Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! #08 (Patreon)

The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 5

Sanny had once been surprised to learn that, despite the many multitude of different kinds of phobias, there wasn't actually a name for a fear of falling objects. There was term for a fear of falling (basiphobia), a fear of walking near tall buildings because you fear something will fall off and hit you (batophobia), but not an actual term for a fear of an object just falling out of the sky and hitting you. The closest he'd ever found was meteorophobia, a fear of meteorite strikes and big asteroid impacts on the planet, and that was about a specific falling object.

It was an idle though as Sanny fallowed after the Tammy and Willy, his body changing, altering, growing more and more flesh and meat…

Either his aim had been better than he thought or Tammy had been guiding herself, but she and Tammy plummeted straight at the giant mosquito, slamming onto its blood-engorged abdomen. Syrup-thick blood went flying as the abdomen tore, the digested blood that had been stored in it dripping like sludge as the ball of ice that was Willy shattered to bits and Tammy bounced once and rolled until she hit a planter box.

The blood immediately stopped dripping and started to flow up, sealing the injury like a dark red, shiny scab as the giant mosquito reeled, trying to get up on its spindly legs as its wings buzzed.

That's when Sanny slammed down into it, his body a large, disgusting mass of flesh and muscle with a few small bird bones swimming around inside like lost fish.

Naturally, he exploded.

He struck the mosquito dead on, and he could feel bits of its exoskeleton cracking under his weight for the spit second he had before the rest of his body hit the ground and he burst like a waterballoon. His skin literally ripped itself apart as his insides exploded, tissue and muscle fibers tearing and spilling out in a spreading pool of blood. Pieces of skin and muscle went flying, and blood gushed everywhere as the blood pressure of his body forced the fluid out, despite the fact his heart had stopped on impact.

He immediately started growing himself back together. Exposed muscle writhed, becoming skin as they pulled themselves close and entwined to make tentacles. Other skin began to grow over his body like an encroaching rot, covering his muscles and organs. The brain was mush, bruised horrendously inside the little bird skull. The skull had cracked too. That was fine. He wasn't really using it for thinking anyway. The spine was broken as well, the spinal cord torn apart. That was slightly more problematic, since he needed that for limbs.

Still, his drone wasn't dead. That was all he needed to be combat capable. He already two– wait, three– three tentacles made from boneless muscle. Nerves began to grow from either end, reaching towards each other as a stomach grew inside his skull, prying the shattered bones apart and digesting the brain as another brain began growing somewhere else. Eyes tore themselves open like mouths, his vision swimming as the cones and rods rapidly divided and specialized themselves and the lenses focused. Othr tears became mouths, sucking in air, performing crude oxygenation of blood on the spot as they waited for new lungs to form. Beneath him, he felt the mosquito shifting, trying to drag itself out from under his weight. Clumsily he tried to wrap his boneless fillet of a body around it, trying to smother it to death. After all, if he needed to breathe, so should it, right?

He heaved his body awkwardly even as he tried to grow more eyes underneath his body so he could see his prey, routing the nerves of the new brain to be able to better process the drone's senses. He struggled to move his tentacles without bones, but his muscles had enough leverage to move and try to enfold around the monster pinned under him. Somewhere in his body, a heart started to beat, restoring blood flow, energizing his body again.

Beneath him, the giant mosquito started to struggle harder, and Sanny felt some kind of weird jelly against his body. What was…?

Sanny jerked as a something stabbed though his body and into his new heart.

Proboscis, he identified.

And then came the siphoning suction, and he felt his heart being ripped out of his body, felt the blood being drawn from his arteries and veins…

Frantically, he tried to cut off those vessels, forming bones to create more blood in other parts of his body, forming another heart as the mosquito under him writhed wildly. Some of his eyes had imploded at the abrupt loss on internal pressure from the fierce suctions of the proboscis, and he was frantically growing new ones, trying to see his prey…

And that was when the abrupt wave of water slammed into him and the giant mosquito both, sending them both tumbling and knocking them apart. There was a moment of panic as water flowed over his every orifice, and he couldn't breathe, there was only water and no air and–

The ground beneath him suddenly tore and he was trust upward on muddy roots that quickly turned into branches and he could breathe again even as more senses came back, and he started to hear the sounds of rushing water. he tried to move, but his body was still week from lack of blood– how long had that been a thing?– but he could feel strength returning as new bones and new marrow started to produce it. More new organs were forming, and he tried to get it all organized, tried to grow an exoskeleton to contain it all, to give him a way to at least move his tentacles…

He became aware of more messages from Tammy, asking if he was all right, warning him of Willy's flood, asking him to respond. They kept coming, another bubble with a message showing up on screen (Are you all right? Can you fight?)

Hands in another district entirely moved, typing. I'm okay. In the zone. Won't reply. Focus on fighting.

