Chương 240: Chapter 236: Patchworked Mad

Nyxalrai barely heard more than the few whispered words before she was on full alert. Her instincts screamed at her. She had no idea what she was dealing with, but she simply knew it wasn't something she wanted to stick around for. No matter how innocuous and… young the voice had sounded. Wings snapped wide. Their newly expanded breadth reached to the dark corners of the tunnel, feathers fading into the shadows. Mist spilled from her mouth at the same time as her tail struck steel. She flew.

Her core name tugged her shadows into a tight storm that encased her as she shredded through the corpses in her way. V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ took hold of a narrow service hatch. It exploded from its steel frame under the impossible forces just in time for Nyxalrai to cut a sharp turn and dive into the narrow space, her wings slamming to her side.

"She runs," a voice reached her ears. Harsh, sharp, and cold. Nyxalrai's tendrils curled back, startled by the faux proximity of the voice.

"She doesn't run." It was still the same voice, but it no longer held the rough baritone. A child; not a man.

"She flies." The voice giggled. Its childish warbling laughter rapidly decayed into cutting barks of an older man. Nyxalrai didn't like that they knew she was a 'she'. Had they seen her? Given all the precautions she went through, that shouldn't be possible. They? It wasn't two people. There was only a single voice, even if it was modulated between two very distinct personalities. Besides, there was only a single set of footsteps. If he had seen enough to know her gender, then what else had been seen.

Despite the roar of her instincts, Nyxalrai hesitated. Should she cut off this escape and hunt them down? Whoever this was, it was no cult leader; none she knew acted this way. She could kill them. The danger warnings were not her only instincts. Even now, she could feel her nature — and that of her mutations — reject the entire concept that this thing was a danger to her. It despised the very thought of being scared.

"That is our target," the older voice said with cold focus, before shifting.

"Really? We finally get to play?" There was a momentary pause.

"Yes. And she shall be our toy." There was a childish cheer, and suddenly the world shifted around Nyxalrai. Her narrow tunnel jerked back. The hard edges of the straightaway she fell down lost their sharpness. Instead of the precision-cut of the service shaft, it flexed out of shape. Another tug, and the entire tunnel whipped around uncontrollably. The walls splintered. It was as if she was stuck in the threading of a rope as it was reeled in. Nyxalrai spun around the wire mesh that whipped around her.

Her wings were larger, but in the darkness, they posed no weakness. Dozens of unwound sections of wall flowed through her shadowy feathers and were coated in blood as they sliced through her red ones. Ỷ̠o̖̯̐gͮ was already flooding the chamber behind her.

"Fuck this." She wasn't about to sit around and get shredded. Her chest tore open, widening until her teeth were no longer attached to her torso. A few chains made a weak attempt to slither out. She battered them back inside.

"No! You can't go!" the childish voice whined. Nyxalrai grit her teeth that her teleportation was known. Even through the hundreds of metres of steel between them.

"Our playtime only started." Nyxalrai was hardly about to let the boy's sulking stop her from leaving. Not that she was going for good. Clearly, he knew too much. But as she rushed to swallow herself, Nyxalrai found herself rebuffed. She impacted a wall. She struck it with all the gathered momentum of her fall… and bounced off. It didn't hurt; the wall wasn't hard. Corruption bled into the storm surrounding her, forcing the broken strands of steel to flow with the spiral, avoiding her entirely.

A neat little trick she'd discovered against cultists that had a habit of using a lot of small weapons. She dropped again, pulling her jaw up to meet her. Once more, she found she couldn't slide through. Her hands felt the resistance of an invisible wall. A soft, spongy invisible wall that felt almost… nostalgic. Though where she remembered the feeling, Nyxalrai didn't know. There was a convulsion in the rope of her surroundings. The strands tensed, then sprung back in a way that was almost comical.

She was struck with the image of a child's toy. Something from the wards' younger dormitories. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Nyxalrai was given no time to dwell on the strangeness. As soon as the spring fully contracted, she found herself before a misshapen imitation of a man… boy. There was really no way to describe what she was seeing other than both.

Bits and pieces of both a fully grown man — somewhere in his thirties, she guessed — and a child half her age were melded together. Not cleanly. Stitches ran diagonally across the top of his — their? — head, splitting the bald head of the man from the messy blonde of the kid. The proportions were off. That child face was bloated by the surrounding skull of someone far older. The rest of the body was just as much of a mish-mash.

