Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! #10 (Patreon)

The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 7

"This feels rushed. This feels very rushed. This is going to go badly," Tammy said to him through the little offshoot he'd left with her. it was nestled somewhere in her branches, a little ball of shell that was basically full of ear, lungs and vocal chords for him to talk back to her with. As the one who was most mobile between them, it was likely any offshoot she gave him to talk through would just be dislodged.

"Well, maybe it won't take the bait and we'll have to go back home," he said, lying down on the roof of a school building to keep out of sight of the people below and staring up at the sky as he kept watch on the area with drones in the shape of birds. Well, vaguely in the shade of birds. His yellow exoskeleton gave the discomfort of lying down on the debris-strewn concrete roof a different flavor than it would otherwise have.

"Why would it take the bait? The bait is disgusting!"

Sanny had to agree. The huge, bloated drone that was basically a huge bag of producing blood, antigen-laced sweat, and carbon dioxide rich exhalations was… well, it looked like something out of a 'mutation apocalypse' video game level, either as a disgusting bit of background scenery or as something a boss would explode out of. It was covered with a thick skin, and already dozens upon dozens of regular mosquitoes had taken the bait, latching on to it and feeding on the rich blood on offer. Were it capable, the drone would already be infected with dengue and malaria.

The fact the big bloodbag of a drone, a pulsating ball of flesh the size of a car, was just lying in the middle of a field next to the Sunken Garden in UP Diliman had initially caused panic, followed almost immediately by a crowd of people with their phones out when they saw it was just lying there, occasionally moving as it 'breathed' to release the carbon dioxide meant to bait the Blood Bug, as Tammy had termed it, out of hiding. Despite it being a weekend, and there having been a violent incident the day before that resulted in many people dying, the college hadn't closed, though the places where people had died, marked with dark brown splotches of blood, had been cordoned off, and each had already gotten a small pile of candles and flowers around them. There were also student activists with subdued but still distasteful signs and small flyers declaring that the deaths were the result of the government's neglect in protecting the students, or that the government had allowed the deaths because they thought that students were all militants and therefore the students should join militant groups to teach them a lesson, or that this was an example of red-tagging by the government…

Sanny could feel his old urge, born from his own college days here, to yell at people to go home and study because they were wasting their tuition on this activism nonsense, rear up inside him, and firmly repressed it.

He'd added the transparent, pustule-like portions that showed the insides were filled with blood, lest someone had tried to poke it. As it was, the campus police had come to try to keep people away by blocking off the roads, which was a little like trying to catch water in a colander, since all the students were on foot. The non-campus police were still taking their sweet time showing up, and he had to wonder if there was some kind of malicious politics or personal history involved. The security guards, notably, were staying exactly where they were, near the doors of the campus buildings.

The blood bag drone wasn't the only bait he had out, just the biggest and most obvious. He had bird drones, cat drones, dog drones, and commandeered rats going around the areas where he'd lost track of the Blood Bug, stomachs bloated with blood, feverishly hot, and smelling of blood antigens. He figured he might as well get rid of the rats while he was at it. Disgusting things. A lot were being killed by panicked people who saw them, especially in the slums in North Triangle, but that was no big loss, and he'd made sure to have the ticks and other parasites on them become fused to the rat's flesh so they wouldn't spread. True, all the pressurized blood he'd filled the rats with were going to be mess, but he had bigger problems, and anyway, he wasn't the one who'd clubbed rats until they exploded into 3/4ths their weigh in blood.

Which was why he was lying down on the roof, his biology set to ectothermic to keep him from being uncomfortable in the sun, as he guided all the drones. He wasn't controlling them individually– he couldn't multitask out to literally hundreds of bodies, even if the number of rats kept slowly dwindling– but each drone had the brains of a trainable animal, and a broad command to spread out and hunt for the Blood Bug had been met with a burst of enthusiasm from the back of his mind.

Which was… mildly disturbing, but no less so than everything else happening.

"Any sign of anyone who might be someone like us?" Sanny asked. Tammy had taken control of trees and plants around the bait, and she was supposed to also by watching using the trees… somehow. She had been against putting the bait there, which meant Willy had also been against it, but Sanny had argued that they also needed to look for the pink rock person who'd shown up, and given how they'd shown up, there was a strong chance they were a student there. So the bait was there for anyone willing to bite. She'd only agreed when Sanny had emphasized that even if she didn't come along, he'd still be going forward with this plan, and that her participation would at least mean innocent people didn't get hurt. Well, far less likely to get hurt, anyway. This was a college. That meant they were surrounded by idiots who'd find ways to hurt themselves even without blood-sucking mosquito monsters.

"Not yet," Tammy said. "At least, no one is obviously big and made of pink rock. How about you? Found the Blood Bug yet?"

"Still looking," Sanny said. "I seem to be attracting every bug near my drones but the Blood Bug."

"What do we do if it doesn't show up? Stay the night? Go home and try again some other time?" From her tone, she was ambivalent to either option.

