Chương 223: Chapter 219: Impatience and Frustration

As Nyxalair's enlarged jaws scoured through the belly of Coral, it swallowed much more than the chains shoving themselves inside. The steel slabs of corridor walls. Miscellaneous scrap from a broken arachnoangel. The burning remnants of a still half-active ritual. But most importantly: bodies. Corpses she didn't care for, but the living ones? They were quick to be digested. Apparently, Nyxalair had carved through an active Worshipper battlefield. Most likely, they were fighting Technocultists.

She was tempted to join them — hoping they could help her against Solan — but she didn't. The Worshippers she'd swallowed digested almost instantly. They weren't strong. They wouldn't have been alive if there'd been any Technocultist there that had a chance to stall Solan. Neither Tarchon nor Ta'Stralanov'r. So Nyxalair kept to her original goal. She carved her chest through Coral until she reached its shadows. Solan, meanwhile, was anything but complacent.

While she now avoided Nyxalair's shadows and the curse unleashing touch permeating through them, she struck with her chain. Solan's massive chain-turned-net swung wide. It was the first indication that the woman didn't know exactly where she was in the obscuring dark, despite having avoided Nyxalair's decoy earlier. The weave of chains sliced through her shadows, leaving little more than forearm's length between each link. Not nearly narrow enough to slip through. Nyxalair didn't have many options.

O̅s̫s̋tho̲th hadn't charged up enough from her earlier fight to allow her to phase through the chains, and even if she had the time, she was wary of striking at Solan and leaving herself vulnerable. What she did have, was an ocean of blood simply waiting for the chance to answer her call.

"Ỷ̠ogͮ!" A dozen slits in her skin opened. Immense pressure from within her veins fought against Nyxalair's rapid healing to widen the openings further. In an instant, she was a fountain. A geyser spilling far more blood than anyone her size ought to be able to contain. Yog was anything but slow to react. The crimson ocean rushed to impede the net as Nyxalair's newly regrown wings desperately pulled her backwards. The bloody sea, embraced by shadows and Pink, struck the wall of chains.

A vast quantity of Life-fluid Yog had gathered from both the Island and Nyxalair's subsequent hunts did little to slow the net in the initial crash. Solan was too strong. A string of crackling pops followed the impact, where Nyxalair's tendrils picked up the sound of countless implosions. She almost dislocated her wings by how hard she beat. Pink provided an almost perfect platform to fly from, yet her body couldn't keep up with the power she was trying to force from it.

It took a moment, but finally the chains slowed — marginally — from slicing through the obscuring fluid. Yog had curled in on itself. Viscous blood hooked through the chains, and desperately pulled them away from Nyxalair. But Solan's weapon had a mind of its own. As if realising that it was being limited, the net snapped inwards. Each of the metallic links stuck in the depths of blood bolted into a lump, forcing a cascading effect upon the chain still beyond the limits of Nyxalair's shadows.

The net was pulled inwards, but instead of tumbling down into Yog, the added power only made the chains whip around her faster. Nyxalair found herself surrounded. Yog realised at the same time she did. The not so little blob tried to rush back to her. The blood still pouring from her veins posed as much of a barrier as it could, but it would make little difference. She couldn't let herself get caught, so she did the first thing that entered her mind in the instant before it struck. Nyxalair ripped open a Dark Star.

The corruption flowed out from her core. It rushed through her shadows, through Yog, and even through Pink. The reaction was weird. Her eyes seemed to flicker over a strange sense of… embodiment or materialisation that permeated the Pink realm before she dismissed it for later. Only the fact that her corruption infected the fleshforged chains was important. It worked! The corruption spilled through the chains, warping them, and tearing them from Solan's control. They twisted into a spiral within her blood.

Massive, towering spikes rocketed upwards, reaching to overwhelm the Pink sky, but never quite able to. A webbing of chains hung between them, holding the only platforms away from the seemingly endless ocean of boiling blood. As expected, before Nyxalair could feel the heavy weight of the Eidolon's gaze upon her again, the expanding Dark Star was crushed.

"I assumed you achieved this with a failed ritual." Solan had severed half her chains in Nyxalair's jaw to coil around and suppress the sphere of unimaginably dense corruption from spreading further.

