The Black Garden: Chapter 4

Music: IVOXYGEN - LIFESTYLE (SKELER X SAGE RMX) (https://youtu.be/J9ucYne7aa0?si=4aeXvlZARmTQLHLP )
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I exploded from the doorway at as the first demon bounded into view. It overshot my position slightly, skidding to a halt, and met the edge of the Long Hunt. The blade seared through tentacles and bone alike, swift, surgical strokes reducing the demon into a trail of writhing chunks. Two more surged up over the edge of the platform toward me and met the same fate, sliding back into the darkness with severed legs and ruptured hearts. The wave of demons that followed them were smaller, barking distorted shrieks of rage as they used claws and tentacles to climb the walls in all directions. The first to leap at me was impaled, yelping and snarling. A graceful arc of wafer-thin blades flickered out from my back, cross-sectioning half a dozen mutated dogs into ribbons so fine they fluttered.

A barbed tentacle broke through the active shield and plunged into the meat of my upper arm, pumping flesh-eating toxins into the tissue: I whirled away from it and tore it free. With a thought, I cut the pain and constricted the blood vessels in that area to stop the bleeding. The air was now thick with the harsh chemical reek of demonic ichor, and something else. Endorphins. Testosterone, oxytocin, adrenaline... the confined underground space was filling with the same aphrodisiac cocktail the husk had used to roofie me.

"Hey! Guess what? I can be high AND horny AND still kick your ass!" I yelled down the tunnel. A husked dog leaped for my throat; I hacked its head off and twisted to let the corpse sail past me, tumbling to the platform to writhe and flail. "I take drugs like this for fun!”

A garbling shriek rang from the darkness, followed by a shuddering, slithering sensation through the earth. The Violator. I lightly hopped and dodged the patches of slippery ichor on the ground, sprinting down the platform. The demon was on the move.

I bounded down to the tracks, Tsariel lending me momentary manifolds to absorb the shock of the impact and continue running, right into the dense cloud of narcotic gas. The angel's presence separated it ahead of us, giving me a small space in which to breathe. A tentacle as long and thick as a tree trunk burst around the curve ahead of me, slamming into the opposite wall. Another followed, clawing at the ceiling, ripping sputtering tube lights and tiles in a rain of ceramic, glass, and plaster dust. The Violator screeched as it broke its camouflage and surged into view: twenty tons of slimy, armored black-and-pink flesh filled the train tunnel, little more than a mass of writhing tentacles surrounding a round, fleshy core. Several human victims embedded next to its mouth flopped lifelessly from side to side. Their bodies were sunk into the demon to the waist, covered in thick black tubules that plunged into their eye sockets. The demon blindly oriented on me, the lobes of its mouth peeling back like a starfish.

A pressure wave of pure, unfiltered hatred rolled over me like a thundercloud, a tidal wave of raw psionic loathing. The demon blasted sensory illusions of the things it would do to me when I failed. It would capture me and milk me of my life-force. It projected an image of my body helpless, entrapped by its crushing power. Primal, ape-like screams of agony and ecstasy pulled from a bloody raw throat, while the demon wrung every drop of pleasure and pain from my nervous system. Humanity would be conquered, our disgusting, fragile shells birthing legion upon legion of demons for the cause. Clean. Elegant. Powerful. Unstoppable demons. And me... I would be taken to its master?

Huh. That one was new.

"Don’t you guys ever get bored with the fascist breeder fantasy?" Wreathed in a floating cat’s cradle of glistening hyperfilament wires, I sprung forward, lightly leaping onto one thrashing tentacle. I used it for leverage and kicked off it to fly right at the central mass of the demon. “Every single fucking demon babbles the same fucking bullshit.”

The Violator belched a battery of flechettes as it continued to pull itself away down the tunnel. They were snared by the wreathe of hyperfilaments, either falling to pieces or deflected from my blade. The Long Hunt sunk into the base of one tentacle, slicing through tendon and artery. Pressurized black blood painted the ceiling as the Violator screeched with rage. I felt wind to my right, dove away, but something else caught me and slammed me at the opposite wall with massive force. The only thing that saved my ass was the narrowness of the space. A dull wet crack, and stabbing pain radiated through my upper back as I bounced to the ground, coughing, struggling to get my wind back. The hyperfilaments caught another round of flechettes, but the Violator wasn't sticking around to see if it had killed me. It was fleeing, squeezing its bulk through the subway tunnel like an octopus.

"No you fucking don't!" I tasted blood as I staggered up and flexed the muscles through my chest and back, grunting. There was another pop, the muscles manipulating to reposition and then seal the broken pieces of my right scapula. It was still healing as I broke into a limping run after the demon, teeth locked, jaws clenched. After a couple seconds, the limp was gone, and I was back into my stride. Wordlessly, I relayed my plan to Tsariel.

