Chapter 1916 – Counteroffensive 5 – For her People [Nahoa POV]
“Fortunate for us,” Nahoa answered drily. She was under no illusions – this was another one of Gaia’s soft tilts in the weave of fate.
A groaning stag shambled forwards. Crooked antlers dripped with Elu’s blood. Four hooves touched the ground in an unsteady rhythm, three more stuck out the flanks of the creature. Beneath two eyes, one too large and one too small, sat a lipless mouth of sharp, yellow teeth, entirely unfitting for a beast like that.
“It’s being summoned-“
“-by a Lorylim-infected druid,” Nahoa finished the sentence for the weakened general. “I know, you silly-billy, we did our research.” Her jovial tone caused the elderly lady to raise an eyebrow. A muted reaction compared to what the demigoddess was used to. “Of the Small Lake Tournament contestants, only a few are unaccounted for now. Xenity, Ankleshanker and Haek – and this fits into Haek’s profile.”
“You are… smart…” A reverberating voice announced the druid before he stepped around the corner.
Like his creature, he was distorted. What had been a handsome young man before was now a true monstrosity. His brown hair had thinned, the greasy tresses fusing into the flesh mess of eyes and teeth that covered his bloated skin. His right eye was a bloodshot mess, the pupil a sickly yellow colour, while the left had wandered up several centimetres. The skull had liquefied into red flesh to accommodate the change, flesh that twisted and curled as tendrils. His chin had been reshaped entirely to accommodate a massively oversized set of teeth.
[Haek AI Picture: ]
“Yeah, unlike you, you are suuuuuch a stupid idiot moron,” Nahoa answered with a mild giggle. “Whatever rode you to sell your body and soul to the total icky that is the Lorylim, hmm?”
“I let him in… that… was all… I needed to see…“
“Urgh, okay, I’m so sorry, but I actually don’t care for it if you’re gonna go and do, like, the usual ‘Oooo, the truth, the eldritch truuuuth!’ kinda thing.” Nahoa put a hand on her waist. Where casual clothes had covered her seconds before, the maid uniform had manifested itself. The axolotl gills behind her pointy ears wiggled in anticipation. “I’ll kill you now,” she said, a dark smirk on her face.
“Try,” Haek croaked.
The mutated stag galloped forwards. Elu backed away, having enough wisdom and power left to get herself out of the firing line. Nahoa stood still.
The sharp antlers rammed into her body. What had looked like the tanned skin of a Mesoamerican woman turned purple and bubbly where the horns pierced her. Sharp teeth scraped over her midriff, trying to deal any meaningful damage. Instead, all the creature did was fill itself with disease.
Nahoa had no misgivings about using everything her thrice-cursed progenitor had left her against the monsters that threatened her new people. The Empty Rot wasted away the cells of the conjured entity. The Crimson Fever broke the blood-brain barrier while messing with the temperature control. The World Disease introduced magical signals into the crosswires of mental function. The Digestive Plague, the accursed Purple, ate it from inside.
After just a few seconds of eating at her, the stag collapsed. “You are the unfortunate tool of a great fool,” Nahoa spoke ritualistically and raised her hand. The bone grip of Nextloaolli appeared in her hand, the curved dagger fitting as perfectly in her hand as the day she received it. The dark, prismatic blade shimmered in the daylight like polished, facetted stone.
The weapon sunk into the back of the stag’s head, carving into flesh already weakening from disease. One nerve bundle was cut and the facsimile of life that the druid had summoned was unmade, collapsing to the floor as a pile of rotten leaves, which then entirely dissipated.
Nahoa opened her arms wide. Purple fog rose from her swiftly sealing wounds. The same fog rose from the bubbling, frothing mucus that dripped from her extremities. “Let’s see how you win this, little druid.”
The Lorylim’s first approach was the predictable one. A mass assault of conjured birds covered Nahoa’s field of view in feathers. Claws opened her skin, ripped off her axolotl frills, and tore at hair, but none of that mattered. Every wound was just an accelerating factor in her fog flooding into the area. The birds wheezed and coughed, for as much as birds were capable of coughing, and soon they dropped, lifeless.
Nahoa took that as her signal to strike.
It wasn’t until she emerged from the cloud that Haek could see her coming. He just barely avoided the stab of her dagger. The tap of her empty right on his chest, he did not avoid as well. Immediately, the compound of eldritch life that was the corrupted body of the druid ejected the touched parts. Flesh splattered on the ground and was then stomped down on by Nahoa as she advanced.
