Chapter 1742 – Lady Vengeance Hunts [Ehtra POV]

The chittering of the foremost drone is ended in an instant. My blade, the sword that is myself, slices through the distorted mixture of flesh and fungal matter. Salt water gushes from the wound of the disgustingly draconic monstrosity.

The creatures behind it aren’t capable of speech. They’re bodies without rhyme or reason. Rotted human brains turned into vessels for the Lorylim. I can feel the souls of the people still in there, pulsing from the brainstem to the tailbone with sorrow, guilt, pain and madness. I understand them well. The song is there, the muffled, maddening beating drums, right outside my consciousness.

I raise the gun from its holster on my thigh. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Heads half-liquified by slime mould explode into splatters of gore. The bullets rip through even the creatures behind them, lurking and creating the clouds of spores that infect the jungle. Trees rot away uselessly. The Lorylim may eat wood, but they cannot proliferate without meat or soul.

My sword cleaves meat and liberates souls. Humans and elementals are ended. There are few of the latter. They’re stronger, yet they pose no threat to me. I am Lady Vengeance and I serve a new Master. I hunt.

They laugh. They always laugh. I remember laughing with them, my head split into a four-way maw like some kind of worm. Tiamat. Mother Chaos. She laughs through her disposable puppets. There’s a grace in it. A song that imposes itself on my mind. I let it in.

It recoils.

A wild, satisfied laughter rises from my own throat. My sword severs another bloated neck from a body. It does not kill the creature, a grotesque fusion of too much muscle and too little skin possessing the head of the elemental and the former summoner.

Frustrated, the presence of the Lorylim tries to descend on my mind once more. I let them attempt to reclaim me. The spores and gore lays thick on my armour now. Tendrils drill into the edges of the plate, trying to sink deeper into me. She’s there. She’s not laughing when my Blood Halo sings back. Mother Chaos holds me for a moment, before the pain is too much for the mycelium and it slouches off me like the dead parasite it is.

My mind snaps back to me in full, grim satisfaction accompanying it. “You were never the main prize any-“ another draconic drone begins. The whirling of biting teeth around the edge of my sword puts an end to the words. Lesser drones try to claw at me, to disrupt me, but none of them are strong enough. Lady Vengeance has her due in that moment. Hate. My hate sings to me so sweetly, while I shred the body vertically from the secondary slit of its jaw down to the tail.

An individual laughter reaches my ears then.

I whirl around, to see the least and yet most grotesque creature yet stand across from me. I am surrounded by gore, flesh dissolving into spores, and nothing else. The other drones slink away into the jungle that they gradually turn into their own hive. Melted trees get reshaped into a trypophobia inducing wall.

The creature is a humanoid. He’s not tall. He’s not muscular. In fact, he’s thin. His proportions are almost correct, his arms just a little too long. I expect claws at the end of them and the digitigrade legs, but I am met with digits and toes that curl without joints. They’re like rigid tubes, animated by something. The bare chest of the creature is still human in nature, but the ribs have been pulled open. In the exposed cavity two hearts beat strong. Rewired veins go up and across the collarbone. Metal arches staple them to the creature’s neck.

It is the head of the monstrosity that is second most grotesque about it. A mockery of the gods of old Egypt, it resembles a jackal. Resemblance is a strong word. I can see the ears, created by fluffy strands of mould, and the teeth behind the lips created by stretched and bloated sinews. The eyes in the head are unmistakably human, even if all of the bone structure around it has been altered.

That’s what I find most grotesque: it is still human. He is not connected to Mother Chaos.

“I can smell him, Master Izha, I can smell him, he is here.” The Jackal giggled. “Do we hurt him if we kill her? Is that what we are here to do?”

There is a greater drum in the Lorylim around me, a different beat altogether. My hatred recedes as Mother Chaos’ influence does. A different head of the hivemind takes hold. Izha, John called it – the man. The enigmatic, unknown man that had garnered the power to control, I could sense him for the first time for myself. It had always been Tiamat before and now she felt… guilt.

A deep guilt so complete that it made me shudder to be near it. A guilt so total, so all consuming, it threatened to extinguish my hatred. Izha was a being of self-loathing and all that he had was nihilism to keep on going. It was terrible enough to give me pause.

Then the hate returns to me.

I charge towards the creature. I scarcely remember who he is. The brother of one Bearings, an obstacle John overcame when he landed on these shores, an alchemist in league with the Lorylim. I cared little for his story, I just want him dead.

The tip of my sword sunk through one of his hearts. The sudden skewering has the creature spit goo all over me. He still laughs. Bodies of stolen flesh crawled towards him, melding their fingers to his ankles.

The slam caught me by surprise. I fly. My wings open up to make it a flight of my own volition. I have marked the target already. Dropping my sword, I grab the gun with both hands and reach for my magic. The bullets fly with purpose, cutting through the spore cloud. Exploding shells rip holes into the Jackal’s body.

“Master Izha, Master Izha, where are our targets?!” he wails, then laughs and laughs as the fog swallows him. A greater creature does as well, using its teeth as the walls to cover the former alchemist.

The fodder is gone, the true army has arrived.