"You two go home," he said. "I'll stay. They'll be less people here at night, so less likely people will be hurt."

"You remember you're the only one with blood to get ripped out of you, right?" Tammy said. "That happened twice yesterday, let's not give it a chance to eat you a third time."

"She," Sanny corrected absently. "It's female. Only they drink blood, the males live off nectar like bees."

"Why? I mean, why not just eat nectar too?"

"They don't need it for food, they need it for animal protein," Sanny explained. "So they can start laying eggs."

For a moment, Tammy was silent. "So, it's a female, and going through the motions of reproducing… like the plague dog we fought?"

"Yeah," Sanny said.

"The one that spontaneously got pregnant three times on the same day and threw its babies at us like cannon fodder working for the bad guys?"

For a moment, Sanny went still. "Shit," he hissed to himself.

"We need to find water," he said to Tammy through his drone, the organs he was using in place of a heart pumping fast as they tried to comply with biological reactions they weren't naturally meant to. "Mosquito eggs need to be laid in water."

"The plague dog gave birth by exploding," Tammy pointed out.

"The plague dog was a mammal, our young develop internally," Sanny said. "Mosquitos give birth with eggs."

"Unless that changed when it ate your blood," Tammy pointed out. "Like the tentacles."

Oh. Oh. Well, wasn't that a disturbing thought?

"That's a very disturbingly plausible thought," Sanny said. "Why didn't I think of that? I'm supposed to be the animal biology person."

"Well, we all have bad days. And you did get skullfucked yesterday."

Sanny twitched. "Thank you for that image, I needed something else to haunt my nightmares." Actually, it would be nice to have something actually coherent to dream of at night–

There was a moment of disorientation, as he realized he was suddenly in a different body, one that was in agony as it was being impaled and exsanguinated–

And suddenly he was back on the roof, trying to breath hard and not having the lungs to do it with, leaving his torso twitching as he tried to heave muscles that weren't there. He shook his head, for once having the right kind of ears to get some benefit from the movement, feeling disoriented after being momentarily in a large mammalian body that had been extreme pain.

Distantly, he heard Tammy talking. "Did you mean to spit on me or did you lose control again."

"The second. Sorry. Uh, I think that's venom, don't touch it or let anyone else touch it. But the Blood Bug just killed one of my drones," he said back, breaking down the venom gland that had managed to grow in his drone on Tammy. "A dog. Hopefully all that happens is it start walking on four legs and gets furry. I'm having the rest of my drones converge on it and try to lure it out. "

The dog drone was still mostly alive, in that cells in its body were still metabolizing, but that wouldn't last. It has been completely drained of blood, its heart gored through. But that was still alive enough for Sanny to be able to have some power over it, and he used his sense of where it was to have all his other drones converge, small mammals breaking out from under cover and bounding at full speed. He heard screams through several as way to many rats for anyone to be blasé about seemed to come out of from every possible hiding place and scramble in a fleshy, verminous tide, their backs starting to bulge with an unnatural pustule filling with red blood platelets and reeking of blood antigens to try and get the blood bug's attention and hopefully away from the people around it.

He had the first drone to reach the Blood Bug throw itself at it to distract the monster–

– he was a dog, thin from a life on the streets, a large blood-filled pustule at his back, and he threw himself at the Blood Bug to catch it's attention and distract it–

– as he organized the rest into a line back to the main bait in UP Diliman. It was a disorienting experienced, as he seemed to be in each body long enough to have the thought of what he needed to do and start doing it, only to suddenly be booted out and find himself in another body, and another, and another, and all of the bodies were his/weren't his, just drones under his control/just animals he'd possessed, all moving to his will/moving to hercontrol…

"They're coming this way," he told Tammy. "It's following my drones. I have to keep letting it catch one so it'll keep chasing them, but it's working."

"'She', remember?" Tammy said. "All right, I'm ready. Just get it here and it's not going to get away."

"Is Willy ready?" he asked.

"As soon as I give her the signal," Tammy confirmed.

Sanny really hoped nothing happened to Tammy. Not just because she was a good kid and a nice person, but because he suspected Willy was going to become completely inhuman without her to keep the taller girl tethered to people.

Slowly, he made himself get up to his feet, and began walking back and forth swinging his limbs, rotating his shoulders, careful to not be seen from the nearby buildings, which meant staying next to the boxy structure that held the motor for the elevator in the building. He felt the body slowly switching to endothermic, but he still felt strangely sluggish…

He felt his drones getting closer, felt them staying justout of the Blood Bug's reach, even as one threw itself at the Blood Bug–

– he threw himself at the Blood Bug–

– to keep luring it in with the promise of blood.

Through the surveillance drones flying up above, he saw the wave of drones running in front of the Blood Bug to lure it back to the university. And he saw the Blood Bug.

