NOVEL NEXT 66. Interlude: The Beast
The city of white was silent. To a casual observer hailing from Earth, it would appear like a normal, if rather large city from the planet if they didn't immediately recognize the massive walls and the skyline. A closer look would swiftly disabuse them of that notion of normalcy. The buildings were mostly bone-white and the bits of metal and the glass that still remained were also turning into bone in the manner of iron rusting or maybe mold on a wall. Once upon a time, a mere week ago, it would have been known as 'The Angels'. This city that had endured as walls rose against the rising tide and even now, in some manner, without life as the builders of this city knew it, it still endured. Its highrises still glinted in the sun in defiance, even with a radically different color and texture. Despite the end of the world, the city still remained. In their own way, those that had lived on Earth shall live on. The bones always remember. This city had once been great, one of the many settlements that had held some of the architects of this world's ruin from before the Unaugured God even gazed upon it. After all, it was the crime of genocide, the creation and deployment of an ossifying plague to free up land that wasn't sinking or boiling, that had attracted the eye of the God whose domain was being utilized.
None of that was the concern of the bestial quadruped creature stalking its streets. It had a singular all-encompassing task. Hunt down the tens of thousands of its litter-mates scattered across the city and devour them all. Or be killed and devoured by one of them. It didn't matter which occurred to its masters. Whatever would remain would inherit the power, the instincts, and the experiences of them all. The bones always remember. It hunted because it was made to hunt. To pave the way, to be the template for a new bone behemoth to drive this long war forward another day. It had self-preservation but its masters didn't care if it survived or one of its siblings. Only that whatever was left in the end was strong enough. Thus was the edict of the Ossific Archon that had descended upon The Angels and thus was what would be. Once, this city was called 'The Angels', Los Angeles, but now it was but another nameless proving grounds for the great war machine of the Bone Realm.
The beast engaged what looked like a slightly scrawnier version of itself with a leap. The two monsters of bone crashed and rolled into the streets, each trying to tear chunks out of the other and fracture bone into bits. They wrestled on calcified roads and shards of bone flew around them. And yet every injury dealt, every limb broken repaired itself back again from the abundance of Asterite in the air. Things healed but in the heat of combat, they didn't have the time to heal properly. Both of the monsters felt their forms warp and twist as they fought to a death that refused to come. But eventually it did come when one of them healed into a shape that left it incapable of defending itself. The larger beast then proceeded to eat its opponent alive even as it struggled against itself. Bone splintered and cracked and then became powder, powder that then merged with the frame of the larger beast as it grew bigger and its opponent smaller. The strong grew stronger and the weak weaker until there was no division left and only one remained. It relaxed in victory and then froze as it heard something else.
The beast was instilled with a single minded hostility towards its litter-mates but not the other forces of the Unaugured God. It was content to ignore them or even work with them as necessary unless they attacked it first. It was not like anything could rise against the Bonelord's master. Even the most feral of kin knew and understood it in a way no mortal could ever hope to comprehend.
It was only because of this non-hostility that it did not attack the strange creature on sight. It just leapt to a nearby roof when it heard the sound of stilt-like bone feet clattering. The beast watched in curiosity as the strange thing moved furtively from one building to another, keeping its head down and looking around. It cocked its head in confusion as the thing caught its reflection in a puddle and shuddered. The quadruped didn't have the mental capacity to understand what caused it but it too thought the creature looked disgusting. It shared the general body plan of [BONEWARRIORS] but it was not one. Elvenoid. The clean fluidity and strength of animate bone at the strange thing's feet flaked and wavered as its gaze rose until its top was a soft pinkish substance with fine dark feelers coming out of it. At least the quadruped thought those were feelers. They looked a bit too fine and crowded. Hair! Memories engraved deep in marrow whispered. Those were hair.
The strange creature held a sharpened piece of bone in one hand and slashed at the wrist of the other. It watched as a cut appeared and then automatically healed. The Bonelord's essence swirling in the atmosphere disallowed it to die. It slumped.
The quadruped watched the strange creature's antics for a bit longer. What even was this thing? And why was it attacking itself? Was it defective? Then should it end this aberration now so that its resources could be better used elsewhere? No. The beast didn't want to accidentally derail the Archon's plans if it was not defective. That would be hurting its master and that was unthinkable.
Somehow the creature seemed to sense that the beast was watching it and looked up. The beast managed to barely dart away from sight before it could be seen but the strange thing was spooked nonetheless and soon disappeared within the buildings. How strange.
For the next few days, the beast would come and spy on the strange creature between its hunts. The creature thought it was so careful but it almost never noticed the beast watching it. Almost. Sometimes the beast allowed it to catch glimpses from afar.