Haek continued to dodge backwards. He wasn’t the fastest but neither was she. 3000 points in Endurance came at the expense of her Strength and Agility. Thankfully, she did have her ways to deal with that issue.
All she needed was that one, tiny cut.
Haek threw his hands out. Two stags manifested from whirls of rotten leaves and stormed forwards. Nahoa carved one open with Nextloaolli, the weapon drumming crystal clear notes as it tasted false blood. The other clipped the plaguexolotl with its antlers, while charging forwards.
“Not concerned… about… where it is going?” the druid asked.
“Not particularly,” Nahoa answered with a smirk. “Not as long as it needs to go through that.” She pointed over her shoulder at her noxious fog. It rolled ever so slowly after her, attached by an invisible tether to the woman that had created it. It would take a truly hardy enemy to move through that and not contract any of her plagues. “By the time your stag gets through, it’ll be, what, 20% slower? Elu can deal with that.”
“You… trust… her…?”
“Barely know her.” Nahoa suddenly took a lunging step forwards, swinging her knife in a wide arch as she did. Haek immediately stepped back. “I’m just under no delusion. If she cannot save herself from a weakened stag, then I cannot win this while protecting her. Not until I get one of my plagues into you.”
“You speak of it… openly…” Haek tilted his head. “Why?”
“Because this is the simple truth of the matter…” Nahoa grinned madly as the fog concealed her form, “…I only need to get lucky once.”
She could see through the fog clear as day. To her, it barely even put a purple tint to what was behind it. She could very well see that Elu struggled with the one stag. Struggle was not the same as defeat though. That was all the peace of mind she needed to act on her words.
Haek wisely kept backing away from the fog. Occasionally, he conjured a bird to fly into it. Weak scout units that lacked the vitality to do more than flutter into the purple mist before the diseases within robbed them of motor function, then mental processes, and finally their life.
Nahoa loathed how much she enjoyed this style of fighting. In it, she found every bit the proof that she was the daughter of the Gluttonous One. It just felt… right to creep up on the enemy, to limit their choices, to be unfair in every move towards them. ‘It’s not how or why I have these powers, it’s what I use them in service of,’ she told herself and smiled. ‘Enjoying the death of evil is virtuous.’
Haek’s back hit a wall that he could not break through, the invisible edge of the Illusion Barrier. His eyes rolled left to right. Nahoa was advancing towards him, leaving corridors in both directions between the impassable wall and the virulent fog. On one side, there was a building, on the other, an open street.
It was simply 50/50 on where Haek would try to dodge.
Nahoa lunged left, towards the open street. In response to the first signs of motion, Haek did the same. “I got you,” the Aztec demigoddess sang, just as her Diseased Knife cut the tall man’s cheek.
As before, the chimeric organism attempted to isolate its infected part immediately. Attempted and failed. More than half of Haek’s face slouched before the greater whole realized that the disease had spread through the blood and other fluids in an instant. The enchantment on the Mythical weapon made it so.
“Rage against it, curse it, but you are dead now.” Nahoa straightened up and let the man get his distance. “I’ve chosen the Crimson Fever for this weapon. Every minute, your physical capabilities will diminish by 1%. Once it’s reached 5%, I will Intensify the Plague. Once it has reached 10%, I will just do it again.” Nahoa beheld her weapon gleefully. “By then, you’ll be too slow to escape my other diseases. Or in other words…” Nahoa put on her cutesy tone, “…you’re, like, soooooo screwed. Not in the fun way, no one would screw you in the-“
Haek roared from the depths of his chest. Magic poured outwards, intertwining into a great storm of rotten leaves. Nahoa heard the grunting of a great boar.
The malevolent smirk on her face spread as far as her lips would allow. There was nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal. There was also nothing easier to strike.
The dagger sunk into Haek’s chest. What should have taken 5 minutes to fully stack up was advanced to completion by the Absolute Plight Attribute of Nextloaolli. She did exactly as advertised, Intensifying the disease, lifting the threshold for the debuff. The boar manifested a moment later.
It was a ghoulish thing, exceptionally thin for a wild pig despite its size. Its tusks were curved, yellowy things. The remaining teeth in its maw were crooked and looked like they belonged in the jaws of various other animals. Same went for the cluster of eyes the creature possessed on its forehead.
‘Big, strong, sturdy – slow,’ Nahoa thought to herself and leapt back into the mist.
Haek’s control over his summons was not absolute, that much was clear. In fact, it appeared fairly limited. The upside of this was a lack of management, but on the downside the boar did not have the wherewithal to stay out of the noxious fog. It rammed into Nahoa with such force that it ripped her chest straight off her hips.