A subtle glow of runes shone from beneath the skin where a stubby arm connected to a muscular chest. To the side of the pectoral, not the shoulder. It was the same with the imbalanced legs. One was fully grown, while the other was that of a child, only with the knee-joint split by an extra bone. Ah, Nyxalrai realised. Was really hoping it wouldn't be this. Madness. As if the profane mix of man and child wasn't enough, the random dog leg sewn into its hip stood out like an ugly sore. It even twitched.

This body had become too inhuman to be anything other than Mad. Nyxalrai stared at the stitches. This was intentional Madness. Who would dare touch something as universally detested as Madness? She didn't hesitate. Nyxalrai slammed her wings back, and rushed this defiled creature. She intended to destroy it quick. Memories of the last Mad stuck with her. She couldn't give it the opportunity to do the same; to manifest its unreality. With all the added surface area, her wings thrust off shadow itself.

Steel exploded behind her. V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ impressed on even the wake of her wingbeats enough that weaker material simply crumpled. If she had the space to use her wings, Nyxalrai was fast. She knew it, too. Her acceleration would take her blades through that boy-man's neck in a mere instant. Yet… once again, she slammed into the soft, invisible padding that stole away all that momentum without so much as a sting from the impact.

"See, I told you there were worms!" It was the older man's voice, but this time it wasn't piercing. It held the same levity as the child from before. He shook his head in denial.

"Nuh-uh. They're little ghosties. Worms are a figment of your imagination. You shouldn't believe everything they put in your head." Where the voice started childish, he seemed to grow more mature with each word.

"But if there's worms, then your shark toys will have something to play with." The adult's voice was back, and mature, as if a ward caretaker encouraging a kid. The boy hummed, but Nyxalrai was no longer paying attention to that. Her gaze fell into the Mad's eyes. One was stitched together, right down the iris, leaving the entire thing murky as the pupil seemed to bleed into the whites. But that's not what caught her attention. Nyxalrai had seen a lot with her galaxy eyes.

Especially after she'd grown another right in the middle of her forehead, completing the arc of eyes. But what reflected in the boy-man's gaze sent another round of shivers down her back. She could see it. She could see the white, padded walls that surrounded them. That blocked her from killing him. It fully enclosed them. It was as if, in this boy's mind, there was no world other than the padded room of younger dorms. It had been so many years since she'd been ten. Since she'd grown out of the padded kiddy rooms.

But there was more. In that eye, in the fictitious white room only he saw, an ocean surrounded her. Not the terrifying thing she'd almost brought about in the middle of her Final Trial, but an almost cartoonish representation one would only find in the simplest of a ward's picture books. The sharks, whales, fish and octopi all had a very… simplistic appearance that didn't match up with their actual appearance. Well… Nyxalrai only had the depictions in books for older dorms to go off.

Books that had to be remade enough times that there were likely discrepancies. It wasn't like she had seen the near mythical creatures herself. They all swam around her, flowing at the edges of her spiralling shadow, but eyeing her as if she was lunch. Considering the faint ghostly traces of worms all squirming inside her body, maybe she was. Nyxalrai gagged at the sight. She almost wanted to peel back her skin and rip them out. But they were different from the ocean critters. Less tangible.

He was seeing the memory of the last Mad person Nyxalrai came across? She was pissed there were even the hint of remnants after she'd killed him. The last thing she wanted was worms wriggling under her skin again. She tried again to push through the invisible wall. Her claws slammed into the padding, only to not so much as leave a scratch… from what she saw in that eye. But she'd resisted an Elder God. Nothing one of the Mad could conjure would stop it. She wouldn't let it.

V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ layered its weight into her arm, and almost immediately she was rewarded with a sensation of give beneath her claws. She was cutting through the wall with ease. What was even better, was the terror suddenly cutting into the boy's face.

"Wha- what are you doing? You can't leave! You'll let-" he paused to gulp, " them in. We can't play with them." Uncaring for the worries of a Mad, Nyxalrai continued cutting. She had no intent to leave this monstrosity alive. The very fact that the Bodytwisters had gone through with such a revolting creation — as this was obviously their work — made her feel sick. She noticed the exact moment the older mind seemed to take control. The childish imagination of an ocean gave way to gaps.

There, below the surface conception, was a horrific nightmare of a world. Malevolent entities and powers with a desire for nothing but agony and destruction. It was a realm of the greatest terrors only an experienced cultist could fathom. That's why the creators of this Mad thing used a child. An adult mind to direct the Madness, but a child's imagination and tame fears to mask the true nightmares below. The Horrors that once nearly wiped out Coral.