tra followed the map Judas had given and Claire had confird to the lowermost of the caves.
It was filled with long strands of a material like spider-silk. It was black and white in colour, hanging from the ceiling in long drapes that swayed from the simplest movent. Unequal length and distances between each created a complicated labyrinth. tra’s armoured hand brushed against one of the wispy strands. A claw of her gauntlet parted the fine threads of a silky drape. Then, she clutched it and tried to rip it off the ceiling.
The material proved resilient, stretching under the force, elongating rather than breaking. Rolling it around her palm, the First of Wrath gave it another pull. The strand eventually tore off the ceiling.
“H’ah guhr l’mgehye r’luhhnythog’s r’eagl!”
A pale hand burst out of the drapes, grabbing tra’s head. The fingers felt too small to get a proper grip on the Astrotium plate helt, yet she was ripped off her feet all the sa. All of the world was white and black streaks. Then, her Astrotium helt dented, slamd with horrendous force against the soot-painted wall of the cave.
tra was dragged along the wall. Sparks of the supre tal flew as it was ground away by the abrasion. The light of her green eyes flickered within the dark eye pits of her helt, attempting to make sense of the situation. When that failed, tra went back to the usual solution to her problems: delicious ultra-violence.
Claws ramd into the stone, tra forced her dragging to co to a sudden stop. The hand released her with carefree laughter, retreating into the drapes. Rex Magnar sliced through them a mont later. The Fusional blade cut through the black-white silk with ease. The cut-off ends did not reveal even a hint of a person. The room echoed with the amusent of the creature.
tra let the rage rise as a growl in her throat. The back-spike of her halberd flared, a torrent of plasma rising from the weapon. Guiding the propellent force, the First of Wrath spun around her own axis.
The energy torch set alight the silk it even distantly passed. Within monts, the underground chamber was alight, the wispy material devoured by the rapidly spreading flas. tra kept her halberd at the ready, constantly scanning her surroundings. The front of her helt parted into a set of tal teeth. Heat within her manifested as visible breath in the scorching hot air.
Individual flas reached the ceiling. The conflagration spread rapidly, the fire moving with such speed that mundane eyes would have barely been able to follow the developnt. tra kept scanning for her laughing opponent. “Are you a Tzitzimih?!” the First of Wrath bellowed.
“Ahf' mnahn' kn'a.”
tra recognized the ancient elental tongue, already forgotten by most by the ti she had been created. She recognized it, but she did not understand it. The mocking tone was all she could decipher.
No matter where the First of Wrath looked, there were just falling, burning pieces of silk. They did not pile on the ground, turning to clean ash, often before they had finished falling. “I know you can speak German, at a minimum, so spit it out!”
tra whirled around again, eyes always seeking her opponent. She locked onto a massive eye. No, not an eye – an eclipse inside an eclipse. It was a portal replacing the burned clean ceiling, giving view to concentric rings of distant, bronze fire. The First of Wrath felt her consciousness drift into that vast, filled black.
She forced her eyes shut for one mont, for her rage to win over this eldritch draw. When she opened them up again, a hand hovered by the inner eclipse, caressing the ring of bronze like it was a halo hovering above the woman’s head.
Her pale arm was bandaged. A tattered, colourless robe covered her. Strands of silk were wrapped around her neck as well. She was a good looking woman with long, black hair and a wide smile on her dark, purple lips. Orange eyes in pools of black stared, filled with pity. The irises looked too small for a human.
[Nyala AI: scdn.imgchest/files/fc5137ef26f4.png ]
“Mgah’eya chi uah!”
Ethereal strands of fresh silk fell out of nowhere. They were anchored in thin air, phasing into existence in a matte black gradient. From each of these new drapes hung a chi, swaying and ringing in the wind of the woman’s charge.
tra barely brought her weapon up in ti to block. The raw physical impact made her insides rattle. Rage fuelled her further, rage that this entity would stress out her Emperor, rage that a friend’s realm was threatened, rage at the pure gall of this creature to challenge the First of Wrath.
The canine maw of her helt split even wider. While the woman pressed against Rex Magnar, tra snapped forward. Her teeth sunk deep into the neck of her enemy. Bronze ichor oozed around her teeth, flying upwards into the concentric rings above, drawn in by another gravity.
The woman put a hand flat against tra’s stomach. A lance of… sothing pierced the front of the Astrotium armour. tra disentangled on her own terms, jumping back before a second attack like it could damage her even more. There was no reason she had to do all the heavy lifting anyhow.
“[Annihilation].”
The un-word carved itself into tra’s wolf ears. A wave of anti-magic rippled through the room. The woman’s eyes widened in surprise, an instant before the attack struck. Blacker than the false night above, it ate the colour where it passed, then impacted the creature itself. Where it t the supposed Tzitzimih, the anti-magic stopped, leaving a glowing line from forehead to left thigh of the woman. The skin was gone, the barrier that kept the true nature of the monster concealed.
And she was a monster. In the gap of the skin crawled tendrils of solar rays, curling around one another as waves of aged bronze and unnatural violet. Spasming head to toe, the woman gripped the upper edge of her parted face, pulling at the white skin. It ca off like an expensive mask, glued to the black bones beneath. Skeletal wings pierced the back of her outfit. Her ribcage opened up like a flesh-eating flower made of thorns.
‘We can scratch supposed from that Tzitzimih description,’ she sent a ssage to John, only to find her ssage ending at the edges of her own mind.
