Chương 13: Homeless Bums with Sticks

Content Warning: Graphic Violence, Torture -/- It was as he arrived at the camp that an odd sight greeted him. An apologetic looking Aliyah and Deborah sat in the back while Musk, Plastic Man and the three non-descripts came to surround Nihil with plastic spears as he approached the bonfire.

"What's this?" Nihil asked, more curious than threatened. The red-eyed and shit-smelling Musk stepped forward, spear in hand trembling from either excitement, fear, or another bout of incoming diarrhea.

"You're hiding meat, you lied. You do need food!" the man shouted angrily.

"Yeah!" Plastic Man echoed awkwardly.

"Slander!" Nihil exclaimed.

"Where is the proof!"

"I had my mosquitoes follow you, there was so much blood around it looked like a butcher's shop!" Musk screamed.

"It's a new ability, it's alright to make mistakes sometimes," Nihil said kindly.

"You do smell like a barbecue, bro," Plastic Man spoke up, double chin wobbling.

"Oh, right," Nihil muttered quietly. He had just smoked a bunch of snake meat. He slowly raised his hands in defeat and smiled.

"Well, you got me. What now?" he asked. This immediate surrender seemed to confuse the mutineers who shared awkward looks.

"Go bring the meat!" Musk demanded, gaunt-faced and desperate. Weird, considering that the skill Nihil had proposed to the man consisted of getting nutrients out of mosquitoes. Something was off.

"How about this," Nihil proposed with a soft smile.

"I beat the shit out of all of you to dissuade future bullshit and then go get the meat. I was going to do it anyway, turns out I need you for something."

"What?" One of the mutineers asked, seemingly confused. The confusion quickly dissipated as the man was sent crashing to the ground by a flying fist not a second later.

"It's time for your weekly dose of discipline," Nihil announced as he retracted his hand.

"Even if you may not believe it, I genuinely want each and every one of you to survive and thrive in this tower. Unfortunately, before that can occur, you still have to learn some important lessons." -/- Nihil stood surrounded by five ragged humans who'd been subsisting on only coconuts for more than a week, wielding plastic spears. The situation was somewhat comical.

He'd gone from combating insectoid monsters as big as skyscrapers and other powerful climbers just a month ago, to now being back to beating up what essentially looked like homeless people and walking fish. It was after exclaiming that he would physically assault them instead of simply surrendering to their orders that the atmosphere on the beach got a tad awkward. After all, just because you wielded a weapon didn't really mean you knew what to do with it.

"You're surrounded!" Musk exclaimed in a last effort to stabilise the situation. Nihil shook his head and laughed, digging his toes into the sand beneath.

"I'd usually say that all I'm surrounded by is fear and dead men, but even dead men would be more dangerous. At least they could threaten my nostrils with the smell of decay. You lot just smell like shit and bad decisions." It was as the group exchanged wary glances that Nihil shot forward without preamble, putting his superhuman physique on full display. He had reached a level of strength higher than that of an Olympic athlete. With his combat experience on top of that? There was nothing to write home about.

The face of Plastic Man crumbled beneath his fist would have caved inwards to signal an end to a wasted life if Nihil hadn't held back in the last second. Regardless of that holding back, the slightly overweight man flew backwards and skipped several times along the beach before coming to a stop in a small circle of displaced sand. Nose, broken. Lights, out.

"The first thing you should know about weapons!" Nihil shouted as he spun around and shot out his hand to clasp itself dangerously around the neck of the fire-wielding woman who'd dropped her spear.

"Is that you should always know what you're planning on doing before holding it up in a manner indicating intended use." The woman choked on air as Nihil pulled her in violently with his detached hand only to meet her with a brutal knee to the stomach that laid her out like a sack of potatoes. He left her retching on the ground as a swarm of mosquitoes suddenly came to life around him, buzzing angrily and trying to sink their barbs into his exposed skin.

He sneered and hardened the threads of his body, thwarting the attempt. His hand flew out again at the position of Musk, whose position he'd remembered for this exact moment. He felt rather than saw, through all the mosquitoes, as the threads attached to the hand smacked against the shaft of a spear, before wrapping around it, the hand landing atop Musk's head where it promptly grabbed the man's hair.

The mosquitoes lost their commander the very next second as Nihil used the detached hand to guide a short sprint towards Musk and greeted the annoying man with a brutal high kick to the face which hurled him backwards and left a good part of his scalp in Nihil's hand. The mosquitoes dispersed completely, buzzing off as Musk lay on the ground screaming through a set of broken teeth and bleeding profusely from the head. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Your actions make no sense!" Nihil screamed as he approached the last two mutineers, who'd frozen up, not even bothering to be quick about it.

"Why do you think you can threaten someone to do something for you when you're obviously not willing to kill or hurt them. Standing there, shivering in your little boots, do you think you register as a threat?" He came to a stop in front of a rather athletic woman who hadn't contributed anything useful up to this point. In terms of conversation, ability, or skill. Gently laying his hands on the spear in her shivering hands he unclasped her fingers one by one.

"When you use violence. That violence has to have a clear purpose. A strategy. A goal. Any less and you're just a wild animal with a bad case of rabies. Do you know what purpose the violence I'm about to inflict on you has?" he asked more calmly. The woman simply stared at him, frozen like a deer in the headlights.

"It's educational," Nihil elaborated before dropping the spear he'd taken and raising a hand to deliver a slap to the woman's face. It wasn't just a tap though, it directly sent her to the ground with a slam, kicking up sand. He turned towards the last man in the group, a man who'd already dropped his weapon and was running away, feet pounding desperately on the ground as their owner made little progress in terms of actual distance. Nihil sighed, bent down to pick up the spear.

