Re:Cursed

There wasn't much space in the decrepit service tunnel outside the airlock. Besides a small storage nook along one side, the path was narrow. Too narrow to leap around as was her preferred style. That wouldn't matter though; Nyxil wouldn't let this become an extended fight.

Her advantage lay in surprise. Both the ambush, and her mutations. If it got to the point where she needed the extra space to move, then she'd already failed. This was a sixth evolution cultist she was fighting; she couldn't give the woman even the slightest of openings.

A metallic clank announced the closure of the hatch. K'Sill was in the airlock. In only a few seconds, it would unlock, and the woman would be upon her.

Looking around, Nyxil found the only place she could reasonably lie in wait. With a hop, Curious and Cuddly latched to the ceiling. The tiny suction cups solidifying across their skin had no problems holding Nyxil's weight. Her armband struggled in vain to keep them invisible, but stretched out from her body as they were, her tentacles flickered in and out of sight. Not even needing her to command it, the three limbs took on a dark shade of grey identical to the surface they clung to.

Even if the veiling film failed, Nyxil's tentacles would be hard to spot.

Pushy unsheathed her blade, and her hand morphed into its claw. She could feel her spines standing tall. Her wings stretched, relishing its long forgotten freedom. The endorphins such a simple act stimulated were addicting, but she had to force the wing still. She couldn't have it shifting when K'Sill stepped through the door.

Nyxil was ready, but she still felt far too conspicuous. Even the dim light was too much.

As her gaze fell on the light strip further down the tunnel, the heavy steel door below her clanged. The mechanical wheel spun.

Nyxil threw weight into her gaze, the lights exploded, and she was thrown into darkness.

The airlock creaked as it swung open. Echoing through the tunnel, the subtle sound raked against silence. Air rushed over her skin. It brushed her feathers before dispersing through the void. Her body strained. Like a compressed spring, every muscle was ready to explode. They only waited for the command.

A single click of a footstep brought her mind into focus. Nyxil's heart slowed. Through the darkness, her eye burned. A mist of particles rose from the metal walkway. Slow. Thin, inverted streams reached up from the fog like monstrous tendrils.

Another footstep. K'Sill's foot came into view.

Nyxil found the woman's name. Talons sunk into her curses, ready to rip in an instant.

Click.

K'Sill's steps were wary. The top of her head peeked through the hatch, twisting left and right in uncertainty. She noticed nothing. The Fleshsmith directed her gaze to the shattered light down the tunnel. Darkness was not a wall, but a constriction to her sight.

Click.

"Nỷx̱?" K'Sill's voice echoed endlessly down the tunnel. "Hiding will not help you."

"Who said I was hiding?"

Click. The spring exploded.

In the instant Nyxil's heartbeat synchronised with K'Sill's footsteps, every wound-up part of her struck. Her wing beat. Curious and Cuddly shoved off the ceiling. She kicked off the wall. Nyxil's body snapped out from the darkness and struck all in one motion.

The weight of her eye became an avalanche. Skin and cloth immediately melted away, flowing from K'Sill to Nyxil's gem.

Each insidious curse laden through K'Sill's soul was ripped open. Unleashed.

Nyxil reached razor sharp claws towards the cultist's head.

Pushy aimed for the heart.

There was no time for K'Sill to move, and the moment Nyxil touched skin, she clamped. Her blade pierced the Fleshsmith's chest. Blood spilled everywhere.

And yet… K'Sill had slipped out alive.

❖❖❖

She clutched the deep gouges in her face. Her right eye was gone. A wound ran from the bridge of her nose, through were the eye had been and finished behind the cheekbone. The sliced bone was visible through the blood. Her next wasn't any less gruesome. Nyxil's claw had cleaved her cheek cleanly, leaving the cultist's jaw to hang uselessly. Half severed.

K'Sill garbled something incoherently.

Her chest was injured, but not as badly as intended. Pushy's blade had struck the underside of her ribs. Not the heart.

Nyxil didn't bother waiting for her legs to touch ground. Her tentacles took advantage of the narrow tunnel walls and threw her at her prey. Worries no longer crossed her mind. All that mattered was this cultist dead.

In a panicked scramble, K'Sill tried to back away. Her demeanour only incited Nyxil to strike faster. This woman was used to being in a position of control, and now that she wasn't, she flailed. Sixth evolution? That didn't matter if she didn't know how to fight.

