Deserve [Layla POV]

It had been so wonderful.

“I’m not too much of a fan that you were a visitor in my private quarters frequently, without my knowing,” John had said to her, “but I thank you for helping me.”

“N-n-n-n-no problem!” Layla had stammered at the camera. Her thighs had been clenching the entire time. She would have said a thousand things she needed him to hear, had it not been for the pleasure coursing through her. They were on entirely different ends of the ship, talking through technology, and it was still so intense she could barely stay coherent. He was looking at her, truly looking at her, and knew who she was and it was unparalleled bliss.

It had been ended in a moment.

“They have killed my parents.”

The words had carved into her soul, leaving grievous marks on a maiden’s heart. Her beloved had not shown his hurt, not to her, not at this time. She had not yet earned the right to hold him in her arms, to embrace him, to stroke his hair and whisper to him that it was alright to cry. She yearned to do all of that, for him, so he could continue. A little, reasonable part of herself was aware enough that he would not appreciate it.

Kill.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

That was what every other part of her repeated inside her brain every second she sat inside her cabin. John did not talk to her any more after that. His presence on the ship was distant, muted. He kept just enough will there to steer the ship towards the American shore.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

How dare anyone, anything, take away what made her John happy? How dare these Lorylim, this Izha, to deprive Layla’s children of ever meeting their grandparents? How dare they? How dare they? How dare they?!

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Yes, she had to kill them. She had to kill them all. One by one. All together. Every last Lorylim had to be eliminated. Exterminated. Excruciatingly stabbed to ****. Vengeance. A thousand years of **** was too good for them. They needed to be exsanguinated. Scorched down to the atom. Shredded until every little figment of mana was just nothing, absolutely nothing.

Kill.

After almost two days of sitting in the boat, the storm of emotions inside her narrowed to a knife’s edge. Pure murderous rage had been tempered by impotent waiting. There was only one path ahead now. There was only killing now. She would stab and slice until it was done.

It would begin with finding a weapon.

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Layla didn’t really remember how she got into the alleyway. She vaguely recalled disembarking with the other passengers. She remembered avoiding John and slinking away. She remembered thinking that he would be too nice to let her go if she told him she was going to **** the will to live out of the Lorylim. She remembered all of this through a fog.

She was swaying through the seediest parts of Los Angeles’ outer districts. It was the kind of environment no woman, let alone a young, attractive one, should have been alone in. No one dared approach her, however. Wide-eyed and dishevelled, she projected the kind of presence that no one wanted to mess with. Even heroin junkies and low-rank gang members knew when something could only end poorly.

Layla’s eyes were solely focused on an absence. There was a thread, present nearly everywhere. The maggot-crawling thread of Izha, connecting to heads and spines even here, where only mundanes tread. Her aura sensitivity let her see the thread. It let her see the souls of those he was touching. They were different. She did not care different in what way. They were not Lorylim. That was the only thing she cared about.

There was an absence.

There was a hole.

She could taste it through her obsessed senses. All that she was had been narrowed down to vengeance. She could see it in the gap of threads in the horizon. All that she wanted was to sink a dagger into Izha’s body. She could smell it. All that she needed.

The aura that she had been tracking was suddenly extinguished. A change that she was familiar with, from real space to Illusion Barrier. She raised a hand and followed. Once more, she tasted the proximity of this aura, this grey horrid mass that hated Lorylim almost as much as she did. The one soul that Izha did not touch.

Just being in the same confined space as it caused the reprobate to detach from her. Layla clenched her teeth, grunting with the closest thing to satisfaction that she could muster at this time. Any inconvenience for him was a small victory for her.

Layla walked into the sole apartment building in the Illusion Barrier. The air was… weird. She felt a tinge of mould in her nostrils, but the actual scent avoided her. In its place, she was treated to a level of cleanliness that almost made her cough. There was not even dust in the air. There was no scent at all.

Yet the inside of the building was horrid. The walls were crawling with grey and black mycelium. Floorboards had been entirely eaten away, leaving only raw concrete. Same was true for doors and window frames or whatever else was made out of any even remotely organic materials. What the mushrooms could devour, they had.

Layla glanced up. The building had been hollowed out. Several layers of floors were gone. What remained was the structurally required minimum. Even it would not remain for long. Between the broken walls rose dozens of crudely forged pipes. Mycelium was stretching between them like rune-covered spiderwebs. Looking at them made Layla’s eyes hurt.

Walking, she followed the sounds of a hammer meeting metal. A steady yet weak ‘clang… clang… clang…’ reverberating like a fading heartbeat inside the building. She only had to follow a single corridor to find the source.

“Lyndell… gorgeous Lyndell…”

The muttering creature was a living fungus. Layers upon layers of grey, black and white sprouted from him. They had the appearance of simple tree fungi in most places, in others the mushroom jutted out like curved teeth or thorns. Under all of that, there was still a vaguely humanoid figure. A head, two arms, two legs, a mouth, and a soul beneath all that grey, that was all that hinted at the entity having been human.

“Oh, to hear you sing to me... one more time…” he muttered.

Layla walked closer. She did not question the scene, did not question what he was. Some kind of Lorylim, she felt that, but not Izha nor Tiamat. He was different from those two. She did not care about him. She only cared about the thing he was working on.

