Ainōryoku Sentai Nightmærangers! #20 (Patreon)

On the Madness Of Mountains, Part 7

The ground was being very uncooperative as Kim tried to take control of it though the particles of sand he had touching the ground. When he'd done this back in UP, and in other times before, it had been like plunging into water that he started spreading out in all directions and yeah that was a horrible comparison. Sticking with the comparison though, instead of water, the ground felt like a rocky beach, dense and thick and try as he might, pushing into it was both difficult and unpleasant. It wasn't impossible—he could feel the ground in direct contact with his hand and feet becoming part of him yet separate, and from there, he could slowly push outwards but there was resistance.

It looked like dropping the Lava Horse into a pit wasn't an option.

The ground shook violently as Willy's streams managed to punch through one of the Lava Horse's limbs, sending it stumbling as it crashed into the ground, its huge bulk beginning to slide downslope, its angered, panicked cries vibrating the sand Kim had reduced himself to. The hardened stone covering its form ripped of its body, exposing the glowing lava beneath that smeared on the ground and burned as the Lava Horse kept roll and falling. It seemed to almost fade in the darkness below, the glowing parts of its body standing out in the gloom. Above, the clouds were so thick they were opaque, and sunlight was a weak, distant thing on the far edges of the immense ash cloud being fed by the volcano. With every cry, the volcano shook, more and more ash spewing, and above them, at the rim of the volcano, Kim saw a burning, moving orange glow as lava began to pour down the slope. It wasn't tame, slow-moving, realistic, nature documentary lava that was cooling naturally as it moved. It was violent, rushing, splattering, fast flowing movie lava, spurts of it seeming to lead the mass like fingers trying to reach the sky.

And it was heading straight for them like an approaching flood.

"Willy, move!" he cried as he pulled all his sand together into a ball and flung himself downslope, fighting all his instincts that told him this would get him hurt as he let gravity take hold and go down the slope the fast way. He rolled and skidded on the ashy ground, occasionally getting flung up some more as he hit bumps.

Willy, thankfully, hadn't needed to be told twice as a large, unnaturally cohesive mass of water flowed down the slope a little off to his side, looking like a giant bag of slime rolling down. Behind them, the gloom became more orange as more lava surged up from the volcano. The leading elements seemed kept surging, and Kim could make out horse-like shapes, of heads and hooves, screaming and pawing the ground violently…

They reached the bottom of the slope, and Kim kept on rolling, vibrations from all over reverberating through him. He burst into sand, reforming back into a humanoid form as he tried to run, the ground still repulsing him as he tried to move and shape it, to create walls to lead the lava way and channels for it to flow through—

Oh. Right.

He turned and, having watched TV and movies just like everyone else, thrust his arms towards the onrushing lava. Glowing spikes grew on his arms, and a massive surge of growth at their base became an explosion of sand that launched the spikes more or less in the direction he wanted. They spun randomly before he reached through them, around them, and bent.

The pieces of himself he'd just launched did not alter their course. They were still moving at the same speed, in the same direction, on the same parabolic arcs caused by the interactions of their shape, spin, mass and velocity. It was the space around them that bent to lead them towards where he wanted them to go, and they slammed into the ground in a strait, if unevenly distributed line. Space bent, and there were no gaps, the pieces all touching, coming together, fusing.

Space was restored, and they were all still touching, a long line of pink on the ground.

Grow.

The pink shards grew, dimensions expanding in all directions, almost as fast as they would have grown from him. The line spread to either side, gaining a slight curve towards him as walls rose, points of crystal trying to stab into the ground. the ground bent, twisted, the points digging in, then tearing the ground apart and being constricted into place as space straightened.

Willy launched herself over the wall, a piece separating from the huge, vaguely frightening watery mass that struck the ground in front of Kim, seemed to ripple and stretch like a giant unbreaking water balloon, before it seemed to snap into a faceless humanoid shape that immediately stiffened into clear ice. The rest of the huge mass arced over her similarly stretched and bounced when it hit the ground, and then rushed at the fallen Lava Horse. The mass of water seemed to grow and grow as it charged, before freezing into an iceberg-like mass that slammed into the burning monster without losing speed. Immediately, the bright lava skin went dark, and there were gunshot-like snaps as the iceberg broke apart, sizzling where they touched the creature's fiery flesh and actually bouncing as the ice turned almost instantly into steam on contact.