The Tzitzimih crouched down, filling her conceptual lungs with air for a horrid screech. It was a raspy sound and yet it was piercing enough to rattle the entire cage. Her head slowly rose as she scread. She bent back down, a second scream ripping from her white teeth. The third scream was so long and shrieking, that it only ended when her spine was bent backwards.
tra took the chance to attack. Her feet hamred on the cave floor. The maw at the front of her helt had been knitted shut again, gone with the power granted by her blessing of rage. A price she was willing to pay for a difference in the plans they had told Judas about and the reality of the situation.
The chis were ringing wildly now, each glowing like a star made of ghost-light. Gorgeous sounds and radiant light, both clashing so intensely with the hideous form of the Tzitzimih.
The eldritch entity suddenly struck a pose, then danced out of the way. Firm steps of deep grace. More instrunts wove into the network. Drums and gongs hovered in the air, bobbing up and down to the whistling rhythm of the black skeleton’s jovial steps.
Lances of inky black dripped from the space above. Nia cut them off with her sword made of manifest nothing. Streams hardened into curled statues, resembling the detached horns of great, black goats.
tra lost sight of the Tzitzimih for a brief mont. Combat instincts had her raise Rex Magnar, the Fusional head of the weapon blocking a kick of the now hooved foot of the entity. She laughed, copies of her laughed, a tidal wave of naked, pale won manifesting from the overhang of her robe.
tra backed off behind an artificial arch created by two overlapping ‘horns’. Forcing the frenzied facsimiles of humanity through the gap made cutting them down so much easier. Swing for swing, thrust for thrust, the First of Wrath diminished their number. Sharp fingernails scratched over her armour, long since repaired by her natural regeneration.
Grasping the space in front of her, tra ripped her hand back. The tide of copies was forced forward, incomplete bodies lting into each other. In a fluid motion she brought Rex Magnar up above her head then brought the halberd down with imnse prejudice. Thunder clapped and the earth rumbled under the dual discharge of the enchantnts. False bodies exploded into a cascade of white sludge and light.
Nia manifested in the opening. Her black blade pierced where the sternum of a human would have been. Nyala responded by pulling in her open ribcage into a deadly embrace. tra was already there. A primitive downwards swing of her gauntlet cracked through the right row of thin bones. Blue and purple particles bled from the stumps, the mana-wounding attribute of her claws working just fine against whatever the nature of this being was. A path to dodge open, Nia simply retreated with two backsteps.
The Tzitzimih giggled, an echoing sound that was thin and forced. She breathed heavily, the tattered robe over her hunched back expanding and contracting notably with every cycle of air.
“Start talking,” tra growled, pointing the tip of her halberd at the enigmatic entity. “What are you? Where do you co from? Who do you serve?”
“Ymg’agar nafl kadishtu,” Nyala responded with another giggle.
It was the final straw for tra’s patience. “Let guide you to the afterlife!” she declared and rushed forward.
The chis had slowed. The drums had fallen and crumbled away into a red dust. The gongs hang lethargically in the air. One drifted into tra’s path. She was determined to just storm right through it. It rang like it had hit sothing hollow when she was stopped by it.
The humiliation of that mont would have flared her powers to maximum, had she been fighting on her own.
A goat hoof slamd into tra’s midriff, forcing her several steps back. The second she was still, her hand disappeared in the space before her, gripping the Tzitzimih by the throat. tra’s arm disappeared back into the portal, yanking Nyala towards her.
One thrust skewered the midriff of the black-boned witch. tra wasn’t sure what she was piercing, what invisible flesh still clung to those bones, but it bled bronze all the sa. She carved the Tzitzimih open all the way to her neck. Lowering her halberd in a swift swing, tra painted a sickle of blood on the ashen floor.
Nyala collapsed to her knees. tra was ready to punch the neck off her shoulders imdiately, but Nia intervened. “One more chance,” the pariah said to the unknown woman. “Talk to us?”
The empty eyes of the Tzitzimih beheld first the pariah, then the First of Wrath. There were no eyes in those sockets, nothing remaining of her face to emote with. All the sa, tra could feel the mocking pity oozing from the female thing. Nothing was said, not even in Ancient Elental.
Nia executed the Tzitzimih herself. A swing of her sword across the neck caused the creature to convulse one more ti. Her existence, bones, robe, chis and all were drawn into a distorted singular point where the pariah had sliced her. Even the false sky above was absorbed, red particles of light sucked into a midnight blue point.
All that remained at the end were the horn-like spires around them.
“Got even the slightest clue what the fuck that was about?” tra’s helt parted, the segnts that made it up folding up to integrate themselves into the collar of her armour. “Because I am more confused than an Assyrian looking at a human right’s declaration.”
As the blonde so often did, she chose to press a kiss on her fellow harette’s lips first. tra reciprocated, it was second nature to her by now. She had not beco tired of having upwards of a hundred kisses a day. The harem life had taught her a whole lot about her own sexuality and liking kissing her fellow won was one of those things.
“The mana around it was disturbed,” Nia finally said. “It reminded of… I don’t quite know.”
“As confused as the rest of us, fantastic.” The wolf-eared berserker scratched the back of her head. Flexing her ntal connection, she reached out to John again. That the connection was re-established was the biggest pointer that they were done down there, disappointing as that was.
It wasn’t as if their enemies owed them explanations in the middle of combat. Neither was it like tra needed a lot of motivation to see how far she could shove Rex Magnar down soone’s throat before they died. Even she, however, liked to have so basic idea of what was going on.
‘Nyala, or at least so Tzitzimih-like thing, is dead,’ the First of Wrath reported. ‘How are things up there?’
‘I think you’ll want to see this,’ John just responded in an upbeat tone. ‘Telling you would spoil the surprise.’
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