V2 Chapter 28: Thicker than Blood.
"'Why don't you devise a containment plan for Dirofil too?'
'Firstly, because he promised Shadiran to go when his spire is swallowed. Not before, not after. We know when to find him. Secondly, Lyssav is someone I know I can imprison. Dirofil? I could meld his spire shut and tear off every last one of his limbs and he would still find a way to foil my plans, whatever they may be at the time. He's not unstoppable… but you go and tell that to him.'
'There's no need. The sea will beat some sense into him.'
'Will it, Morbilliv, will it?'"
—A discussion among the brothers, shortly after Morbilliv joined the Corship's crew.
To be awake or to remain in deep meditation seemed the same state to Dirofil. The awareness of whether his mind was united or fragmented, and a weak attempt at psycholocation, those were his only clues to make out his current state. He was alive. Weakened by the efforts he had made to resist her mauling. Safe in his premature burial of puppies. But even their innocent licks and gnaws would eventually exhaust him to thoughtlessness. Like his poor spire, he would perish to the weight and cuddle of the Retriever mass.
No. He still had a mission. Losing his body was no excuse to shirk from his duty. He would reach the other side, reunite with Shadiran, and stop the heartbeats of the sea. Of creation. And he had to make haste. So he struggled, he made his sluggish form flow, boneless as it was, and carry his core with it. With his flesh surging from below he used the heart of his existence to push against the mass of puppies and pry open a path out of the Retriever layer. He wanted to expose himself, to paint a target upon himself. Because he had a plan, and it would work as long as he could attract something weak. Something killable, even in this sorry state of his.
He emerged among collies and dragged his core until he found something resembling a clearing on the cloud of shepherd dogs. Maybe the cloud encroached the heights beyond the reach of his psycholocation, he couldn't be sure. Whether that mattered or not worried him slightly: this was a bet, and he was betting with his life. If a thick cover of collies concealed him from predators he couldn't handle, that would be ideal. If on the contrary, there was anything unmanageable and unescapable looming above and waiting to pounce… well, he was screwed.
He thought about flashing the eye of the Reaper. About using wings he didn't have anymore to clear packed mounds of pups. Less than a tide crippled, and he already missed ability, in the broadest of senses, dearly. Being blind and deaf left him alone with his thoughts and their radar, and the minds of children of a mind were, at times, hostile places to find oneself stranded into. He knew their cores preserved echoes of the creator's psyche, for they had to. Dirofil was of the belief no mind creates anything completely unlike itself. That oen could always find traces of the original, even if they were only the antonyms chosen.
This haunted him at times. How to create a world with beings, and with no suffering at all? The World Before the World had been worse in ways he found indescribable. Memories of the concepts of famine, of war, of rapes like shared smiles, of feuds that extended beyond the life of individuals, of ideas gone rogue, spreading, causing pain only for the promise of a lie. There was no wonder the creators had brought them a pain so peculiar, scheduled an end so sincere and beautiful. It was not their ultimate fault that the spoiled children had grown to hate an aging paradise.
A caress against the limits of his perception roused him from his musings, made the brained amoeba act fast. He crawled over a loose pup and quickly enveloped the snoring creature, leaving its head out to allow it to breathe unimpeded. Now he had ammo. Or a very exclusive club it's wannabe predator's head would soon meet.
The frequency of the psycholocation pulses got increased. This could draw further attention from the creature, or some undesired one even. But it was better to give it all in the battle he knew would come before worrying about those that could come.
He slid his core under the puppy and allotted part of his energy for a blast, concentrating it on his underside. Whatever tried to attack him, it was likely to come at him mouth first. And some mouths were veritable knife arsenals. With the right amount of force, he could turn it to a cache all of his own.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
A bless in this tide, as the stalking monster approached enough for him to make out the outline of a mutated Chihuahua. This was perfect: a dumb, mindless goblin awaited their demise.
The chiranha hopped from collie to collie, looming over, getting into position to lunge onto his prey like a housecat would. It seemed slightly dubitative, in Dirofil's opinion.
In the chihuahua's opinion, Dirofil was easy prey he didn't want to chase far.
But the Fourth imagined had his shield, and it still slept soundly.
