Re:Cursed

Chapter 171 167: Eyes on a Platter

Nyxala bit down on a lump of hair. It sealed the wound, but that wasn't all that helpful when her lip was gone. She wasn't sure if it slipped out into the dark, or she'd accidentally swallowed it. Either way, her lower rows of teeth were exposed for anyone to see.

Good thing I'm stuck in Coral's shadows. Nobody will see me here.

If she wanted to heal her face properly, she would either have to kill something living, or find somewhere safe enough to enact a healing ritual. Considering the phantoms shearing through ancient pipework behind her, that was unlikely to be anytime soon.

Nyxala cracked her wings, shooting down a meandering tunnel without pausing for an instant to decide whether it was the right path or not. She lacked time. The crack and creak of metal along with the undertone of a swarming whisper told her all she needed to know. No matter the desire to turn and face the creatures that hounded her, Nyxala couldn't let herself fall for it. She didn't need the phantoms any madder than they already were.

Any assumptions that she could fight these non-beings had already vanished. Nothing she'd done had hurt the first. Instead, it had inflicted far more damage on herself. And now there were so many more.

All Nyxala could do was run — or fly — until she'd escaped the domain of these unrelenting creatures.

Like everything she seemed to deal with, it was never so simple. If she could slip from these shadows, she would have. The depths of Coral were always this convoluted. The shadows made no difference to corrupted space, but the difference was that she wasn't given the time to breathe. If only she could stop and take the opportunity to worm her way past the worst of the convoluted space, she'd be back on the surface right now.

It didn't help that the host of these shadows looked like it hadn't seen a human touch in a million years.

Nyxala twisted harshly, angling inside a narrow tube that cut her wingspan by half. Her claws dragged through the side of tunnel as she felt gravity flip. She was able to account for the sudden change in what was up and down, but not the fragility of the walls. The sharp blades that replaced her hands didn't cut through metal and give her control over her trajectory as intended. The walls flaked away like brittle, rotten wood.

Instead of curling around the bend, she hit the other wall and scraped along it with all the power of her gathered momentum. The curve was soft, but the rough, ancient metal made the slide anything but pleasant. It cut open her skin. Where her tentacles tried to separate her from the surface, they sliced on jagged steel.

She'd lost speed. The whispers were getting louder again. They tickled her antennae, breathing down her neck. Nyxala held herself back from turning to acknowledge them. It was still unknown whether they were brought to the hunt in anger for the light she emit, or her perception of them.

Nyxala hoped it was the latter. She could easily avoid glancing the way of the phantoms if needed. Stopping her chest from glowing was far more difficult. Not unless she wanted to drown herself in shadow and go blind. Down here, in the phantom's domain, that was a death sentence.

As she finally lifted herself from the wall at the end of the curving tunnel, Nyxala tried to beat her wings. The confined space inhibited her movement, but they still threw herself forward.

Down into an even tighter passage.

An idea had come to her. It may not be the best idea, having to trap herself in narrower confines, but it was the best she could come up with.

As soon as she was inside, Nyxala slapped her wings to her side and twisted. Her claws scraped through the surrounding walls. Each tentacle tore off a clump of hair before, along with her claws, they pulled the ancient metal in to a tapered point that sealed her away from those creatures chasing her.

One side shattered. The brittle metal not able to withstand the force of being bent so far out of shape. Nyxala sealed the break with more mould.

The whispers didn't dull.

Nyxala backed away, already expecting to leap into another chase. She didn't trust such a flimsy barrier to hold back a determined child much less a phantom.

In no time, the creatures reached the makeshift seal. Frost accumulated on the metal. In its centre, a handprint appeared. It shifted, touching elsewhere. More joined the first. Then faces appeared in the metal. Hollow depictions of human faces manifested in the chill permeating the blockage as if the phantoms were pressing their heads through wall. Their visage appeared in the surface as they had through the glass of a trolley.

For whatever reason, the less than impressive barrier had stopped them. Nyxala did not feel relieved. She was still shrouded in shadow, so it was only a matter of time before more phantoms found her presence distasteful. She left. Deeper into the labyrinth of piping.

At least, that's where she expected this narrow tube to lead. Instead, she quickly found herself tumbling from the ceiling of a open space. Her wings caught her. Nyxala's instinct to perceive her surroundings was halted only a moment too late. The weight of her gaze revealed a massive hall. Huge, ancient machinery reached from floor to ceiling along the walls, leaving only the tiniest space between for stacked walkways.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

And, almost imperceptibly, footprints. Disturbing the dust.

Nyxala ceased her sight and wrapped her chest with her robe and cloak to stifle the light. The whispers weren't strong here. Only a subtle hum. Hopefully she'd been quick enough to reduce herself to blindness to halt the aggression of phantoms.

Landing on the upper of three railings bridging the machinery, Nyxala took the moment of respite to consider exactly what she could do.

She had no way to know whether it was her vision or light that attracted more phantoms. Not without testing it directly. Something she was not exactly bouncing on her toes to do. So for now, it was better to assume both were the cause.