A fresh pair of arms burst out of the stump, the rest of her torso swiftly following. Purple sludge at first, she regenerated into her full, impeccably dressed form within seconds. ‘This is exactly why I keep my core down there,’ she thought.
The boar realized it had a snout full of slime at some point and turned back around. It came at Nahoa at a speed still too rapid for the demigoddess to avoid, turning the pavement into pebbles where it advanced. Yet, the force of the impact was lesser – too little to rip Nahoa apart again.
Folded and impaled by a tusk, the axolotl maid raised her knife and rammed it into the boar’s forehead. She did it again and again and again, while the creature thrashed about. Each time she did it, she moved faster.
When the thrashing did finally toss her off, Nahoa tumbled through the air with grace. She landed on her legs and deliberately whistled so the boar would know where she would be. Immediately, it came towards her again.
It moved at a crawl. Her Noxious Fog sapped the Agility of enemies within, transferring those Stats to her. It was a status condition her dagger worsened. That was just one of the layers that turned the boar into a non-factor. Her many diseases each further weakened it and then there was the Charisma Death. The enchantment diminished the Charisma of the target with every strike. Once the Stat hit 0, the debuff lowered All Stats instead.
By the time the boar reached her, she simply kicked it aside. It crashed into a nearby building. Nahoa could have easily finished it off, but it was more useful to her alive. The Agility she had sapped would go away once she killed it.
Better to use it to take a quick trip to help Elu.
“Struggling with this?” she asked and sliced the head of the stag, before it could even react to her presence. It had also contributed to her speed, but not by so much that she really noticed it.
“I’m struggling with a lot,” Elu hissed and tilted her head. Black veins were travelling up her throat.
That put a timer on the matter that Nahoa had not been aware of before. “I’ll be right back.”
Haek was right where she had left him. The spell had clearly exhausted him. The Lorylim were often endless, it felt, but there was nothing in this world that actually was. “Arrogant bi-“
That was as far as he got before Nahoa stabbed his forehead. “You are a sacrifice for my people’s prosperity. You are a sacrifice for my husband’s happiness,” she hissed, hoping he was aware enough to hear those words before the light fully died in his eyes. Confirmation that he was dead came with the diminishment in her speed.
She ran back to Elu. As she did, she really understood why Sylph was always so chipper. Being fast was fun. So was being able to tank every hit the enemy threw at her, though.
“Coming to give me a dignified goodbye?” the old lady croaked. At roughly level 200, her physiology was quite resistant to the Lorylim, but not fully. Whatever had happened before Nahoa had intervened, it must have planted the corruption deep inside the woman.
“Don’t be such a silly little thing, I’m a maid of my Master, I got the special things.” Nahoa pulled a vial out of her inventory, filled with a grey liquid. It looked remarkably plain for what it was. “Delicia’s prototype of a cure, created from extracts of Lyndell’s flesh and blood,” she explained, serious now. “I only got the one and I can’t promise it’ll work, but I think you’re up for a try.”
“Mhm… I wouldn’t mind dying at my age… but I would very much mind dying like this,” Elu groaned.
“Alright then, Delicia said to just pour it over the affected area.”
“That would be here.” Elu pulled her robe back, revealing a stab wound right beneath the heart, festering with Lorylim rot.
As soon as the liquid touched it, the fungal infection turned on itself. What was black turned grey and gnawed itself out of existence, until only dust remained that clung to the bloody wound in clumps that would need to be washed out. “I’ll keep you company until the healers arrive,” Nahoa said.
“You would do me a greater service if you went ahead with the mission,” Elu groaned and sat against a fallen block of concrete. “They already sent their big hitter after me. If they throw a second, lesser attempt at me, I can handle it.”
Nahoa considered this. In a town this small, the chances of the Lorylim having another Synapse ready was quite small and even injured Elu would indeed be able to fend off most attacks. “I’ll ask John.”
“Your husband, you mean?” she asked with a giggle.
Nahoa almost froze up while typing. “Please do not tell anyone I said that… Jane is scary when she is mad…”
“I’m not going to talk to her or any other of your ‘king’s’ associates if I do not have to.” There was a clear hate in her tone. “That was the last betrayal I could stomach. I’m out of politics and out of your military as soon as this war is over.”
Nahoa regarded Elu with a cold stare. “You are acting like John is a tyrant that cares nothing for any people but those exactly like him.”
The North American woman opened her mouth in retort. Whatever she had thought to say, she swallowed it when she remembered who she was talking to. The Harem Comms popping up in front of Nahoa ended the conversation.
“My Master has granted your request. I will be on the move.”