And then he was back there, raised up above the water on roots that were turning into branches, even as he felt some trying to bore into his flesh with thorns. He ignored those, growing exoskeleton to protects from Tammy's urges as he raised an eyes-laden tentacles to see around him. The water had washed away all the animals he'd dominated to fight, which was no big loss. They hadn't been all that useful, and were all now wandering, wet and out of his control. The water was flowing away, leaving only mud as a tall figure made of ice and a small, slim, celery-green figure attack the bloodsucking insect form both sides.

It had changed.

Gone was the oversized but anatomically correct mosquito from before. It now stood on four of its long, slim limbs like some kind of weird centaur, the thick pulsing abdomen filled with thick blood hanging obscenely beneath it, too large and still to be a tail. The remaining two, equally long, was flailing at the two girls randomly as if it had never used those limbs for that before. Large compound eyes covered nearly all its head, and between them extended a long, swordlike proboscis, still dripping with Sanny's blood and already covered with a thick sheath. Its body and ragged wings were covered in dark red scales like hard plates instead of the fine hairs its kind should have, its long antennae twitching at seemingly rnadom. Was this why it had writhed as it fed on Sanny's blood? Why had it changed?

Helplessly, he watched as the three fought. The mosquito moved with speed, evading the thorny vines that Tammy was growing from her arms as she rushed full speed at it trying to get close, and the sprays of water Willy was shooting out with as much annoying nimbleness as the rest of its smaller kin. Just like the Gagambuhala in Makati, it blatantly gave the square cube law the finger as it kept dodging back and forth from the trees to the ground, scurrying leaping and twisting all over the place, seeming to maintain its grip with hands on the end of its limbs as Tammy kept charging it like she was in some violently energetic game of tag. Ocassionally the the branges of the trees it was on would move, trying to snare it, but it would always quickly dance away. It didn't seem to be fighting them so much as avoiding them, and when it moved deliberately, it seemed to be towards the sounds of people's cries, as if seeking prey was still its priority.

Sanny's drone body was mending, bones growing and snapping into place, exoskeleton growing like fingernails from his flesh and overlapping each other to form a protective outer layer that snipped off the roots burrowing into him, glad that plants seemed to eat slowly. Lungs grew, drawing air from a single mouth, and the new heart started to beat, pumping the new blood being generated in the marrow. Excess flesh sloughed off, falling to the ground to wriggle like worms as he slid off the branches onto mud, still uncoordinated as his bones slipped into place, multiple ball joints snapping together and cartilage wrapping around them as tendons anchored themselves to bone and muscles and hardened exoskeleton. A skull finally finished wrapping around his new brain, with only a few holes for sensory nerves as dark compound eyes spread over his face, the last of the extemporaneous mouths and eyes closing up in the flesh under the armor plates.

His own feelings of satisfaction mixed with the ones coming from the back of his head as he pushed himself out of the mud and browning grass, the last of his bones, organs, muscles and thick, bony plates falling into place as he got to his feet, teeth filling the area just beneath where his mouth would be. More teeth were growing just under the skin of his arms in a line along the outside of his forearm, under his heel, folded along his elbows and knees. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the two connected ball joints that gave him his range of motion shifting with the movement. They were incrementally different again, giving their limbs just that little bit more range to rotate.

Then he crouched, turned, and pounced.

Tammy and Willy had drawn the altered mosquito away from him as they tried to coral it among the trees, whose branches were becoming tighter and more entwined as Tammy controlled and altered them in no doubt the same way he could control and alter normal animals. They had maneuvered to opposite sides of it, keeping it between them with blasts of water and vines as they slowly trapped it, containing it to where they could force their way close.

Sanny covered that distance in what seemed like eye blinks, his unnaturally untiring muscles accelerating him faster than anything a merely human body, no matter how tall, would have been capable of, and he slammed into the mosquito's torso with all four limbs as he reached for one of the thing's long, darting legs and grabbed it with both hands. As they tumbled into the dust and mud, he twisted unnaturally, planted both feet on its small, red-plated thorax, and kicked hard. The stiletto-like teeth slammed into it’s the red, rocklike plating as he used the force to rip the leg he was holding on to off the mosquito's body in a shower of viscera and yellow-green hemolymph.

He threw the leg aside, twisting in midair to bring his feet down and his face toward the mosquito again, launching himself once more. One hand swept down to grip another leg, holding it in place as the other hand snapped up to grip the base of the proboscis right where it connected to the mosquito's head. Twisting, he slammed the mosquito head-first into the ground, crushing the top halves of its compound eyes, before placing a foot on its chest and pulling. Leg and proboscis ripped off in more hemolymph and, in the latter's case, thick, syrupy blood.

Sanny didn't roar, but he did feel a bloody satisfaction, echoed in the back of his mind, at fighting back with this mighty body, a violent thrill that sang to the part of him that had always writhed in frustration every time he had to hold himself from punching some idiot who'd irritated him, from having to just keep walking when some highschool tough guy had shoulder checked him in the corridors for seemingly no reason, for every forced apology he'd had to insincerely give just for defending himself from some gradeschool asshole…!

