NOVEL NEXT Chapter 51: Ambush
Steel punches through the center of my back and out from where a human heart would be. The sensation of being stabbed in the chest is getting uncomfortably familiar.
Lethal in a human. Still lethal for me, but not immediately.
Instinctively, I try to return to my Bloodpath, but I find I can’t. The world obstinately remains in shades of grey and beige, and my form remains ever so humanoid. My skin tingles, and I’m reminded of the brief moment before my dream-copy tore me to pieces by ripping the blood from my veins.
I kick backwards as hard as I can, and my foot makes contact with something. A human body.
The utter lack of sound is disconcerting. I’ve been able to adapt to a lot of situations. This should be no different, but I guess I haven’t realized how much I’ve grown to rely on my senses. Without the accompanying grunt of impact, I can’t tell if Rin’s actually suffered any damage from my kick.
It gets me enough leverage to shove myself off the knife, which is how I learn that the blade is serrated. Rin’s knife glows softly as it tears through me, and she manages to twist the dagger even as I slide off it.
More blood than usual geysers forth from the open wound, and it takes me a moment to figure out why.
My Shape Blood is working slower than it should. I can’t control it well enough or with enough strength to plug the wound like I normally do, and my life drips out of me pump by pump. I put a hand to my chest to stem the flow, soaking my hand in crimson immediately, but I can’t stop the entry wound in my back from bleeding.
The pristine white bodysuit I’m wearing gets an impromptu splash of color.
I spin my head around, relying on my thankfully untouched Mind (Speed) to give me time to process things.
This is an ambush, and a cleverly plotted one at that. I knew there was something going on with these people, but I thought it would’ve been some vested interest in the contents of the laboratory here, not a plan to attack me out of the blue.
I hear no sound, and I assume nobody else can, so I can’t call out to Adrian or Sierra. Something they’re doing is dampening my skills, and I don’t know what it is. It could be the earplugs or the bodysuit or even the lingering effects of the clearly magical dagger that Rin’s stuck me with.
On top of it all, they got the first strike in. I got one in return, and I can see Rin’s doubled over, but I don’t know how much that matters.
With my free hand, I draw a knife from the bodysuit’s belt. Just to check if it’s available, I try to use Misty Mirage.
The shadow of my blade travels a single foot out from my body before dissolving into harmless fog.
Great. So my skills are nearly completely shut down.
Simon continues to stare at me without a single emotion expressed on his face, while I think Rin is actually laughing even as my blood stains her face and bodysuit.
Energy swirls within me with nowhere to go as Relentless, the trait that only applies under what the system terms “impossible odds”, finally triggers.
My traits are still intact, then.
That means my mostly-unused Voidtouched trait can still bypass defenses.
I stop holding my blood in and charge towards Rin.
Simon remains unmoving at the edge of my vision, but Rin laughs and laughs and laughs, not a single decibel of it reaching my ears.
I try to remove the earplugs with my bloodstained hand. Even with the blood, my grip should be stable enough to take them out, but one touch reveals that they’ve sealed themselves to the inside of my ears somehow, and I can’t Shape Self to change that with the suppression on.
Darkness creeps at the edge of my vision, but I ignore it, returning my free hand to stemming the flow of my blood.
Rin isn’t far from me. Three quick steps take me to her, and I lunge towards her with all the power I have in my body, using Relentless power to lend my dampened Knifefighting skills some strength.
The woman who stabbed me throws her head back in utterly silent laughter as my strike connects with her vulnerable, exposed throat—except it doesn’t.
Rin vanishes once more, and then a knife plunges into my lower back and punches back out. The pain is sudden and sharp and completely unnecessary, and I’m swiveling around even as the attack connects.
She disappears before I can even finish turning, and she reappears directly in front of me, her dagger already poised to plunge into my belly.
This time, though, my barely-functional Knifefighting enables me to see the course of the attack, and I redirect my momentum in a single instant, turning her blade aside with practiced ease.
With my free hand, I punch her.
At least, I try to.
For my efforts, I’m awarded with Rin vanishing once more.
I stab backwards blindly the moment she disappears from my sight, and the lack of defense costs me. Another strike lands solidly in my sternum.
This time, though, I feel flesh part under my knife, and I pump as much power into it as I can, directionlessly pushing out my Relentless-boosted magic power into my knife.
When I manage to turn around, I’m bleeding from six separate wounds—three entry, three exit—so I stop holding onto them as much. I need to focus on offense to have a shot at winning here.
To my surprise, Rin doesn’t immediately attack. She’s dropped her glowing blade on the ground, both of her hands clutching at a patch of dark crimson spreading at her gut. Her face, exposed thanks to the different type of suit they wear, hangs in a shocked expression of pain. I think she might be screaming.
A surge of vindication pulses through me, but I remind myself that this fight isn’t over yet. She might be halfway down, but Simon hasn’t even started to move yet.
And then the blood spilling out through her clenched fingers starts to reverse. The growing red stain begins to shrink instead, leaching out of the pure white of the rest of the bodysuit, and Rin sucks in a breath.
