Rot and Gold Finale – The Turn

Lyndell dislocated her own shoulder in her attempt to move her arm. Fingers cracking, breaking, and snapping back into place, she grabbed the arm and slotted it back into place. Her head swung, her torso followed, and the whole of her flopped out of the basin. She twitched. The muscles in her thighs tensed, pulling her lower leg forwards with such **** that her kneecap snapped. A sickening crunch later, healing **** it all back into the proper place.

The helpless attempts to move felt wrong to look at. A baby should have had troubles moving like that, not a fully formed woman.

Lyndell’s neck broke again. Black fluttered from the motion. In the lightness and transparency of the material, it reminded John of a satin veil. Unlike a veil, it was attached to the roots of the primordial Lorylim’s hairs. Specifically, it grew from the top of the head, making it so only the back of her messy hair was under it.

Making the likeness to a bride whose veil had been lifted was difficult when that same entity gargled her spit in an attempt to talk. “Lhrrrrghhh…. A. A. A. A.”

The woman suddenly stopped spasmodic motions. Her eyes fixed on random spots in the room. John’s face, Delicia’s face, Hailey’s face, Lorelei’s face, the table, the basin, a nearby crate. Her hands and the back of her feet glided over the floor without lifting.

“B. B. B. B. C. C. C. C.” She kept loudly and clearly vocalizing individual letters, journeying down the entire alphabet. “Z. Z. Z. Z.” Her mouth snapped shut with a soft clack. Her arms and legs stopped moving.

Then, she sat up.

Fluidly and without issue, Lyndell first righted her upper body, then grabbed the edge of the nearby table. “Lyndell,” she said her own name properly. She still wasn’t speaking to them. She rose to her feet, stood, and swayed. She was experiencing balance on human feet for the first time. She figured it out quickly, standing still after just a few seconds. Her eyes darted in random directions, before finally coming to rest on John’s face with purpose. “Useful.”

“We can be of use to each other, yes,” John agreed readily.

One of Lyndell’s eyebrows rose slightly. She cleaned the remaining saliva from her chin with the back of her hand. Now that she no longer moved like a puppet searching for its strings, the fact that she was attractive was all the more apparent. The forlorn look on her confused face tugged at John’s soul. Another emotion to remove, this time out of caution rather than cynic pragmatism.

“I understand that a human body is new to you, but I have no time to converse with you on everything,” he told her. “This place is being attacked by Tiamat and-“

Lyndell was mere centimetres from his face in a flash. The grey of her eyes was like a broken gemstone. Silver mycelium inside laid out that familiar shape: a ring, crossed by seven lines. Against John’s expectations, there was a pleasant smell to her, sort of like an autumn forest after rainfall.

“Where?” Wide-eyes stared at him. Still, there was the depth of sadness there. For this moment, the rage had moved to the forefront.

“Follow me.” John turned away from her. “You should get back to the laser.”

“Will do,” Hailey spoke for the three of them. They still had their doubts and they should, but between him and Lorelei not stopping Lyndell, they evidently put their trust in John’s plan.

John guided Lyndell to one of the side exits. He did not need the military staff to see her. Plenty of questions would have to be answered after the battle either way. To deploy her was the first and foremost priority.

“Do not kill my people,” he told her on the way. “We are working together towards victory against Tiamat. After that, we can decide what we are to each other.”

“I agree. I have no quarrel with you.” Every syllable felt like it was spoken by a woman that had resigned herself to sinking into the depths of a pitch-black sea.

They stepped out into the open air. Lyndell inhaled deeply. She broke her neck again, twisting it by 120 degrees to stare straight at Tiamat. The rest of her body turned afterwards. Her goal found, she took the lead in their walk. John lingered, to witness what power she had.

Even locked between Dendepthr and Nathalia, the imperfect avatar noticed the presence of Lyndell in turn. “Oh, so it's all mine! IT'S ALL MINE NOW! THE LETHARGIC LITTLE THING HAS SEPARATED HERSELF AND NOW CHAOS IS THE ONLY MOTHER!”

The words of the goddess echoed all over the island, rustling leaves with their ****.

