Chương 241: Chapter 237: Mad Assassin

"N o o o o o o!" The Mad mix of man and child screamed, older voice rippling over the younger one, replacing at one moment, and blending the next. His fingers dug into his face. Nails pinched at stitches, unravelling a couple above the eyebrow.

"Control ourself!" the man screamed, melting away to the boy's panicked voice.

"I'm trying!" Nyxalrai's claws continued to slice through the invisible padded wall until she felt it crumble out from beneath her. She kept her gaze locked on the boy's. The eyes stayed wide, peeled back and hysterical, granting her sight of the imagined reflection. All around her, not just the one she cut through, white walls unravelled. Something massive struck the boundary.

Something vicious with long, jagged teeth and no comprehensible form scraped a the world of innocuous fish, leaving them to quiver and flicker. Momentarily, the cartoonish sea-creatures became true physical manifestations of terror. They gazed upon her. They hungered. Then, they were gone. The ground collapsed underneath her, and Nyxalrai lost sight of that nightmare world as the Mad creation fell. All around her, the world had met disaster.

Nyxalrai floated and took in the near-powdered mountain of metal that fell along with the boy-man. Dozens of chambers had been half eaten into, and even then, there were deep scratch marks beyond. One room, she found, held half a dozen bodies. Corpses. They looked like they'd been torn to shreds by a million piranhas. As she watched, one of them slid off the edge of the broken wall and tumbled into the pit of metal sand. Nyxalrai didn't wait. She struck out with her wings and tail, and pierced downwards.

Just because she could no longer see the imaginations of the Mad did not mean they were gone. She crashed into the mound of unsettled steel. Tiny shards cut at her skin, and one got lodged in an original eye, but she ignored it. There was less than an instant between when she caught sight of the Mad floating upon the shifting metal, and when her arm stabbed through his heart. It was followed by four more thumps. Each tentacle driving a rapier home. The boy giggled, seemingly incapable of realising his coming death.

While he was Mad, his soul was a butchery of an unevolved and a fourth evo; it was unlikely he had a name to survive the shredding of his heart. Not to mention the rest of the damage her rapiers had done.

"That was close." The boy giggled again, an older tone slowly creeping in as he spoke.

"Can't let them out. We're not a naughty boy." Nyxalrai spat a globule of acid on his throat as her tentacles ripped out four of her flamethrowers. She felt her skin dry and flake as the overwhelming heat melted his face. A chuckle broke through the roar of the blaze.

"You have wiggly legs too!" a sickly mix of old and young said. She didn't let up on the blaze, even as her own arm bubbled from the heat.

"Squid and Octopi have friends!" There was no time to react. Nyxalrai felt the soft touch on her tentacles only an instant before they were ripped from her sides. The thick bundles of muscle and tendons where they latched to her pelvis tore away a significant amount of flesh and skin too. Lý̥o̻t́e̞pͦ immediately got to work repairing the damage. Long past were the days of needing to kill for it to activate. Now, perseverance alone could ignite the name. As was the case with both other parts of the Feat.

The bloodthirst pushed her on. The boy's face was little more than melted goop, yet it held its form. Enough, at least, for Nyxalrai to make out the grin.

"The fishies really like you!" Nyxalrai threw her face forward. Her teeth got lodged in soft cushion, but she didn't care; V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ was already enhancing her. With an animalistic jerk of her neck, she ripped away a chunk of wall before digging deeper. Her claws slicing through invisible, impenetrable wall to widen the hole.

The Mad chimera's eyes had already evaporated so there was no way to see what was coming, but Nyxalrai discarded the niggling terror of that concept and focused entirely on what she had to do. Her chest exploded as the first of the imagined horrors decided swimming through her was the best opening play. Or maybe it didn't think? Nyxalrai didn't know, and she didn't care.

The hole was finally large enough and she shoved her head inside, uncaring for the way her bark and concealer covered shoulders dislocated and folded back under her own unflinching aggression. The mouth in her tongue got to taste Mad flesh an instant before her own teeth — sharper than the shark she'd seen through his eyes — sliced through the face of the child. She began to feast, paying no attention to the way bite marks began to sprout across her body.

Yog spilled from each wound, trying to fight off each invisible enemy, but his explosive efforts to flood the surrounding steel dust with her blood found no success. They simply didn't exist to be struck. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. But Nyxalrai was vicious. For each wound inflicted upon her, she bit and swallowed more of his body. She ate the first brain, then the larger second mashed in beside it.

Acid spilling from her hungry lips left much of the upper body she hadn't eaten a mess of sludge. Only when her right arm snapped back into place — her left being chewed off — and she began to work through the belly of the patchwork did the rabid assault on her own body finally fade. A ritual — a powerful one — broke. The glow of runes burned into the man and boy's bones dissipated, ceasing its forceful continuation of the thing's life. Nyxalrai kept feasting.

The damage to her body threw the state of bloodthirst that had become inescapable since her sixth evolution of Lý̥o̻t́e̞pͦ to heights she couldn't ignore. Her feral onslaught continued. Claws and teeth and acid ripped through the wicked creation until it was gone and her body had fully reformed. It was over. The Mad child-man was dead, and so were his imaginations. So was that terror realm. That… had not been one of her cleaner fights.