Nyxil pressed her advantage, but K'Sill had at least some additives that boosted her speed and reaction speed. Both rapier and claws only left superficial cuts. A single mistake would be the cultist's end. Especially now that the curses were making themselves known.

Skin melted off her in random patches, revealing the muscle fibres below. That, in conjunction with her heavy gaze, would strip the cultist of everything but her innards soon enough.

K'Sill reached in her robe and pulled out a mass of metal and bone. Knowing just how threatening some of the Fleshsmith creations could be, Nyxil didn't let up. Hesitation could be her death. With a beat of her wing, she was in the cultists face before she could react. Claws wrapped around her wrist, and clamped.

The hand holding the fleshforged creation severed.

Guttural screams welled from K'Sill's throat. Her eyes were wild, but still focused on Nyxil, not her hand. The curse of screaming had settled. Loud, shrill, and echoed through the tight space.

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Shouldn't have activated that one. Nyxil wanted to rub her ringing ears. It's as much a curse to me as for her.

Forgotten, the fleshforged creation skittered around the falling hand before leaping to Nyxil. Curious swatted it, but that only gave it something to grip. Small teeth embedded in the flesh between plates of metal sunk into the tentacle.

Nxyil grit her teeth, and moved to keep attacking K'Sill. She was the most pressing threat.

At least, that was her initial assessment.

Not a second later, the lump of metal and flesh had worked its way up her tentacle, leaving a trail of bite-marks behind. Pushy pierced it with her blade, but the soft flesh rolled around the sharp metal effortlessly. It climbed her spines.

K'Sill protected herself from Nyxil's assault with her already severed arm, trimming it further. Just a little more, and the cultist would stumble. With her melting skin and constant backpedalling, she was bound to make a mistake, and Nyxil wouldn't miss the opportunity.

Then, the crawling mass of iron and flesh clasped her neck. It tightened till she choked, but that was hardly what concerned Nyxil. The feeling it evoked was familiar. The collar bit into her throat, sapping at her energy and feeding on her blood. Almost immediately, she felt her muscles grow heavy.

This was identical to the chains that bound her in her previous life.

Nyxil clutched at her neck. Her claws slipped under the binding and cut, but the collar simply reforged. Desperate to end this now, she charged the cultist. It was blind and straight, but K'Sill had not shown any close-range prowess.

She didn't make it more than a step.

The strength of her wing and tentacles worked against her as the collar tugged backwards while the rest of her body was trying to move forward. K'Sill, still screaming, made a motion with her hand, and the collar yanked Nyxil off her feet and pressed her face to the ceiling.

She scrambled against the surface, but couldn't push away. The binding of iron and flesh had already welded to the rafters.

K'Sill pulled out another of those fleshforged creations and tossed it Nyxil's way. She tried to glare at it, but her collar twisted, shoving her chest into the ceiling and blinding her. With how she hung, Nyxil was lucky her spikes had strengthened her spine.

As her eye tried to burn through the ceiling, Nyxil desperately scraped at the collar. She would leave deep cuts that recovered as soon as her claws left the flesh. Even leaving the blades inside would only have the collar form around them.

The next fleshforged creation struck her back. It immediately joined its sibling in trying to weaken Nyxil. Her tentacles were incredibly agile, and could slip out from the tightest of grips, but they could do nothing against the teeth that sunk into their flesh. While her neck was pinned to the ceiling, her tentacles were slowly bunched together and bound against her wing.

K'Sill's Screaming ceased.

Had the woman worked past her curse? Could she do that without sacrificing another name to get rid of it? Nyxil knew she was in a tight situation. Her priorities had changed. Now, she had to focus on was getting out of these binds.

She spat into her hand. Quickly, as to not spill any, she threw her claws into the collar. This time, it couldn't reforge. It felt agonisingly slow in the heat of battle, but the acid ate through her binds with ease. Each slice of her claws spread it further.

Before long, the collar was falling apart. Nyxil fell to the ground.

It was surprisingly effective. As Nyxil glanced down at her claws, she found the acid had settled over the blades in a thin sheen. Unlike her hands, she didn't have a palm to cup the acid in this form, so her saliva should have slid off her chitin after a second or two. Instead, it coated them like gloves.

Putting the thought aside for later, she freed her tentacles from their trappings, and turned to the cultist. She expected to have to defend herself from more of those bindings. Not for K'Sill to be all but bound herself.