"Good. You're helping." Willy's vibrating voice was bland and dismissive. "Don't be a parasite at group work."

So saying, she charged the Lava Horse again as the mass of ice she'd launched ripping, shivered, and began to grow, trying to encase the equine, its skin growing dark even as the ice touching it continued to flash into steam. It struggled, but while it was able to melt its bonds at the point the ice immediately touched, the ice kept pressing in, growing and enclosing…

The lava rushing down the slope slammed into Kim's wall, and he felt the point of contact start to shatter and crack at the sudden heat. He didn't wince, because that was an involuntary reaction, but he forced the pink to fuse back together, forced it to keep growing, to thicken, to resist with shear mass even as the outside started to snap apart, cracking and breaking along cleavage lines.

Kim could see through the wall. The wall was a part of him and he could see through it. He saw the lava, blazing bright and how, closer than any human being should ever have to. He could feel the heat in a way that no human should, could feel it transferring obscene amounts of energy into his molecules, heating them up as he tried to think cold thoughts.

He felt it when parts of him started to melt, too hot to stay solid, felt them slipping out of his control, as those bits of him went blind and numb, joining with the lava…

There was no pain, not as he'd grown up with it. Why should there be? His body wasn't meat and bone, but some bullshit pink rock. The heat he'd felt wasn't burning agony, but energy and shaking molecules and how did he know that?

No, no, now was not the time for him to start wondering why he knew that he felt temperature directly from the energy exchange with his molecules and not some sort of intermediary. He turned his back to the wall he made. It would hold for now, diverting the lava to either side as the bits that burned and melted off were replaced. It was very convenient, that 'violating conservation of mass' thing that they could all apparently do. He ran to join Willy, whose ice had completely enclosed the Lava Horse save for a small spout from which steam and spurts of hot water were erupting, only for the latter to freeze back into ice. Inside, he could vaguely make out the equine form still struggling inside the growing, spreading mass of ice, form obscured by bubbles of steam.

The ground shook violently, and Kim nearly fell again, barely moving his feet in time as he had to maintain his balance using purely visual cues and what little pressure information he had from the parts of his feet that touched the ground. More Lava had erupted from the rim of the Volcano, and he hurriedly raised the height and width of his wall to keep it back from them, he could feel the heat like a constant weight pressing down against his body from the mass of lava near them,

The surge of lava slammed into his wall, and then to his horror started to climb over it, the glowing infernal liquid piling up behind the cracking pink barrier and pushing it up higher and higher instead of flowing to either side. The apex of the lava crested over the top of his wall, forming the head, neck and forelegs of a horse. It made strange, bubbling screams as it tried to pull itself over the wall, it's glowing legs hitting the ground with a wet plop. The end of the legs started to spread before they darkened into glowing red stone hooves, pulling the rest along and lava started to stream over his wall .

"Willy! There's another one!" he warned. Kim reached through the wall he had made, its upper edge cracking, and snapping into small bursts of shards at the heat, and made it grow. Thrusting spears and pillars of pink rock grew from beneath the horse-headed stream of lava, pushing into it, trying to block its path. The lava just flowed through, and Kim felt the secondhand pull of gravity as he realized that his wall was dangerously unbalanced and at risk of toppling over…

Spikes of stone thrust into the ground to take the weight, and the wall held, even as more and more lava tried to climb and flow and drip over it, trying—Kim glanced back to be sure— to reach the trapped Lava Horse that Willy was trapping in more and more ice. The ice was the size of a building now, water erupting from the spout at the top like a geyser as the dark shape within the layers of frozen water and trapped ash continued to glow a dull, fiery red. Kim remembered the blazing glow visible through the dark waters as they had flown overhead, and the lake that boiled, the forms of dead fish floating on top…

The dark shape trapped inside suddenly blazed gold.

That was the only warning they had as the tomb of ice suddenly shattered explosively, a tall geyser ejecting upwards from the vent hole on it before car-sized chunks of ice and smaller chunks of rock went flying in all directions in a massive cloud of steam. Willy broke into a least four pieces as she was struck by bits of her own iceberg, getting knocked to the side, the pieces tumbling away from Kim. What remained was a large misshapen thing of dark and crimson glowing rock, steam wafting from its quickly drying surface. Hadn't the Lava Horse been smaller than that—?

