Stronger Together chapter 208 (Patreon)

The meat from the lizard bird creature tasted like ass. This was not  unexpected because it's blood was toxic sludge green and it's flesh was  grey which just did not look appetizing to begin with. Not to mention  having to basically charcoal brick it with soulfire to be as safe as  possible when consuming the stuff didn't do it any favors. Despite that  however Yang and I both noticed something incredibly strange about the  flesh. We were full in only a few bites. Normally our bodies digested  insane amounts of food and we had to eat a ton, but not with this stuff.

My  only guess here was that the food was incredibly energy dense and a  small amount of it could offset massive amounts of hunger. Of course, it  was literally the most disgusting thing I had ever tasted to it kind of  balanced out, since I wouldn't have been able to force myself to eat a  sizable portion of it anyway. We finished our food quickly, and wrapped  the meat in a makeshift bag made from the hide before lying down to  sleep. We took turns one sleeping and the other keeping watch, it would  make this whole trip longer but it seemed like the only safe way to do  this.

Yang insisted I take first shift sleeping, and  despite my instincts telling me it should be her, I remembered that  people with concussions or who have recently been unconscious aren't  supposed to sleep. My brain was full of magic metal and she had woken up  later than me anyway so I decided to give her this one. I expected to  be unable to sleep, especially when I laid down and felt the glassy  gravel digging into my side, but I must have been more tired than I  thought because I was out like a light pretty fast.

I woke  to Yang shaking me, I felt well rested, if slightly sore and stiff, and  I was surprised to note that if I'd had nightmares I didn't remember  them. Hell seemed like the kind of place you would have nightmares. I  grinned wryly up at Yang. "Can't tell shit from the sky here but why do I  get the feeling you let me sleep later than we agreed?" She just  chuckled and grabbed my metal hand when I held it out, hauling me up to  my feet. I stripped off my jacket, which though stiff from dust, was dry  after hours asleep in this oppressive heat, and laid it down for her.  "Well if you're letting me sleep I'm putting down my coat."

She  looked a bit annoyed but finally rolled her eyes. "Fine, whatever you  say stud, not like you need the warmth down here anyway I guess." She  worried at her lip, seemingly wanting to say something but deciding to  bite back her comment. I wondered briefly what she wanted to say, but I  shrugged it off soon enough. She laid down with her back to me, rolling  up the jacket to make a pillow, and I climbed up on a nearby boulder  next to the one we used to cook to stare out over the endless black and  red expanse.

It was an odd  sensation. Hell was a bit of a gestalt. Mountains of iron and rivers of  lava and dunes of black glass sure, but also fields of shale and ash and  lakes of blood. The more I looked the more I could see pockets of other  slightly different environments seeded throughout the place. But the  odd thing was, looking at those pockets I felt like it was more of the  same. Like hell itself was the whole and being a unique piece of the  puzzle made the entire thing, even the unique bits, somehow repetitive.

The  sight as a whole gave me the unsettling feeling of being a rat on a  treadmill. Like someone was taping pictures of different places down for  me to run over, but in the end I wasn't actually going anywhere. Which  rather than scare or confuse me just pissed me off. If we didn't get to  that stupid city before I ran out of food I was going to charge up the  biggest godsteel punch I could manage and just start smashing absolutely  everything with my fists. I was pretty sure given proper motivation I  could use up to the seventh form if I only held it for a split second.

I  briefly amused myself imagining smashing a giant construct fist of my  godsteel energy right into the center of this hellscape. This was  probably in the nevernever, did the nevernever even have foundations?  Could I shatter the bedrock here? Or was the place just floating in a  void. Maybe if I punched hard enough it would break off and float away  into oblivion. Probably a hard win for most of humanity but I'd rather  not be stranded in hell as it drifts into...something? I shook my head,  these were nonsense thoughts.

I  wasn't going to risk full conversion just to damage infernal real estate  prices. It was nice to daydream about venting but...I froze. I had seen  something. Movement. I called the lightning into myself, aspecting my  subdermal weave with my usual lightning force combo. I stood there,  immobile, for about ten minutes. The major downside to enhanced  perception was the constant waiting. But finally the shapes I'd seen  came out, and it was on. I threw a wind shield on yang so she wouldn't  hear and turned to face the shapes.

I  was lucky I had my lightning aspect up, because I froze for a second.  Ugly. Seriously, massively, unfortunately, ugly. That was the impression  I got from the things in front of me. The looked like black scaled  hyenas, but with three eyes and flat snakelike noses. Their teeth were  too big for their mouths, making them look both dangerous and misshapen,  and their tails were scorpion stingers. I had no actual clue what the  fuck these were but they definitely did not look friendly. Oh, and there  were ten of them.

