Rot and Gold 2 – Masses [Various POVs]

John Tebbles would have described himself as a fairly regular Abyssal.

He was born, 32 years ago, to two Abyssal parents. His parents had their issues, but they stuck together. They were part of a guild local to New York City, a small one that acted as a contractor to Bearings. That they worked for scum was well known. That was just what one had to do to in the Abyss.

One time, the family of five, John had two younger brothers, had attempted to turn to the mundane side of things. They had bought a house in the suburbs, hoping they would be safe out there. Mana slavers had made them a family of four within a few months, so they returned to the big city to live under the protection of Bearings again. Better to work for scum than be **** by it.

The Tebbles’ fortune turned when John Newman arrived. In the initial war, they were positioned against him. Sensing where the wind was blowing, they managed to weasel their way out of partaking in any open attack against him and joined his side as quickly as was possible. They were rewarded for this, becoming a vassal of Collide and then a member of Fusion. Rather than hired bodies that were shifted around, they got to work in the early Guild Hall.

John had watched the island expand over the last two years. It had felt like it had been a moving metaphor for the growing prosperity of the people. Every day, things were a little better. There were more things in circulation and then, suddenly, what had started on an island in the Hudson covered practically the entire continent.

In all of that, John had played his part as a shoemaker. Not the grandest work, compared to what else was going on, but he enjoyed working with the manifold materials that the market offered. Everyone needed footwear. He provided nothing fancy, just what most people needed. He would have gladly spent the rest of his life doing that.

Then, just two days ago, things had suddenly changed. The call to evacuate was confusing. Confusing, yet the Tebbles family was too smart not to follow the advice of the people that had a renowned seer in the ruling class. Thus, they moved on over. It had not been long thereafter that they had seen the infestations crop up. The towers of mould, ruining the streets they had made their home.

‘I owe it to Fusion to protect it with my life,’ John had thought. Even if the federation changed into a kingdom, he owed it to this guild that he could have lived a stable life. The only bad thing it had brought into his life was that the name John went from highly regular to laden with joke opportunities.

For that kind of balance, he would pick up arms and fight. How much worse could the Lorylim be than some goons? It was just some oversized fungal structures in the distance.

The five-armed creature dragged itself out of the water. The channels near the Shadow Island were always a little darker than the rest of the island. Now they were pitch black and thick, behaving like crude oil. A slick film had been left behind after the wave had crashed into the land. A slick film that rose into various twisted forms. Organs hung out of slimy flesh. Vertical mouths stretched in cacophonic laughter, overlapping with screams of ecstatic pain and jovial hollering into a twisted mockery of music.

There was a beat there. A drum that beat in the depths of John’s ears.

“OPEN FIRE!”

The two words were a trigger in his brain. A drilled in instruction, strong enough to make his finger curl on its own. Kickback. Thundering rings. Alchemically enhanced gunpowder turned into a muzzle flash. Abyssal senses let him perceive the barest hint of the bullet. The elemental metal ripped through the crowd of Lorylim, shredding what once could have been human flesh like wet tissue paper.

Horrors laughed, then screamed and screamed and screamed. Hole-riddled flesh pulled back together. Wet squelches filled the air. The second volley already pierced the air. One of the other soldiers in the line pulled the auto sear of his weapon back, putting the weapon on automatic.

“NO, YOU IDIOT!”

Whoever the commander was, even his three words came too late. The fellow conscript emptied his magazine into the mass of black flesh. Bullets turned sludge to pulp that rained down on the rest of the horrid monstrosities that ranted and raved atop the black stone shore.

The gun stopped firing.

The creatures stopped laughing.

Click. Click. The conscript kept pulling the trigger back.

In his panic, he did not realize that he need to switch out the clip. Not until the Lorylim, as one, started charging at his position.

