A worm wriggled behind her eye.
Nyxala bit back a scream, and barely stopped herself from stabbing her claws into her head to tear it out. The damn thing was incessant. Unavoidable. It was as if all the pain tolerance she’d accumulated was ignored.
All her strength was gone, and a bug dug through her head.
The vision in her right eye warped with the sickening sensation that something living was making dough of her innards. Her sight was wrong. Through the affected eye, the world seemed to bloat. Her hand grew a hundred times in size. The man with the infantile mind seemed to explode. His head deformed as it expanded. A thousand horns sprouting one after another until it looked more like a thorny plant than a face. And his chest, the already oversized upper torso bubbled outwards. Masses of muscle bulged against skin as they spread, swallowing his arms as if they were the stem of a cherry.
Nyxala forced the eye closed, covering it with her palm, and the world returned to normal… for everything except the Mad boy before her.
His mutations were no longer contained to a single desired form. They spread and stole whatever was human. She watched as horns pierced through the boy’s eyes, bursting the sockets of fluid from the inside.
And still, he smiled. For a moment, Nyxala thought the uncontrolled growths had locked the innocent smile in place, but then he giggled. It was an unassuming sound. Maybe a bit childish for how deep the young adult’s voice was. Yet the worm quivered in response.
“Look Birdie, there’s a bunch of worms! You can feed your whole family!”
And with those words, the Mad boy’s hallucinations infested Nxyala’s body. A dozen more worms appeared within her. She stared in captivated horror as one crawled through her arm, cracking chitin when it did not flex like human skin.
The agony of her chest was worse. They pushed out at her skin from within, and she could no longer contain herself. She needed them out of her. Now.
Nyxala’s claws pierced her own chest as she tried to find the buggers that didn’t exist. The pain of stabbing herself was bad, but it didn’t compare to the worms crawling around in her flesh. She would prefer Shelo’Su’Senalos’s maggots over this.
There was a shimmer of barely present grey beaks, like the veil of reality slipped for just long enough to let her see the beings borne of Madness that lay beyond. That was all she saw before the hand covering her eye shattered.
Her arm cracked open. The chitinous hand that held strong against both bullets and blades, shattered like a cracked nut beneath the Mad hallucination’s beak. And even then, her broken arm didn’t stop it. The bird bit into her eye. It didn’t pause for a moment before it started digging around for the worm.
Enough was enough.
Nyxala’s boot struck the boy’s head, following all the way to the ground where she tried to shatter his skull. It might have been clean if she still had access to her name, or the boy’s skull wasn’t a shield of thorns. Instead, the force of her boot only snapped the boy’s head to the side, rather than crushing it.
He screamed. And oh, how he screamed.
There was another shimmer in the veil. Nyxala barely had an instant to garner less than an impression of the beings, but they were nothing less than nightmares. These weren’t the simple critters that caught a childish mind’s curiosity; these were nightmares conjured by one seized by decades of forced slumber.
She stomped again. Pushy struck with her rapier, while acid spilt from her jaw. He couldn’t die fast enough.
The veil shimmered again. The things she saw were incomprehensible.
Horrified shrieks and bloodied gurgling rained down from the raised platforms. One man burst. His blood painted his neighbours and half the room around him. Another fired blindly, only for his weapon to melt in his hands. Starting from the muzzle, and moving inwards until his arms melted too. His life ended when a hole drilled to his heart, the flesh burning red-hot around it.
All this, and without a spec of corruption.
Nxyala twisted and brought her tail down on the screaming Mad boy’s head. Finally, it broke. Grey matter stained her feathers, but his mental function had finally ceased, and with it the worms and birds vanished too.
Neither her eye nor the wound in her chest of her own making healed. Her name was inaccessible. Now that the entire reason she was here was dead, she just needed to clean up and leave before she bled out.
There wasn’t much left of the boy. The horns had sprouted down to his neck, and the unnatural muscular lumps had grown so large around his chest that there wasn’t much of his arms or legs that still remained visible. His mutations had truly taken on a mind of their own in his final moments.
Was it due to the Madness? Or did he turn Mad because of the excess mutations?
Nyxala wished she hadn’t been so caught up in gutting herself. If she’d paid attention to his soul, she might have learnt how this happened. Whether something happened to his well as the mutations took over.
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“I thought you said this place was immune to Madness. Was that a lie?” Nyxala stepped towards Judge, who stood horrified at what had happened to some of his cultless.
“It should be,” he whispered. “My antecedant recorded our tenacity during the Mad reign. Madness is as ineffective here as any name.” Judge stroked his short beard, bringing his hand back to find blood coating his fingers. “That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Well, now that I have nothing to ask of you, there’s no point in leaving any of you alive.” She would at least do them the favour of killing them quickly. Everyone but Prong. He would power her regeneration… after she made him suffer a bit first.
“You still wish to have us killed.” Judge wasn’t impressed.
“What?” Nyxala scoffed. “You think a little communal danger is enough to have me forget how much of threat your existences are now that you know what I am?”
“How many saw you as you walked through the Refuge?” Judge suddenly asked. “A thousand? Ten? If we die, the Cultless will know it was you. Lys told me you are not quite as fond of the cults as your position within the Technocult would lead one to believe. If you ever wish for assistance from the Refuge or the Cultless, you would be wise to reconsider.”
Judge was pleading for their lives with as straight and confident a back as ever, and yet he couldn’t hide the way his eyes flickered to the brutalised guards whenever one moaned in agony. Unlike anything she’d seen from the cults, he actually seemed to care about those lower in the hierarchy than he.
