Chapter 990 - Calling for reinforcements!

Sofia had no idea how she could find the control room of the local emergency broadcast system, and asking the local seemed like a terrible idea, so she could only hide in an alleyway and bring her communicator out.

She pressed the button, but the device was silent.

“Hello?”

Pressing the button multiple times, nothing happened.

“Did it break?”

A sudden chill ran down Sofia’s back as she pressed the button a few more times.

Why is the city suddenly so silent?!

Keenly sensing that something was wrong, Sofia retreated to the spiritual plane right away. There she could see the souls of the nearby inhabitants of the city, all had stopped all moving, they looked in her direction.

Moving back through a few walls, Sofia was relieved to see that the souls’ gazes were not following her.

Are they acting like this because of the communicator?

Biding her time in the spiritual plane, Sofia watched the narrow empty alleyway. A few seconds later, a new soul arrived from each side.

They’re searching for me…

The new arrivals combed through the alleyway for a few minutes, before leaving unhurriedly. Only then did the other human souls stop all staring in the alleyway’s direction.

Squatting in a corner, Sofia organized her observations.

Poor or absent spiritual sight. Seems to react to communication devices. Absolutely everyone nearby is affected, including rats and stray cats, but not birds?

I thought about mind control or hypnosis but it felt more like… Is this some kind of hivemind like the Kleptras?

The search right now makes it pretty clear they are on the lookout for intruders, but I walked through the streets without an issue earlier, nobody even paid me any mind.

Wouldn’t a hivemind know I’m an outsider?

What exactly are we dealing with…

Let’s do some light testing.

Sofia spent some time in the spiritual plane looking for the perfect place to conduct her tests. Settling with the construction site of a tall building, which only had supporting beams and floors surrounded by scaffolding. It already stood taller than all surrounding buildings, and there were no workers anywhere so it was perfect.

Jumping up the empty elevator shaft to one of the upper floors, Sofia grabbed one of the skeletal thralls she kept in her eye, a random cat skeleton, and placed it on the ground alongside her communicator.

Sofia grabbed the skeleton’s paw and pressed it against the communicator’s button.

There, don’t move, when you notice someone approaching, play dead.

The instructions were already a tad complex for a thrall, but Sofia felt it would be fine. While the cat pressed the button, she hid in the spiritual plane again.

She did not have to wait long before a few human souls ran up the building’s daunting stairswells.

That endurance they have seems far from human.

The three souls ran up fifteen floors without pause.

While Sofia was curious to see what they would do if they found the communicator, it would be inconvenient to lose it. Reappearing in the stairwell behind the three figures before they could emerge on the cat’s floor, Sofia froze their skeletons in place, while giving the cat the order to stop pushing the button.

Now what do we have here?

Standing a few steps above Sofia were three adult men, frozen in place mid-step, their entire body trembling but completely unable to move under Sofia’s influence. Or so she thought. Before she could even begin to try anything, she heard a crack, and one of the mens’ heads started spinning back.

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Motherfucker, what?!

Before the man could see her, Sofia collapsed his skull into itself, crushing his head to a paste.

The man had forced through the control to look back at her so strongly that he had broken his neck. To prevent the other two from doing the same, Sofia quickly encased them in bones and set them aside while she walked up to the headless corpse. While the bones were still under her control, the flesh no longer moved.

At least it’s really dead? No kill notification of course…

That was a bit too easy. Was it mind control after all?

Controlling the man’s ribs to burst his chest open, Sofia had a quick look inside.

Looks like a pretty standard human, at least it’s not a mimic.

More footsteps echoed from below.

Ah, crap, more? If I’m not careful I’ll have the entire city on me.

Sofia quickly cleaned up the scene, scraping spilled blood with bone slates, storing everything she could into her eyes, and quickly crushing the head of the remaining two bone-encased prisoners to send them in as well.

But only one disappeared when she tried sending them to her eye.

What?

Is he not dead?!

With no more time to lose, Sofia removed the bone casing and just had the nymphs grab both her and the third man to the spiritual realm. There she could no longer control his bones, but the third man who was still alive despite a crushed head was still stuck, gripped by half a dozen ghostly nymphs.

The soul looks perfectly intact despite the physical damage. Weird. Normally there is some reciprocity of damage even if it’s light.

Is this… A different kind of soul parasite? This does look like a human soul but…

Another handful of people made it to the floor now, running right past Sofia and the other spirit to the place where the cat skeleton was activating the communicator before.

Definitely not a hive mind. Reassuring. The soul parasite hypothesis is also void, they cannot see souls for shit.

Mind control would have known I was there like a hivemind, so that leaves only some kind of mass hypnosis that I can think of.

Keep that one in place. Sofia ordered the nymphs, before floating up the stairs to join the new research subjects surrounding the spot her cat used to be at. Grabbing her dagger, Sofia slashed the soul of one of them in half. The man died on the spot, Sofia could see the faint outline of his physical body in the spiritual plane fall to the ground as the soul started to disperse.

The others all looked at the suddenly-dead man.

Sofia killed another one, observing the reactions from the remaining three.

They no longer just kept watching, instead, they suddenly all ran in opposite directions. Sofia was not as fast in the spiritual realm as was in the physical. She cut down one that ran toward her, and caught up with another, killing it on the spot, but that left one who had managed to run all the way to the border of the building which had no windows or walls.

She had to return to the physical plane to freeze its bones, but what she saw then was the man standing on the edge, facing away from her, something shooting out of his head like a cannonball and disappearing into the distance.

The last man’s body fell backwards, lifeless. His mouth was wide open, too wide, the skin around it torn open, bleeding and covered in a slimy substance.

Quickly peeking into the spiritual plane, she confirmed that this last man’s soul was nowhere to be seen anymore.

It was really a fucking parasite, and a big one, too!

Sofia didn’t even have to open up the body to see what was wrong, while it escaped the creature had completely wrecked the body’s jaws, she could clearly see inside of its skull. It was empty.

Sofia returned to the stairwell.

Bring that other guy back.

The third, headless man, who had been trapped in the spiritual plane, was pulled back into existence by the nymphs.

Sofia tore the body up limb from limb. Sending an arm into her eye, then the other one, then she kicked the body to the floor and started tearing off a leg. A disgusting creature suddenly shot out the bleeding wound of the missing right arm. But the body was surrounded by the five new skeletal thralls the monsters had just provided Sofia with. It was caught instantly.

Sofia observed the fleshy and slimy monster squirming and screeching a high pitched shriek as it tried to escape the skeletal fingers sinking into its flesh. It more or less looked like a toothy mouth haphazardly stuck on a writhing mass of tentacles.

“Lovely. Do you understand human speech?”

The creature continued to squirm and shriek in the same way.

Sofia shook her head.

“Kill it.”

The thrall effortlessly crushed the parasite into meat paste, its pitiful screams died out, and there were no more footsteps coming up the stairs, so for a moment, there was silence again.

Too much silence, the sound of cars and other city noises were all gone again.

Loud shrieks tore up the silence, they came from every direction.

I should have tried harder not to let that other one escape.

Stepping out of the stairwell, Sofia had a look outside. Gigantic fleshy creatures were rising up all over the city and from the villages forests around, their massive forms towering over the buildings and the trees. All facing her direction.

Sensing Pareth stepping out behind her, Sofia smiled.

Those are some nice bones you all have there.