Stab. Stab. Stab. [Layla POV]

Layla was covered head to toe in guts.

Human guts, animal guts, elemental guts, most importantly Lorylim guts. Every corrupted entity she came across tasted her dagger. The weapon the fungal smith had left her did what it was supposed to, carving the life and soul out of every host that she came across.

The Lorylim matter on her skin crawled. The individual cells of the creatures were confused. Wiggling bits of the hivemind soup were being carried on her moving form, yet did not burrow into her. Even though her breath necessarily pulled some spores into her lungs, she exhaled them without harm. Indeed, they left her as dead ash, burned up by the fire of her soul.

Layla had been manipulating the shape of her spirit to be indistinguishable from one of the Lorylim drones. One slip-up and the Lorylim would realize the change and infect her. Layla was more than willing to run that risk. There would be no failure until she had carved out the hearts of those maggots that dared to hurt John.

Izha.

Tiamat.

Two names looped inside Layla’s head, behind them the steady beat of her simple and pure intention. It was a maiden’s desire, clean as freshly fallen snow. Only the love she felt for her man could surpass the intensity of this innocent and justified desire.

Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab.

Layla stabbed repeatedly into the spine of another Lorylim drone. Through her clenched teeth, a half-mad cackle left her throat. Why shouldn’t she enjoy hurting those that had hurt her John so? No. There was no purer enjoyment than this. If there was something to be happy about, then it was punishing these creatures unworthy of living in their perfect world.

Jumping to her feet, Layla looked around, to stab another one of the witless drones to ****. Heavily breathing, she noticed that there were none left. The rows in the shop were empty, only dust left behind.

Layla growled and turned her dagger on herself. Careful, very careful, she used the keen edge to scrape the Lorylim matter off her skin. As she did, the slimy eldritch stuff turned into a fine dust, leaving her skin dry and clean. The single-edged blade looked like simple steel. It was anything but.

What exactly it was, Layla did not know. She did not care in the slightest either. What mattered was that it killed the Lorylim. Wielding it was like wielding their poison. Creatures that should have been too large and powerful for Layla to kill fell to this blade. It craved the **** of the Lorylim, she could feel that. In that, they were united. She was the weapon’s way of getting its own **** and that served her just fine.

Layla had eventually scraped the last of the Lorylim guts off herself. Her clothes were in utter ruination. Conveniently for her, this pod of the hurter of her man had taken residence in an Abyssal store. A store that had, among other things, clothes and food. She needed both.

Puddles of blood turned the carpet into a spongy mess. Uncaring, Layla stepped through it, letting her footprints remain on the clean parts, as she searched for whatever could be scavenged. The marks of her work were all around. Lorylim matter may have turned into dust, but the parts of the corrupted bodies that hadn’t been converted remained scattered about.

It had been a gruesome set of hours. While the Lorylim matter itself was incapable of realizing what Layla was, the drones could use their other senses to verify. It was a constant dance, to avoid detection, to quiet the justified rage in her soul, while she waited for her opportunity to strike.

The Lorylim here had made it relatively easy. They had been inactive, waiting for some kind of order while they remained in pods of sludge. From the looks of it, the owners of the store had either been corrupted or simply attacked. Either way, they were dead now. Layla did not care whether she had liberated them or not. It would have been a side benefit of carving her way through John’s enemies.

‘Maybe you should care about being a good girl a little bit,’ the voice of sense in her brain spoke up.

It was the first time Layla had heard it since she had learned of his parent’s ****. She did not push it away, but embraced it instead, all while letting her obsession remain in charge. They had done their best to teach her to be at least a little reasonable at times. It had stuck. Not enough to overpower her more than warranted prioritizing of everything John, but enough to at least let her pretend to be normal sometimes.

Layla stopped in front of a full body mirror and looked at herself. For all of her attempts to remain unharmed, she was bruised and cut all over from plans that hadn’t gone exactly right. Her hair was matted, her face covered in dried up bits of blood and guts. She leaned in close, using a conjured flame to burn away the biggest blotches. Although she had no unique talent for it, she was still a decent fire mage.

‘I need a shower,’ she thought. Her stomach growled. ‘Food,’ she reminded herself of her primary priority. She hadn’t eaten anything since… how long had it been since she had set out from the boat? She remembered listlessly chewing on some dried meat there. Since then there had only been stabbing.