With each passing day the thing grew more and more furtive and erratic. The beast watched as it tried to saw off its neck. The beast didn't know what kind of evolution the creature was trying to force but it didn't interfere. It was content to watch. It sometimes jumped off heights to push its durability too, whatever litter-mates it had to devour likely required forcing an evolution. Something to fight a creature that could fly and grab things to drop from them from lethal heights perhaps? Amidst all that, it seemed to be searching for something in the city. And then one day, it found it.
The beast watched as the thing broke into a fortified building and came out clutching a spherical object. It pulled off a tab on it and wrapped its arms around it as if hugging it. It rocked to and forth while the spherical object beeped once and then twice. Memories engraved in bone remembered; the beast realized that it had to get away or it would die.
Powerful leaps created distance as it meant from roof to balcony to street to the top of a now defunct vehicle to balcony to street. It landed behind a building and awaited the explosion. It was not even close to the cataclysmic blast instincts feared. A distant explosion and a minor shockwave of free Asterite.
Curiosity got the better of the beast and after a few moments of waiting for any subsequent blasts, it slinked back to where the strange creature had been.
Two things were different about it. For one the bone had subsumed more of the fleshy substance. The second change was less obvious to anyone who hadn't been watching the creature for so long. Usually the creature was always moving, always trying something new but not now. It had simply stopped doing those things, instead choosing to stare into the darkness silently otherwise.
That time the beast didn't try to hide from the creature. Instead it landed down heavily on the ground and stared at the creature, daring it to approach. The creature bolted up, tense.
The beast noticed that even though the creature was not in a stance for combat, it clutched the sharpened bone blade tightly. How odd. Could it not tell that by the time it could even raise the blade, it would be shattered into bone chunks if the beast desired?
The beast approached, wary despite how weak the other creature looked. Looks can be deceiving. It hadn't survived against its siblings for so long by being careless. And still the creature intrigued the beast far too much for it to not come down. It approached hesitantly and the creature spoke, spoke in a tongue that was not a part of the knowledge base the Ossific Archon had instilled in her minions. But bones remember. And bones had been recycled and memories had been refused. Something had known this language and the beast had devoured it when it had yet to become aware.
"You are not crazy like the rest, are you?" The creature spoke. The beast just stared, empty eye sockets trained at it. The creature shook its head, muttering to itself how it obviously was not. Then it spoke again, voice strange. Strange. And strangely hopeful.
"Are you going to kill me?" The beast shook its head before jerking. It had heard something else. Another sibling. The beast galloped off, the directive came first. The oddity might still be there when it was done.
The sibling was strong. It had evolved beyond the basic caniform to sport three heads with snapping jaws lined with teeth each the size of the beast's paw. Three vertebral tails swished behind it and wings like blades emerged from its shoulders. The sibling rumbled a challenge and the beast met it in a whirlwind of claws and teeth.
Even from the first impact, the beast knew it was not going to win. The sibling was at least a whole tier above it and it knew how to leverage its higher stats. Claw swipes crushed bones and bites broke its body into pieces and just like it had been wearing down its weaker kin, it too was being worn down. Still the beast struggled, refusing to give in. Every clash was a loss, every regeneration slower, and yet it endured. Instincts insisted on a battle that the body could not win but it too inflicted damage. They struggled against each other until the sibling flipped the beast on its back and pinned it down. Maws snapped close with the self-assuredness of a victory and the beast was lesser than it had ever been. The sibling grew again and repeated the motion. Over and over again until the beast only hung on by a thread.
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Then, everything changed. The sibling collapsed on top of the beast with a hefty crunch, skull shattered and slowly reforming. And behind it stood the strange creature, heaving with a baton clutched in its hands. The beast didn't wait to be grateful and attacked the recovering sibling with as much strength as it could muster. Another bone crushing swing from the creature landed on the sibling at the same time and it crumpled under the dual assault. Even with the strange creature helping it and the sibling already heavily injured, it took nearly an hour to finally put down the sibling for good.
Once it was dead, the beast rested, eyeing the strange creature with wary eyes. After all, it had just helped kill the strongest sibling the beast had encountered so far. The creature didn't seem to share that wariness and held out a limb over one of the beast's now three skulls and rubbed it. It bared its teeth, sharpened into fangs that pierced its fleshy pinkness to release red liquid dried into black sediment.
"Hi, I'm Erin. Do you have a name?" The beast shook its head. "Hmmm, how about Hellhound? Do you like that name?" The beast stared impassively, it didn't care. It just wanted to rest and almost wished the strange creature would go away. It didn't, and the beast felt glad for some reason it couldn't articulate to even itself.