We fell on the demon's largest tentacle like a velociraptor. I rammed the full length of the Long Hunt into the thick rubbery flesh, wrapped in coiling, graceful arcs of ephemeral metal. Tsariel's spidery wings branched out from the exoskeleton, ejecting from it to anchor into the sides of the tunnel. The Violator didn't realize until it was too late - its momentum dragged the sword through the entire length of the limb, splitting it from base to tip. Its screech of agony filled the narrow space, and it suddenly lost a lot of its ability to propel itself forward. But it was almost at its destination: there was a cavernous space maybe fifty feet away.

I was willing to bet it was the station's concourse, the place it had made its nest. We weren't going to kill it before we got there. But we could sure as hell even the fight.

I focused on the two halves of the now-useless tentacle, gasping as pain wracked my belly. I was down another half-pound of bodyweight, and my stomach roiled with hunger. I irritably suppressed the hormonal signals and pain and triggered a cytokine storm in the demon's damaged tissues. Another wail pierced the gloom as massive inflammation ripped through the Violator's stolen flesh, causing it agonizing pain.

The mouth ahead of us opened again, gaping as the demon suddenly changed course and lunged for me, radiating pure, undiluted rage. It drove the spined lobes of its maw right into the hanging cloud of hyperfilaments, slicing itself into ribbons as Tsariel and I, working in perfect sync, tightened them into a cat's cradle of exquisitely sharp wires. The demon seemingly shrugged it off, spraying a cone of corrosive liquid. Some of it hit my leg and slid off the nanoweave, spitting and hissing. Wherever it splashed my bare arms and face, it bubbled and burned. I could feel the thin flesh of one cheek sear away, baring bone and teeth.

Tsariel looped strands of filament around the hilt of the Long Hunt just before I flung it, end over end. It hit the demon right at the back of its stupid pussy mouth, sinking in to the hilt. The demon let out a new sound: high, shrill, even desperate as it thrashed backwards and out into the open space behind. As it retreated, I gestured for the angel to exert tension on the wires - they yanked the sword free again and back into my hand, tearing tissue and ichor as it did.

The Violator undulated out into the open space, flopping awkwardly. It had lost two smaller tentacles and was dragging the rapidly-necrotizing split tentacle behind it. Blood drooled from the ruin of its maw as it whirled around on me, shrieking as it ejected urchin-like spines from every surface. The two humans were long gone, absorbed to fuel its regeneration.

“Just fucking die! Because I won’t!” Hyperfilaments whistled and flared with momentary flashes of light, slicing flechettes and severing dozens of thin barbed whips that coiled out of the demon's mass. But despite my angry ranting, I could feel myself starting to slow down. Half my face was gone – I was trying not to think about it. My immune system was screaming at me. I was burning more energy than I had to deal with the agony of multiple serious injuries.

'Find the core. I will guide your strike.' Tsariel's presence was deadly calm.

Cold air dragged along bone as I zigged, zagged, and dashed forward, seeking the location of the core. I'd hoped to hit it with the harpoon move, but this Violator was somehow smart enough to have its core somewhere other than its center mass. Direct sight couldn't reveal it, nor could anything else. A demon's core was composed of exotic non-baryonic matter, invisible and intangible to baryonic beings, such as humans. If you somehow managed forcibly strike a demonic core with any matter-based weapon, the resulting explosion would be powerful enough to delete the entirety of Seoul and a good part of the Korean Peninsula.

There were two ways handle demon cores. Option one was to inflict enough damage to the demon's matter-based body to expose the core. Once revealed, the antimatter core came out of superposition. Its existence became a paradox, forcing it to invert back into the Abyss - where it would definitely remember you the next time it breached. The second method was to hit the core with a weapon that was, itself, comprised of antimatter.

I used lifesight to search for an absence: an odd, blank space within the demon that didn't serve any function. I had to keep fighting while I searched, parrying blows and dodging a storm of tentacles that smashed the station platforms to each side. But as it hauled itself up into the air, I spotted it. The void in the rounded, fleshy body of the Violator. It was three inches or so around.

Tsariel's presence intensified as I burned my last disposable calories and caused the flesh over the Violator's core to forcibly erupt. Hyperfilaments cut it away even further as I leaped up and the blade of the Long Hunt briefly vanished, leaving only a hilt in my hands. The air distorted around it, gravity bending away from the unseen blade. It took all of Tsariel's focus and creativity to manipulate physics this way, reality itself fighting us as we plunged the sword deep into the startled Violator's heart.

The demon didn't even get a final scream as the antimatter blade snapped off into the core and it imploded, sucking the demon's body into itself before winking out of existence. Somewhere in the Abyss, an explosion with the force of a dozen nuclear bombs went off. I hoped it took a hundred million of the fuckers back to hell.

Blood streamed from my eyes, from my nose and mouth as I stumbled down to one knee, fighting to breathe. I was burning with fever, sweating and trembling. I had so little bodyfat left that I could see the striations of muscle and veins through my skin. My kidneys were throbbing with distant, suppressed pain, bladder burning and fit to burst. If I pissed now, I knew it would be straight up blood. I was thinking about trying it anyway when I heard a snarl from overhead.