The last curse, her largest one, had finally set in.

Ghostly shackles clamped around a dozen parts of her body. The wispy bindings looked ethereal, like a hand would pass through them without resistance, and yet they clamped hard against the Fleshsmith's skin. Shackles locked around her wrists, elbows, ankles and neck. There was even one stretching across her broken jaw, leaving the woman mute.

K'Sill struggled against the binds, but from each, a spectral chain sunk into the ground. It was a challenge simply to keep her feet. This was not a position where she even had a chance to defend herself from Nyxil, and by the wide-eyed look she threw her way, K'Sill understood that all too well.

Nyxil stepped towards her. She would have ended it quickly, but the chains acted first. They broke K'Sill's resistance, and her head was slammed into the hard metal with enough force that even a sixth evolution cultist would be left with a concussion.

There was a desperation to those chains. They wanted to pull this woman into the depths of Darkness with as much ferocity as Nyxil wanted to slaughter the cults. This curse was fuelled by hatred. So much hatred and focus that unlike most curses, it manifested with a clear image. K'Sill must have captured and tortured thousands.

Whether she had been a direct superior to K'tan or was part of a separate operation, it was clear she played a major part in the Fleshsmith's acquisition of human sacrifices. That alone was enough to invite the harshest response from Nyxil.

Besides, how could she ignore such an offering? This woman's victims might as well have presented her on a platter.

Curious sliced itself against her blade, and began painting the floor and ceiling around K'Sill. The sacrificial ritual was clearly something the cultist recognised, given her feral eyes.

Nyxil Knelt before the woman. "You wouldn't be interested in offering an Invow, would you?"

The Fleshsmith's glare alone could have killed.

"Yeah, I didn't think so." While she despised the thought of having any connection with a cultist like this, Nyxil had contemplated the idea of a devotee under her command. It would help her current situation; she would love to have the Fleshsmiths running in circles so they wouldn't bother her through the Trials. "Well, you're not going to enjoy this next part, but I don't need to tell you that, do I?"

Nyxil ignored the woman's struggled — except to spit on the dozen shackles that slowly crawled from her robe — and began her hymn. She didn't have any candles, so she cut up K'Sill's severed hand and used the fingers instead.

For such a basic additive, El was convenient.

In the next few minutes, Nyxil was more glad than she could express with words that the cultist was gagged so effectively. As her body dried and her soul was broken down to funnel into Nyxil's, K'Sill's agony was tremendous.

Nyxil had missed her heart with the ritual dagger. It technically made the sacrificial ritual less efficient, but it prolonged the woman's death. Considering her atrocities, Nyxil felt it appropriate.

As the hymn ended Nyxil felt a wave of strength wash through her. Even in the Dark Star, she hadn't been able to sacrifice the Fleshsmiths she'd killed. What little fatigue she'd built from the Trial and her fight disappeared. Her human body couldn't be improved any more than it already had, but she wasn't so sure that applied to her mutations.

Even if it didn't, the sacrifice would only help her reach her next evolution sooner.

Nyxil considered the dried husk for less than a second before her gaze consumed the soulless corpse. Better to leave no evidence. She did the same for any surface where blood had been spilled.

She was ready to leave and rejoin her team when another surge of strength bloomed within her. It was odd. Not at all like the energy from the ritual, but something separate.

Nyxil glanced down at herself as the power shifted from a welcome sensation to a miserable feeling of discomfort that gathered in only a few parts of her body. It wasn't painful, per se, but considering it felt like worms were crawling around inside her, she would have preferred pain.

But she soon forgot the sickening feeling when the stub of her arm moved on its own. Pulling back the sleeve, she found skin rolling downward as her elbow regrew. She watched in awe as her arm grew millimetre by millimetre.

Something slithered along her waist. She pulled up her robe and found Shy, growing far faster than her arm. Despite it just being another limb, Nyxil was almost brought to tears. She hugged her tentacle. Cuddly, refusing to be left out, leapt into the embrace.

Shy, rapidly reaching full length, couldn't flee from either of them no matter what it tried.

Nyxil quickly found that both her wing and leg were also regrowing — the latter first severing the prosthetic — but she didn't understand why. It wasn't the ritual. It wasn't designed for healing. Nor could it be a side effect of her own blood or something; it would have healed her the last sacrifices if that was the case.

This was different, though certainly not unwelcome. What could have caused it?