The Cursed Extra

Chapter 167: [3.40] This Isn’t Even My Final Form

"A Blackwood does not surrender. Not while there is breath in his lungs. Not while someone is waiting for him to come home."

***

The shaman wasn’t expecting it.

Creatures that had been beaten, broken, and stripped of their weapons were supposed to cower. Not attack. They were supposed to weep and plead and offer anything for a few more moments of life.

Rhys covered the distance between them in three quick strides.

The broken spear shaft raised above his head like a war club. His boots found purchase on the slick stone floor through sheer stubbornness. His body screamed in protest against the demand.

But his body had been screaming for days now.

He had learned to stop listening.

The shaman tried to bring its staff around to block.

But Rhys was already inside its guard.

The creature was fast, yes. But it had grown complacent in its certainty of victory. It had expected the prey to die quietly.

Rhys brought the splintered wood down on the creature’s wrist with every ounce of strength he had left.

Bone cracked beneath the impact.

The shaman’s grip on its staff loosened. The weapon clattered to the floor between them.

The creature shrieked and staggered backward. Clutched its injured wrist against its chest. Its yellow eyes burned with fury and something that might have been fear.

This wasn’t how the script was supposed to go.

The broken human was supposed to die quietly. Not fight back with the jagged remains of his weapon.

Rhys pressed his advantage. Swung the makeshift club again.

His shoulder screamed at the motion. The injuries from everything he’d endured flared with fresh agony.

He ignored it.

He’d had plenty of practice ignoring pain.

This time he aimed for the shaman’s head. The creature ducked and the blow caught it across the shoulder instead. Dark blood welled up through its robes. It stumbled against the tunnel wall.

The stone was slick with ancient moisture. For a moment the shaman’s feet slipped. It slid down to one knee.

For a moment, just a moment, Rhys thought he might actually win.

The shaman was hurt. Off-balance. Separated from its staff. Its yellow eyes were wide with shock and something that looked almost like respect.

If he could just land one more solid hit. If he could bring the splintered wood down on its skull with enough force to crack bone. Maybe, just maybe...

That was when the creature’s eyes began to glow.

Not the sickly green light of its magic. Not the corruption that had animated the dead and tainted the very air of these tunnels.

Something else entirely.

A deep, hellish red that seemed to burn from within. As if someone had lit a furnace behind the creature’s skull and the light was leaking out through its eye sockets.

Oh no.

The shaman’s form began to shift and writhe.

Its robes fell away to reveal something that had never been entirely goblin to begin with.

Its limbs elongated. Bones crackled and reformed as muscles bulged beneath skin that turned from green to mottled black. The transformation was not smooth or elegant. It was violent. Organic. The kind of change that should have been accompanied by screaming if the creature had still possessed anything like a normal throat.

Claws erupted from its fingertips. Each one as long as a dagger and twice as sharp. They gleamed with an oily sheen that suggested poison or worse.

Its face stretched and warped. The jaw unhinged like a snake’s to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth. The eyes, still burning that hellish red, had doubled in size and now dominated a face that no longer held any trace of goblin ancestry.

Whatever this thing was, it had been wearing the shaman’s form like a disguise.

A mask to fool prey into thinking they faced something merely dangerous rather than something catastrophic.

When it spoke, its voice was no longer the guttural chatter of goblin-kind.

It was something far older.

Infinitely more dangerous.

The words seemed to come from everywhere at once. Vibrated through the stone walls and the damp air and the marrow of Rhys’s bones.

"You-think to war-fight me with splinter-wood, man-child?"

The creature rose to its full height.

Easily eight feet now. Its transformed body filled the tunnel like a nightmare given flesh.

"I am old-ancient. I walk-tread these tunnels when your father’s father was dust-unborn. I drink-taste the fear-soul of hero-fools greater than you could dream-imagine."

It took a step toward him.

"Your kind... your kind I eat-consume like bread-scraps."

Rhys backed away.

His makeshift weapon suddenly felt pathetically inadequate. The thing that had been a shaman was now something else entirely. Something that belonged in the deepest nightmares of sleeping children. Something that bards whispered about in stories designed to make warriors check over their shoulders in dark rooms.

But he didn’t drop the broken spear shaft.

And he didn’t run.

Because somewhere in a cottage at the edge of the world, a little girl with pale skin and tired eyes was waiting for her big brother to come home.

She was probably sleeping right now. Her thin chest rising and falling with those labored breaths that kept him awake at night with worry.

She believed in him.

She had told him, the day he left for the academy, that she knew he would come back. That she knew her big brother would never leave her alone.

And that was worth dying for.

Even if it meant dying badly.

Even if it meant dying afraid.

Even if it meant his last moments would be spent screaming in the grip of something that had crawled out of the world’s oldest nightmares.

The creature’s taunt echoed off the tunnel walls. Each word a mockery of everything Rhys had ever believed about courage and honor.

But standing still meant surrender.

And a Blackwood did not surrender.

Not while there was breath in his lungs.

Not while Elara waited for medicine that would never come if he died here as a coward.

Rhys tightened his grip on the broken shaft.

Planted his feet.

And roared.

I’m coming home, Elara.

Even if I have to go through this thing to do it.