“Have it all.” Lyndell’s expression was frozen with rage. Ritualistically, her right arm rose. The black that covered her white skin retreated to her shoulder, then crawled down in runic weaves of fungal roots and nerves. Geometric patterns laid the foundation that all came to a point in her extended finger. “Less targets.”

A point of light hovered in front of her finger. Thorny roots grew from Lyndell’s back, ramming into the ground and spreading through it. Each of them spread out into a rune of its own right, before turning rigid. The shapes of the symbols burned themselves into John’s retinas, despite the fact that his sight was magical. It was one step below the pain he experienced when he was exposed to Nia’s full power.

The dot of light turned into a beam over a metre wide. It was a gorgeous blue colour, bright and foreboding, moving through the air with a sound like synthesized bells breaking. Tiamat’s glee was replaced with a multi-voiced scream of pain. The beam disintegrated a quarter of the chaos dragon’s jaw.

Horrific destructive power, especially at this range, but that was not why John had taken the gamble on helping her form. Another strong fighter could have been found in a multitude of ways. No, what he had needed was the aftereffect of her strike – or the lack thereof.

The wound her attack had made did not heal. There was no Lorylim matter that slouched off the skeleton nor did the wriggling tendrils of flesh succeed in knitting themselves back together. That was what John had banked on. After all, she was the Lorylim’s Bane.

The runes on Lyndell’s arm dissolved, the fungal roots and nerves retreating back up her shoulder, where they fused back into the shape of the dress. Same went for the extensions that had buried themselves into the ground.

“I suppose you cannot just keep shooting those?” John asked.

“No.” The expected answer. They were not far enough from each other in power that John could not make a rough estimation on her limitations. As per Observe, her mana was impossible to measure. John doubted that was because it was an endless reservoir. Rather, it must have been entirely alien to how his system usually displayed mana. “The symbols used need their time to reshape and recover.”

‘More a matter of cooldowns then?’ he theorized. “Lyndell!” he spoke loudly, when the primordial Lorylim crouched down into a leaping position. Her black-framed eyes beheld him with calm curiosity. “I trust you will keep your promise. Do not harm my people. After the battle, return here. Our use for each other does not end here.”

“I shall contemplate.”

Not the answer John had hoped for. Lyndell jumped before he could insist and he turned around to return to the command room the moment thereafter. He could only hope that she would make the difference that he hoped.

“I am retaking command,” John told everyone when he went through the front door.

“Have you gotten what you wanted?” Emrik asked.

“We will see.” That was all he had to offer, before reclaiming the command spot from Chemilia. He immediately returned to scanning the map. The situation had worsened during the minutes he was absent. Chemilia was good and she had broadly the same goal as him when it came to preservation through sacrifice. She simply was not as good as him. “A new ally joined the battle. She is a white-skinned woman with a black, organic dress and veil. Stay out of her way.”

That was the update he gave the army, before returning to giving his commands. His mana was at a steady outflow, assuring that Gnome, Siena, Salamander and Sylph had extra power to throw at their enemies.

After twenty more minutes of fighting and planning, John finally saw the ray of light. Lyndell’s powers were the tipping of the scales. What exactly she did out there he could only patch together through distant Possessions and battlefield reports. It sounded like she was carving runes into herself and the land to evocate various elemental effects. An incredibly potent magic just from the sound of it, both in flexibility and scope.

More importantly, when she slaughtered a Lorylim, it stayed dead. Usually, a Lorylim left behind a corpse that dissolved spores that could then turn into hives to form weaker Lorylim. Not so with Lyndell, she just removed a threat in an area for good. Similarly, when she weighed in on the fight against Tiamat, she did not cause a release of new creatures that assaulted the Guild Hall.

And so, bit for bit, the weight on the scales shifted until, finally, John could make a general announcement.

“To all brave fighters of Fusion, the storm is weathered! These are but the final gusts in their ****! Stay vigilant and stay the course, victory is upon us!” He cut the communications immediately, then straightened his back. His spine popped. He had been hunched over the table for over forty minutes. “I’ll deliver the moral victory.”

“As you say, sir,” Chemilia stated with approval.

John wandered out, accompanied by several other members of the command staff. One of the less important members had the honour to carry the camera instead. They had a protocol for exactly this in place. It was older than the recent decision to become king. All war efforts required propaganda to some degree.

