Re:Cursed

Chapter 176 172: An Old Experiment

Besides the lead on her sceptre, the primary reason Nyxala chose to take on this squad of sixth evolution Scriptures was to force O̅s̫stho̲th to react. There was power lying in that name. There had to be. Three of her most powerful abilities had gone into its creation, so she just needed to give it the environment to flourish and it would.

That's how she'd learnt what all her other names did; not by reading their extremely convoluted descriptions, but by being thrown in danger and finding herself forced to adapt. This should have been no different, but as Nyxala weaved past exploding ritual scrolls being launched at her, she found very little assistance popping up from the new name.

She'd lost her pillar names and now she was wading through murky waters to find exactly what it was they'd been chopped down to create. She refused to believe it was a Talent alone.

Nyxala flew around a tree just in time for the plastic it was made of to explode and melt in a boiling swathe of heat. She dived in a narrow tube. The walls quaked with another blow, cracking around her. As her tentacles carried her forth, she found herself back out in the open of the large field.

If she had to guess, this was a training field for the creatures that had once been contained within the kennels. There were plenty of burrows that looped back on themselves, and diverse environments contained within its boundaries. All fake. A forest of plastic, identical trees. An ocean, illusory rather than of real water.

The group of harbinger hunters were chasing her, but this place was even less ideal to face them than the kennels. Too open. Corruption, while thick, wouldn't hide her.

"Did anyone see what hit me. I didn't notice anything until I had a knife in my neck." Varrus said, a touch too casual considering the wound he'd just taken.

He was met with nothing but shaking heads.

"There's at least two, but I don't think we should assume it is only two," Kuzlos said. "But the fact that they hit and run paints them as likely no stronger than ourselves."

"Haven't seen you get caught off guard like that in a long while, Kȕ͉z̯los͎̍̓. How's the arm?" Varrus' voice tickled Nyxala's ears between blasts of explosive heat.

"You're not one to talk," he grunted. "Assessing the reattachment can wait until the thing is dead. What of our Tome's favourite?"

"Dead." Chaz scoffed. "Not surprised she fell to the first proper threat we find. At least her skull is now mine."

Nyxala twisted her head back at their words. Through the swarm of dried flakes that obscured her, she saw that the camouflaging cultist had already negated her severing of his arm. He rolled it, and the motion was not bothered in the slightest.

"You got your eyes inside that shroud yet? I'd rather not waste skulls."

In sync with her heart, Nyxala pounced with wing, tail and tentacle alike. She could see the adjacent room. It was blocked by a wall, but if she could break through, it would hold greater opportunity for her than this open space where they could follow all her movements. From the edges she could see, it was a storeroom. Long shelves gave her the perfect arena to engage in hit-and-run tactics, as would be her greatest strength against these four.

So long as she dealt with Kuzlos first.

"Give me a moment."

The words barely trickled along her antennae before she flew over the oddest thing. A small pile of skitter-spawn. Five of them flowed into each other with that typical flickering of theirs, but they didn't attack. Nor did they scamper from her appearance. Instead, they crouched low, as if hiding from her eyes, and watched her.

When Nyxala's mundane eyes found them, she figured out how Kuzlos had been the first to see her.

"What?" he mumbled in mid-sprint, as if disbelieving the eyes that weren't his. "It's the Trial winner."

Nyxala whipped her tail down as she passed, crushing each of the camouflaged skitter-spawn in the heartbeat they all remained physical.

"Not a beast? I'm pretty sure that was a tail that carved through the idiot's chest."

"Yes a beast," Kuzlos snapped back at Chaz's remark. "But that beast has the girl's face."

Well, they knew who she was now. No backing out. Not that she ever intended to do so.

Finally, she flew through the final stretch to the wall that blocked the way to the battlefield of her choice. A twinge in her mind guided her. Nyxala tucked her arms, legs and tentacles into her chest, and after a last beat of her wings, they joined the rest. Curled tight.

The spines down her back and along her tail rose, snapped down, then rose again. Her body spun. Like a coiled whip, her tail screeched as it unfurled, crashing first through the obscuring swath, then striking the solid wall. Harder even, than how she struck that gun wielder.

An intense impact recoiled through Nyxala's body, but there was no pain. Her tail hit metal wall in time with her heart — a rhythm that now came as naturally as breathing — unleashing devastation on the unfortunate structural slab of steel that blocked her path.

The spikes pierced the metal first. Then, all the weight of her tail drove them through until the hardened bone of the tail itself crashed into the half dozen newly dug divots. Nyxala may have lost a lot from the names now gone, but her body remained powerful.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

In an explosion of steel, Nyxala tumbled through the new opening.

Such a heavy blow quaking up her spine should have left her reeling. Instead, her feet found ground and she dove beneath the first line of shelving as an explosive scroll ripped through the hole she'd made. The blast toppled a shelf. Glass shattered, and a hundred bottles splattered across the floor.

From the single foul whiff Nyxala got from the spilled contents, she resolved herself to steer clear.

Nyxala scuttled around another dozen shelves. Thankfully, this space was as much a confusing mess as she'd hoped. It was extensive, too. She didn't have to worry much about Varrus simply blowing up the whole storeroom to get her.

She glanced back, and while edge sight didn't offer as comprehensive a vision as mundane, she could see how the explosion ripped through the wall. Metal bent inwards where she'd slipped through. More wall bent outwards from the force of the blast. And the four sets of teeth — along with all of Kuzlos' pets — were already slinking through the gap.

Long strips of LEDs hung over each aisle. Nyxala climbed on top of a shelf, trying to get her bearings, but if she were hoping the lights would offer a comprehensive layout of the corrupted storehouse, then she was sorely mistaken.

Good thing the confusing array of shelving was just what she was after.