For the next few weeks, the creature — Erin and the beast worked together to hunt down more of its siblings. With each kill, each litter-mate devoured, the beast named Hellhound grew farther away from the canid frame it had started with in favor of a quadruped serpentine form that could dart in and out of danger instantly. And with each kill, Erin seemed to be just a bit livelier and emotive in a way that the beast didn't understand.
Around a month after Hellhound and Erin teamed up, the quest arrived accompanied by a dead Bonedrake crashing into an outer wall like a flaming meteor.
\\\\Generating quest
\\\\Claim the Bonedrake frame for yourself before your siblings can
\\\\REWARDS: Bonedrake frame integration
\\\\Failure will result in consumption
The quest didn't have the option of refusal, not that Hellhound could have refused even if it wanted to. Any sibling that integrated it would be more than capable of devouring it in moments.
The crash had shaken the city and bone structures had lurched dangerously but nothing broke. Erin and the beast approached the crash site cautiously, sticking to the shadows of buildings with eyes peeled. A crater awaited them with a smoking Bonedrake laying smashed at its center. Wisps of glowing gold covered the crater's floor.
Some of the greater siblings strode in the open, smashing their lesser kin with singular powerful motions. Hellhound bristled, some of them were beyond even it and yet peace was anathema to it like the Bonelord's power was anathema to flesh and blood life.
A particularly impressive specimen, having entirely discarded the canine form for a heavyset quadruped with an enormous front-facing horn, walked low to the ground, almost to the point of scraping at it with every step charged and gored clean through a sibling four times its height. The taller one fell and before it could heal, the charger tore into it again and again, uncaring about the lesser siblings that were crushed underneath as they tried to stand in its way.
Elsewhere another kin, a land squid wrapped others in vertebrate tentacles lined with hooks and smashed them until they were pulverized bone.
Everywhere the eye could see, Hellhound's kin were appearing. Hellhound would have joined the fray already but Erin held it back. If not for Erin, Hellhound would have given into its instincts already. It shook its head.
"No, let them weaken each other first."
The first target was another caniform that had been flung out of the battle unfolding at the basin of the crater. As siblings focused on the more immediate threat, Hellhound and Erin circled the crater and picked off stragglers and the injured. Each revolution around the crater made Hellhound stronger but eventually something noticed them and decided that Hellhound was a threat. A hexapedal antlered wolf-thing ambled forward and swiped with a claw that ripped open gauges on the bony streets. Hellhound had Darted away by the time it had even attacked. It paused when it didn't feel the resistance of Hellhound's body that it expected. By then Erin had already leapt on its back and was breaking its skull open with powerful swings of the baton. The creature tried to reach the pest on its back but its limbs had healed to fight off feral kin, not what Hellhound suspected was a repurposed human latched on to it. With some time, it would have adapted but Hellhound didn't give it that time.
Joints gave way when Hellhound rammed into them, the head drooped and hung low when Erin broke the neck and eventually, the thing fell. Hellhound's instincts told it that it was now strong enough to fight but it ignored them and devoured the fallen while watching its kind fight and kill. The horned charger was restrained by the squid's tentacles but it was still charging around madly, the squid being dragged behind it in a way that was hurting it a lot more than it was the charger. Elsewhere, two almost identical kin were locked in a wrestling match.
Eventually the squid's tentacles broke from the strain, individual vertebrae raining like pearls and it was left behind. Hellhound made its move. The squid, broken from the damage the charger had inflicted upon it, never saw it coming.
By now it was apparent that the charger was going to be the greatest obstacle between Hellhound and the Bonedrake. Or so it thought until a snake-like slug made of countless tiny bone pieces wrapped around the charger and crushed it into a pulp that was then promptly absorbed. Hellhound had only tempered its instincts because of Erin. The slug had mastered them. It had been waiting. It had been seeping into the crater in the confusion and the scattered bones that had been broken off, devouring in silence until now.
The slug pulled up to its gigantic height and Hellhound knew that there were no other siblings left. This was the end of this trial. The slug hissed, tendrils just like that of the squid emerging from a mouth that was a whirlpool of grinding death. Even larger tendrils covered the creature's length. It shot forward and the beast understood that the slug was going to attempt to swallow it whole.
The battle would have ended right then, if Erin had not tossed something into that open maw. Something that exploded and dazed the thing long enough for Hellhound to leap at its back and rip off several tendrils. The tendrils regenerated in seconds. The slug ignored the beast on its back struggling against its tendrils and shot towards Erin, the now obviously bigger threat after that attack. Erin didn't attempt to run or dodge, it simply stood as the creature reared its head.