It had grown, Kim realized with a chill. Like them, it had increased its mass and heat by somehow generating more lava out of its body, or perhaps turning all of its skin back into lava simultaneously—

There was a crack, and the wall Kim had raised sheared, the top half collapsing as a wave of lava suddenly came rushing down. Kim scrambled out of the way, the world around him bending randomly in his panic and urgency that was all in his mind as the lava surged, slamming into the glowing nugget that was the lava horse. Random flames flickered as the lava wrapped around the stone, turning the bits of ice it flowed over into so much steam without seeming to lose any heat, and enfolding the trapped mass in a new fiery embrace.

Kim had a sudden flashback to that morning, of him checking on and under his bed for bits of sand and rock.

The lava seemed to clench, and then a slit tore open, releasing a bubbling roar as the lava began to take the shape of a horse's head the size of a van, as opposed to merely being the size of a motorcycle. The lava behind it thickened, growing or drawing from the surging lava behind what remaind of Kim's wal, becoming a neck. Pillars as tall as telephone poles and thick as ancient trees slammed into the ground and distending it as lava solidified into stone, which glowed a dark red, formed hooves…

Kim ran, watching all this behind him, even as a part of him screamed at him to turn around, to be a decent adult and go back for Willy. Through the literal back of his head, a torso that could have been a small office building ripped itself out of the lava that had been flowing down from the, tearing some of the ground with it, formed dark hindquarters as a lava began to gush from it's rear, forming a burning tail that littered the ground with volcano's rim. Something was different about it though, something that immediately leapt out at Kim.

On the side of Lava Horse's head, there was a large manhole-sized patch of dark rock. In the orange light cast by the lava, Kim could faintly see it glitter, like dark glass.

The now 50—60? 70?—feet taal Lava Horse turned its head, the dark patches looking eerily likes eyes, and Kim got the sickening feeling that I was looking at him. Him, who was glowing pink against an ashy background on a day so overcast it was practically twilight. He actually wasn't sure what the time was…

Was this distraction? Was he trying to keep his mind away from the subject of his clearly impending death?

Still seeming to look at him, the massive horse turned, legs shaking the ground violently as it took small, careful steps to the side, sending ash back into the air, setting ash-covered and charred wood that had been plants just that morning alight. Each step was like a bomb going off, making his knees shake and the ash momentarily flow like water. Kim was horrified to see it didn't move with the ponderous, heavy gait that the occasional giant monster in a movie had conditioned him to expect. No, it moved with a liquid grace and speed that one would expect of a horse, despite its size. It took a step towards him at a deceptively normal speed, almost moving him stumble, then another and another, each impact hitting the ground so hard Kim tripped and fell onto the ash.

Thankfully the ground was flat enough that he didn't go rolling, even as the Lava Horse broke into a… a canter? But it was a canter of giant, and Kim watched as a giant mouth opened wide to rip him out of the ground like a clump of grass—!

Kim bent the air, and the Lava Korse took a massive bite of the ashy ground to Kim's left as Kim scrambled to his feet, running under the Lava Horse, under its long, burning neck and between front legs like a monumental arch. He ran towards where he thought Willy had been sent flying, hoping she was all right and that she hadn't been thrown into lava. Could she survive being evaporated? He wasn't sure, but that didn't sound healthy for a young woman to have to go through, psychologically.

Behind him, He saw the Lava Horse's head spit out a large clump of dirt and ash, then shake furiously from side to say as if trying to get rid of a bad taste. Could it taste? How could it—not the time!

There was a rushing sound as the Lava Horse turned it's head, and it could definitely see him, the glittering back eyes pointed a thim before it trned it's entire body in another bombing run that shook the ground to face him. Instead of trying to bight him again, however, it raised up its head and began to… gag…

Kim instinctively covered his head in a warding gesture as he bentspace, and the giant projectile vomit of lava curved around him to either side, only a little splattering on the ground in front of him as he kept on running, looking for…

A wet patch of ground that he'd thought has simply been the melted remains of one of the big piece of ice suddenly started blasting streams of water which… arced rather pathetically before dropping on the Lava Horse's glowing, molten hide like a drop of water on a hot griddle, now too big and too hot for such an attack to affect it, at least on that scale. The Lava Horse moved its head out of the path of the stream, clearly more confused than anything else.

"Willy!" Kim cried, skidding as a dark black head of ashy water rose from the puddle. "We need a new plan! That's not working anymore!"

