Re:Cursed

Whatever monstrosity the Fleshsmiths had summoned, Tarchon stood head on against it exactly as he had the semi-dead cultists.

Nyxil, however, was not so undaunted.

The rows upon rows of spinning teeth slicing away at the walls ahead of her were similar enough to the drill-like plated head of the massive fleshforged whales that her mind was immediately thrown back into the Dark Star. It didn't help that her heartrate was through the roof; stress claimed her quickly.

None of the Fleshsmiths appeared worried, despite being as much in the path of the nightmare worm as Tarchon. Strange, but it was their summon. Maybe they had a way to assure the creature wouldn't eat them?

Tarchon's right leg slid back, bracing himself as he raised both arms forward. Thick metal screws slid from his legs. They followed rails along the side of his feet, and pierced the metal surface where they drilled him into place. his hands split open, folding outwards to reveal a nozzle where most people's bones would be.

A breeze washed over Nyxil's face. An incredibly rare occurrence, even in the air-filled Biovault. Usually it meant a bad gas leak or something a bit more sinister.

And this time would be no different.

The small blowtorch on the side of his arms ignited the main nozzles. Immediately, the tunnel bathed in fire. Nyxil's skin dried and flaked by simple proximity. The flaming jets rocketing out from Tarchon's arms carried such force that she was surprised his legs didn't tear off.

Coral trembled beneath her tentacles. Nyxil touched her ears, and her fingers came back bloody. Without sound, it was impossible to know if the quaking was Tarchon's flamethrower, or a roar from the summoned beast as it swallowed the flames. For all she knew, the ground itself was about to cave in around her.

Nyxil should have long fled by now. She honestly never should have come here, knowing there would be an ambushing group of Fleshsmiths nearby. But the way Tarchon stood, unbothered by anything thrown his way, had… awed her.

He was a rock in a storm. An unflinching mountain of a man. He was also the one that had stood by her and defended her more than anyone. Despite his claims about being unable to offer her any protection once the Trials were underway, here he was eliminating those that had tried to ambush her.

Someone so admirable was looking out for her. She never would have imagined such a scenario in her past life. It felt alien. It felt nice.

She couldn't turn away.

The worm's teeth exploded from the flames. Each had a sheen of molten metal, yet they barrelled forward nonetheless. The tunnel itself warped. Proximity to the creature seemed to inflict deep corruption on their surroundings, as what had once been a narrow corridor was now widening into a grand hall. One that filled the maw of a giant worm.

Tarchon's flaming jets cut off as his hands snapped back into place. Not a moment passed before a series of harpoons shot out from his back. They pierced the walls and connected them to himself with a spiderweb of cables. Still, he didn't move.

When the corruption reached him, the walls tugged at his cables. They stretched Tarchon at all sides, yet he held his ground. While the walls bent outwards like a stretching balloon, the harpoons proved the only point of resistance. Corruption refused to sink into the cables, so the walls strained against the only points where they couldn't expand.

This only gathered the shredding teeth into a tighter cluster. It did not slow the worm down. Nor did it halt the destruction.

Having bound himself even further to this tunnel, Tarchon had discarded any chance to flee from this monstrosity. Steam bellowed off his frame. A number of panels opened at his back, revealing turbines that spun fast enough that any lingering gasses caught in the tunnel combusted as they shot out behind him.

His arms shifted. The elbow hinge opened at the rear, allowing a long piston to fold out and click in place. Both arms slid forward and back experimentally, rolling on a rail along his former elbow. With each passing moment, Tarchon lost more of his humanoid form.

He braced himself, and Nyxil could only do the same. She trusted he could handle himself enough to linger here, but she did the minimum to keep herself safe.

The worm slammed into Tarchon. And Tarchon caught it.

Each jagged tooth pushed against him. They spun like an inverted buzzsaw. Yet all that might came to a crashing halt as they hit Tarchon. His arms bounced back, releasing immense steam, but his body didn't move. Each hand split and drilled through the metal teeth, giving the worm no chance to slip from his grip and slice away at him with rapid rotations.

For an instant, they stopped like that. Tarchon held the worm's teeth, and the worm was unable to carry its immense weight forward any further.

But of course, that didn't last. There was another tremor through her tentacles, and the latter rows of teeth which had previously stayed in an orderly line suddenly shot forward. They slid past the anterior jaws in a way nothing natural could.

Each tooth scraped away at Tarchon's form, leaving deep scratches where nothing else had left a mark. Yet, he didn't run. With his hands drilled into opposing teeth, the long extensions at the back of his elbows clicked into his ribs — or where ribs would be in a normal person.

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As strong as Tarchon proved to be, he only had so many arms. He could only deal with two teeth at once. Nyxil wanted to help. Of course for a beast like that, the only way she could be of any assistance, and not a dead-weight, was to unleash whatever curses it may have.

She cast her senses forth, but immediately she found a problem. The worm was an endless pit. There was a lingering sense of its soul, but it was as if the name was at the bottom of a well that she could not see into.

Discarding that idea, she searched through the void behind the spinning fangs for Zandisth. Someone like him, who manipulated souls, was bound to have some harmful curses. It was possible this would reveal her, but she considered it worth trying.

Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found.

Tarchon continued to take damage, but he shrugged it off. His arms, which had been stationary and doing nothing more than holding the teeth still, now ticked inwards. It was small, but with each second that passed, the teeth were pulled further from the walls in mechanical increments. With each arm connected to his torso by two connection points, they had become a hydraulic press.