I dive for her blade, but it’s already too late.
Half a second later, five separate blades dig into my neck, penetrating to the bone and gripping it.
No, not blades.
Fingers.
My vision darkens further.
Rin readjusts her grip on me, tracing bloody rivers through my flesh as she turns me to face her.
Her wound is gone completely.
Up close, she truly does look deranged, which means a lot coming from me. Dangling dyed-purple hair frames her pale face, highlighting eyes filled with mirthful malice. The woman’s mouth moves, but once more, I hear nothing.
She must realize that I can’t tell what she’s saying, because I see her shoulders slump in annoyance. Rin turns her head, addressing someone else. Simon, I assume.
I try to struggle free, but her grip is iron and I’m losing strength rapidly. Relentless has a cap, it seems, and that cap is severely reduced by the apparent shutdown of most of my skills. It doesn’t help that I’m losing enough blood to kill a human every few seconds.
“—turn the damn thing off, Sy! It can’t be that hard!” Rin shouts. The sudden return of sound is a welcome shock.
“Sound suppression is off,” Simon—or Sy, apparently—calls from his location, having still not moved. “You can speak.”
“Oh, can I?” Rin asks, turning back to me. “Brilliant!”
“Why?” I ask. I don’t have Acting to draw upon, but I think the usage of the skill has taught me a few tricks. It’s hard to make myself look any meeker, and adding a quaver into my voice should help sell the illusion. “Why are you doing this?”
“Good question,” Rin says, shrugging. “Sy?”
“We have new orders,” he replies. “Remember?”
“If I didn’t, I would’ve cut her head off the first time,” Rin replies. “Anomaly girl, for what it’s worth, you landed a pretty nice hit on me. That might’ve killed me if I was a little weaker!”
“I—I don’t know what’s going on,” I try. “Why are you—“
“Cut the shit, escapee,” Rin says, flashing me an overly cheery smile. “You and I both know what you are.”
“It’s too human,” Simon says. I can’t see him from here, but with my hearing restored, I catch the slight rustle of fabric that indicates he’s crossed his arms. “I still think we should kill it.”
“When did I become the reasonable one?” Rin asks. “Sy, she’s
coming.”“Doctrine insists—“
“Doctrine means nothing to her, and you know that,” Rin says. “Come on. You know what she’s like. She won’t let us kill anything interesting until it’s a challenge.”
Objective: Find Sapphire
Sapphire is coming to find you.
Distance: 46 miles
Ah, shit.
Simon sighs. “I know, I know.”
“Once she gets strong enough, we can kill it,” Rin says, her tone as light as if she’s discussing the weather. Her grip tightens around my bone, and my vision darkens even further.
But she’s not going to kill me? With no skills, I don’t know if even Demonic Heritage will protect me when she’s actively hurting me. Even if she doesn’t kill me, I think there’s a decent chance I’ll die of exposure if she just drops me right now.
“Do it, then,” Simon says. “I will be ready when things go wrong.”
“Sy, Sy, Sy,” Rin says, shaking her head. “Always so unbelieving.”
“Preparation for the worst trains discipline.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Rin says, shrugging. “You surprised me, anomaly. Keep it up and maybe you’ll put up an interesting fight.”
Keep it up? I didn’t even have my skills unlocked! I’m aware they ambushed me for a reason, but I find myself angrier than I should be at the implication that I’m not strong enough yet.
“Good luck,” Rin adds.
She turns, wrenching her body as white light suffuses her, and she throws me.
The wind whistles past me for a single second as I pass through the damaged laboratory in fast motion, and then I’m somewhere else and I can’t see a thing.
I smash into a stone wall at speed, and the combination of my bones breaking and the extended blood loss finally proves to be too much. Darkness takes me.
The last thing I remember is falling.
I’ve really been spoiled. The last few times I’ve blacked out (which is a concerning habit in itself and probably something I should address), I’ve woken up to an ally or a friendly stranger caring for me.
This time, I wake up because something bites my hand off.
Pain lances through my body, but Pain Resistance in combination with my natural inclination to not bother with it means the warning signal hits me later than it probably should have.
I am, somewhat surprisingly, still alive. The wounds in my chest and back have closed, though I do appear to lack a right hand.
Again.
Seriously?
A decaying skeletal rat the size of a dog scurries away from me, covered with my blood. It’s dark enough in here that even with my enhanced nightvision, I can barely make out its form where it sits not six feet away.
I tilt my head at it, then draw on Shape Blood.
Blood spears shoot out from my hand, spearing the emaciated beast through every part of its body that looks like it might hold vital organs.
My skills are back, and I can hear. When I raise my hands to my ears, I feel nothing but the slightly-lacerated flesh there. I still don’t know if it was the plugs that turned my skills off or something else, but whatever the case, I’m no longer affected.
I… don’t really understand, but I have more important issues to deal with.
