a blinding yellow light.

The same acrid colour of Sekhhath'Ra's sun. She should have been thrilled to have what was hers back… but her eyes returned to the thousand sacrifices being kept alive by machine. To the three curse-mutated held captive, just as she'd once been. As much as she hated what was done here, Nyxala wouldn't save them. She had nowhere to take them, had no intent on being bogged down taking care of others when it would do nothing but hold her from the single task that needed completing.

Even if she had a way to get them all out unharmed, she wouldn't. Too much lasting damage had been done here. The only thing she could do for the tortured was free them of their endless agony. But… was that wise? Nyxala could, if she wanted, simply leave them here. It would make it seem as if Euphoria's appearance was nothing more than a freak appearance. Nobody who broke in here would steal only a single torch when there was so much of value.

She could make it seem like nobody had ever made it into this part of the Tributary. And that was the moment her badge failed to defend against the detection system. The ID exploded into bits of circuitry. Not a second later, a siren was blaring in her ears. Well, there was no hiding she was here now. Might as well take the sacrifices away from the Worshippers… and put the eternally tortured out of their misery. Nyxala found herself looking upon the three cursed again. What to do with her fellows?