He took that lifetime of repressed feeling and 'emotional maturity' and 'being the bigger man', gathered it all in his foot and slammedit down into the thing's abdomen with violent, cathartic force, crushing the blood reservoir there, drenching himself and the monster at his feet. Tammy and Willy faded from his awareness. There was only him and the strength coursing through his body and the monster before him. A perfectly acceptable target for that strength, and the desire to punch, to kick, to inflict pain and cause harm and to claw and bite and to not have to turn the other cheek or say pointless sorries or anything of a lifetime's experiences of school discipline that always seemed to favor the bullies when it tried to be rationally fair and impartial...

The mosquito's wings were buzzing, but they'd been crushed again when Sanny had kicked it to the ground, and it was trying to awkwardly slide away on its remaining limbs. He fused the teeth on his forearm, and they thrust out like a dagger over the back of his hand, anchored to bone and exoskeleton.

He slammed down his other foot onto one of the mosquitos legs, trapping it in place, and drew back his arm to punch through the joint between its thorax and head so he could rip the latter off.

His compound eyes exploded, bursting from the insides as his own blood was pulled from the other parts of his body, the sudden surge in blood pressure rupturing the delicate organs. Unexpected, excruciating pain wracked him as his blood boiled, bubbles of steaming blood filling his veins as the mosquito lurched forward, its elongated limbs with their strangely hand-like ends grabbing his head and pulling him down as it jammed what remained of its mouth parts into one of Sanny's eyes and started feeding on his blood.

His eyes burned with pain, his veins filled with agony as the blood was ripped out of them yet again, but there was nothing as his brain was sucked out like so much mush to get at the blood circulating through it. He tried to fight back, to push it away, but the pain… it filled him, every part of his suffocating as his blood was stolen away.

A literally distant part of him, sitting in front of a computer, noted that his bodies needed both air and blood.

Sensation was fading as his body was drained of life blood, and the feeling of hitting the ground again was distant. His marrow was trying to make more blood, his exoskeleton opening at the seams to allow the flesh beneath to take in air, his body switching to other circulatory systems to keep functioning.

He wasn't dead yet. He could tell from how it hurt so much… How could he be in so much pain without a brain? Oh, his spine was functioning, and there was still some brain matter at the base of the skull. Apparently that was all it took to be in agony…

For a moment, he was back home, staring at his laptop's screen. Am fine, he typed. In pain. Still alive. Will try to revive again.

It wasn't that he was no longer aware of his broken, exsanguinated form. That part of him was still in pain, still too weak to move. Indeed, his other bodies were shuffling uncomfortably in sympathy, shifting uncomfortably in their seats, fluttering weakly in the air…

Oh.

He looked through the eyes of one of his flying drones, still in the air. Tammy was dragging away his drone, and he was vaguely aware fo the feeling of her vines on him as she pulled him back from the mosquito. It had changed again, its limb growing thicker, stronger. It was completely red now, and it had regrown its limbs with what seemed to be congealed blood. Its torso had grown wider, more humanlike and it… it…

It had a long, proboscis-like, bony spike jutting over the hand-like ends of its limbs.

Shock filled Sanny as realization hit. It had fed on his blood, his drones blood, and had somehow used it to… alter itself? Make its body more like Sanny's drone? That was… new. He looked at the drone again, and finally saw the similarities. The long limbs, the armor-like plates made of blood, the now-crimson, blood-covered compound eyes…

Oh, shit.

He was vaguely aware of roots burrowing into his drone, even as Tammy let out a weak, wheezing sound of frustration and ripped the roots out of him with a hasty 'sorry'. Willy was fighting it now, her limbs of ice melting into water so she could lash at it with liquid tendrils. It kept evading her, darting back and forth seemingly even faster than before, its wings buzzing behind it giving it speed, and even seemed to allow it to hover for short bursts…

Oh, come on! he wailed internally. Why could every monster fuck the square-cube law but not him?

Tammy's drone was speaking, he realized, and he forced himself to listen, to pay attention, routing his ears through the little bit of brain he had left in his mostly-empty head.

"– here, okay?" she was saying. "It's feeding on blood, and you have that. Try to get people to safety, we'll take care ok this, okay?"

He forced his face to tear open, opening a mouth behind all the teeth that had been stored there. "Got it," he said gutturally as soon as he had basic vocal chords.

She gripped his hand, obviously trying to be reassuring, and so he tried not to take the thorns that suddenly grew personally. "You did great getting us here and hitting him like that. Now leave this to the ones without blood."

He… supposed he had to agree with that logic.

She let go of his hand, leaving thorns in the joints of his exoskeleton there, and he focused on expelling them and deal with the inflammation they caused as the rest of him tried to heal his entire body all over again.

His brain started to grow again, and he forced his ruptured eyes to work once more, rebuilding them from their torn flesh (why was this taking so long?). He needed senses, needed to see, needed to be able to be able to pick up more than distant, confusing sounds, and strange vibrations from the ground as his body slowly started filling with blood again…

Vision returned in time to see a large, candy-pink monolith looming over him and about to step on his head with one blocky leg.