John pulled the trigger. Every fibre in his being wished to pull the auto sear himself, to spray and pray that Gaia would smite his enemies. He was painfully aware of the three magazines he had to spare. A generous amount of ammunition, considering how expensive it was to produce bullets that were more than a painful pelting against Abyssals.

The horde of Lorylim did not break under the line of fire. Flesh horrors galloped on malformed limbs, climbing over the bodies of their fallen vanguard wherever needed. The space between shore and entrenched position was littered with more bodies by the second. Bodies grew hardened stalks that released spores into the air, gradually filling the air with black and grey.

The panicked conscript had finally managed to ram the second clip in. Too late. The Lorylim were on his position now, having charged with sheer bulk through the kill zone and into the gap.

One monster grabbed the conscript’s head. Thumbs squished eyeballs into a bloody paste. The conscript screamed and screamed. Black spread through veins around the eyeballs, while slime mixed with blood, pearling down cheeks. Screams turned into laughter. Oversized, black teeth grew from the inside of the man’s skull with enough **** to send bone splinters flying.

‘That’s going to be me.’

John had never had a calmer or more terrifying thought in his life. He moved his gun over, placing two well-aimed shots in the heads of both Lorylim creature and infected human. Immediately, he turned his attention back to the shore.

Before him was the five-armed creature that had first dragged itself on land. It had no legs, just a slick tail that it could drag behind itself without slowing down. Its head was vaguely insectoid. John could make out all the horrid details. Bulbous eyes like that of a fly mixed with bits and pieces of teeth forming a carapace full of holes.

John remembered nailing this thing in the head. Indeed, there was still a hole where the shot had landed. The creature didn’t care. He ripped his gun up and it ripped his jaw clean off.

His tongue hung out.

Before the pain could even settle in, the monster grabbed John’s shoulders. It grabbed his neck. He was pulled in a tight embrace. His open wound was pressed against the wet flesh of the creature’s chest. Maggots crawled into his bloodstream and muscle tissue. They squirmed under his skin.

The drums beat in his head.

John reached for his belt. His hand found the hard, round shape of the grenade.

With the last of his fading, free will, he pulled the pin.

_________________________________________________________________

It was only a year ago that Remia had fought the First Lady in the crystal fields of the Silicate Island. Now, she was fighting off horrors that she had not encountered before in her life. The side that she had attacked then she now fought for.

Remia’s blond hair fluttered in the shockwaves of the explosions of her spells. Arcane might was her secondary expertise and she used it whenever she could. Spells of blue and purple cut between differently coloured crystals that covered the island in clusters and spires.

Every spell splattered the gooey mass of another Lorylim creature. There were few of them there, just the survivors of the blast that the enigma engineer had aimed at the wave. Remia had been sent to stem the remainder on her own. She aimed to succeed. Fusion was the best future her people could have.

Besides, this was where Remia was most effective.

Slender fingers wrapped around the protrusion of a nearby crystal. She snapped it off like an icicle, filled the gemstone with her power, then hurled it at a crowd of Lorylim. The spell she had woven into the gem exploded outwards at her command, sending arcane rays out in every direction. If those did not kill the creatures in the cluster, the shrapnel of the exploding medium did.

Remia was a gem mage, manipulation of crystals was her specialization. Here, she had more material than she could ever ask for.

‘Seems like the immediate threat is over?’ she thought to herself. There were pieces of Lorylim matter still crawling about. Even the average soldier could crush that much with a deliberate stomp. Remia was an elite, she had been given clear orders to rest whenever possible.

Her eyes snapped upwards. Stirwin’s enormous form slammed into the side of the northern mountain range. Even as high-level as she was, the scope of witnessing that barely made sense, doubly so when Tiamat was there a moment later, her uncountable wings spread out, four-parted maw opened wide.

The goddess of chaos went for the throat of the Guild Hall’s protector. Searing claws grabbed her by the throat, but they just sunk into the muck of her form. For a moment, it seemed as if Tiamat would deliver a harsh bite – then a pillar of water and radiant silver suddenly rose from behind the mountain.

