Chương 205: Commencement of Catastrophe

Nyxala was aware the very instant the ritual began. It would have been difficult to miss. One moment, she calmly floated in the dimly-lit river of blood that was Yog. The next, a vast ritual array ignited above. It burned from the outer rim, and rapidly concentrated toward the centre like a wave. Even if she was blind, and the crackling sound didn't follow the flaming runes, Nyxala would have known. The space itself felt different. An unsettling weight settled on their souls.

It was entirely distinct from the Darkness tentacles that would tug one down to the black hole, yet she still felt herself pulled upwards. Towards the core of the Island. Suddenly, nowhere felt safe. The metal ceiling alone was rapidly overcome with an unsettling sensation of illness. As if the steel itself was sick. Whatever had been done, the ceiling, and likely all other surfaces of the Island, would no longer provide protection of any form. The infection of something else was bleeding through those pentagrams.

Nyxala wanted to call it subtle… but really, as soon as she felt it, she was unable to cast away the abhorrent impression. If this was just the beginning, then Nyxala did not want to see what would happen if the ritual were to succeed. She cast aside her temptation to overwhelm the ritual. Whatever… wherever the Fleshsmiths were reaching, it would be beyond reckless to trigger anything worse.

"Something's happened," Lysyra said, still doing her best to keep out of the muck.

"They still have a day before they should have begun."

"They know we're here?"

"No." Lysyra shook her head.

"They'd delay it in that case. Why risk sabotage?"

"Well, there's no point speculating." Nyxala spread her wings.

"Now we don't need to wait." As Tṡial̺air̡ gathered her sceptre's darkness around her and her wings tensed, Nyxala paused. Glancing down at the ocean of blood rising to hug her chest, she spoke.

"Yog. I have something really important I need you to do. Stay here and mix with the flesh as much as you can. When-" WE WANT TO STAY WITH YOU.

"I know." She pet the blood as if it were a child's head.

"But this is something only you can do. When I call your name, come and find me. Bring all the flesh you can. Can you do that?" Yog's disappointment was palpable, but it nodded anyway. OK"Thank you." Doing it a favour, she reached down and dipped her arms in the crimson river. It was rather awkward for a hug, but by the ripple that spread out through the blood, rising into dangerously large waves, Yog was happy. WE WILL MAKE YOU PROUD. YOU WILL LOVE US.

Nyxala suppressed the pang of guilt that seemed to spill through her chest, and nodded. There was still so much she didn't know about its origin, so it was difficult to trust completely, but the earnestness in which it acted was chipping away at her continued reluctance. In a few moments, she was out of the flesh basement and climbed back to the populated levels. It seemed she wasn't the only one taken off-guard by the suddenness of the ritual.

All the teeth above were scrambling to move towards the core of the island. Not even half lingered on the outer rim to complete jobs that hadn't yet been completed. Perfect. As soon as Nyxala broke through the first of the ritual floors, she launched into the hunt. Her first kill never saw her coming. A decapitation. The simplest and easiest way to assure the end of a life. Though, it wasn't always reliable.

Racing through the sacrifice preparation chamber — now without its sacrifices — Pushy sliced clean through the neck of the fifth cultist yet to react to her. Only, the moment she'd turned her attention from the decapitated corpse, something grabbed Pushy and yanked her back. With her heart thumping, she had the reaction speed to drive her four other rapiers into the man's chest. He was still headless, but that didn't seem to matter. Despite his pincushion of a chest, he kept moving.

Nyxala felt a hand wrap around her wrist. Again she was tugged forward. The man couldn't see her — both because of her sceptre and his missing head -- but clearly he'd been in enough scraps to instinctively reach for her neck. She bit off his hand.

"Ah! You fucking thing." Wrenching her blades from his chest, she took a moment to gather the situation. The body was still standing with horrid wounds, unbothered, but on the ground behind it, a head was screaming.

"I don't know who or what you are, but this is Z͐a̟͠n̖͐di̥s͈t̝̾h̃̔́'s ritual. By interrupting it, you have doomed yourself to the most agonising afterlife imaginable. You-" Not caring to listen to the still animate head any longer, Nyxala spun, slamming her tail into the body to knock it aside, and clamp her claws down on his head. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Yet even that was not enough.

The head — now in five chunks — flopped around as its jaw muscles continued its attempts to threaten her. She stared at the tongue as it cursed the ground it wiggled on. His body clambered to its feet again. Was he really still alive through all that? Well, it finally gave her an excuse to use her situational Feat. Layering corruption and a layer of her soul over her rapier, she poked his heart. The change was instantaneous. His tongue stopped flapping, and she could see actual fear enter one of his loose eyeballs.

Nyxala cranked her chainsaw. She opened her mouth and let her tongue spit on the pieces of head as her tail shredded through the body. Nyxala spun and found her next target. She hadn't so much as taken a step before she was freed of her death pact. For the next dozen minutes, she cut through every Fleshsmith with decreasing difficulty. The improvements to her additives showing their worth. She lurked through the outer rim of the ritual, butchering any she came across.

Lysyra spread herself out, ready to drive her knife into the heart of whoever noticed Nyxala early enough to trigger an alarm. Besides that cultist that made a puppet of his own body, there had barely been resistance. Already, she'd eliminated a hundred cultists. But it wasn't enough. She needed to head inwards. That was where she'd find the higher creeds. The ones too busy with their ritual to resist a blade through the heart. But her first upper creed cultist kill delivered itself right to her.