Nyxala clicked her tongue when the cultists remained grouped. They should have split up. It would have made killing them all so much easier.

Then again, ease wasn't why she'd chosen to engage a sixth evolution harbinger squad.

Now that she knew they weren't just random pests, Nyxala made sure to hunt down each of the skitter-spawn she found. If she wanted the upper hand, she needed to gouge out their eyes. She dismissed Tsal̺air̡'s swirling particles. Now that they knew who she was, it was pointless. It would only give away her position.

"She's figured out how I watch her."

Nyxala was really enjoying these new ears. Even whispers she picked up clear as day.

Following his statement, Kuzlos pulled back his little army of skitter-spawn. The rat teeth shifted in and out of existence to Nyxala's eyes as they ran to surround the cultists. Frustrating. If she wanted to cut away any more, she'd have to reveal herself. Still, she now had the freedom to move around mostly unseen.

Something else that wanted to remain unseen slunk through the hole in the wall. Nyxala smirked. The Scripture hadn't yet realised that she could see his little pets through walls and was trying to sneak them in.

As she lay between heavy baskets of coal on the first shelf, waiting for the cultists to reach another aisle so she could cross, Nyxala's caught sight of a lone door at the side of the room. It was the only place not illuminated. A ring of lights surrounded the borders of the door, seemingly placed with intent, yet the glow avoided all cracks in the frame.

The shadow of Coral. She'd really not travelled far.

Her head swivelled to check that the cultists had passed before bounding back to the entrance. The four had stopped, likely waiting for a vitiate bound beast to sniff her out. They would not be quick enough to save their pets.

Nyxala leaped over the broken shelf, and immediately leapt into the chaos of battle. It wasn't vitiate creatures alone. There were some rather stalwart summoned beasts with vicious, serrated tusks. Whatever they were, all fell to her aggression.

There wasn't much need for conscious thought through the slaughter. Nyxala's claws sliced through jugulars. Acid melted fur. An occasional thump of her tail shattered bones. She even tasted blood on her tongue as her teeth cut through the thick hide protecting the spine of one of the bigger beasts.

The realisation that she'd once again so naturally used her teeth in battle was enough to stay the slaughter. Ten dead beasts lay around her. Some had managed to flee, but she could hardly complain about the results she'd achieved.

At some point she'd been bitten, but the vitiate infection could do nothing against the regeneration of her Feat.

Four Scriptures returned in a hurry. They each got the blink of an eye to take in Nyxala's blood-soaked, almost feral form, before she was gone. Her wings rocketed her over the nearest shelf. A shelf that exploded in fire only an instant later.

Nyxala didn't stop until she was near the other side of the storeroom. The butchering of his squad-mate's bound pets — or maybe just her appearance — was the final straw for Varrus. He no longer cared to waste time searching for her in this abandoned storehouse.

Explosions rattled the room multiple times a second. Each scrap of parchment that flew from the ritual embedded in his arm shredded an entire floor to ceiling cabinet, tossing fragments and splinters everywhere.

Nyxala was unbothered. It would take him at least ten minutes at this pace to break through it all, and every time he did, he still left plenty of rubble behind to cover Nyxala's movements.

The quiet one, Ezaltena… Nyxala had almost forgotten her, until finally, her voice joined the others. She sounded… ponderous.

"We… need to capture this one."

"Capture?" Kuzlos' voice lowered dangerously. "After it killed so many of mine? I'm stripping the corpse and using her skin as parchment. Her bones as fertiliser. And everything else will be mulched to feed the livestock to feed my pets."

Nyxala quirked her brow at the venom in his voice. He apparently cared for the vitiate beasts more than he did the woman she'd killed.

"Something was interfering with my perception, but I believe those were cursed mutations." Ezaltena was apparently quite sharp.

"Not Bodytwister tampering?" Chaz asks.

"She's with the Technocult," Varrus said without pause in his efforts to incinerate his way through the storeroom.

"Say they are cursed mutations." Chaz jostled the bag of skulls hanging from his back. "You're not suggesting she is one of the Mad? I'd rather not have to flee from a child barely past her Trials. The shame if anyone were to find out."

"No…" Ezaltena trailed off, her teeth drooping, as if trying to look within herself. "I read a tome recently. An ancient thing I would never have been able to get my hands on normally. It postulates the possibility of a singularity in the form of a sacrifice."

Nyxala stiffened, but unnecessarily strained her antennae to make sure she didn't miss what was said.

"Most children unfortunate to adopt a cursed mutation are bound to lose their minds. With more than one mutation, Madness becomes assured. The rare few that are found early enough for measures to be put in place to maintain that sanity become sacrifices of no equal. So then, what would happen if there is a child containing many such mutations, yet exhibits no symptoms of Madness?"

"A powerful sacrifice?" Chaz guessed.

"The perfect one," Ezaltena said, lost in her own words. "A sacrifice so great that the Eidolons themselves would bestow all you could wish for all of eternity. The tome itself is an account of an experiment a thousand years past that chased that ideal. It ended with four lost generations and nothing to show for it. But if, by chance..."

Nyxala groaned at the silence that followed. Their greed was obvious, despite how unlikely it was that Nyxala would just happen to be this theoretical perfect sacrifice because of what one read in some old tome. Well… she was, but that was besides the point.

"That explains so much."

Nyxala jumped at the new voice. It didn't only sound like it was next to her ear; it was next to her ear. She was ready to lash out, when Lysyra manifested with a grin on her face.

"So, that bundle of cursed mutations of yours makes cultists salivate." The girl looked back, as if seeing through the shelves. "One down, huh?"

Between the girl's attitude and the group hunting her down, she paid attention to neither. Only one thing stuck in Nyxala's mind.

She hadn't been able to see the sharp edges of Lysyra's teeth until she appeared.

Nyxala clicked her tongue.