It opened wide and moved to end the strange creature. And then it simply stopped. Erin bared bloody fangs again.
"You can't kill me either, can you?"
The slug hissed fury before trying to coil itself around Erin. Yet again, as soon as it came with a certain proximity threshold, it froze. Erin sighed.
"Fine. I am not allowed to die then. You however, are. So, let's just make it quicker for both of us, alright?" The slug didn't answer but between Hellhound's hit and run tactics and Erin standing as an invincible vanguard, the slug fell. And with that, it and the bonedrake were both taken.
The system chimed its victory hymns.
\\\\Quest completed
\\\\Bonedrake frame granted
\\\\Quest completed
\\\\Bone Behemoth ascension frame granted
Instincts screamed for evolution but the beast restrained itself. Uncontrolled evolution would result in a substandard tier up. It would have to be a carefully drawn out process. It sagged in exhaustion, wresting control of the wild need to grow for a moment. Erin turned to look at Hellbound, mouth opening silently.
Then the sun fell from the sky.
The world groaned and creaked as the being of blinding gold descended from the heavens. It fell quickly and yet agonizingly slowly before coming to a stop, hovering in the air as strong winds carrying barely visible pale Asterite violently buffeted everything below. Hellhound dug its claws into the ground and Erin grabbed it in turn to hold on. Skyscrapers and arcologies bent and curved towards and around the golden one as if simultaneously bowing in deference and shading it with their own beings. The crater deepened and expanded while the displaced material formed a raised circular rim, a boundary around it.
In a moment, the city around them had transformed into a stage for the being shining imperiously from above. Things like structural integrity and the laws of physics fell to the wayside as the mere presence of the Ossific Archon strengthened Asterite-tainted bones to be far above such pedestrian concerns. The winds ceased all at once.
The thing, clad in the Eternal Golden Barrier of the Bonelord's Chosen, looked like a skeletal dragon, an elvenoid and something else that Hellhound didn't know all at once. It didn't speak but concepts and thoughts formed unbidden in Hellhound's mind nonetheless. The Ossific Archon seemed pleased. Almost like it was sending congratulations.
Then Erin tossed an explosive at it. It arced through the air and then simply disintegrated into dust. The Archon cocked its head in confusion before a sense of disappointment rolled off it. Another quest came and instincts rewrote themselves.
\\\\Generating quest
\\\\Kill and consume the failure
\\\\REWARDS: Elevenoid Class Factor with Earth survivor class weights, manual class selection unlocked, True Awakened trait
\\\\Failure will result in consumption
Once again Hellhound had to kill. One part of it felt something it would later recognize as sadness but it could not disobey an Archon even if it wanted to. And it didn't want to. It was the singular animating drive etched in every single particle of its frame. Serve Aster and his greater servants.
Erin, on the other hand, was unable to move at all, its body rebelling in retaliation for Erin's rebellion. It struggled for a moment before calm acceptance and a hint of something like relief took over its features as Hellhound turned to it.
The least Hellhound could do was make it quick.
When Hellhound tasted Erin's bones and what they remembered, it understood. Erin was not like Hellhound. It, she, had been a denizen of this planet from before the invasion. She was a natural, not a construct for war. A natural that had been spared for the classes that a survivor of a fallen planet would earn; spared but not left whole. She had been trying to free herself through death even as Asterite was changing her body and twisting her mind to become a tool for those that had ended her world. She had felt it growing every day, whispering in her violated mind that the world after the invasion was better, that Aster's God was right. There was anger there, and also guilt about how the world had been before the invasion and she had been relatively sheltered as people starved and died en masse just outside the walls. But above all, there was dread as with each passing day, she had felt her thoughts drift towards ends not her own and found herself caring less about it. That final act of spite had taken all the will she could have possibly mustered.
Woman and weapon's memories mingled like ink in water, and Hellhound saw that they weren't that incompatible after all. Usually, Hellhound didn't take everything but for Erin, it remembered her whole life. Every single moment, no matter how mundane or inconsequential, every emotion associated with them, no matter how alien. Every relationship, every wish, every weakness.
The quest ended in success just like the two before it. The Ossific Archon was pleased.
Hellhound howled in victory, but also in mourning. It howled in triumph and in lamentation. Its body blossomed into something unimaginably greater after three full quests of banked evolutionary upgrades but its thoughts were occupied by its short-lived partnership with the human. It couldn't forget Erin even if it wanted to now, not after reliving her entire life as if that were its own.
After all, the bones always remember.