The  snake hyenas circled out around me, the ones to the front trying to  slip a bit closer to draw my attention so ones to the rear could get  into my blind spot. I lashed out with a triple stacked force punch,  combining aura, spell, and aspect, with my lightning speed and crushed  one of their heads. I expected the quick death to scare them off a bit,  animals usually won't fuck with anything obviously stronger than them  unless it actively pissed them off, but these things didn't act like  animals. I deflected four of the bastards and avoided another four, but  it put me in range and one of them sunk his fucking fangs into the meat  of my thigh.

Luckily  they didn't go in too far because of my godsteel network, but their  fangs were sharp and thin like a snake, and I suspected hollow based on  the burn in my leg. Great. I was fucking poisoned. Or I guess envenomed,  not that it mattered. I'd have to deal with that later, hopefully my  partially angelic flesh would resist it, and maybe some time in the  forms would help purge it. I didn't have much time to think about that  though because the other ones were on me. I dodged another bite and  pulped the head of another one, but a second got his teeth in me.

These  things were not sturdy but they were fucking fast. I could dodge  bullets in my lightning aspect but even I was having trouble keeping up.  Aside from that they had some sort of instinctive grasp on both tactics  and each others positions, letting them harass and harry me using even  minute hesitation. Fuck, apparently in hell pack animals have a  telepathic hunting link, that would be so cool if it wasn't trying to  kill me. The fight lasted another fifteen minutes or so, and I was glad I  put up the shield because a few of them went for Yang and I had to grab  them and drag them away when it stopped them.

Finally  the last one was dead and I dropped my aspect, slumping against a  boulder. I'd been bitten eleven times during the fight, and that fucking  venom was circulating through me hard. It hurt. A lot. My regeneration  was high, but I could literally feel the stuff eating my muscles like  tissue paper, the progress was just slow because my body was trying to  heal the consumed flesh as it was being eaten away. I stood up and  shifted into the first form, at this point it would take a century for  that small amount of soul energy to fully convert me so it was safe to  circulate it.

After about ten  minutes of agony the soulfire purged the infernal poison, and after  spending another ten puking up bubbling green and black toxins I dropped  the form to let my body heal naturally. At this point the conversion  from the first form was so slow it barely outpaced my native  regeneration and my normal healing didn't replace my flesh with  godsteel. It took most of the rest of the time Yang was asleep to finish  healing the wounds, but heal them I did, and after I was done I  felt...good.

I  closed my eyes, delving into myself to try to understand what the hell I  was feeling. It took a minute to notice because I was use to a gradual  difference. The venom had cleansed some of the mortality from my body.  Not a huge amount in the grand scheme. But I felt like I was maybe a few  months of klurkor ahead of where I had been. In fact, I could feel that  my mortality was being ground away just from standing here. Hell was  not meant for mortals, and it seemed like just existing in this place  rejected my humanity.

My  eyes were wide. It should take centuries to finish becoming an angel,  but considering the venom, the air, and even i suspected the food I had  eaten, a few months here would be enough. Which of course made me  shudder at the thought of being stuck in this literal hellhole for a few  months. Shaking off that unfortunate thought I turned to wake Yang. She  needed to know about this. She'd been asleep for about six hours or so  now while I healed up so it was about time anyway. I walked over and  poked her with my foot, activating my lightning aspect just in case.

Good  thing I did, that girl did not like being woken up. Her fist went  through the space where my dick had been a few seconds ago and I visibly  winced at the brutal attack. I made a mental note never to wake Yang up  again without a stick or something. She was a bit groggy but after a  bit of blinking managed to finally wake herself up. She winced as she  climbed to her feet. "Man, this place is not the four seasons.  Apparently sharp rocks and gravel make a shitty bed, go figure. My neck  is killing me." She groaned at the stiffness and tried to stretch out  the kinks.

She  stretched expansively groaning in satisfaction as multiple joints  popped. I smiled at her. "No it isn't. I cheated a bit since I'm partly  made of metal, but even I was sore." I gestured to the mess in out...I  hesitated to call it a camp. "Anyway we got attacked, I took care of it.  I figured out something interesting though." She looked annoyed at  being left out, but then I started talking and her eyes began to widen,  by the time I finished explaining she was practically bouncing with  excitement. I had to admit I understood that. We had a real chance to  cast off our mortality decades or centuries early. Things would never be  the same.