The memory of the dagger sinking between the ribs of Lorylim made her smirk.

Layla stalked the halls, wary of any nest of corruption she may have overlooked. The barrier and the structure within it were big, but not massive. She eventually found the breakroom, but that had been cleared out of food. All she found there was an electronic clock, still counting the minutes, hours and days. 4th of December 2019, it read.

It had been over 30 hours since she had last eaten or rested in any capacity.

The realization hit her like a ton of bricks. Her throat felt parched, her body ached, her eyes burned and above all was the thought. ‘You can’t go around and mistreat your body like that, what will John think?!’

For all her need for vengeance, she could not die in its pursuit. She needed to come out of this alive, to give him all the grandkids that his parents would have wanted.

Further exploration eventually brought her to the attached living quarters. The Lorylim had left that part of the building untouched, for reasons that Layla could only speculate about. She tossed a selection of clothes that she had grabbed from the shelves over the backrest of a chair.

The oasis of normalcy was… revolting. Layla dwelled in it because she had to, but it did not fit her current mood. The dominant drone in her mind continued.

Izha.

Tiama.

Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab…

The chanting of her own voice in her head mixed with the sound of water drumming on the shower floor. Magical engineering continued to operate as normal, for now. She used the half-emptied soap bottle of whichever woman had lived here. No doubt part of her blood was also clinging to Layla’s skin. She had to scrub for minutes to make sure she was clean.

The knife did not leave her hand even during this time.

Layla heard clattering. Immediately, she moved out of the shower and towards a corner of the room. The water continued to run, while she listened for other sounds. There was the rustling of cloth and a laugh. A moment later, the door to the bathroom opened.

In stepped a woman. She had dark skin and long black hair, in whose shadow red eyes rolled, grown from matted mycelium. Although she was the least changed creature that Layla had witnessed so far, she was still visibly distorted and corrupted. Her arms were bloated and had burst open in places. Flesh tendrils squirmed, like tongues growing from her exposed muscle. The dimensions of her chest were off, the large breasts bloated in a sickening way. Veins beneath her skin shifted, worms wriggling within.

She still wore human clothes, revealing ones at that. A black crop top and matching, tight leggings. Eyes whitened by cataracts drifted through the bathroom. A wide grin stretched her lips to the point of tearing, revealing teeth that were too sharp for a human.

[Inferna AI: https://i.imgur.com/nOq4QaL.png]

Layla remained in hiding, squatted behind the toilet. A poor hiding spot, but it appeared to work well enough to tri-

“I can sense you, drone… and why is it then that I cannot command you?” the dark-skinned host asked.

Layla narrowed her eyes. ‘This one knows what she is,’ she thought, clenching the handle of the dagger harder. Dispatching the Lorylim that had completely taken over the flesh of their victims was a simple task that she took joy in. To kill these messengers of Izha and Tiamat, that was an act worthy of revelling.

The eyes of the woman wandered to Layla. “There you are,” she purred and began to walk. Her nostrils flared, her head tilted, her gait swayed as she approached. “Oh, you’re a fresh one, are you?” she cackled. “Not done transforming yet? I will help you along.”

Layla’s own focus was on the string of crawling maggots that had attached itself to the woman’s spine. It was much thicker in creatures like her than it was when it came to others, a two-way connection that let Izha see what occurred. Such was the matter in theory, but the presence of the dagger in her hands slowed the maggots crawling up the connection to a near halt.

Breath held, the justified stalker surged forwards. The woman giggled, amused at resistance or her own insanity. Any laughter died in an instant when the keen edge of the dagger sliced through the ephemeral thread.

The woman’s mouth opened wide. A black mass stretched from the back of her throat, parting into a layered maw that screamed ****. She kicked Layla’s chest quicker than could be reacted to. There was incredible **** behind the motion, enough to break her ribs and send her flying through the reinforced drywall.

Layla reclaimed her orientation swiftly. She had been trained in combat for years, by the Abyss itself and professionals that had survived it. The aching of her ribs mingled with the other pains of prolonged deprivations of food, water and sleep. All of it was secondary to the simple urge to stab.

The Lorylim creature clutched her head and screamed, “WHERE IS THE MASTER?! WHERE IS THE MASTER?! WHERE IS THE MASTER?!” She threw her arms around, effortlessly turning all that she touched into shards of porcelain, wood, and other materials.