But Nyxala’s conviction wasn’t so weak as to falter upon seeing a single glance of care. She still wasn’t ready to take on the full attention of the cults.
“When have the Cultless ever stood against the cults?” If they refused to fight their oppressors, then what good were they?
“Every day we live.” Judge stood, far too proud of what amounted to nothing.
“By hiding away in this place protected by a ritual you don’t even understand?”
Judge sighed and stepped towards the intercom again. “Clearly, nothing I say will convince you. So I will let her.”
He flicked a switch, and a rapid jitter of tapping spilled through the speaker before it stopped and a voice took its place. “I’m here, now let me in. Preferably quickly, or now, if possible.” There was a pause, then, “please?”
Nyxala considered it. The girl had been adamant about Judge’s survival. With how an Invow worked, Lysyra would not only understand why Nyxala killed them, she could never hate her for it. But that wouldn’t stop her from feelings unrelated to Nyxala.
“None of them leave this room.” She left no room for debate as she approached the door. Once again, she pulled her mutations back into their hidden confines.
“Tend to the wounded.” Judge called. They did so quickly. Most had already forgotten to keep their weapons trained on Nyxala after the Mad scare. “Prepare them to be rushed to the infirmary, but don’t leave until I give the word.”
Judge glanced at her in question, and she nodded. That was good enough. She would keep her edge sight on them, and if any decided it was a good idea to flee on their own… well, Lysyra wouldn’t get the chance to plead for their survival.
The gates opened for them, but before Nyxala slipped out after Judge, she cast a last glance to the boy that had been the Worshippers’ prisoner.
When had he gone mad? What exactly had caused it? And most pressing of all: could the same happen to Nyxala?
The obvious answer was no. She was the ‘perfect sacrifice’. It was the entire fact that she remained sane with so many mutations that made her so desirable. But what was it exactly that stopped her mutations running Mad beyond their intended or beneficial state. Just by what she’d just seen, it was clear individual mutations didn’t have a predefined ‘stopping point’.
He had unlikely been Mad when she’d found him. The Worshippers wouldn’t have preserved him the way they had if he’d already been Mad. Presumably, they’d kept his mind suppressed so that his Madness wouldn’t be realised, which only caused the long overdue affliction to rush to the forefront when he finally awoke.
There was a direct connection between Madness and mutations going out of control, but which caused the other? Were mutations themselves inherently self-destructive, or was there something else interfering with them. Something like how blood had interfered with her name.
Was Nyxala truly immune to Madness, or was it simply waiting for her to reach a certain age to sprout its ugly head?
If it truly was age related, then she only had a few years to accomplish her task.
Nyxala turned and followed Judge down the hall. Many of the guards up in the ramparts showed concern that the man walked alone with a stranger to the exit of their Refuge. A few shouted words of assurance was all they needed to cross, but it hardly made the unknowing guards fret any less.
They seemed to care for him much more than they did for Prong.
Another thing of note; this lower entrance was guarded with much greater resolve. Double the soldiers. More guns to go with them, including a row of artillery cannons. The initial entrance funnel was also much longer, and allowed for a number of heavy, belt-fed machine guns to be set in place.
It seemed they expected any actual assault to come from below.
“Finally!” Lysyra slipped through the hatch as soon as Judge opened it. She was twitchy, and her eyes pivoted almost too quick for her to see anything. “Finally,” she repeated, calming her ragged breathing with a hand on her chest.
“Ly͚sy͚rã,” she started, pulling the girl’s eyes on her.
“What happened?” She gaped.
Nyxala looked down at her hand. Blood spilled through the countless cracks in her chitin, and there was a wide section completely missing where the imaginary bird had snapped its jaw through.
“Our Worshipper victim went Mad.”
Nyxala inspected the girl opposite her. She was very fidgety, and wholly unnerved. It was entirely unlike herself. So much so, that Nyxala checked her name just in case it was someone or something pretending to be her. It was Lysyra, no doubt.
“Now that you’re here, why exactly should I leave Judge alive considering what he knows?”
Lysyra gulped as she looked between the two. Any trace of the girl’s arrogant demeanour was lost to this… fretful child. Her eyes caught Nyxala’s, and turned downcast. With one hand clutching another, she spoke.
“Back when P̝̦͆h̥͝ŏs͂p̢̑ḣ͓o̻̮̭̗ŗ̀t͉a̐n̮i͋͒͒̀̂̋͘͠s was still actively hunting me, Judge protected me. He helped after the Technocult abandoned me. For a time, he kept me hidden. The Cultless could have sold me to the Bodytwisters for a place amongst their ranks whenever they wanted… but they didn’t. I’m sure Judge will treat your secret the same.”
Nyxala frowned. The Bodytwister leader had slaughtered all of Lysyra’s ward. Why had she been after the girl? She doubted it was about witnesses. What cult leader cared if they were known to have killed a bunch of kids?
Judge cleared his throat, probably unsettled that Lysyra’s words hadn’t suddenly melted Nyxala’s expression. “We… could use someone of your talents. There is no one else that retains the strength you do within the range of the ritual. We would gain more by using you than giving you up to the cults that have already shown to betray at a moment’s notice.”
She hummed, then let out a conceding sigh. “Fine. On one condition.”
Judge’s eyes did not light up, even if Lysyrs’s did. “And that is?”
“You begin preparing the Cultless for war.”