It was a mould of some kind. He was banging his hammer directly onto a mould. That was not any kind of blacksmithing she had ever encountered. She did not question it, however. She only cared about the final result. Mycelium was burned away every time the incandescent hammer struck the black casing. Grey and white, it regrew, each time forming different runes on the surface. Weaker and weaker, he struck.

“One blade to bind and one blade to seek, one blade to pull and one blade to pierce, one blade to invite and one blade to kill,” the blacksmith muttered, his voice fading ever further. “I see you there… you are a good fit… for this **** I shape.”

The man lifted his hammer all the way up and brought it down with a final scream. All his remaining life **** had been in that motion. His hammer bounced off the surface of the mould and he collapsed. His legs gave in, he fell to the concrete floor and his body scattered as if it was made out of fine sand. His own weight turned most of his form into dust in an instant. What remained looked like it was half-buried in a dune.

Layla did not care. She had come for a weapon. She found it in prying open the mould.

It was a dagger. The blade was the length of her hand from wrist to middle finger’s tip. It was of an incredibly simple design. The colour was that of steel. It had one edge. The point was sharp. The grip was a dark grey material that Layla could not quite place. It looked like metal, but was a little soft to the touch when she lifted the knife out of its cage.

She stabbed the anvil.

The knife effortlessly slipped in, stopping only when her hand met the dark metal. A crazed smile spread on Layla’s lips. This was exactly the kind of weapon she needed. Simple, close, personal, and answering to her thirst for vengeance with its own.

Kill Izha.

Kill Tiamat.

Kill Lorylim.

Kill.

A sheathe for the knife sat on a workbench. It was of the same odd grey material as the handle. After sheathing the weapon, she tugged it under her waistband. She regarded the mushroom creature with one more stare. His half-undone mouth was spread in a wide smile. There was gratitude to be felt here… Unfortunately, there was only the unyielding rage.

Layla’s head whipped around. She felt the entrance of another creature into the Illusion Barrier. Its aura was a crawling mess of rot and raven feathers.

Then the building collapsed.

Layla barely managed to lunge beneath a table. The heavy metal held under the rain of concrete and rebar. She covered her face with her arms, unwilling to let any damage come to what her John should look at every morning. The audacity of the Lorylim found no end. Then again, what did a scratch on her cheek really add to the sin already committed?

More than nothing, which was enough to stoke her rage again.

The dust was filling the air still, while the creature responsible for the sudden collapse shambled inside. It had been a man once, of regular, if not below average, size but of broad, somewhat chubby build. Writhing infestations had tinged the entirety of his skin black or grey. His red hair had melded into a mass of tendrils, spilling crimson over his shoulders and even his arms. His eyes were empty sockets above an inhumanely large mouth, filled with an excessive number of sharp teeth.

[AI Image: https://i.imgur.com/JkbdXCH.png]

The boulder of a man touched a large piece of rubble in passing. The concrete liquified and rearranged itself, Lorylim tendrils glueing together enough pieces to create the esoteric shape of a tower. “Yes, Master Izha,” the monster gurgled. The tower pointed at where the smith had been, blasting what little remnants there might have been with multiple disks of consolidated earth.

Layla observed it all from her hiding place. The creature only had to turn its head to see her, if a Lorylim even needed to rely on where the eyes had been originally.

Yet it did not see her. Layla shrouded herself in the same way she had shrouded herself to be undetected by the Guild Hall’s guardians. The surface of her soul was reshaped to resemble the Lorylim. The corrupted man before her did not react to her presence, not even when she pushed aside the rubble that caged her in.

More of the towers of filth and concrete were erected. They shot at any bit of the forge around that was still usable. Calm as a shark observing its prey, Layla walked between the projectiles. She was not powerful. Just the shockwaves of them were enough to make her steps sway. She could barely even perceive them.

Fear did not register in the mind of a woman furious.

The creature did not realize she was next to it until it was too late. The knife cut through the connection between the creature and the hivemind. It let out a rattling sound, followed by a satisfying scream of utter torment. All of the individual pieces of Lorylim matter that had corrupted the human form squirmed with undesired individuality, pushing against each other and the nerves that they had attached to.

It must have been a horrific pain, a total pain, a pain almost close enough to be payback for what they had taken from her John. Layla laughed at it and stabbed the creature’s spine, before any sort of connection could be returned. One slice and the creature was turned paraplegic.

Layla dropped down on the monster while it was still screaming. She kept on stabbing, slicing the connection again and again, keeping the man exposed to the reality of his corrupted flesh. She laughed, the rush of enacting vengeance on his enemies the only satisfaction she could ever find in a time like this.

The creature had vast vitality. By the time it stopped squirming beneath her, her voice was hoarse and her arms lame from exhaustion. She still plunged the knife into the black, gooey flesh over and over again. No matter how sticky the ichor was, the knife always came back clean and sharp, ready to cut away another slice of life ****.

Heavily breathing, Layla only rose to her feet when the soul of the monster no longer existed in the Illusion Barrier. She wiped a bloody hand over her forehead. At some point, she had stopped stabbing a Lorylim and had been stabbing the sack of human meat beneath. A sinner was a sinner no matter what he looked like, so that made no difference to her.

All that mattered was to kill more.