Re:Cursed

Chapter 174 - 170: The Kennels

Nyxala dismissed Lysyra's comments about her blood coating from her mind. It wasn't like she wanted to be bloodsoaked all the time. Her knife cleaned up some of it, but damn was it hard to get out of her robe and cloak without a bath.

At this point, it was easier to just ignore the little bloody fingers poking at her skin.

"You know where the Sripture squad is?" Nyxala asked.

"Hmm? Yeah." Lysyra seemed reluctant to stop poking fun at her, but she must have noticed Nyxala's impatience to start. "You chose a good place to rise from. They're not too far from here. C'mon."

Nyxala followed the girl. Her claws ached to slice through something that she could actually hit. Her short time in the shadows… she'd been unable to land any decisive strike. On the phantoms or the Animate-Spawn. Her claws twitched, snapping every few seconds in her growing excitement for a fight.

"So? What have you learnt?" Nyxala asked.

"There's five of them. Between my basic strength sense and what I've been able to overhear, they are all roughly the same strength. Sixth evo." Lysyra said. "They just finished hunting down a — from what I could tell — Bodytwister messenger squad. One of them really likes explosions; throws 'em out one after the other faster than I can stab. They've also got a ritual specialist and… someone with a camouflaging ability. He stays hidden at all times, but it's nothing compared to my own name."

Nyxala shook her head at Lysyra's clear smugness at that last point.

They stalked down the hall until it opened to a forest of iron bars. Voices echoed. So slight she was certain that without her antennae, they would go unnoticed.

A dull ringing resonated through the bars. The thrum of battle seemed determined to linger, even when the last explosion had been minutes ago. Each iron pillar clung to sound. It reverberated in perpetuity, ever so slowly seeping into a single hum. But her antennae picked up each minuscule deviation. Nyxala was sure if she was given enough time to adapt, she'd be able to have these new ears of hers hear sounds from minutes ago. Pick out conversations.

Well, if she could, there was no reason to think others couldn't. She would need to be careful.

"Be careful what you say," she whispered to Lysyra. "No details."

The girl turned back to Nyxala and halted her steps. "Are you sure you can do this?" Lysyra whispered back. "Will you really be able to take them? I mean, it's five six evos. Each of them would have wiped the floor with… uh, horse-boy."

Grifvoi? Taking Nyxala's word to heart, Lysyra had stopped the mention of any names. They were both linked to his death, so it was hardly an excessive precaution if anyone happened to hear their words. Even if the chance was unlikely.

"Don't worry." Nyxala momentarily dropped her concealer. "With these, so would I." She clicked her claws, but Lysyra's focus was on Nyxala's face alone. With a smirk, she winked her upper left eye before reengaging her concealer.

"When did-" Lysyra shook her head, dismissing the thought. "I'll try to distract them when you go in, but don't expect too much."

Lysyra twirled a dagger on her fingers as she faded into nothingness, leaving Nyxala alone once more. She didn't wait around. She could hear the shimmer of voices through this steel jungle. They were her targets.

She kept her body low. Peeking her head through a broken gate of similar thick rods, her eyes — the normal ones — took in the war-zone before her. There was a decapitated corpse lying not far from her. Three massive chunks were missing from the man's torso. Bite-marks. The creature that tried to eat him didn't get far; its stone flesh had shattered along the ground besides him. Only the ugly scaled face of a beast remained as proof of what might have been held here.

This was a kennel for untrained summoned or enthralled beasts. At least, it had been. The bars — each with their own soft orange ring of LEDs at the base to ward off shadows — were a warped ruin of the line of cages they were meant to be.

Someone or something had come through here and sliced through the bars in some places while bending them out of shape in others. They had left the place a disaster. Though it was still unclear if the pile of corpses littering the floor were from the attacker, or the freed beasts they left in their wake.

Could it have been her targets?

As she looked further at the shriveled up bodies, she found what little blood remained was far too dry. Black and foul. These weren't the corpses of recent deaths. At least a day had passed. If the war hadn't begun only a week ago, she would have assumed the place had been like this for weeks.

The life of this battlefield had come and gone long before the five she hunted arrived.