"Not at a whim," she sneered.

"Your existence is far more dangerous than I anticipated." With a jerk of her arm, the spiralling chains collapsed into a point. The Dark Star collapsed into a singularity, then disappeared. None of the net remained. If her Dark Star hadn't worked on Sekhhath'Ra, then there was no chance it would work on someone double his evolution. She got what she wanted from it, and that was enough.

"No." Solan paused.

"You are greater than was ever predicted. I was going to contain you until you ripened. Not anymore." Nyxalair paid no mind to the woman's idle comments. The way was open, so she took it. Before Solan could cast another net, Nyxalair's mouth cracked as wide as it would go. With a powerful beat of her wings, she slipped past the chains. As she landed in the pitch black of Coral's shadows, the ancient flooring shattered under her feet. A boot was stuck. Wedged in the sharp points of serrated steel.

Nyxalair abandoned it without so much as a second thought, and flew down the first hall she found. The echoes of her footsteps — or tentacle slaps — guided her as much as her edge sight or shadow instinct. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Barely a few seconds since she'd arrived in this dark place, and Nyxalair was already dodging phantoms by the dozen. Her feet and tail slapped walls where she needed to dodge in an instant.

It was quicker than sacrificing the speed of her wings for manoeuvrability. Nyxalair's chest strained with the effort of keeping her jaw as tight as possible. It had slammed shut the moment she'd slipped past. Maybe… just maybe, if she could keep Solan stuck in her stomach for a while, she could eventually digest her. How long would that take? A month? A year? Was it possible at all with someone so far beyond her? The chains scraped against her teeth uselessly.

Despite all the strength thrumming through Solan's weapon's, they couldn't open her mouth any more than she could chew through them. Her ribs were, amazingly, immovable. Until Solan got her hands on them. Nyxalair felt the moment the Fleshsmith leader's hands landed around her teeth. Even as she turned into an open space hundreds of metres from where her jaw still hung, the way the woman's chains twisted around the opposing teeth she gripped was unmistakable.

Solan wrenched her ribs apart, and Nyxalair could only grunt as her chest was forcibly opened. Far too easily. Well, the hope that Solan would just flop over and let herself be eaten was gone. At least Nyxalair had some distance between them now. Yog trailed after her. A long globule of gurgling, bubbling blood coated her spines and left countless droplets behind which rapidly increased to pools. The corruption was still thick. Already, amalgamations were clawing their malformed bodies into reality.

One reached a tongued hand over her shoulder. She flinched, and rolled through the air, knocking it from her back. As dangerous as it was to let them spawn so close to her, Nyxalair hesitated to toss some of Tarchon's stabiliser into the blood. No amalgamation would pose much a threat to Solan… but they might slow her down. Or force her to attract the attention of the phantoms. Nyxalair felt the moment Solan stepped into Coral's shadows.

Her own were still permeating all through the place, so as soon as she felt the woman's soul, sh- A huge chain crashed through the ground below Nyxalair, obliterating half the hall. She swerved. Her tentacles lashed out at the walls as both wings and tails tried desperately to avoid the towering mass of flesh and iron. An eyeless face rushed right before her own, lit by a trickle of a glow cast from the sudden crevasse. Their wails rattled deep into Nyxalair's soul…

only to be echoed moments later by the spine tingling screech of a thousand phantoms. Nyxalair didn't look. She knew how terrible of an idea that was. But through the subtle hints passed through her shadow and the tremors of her antennae, she knew the phantoms had all snapped their attentions one way. Solan had angered the swarm. Cuddly curled around her chest and pulled her flat against the wall just in time for a phantom to disturb the floating steel dust a millimetre from her face. Hundreds…

thousands of phantoms rushed through corridors and into Nyxalair's hall to hunt down the source of the invasion into their territory. Far more passed her than she thought could exist in the tight spaces. Solan's chain cut through another wall, raining down more light as it sliced through Coral on its way to find its master. After a moment, Nyxalair breathed. She went to move, but her instincts screamed at her to freeze.