‘Don’t think about the camera,’ he cautioned himself. Too much awareness would make it staged and that was a whole different issue. ‘I’m already out of fight mode,’ he considered and set eyes on what remained of Tiamat.

Dendepthr had come and gone, Tilgun had crossed the point of exhaustion and retreated, and so it were Nathalia and Momo alone that still fought the enormous avatar, occasionally supported by Lyndell’s long range spells.

The avatar was scarcely a formidable foe anymore. Most of its mass had been stripped off. What remained was the cartilage and bones of construction materials. Even the water had turned from a black sludge to more of a grey slop. The momentum running out of the **** was apparent in every one of Tiamat’s motions.

‘Momo, can you tell Nathalia to pin Tiamat down for me?’ he requested.

‘Consider it done, Master,’ his fairy maid responded dutifully.

Trusting in that, John raised his hand to the sky. The obsidian claws were punched to a fist, then esoterically pulled down. Arcane Ascension poured a truly absurd amount of mana into a singular spell, the only spell that John could use at a target well over five kilometres away.

Volcanoes bloomed in the Hudson. The river all around was disrupted a hundredfold by the islands created by the upheavals Nathalia’s spells had caused. This last eruption was not even the largest, but it was enough to entomb the lamed legs of the goddess of chaos in magma and stone. She only laughed as she faced the sky and that which fell from it.

The silver star descended at rapid speed. John had opted for precision over power. The blow struck the diminished avatar in the chest, finally shattering the spine of the monstrosity, sending her remaining wings, head, and limbs flying.

As her pieces rained down into the river, Tiamat had her goodbyes to say. “I’ll keep what I got. You’ll have to reclaim it all.”

“We will,” John declared, to himself most of all.

He distantly heard the triumphant shouts of the soldiers and civilians. What remained of the Lorylim was retreating, shrinking into itself as if it had never been there. The remaining spores in the air cleaned, until the mouldy smell in the air was gone. It was like the world itself was mending.

Not so John’s mind. The more the world cleared, the more the pragmatic seal he had **** on his mind unravelled. He put his hands into his pockets. “We can all afford a twenty minute break,” he announced to the people behind him. “The secondary staff can coordinate the clean-up procedures. Ladies, gentlemen, our job is far from done, but we can take a breather.”

The command staff around gave him grim nods. Although they had spent the battle in relative safety, they also now lacked the cathartic release of **** finished. The soldiers’ lot was no doubt harder and riskier. The generals’ work never stopped.

John made his way into the depths of the Palace. He made it all the way to his apartment. He wandered into the restroom and finally took his hands out of his pockets. They were shaking. Bunching them into fists made it worse. They were clean. He washed them anyway. He needed to wash them.

Looking at himself in the mirror was a harrowing experience. There were no rings under his eyes, no blemishes. Only the drop of the corners of his lips and the slight drop to his eyelids betrayed that he was tired at all. He was fine. That was the harrowing fact of the matter. He did not need 20 minutes. He didn’t even need 2.

He shook his hands. Water droplets scattered into the sink. A towel got the rest. His hands were no longer trembling. His mind returned to that soldier in the **** Zone. Mark, that one man, who he had known for such short a time, who had not been strong enough to survive spore exposure, but who had insisted to die as himself. A man who had met that end every bit as heroically as John dreamt he could die one day.

**** was on his mind. Travolta’s ****, so far back now, with that final wish for him to save the woman whose blood he had ingested. Victoria’s ****, brought upon by her own hubris. Eliana’s ****, a sweet relief that she had sought. Alexej’s ****, the rightful reward for betrayal. Abraham’s ****, to this day an enigma on what he had died to protect. His parents.

Individuals that he could put names and faces to. Deaths that he endorsed, deaths that puzzled him, deaths that broke his heart.

Hundreds of unnamed soldiers, running to their deaths because they trusted that his commands were for the best. They were right. He was convinced he was right, that was why he had given the orders. Logically, there was no need to be upset. He did not want to become that machine. That was why his lack of tiredness was so harrowing. It was a grim craft, to be the supreme commander over military forces. Yet, he would continue to do it.

Someone had to build the walls out of body bags.