(109) Next In Line

[Nightmare Amalgam - ???]

Ramose watched with brows furrowed as another chunk of glistening flesh fell from the beast, impacting the ground with a sickening thwump.

The blob of wobbling flesh, around the size of a grown man, writhed and pulsed, propelling itself along the ground…well, not quickly, but far faster than one would expect from a chunk of severed meat.

The blob stretched, flattening itself against Ramose’s shield in a thin layer. He grimaced, watching its underside transform into a myriad of gripping hooks and claws, raking the shield, attempting to breach it and consume the tasty morsels inside.

Thaleia landed, slicing the creature into tiny pieces faster than one could blink and dousing it with blue flames. They seemed to burn atop its flesh harmlessly for several long seconds before, with a terrible shriek, they were consumed.

A bellow shook the ground as if in sympathy, and Ramose fixed his gaze on the creature in the distance. It was titanic, towering over the buildings, one ‘foot’ in the residential circle and the other on the outer, agricultural circle.

Though vaguely bipedal, it was more like a mountain of jiggling meat than a person, or perhaps a chunky starfish variant. It almost hurt to look at it, its movements not lining up logically. Its larger movements were slow, fitting for a hulking behemoth, but its entire body constantly jiggled and writhed, every small vibration shaking it in contrast to its slow amble.

It had no distinct features. Even the roars it regularly emitted were projected from inconsistent mouths. They seemed to shift and change. One roar came from a cavernous maw on its back, and the next was from the top of its ‘head’. Otherwise, it was a uniform pile of merged flesh and bone.

Perhaps the most disturbing part was how wet it was. It seemed to secrete some sort of fatty oil or fluid. Its skin was constantly slick with a foul sheen, and this layer of fluid seemed to resist the demons’ fire somehow.

“What in the gods above is it?” Daena asked.

She stood just behind Ramose, her hands held at her sides, fists clenched.

“An abomination,” Ramose replied simply.

He was not trying to be rude, but the mana shield was not easy to maintain, not at this size, and he had no energy for idle conversation, not while it was being battered by the creature and its spawn.

He stood before the council chambers, his gray shield of magic covering the entire building, which was packed with people. Apparently, there were no escape tunnels, or none that the residents were willing to disclose to him. Something about every secret egress being a potential ingress for their enemies, but Ramose thought it might simply be a cover for their desire to remain.

Part of him understood their plight—logically, at least. Their entire lives, their very survival, seemed to orbit this colony. It was so extreme that they viewed leaving as tantamount to death, so he understood their desire to remain, even in the face of such a monstrosity. If death was both outside Chicolua and within it, they might as well stay and die in their home.

However…

Schlick!

A tendril of meat shot out from the creature’s leg, snatching a woman as she sprinted from a building next to it. She was one of the several people who failed to evacuate in time. Many had decided to hunker down in their homes rather than gather in the center, perhaps underestimating the danger, or maybe even unsure what to do, having spent their whole lives in the colony’s safety.

Her screams sent shivers down Ramose’s spine, though the majority of his discomfort came from watching her body rip itself apart. It seemed to invert, shifting what was inside to the outside before flowing up into the creature’s main body and incorporating into it.

Was this actually preferable to dying out in the Peaks?

Daena beat on the shield, grinding her teeth so loudly he could hear it.

“I would advise against going out there. I am well above 300, yet even I cannot see the creature’s level. You would do worse than nothing out there: you would fuel it,” Ramose explained.

“Fuel?” Daena asked, turning a fierce glare on him.

“Yes, this creature appears to be sustaining itself on the lifeforce of its victims. It was likely created from a ritual. This is both good and bad news.

“An abhorrence this powerful is not something that can be created overnight, as it seems to have been, without consequence. The ritual seems to have combined the lifeforce of whatever poor souls were sacrificed to fuel it, and it grows with every addition.

“This is unsustainable, however. The hotter the fire, the faster it burns. It is very easy to start an inferno. It is far more difficult to sustain one, especially with what must have been a hastily constructed ritual relying on blood tithe.

“It is possible that, were we to merely contain it within this mountain, it would burn itself out in a couple of days,” Ramose hypothesized.

“That would destroy the colony,” Daena remarked.

“Yes, but its people would survive. Is Chicoulua its buildings or its people?”

“Both. Neither can survive without the other,” Daena answered without hesitation.

“Right,” Ramose relented, sighing. “That being the case, our current best is what the others are doing: chip bits of it off and destroy them. Whittle it down until there is nothing left. Though with regard to such a powerful creature, that is much easier said than done, especially while trying to limit damage to the environment.”

Just as he finished, Ramose noticed a thick blue flame rising next to him in a column. It seemed to firm and solidify until the flames seemed like physical objects, and then they vanished without a trace, leaving Hannibal standing in their place.

“What the—” Daena started, throwing her arms out as if she might do combat with him.

Hannibal paid her no mind, staring at the creature with his trademark unbothered visage. He stroked his chin with his hand, analyzing for a few seconds, while Daena slowly disarmed.

“What do you think?” Ramose prompted.

“I can do nothing in this form,” Hannibal responded.

“That is…not ideal. Fighting it in your other form would likely be more destructive than simply letting it burn itself out while rampaging,” Ramose said, grimacing.

“Indeed,” Hannibal agreed, turning toward Daena, who had finally resumed her clenched-fists posture. “Gather your ten strongest.”

“My what?” she asked, taken aback.

