Chương 75: When a Plan Collapses

K'Caies ground her teeth and fidgeted with her blood-stained staff. She spun, twisting her head every which way as if the sacrifice could pop out from any shadow. With each clang of the Forge hammer, it was very possible. The thump crashed through her chest, and before she could reorient herself, a clink of metal sounded behind her. K'Caies leapt out of the way. When nothing pierced her body, she turned, and readied herself to fight off the twisted girl. But there was nothing there.

Instead, she found K'Thorn's rifle resting motionless on the buckled earth. She took a step towards it. Even if she lacked the name to use the weapon to its fullest extent, it was still a powerful fleshforge creation. Her talent in marksmanship was poorer than her deceased mentor, but it was still better than letting that monster get in close proximity. K'Caies reached her arm out, only for the world to decide it wasn't to be. The Fleshforge hammer struck again, and the rifle was gone from her sight.

It was supposed to be a nostalgic sound. She'd spent enough of her life around the grand Fleshforge of her cult to have become accustomed to the heavy strikes that pounded through her chest at all times of the day. Yet over the time they'd been stuck in this Dark Star, it gradually grew unnerving. Morphed by the unnatural environment, each hammer strike sounded both exactly as she remembered, and completely alien. It had begun as a barely perceptible change. Now, the thumps incited a feverish feeling within her.

Like she'd just woken from a nightmare, except it never faded. With the rapid, heartbeat-like pace, the sensation was growing exponentially worse. She hadn't let her bother her — nightmares were just another threat you had to overcome, after all — but with the catalyst of fear, her horror was spiralling out of control. This wasn't meant to happen. Of course, killing K'Thorn was bound to be risky. She'd known that for years. But she'd never expected the danger to be external.

Especially not some young sacrifice with a few too many unnatural growths. Her mentor wasn't the most powerful harbinger in the cult, but he filled a role that was difficult to replace. The upper creed would not ignore his death. If she ever went through with her… private musings, she would not escape undiscovered. K'Caies didn't hate her mentor. He had simply passed his use as a teacher, and stood in the path of her progress. She'd become known as his exclusive healer.

And all her opportunities to move beyond him, to support stronger or more influential harbingers, seemed to disappear as soon as they appeared. She would be naive to assume K'Thorn lacked a hand in it. They day she'd learnt of his interference had been a wake up call. In a cult of people willing to sabotage their best friend, the path of healing was bound to end poorly. She needed strength of her own. Or, at least a way to steal it. That day, she had two options before her.

The first, was to lash out and leave the older cultist. But as a higher creed with influence higher than his standing, that would only lead to an uncertain future. Would other cultists take her on with that risk in mind? No. K'Caies went with the second option. Bide her time and focus the evolution of her name in a different direction in secret.

With abilities that already had other Fleshsmiths willingly giving them intimate access to their bodies — and a fairly lucky set of additives — it had been the obvious choice to shift towards a way to control those she had access to. Optimally, she would find an opportunity to control her mentor. Take over his role, then funnel all the rewards of such a post down to herself.

If she set herself up well enough, the higher creeds wouldn't bother her even if they discovered what she'd done; she was still fulfilling K'Thorn's specialist role. Of course, her corpse puppetry was still a method that needed a lot of time and development to become seamlessly usable. So should she be given the opportunity to simply remove him from her path, she would take it. And the opportunity had come. As soon as she'd seen the fall of the fortress, she'd known it was time.

Really, this whole Dark Star had been the best opportunity she'd been given in years. Well, assuming she could survive. Even ignoring the additives she'd achieved since first getting stuck in here, the sole fact that she could get away with intracult murder was a blessing. All deaths would go unquestioned. All of them were simply casualties of a disaster. She'd held back because there hadn't been any certainty in just how much longer they'd be stuck here. Throwing away a pillar of strength would be stupid.

And despite her efforts, she'd yet to reach the point where her control of a corpse didn't require direct contact. It would be all but obvious what she'd done. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Then, all witnesses were suddenly dead. Dead, or well and truly occupied. With Solan here to finally put an end to the Dark Star, it had been now or never. And she'd done it. She'd killed the man she'd followed for near two decades.

K'Caies would have taken this opportunity and killed her mentor even if the once in a lifetime sacrifice hadn't appeared. But she had, and it had only urged her to act. The cultist hadn't been sure if she would have gifted the girl to Solan, and relished in the indisputable rewards that would come her way, or hide the teen away for her own benefit, but that no longer mattered. That sacrifice, that… beast masquerading as a young woman was now after K'Caies.

The hammer struck again, and a spike of fear ran through her. She tried to turn, but the ground fled from beneath her feet. She knew she was panicking. She knew she had to calm herself and think of a way out of this rationally, but she'd just seen the man who had been a major pillar in her life have his throat ripped out — even if he'd already been dead — by a girl who shouldn't be past her first evolution.

