Re:Cursed

Chapter 173 - 169: Folding Eyes

Nyxala hung at the bottom of Coral. The Darkness of the black hole reached for her once more. Her claws were buried to the hilt. Long divots trailed above, marking her efforts to slow.

Somewhere high above, there were scratch marks where her first attempt was not so successful.

She was back where she started. The curling outline of light at the edges of Coral's undersurface where gravity hadn't fully pulled every last strand down into the depths was a welcome sight. Nyxala had lost progress — actually sent to a state worse than she'd started — but she didn't care. Finally escaping that nightmare of the shadows was enough.

How Nyxala was supposed to adapt to a place like that, regardless of which mutations she adopted, it was lost on her. For now, she had no intent to return. Even if her new sight gave her a way to navigate those shadows without instigating the phantoms' anger, she'd had enough of that place.

Glancing around in the calm that came with a lack of something trying to kill her, she properly embraced the lines. Below was a pure void. Not exactly unexpected, considering where she was. The chaos above remained, but now that she had time to breathe and take it all in, the complex weave of needles was almost comprehensible.

Not entirely. Some lines bent unnaturally and hurt to look at while the rest seemed to fade into a background texture after a certain distance.

Nyxala pulled a claw from the wall and covered an eye. She'd wanted to see if her depth perception was the only reason she could comprehend anything amongst the chaos, but two surprises awaited her. The first was that while her mundane sight was blocked, the lines remained. She already knew she could see edges through objects, but considering they all disappeared when she closed her eyes, she figured the cover of her hands would be the same.

The other surprise came when she poked herself in the eye. An eye that had not been there before.

With crippled wing, it would have been incredibly stupid to tear her other claw from the only thing keeping her falling. Yet, Nyxala almost did exactly that. Cuddly had to slap her before she threw both hands to her face to feel the new mutation. She'd assumed it had simply altered the eyes she already had, but in the skin above her brows, new eyes settled in place.

While she prodded at the recess in bone around one eye, Cuddly did the same to the other. She could feel the part of her cranium that had been carved away to make room. Or, as she felt further, it was more like her eyesockets had been expanded. Two intersecting holes.

Experimentally, she winked, and found she could blink her new eyes independently from her originals. But the way her eyelids closed beneath the sensitive touch of her tentacle was odd. It felt entirely distinct from the orbs below. There was two motions to it, the first cutting in from the sides, then a somewhat typical sealing from above and below. Poking, and feeling them open a few more times, Nyxala was certain she had two layers of eyelids.

I could really use a mirror. Nyxala thought. Especially if my face alters further.

Bowing her head, she tried to look up at herself through the eye in her chest. It wasn't a great angle, but she could see the disparity between the eyelids above and below. The new ones were straight. Far more-so than anything of flesh ought to be, yet it was no less skin than her originals. They shut like a perfect seal. Two razors touching. Only at the sides of the eyes did a strange sort of… folding occur.

As she opened them for her own visual pleasure, the deviation from the norm only intensified. The second eyelid layer she expected. Perpendicular to the first, they fit underneath quite snugly. What her touch hadn't really expressed, was just how much the eyelids opened.

The flaps of skin opened up slightly, almost like a pair of serpentine jaws. With how far back the eyelids folded, Nyxala was sure that with only a bit of practice, she'd be able to flip which folds were on top. If she wanted, she could give herself vertical eyelids.

Strange.

Neat.

…Not all that helpful right now.

Nyxala lowered down beneath the ledge and fully extracted herself from the funnel that lead into the shadows. As she swung around the lip and hooked herself to a ventral antenna, an ever so slight voice from O̅s̫stho̲th gave her pause.

A tentacle reached down to unbuckle her boots. Cuddly pulled them from her feet, and passed them off to Shy. Nyxala flipped herself inverted. Pressing her feet against the belly of Coral, the slime spread and clung. Like the thick roots of a trunk trying to dig into soil. Ever so slowly, she released her weight from the antenna. Each leg tugged at the mass of liquid that were her feet, yet it held strong.

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Upside down, she shimmied across the polished metal, drooping all the while. The slime didn't exactly fill her with the same sense of freedom that her wings and tentacles gave when they were unbound, but it was nice to let them out for once.

Especially since the subsurface was tasteless. Not a soul came down here to spread filth where Nyxala had to walk.