A group of eight ran through the halls. The sharp edges of their teeth and blades moving in a way that looked like they were racing towards Nyxala despite the walls separating them. For a moment, she wondered if they had discovered her presence already. At the very least, they'd noticed a disturbance in this section of the Island. Probably from all the cultists not doing their jobs at such an important time. Most of those coming weren't higher than fifth evolution. Only two were seventh.

And, upon looking at their souls, Nyxala realised she knew these two. Zan'Umi and Zan'Zalsaz ran past a small corrupted spiral in the wall where Nyxala hid herself, and didn't see her leap out at them until her blades were already cutting skin. Zan'Zalsaz simply stood, taking the blade to her neck, before she stopped it with her bare hand. Zal'Umi did something far more concerning. The moment Nyxala's blade touched her skin, all her strength slid from her arm.

Tumbling past them, Nyxala didn't waste the chance to cut through five of the lesser creeds before she slid to a stop. Nyxala had put away the sceptre in her chest to get the drop on these two, but it was already back and covering her appearance. Hopefully, they didn't glimpse her. Not that it would matter. If they had, it just meant she needed to eat them.

"Hey!" Zan'Umi startled, clutching her bleeding neck.

"A clogging darkness! I'll bet you a fifth evo soul that's what the Bodytwister was talking about." Taking a moment to take in her surroundings, she realised that like the last time she'd seen these two, there were eight more cultists than there were teeth to go with them. Somehow, she doubted she'd suddenly found the cultist group competing for worst smile.

"I'm not taking that bet." Zan'Zalsaz's voice was as gruff as it was before.

"Whatever it is, it shouldn't be here." The woman twisted her hand, and suddenly those eight suspiciously toothless cultists rushed Nyxala. She swung her tail, expecting to shred all who came too close. Instead, her chainsaw simply passed through them. Fuck. Nyxala beat her wings, gaining distance. She's somehow got souls fighting for her. Considering they still looked entirely human — besides maybe the absent look in their eyes — there was something more to it than simply souls themselves.

Those would be inneffective in a direct battle, even if they were somehow given the proper desire to fight beyond their death. It wasn't like they were much more than a reflection of their former self, so as far as Nyxala knew, not even Invows would hold. Nyxala stretched her tail out behind her and lowered her front until her claws were scraping barely above the floor. There wasn't as much structure to it, but the feral fighting style really flourished with O̅s̫stho̲th.

With two seventh evolutions, and a bunch of thralls she couldn't hit, Nyxala would need to be in peak form for this fight. Even then, she couldn't rely only on what she knew. When she had a boost that rewarded fighting in differing ways, she was almost required to find new methods. She flicked off her concealer. It felt wrong, when there were so many people around to see her, but she had to trust that either she would kill anyone that saw her, or her sceptre would continue to hide everything.

Nyxala leaned into her secondary voice, and hissed. The overlaying tone startled the lower creeds, but was completely ineffective on the souls and the seventh evolutions. Channelling the most unsettling mimicry of Euphoria she could manage, she laughed at those before her.

"Death will claim you all." Nyxala didn't really like taunting in fights. It was a waste of time and pivoted her focus from actually killing her target… but the response from O̅s̫stho̲th was positive. She could feel her boost increasing just from those few words. Mostly from the fear riddled gazes of the lesser creeds. If she was really going to try and terrify her opponents mid fight, she really needed to improve her taunting and menacing aura. Neither of her two actual targets were bothered.

Zan'Zulsaz opened her mouth to speak, but a flash of blue cracked across the burning ritual lines all around them. The smouldering red shifted blue for an instant, and it was gone again. A second passed, and it didn't seem to actually do anything… until the bodies started falling. All the lesser creeds crumbled. Then the souls vanished; replaced with strange doll-like bundles of flesh and iron. Zal'Zulsaz was the last to fall. Her eyes vacant, yet not without life. She breathed. Blood pumped through her veins.

Her body was whole, unblemished, yet as Nyxala searched for a name, a soul, she couldn't find one. Zan'Umi alone remained.

"Well, this wasn't supposed to happen for a while yet." Unlike before, she looked unsettled. Her eyes flickered between the darkness surrounding a pinprick of searing light and the motionless bodies around her. Nyxala was almost completely unsurprised that the Fleshsmiths would sacrifice their own. She took it for what it was, and accepted the opportunity. She pounced. What was surprising, was that Zan'Umi turned and fled without so much as a clash.

Even if she had lost all her comrades, she was still a seventh evolution. She was hardly defenceless. A wry grin crossed her lips as she watched the woman tilt her head back toward Nyxala, only for Lysyra to appear and drill her knife into the woman's chest. She gasped, and swung at Lysyra, but Nyxala's claws cleaved through her elbow before the strike landed.

"Oh, fuck off. I'm no-" Suddenly, the blue flashed again, and Nyxala felt the sharp grasp of ethereal chains wrap around her soul. It took little more than a flick of her soul-touch to dislodge them, but when she came to, she froze. Lysyra's replica collapsed to the ground, lifeless. Her eyes stared without seeing. She had not exploded into white motes.