"Then think of one, freeloader," Willy said, pulling herself out of the ground. Her head began to clear as dark, dry sludge began to seemingly scale off. "You haven't' done anything useful yet. This is supposed to be group work, so contribute."

A petty part of Kim wanted to snap that his dad had given them a ride and he'd made a wall, and that was a good 'C' effort. The rest of him told that part to shut up, grow up, and think of a new plan!

"I distract it, you head to the lake and use all that water to drown it again?" Kim said. If the scale was the matter, then just do what they did before but bigger, right?

(He tried not to think about how the Lava Horse could just do again what it had already done, but bigger.)

A sharp nod of a now-transparent head of ice. "Distract it then," she said, before collapsing down into a glistening puddle of water that just… lay there.

Distract it? How? Sure, it had been his idea, but how was Kim supposed to do that?

A small part of him mused that maybe Willy had a point about him not properly contributing…

He turned and ran, kicking up ash and mud and making himself glow. His glow was a sickly thing, compared the pervasive hellish radiant of the Lava Horse and the volcano, or the darkness of the ash clouds above, but it made him stand out, and if he could draw attention—

With a bubbling scream, the Lava Horse stepped, stepped and reared up, and up, and up onto its hind legs, then began to come down, down, downagain, burning front molten hooves leading, coming right for him…

Kim bent the air again, the hooves landing to either side, missing him by an arm's length. Immediately, lava exploded at the point of impact like someone had jumped into a puddle, and Kim found himself getting slammed by a thick, viscous, HOT mass that seemed to clump instead of run and flow, covering him, and he could feel his molecules gaining energy, far too much energy, too fast, felt the cracks, felt the lava cover him, felt—

…on the edge, just the merest touch, but soon he would fall, and it would consume…

…it would devour…

Kim screamed, every inch of his body, every body, vibrating violently as for a split second he felt like a grain of rice of the lips of a giant, and all it had to do was lick and… and he screamed and screamed, and his body shattered and grew and threw, his outermost layer exploding from him as the layer beneath it grew into ten times his body's volume of sand per square inch, the abrupt growth casting off the lava that had covered him as he stumbled back, feet stepping on lava, skidding, and he made protrusion on his back grow explosively, using his body as a platform, sacrificing it to the devouring lava as he threw a glittering rock that was himself, the most important piece of himself, the truest himself out of all the pieces of himself, away from between the Lava Horse's forelegs.

He bounced tumbled as the piece of himself that had so recently been his body, cracked and shattered from the heat, as the part he had ejected grew, forming arms and legs, as it bent space in fear, in terror, truest terror of the mind and heart and soul without the petty limitations of bodily functions and neuro transmitters to dictate the pace. He launched sand in front of him even as he was just a tangle of protrusions, bendingthe space between him and the farthest speck of himself, collapsing the distance between them as he gave himself the smallest shove with a forming extremity to move just the slightest bit—

Kim was five feet away from where he had started and the Lava Horse was scraping its hooves along the ground, lava pouring from it like a hose, the pieces of him that had been left behind gone, shattered, melted, consumed, devoured…

He stumbled on stubby, barely formed feet, throwing a stubby hand ahead of him, seeding the way with dust, then bending and space collapsed and he was twenty feet to the side, the piece of himself he'd thrown at his feet. He ran, legs not working properly because they'd stopped growing, and he was too panicked to remember how they should be. Three pink stone stubs made him stumble along, threw another piece of himself, reaching towards it before he hit the ground, bending—

He collapsed space behid him as the Lava Horse vomited lava all over where he'd just been, his entire body vibrating, as he tried to move, move, move…!

Something dove down from the sky.

Two arms, two legs (oh, right, that's how it's supposed to look…), plates of armor like a knight from some movie, as orange as the lava in the gloom and burning light, wings buzzing so hard they sent ash flying, Sanny in combat mode swooped down, hands grabbing the first protrusion they could, wings reaching a new feverpitch of buzzing—

Only for Sanny to give a yelp of surprise as she was jerked to a stop by her shoulders, her entire body flipping forwards ass he crashed into the ground hard onto her back.

"Damn, you're heavy," he heard her say. "Fuck, it's hot. This was a bad idea…"

"Sanny?" Kim managed to say in surprise.

