Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! #11 (Patreon)

The House With Pink In Its Walls, Part 8

Sanny threw himself into the hole the two girls fell into.

The first sign this might not have been a good idea was the hole going from thirty feet wide when he was above it, and the size of a fieldwhen he was in it. That did not pair well with the fact that even when it had been thirty feet wide, he hadn't been able to see the bottom. At first he'd though that was just his angle of view, but now he wasn't sure.

Now he was in freefall into a pit fit for the foundation of a skyscraper, the walls of which seemed distant and strangely twisted, studded with little points of blowing pink rocks that looked like someone had stuck LEDs to backlight pink sugar candy. He could barely feel the air rushing over his body through the sensory nerves he'd put on his exoskeleton as he angled one of his drones above to fly directly over the hole and try to see what was inside. Despite the wide opening to the clear sky above, the inside of the unnaturally huge pit was dim, as if not much light was getting through. His compound eyes reconfigured, becoming superposition compound eyes to increase his night vision, and his view of the pit brightened, the colors growing sharper.

The ground beneath, he saw, was a roiling, heaving, vaguely glowing field of pink. It moved unnaturally, seeming to explode like it was growing, shattering and rolling along like waves, creating strangely geometric shapes that no one substance would form naturally in nature. Grains that seemed fine as sand heaved large, too-regular cubes, which seemed to shift and roll strangely without ever changing shape…

On top of that, the shattered circle of trees that was Tammy lay like debris on a flowing river. A few were partially encased in pink stone growing on it like some kind of bad pink ice special effect, while other were fighting back, roots and branches growing explosively and shattering the stones binding them. As waves of pink hell sand and unnatural, twisted, warped stone tried to subsume Tammy over and over again, she just kept growing and growing, expanding within the layers of rocks trying to cover her like amber covering a bug, showing exactly how trees cracked apart rocks into pebbles.

Beneath and around that battle, water and strangely glittering sand fought their own rendition of the mountains versus the sea as the formless, onrushing tide that was Willy slammed into the glittering pink again and again, seemingly breaking against the stones. However, when she passed, edges were a little less sharp, and whenever the sand started to fuse together into stone to try and encase what it could, the water froze into ice, expanding ruthlessly, filling cracks and expanding some more.

In contrast, the dripping wet Blood Bug seemed the only sane thing there by trying to gain altitude and leave all of this behind, listing slightly from the weight of the tentacles at the end of one arm, its thorax bloated from the blood it had managed to suck up from the bait drone. It had changed again as well, just as they'd intended. Its four lower limbs now looked tipped by short, stubby claws that made no sense, as if it had taken from a mishmash of dogs, cats and rats, which it probably had. It was also bloated. Its head, abdomen and thorax were bulging like an obesity fetish drawing, which was making flying difficult since its wings were obviously straining to make it move. Still, the occasional rocks thrown launch at it by the shifting field of pink were telegraphed enough it was able to move aside to avoid them, even if it moved like a blimp.

How the heck was it still flying?! Stupid square-cube law discrimination!

Sanny took all this in moments, not even needing to turn his head—the wonders of compound eyes—as he plummeted towards the roiling pink ground below.

Yeah, no way was he touching that.

The exoskeleton on his back fused together, ripping out to form four large, near-transparent wings of cuticle the length of his arm. They flapped rapidly as his spine, head and a few internal organs sloughed off of the rest of his body, the jettisoned weight allowing him to slow his fall considerably, even as his head and spine flopped down towards the ground like a reverse balloon as the bone and attached bits of meat and nerve writhed, growing on the bare bone and connective tissue like a rapidly spreading mold. Bone was consumed, leaving only light, hollow shell as more and more muscles connected to the flapping wings. Sanny felt his head contorting, his skull dissolving under his exoskeleton, bits of his brain turning to mush and absorbed as unnecessary mass, his bits being tucked inside the forming body to a mild feeling of exasperation from the back of his head…

Sanny couldn't help shuddering whenever that happened, couldn't help but wonder what he was doing his thinking with while it had taken place. His spinal cord, maybe? He doubted it was with his… well… no matter what people said about men.

Far, far below, the body of meat, skeleton and exoskeleton he'd just ejected struck the flowing, chaotic pink ground, cracking and splattering upsettingly, especially since he was still connected to it. A moment later, the sand and stone and heaving geometry all slammed and wrapped around his ejected biomass, and Sanny could feel the microscopic grains tearing at the little pores and spiracles of the shell, deliberately widening and ripping through them like drills, shoving between the plates of his exoskeleton, into the wound in its back where he'd ejected head, spine and manly bits, completely wrapping around and penetrating everything and…

Sanny had learned about fossilization in school. How buried organic matter, usually bone, had its molecules replaced over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, creating a perfect stone impression of what used to be there, sometimes wrapped in exact outlines of skin and hairs and feathers. What happened to his discarded body was fossilization happening in heartbeatsas the stone completely encases it, binds it, penetrates it. Then from the outside in, every cell was suddenly pierced by microscopic, shifting, mineral particles that seemed to vibrate and shiver to some strange, unspeakable cosmic music. His body's cells were torn apart molecule by molecule and replaced with particles that shook as if alive, cellular fluid getting pushed out for viscous stone that flowed as if pink obsidian was trying to flow like watery glass—!