So rushed to kill the Mad boy quickly, she'd not been able to gather power to O̅s̫s̋tĥo̲t͛h. If she had, would she have been able to flicker through the padded wall? Or would a Mad creation stop even that? It was impossible to tell how something that shouldn't exist would react to her abilities. At least V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ once again showed its worth. Nyxalrai rose to her feet and brushed herself down. While her robe was quick to sew itself back together, a spark from her shoulder announced that her concealer was broken.

Again. Where she snapped her shoulder joint, the metal was warped. While V̠ͅai̝k͍na̓ made it possible for her body to penetrate those imagined walls, the same was not true for the mechanical pauldron. Still, that damage alone wouldn't have been much of a problem… if there wasn't a massive bite taken out of the side as well. Blood curled around her legs and rose to hang over her shoulder.

"I'm alright, Yog," she said, patting the bubble of blood before glancing down at the corpse… puddle that remained.

"But this is concerning." Had it… known what to look for? From the Mad creature's words, it had been sent out to find her, but the knowledge it had of her… had someone given it details about her? Did someone know Nyxalrai was hunting the cults? No, she decided after a moment. The boy had been able to see her tentacles even through her enshrouding shadow. Or maybe he hadn't seen. Rather, Madness whispered the truth of what she hid, along with who knew what sort of lies that bent his mind. Still, this was deliberate.

The man-boy had been put together in a way that specifically encouraged the sprouting of Madness. They created this thing, then sent it out to hunt her. The Bodytwisters? This was clearly their handiwork, but… would they dare trigger the anger of all the currently neutral cults? The war already put a strain on them, even if it had calmed in the interim. If others found out… it would ignite again in fury. A Mad? No, an adult Mad? That was a threat to the every cult.

Whoever thought they could control one of the Mad might as well be mad themselves. … If only Nyxalrai had preserved evidence of its existence. Nobody would care about a 'Nightmare' that had wiped out the weak Fleshsmiths if they knew someone was messing with Madness. They might even think the one killing everyone was a Mad themselves. It would be an incredible change for Nyxalrai's position. But, the Mad weren't something you took half measures with.

Even the idea of bringing back proof of their existence would be too much a threat of it spreading. At that thought, Nyxalrai recollected the half-expended flamethrower canisters and set to igniting the mound of steel dust. In seconds, molten streams ran by her feet. Her wings spread wide and she floated. Once each of the flamethrowers spittled out the last of their blaze, she gained height and tossed them. The frigid blast destroyed anything she hadn't burned away… or eaten. Good thing she was immune to Madness.

She hoped. She had to be, considering just how inhuman her form had become. More than a few had laid eyes on her unimpeded form, but none would call her human. Not that many lived. Between her new wings, and the way her chest mouth expanded beyond her body, she couldn't even be considered a fully physical creature anymore. And Pink was… more. Well, her concealer was broken, and Nyxalrai was hardly planning to wander Coral without it, so… time to get it fixed. Again. This was hopefully a one time thing.

She really didn't want to worry about Mad assassins. It didn't take Nyxalrai long to return to the Technocult Cathedral. A couple of hours. But when she arrived, she was immediately on alert. The sirens she heard first. They blared through the entire moving tunnel. And the flashing alarm lights almost blinded her with how bright they were. They nearly even cut through her shadows. She bound through the long — unmoving — tunnel and found herself at the main entrance.

Only then, did she realise this wasn't some warning. The entire side wall where Technocultists once dealt with outsiders was gone. Eviscerated. Deep recesses were carved into the steel and exposed a mountain of machinery once concealed. And littered across the ground were the shredded parts of arachnoangels and other Worshipper machines. If there were human corpses amongst the wreckage, they were far too crisped to be recognisable. Nyxalrai ran.

The perspective warp almost immediately revealed four massive cannons staring her down. She halted, heart sputtering as she felt the thrum of Ta'Stralanov'r's blue energy surging through the core of each weapon. She dropped her concealing storm, and immediately the weapons shifted to the tunnel behind her. Two cannons stood sentinel from the ground, while the others dropped from the ceiling. Nyxalrai realised all the cycling storage platforms were gone. Stored away somewhere safe and out of the way most likely.

Despite that, she noticed the interior was not without damage. One of the racks had been severed, leaving a dozen shelves and all their contents splattered across the ground. Hundreds of Technocultists rushed around, flamethrowers scalding through the mess as others stood alert. They were ready for battle at a moment's notice. And there were quite a few which hadn't exactly been given knowledge of her mutations that now stared at her. This was more Technocultists in one place than she'd ever seen.

For so many to be brought back from the war with the Worshippers…

"What happened?"

"We were attacked." The heavy thump of Tarchon's footsteps approached. The apertures of his eyes spun and steam rolled from his neck in a non-stop flow.

"One of the Mad infiltrated the cathedral. They almost reached Ta̽'Ș͑t̕r̊a͑ḷa̾͆n͙͂o̼͗v͐͐̿͝'r̝͇͎͓͜ 's core."