In the time it took him to do that, Sanny had flipped over, braced her feet, and began to drag him with surprising speed, a speed that increased as a second pair of legs erupted from her thighs and hips, then a third pair. Her legs began to bulge, the shell falling away to reveal skin tight with muscles, and the hands and arms dragging him thickening as well, the grip holding him increasing in strength. "Don't die on the first day, Pinky," Sanny said through hwhat were obviously gritted teeth and pain. "Pull yourself together! Two arms, two legs, a torso between those two, a head is optional! Tables! Think of tables! The ones with legs, not the kind that are pillars with a big circle on top! That's it, you can do it!"

Sanny heaved, another pair of arms reaching out to hold him, and Kim realized they were galloping over the asked, multiple limbs pounding on the ground and leaping, the whole body coiling only to uncurl and hurl everything forward.

Behind them, the Lava Horse was giving chase, each footfall deafening, making the ground shaking and vibrating from where he was now being carried on Sanny's back, the flesh reddening and sizzling and darkening where he was in contact with it…

I'm burning her… he realized in horror, realized that even though they were no longer cracking and shattering, the molecules of his body were full of energy, of heat. And that heat was cooking Sanny alive, even as she ran, scrambling for traction on ash, over rocks, even as the Lava Horse pursued, vomited molten stone splashing behind them, flecks reaching Sanny and burning her even more. Kim saw one leg burned through the muscle and to the bone.

"Let me go!" he cried.

"Got a plan now?" she said, a face suddenly appearing where it could see him. A simple face. Eyes, mouth.

"I'm too hot! You're burning!"

"Drone, this body is expendable," the mouth said, trying to smile but showing muscle and bone getting covered in ash. "You call, I'm here. What's the plan?"

"I don't have one!" he screamed. "I'm shit at this! I don't know what I'm doing! I think I made things worse!"

A laugh. "Welcome to the club! All right, if you don't have a plan, I'll give you one. Grow. Ignore whatever happens, just grow and grow and grow as much as you can!"

"It'll eat me!"

For a moment, something dark and vengeful glittered in those eyes facing him… and then flesh around it contorted, and the whole face wobbled from side to side as if shaking its head. When it faced him again, there was only sympathy. "Been there," she said, and there was no smugness, no vindictiveness, only empathy. "Twice. Wanna know how to keep it from happening?"

"How?-!"

"You grow," she said, even as a glob of lava slammed into what he's assumed was her head, setting it on fire, burning meat and bone to ash. They stumbled but the face in front of him never flinched, even as blood welled and flowed. "You grow and grow and keep growing so that no matter how much of you gets bitten off, there's always more of you to grow and fight back. Then, when you're bigger than it can chew… throw everything you've got at it and eat."

The front legs collapsed, and Kim went tumbling, rolling, all that inertia keeping him moving.

Behind him, the lifeless hunk of bloody meat disappeared beneath lava footsteps.

Kim screamed. It might have been 'No!'. It might have just been a scream. He rolled, and he screamed… and he grew. Friction, and the ash building up in front of him force him to slow, to stop, but he grew. No arms. No legs. No head. Just a single, glowing, pink mass, growing and growing…

The Lava horse reared up, forelegs flowing, slamming down on him hot and hard. Cracks broke, pieces fell, but he grew. The cracks mended, the pieces began to grow themselves. Fusing to him once they touched once more. He didn't mend space, he didn't divert blows, he just grew. He became even with the Lava Horse's shins.

Then with its undersides.

The bottom of its throat.

Its head came down, mouth open. It bit at him, mouth distending, widening, becoming a maw, lava flowing like drool that trickled down his sides as it tried to bite him, but there was no sense of being a speck on lips…

He was even with its back.

The fear, the terror, was gone. He was a rock. No physiology, no neurotransmitters, no hormones, no involuntary instincts. Just rock.

Lines cracked down his sides, and up his front. With a roar that vibrated across his whole being, a roar that made the ash shiver and low like the voice of a giant, the giant stone uncurled, raising him up, and up and up…

Arms unfolded, swinging out to the sides. It had no hands, just blunt rocks.

He has no feet, just a spreading conical shape like roots growing out from the base of a tree from his knees down, the better to distribute the load.

He had no head. He didn't need it. Every inch of himself were his eyes and ear.

Moving slowly, ponderously, each shift careful because he only had visual cues to guide his balance, Kim punched the Lavahorse in the side of the head.