Layla slowly rose to her feet, trusting her instincts, and stalked closer. Bits and pieces that stuck out of the host saw her coming, but failed to instruct the whole. The creature had been cut off from the hivemind and now its parts failed to communicate with each other.

Every flailing motion could have been her end, yet the brunette dove in. It was vengeance or **** for her. She would get back to John, she would talk to him like a woman when she next saw him, she would proudly present him the head of Izha.

The dagger carved through the biceps of the flailing woman. Blood sputtered. Lorylim matter turned to dust. The arm flopped down.

Layla could not dodge the impact of the shoulder that followed. The gap between powers was too vast. The brunette was thrown to the floor. A shard of porcelain sunk into her thigh. She hissed, ripped it out, then immediately repaid the favour. The leg muscles deflated, as the dagger turned corruption between fibres into tiny particles, rising from the wound like smoke.

The woman tumbled to the floor and Layla was immediately on top. STAB! She lamed the second arm, cutting the tendon of the shoulder. STAB! The dagger sunk into the chest. STAB! STAB! STAB! Over and over again, causing the inhuman proportions to deflate until they looked correct and wounds were running red.

‘If you can save her, wouldn’t that be better?’

The intrusive thought cut through the rage just before Layla rammed the dagger through the eye socket of the woman. There was so little dust now and so much blood. Even if she cut away the last of the corruption, there was no guarantee this woman would survive.

‘But she’s the first one I met that looks like she’d have a chance.’

Layla grabbed the parasite protruding from the woman’s mouth. She pulled and pulled at it, until she saw regular flesh at its base. Then, she carved away at it, until the whole screaming thing was just another bit of dust.

That was the tipping point for the corruption that remained inside the woman. What remained was cleansed in a cascade of tracing energy from the dagger. A happy giggle left Layla, a relieved breath followed, and then her consciousness slipped into pain and deprivation.

____________________________________________________________________

Layla woke up in bed. She shot up instantly, looked for her dagger, grabbed it and pointed it at anything and everything around her. There was nothing that moved. She was in the bedroom of the previous inhabitant. Pictures and decorations proof of a different life. There was a distinct lack of shrines to John and a saddening presence of proof that she had taken lives she couldn’t save.

‘I had to do it,’ she thought to herself. Her mind was a little clearer now. It was dark outside, which told her that she had been out for at least eight hours. ‘I had to do it and I liked killing Lorylim… sad that people died though.’

Layla sluggishly moved out of bed. Her limbs were **** to obey the commands of her mind, the lack of food truly manifesting now. The clothes she had picked out earlier had been left on the floor. They were a chaotic mix of darkly coloured things that she found to match her size. She put them on, then made her way to the living room.

The woman sat there, twirling a pen between her fingers. Once Layla entered her field of view, she showed something close to a smile. Her teeth had reverted to something human. The many stab wounds had crusted over and had been cleaned.

“Seems like carving the bad decisions out of you worked,” Layla hissed. She still wasn’t sure how or why the woman had fallen, but she refused to believe someone that powerful just became part of the Lorylim without any input on their own.

The woman did not answer, but she did open her mouth to reveal the absence of most of her tongue. She tapped a piece of paper on the table in front of her. Layla grabbed it and read it.

‘Hi,

Name’s Inferna. First point: thank you for saving me. Wish you did it without half-stabbing me to ****, but beggars can’t be choosers. Thankfully, I am quite sturdy.

I’ve turned out that way because, last year, I met a charming young man that offered to train me… and he did. I rapidly grew stronger after I let him in and apparently that was Izha and apparently I left myself open for takeover in the process. I’m an idiot for thinking there was a free lunch, I guess.

Now that I am out of the hivemind, I want to tell you what I have learned. Izha hates Tiamat. He hates her a whole lot and I think he wants to do something to harm her. No idea what though. If you could help me to find a phone or something, I would like to contact the below number. John Newman, the President, gave it to me after I fought in the Small Lake Tournament, so it should go to some higher-up.’

Layla immediately folded up the paper, to have the number in pocket. It could let her call John directly and that was just something she deserved to have. “I’ll help you,” Layla promised. “But I’ll also keep hunting Lorylim. All of them. Forever.”

Inferna gave that a deep nod.