Her third eye, regardless of how helpful it had been in the past, was now the cause of her grief.

The solution was obvious. Nyxala needed to mutate a new way to see.

Hidden in her core name, there were a surprising number of mutations related to eyes and sight. Surely one of them would allow her to move around in the dark without attracting any more phantom attention than her mere presence did.

Her first prospect was the swirling eyes she'd had back in her last life. She hadn't had them long before her sacrifice. Only long enough to catch their reflection a few times. Like her feet and hair, they had replaced her human parts, so the cultists had not been willing to get rid of them as they had so many of her inhuman mutations.

Despite that, Nyxala had never noticed a changes to her sight. If the spiralling lights in her eyes did anything at all, then it would be something she still needed to figure out. Though, mutating eyes with the light of tiny stars seemed rather counterproductive considering where she was. Her evolved Talent might give her hints, but it wasn't worth it. Not right now.

Especially considering the part of her name that held her Talent was now lost to her. She didn't know how long that would last.

Instead, she trailed her focus along the other eye related cracks in her name. There were many, but she dismissed all the ones that required some other prerequisite mutation. Then, she cast aside any that somehow weren't related to improving her sight.

Oddly enough, that was a lot.

Nyxala settled on three. The first, she could almost clearly feel was a sort of low-light vision. It might help… if there was any light down here at all. The little cracks of light that filtered through her robe would probably be enough, but Nyxala wanted to smother that light out of existence. She needed it gone. Not another reason to rely on it.

The next was interesting. Eyes that gave off a feeling of a dozen alien colours. Would this expand what she could see to ultraviolet or infrared? That was a safe bet. Maybe she'd even be able to see those uncommon machine signals. That would be an immense help when she found her way out and eventually got stuck fighting Worshippers.

Lastly, were eyes that gave her a much harder time figuring out. She knew it would give her new sight of something, but it was even more unclear than the mutation with alien colours. The only hint she got was the sensation of sharp. Usually, she would associate that with some sort of attacking mutation — like her claws — but the distinct sensation of vision wove through the sharp as if it were one and the same.

The answer was obvious.

Well, it should have been, but Nyxala's curiosity in the face of such dangerous circumstances led her to taking a chance. Instead of taking the safe option and expanding the vision she already had, Nyxala opened the sharp eye mutation.

She felt the breath down her neck the same moment the skin above her brows had the worst cramp she'd ever felt. She flung into motion. Not a minute had passed since she'd stopped, yet that was apparently all the time she would be granted. The phantoms had noticed her, and their chill — completely separate from real temperature — now clung to her spine.

The twitching of her eyebrows grew so strong that she was forced to seal her eyes as she twisted through the air, down past pistons of long inactive machinery and landed on the lower floor. Her tentacles and tail barely struck ground before she raced towards the only exit she could see. A massive set of sealed sliding doors.

As she raced towards them, she couldn't see any sort of manual control. There were no handles. No panel besides the doors. It was truly an ancient design. Nyxala flew close, ready to rip the doors off their decayed tracks, but shockingly, the doors opened themselves.

Nyxala was immediately on guard. This wasn't part of a Technocult system. Unless a Worshipper had decided it was a good idea to trap a soul in the circuitry of a door of all things… then this was inhabited by something else.

Were the people of old stupid? Why would anyone make a door fully automated? Even the Technocult left physical limitations on their systems so that no actual decision making was made by the machine. The same could be said for the Worshippers. Their machines had automation, but as far as Nyxala was aware, that automation was the result of whatever beings were summoned to inhabit the machines.

She halted her flight, and did a full u-turn. The phantoms were dangerous, but she trusted her chances with this door even less.

As if to prove her right, the doors slammed together, brushing past each other and narrowing to a sharp point that compared to her own teeth. If she thought she was safe not passing through the dual doors, she would be wrong. As soon as the toothy doorway realised she hadn't slipped into its decapitating maw, the entire wall bulged sideways.

Like a mouth stretching forward, the infested automation bit through ancient machine. It shred a hundred tonnes of steel with the same ease Nyxala bit her lip. Corruption, guided by the sinister spawn, twisted the entire hall against her.

Nyxala had never seen an animate-spawn, but they certainly lived up to their infamy. Corruption itself seemed to bend to its will. The walls narrowed. Machinery grew sharp, and reached for her like a dozen mandibles.

Worse, she knew she was flying back towards the invisible phantoms, so she had to soften the intensity of her third eye until she was essentially blind. When Curious fell only slightly below her body and the pain of her soul once again being scraped overwhelmed her mind, she was about ready to forgo her caution to regain her sight.

Curious hung limp. Shriveled and unresponsive. Its siblings were quick to curl around it and pull it out of further danger, cradling it at Nyxala's side.

She was so close to dumping all the weight in her third eye again, when the cramp in her brows cleared and something wet trickled into her eyes. She opened them, blinking away the unwelcome sensation. It didn't leave.

Without ever closing them, Nyxala opened her eyes.