Slowly, and on soft tentacles rather than loud boots, Nyxila crept over the broken gate. She could still hear the voices, but the kennels extended far enough that the countless iron bars — even broken as many were — obscured her vision of any life.

Her mundane vision. The two new orbs that sat above their older siblings could see through the poles as if they were glass. Or — more aptly — as if they didn't exist at all. Cylinders had no edges, so they weren't real as far as her eyes were concerned.

It was strange to see that the connection point between bar and ground or bar and ceiling also remained non-existent. Even if the metal itself didn't count as an edge, didn't the voided space itself count?

Nyxala waited, as if expecting her sight to change.

Nope. Still not an edge. Nyxala huffed to herself. There goes the thought that a concept based sight can be altered by how one thinks of it.

Rare they may be, but some beings could alter the world around them simply by aberrant comprehension. She was already considering her own lack of humanity, but these eyes apparently did not originate from one of those creatures.

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Not that she knew where any of her mutations originated. It wasn't like some of the worst Bodytwisters; she wasn't grafting monstrous parts onto herself. There was no creature she was mimicking with these mutations, no form she'd ever seen that she was shifting towards.

As the thought crossed her mind, she rebuked it so fiercely, she almost shouted and revealed herself. Nyxala was no poor mimicry of some other beast. She was herself, and anything that looked similar was a imitation of her. It was her soul — not anything lesser — that these changes originated.

Nyxala tossed a bullet in her mouth and chewed on it. Her emotions burned fierce, and while they were true to herself, the grip her instincts had over them was intense. She hated the idea that people would look upon her, and compare her to the disgusting flailing of the Bodytwisters. But it was the memory that she had once seen her own mutations with that same disgust that lit a burning fury deep inside her.

Her eyes landed on the pauldron intended to keep her mutations hidden. She could see the outline of metal beneath her robe. The sharp edges of each screw that bolted it to her bones. Even the small little notches where the corruption of her arm had already twisted the metal. As much as it was supposed to keep her safe, Nyxala couldn't help but despise the appearance of the thing.

It was bulky and interfered with her flesh. Its very existence was designed to hide what she was. The thing didn't fit, locked to her shoulder as it was. A… heresy.

Nyxala caught herself reaching sharp claws for the device. This wasn't her. No… this was exactly her down to the very core, but she couldn't allow the instincts and desires that seeped through her mutations to alter her path too far.

The concealer would come off, but only when she didn't need it any longer. Until then, she would allow its blasphemous touch to infiltrate her arm.

A scream made her antennae flinch back, and her eyes rose to peer through the bars.

As they were non-existent to her new eyes, it took no time at all to find the source of the voices… and the now silenced scream. Nyxala could not see everything, but the people held enough sharp things on them that they took shape in her mind.

Blades, scrolls, even the swarm of dots that made one's beard was enough to spot them. Five moving, and plenty more not. Now that she found them, and could inspect what little of their bodies she could see through this strange sight, she discovered one single aspect was far greater to track these people, and likely any other cultist she would come across in the future.

Teeth.

It didn't matter if a mouth was open or closed, of the living or dead, compared to the other indicators she would need to search for, each person's teeth stood out. They were impossible to mistake for anything else. Two arrays of bold lines with some slight notches splitting each tooth.

The pointy tips of hair came close, but considering it was a bunch of minuscule dots, it was a lot harder to pick them out from the background noise.

"Will you hurry up with that. She was a soulsinger. If we wait too long, her soul will find its way through the cracks."

Nyxala's antennae strained to hear the voice through the echoes. The man's voice was legible… if only barely. From the flopping of teeth, she associated the speaker with the one standing over a motionless set of chompers.

"You know I can't pass up an opportunity that comes my way," another man said. This one worked a blade around the head of a corpse. "Besides, you should trust E᷊z᷅︠altḙn̲a͉'s containment ritual. No Bodytwister soul will do anything more than rot in their meatbag until she says otherwise."

The speaker rose with a flourish of his knife, and the corpse lifted with him. He tossed it aside, only for the set of teeth to settle at the middle of his back. Had he thrown the body in a sack?

It was only when he pushed aside the first man and began cutting at the next corpse did Nyxala realise what he was doing. He was scraping off the skin from the skulls, and severing them from the rest of their bodies. Soon, a second set of teeth joined the first.