I am a storm of death in the middle of the enemy army. They are strong, entities akin to what my Master faced in the Death Zone. Massive elementals, created by fusing dozens if not hundreds of them together in a cruel process of constant combat and pressure. Are they the best Mother Chaos has to offer or merely what she could spare for this operation?

The Lorylim feel not guilt. The bodies they puppet do, but not the insane remains of the old species that is in charge. The first foe fights with only madness in mind. They weren’t always like this. I remember the old Lorylim. Terrifying devourers of physical matter, building themselves into tall hives akin to teethed flowers. There was a beauty in them then. Mother Chaos ruined even that.

Hate. For Tiamat, there could only be hate.

Let order rule the world.

Let my king be the creator of that order.

A three-layered maw opens up next to me, big enough to swallow an old oak. Jagged and uneven teeth line the lipless gums, as they surround me. I launch a Grey Smite at a lesser drone coming for me while I raise my weapon. I am devoured. I rip and tear my way out of the guts, my feathers shredding soft tissue.

I rise up high, trying to get an overview of it all. I have grown accustomed to the flow of intel from my Master, but I have moved too far ahead. No matter, I can sustain the damage thrown at me. A massive fireball strikes me from below, engulfing me in blue flames. My hatred burns through fire and pain. The melting of my armour and the metal body below is reversed swiftly. I dive from the skies into the elemental that struck me.

It is a flying island of tendrils, maws and eyes. As maws close and eyes blink, they turn into the other. Mycelial bundles form the pupils. I ram my sword into one of the eyes. Vitality rushes up through me. Life energy they stole, I steal in turn. Contempt fuels the energy once more whirling like teeth on a chain around my sword. I run atop the corrupted inferno, slicing the deformed fire spirits as I run.

There is only the presence of this Izha now. Mother Chaos is insane, but she must have remembered who and what I was. Izha is not the target of my vengeance. Possessed and guided by him, the Lorylim do not suffer additional damage nor true death at my hands. It makes my task more difficult. Alas, there is joy in that. What worth was a swift revenge?

I exposed the internal organs of the knot of fire spirits, or whatever passed for them. I leap up, switching to my gun as I did. I jam a new magazine into the bottom of the armament. Holding my fire, I count the seconds. One, two, three, four – then I unleash the round. It explodes into a gorgeous flower of ice and death. The experimental round works a little too well, tearing apart the gun itself in the process.

I hiss, discarding what was one of my favourite pieces of equipment in my long life. A replacement would be made. My sword returns to my hand as it always does. The straight edge pointing down, I plunge once more, driving the grey blade into the disgusting hide of what still squirms of the corrupted elemental. “Die, die and know peace,” I growl.

A new giant is charging towards me, woven from green and blue. A creature of speed and slicing gusts – which is stopped by a singular entity of a similar nature. Thunder claps as Sylph descends, the first of my allies to arrive.

Others are swift to follow. The dense spores are set alight by a falling star. Salamander makes good of her title, raining an apocalyptic vengeance down on her unsavable kin. Siena is by my side soon, joining me in slicing up these horrid mockeries of life. Gnome and my sister arrive next. I fight with them, all of us stemming the tide. My Master is elsewhere, further in the background, overseeing it all.

Arcane might explodes elsewhere on the battlefield. The Azure Tribe have joined us in the action. Are the god-warriors also helping or are they watching us slaughter their invaders? I would trust them to do the latter, cowards that they are. I hate them. I hate what they have made of a civilization they had hundreds of years to perfect. They chose to make them violent and without regard for life. What a horrid waste.

I sense Mother Chaos again.

Her presence in the hivemind is a beacon to me. My hatred leaves my lungs as a screech. I am thoughtless, my contempt is me and I fly once again. I fly east towards the Azure Tribe. I realize then what the goal of the Lorylim here is.

“Daughteeeeeeeeersssssssssssss, come one, come all!” the slimy voice of Mother Chaos vibrates in the spore cloud. Suddenly she’s all around me. Her presence confuses me. “I remember how you work, little hatred, little me, you do not get to interfere.”

Fire scorches the cloud around her. “KEEP MOVING!” Salamander shouted.

I do not even nod. The apocalypse elemental obliterated the manifestations of Tiamat that were appearing around me. Clouds formed the endlessly-winged shape of the goddess of chaos, only to be burnt to ash. I hurry. I hate her. That is all the motivation I need to obstruct her plans.

I am too late.

I arrive to Karia desperately trying to reach her companions. The teleporting arcane elemental cannot find a way into a dome of foul saltwater, erected by yet another of the elemental amalgams. In it I see the Jackal latched onto the back of the large swordsman Singed. The daughter of chaos Liakan is beset by several of the draconic incarnations of the Lorylim. Humanoid and dragonspawn alike seep into swirling blue sands, parasites taking hold of their prizes.

I slam into the dome, cutting through, only to be immediately catapulted back by an arcane projectile slamming into me. The saltwater explodes into a flood that tears down much of the ancient trees. The stench is nauseating. Liakan takes wing, a laughing creature of triumph and sobbing horror.

Mother Chaos always corrupted her children the quickest.