Her feet had shown to have at least enough strength to hold her weight… but with the black hole looming below, it was difficult to trust entirely. With a wing limp and dead, she needed to be careful. So instead of wading through ankle deep muck alone, she shifted from pillar to pillar, keeping to whatever flat ground she could.

Walking inverted did take some time to adjust, but with all her experience moving through the air, it wasn't difficult.

Her eyes were on a service hatch. A hundred metres away, there was an old suspended walkway that cut-off halfway to make space for a steel grill hive. She was sure it was ancient, but unlike the metal in the shadows of Coral, it was solid and polished like new. Did the drones repair even the remnants that had long since lost their purpose?

Having abandoned the shadows, the only option Nyxala had before her was to climb up through sections that were not so… devoid of people. Maybe she'd find some unlucky lone cultist to heal her body and soul.

Hopefully she wouldn't be the unlucky one and come across Solan.

Nyxala hadn't made it half the distance with her slow shuffle before another problem had to rear its head. Literally. From the blood coating her sides, a wolf's maw bit through her cloak and let out a hollow howl that sounded more like nails scratching stone than anything a beast would create.

She almost shredded the snout sprouting from her side in an instant. Only a thought stopped her. Instead, she left the blood to boil and the Amalgamation to manifest.

Soon enough, long, sinuous claws pierced the obsessive coat of blood and pulled free the rest of its body. The wolfish maw slipped from the side of her ribs to reveal something that shared no resemblance. That jaw was one of a dozen. Matted hair linked them all in an ugly chain that attached to a somewhat bovine body like a tail that had never been able to break through the skin. Ingrown all along its back.

The snapping and howling reached a fever-pitch now that all the wolves' maws were trying to outdo one another. Its massive thick torso was covered in the discarded sheddings of a snake. As loose and crinkly as the scales looked, they were part of its skin.

It lacked a head. The closest thing that could be called that, was a distorted lump with a blowhole bulging from the spine. Off-centre, of course. The wolf jaws bit at her as the black hole immediately sunk its hooks into the heavy beast. A bite to her chitin and its hooked claws tearing into her back were the only things keeping it from falling.

The creature didn't care about the danger it was in. Just like every other time an amalgamation had been summoned, it was desperate to kill her. Strange how that was, considering they spawned from blood that loved her.

Nyxala's claws ripped it to shreds in an instant. Life was slow to fade, but as it did, she left it to fall into black hole.

With how many gravitational tentacles were already weighing down on it, the creature was not worth stripping it for value. She took its life, and that was all she needed. The Darkness took its share. The amalgamation stretched into nonexistence from all three of her sights.

It was enough. Nyxala's Feat activated, and she healed.

Her shriveled tentacles and blackened feathers each regained their lustre, and her body recovered. But her soul was belligerent. The marks in her names were not removed, and likely wouldn't be by anything but the passage of time.

Nyxala flexed her wings, and with a flap, she reached her goal in moments. Slime slipped back in its casing, clamped tight. As interesting as it was to hang upside down over the deadliest place in the world, the use of her feet was rather limited.

She opened the hatch and slipped within.

The room she found herself within was ancient, but it had not gone uninhabited for nearly as long as those in the shadows. A thin layer of dust was proof that there had been at least a few visits in the last half a century.

Like with so many ancient spaces on Coral, the old room was difficult to determine the purpose for. At the edge of the hatch she'd entered through, there were a bunch of latches and brackets for a wall or structure long gone. Deeper in the room, wide, thick shelves stood vacant. Slots for machines? A storage space? It was impossible to tell.

At some point in the past, someone had come through here and stripped the room of anything that might have indicated its purpose, or given Nyxala a general idea of where she was on Coral.

Well, now that she could essentially see through walls — even if it was just for sharp edges — navigation was going to be far easier. Having even the slightest idea where she was in respect to Coral as a whole would be invaluable.

Nyxala pushed through the empty room and began the trek upwards. She needed to find Lysyra. Preferably, without Solan or any other cultist noticing her.

She opened a door into a long, sterile hall, and heard the ripples of explosions and the quivering of a roar far in the distance. The sound of war? Nyxala had to hold herself back from the temptation to chase the thrum. She would have all the time she wanted to play some guerilla warfare once she got her sceptre back.

"This is going to be a constant, isn't it?"

Nyxala spun at Lysyra's voice. The girl had decided it was a good idea to pop into existence right behind her, and she very nearly drove a claw through her head in response.

"What?" she asked.

"You! You're covered in blood again." Lysyra threw her hands up in mock exasperation. "It hasn't been an hour!"