"She is good at these sort of rituals," the first man, now standing back from the dozen corpses, said. His jaw angled to the side slightly, likely glancing towards the third set of living teeth. "That's the problem. Who knows what else she's slipped in that we can't read?"

The woman, Ezaltena, barely moved. Nyxala wasn't sure if she hummed, or if that was due to the confusion of echoes. Her new ears were good, but not that good.

"If she were to even try, it would be her death." The fourth set of teeth spoke. A woman. "Tome L̄̈́͛uz͎͓͂z͎͓͂o̙u̓̊̾̅͂ would not let it stand."

Nyxala's eyes trailed across the weapon she carried. There wasn't much she could see, but it was enough to determine the type. A trigger. The rail holding a set of sights. Even the crumpled bits of ritual paper wrapping each bullet in a long chain.

"Hah. You really are hooked on their word, aren't you?" the skull collector said. "The Tomes don't give two shits about you."

"Say that again when her second in command gifts me another seventieth floor scroll."

"Inz̴͙ͩ̅iz̥͚̕ou͛s͟ isn't her second. He doesn't even work for her directly." The other man said. "I don't know why you insist on believing his nonsense when everyone speaks to the contrary."

"Simple lies. I shall not succumb to the words of the faithless."

The man with the bag of skulls huffed and forced a change of topic. "So, what do you think this whole operation is for? And working this closely with the Worshippers? It rubs me the wrong way. The bosses are definitely up to something." He moved onto his third skull as he chirped.

"C̬hͥͬa̙zͩͫ," the first man spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. "Do you want another punishment session on the bleeding mint? How have you not learnt to avoid questioning the upper creeds?"

"Oh, come on V͉͕̿͘arrus͓︢. They take us from defending the heart, send us down for a major joint operation with the Worshippers, and now that's seemingly on hold and we're on the hunt for soulsingers? Why do we care if there are soulsingers nearby? Look where we are. A kennel. It's not even one from any of the pinnacle cults. They haven't given us even the slightest hint as to why we're down here. Aren't you curious?"

Nyxala's eyes trailed to the fifth set of moving teeth as the two talked. it had been moving around the edge of the cell of corpses where their battle had obviously taken place. This person was keeping an eye out as the rest of the group did… whatever they were doing to the pile of corpses.

Despite their observation, Nyxala felt relatively safe from discovery where she was. Unless she was unlucky and the cultist had a name to see through walls or something, she wouldn't be spotted. Even if she made a racket, she wouldn't be heard.

She wondered if Lysyra felt this same subtle rush whenever she listened in on someone that couldn't know she was there.

Taking the opportunity, she cast her name touch forward too. It passed effortlessly through the forest of iron bars and feathered across the souls of those she could only barely see. It was as Lysya said. Four were sixth evolutions. Only one — the quiet woman — was at their fifth, but considering they had double the number of additives at fifth than their compatriots, assessing them as weaker was wrong. At least, not confirmed.

Each of them had their own curses. Loose lips, blisters, unlucky eye spikes, and a bunch of other effects. Nyxala was entirely unsurprised to find the one skinning the skulls of his opponents had the worst curses.

She couldn't wait to see his guts melt.

Varrus finally relented to Chaz's prodding. "I will say nothing about the Tomes or their experiments, but… this is quite the interesting place." He paused, as if changing topics. "Did you know a friend of mine was sent out to clear these few tunnels only days before the war? Quite the coincidence, huh?"

Chaz halted his slicing. "You think this is the site of one of the Tomes' experiments?" He glanced around as if something would leap out at him.

Nyxala's eyes trailed back to the guard, who had stopped moving. Teeth tilted. Something had set them off. Whatever it was, Nyxala wasn't about to give them the time to prepare for her.

She had improved a lot since the last time she'd used her mutations against a cultist, but this was a harbinger team at the sixth evolution. They would be deadly. Likely, a single mistake could be her end.

Still, Nyxala readied herself for a fight. This was her hunt, and she wasn't about to flee because they were a threat.

Her tail swooped behind her, eager to begin.

Silently, she launched into flight.