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Yet despite all this ruin, the creature grinned. "You dirty little ant..." he growled, the words thick with blood and spite.
He spat. It wasn’t just blood, it was clotted, blackish sludge, like a clot torn from deep within his lungs. "...That almost worked."
His voice didn’t sound painful. It sounded hungry. His wounds quivered. And sothing beneath the ruined skin... began to stir.
Akayoroi’s claws clenched. "Vel. Shae. Naaro from the blade front."
They erged behind her, wounded but standing. Only fifteen of the original fifty remained standing. Many were injured, many buried. Many were paste. All of them were furious.
The Frog-Man charged. And the Queen t him with all her force.
She again launched forward with her Rootstep skill, disappearing through a patch of bark and reappearing behind him. This ti her claws glowing. She slashed his hamstring. Black-green sludge erupted.
He spun with a roar, slamming his bulk backward but Akayoroi ducked, rolled beneath, kicked his gut.
WHUMPF!
He coughed then stumbled.
Shae leapt in from the right, stabbing both her stinger arms into his side.
He grabbed her. Bit through her head.
CRACK.
Her body slumped. "NO!" Naaro scread, rage overtaking caution. She dove forward only to be backhanded midair, her body smashing against the tunnel ceiling with a sickening crack.
Akayoroi tackled the frog again, climbing his back like a spiked shadow. She stabbed both claws into his shoulder blades.
He scread. He flung her off. She hit the wall. Crumpled. Dazed. Her breath faltered. Her antennae twitched. She saw only nine assassins left.
The Frog-Man limped toward her, dripping blood, smiling through shattered teeth. "You fight like a queen."
He towered over her. "So I’ll make you mine, Mother Queen."
He grabbed her by the throat. Lifted her up. Her legs kicked the frog’s belly once. But his tongue extended and slapped her backwards.
The air was heavy. The frog began to regenerate his body. Moist. Reeking of smoke, blood, and broken pheromones.
His charred eye sockets pulsed. A wet squelch echoed as sli oozed from the craters where vision once existed. The surrounding skin twitches violently—ruptured flesh knitting together, cell by cell. A soft mbrane bubbled to the surface, expanding like jelly until it ford a translucent protective lid. Beneath it, milky white pupils spun erratically before stabilizing into glistening orbs of swamp-green, frad by burst vessels and twitching nictitating mbranes.
His split tongue lolled from his mouth like a mangled strip of at which scorched at the edges, twitching spasmodically. But then it convulsed. Frothing pus bubbled along the wound lines as tendrils of muscle wove themselves back together, curling inward like the spirals of a fern. The forked tip hissed and hissed, flesh bubbling and rejoining until the organ throbbed back into its swollen, wet shape. He licked his lips, a long slurp that sared thick saliva across his face.
His chest was a ruin of scorched blisters and gouged muscle, one side flayed open down to raw ribs. But steam rose from the wounds now. A thin film of mucus spread outward, secreted from deep within his glands, sizzling as it made contact with the open air. The mbrane shimred faintly, a greenish translucent sheen sealing the damaged tissue beneath. Veins thick as leeches writhed under his skin, pumping regenerative enzys through his torso.
Cracks in his sternum clicked into place with disturbing precision. The exposed heart, briefly seen fluttering between ribs, vanished behind reforming flesh. Muscle, sinew, and amphibian fat molded themselves into the curve of a chest too wide, too slick, too wrong.
And still it grew.
He swelled with each breath, a grotesque inflation of power. His breath ca in wet rattles, each exhale leaving trails of steam on the bark floor. New boils burst open and closed as if his skin couldn’t decide whether to destroy or remake itself. Even the wart-covered folds on his back slithered like living sacks of fluid, twitching with barely restrained hunger.
"Ahhhhhh..." he crooned, full tongue slithering out again to taste the air, voice oozing pleasure and madness. "That hurt... I liked it..."
He blinked once, his new eyes glistening with hate and hunger, focused on the queen above.
"Your turn, little blade master. Give a big kiss and promise I will let others live."
Akayoroi’s back slamd against the cold tunnel wall. Her limbs twitched, her breathing ragged. The Frog-Man lood above her, his slimy hand wrapped around her throat, lifting her off the ground like a discarded root.
Her armor cracked from the last attack. Her abdon was bleeding. Her assassins had fallen. Only five of them were still standing... just five out of fifty.
Their chitinous bodies trembled, mandibles cracked and limbs scorched. Acid burns streaked across their carapaces, smoke rising from blistered plates. Dark and thick blood dripped from broken joints, pooling beneath their feet like the last remains of a dying legacy. Each breath they took was ragged, shallow, defiant.
They had once been a sisterhood of fifty elite warriors who moved as one, blades of shadow beneath the queen’s will. Now they stood like broken statues amidst the ruin of their ho, surrounded by the corpses of their kin, twisted, crushed.
And behind their agony... was mory. History was repeating itself.
Three years ago, their entire kingdom, a proud, thriving empire beneath the roots of the Obsidian Forest had been erased in flas. The sky had cracked open that day with screams, the tunnels drowned in blood and betrayal. They had bowed in surrender then lowered their weapons and their heads, believing rcy might be granted.
But the enemy had shown none.
They had watched their mothers butchered. Their sisters get crushed. Their eggs, the future of their race, were burned to ash in shallow pits.
They were the only ones who escaped—just fifty elite assassins, fleeing through collapsed tunnels with a teenage princess clutched between them and the last few surviving eggs sealed in their mouths, held like sacred relics.
Since that day, they had sworn an unbreakable vow.
Never again.
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