212 - Flesh-thief's Hex/Tsetse Battle [Cherno] (Patreon)

A/N: I'm not dead. I just got sick. I'm better now. Not fully okay, but better.

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“Om, Zavyarana sowaka, behold the heretics and set their stolen flesh against them! Om, Zavyarana sowaka! Sear the mark of their sin upon their souls!” Yazata chanted, pulling her church signet from her neck. She held it up as she hopped back and forth in the desperate attempt to keep all three of them in her line of sight. Her eyes burned in their sockets, her hair floated without weight, and her gaze was briefly filled by a numinous light that scorched the grass. At that moment, she went blind.

Yazata’s sight returned to a blurry shadow of what it was normally as the surge of divine power faded. She could see well enough to be certain — she could see them writhing, twitching, wringing their hands together, their cheeks splitting as their faces opened with mandibles and the contents of their stomachs poured out. Coffee grains — half-digested blood. Though not visible physically, their astral bodies had been branded, the curse sigil a modified, refined version of one which had once been used to brand body thieves in a far off land, trapping them within bodies that rejected them.

“Th-the Flesh-thief’s Hex, but ah, it reeks of self-righteousness! What have you done with it, you church harlot?! I shall pluck the eyes from your skull!” one of the three evoy seethed, visibly regaining self-control quicker than the two others.

“Good guess,” she admitted as she struck the Trapezohedron against her leg once again. ”My version is better. My “Plunderer’s Branding” never goes away.”

The Plunderer’s Branding was a reconstruction from the ground up, making it impossible to dispel using the methods that worked on its lesser counterpart. She had even embedded traps that would agitate the brand under specific conditions, and even a targeting mark for the purposes of her other abilities. One such trap was in place to prevent the victim from using Mamon Couplers — terribly convenient, and justified within the brand’s purview by the fact some Couplers could be modified to temporarily suppress rejection symptoms by overriding them with the transformation.

One after another, the three evoy burst out of their skins in a manner Yazata had never seen. A wave of heat and rancid stench washed over her, fluid gushing onto the ground near them. In moments, the three transformed, growing to easily two and a half meters tall, into forms clearly intended to resemble war-morphs — the so-called “Abara Morphs” Aristedes had mentioned.

Yazata couldn’t help smiling, and then, she began cackling.

They were huge, hulking, but also completely malformed. One couldn’t breathe properly. Another’s legs were comically tiny in contrast with gigantic, oversized, clumsy arms. The third — the one who had recognized the curse — was the only to transform mostly successfully. In fact, his malformations increased his offensive power, silver sonic blaster membranes gleaming across him from head to toe.

He would’ve been a problem had Yazata spent the past few seconds doing nothing, but she knew better. While she couldn’t use her eyes as a casting medium for the next several hours, she had backups for backups. This whole time, she had been striking the Black Trapezohedron against her leg, modulating its frequency towards a desired pitch.

The blaster-covered Abara Morph joined Yazata in laughter, shockwaves of sound blasting out with each cackle, shattering the stones underfoot and throwing them out like pebbles, forcing Yazata to focus every bit of her remaining strength towards deflection. Her eardrums would have surely burst, were she unwarded. She weathered the storm for a few moments more, finally reciting an invocation, covered by the noise: “Ring out from the spires of Zor’Aguhastra, and sing…”

At once, distortion flooded out of the Black Trapezohedron, flowing through the air and swirling around the three evoy. Their chitin began to crumple in on itself, as if submerged far underwater, and quickly being dragged deeper.

“Sing, o Great One chained in the deep!”

With the passing of a breath, the three evoy’s bodies burst under the pressure.

Yazata let out a satisfied sigh. Each time one of her coworkers questioned how she could put up with so many limitations to how she could use her magic, she wished she could show them this.

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Dozens of blows exchanged in moments. Hundreds of meters traversed in seconds. Tracks carved, burned, and torn into the flooring, shards of polished stone shifting around and sparking with crimson magic as the ballroom floor tried to pull itself back together.

He had to finish this quickly. To say he didn’t have much time was a generous understatement — he had no time. With each passing second, Casus could feel his brute-force-evolved transformation eating away at him, eating away at himself. He just wasn’t strong enough to hold it together, neither in physical nor in astral body, not to mention where he lacked spiritually. It had been purely this moment, this context, that had allowed him to transform into Eisenretter.

Had it been anyone else, anywhere else, at any other time, he could not have done it.

But it was Tsetse, right here, right now. That, alone, had been the permitting factor. This sword on his arm, this twisted, malformed thing, had been forged solely to cut down this Abara Morph. A part of Casus knew his armor would burn straight off of him if he turned it against Semzar.

As he sprinted, Casus used his left arm as a counterweight, drifting at a 270° angle, nearly flat against the floor, in order to get under one of Tsetse’s kicks. Its blastwave removed the heads of eight or nine fleeing people and exploded numerous pieces of glassware, sending a small tidal wave of razor-sharp dust roiling through the ballroom.

From his near-prone position Silberblut pushed off of the floor with his left hand. The blade of his right arm trailed a gold-burning arc through the air, intended to sever the Abara Morph’s left arm. Tsetse dodged, of course, but the wound had been struck — oily blood gushed forth from a flesh-ravine that now ran the entire length of his torso on the left side. His left arm visibly lost some volume.