It… no longer looked like a proper mosquito. Instead of been long and slim, with slender-looking limbs, it looked… well, it looked vaguely like his battle mode if it were mosquito themed and painted red. It seemed to have doubled in size, and stood on four slender legs like a centaur, the long, bulging abdomen extending behind it, engorged with blood, and ending in a long, rat-like tail that was clearly starting to grow fur. Instead of being narrow and seemingly spindly, its thorax was thick and wide, with a vaguely body builder-esque silhouette, if that body builder was a hunchback. Its front limbs were clearly arms now, thick compared to its other limbs and just as long. while the left ended in was looked like a claw-tipped hand, the right ended long in five long tentacles, all studded with compound eyes and thorny proboscis (proboscisi? Proboscisae?) that made the tentacles look like spike-covered whips. Its previously round-seeming head had elongated, the proboscis now seeming to be its nose as a hinged, doglike jaw with uneven teeth and rodent-like incisors snapped at the air. The Blood Bug was covered in armor-like dark crimson plates that seemed covered in shaggy red hair, and its wings had grown to enormous proportion, extending from its back and over its abdomen, seemingly made from transparent red film.

When they flapped, it wasn't so much a buzz as a roar like a helicopter, and it certainly flew like it, sending the air around it in powerful blasts of downdraft as it aimed for food in the pack of drones beneath it, lashing out with the tentacles on its arm. The drones dodged– he dodged– the tentacles as best as they could, but some inevitable got hit, and those threw themselves at the Blood Bug to keep baiting it as the rest ran just within reach…

"Get ready," Sanny told Tammy, his main body crouching down and getting ready to jump from the building. His shell would crack and his muscles tear from a leap at this height, but his main body could heal too fast to let little things like that stop it, and he was surprisingly light on his feet for something of his size. Sanny supposed he told the square-cube law to go fuck itself in his own special way.

Below, screams of disgust began to sound as the forward elements of the flood of drones came into view of the people in the area. The horde scrambled down the middle of the street, their muscles tireless from his influence. Then the disgust became true terror as the Blood Bug came up behind them, face covered in animal blood that was already hardening and integrating into the armor covering it.

In the middle of bloodily devouring a dog, it paused and raised its head, and Sanny saw to nostril-like holes on other side of its proboscis, next to its mandibles, flare wide, as if it was taking in a breath.

Sanny cut the anti-gen secretions and the breathing of the bait drones, making them dissolve into worms as he had the large, blood-filled bait drone let out a warm, carbon-dioxide heavy, antigen-filled breath. It was probably overkill, like putting a spotlight on a pile of steaks under a box held up by a stick… but that was sort of exactly what they were doing.

A normal human wouldn't have seen what happened next. Their eyes would have seen, but all the muscles that needed to move to point those eyes in the right direction were to slow, needed to be consciously moved. Their ears would have heard the sudden, helicopter-like roar as the wings propelled the Blood Bug towards the bait, its proboscis sinking into the flesh, drinking in the rich, thick blood underneath.

"Now!" he told Tammy, purely for some way to let out his excitement.

She was already moving, the little saplings around the bait that had gone unnoticed– why pay attention to suddenly-appearing saplings on a field when that field had a huge, fleshy, blood-filled abomination in it?– exploded into rampant growth. Thin growths barely twice as thick as a thumb seemed to inflate like a time-lapse as they became arm thick, leg thick, and then just thick in seeming heartbeats. Branches exploded upward and to either side, weaving together with unearthly synchronization as the explosively growing trees all rose up and bent inward over the top of the bait, forming a dome of thickening new growth. Leaves erupted, cutting the Blood Bug off from most of the carbon dioxide being exhaled by everyone else on campus, hopefully effectively putting them out of the Blood Bug's awareness.

Then, as the Blood Bug continue to gorge itself on the bait blood, water began to rise out of the ground. It flowed to the edges of the dome and just stopped, even as the water level began to rise like a flood, climbing up the Blood Bug's legs, swiftly covering it up to the waist…

It was completely submerged before it realized it was in danger as air to its nose and spiracles was finally cut off, and it realized it couldn't breathe.

Willy was not oxygenated.

It finally pulled itself out of the bait, and blood began to darken the water as it gushed out of the entry wound as the Blood Bug struggled to reach the surface for air. It's wings flapped, creating a thick froth, but try as it might, Willy water kept the surface just out of reach as it filled every cube of Tammy's wooden dome and beyond, the Blood Bug and the cage of trees soon trapped in a large dome of freestanding water…

And that was when the ground suddenly collapsed underneath them, and water, trees and Blood Bug suddenly fell into a pit lined with strangely iridescent pink stones...

"Tammy!" Sanny cried, trying to talk to her. He checked on his drone, nestled in a hollow inside the tree Tammy had reluctantly been disguising herself as, and found it underwater, growing gills but asphyxiating

Willy was not oxygenated.

For a moment, he just stood there, staring. Then he threw himself off the roof, rolled when he hit the ground almost like he knew what he was doing and got to his feet running towards the field, where he threw himself into the hole after the two girls…