Surpassing the threshold of evolutions wasn't impossible — K'Thorn was famous for assassinating eighth and ninth evolution harbingers from competing cults while at his sixth, but a gap of five? That was obscene. Below K'Caies, the world continued to compress. Mountains of fractured steel spilled with molten floods and pressurised streams rocketed skywards. One burnt past her, barely missing. The sphere they were stuck in was only the size of Coral now, and it continued to shrink.

With whatever wits she still had, the cultist slammed her staff over her shoulder and into her own spine. She hated the sensation, but this wasn't a time for unimportant concerns. Her metal tinged, healing threads weaved through her body with a technique she rarely, if ever used. They clung to her muscles and permeated them so deeply that any besides herself would find it impossible to remove. K'Caies' strength amplified a dozen times, just as she struck the mountain.

Her legs took the impact easily, but slipped out from the wave of hot flesh. More of those little strands wove through her fingernails, cracking them, but she forced their sharp tips outwards enough so they dug into the metal and stopped her sudden tumble to the erupting ocean below. She released a breath of relief, but it would be her last. When she glanced up, K'Caies saw the sacrifice. The girl's body was unnaturally thin. Oddly so, considering the strength she possessed.

Hollow, bony cheeks framed her face, while her pale disposition made her look sickly. These off human characteristics were only exemplified by the inhuman ones. Violet-crimson veins shone like a permanently activated ritual upon her skin. The bright glow was only diluted by the girl's clothes, and the strange translucent hair that twisted that red light through it, adding harsh red streaks to the otherwise bluish-white. Despite losing half her human limbs, the sacrifice moved across the surface with grace.

Long tentacles snapped forward, carrying her with unreal balance. The girl's physical and mental stability was still surprising considering the mutations that grew all over her body. By all means, the mutations should have grown out randomly and without meaning. Just as with any amalgamation. Instead, she had wings grow at her centre of balance, tentacles at radially equal spacing, and a gem perfectly aligned in her chest. Corruption was chaotic by nature. Her mutations were not natural.

In a way, it was stunning to look at, but at the same time, it incited nothing but K'Caies' terror. Didn't help that the creature was rushing right for her. Swallowing her fear, K'Caies forced the tiny threads to twist her hands into poor imitations of the sacrifice's claws. Her bones shattered and lacerations appeared all over the skin of her arms, but she was able to forge her hands into weapons. No longer could she even consider capturing the girl.

Sacrifice of the millennia or not, it wouldn't matter if K'Caies life was over. This was no longer about forging an optimistic future for herself. This was only about her survival. Unfortunately, her best option meant mutilating herself. As horrible as it felt to warp her own body like this, it gave her the power to overpower both K'Thorn and K'Hallou. It had been what she'd planned to kill her mentor with if he hesitated to have her staff in his back for whatever reason.

Now, with knife like fingers, multiplied strength, and the benefit of her rapid healing, she was sure to fight off the mutated girl long enough to reach the end of the Dark Star. Or even kill the sacrifice outright. Though, she couldn't help but cast a wary gaze at the dangerous looking pincer, or the line of fangs and mouth covered in blood. K'Thorn's blood. K'Caies swallowed again, and readied herself. She would survive. No matter what it took. The sacrifice seemed to recognise her resolution, and snarled.

Like a beast, she bared her fangs. K'Caies idly noted the two rows of shark-like teeth in her mouth still had bits of flesh stuck between them, but quickly shook off the thought. The beast beat her sole wing and rushed in faster. A gong rung out, but the Dark Star was too narrow now. She only shifted a few metres. That gem in her chest observed K'Caies again, causing the skin over her head to disintegrate, but the cultist simply healed away the attack with no trouble.

The burning fury in the beast's eyes almost reignited the terror within K'Caies, but instead of cowering as her instincts yelled at her to do, she rushed forward, intending to use the surprise of her boosted strength and deadly hands to end the sacrifice in a single blow. Before she could adapt. Running head on, K'Caies threw her hand forward. The broken morph of her hand could pierce hardened steel, but as she jabbed into the beast's chest, it was as if she suddenly flowed like water.

The sacrifice slipped around her arm with a flexibility that seemed more appropriate for a snake. Her spine bent like a bow, and she slipped past her deadly strike to return the cultist with her own. She felt the tiny scrape of those terrifying claws around her neck, but couldn't pull her gaze from the hateful gaze of the girl before her. She was so young, yet there was a deep fury there. An anger and despisement against K'Caies that she simply couldn't comprehend.

If looks could inflict curses, than the cultist would be nothing but. Not that she needed to worry about curses. She was dead. The last thing K'Caies saw, was the mountains of the sky scraping against those of the ground. She rolled. Then, she entered the void of oblivion.