The Chihuahua lunged, mouth open, teeth sharp and ready for the kill. Dirofil let go of the concentrated energy, propelling from the puppy-substrate and taking air moments before the Chihuahua connected. The invulnerable puppy woke up when it impacted against a half-closed mouth, a wall of long teeth meeting the ultimate hammer. Which was a very confused Golden Retriever. A tip of an incisive broke, and before it fell too far Dirofil managed the titanic effort to extend a cohesive-enough tendril of slime and catch it midair.
Now he had a puncturing weapon, something far rarer than the very abundant blunt ones all around. At least, the easy to use puncturing ones, because he could ram an openmouthed puppy into his enemies, but he found it… an inelegant and convoluted solution.
Now in possession of a shiv, he was a menace to any soft tissue to be found around. He had no time to waste though, because the owner of the tip was getting up, even if its step betrayed that it still was a victim of a slight daze as the puppy skittered away, climbing over a nearby Collie and dropping out of sight.
It slobbered blood all over the golden, brown and black coats of the puppies underfoot as it stared at Dirofil with hate-injected eyes. The fourth was quick to acquire a new puppy, enveloping it as carefully as he had done the first. Waking them up rendered them useless, and the Chihuahua was stalking closer and closer. Dirofil made sure to hold the puppy and the tendril with the tooth close. His psychosarc lacked the force to stab the thing through the Chihuahua's scales on its own. So he created a bubble of air around his core, keeping it connected to the remainder of his flesh with a thin stalk, and covered only by the necessary amount of psychosarc. A thin bubble, a useful one. He began to spin his core like a little planet
With a sprint, the beast went for a low bite. But Dirofil kept accelerating his core, with all the irregularities on the outer layer of his mistreated thoughtcrystal accounted for, and counted in.
When the dog stepped past an arbitrary line the Thinker had deemed "close enough" he collapsed the bubble, making the whole mass of his body shift violently, puppy and teeth included. Extending them just a bit, he managed to nail the tooth into the exposed neck of his attacker, hammering it in with a well-swung Labrador, knocking the Chihuahua to a side as it wailed in pain.
Letting the puppy go, Dirofil wasted no time to crawl over the fallen creature. It was still alive, even if a bit shocked by the wound and intact. Blood whose color he could not see welled from the wound, but he was afraid it would not result lethal lest he intervened.
While the chihuahua thrashed and attempted to overcome the disorientation caused by a rattled brain, Dirofil intruded a thin tendril of slime in the wound, looking for the teeth.
Then he found it. And pushed it deeper. Slowly. Blood gushed violently out the wound when he managed to pierce an important vessel, despite the trashing of the dog that kicked at his slime and tried to get him off, barely moving his head to bite because that would only send the tooth deeper. Dirofil, as it was expected of him, still kept his core at a reasonable distance from the creature's mouth.
Dirofil wondered what he could be feeling as he killed the dog, besides the overwhelming need. Empathy? For a Chihuahua? It… didn't go against the laws of the universe, and that was the kindest way to word it. Disgust? A bit of it dwelled in his mind. Regret? The sole idea brought to him the mental image of small green arthropods and their mating calls.
Just for good measure, he readied a third blunt weapon. If he kept using them at this rate, he would run out of sleeping puppies. Eventually. In about a million lifetimes.
Then he had what he deemed a marvelous idea. There was no need to cause cutting damage any further: a single wound could do. He invaded the vessels heartwise, painfully pumping his body inside the dog's against the current of arterial blood. When the dog tried to retaliate, he wacked it in the head with a puppy's unbreakable skull, again and again. The Chiranah was already battered, pained. Broken, one could say. It didn't have much fight left in it as Dirofil blazed a trail to the heart.
And it was kind of romantic, if one considers romance as malleable as psychosarc, how the very matter of his body entered the heart, filling it to the brim, pushing against its beats as Dirofil clogged valves and inflated chambers taut. Maybe the mucilage wasn't strong or stable enough to act as a weapon on its own, or to resist the assaults of claw and tooth. But it was thicker than water, thicker than blood. Stronger than a systole, so long as he kept his flesh contained, held together by the dwindling power of his very self.
But if he didn't succeed, he was going to go thoughtless anyway. So, any expenditure needed to be seen as an investment. An investment that made muscles go stiff, that made a mouth foam and the body seize as it got seized.
Before long, Dirofil held a dead Chihuahua in his slithy grasp.
Now, he needed to enact the second part of his plan.