Remia could not make sense of much of it. There was yet another dragon, a serpentine one, riding on hurricane winds. ‘Is that Tilgun?’ she wondered to herself. She had no idea how strong the younger brother of Nathalia truly was. Could he weigh into this clash of titans? It appeared so, at least enough that Stirwin managed to complete a spell. Silver seekers bombarded the chest of Tiamat, hurling her backwards. Celestial Devourer followed, the fight disappearing once more into the wider Hudson. Tails and backs were still visible at times.

Intuition was the only thing that saved Remia’s life. Her hand was on her belt, allowing her to draw out a prepared defensive spell the moment she caught the movement. Water was still parted from the rapid acceleration, when the claw of the creature slammed into the Mana Barrier. The blue bubble shattered, but Remia managed to jump back before the creature’s hands closed around her throat.

It was a male figure, more coherent than Lorylim creatures tended to be. That in and of itself was a horrid fact. The closer a Lorylim’s body plan was, the more likely that some semblance of the original will was in there. In turn, that meant that the corrupted had been a strong person.

It was worse than a person.

The figure was like a mockery of a Greek statue of a man. The male proportions were exaggerated, with hips a bit too narrow and shoulders a bit too wide. Arms were just a tad too long, the chest a tad too broad, and despite the layers of stretched, black muscle fibres, the loose pieces of a grey, metal ribs were visible. The monster’s head was a hairless mass of writhing veins, disrupted only by exposed teeth and wide open, hateful eyes.

“METRACANA!” Ramia shouted, hoping someone was listening to the communications. Any and all calm she usually had was thrown out of the window.

The creature bridged the distance. She activated the charged gem a second time. The remaining mana within only served to slow the strike. Her ribs cracked. She was flung. The world was a confusing mess of colour, then a harsh pain and she was still. She was on her chest. A foot slammed into her back. All of the air was pressed from her lungs. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t even inhale. She turned her head as far she could, staring with one, fearful eye up at the Synapse creature.

‘Is this the end?’ she thought. The lack of air made her feel dizzy. Various coloured dots danced in her field of vision. When the Metracana’s foot was suddenly gone, it took her a moment to realize why.

Stone splinters. Heat. Cataclysmic sounds. An exchange of blows that turned the air into a series of shockwaves every bit as potent as her spells.

Remia breathed. She breathed and sat up, trying to understand what was happening. ‘Salamander,’ she thought, once she managed to make out the six-armed form of the Gamer’s fire elemental. The armoured woman was driving back the Metracana, attack for attack.

The communication piece in her ear clicked. “Pull back to Point SI-9,” the voice of John Newman rang in her ear. The communication ended before she could respond.

Not that Remia intended to talk back.

_______________________________________________________________________

Spore tendrils wound through the sky. They split into fingers of corruption, making landfall wherever the hivemind considered advantageous. Spores turned into constructs of fruit flesh and mushrooms. Corrupted air elementals within the streams consolidated into bubbles, twisting into living portals that birthed abominations, each possessing a soul that the hivemind had digested down to a hollowed-out shell without will or personality.

The main path of each tendril had a clear target: the large camps of civilians near the centre of the Guild Hall. They were disrupted in this by spells and shells and all that the military of Fusion could throw at them.

From a distance, it was fascinating to behold. Every strike against the spore cloud left a clear hole. It resembled a school of fish dodging predators. Like such a school, the spores flowed back together, seemingly uninterrupted in their flow.

Elementals from the islands and fairies of the Midnight Forest took to the air. There was a greater fight there. Creatures within the spore cloud came out, to meet those that wished to defend the Guild Hall.

Still, the mass of spores meandered ever onwards. All of the might thrown into the path of the tendrils could not stop it. The hungry hivemind knew its target, it knew where it could hurt the enemies the most and where it could feed.

And all the civilians could do was hope that someone would come in to save them.