“We will draw it from this place. We must bring it to a more suitable location to do battle,” Hannibal explained, turning back to stare at the monster with his arms crossed.

“The fuck do you expect us to do? Wings here just spent the last twenty minutes explaining to me how useless it would be to fight,” Daena said, gesturing frustratedly at Ramose.

“Your job is to be the bait, not to fight it,” Hannibal declared nonchalantly.

Daena stared at the back of his head for several long seconds, opening and closing her mouth.

“You want my people to be bait? How about you be the bait?”

“I cannot. None of us can. This beast feeds on the lifeforce of this world. It cannot feed on us; thus, it is not interested in us, save as threats to exterminate,” Hannibal explained, still not taking his eyes off it.

Daena stood motionless, her stare practically burning a hole in the back of Hannibal's head. Eventually, she glanced back at the council building, her brow furrowed in concern.

————————————————

“Thirty-four knights and fifty-one soldiers, my lord,” the knight commander reported solemnly.

Ragnvald frowned, chewing the insides of his cheeks as he contemplated. The failed Titan was gone, blasted off to who-knows-where, and he had just lost not only soldiers but knights, nobles. Even if he somehow managed to blast the gate down and cut a bloody swath through the city before reclaiming it, he would already have failed.

This was supposed to be easy—more of a demonstration than actual combat. The expectation was minimal, if any, casualties.

“Damn it!” he spat, turning on his heels.

“My lord?” the knight commander asked, trotting after him.

“Form up. We will begin a siege. I don’t know where they mustered all their sudden strength, but we’ll see how long it lasts when belts start tightening—” Ragnvald started, but he was cut off by what sounded like a distant roar.

The entire army turned to face the wall, staring at a point just above the gate as another roar pierced the air, seemingly coming from that spot.

Though they were a mile away, they could almost hear the rush of displaced air as a scaled beast mounted the wall, gripping the parapet with winged forelimbs possessed of three sharp claws. It pushed its head forward, its long neck stretching well past the wall, and roared a third time. This one nearly vibrated the ground with its intensity.

Without warning, it leaped from the wall, flapping its powerful wings to climb into the sky. It soared higher and higher until it was almost invisible, then suddenly turned sharply and plunged toward the ground, toward the army.

“Stop gawking and kill it!” Ragnvald shouted.

Knights and soldiers shifted, startled out of their collective reverie. Enormous bows were drawn back, arrowheads glinting in the sunlight. Mana swirled around the robed knights as spells were prepared.

When the beast was close enough to make out its fiery, glowing eyes, the army loosed their arrows and spells. The sky was momentarily filled with the light of a hundred spells, which competed with the shadow cast by hundreds of speeding arrows, many with their own spells or enchantments attached.

The creature continued its descent, unwavering, shifting into a roll that seemed to whip the air around it into a frenzy. In less than a second, it was completely hidden by a quickly darkening funnel cloud that sped toward the ground.

The assemblage seemed to hold its breath as its attacks sped toward the descending wall of wind. Time seemed to slow momentarily, but with a blink of the eye, chaos broke loose.

Arrows were cast aside like leaves in a tornado, and spells impacted the wind fecklessly. Fire was extinguished, ice was cast aside, and nearly every spell effect was either rebuffed entirely or redirected. Though a few seemed to penetrate into the funnel cloud, its descent did not slow, likely indicating the beast inside was unharmed.

“Brace!” Ragnvald shouted.

The derecho crashed down, flattening a host of soldiers unfortunate enough to stand directly beneath it. They were pressed into the ground before being ejected, thrown in all directions by the force of the storm. The surrounding soldiers backed away, and many of the mounted knights’ horses grew restless, trained for combat with other people rather than the forces of nature.

The wind suddenly rushed outward, clearing the clouds and revealing the beast, which hovered only a hundred feet in the air with its wings fully extended, as if it had blasted the storm away with only its wingbeats. It had to be thirty feet from wingtip to wingtip, and its scales shone in the sun, a fierce encapsulation of predatory beauty.

Before anyone could react, there came a recognizable but invisible pulse from the creature that the army felt in their chests, followed by a high-pitched, almost electric whine.

“Did that thing just cast a—” one of the robed knights began.

He did not finish his thought, as a spear of fire pierced him from head to groin, stabbing into the ground below his feet. Dozens of such spears impaled knights, most of whom wore similar robes.

The only sound was the crack of several magic barriers being effortlessly pierced. The spell was not content with merely those few victims, however, erupting in a blazing inferno, swallowing three to five other knights around the impaled.

In the blink of an eye, hundreds of knights, and most of the mages in particular, had been eliminated.

Ragnvald stared with his mouth agape, unable to process such devastation. He just barely retained enough of his mental faculties to note that the beast had a rider.

“My name is Bernard Buchanan, and this wyvern is named Wrex. I am the Executor of the new, free nation of Radaar. Consider this our formal declaration of independence from Sardvend.

“As a celebration of this momentous occasion, I will give you all a single chance to retreat, to keep your lives,” the rider said, his voice booming across the field.

Without giving Ragnvald a chance to respond, Wrex flapped his mighty wings, diving into the army and grabbing him in his claw. He quickly ascended hundreds of feet into the air before stopping, hovering in place. He brought his hindclaw before him, holding Ragnvald level with his mouth, which vibrated a low growl that spat licks of searing flame from between his teeth.

“Will you order the retreat, archduke, or will I have to ask the next in line?” Bernard asked.