Even with the danger sense she'd picked up to detect the phantoms, her shadows didn't warn her until the very last second. Something moved through the hall. Something immense. Powerful. Her name trembled in its presence, and her body shivered in sudden weakness. A deafening sound of rending metal echoed through the open space. Nyxalair's edge sight caught one of the narrow doorways she'd come through crumpling and bending outwards. A burrow being torn open for something massive to fit.

Nyxalair waited a few more moments in silence before, with a flick of her soul-touch, she finally unleashed Solan's first curse. Just in time for whatever that thing was to find her. The half-agonised scream of fury was music to Nyxalair's tendrils. Nyxalair scuttled on. Light was pushing back the shadows, so she needed to move deeper into the dark. Preferably somewhere that Solan's primary chain couldn't simply carve away the borders.

Then again, if Solan's wilfulness attracted more of those nightmarish phantoms to herself, maybe it was better to stay? Well, at least near wherever there was light. While she had even the slightest hints of light, Nyxalair noticed that the dozens of amalgamations that had crawled from their birthing blood were not attacking her. Instead, after a few moments of fumbling around and learning how to move with their twisted forms, they ran off down the tunnel for Solan. More often than not dying to an angry phantom.

"Ỷ̠ogͮ," she whispered.

"The amalgamations… they're not aggressive. Did you do something?" The pooling mass of boiling blood jiggled up and down. An affirmative if she's ever seen one.

"Right," she said. As much as she'd love to ask how, Nyxalair wouldn't be able to see its answer. If only Yog could speak.

"Later." Another furious shriek echoed through the shadows behind her, and Nyxalair tripled her pace. The phantoms were giving Solan more shit than she ever could have hoped. If… when she managed to slip away, Nyxalair would have to thank Ta'Stralanov'r for the tip. It was a strain, but she continued to stretch her shadows back through the halls to scratch at Solan's curses.

There were a lot in that soul of hers, but unfortunately, the Fleshsmith leader put in far more work to manage her curses than Sekhhath'Ra had. There were a few typically fatal curses in there from all the horrid things the woman had done, but Nyxalair wouldn't bet on them actually being lethal. Not to Solan. Nyxalair kept running, flying and crashing through whatever wall was thin enough for her tail to crash through.

As Solan ran after her, working through all the phantoms bearing down on her, her chains followed after her. Soon, they would leave Nyxalair's jaw free to shut. When that finally happened, she would be free. Nyxalair could hide away in the Technocult cathedral with Ta'Stralanov'r's protection for as long as it took for Solan to give up. Or, at least until she found a way to avoid her movements so she could teleport around wherever the powerful cultist wasn't.

But of course, the moment the last of Solan's chains slipped from her maw, the Fleshsmith leader decided to change the rules of the game. Something exploded. Nyxalair didn't know what. All she knew was that every wall around her crumpled like a crushed can. Her body quaked, and it took a moment to register the pain. Nothing serious, but she'd been struck. After killing a new-born amalgamation to initiate her healing, she moved on. At least she tried to.

The moment she beat her wings, chains began to sprout from the half dozen small wounds across her body. In an instant, both wings were constricted by chains forged from her very own flesh. They appeared all across her body. Nyxalair grabbed the one in her neck and hip, immediately yanking them out of her flesh regardless of the damage doing so caused. So long as it was only limbs she could discard that got entangled, Nyxalair would be fine.

But before she had the chance to do exactly that, she found herself slammed into the ground. Nyxalair scrambled back to her feet, already slicing off both wings and an arm, which almost immediately pulped under the tightening pressure of the chains. She forced herself to move. The remaining chains held her back. As much as she tried, her limbs wouldn't grow back fast enough that she could discard those already bound. Too quickly, Nyxalair heard the chorus of phantom screeches growing closer.

The rattle of countless chains announce Solan's presence. Nyxalair risked a glance back in the dim light, and found that the curse had already spread significantly across her body. Though, clearly it didn't affect her enough. A dozen fist sized mooring bollards sprouted from random parts of the woman's body like unwanted warts. Beyond that, her right arm was limp. It seemed even Solan couldn't go unharmed in the face of phantoms.

"Enough of this. I will no longer be made the fool."