The darkness stretches on above me for a while. I can’t make out any shapes there, nor any ceilings. I can’t even see the bridges that characterized this city.
Am I on the bottom level? If there were ruined laboratories on the sixty-second level, I shudder to think what kind of monster might be on the first.
I glance around me, and I see the corpse of a rat as large as a dog. It’s freshly dead, and there’s too much blood around it. What the hell killed this?
Well, if it’s fresh…
It looks disgusting, so I instead use the ranged Devour.
Devour granted +12 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Antimemetic Cloak
Induces amnesia of the user’s existence when the target looks away.
Oh.
I can guess who killed this now, and she’s standing right here stemming the bleeding from her missing hand.
I’m going to have to get that fixed, aren’t I. Inconvenient. This keeps happening!
Well, this thing doesn’t seem too much of a threat, but that skill is really potent.
I understand why when I try to activate it and lose nearly a third of my magic power in under ten seconds. Wow that’s a high-cost skill. If I can get an enhanced, cheaper version of that down the road, I’d be nigh-unstoppable, but that’s not looking realistic right now.
There might be other things like this hanging around. There might be other beasts like this that I’ve already forgotten.
I should be glad that only one of them got to me before I woke up. I must’ve been out for a while. Several hours, bare minimum, since Demonic Heritage has had enough time to put me together.
I need to be careful.
New skill unlocked: Antimemetic Resistance
You gain a slight resistance to low-level antimemetic effects.
With the slightest exertion of will, the world turns red. This is a useful new resistance, but I can’t trust it to perfectly guide me.
But in my Bloodpath, I’m safe.
Objective: Exterminate the infestation
Kill monsters on the first level of Novarath.
Progress: 0%
A percentage bar? Not hard numbers? That’s interesting. The objective doesn’t tell me to kill everything here, either, which is a first.
We’ll see how this goes.
I set off aimlessly, secure in my Bloodpath. Thanks to Rin and Simon’s skill-eliminating magic item, I have plenty of magic power to draw from, and my Diamond-tier Devour is putting in work for keeping me fuelled.
With Shape Blood going on at the same time, I’m able to somewhat map out my surroundings with scattered bits of my self.
This place is a dump. I mean that in a figurative and literal sense both—there are literal heaps of twisted metal scraps and broken buildings that must’ve come falling from up above, and streams of some unidentifiable liquid trace paths between the raised hills of garbage.
It takes me around four and a half minutes to find someone screaming.
Their form isn’t entirely human. Two legs, two arms, but they’re longer and have more chitinous flesh than what a person would. On their back, the fleeing figure has four more boney limbs, which I know can connect to form two dragonfly-like wings.
Deep dwellers. They have to be. Nothing else fits.
What is this one running from?
I find out a moment later when my blood-perception impacts something invisible. It’s shaped like a wolf, I think, but I don’t really bother looking at the details.
Still in my Bloodpath, I careen into its path, forming a blade out of my self and slashing it upwards. As it makes contact with the monster, I return to my material form and slash out with a Soulknife. A moment later, I follow up with a Misty Mirage. I’m not taking chances on this.
As it turns out, it’s massively overkill. The monster howls in pain as my first attack hits it, and the Soulknife silences it. My misty echo lacerates a dead body.
It does not become any more visible when it’s dead, so I kick it a couple times to check.
Yep. Not moving.
Chittering behind me alerts me to the presence of the deep dweller.
I sigh. This better not be a problem.
Though I can’t quite make out the dweller’s features without my bloodsense, I can see them kneel.
“What… are… you…?” they ask.
What, indeed, am I?
I’m the one who annihilated a town in an instant.
I’m the demon that got away.
I’m the level 14 with 213 kills to my name.
I am Evelyn Carnelian.
Response after response comes to mind, but in the end, I discard most of them. Dwellers aren’t likely to reply to anything that’s only affected the surface. Most of my accomplishments are moot in their eyes.
“I am death’s reaper,” I tell them, drawing on Acting to put a bit of extra power into the statement, “and I have come for what others have sown.”
I start Devouring the invisible wolf.
Devour granted +311 XP!
You have advanced to level 15!
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
Due to your actions, you may exchange up to 2 of your existing skills with skills from the following list.
Fireball (Silver)
Restore Self (Silver)
Electromagnetism (Silver)
Dominate Lesser Monster (Bronze)
Antimemetic Cloak (Silver)
Electric Shield (Silver)
A first step, but one of many.
You may choose to also evolve your class.
No. Absolutely not.
“I can feel you lurking,” I hiss at the remnant of a broken god lying within my soul somewhere.
The deep dweller looks at me in confusion, but I can’t be bothered. This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Sapphire. The broken god. The demon tree. Scintilla. Sy and Rin.
I have had enough of enemies who outpace me, who direct where I go and what I do.
Fuck this. The system wants me to eliminate the anomalies here, which will keep me in one place for long enough for the half-elf woman to reach my location.
“Dweller,” I say out loud. “Take me to your people.”
I’ve had enough of these games.
I have a city to break.