He tested the heft before suddenly jumping forward a quick three steps and hurling out his arm in a perfect throwing motion. The plastic spear whistled through the air and slammed tip-first into the right shoulderblade of the fleeing man, dropping him before popping out of his back, leaving him cut and bruised but not dead. Nihil was left standing there amidst five broken bodies. The entire thing had only taken one minute.

He suddenly felt something in his back and looked down at the speartip emerging from his chest, perforating his clothes. Idly kicking behind himself, feeling his foot hit a body and dislodge the hands from the shaft of the spear, he turned around.

"I applaud your practicality," Nihil praised Musk who was laying on his back and scrambling all four limbs on the floor in an attempt to get away.

"You're a dumb piece of shit, but maybe you have the ruthlessness to succeed in this tower."

"You fufing monfter I stapfed you in dhe heapft!" Musk screamed shrilly through broken teeth as he continued scrambling away. The distance between the two did not widen however as Nihil approached the downed man with calm steps that perfectly matched the scrambling in speed.

"You're calling me a monster already," Nihil said jokingly, hands coming up to his jacket and t-shirt combo that were completely ruined by fishman blood and now a hole. He ripped it all off with one smooth motion, leaving behind a smooth chiselled chest with a spear-tip poking out right where a normal human would have a heart.

"So why do you think I have a heart?" he asked rhetorically with a laugh. He continued approaching the fleeing Musk who was getting closer and closer to the bonfire and the now completely wide-eyed and shivering Aliyah and Deborah.

Two hands went up to the chest, gripping the tip of the spear, before, with overly dramatic jerking motions, Nihil pulled it out of his body, inch by inch as he stared down the completely terrified Musk who'd stopped even trying to run, having scrambled to the immediate vicinity of the fire. The spear was finally pulled out after a few seconds of effort, leaving behind a black hole of nothing but darkness where the heart should have been. The hole slowly but surely stitched itself together, thread by thread.

In just a few moments, only unblemished skin remained.

"You know Musk, I respect what you did, really," Nihil softly praised.

"You believed in something and even if it was idiotic, you put in the effort into trying to enforce your will on the world. There's an issue, however," he muttered while shaking his head. Musk stared at him with pupils as wide as the iris. He swallowed once.

"The issue is that you just tried to fuck me over and stab me in the back," Nihil elaborated once he saw that Musk wouldn't speak.

"If I let you get away with it missing only a few teeth and some skin on your empty skull, I'll be a laughingstock! A push-over!"

"Whapf?" Musk choked out, tears starting to come to his eyes. Nihil paused, tilted his head, looked around as if searching for an idea. Then he clapped his hands and smiled.

"I know!" he exclaimed happily.

"You can still be useful to me so I won't go with the usual, an arm or a leg, which one would you prefer keeping? I'll just ask you this." He squatted down to be eyelevel with the now sobbing man. Nihil opened his mouth with a kind smile.

"Would you prefer me to push your face into the fire and hold you there for ten seconds, or would you like to do it yourself?" he asked the trembling entomologist.

"Enough!" Deborah, the former schoolteacher, suddenly shouted, having jumped up. She was trembling worse than a leaf in a hurricane but she was looking Nihil right in the eyes.

"He knows he made a mistake!"

"I don't want him to know it, I need him to feel it," Nihil replied coldly.

"You said you needed him for something," Aliyah suddenly interjected with a pale face, but more calmly, likely because out of everyone present she had the best relationship with Nihil.

"Ah, yes, I uncovered a hidden quest," Nihil replied.

"We can unblock an underwater tunnel and the fishmen will go back into the open sea. Then the middle of the jungle is ours with no conflict necessary." It was the act of sharing this quest that notified the three people present consciously at the bonfire and shared it. All three of them quickly read through the information, which Aliyah then immediately used as ammunition.

"You need him to dig, right?" she asked.

"Holding his face in the fire will lay him out for weeks." Nihil tilted his head. She was right. He didn't feel like digging himself and giving Musk third degree burns in the face would indeed make the man even more useless than he already was, as hard as it might have been to believe that that was even possible. He suddenly perked up getting an idea.

"Open your mouth," he ordered Musk, who looked at him distrustfully and didn't comply.

"Open your mouth or it's the fire," Nihil explained. Musk slowly opened his mouth, never taking his eyes off Nihil. The vigilance didn't make a difference. Nihil's hand shot forward, fingers entering Musk's mouth and ignoring the bite that the man gave with the few teeth he had left. A hardening of the threads making up his fingers and a pull resolved the situation. Musk screamed like a dying animal having a coughing fit, hands on his mouth, blood spilling forth as if from a fountain.

He scrambled around desperately while Nihil turned around to pick up the spear that had been in his chest a scant minute ago. He broke off the tip and went to the fire to heat it up in the flame. When the plastic was starting to melt he went over to the screaming Musk, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced the heated blade into his mouth where it hissed and spit as Nihil carefully dragged the flat of the blade against the stump of the man's tongue.

After the wound was improperly cauterised Nihil pulled out the blade, leaving a nick on Musk's lip and threw it away.

"There, a punishment somewhat fitting for the crime," he said in a bored voice.

"Convince other people of a stupid plan of action, lose the ability to speak. It's almost poetic, better than the face idea to be honest." Musk had long since become an unmoving husk, a sobbing wretch who probably wished he was dead. +3 Exp +2 Exp +2 Exp Nihil rolled his eyes, mentally noted that he hadn't ever pulled anyone's tongue out, and went to sit by the fire next to the still standing Deborah and the sitting Aliyah.

Noticing that he was still holding Musk's tongue in his hand he idly threw the piece of garbage into the flame. This whole mercy and not killing people thing. Starting to get kinda hard.