Slowly, I turned my head to see more of the small Warriors padding along the edge of the platform, yelping to each other like hunting hyenas. A feeling of deep resignation washed over me as I tried to get up to my feet and stumbled back down to hands and knees.

The first of the Warriors dropped gracefully to the tracks, sniffing in my direction. More and more of them, still wet from their spawn capsules, crawled and leaped down to surround me. Like the Violator, they could psionically project their emotions. The entire pack was taking their time, burning with cruel amusement as they began to slowly close in. One of them lunged forward, nipping and snarling, only to collapse with a yelp as Tsariel's hyperfilaments slashed it apart. It sent the rest of the mutated dogs scattering, but even channeling that small manifold took its toll on my body. A fresh bolus of blood welled up behind my teeth, damaged lungs burning on every breath. Tsariel’s presence was a dim roar in the back of my mind – but the angel seemed strangely unconcerned.

"You guys have no idea how happy I am to be here." I spat at the demons. Blood pounded in my ears, fingers almost automatically clenching around the hilt of the Long Hunt as I rolled onto my ass and leveled it at the nearest dog. “I get to kill you fuckers to the last fucking second.”

The first hounds to lunge in took the sword to the face. I split the head of one and exsanguinated another, only to fall as a dense canine body tackled me from the side. Hyperfilaments constricted around it, slicing it apart, but me going down drove the entire pack into a feeding frenzy. I kicked and chopped, vaguely aware of having one of my boots pulled off, fangs ripping into the flesh of my arm and injured face. The world shrunk to a narrow funnel of writhing canine bodies, flashing teeth, and tentacles.

There was a weird buckling, screeching sound from the other end of the concourse. The air of the station seemed to wobble... and then a dozen Warrior heads exploded in a shower of gore. The corpses tottered a few steps and collapsed across and around me, spasming, only to go flying as a forest of white-hot spines ejected from the earth. They skewered yelping, confused demons and lifted them eight feet into the air before shattering. Gunfire rang out through the tunnel, the pulsing sound of our very own Halcyon ADSM rifles. Roars and snarls, moving away from me, drifted to my ears as my vision swam.

“Ah.” My thoughts felt like bubbles, rising and drifting away. “Good. Squad made it.”

I found myself relaxing, and dared to close my eyes. Just for a second. When I opened them, I had a mask over my face. Frigid air crawled over the exposed bones of my face. Two helmeted, visored shadows hovered above. Beyond them I saw a brilliant column of light opening up, beckoning me. It was warm, and I was cold. I started to move toward it, only to halt as the light split around a towering, ethereal figure. Tsariel, leaning out of the light. She was made entirely of metal, her face hidden behind layers of razored veils. Six impossibly intricate wings stretched across the threshold like spiderwebs as she reached toward me, placing long, bladed fingers against my chest.

"Not yet." Her voice was like the whisper of a scalpel parting skin. "Not for some time, Seung Min-joon. You are needed."

"This is slave labor,” I grumbled. “I'm an old man and I just died doing what I love. Let me go.”

She gently, almost fondly pushed me away. "When it is time, you will be welcomed with loving embrace. Go. Your friends are worried."

I was slowly, inexorably being drawn back toward my burned out body. “I’m going to complain to the union about this.”

Her Presence rippled with laughter.

Cold. I was cold, and felt like a hole had been pushed into my chest. As I came to, my ATLAS informed me I had half a dozen broken ribs and my kidneys were starting to shut down. Oxygen trickled into my nose.

"Z!" One of the shadows had his helmet off. Strong, craggy face. Tattooed scalp, big teeth. Gaius. "He's alive! Blackie, get the damn stretcher!"

I tried to speak. A weird croaking sound was about all I could manage. Other voices cried out from deeper into the tunnel. “Clear!”

"Thank God, he lives." Lilia's thickly accented voice sounded from my right. She was stringing a drip along a hastily-assembled frame. "Z, can you hear me? I am inducing a medical coma and we are evacuating. You are very near to death."

"Oh," I managed to rasp. "Great. I love coma."

"You actually soloed a goddamn G-2 Violator, you unhinged chihuahua." Gaius cradled my arm, keeping it elevated as Lilia slipped a catheter into a vein on my forearm.

"'Course." I managed to crack a weak, half skeletal grin. "I'm a giant-killer, baby."

"You’re a nutcase. You have a Napoleon complex."

I wanted to agree with him, but I couldn't find my mouth. A warm feeling replaced the pain, pulling me backward, into the ground. The light, the hovering presence of my angel, the warmth of my friends... they pulled away, leaving nothing but the darkness and one lingering thought.

Why had the Violator wanted to capture, rather than kill?

Next Chapter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/black-garden-5-118204039