Sanny watched and felt as the pink stone devoured him, the body he'd so recently vacated, made from his own meat and bone…

The connection broke like a New Year's resolution, and suddenly he was himself again, stuck alone in a mutant dragonfly body, wings flapping literally tireless as his strange biology and terror drove the muscles to flap and never stop. He tried to contact his drone with Tammy, but it was gone, the connection broken as if it never was. The bait drone was the same, and he had the momentary image—imagination or memory?—of the bait drone tumbling out of the water, over being covered in sand and stone and…

Devoured.

Consumed.

A part of him was screaming to get out of there, to cut his loses, take to the skies, rebuild his body, head back home and just crawl under the cover. For once, the sensations from the back of his head said they really wouldn't mind going with the 'flight' part of the 'fight or flight' instinct. They'd had drones die before, eaten and digested. But to be devoured, even at a remove…

The feeling he got from the back of his head wasn't as simple or prosaic as 'fear'. It conjured memories of his childhood, lying alone in bed, of the house silent and staring into the dark of his own room, every shifting subtle shadow a place for something to hide, a monster from his deepest nightmares that made him want to cover his head to hide, except if he did that he wouldn't see what was coming out of the dark, he'd have no warning, he couldn't leave because if he stepped on the floor something would get him, he couldn't sleep where he could be seen from the window lest he present a tasty, helpless meal—!

Sanny snapped himself out of the spiraling fear, no matter how much they paralleled his own thoughts. He wasn't a helpless child here. Hewas the monster in the night, the terrible devourer out of nightmare. He was the one with all the teeth and fangs and relentless, devouring hunger, the thing that looks through windows in the dark.

Hewas the beast of nightmare.

They had come here to lure, catch and devour prey, and that's what they were going to do!

He stared at the Blood Bug. The shell between his much reduced compound eyes shivered as the exoskeleton softened to flesh, a tear forming, and he opened a single, lensed eyeball in the front of his head, configured for night vision and distance. It was disorienting only for a moment before his brain started to extend down his throat to increase the size of the load that was processing his sensory input. It wasn't like he needed any organs other than his lungs, his circulatory system and his bits. There was plenty of room, since he'd gotten rid of his liver, his intestines, his stomach… The eye stared focusing on the object of their hunt, their target their prey. It buzzed and darted, enormous wings flapping and making it zip with a clumsy, unstable grace.

Prey. Catch. Devour.

The dark spiraling fall into a void of emptiness coming from the back of his mind shuddered. Slowed.

I need, Sanny… didn't exactly think. Didn't exactly feel. Didn't exactly say. Didn't exactly imagine. He wasn't sure, but he didn't think the thing in the back of his head—her—the one who managed the powers under his control could understand words. But he was human, and words could be wrapped in thought and feelings and imaginings, and that's what he used. I need to fly. I need to fight. I need to DEVOUR before it escapes again!

He tried to imagine something with wings and claws, maybe with poisons sacs and glands, bones spikes… something  he could use to attack, to strike down this monster that had escaped them before and eaten of them while doing so, so that this time they would be doing the eating…!

A spike of eagerness in that spiral of fear…

Even so, seemingly against his will, without even needing to turn his head because of his compound eyes, the field of pink below seemed to dominate his vision, and the spiral spun, and it was darkness and hiding and not wanting to be seen and needing to watch…!

Deliberately, he took his one eyeball away from watching the Blood Bug and stared at the tree that was Tammy. It had stopped being buffeted by the surging, chaotic geometries of the field of pink, somehow rooting itself as it spread its branches and grew, the branches drooping down and growing streamers that became roots that fell into the pink sands and cubes and polyhedrons and Klein bottles, bifurcating and breaking through the pink mineral that tried to coat it and batter it, the sudden erupting spikes that embedded into the now thick, ancient seeming wood being entangled and enclosed and crushed by wood that grew and grew, one enormous many-branched limb suddenly swinging down with deceptive slowness and sending the sand flying, like a giant broom clearing the floor of dust…

Movement, and the eyes shifted direction, focusing on the surging waters that now filled the bottom of the pit from wall to wall, flowing like raging currents and seemingly trying to erode the walls, suddenly exploding into miniature icebergs and sending pink geometries flying, trapping stones in ice, waves of water meeting waves of sand in bigger and bigger surges that were clearly becoming more than the stone could bear. Barriers of pink stone grew, only to be met by equally huge icebergs slamming into them, their mass augmented by kinetic energy, cracking the stone, making openings for water and roots to enter and expand, shattering the stone from within, whirlpools forming as sand and water met and churned, forming a strange pink sludge as the two mixed…

The spiral slowed, and stilled. Wariness came from the back of his head.