The worm hated it.

Its attacks grew fierce, and scratches accumulated across Tarchon's previously pristine form. Never deep. Never seeming to give him pause.

All at once, Tarchon's arms snapped together. Not only did the teeth crash inwards, but so did the walls themselves. At least, that's what it initially looked like. After the tunnel collapsed, metallic surfaces remained behind. They were damaged from the teeth, but back to their minimally corrupted shape from earlier.

Flesh peeled from the walls in a cascading wave back into the depths of the destroyed tunnel. In moments, there were no more teeth. No more worm.

No… the worm was still there.

In Tarchon's hand was the tiniest little worm, not even as thick as her pinky. It squirmed. Weak and unimpressive, the small creature was trapped. This is what became of that monstrosity?

Tarchon squeezed. The little creature popped into black ooze.

The lights returned, and Nyxil could see with her human eyes again. Where the shredded section of tunnel had once extended far in the distance, it now ended abruptly. Maybe that was to be expected after all the damage done, but there wasn't a void where the worm had been. Instead, a warehouse with large tanks took its place. Coral had warped already.

Gone with the tunnel, was Zandisth.

A burst of steam escaped Tarchon's neck, and despite being unable to hear anything besides dull ringing, Nyxil could imagine the annoyed growl at his enemy escaping. Zandisth hadn't even tried to fight.

Well, it wasn't all bad. Zan'Asyll, along with all the other Fleshsmiths, now laid as burnt crisps around Tarchon. Nothing besides the worm and Zandisth had survived those flaming rocket exhausts. The powerful cultist hadn't bothered saving his underlings as he fled.

One after another, the vents along Tarchon's back closed. His legs dislodged from the earth, and each arm folded back into themselves. The massive v-shaped neck-guard unlocked from his jaw and slid down over his chest. Amongst the bundle of conduits and pipes, ice had formed. Vapour rolled down his sides, pooling in a shallow fog.

The metallic tubes that bent out of his upper arms had a different problem. They glowed red with heat. With how even the steam seemed to shimmer around them, Nyxil decided it best she never touch. She got the feeling that right now they were far hotter than any of the molten piping down beneath the Fleshforge.

Seeing no reason to hide anymore, Nyxil lowered herself from the ceiling and removed her shroud. As she approached, Tarchon turned her way and grunted something, but with her ears in the state they were, not a word reached her. Annoyed more than pained, Nyxil almost opened the mutation she'd seen that replaced her ears. Only barely did she hold herself back.

Nyxil poked a finger in her ear and showed Tarchon the blood that soaked it. He had the audacity to look annoyed. Nyxil glared. It was his fault they'd burst.

She sat down to sketch her recovery ritual. A popped eardrum shouldn't be too bad of an injury for the ritual, unlike her limbs, so despite being unable to hear herself, Nyxil began her hymn.

Tarchon motioned her to stop only after she sliced her arm.

He had her sit before him, and from a slot in side of his leg, a dozen small machines rolled out. The technocultist's apertures narrowed on Nyxil's arm, leg, and the prosthetic she'd cut up only a few minutes before. He raised his brow. Judging, and questioning.

Nyxil leaned into her sudden deafness, pretending she didn't notice him. Instead, she focused on the basic machines as they rolled around the tunnel. They were not much more than drills on a wheel, and yet they worked in perfect harmony to inscribe a ritual circle into the floor.

Well, a Technocult ritual circle, so it was more of a square.

When the little machines were done, they rolled back to their home inside Tarchon's leg. He spilled some dark crimson substance to fill the drilled lines, and having already sliced open her arm in preparation for one ritual, Nyxil spilt her blood as a sacrifice.

She tried her best to memorise the ritual, but the straight yet hyper complex circle just didn't seem to want to mesh with her mind. It was too inorganic. Not to mention she couldn't hear Tarchon's — no doubt monotone — song.

Her ears recovered and her dried, slightly burnt skin healed, but she noticed it didn't work as well as the one she'd stolen from the Fleshsmiths, despite Tarchon being such a high creed. She wondered why?

The answer came as soon as she looked up from analysing the mechanical runes. Tarchon's scratches were gone. His body of machinery gleamed as if he had taken an acid shower. His ritual was designed to fix equipment, not flesh.

And, of course, her hearing was welcomed back to the sound of the tone-deaf.

There was a groan at her side, and Nyxil turned to find a Fleshsmith crawling out from the pile of arms, where the wall had grown them before she'd arrived. One was still alive!

"Hey, can I sacrifice her?" Nyxil asked. "I want to test how this healing works." She waved her half-regrown arm for emphasis.

Tarchon narrowed his apertures and opened his mouth, but whatever he was going to say, he let it go with a sigh. He hid it well with a burst of steam, but Nyxil was onto him. "Sure. Go ahead." He looked down the tunnel she came. "I assume this means your observer is dead?"

"Yep," she chirped.

Already, she was besides the Fleshsmith. The woman's legs were crushed and she looked barely looked conscious; she was in no state to even politely ask Nyxil to not sacrifice her.

"You left your team." He states the obvious. "How do you intend to explain your improved condition?"

"I'll let their imaginations take care of that." Nyxil shrugged as her tentacles sketched the last of the runes needed. "For now, I intend to find out exactly how I healed. If I can replicate it…" She slipped into hymn before she could finish the sentence.

With how her ears had only momentarily recovered, she wasn't sure if she was hearing things, but she swore she heard Tarchon murmur, "and this was supposed to be the tranquil half."