He shifted the eye to point at the Blood Bug.

The spiral turned ever so slightly, but the eagerness rose once more, even as another spike of wariness accompanied it. Then the spike dulled, broke, fell.

… trust…

And suddenly, the sensations in the back of his head seemed to vanish.

For one disorienting moment, he felt alone in his own head, as if he was back to those old days of being short and heavy and slow and weak and…!

A presence in every cell, every tissue, every organ, every bone, every muscle, every fat store, every neuron. Touching everything, changing everything. Inhuman, encompassing…

It was like wearing a second skin, but over his mind, but it was inside him as well, and he was what was being worn…

Realization was followed by eagerness as he felt his body in a way that had always been there but hadn't been aware of. The cells that made up his muscles, his bones, his nerves and brain, the way air he breathed through his spiracles was used to break apart sugar for energy, the wastes his muscles produced, the wait, no, how was that, strange, no, that, isn't, no sense, where how—

His body tried to sweat, to shiver in… horror? Excitement? Awe? Terror? It tried, and he sawthe parts of his brain that sent the signal, saw the parts of his body that responded, saw them suddenly stop dead as he willed himself to not shiver, not sweat, not have his circulatory system increase the flow beyond what it had already been doing to support the wings keeping him aloft and all other systems besides, saw…

Sanny blinked, the flaps of skin that had spilt apart to reveal his singular eye squeezing shup and open again, the musculature and epidermal folds for it seeming to appear near instantly in the moment between him thinking of blinking to clear his mind and the actual blink. He blinked again, trying to ignore the literally millions of minute cellular changes, shifts and alterations this caused. It was all too much… too much to think about…

He focused on the Blood Bug.

Prey. Change form. Attack.

He imagined the form he wanted. Something bipedal, long-limbs, clawed fingertips, the internal skeleton, muscles, tendons, exoskeleton armor layer… he'd have to ditch the wings, since the stupid square-cube lawwouldn't let him fly, but if he got above the blood bug and dive-bombed it… well, that had worked once before. He could—

…trust…?

He thought something had come from the back of his mind again, but no… it had come from everywhere, as if every cell of his body was talking to him… as if something had been laid on the back of the soul of his hand. Not a hand or a claw or a tentacle, but an appendage made of trust and a question.

For an endless moment, Sanny hesitated… and then somehow, he let go.

From everywhere at first, and then from the back of his head, where it had always been, he felt spark of satisfaction, agreement dulled and strange and… once more, as if something was being laid on the back of his hand.

And then his entire body began to writhe.

On his back, he felt his wings lengthening, beating faster and faster. Nubs formed on the underside of his body, segmenting, forming miniscule limbs. The tail that had grown from his spine, meant to balance the weight of his head, hardened and fused with the rest of him, and he felt the man bits in the center of his body beginning to drift downward. His balance shifted, his body suddenly becoming tail-heavy, his head going up, suddenly starting to writhe and narrow and lengthen. The nubs shifted, two moving to the side, and suddenly they were growing, the limbs becoming arms, the subtle graspers on the end shifting and altering and flattening to become hands, even as the other nubs drifted blow, shooting out into limbs that form legs that narrowed to a point, before cracking to form an ankle and a thick, weighty heel…

His abdomen hardened, thickened, expanded, shaping itself, narrowing to a waist, growing overlapping plates of lightweight shell. Not exoskeleton, as he'd had before, but a substance with a structure not unlike seashell, except it was made something else, something that was being drawn from… the liver? He had a liver, despite usually getting rid of it to save space…

Sanny raised his hands, stared at them. The hard outer covering seemed slightly thinner than what he usually covered himself with, yet felt strangely lighter. It had minute striations beneath the layer of glossy, natural polish, shining a brilliant, living yellow. Fingertips flexed, and their tips reforms into claws. No, not claws. Teeth. Slightly curving, serrated, shark-like teeth. Wide, unblinking compound eyes saw all around him on a head that felt… right. Interlocking plates of shell covered his body from his crown to the tips of his armored feet. Yet, he felt… light. Lighter than he'd ever felt before, as if he'd shed so much unnecessary weight. On his back, the four insectile wings buzzing kept him aloft and level, his greater mass keeping him from wobbling and being caught by eddies of wind like smaller insects were…

He was flying. He was bipedal, armored, clawed, and he was flying.

From the back of his mind, satisfaction and smugnessrose.

His wings roared as he stopped merely hovering and attacked, darting towards the Blood Bug like a bullet.