Only after swallowing the second Bodytwister, did Nyxala consider the possibility that not killing them first might give her indigestion. For all she knew, they could enact some ritual while inside. She had done the same back with that fleshforged great white.
But she didn’t give the thought more than an instant of her attention. The situation was still dangerous.
Nyxala leapt towards the nearest Bodytwister who was still staggering from being stabbed in the neck. The girl had been surprisingly prepared for the moment Nyxala struck. No need to communicate at all. As soon as Nyxala swallowed the bitch trying to snatch her sceptre, Lysyra had ambushed not one, but every enemy nearby.
Apparently that syringe dagger they’d taken was a lot more dangerous than she’d given credit for. Lysyra wasn’t exactly all that strong, but in the fraction of a second, Nyxala had seen those blades drill through flesh and bone almost of their own will. Stranger yet, was the complete lack of moving parts. This was not a piece of machinery as you’d see in the Technocult or Worshippers.
That she could use her reflections to multiply the blades… well, it put the girl’s names in a new light. Nyxala had to force her mind back to the fight at hand before she got lost in all the ways they could abuse that ability.
Her chainsaw struck the disoriented cultist in the side. The bladed teeth sliced through flesh, but just like the man she’d just sated her ravenous appetite with, his otherflesh was tough. She wanted to complain that her new toy wasn’t as effective as it had been in her last battle against the Bodytwisters, but there was a vast chasm of difference between those low creeds and this proper harbinger strike squad.
The man, instead of avoiding the blades, leaned into it. Muscles through his arms bulged three times over until they were as thick as his torso. One bent around the chainsaw, locking it in place at the expense of the continual shredding of his side and arm. He didn’t seem to mind. The other arm reached into his chest and snapped off a rib. He pulled it out to reveal a sharp curved blade.
Nyxala’s new jaw gnashed at the challenge.
Caught staring into her eyes, the cultist hesitated. Pink seemed to unsettle even powerful, experienced cultists, and she wasn’t one to let opportunities slide.
She spat in his face. One claw pierced his chest and snapped shut while the other clamped around the arm pinning her tail in place. Both got caught in bone. She tried to tug her arms free, but they were locked tight. Retracting her claws likely would have saved her, but she decided to take the opportunity this offered.
The slime of her feet slipped from her boots to grip the ground tight, as her tentacles pulled out the new drill clamps she’d been given. They each pressed the mechanisms into the ground around her, letting the screws trigger and lock her in place. Well, all but Pushy. The tentacle, at its own whim, flung the hand-hold into the face of the cultist, where it triggered. Three of the four screws whined as they tried to drill through the Bodytwister’s tough bone, but one corner caught slightly lower and drilled right through his eye.
Apparently, the screws were adaptable enough to curve inwards to give her a lock.
The seventh evolution Bodytwister swung his sword as Nyxala heaved. His bony blade cut deep into her shoulder, but like his bones did with her claws, Nyxala’s bark clung to the weapon. With all the strength she could manage — and a significant amount of change-boost — she lifted the cultist twice her size over her head. Her spikes snapped down, and her spine flexed.
Folding backwards, Nyxala slammed the cultist's head into the ground. Hard.
Of course, for a Bodytwister that had enhanced their body so heavily, a bit of a strike to the head was hardly anything to worry about. Not even enough to daze him. But that wasn’t the point. Nyxala was in a much better position.
With her torso bent back so far, her new mouth opened wider than ever. She could feel the saliva — blood of her previous kills — dribbling up her neck as she slavered over the thought of another feast. Nyxala’s feet let go of their hold. Now, she remained suspended entirely by her tentacles’ strength.
Nyxala didn’t let the motion of tossing the heavy man over her head go to waste. As soon as his head hit the ground and the slime was no longer in her way, she tossed herself at him. Simultaneously, she pulled him inwards. Nyxala’s ribs stretched wider, eager to pierce flesh once more.
The Bodytwister, to his credit, was not slow to react. Only problem: anything he did only accelerated his death. He tried to yank his sword free, and while he succeeded, it also yanked Nyxala closer. Learning quick, he didn’t pull his other arm pinning her blade in place. Instead, he tried to twist her out of the way… but that didn’t help when she had a tentacle pinned to his face.
Nyxala jerked the cultist into her chest head-first. Her rib-teeth slammed in on his sides, getting caught on the inflated muscles of his arms. When the first bite didn’t do enough damage, she chewed again. Each bite cut deeper. She’d already accidentally severed Pushy in the crossfire, but at least her tail didn’t get severed so easily. After a few more bites, the chainsaw slid free of her torso.
This one was putting up a lot more resistance against her than the last two did. He gripped at the teeth with one hand, and kept pulling himself out as her teeth and claws kept trying to shove him in.
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Eventually, he pulled his ivory curved blade from the inside of her jaw and started stabbing at her sides wherever he could reach. She was so glad he couldn’t seem to stab her from inside out. It settled some of her fears from the last two she’d swallowed without properly killing them first.
Lysyra appeared with a flying kick to his arse. Nyxala appreciated it, but she was neither strong nor heavy enough to make a difference. Neither she nor the man stuck half-way into her gut budged.
Nyxala winced as the man stabbed again, cutting through her heart. She gasped, and felt the world speeding up around her as the organ suddenly lost its ability to keep pace. Lýotepͦ’s slaughter state immediately took effect. In a fit of anger, she grabbed him by the wrist — he tugged, but couldn’t slip free of the empowered grip granted to her claws — pulled it up to her original mouth, and bit off his hand.
He should never have taken her on in a grappling contest.
Having just gifted Nyxala’s ribs much greater biting power, the cultist didn’t last long. She chewed, mincing his body as she allowed him to fall into the seemingly endless pit that was her stomach. It took a few seconds, but soon her healing activated.
Once she was done, Nyxala looked around. The Omen Artisan was dead — he apparently couldn’t forsee Lysyra’s knife — but the other two Bodytwisters were nowhere to be seen.
“Where did the sixth evolutions go?” she asked.
Lysyra appeared before her. Nyxala noticed how she had let the replica who tried to kick the cultist down Nyxala’s throat vanish, rather than face the embarrassment of getting to her feet again.
She shook a couple of empty vials. “I hit them with hallucinogenics.” Lysyra sounded pleased with herself. “It won’t last too long in Bodytwisters of their strength, but for now, they’re trying their hardest to kill each other.”
“That sounds incredibly useful. Can you just keep recreating poisons like that?”
Lysyra looked chuffed, but the expression was dampened as she explained. “It takes a while to integrate weapons into my reflections, but unfortunately, poisons — or anything that leaves my touch for too long — don’t work. I have a few vials that I need to share around.”
Nyxala finally caught sight of the two sets of teeth. They were as Lysyra said; fighting. “Shall we? While the opportunity you’ve given us stands?”
The other girl didn’t respond immediately. Instead, her gaze was focused on the corpse of the Omen Artisan. “Sorry. The situation looked bad, and I wanted to cut down their strength as much as possible before they could crash down on us. If I’d left him alive, we might have learnt why an Omen Artisan is here. With the Bodytwisters.”
“It’s not that big of a problem.” Nyxala shrugged. “I have a fairly decent guess at why they’re here, given the Artisan’s reaction. The Omen Artisans are currently working on a prophetic artwork they call the Mural of the Endless Ocean. The cultist you killed likely led the Bodytwisters here… though I’m not sure why.”
Lysyra considered for a moment. “If they’ve been working with the Bodytwisters, and can see the future, then that explains a lot. I always wondered where we got the information of the Null Scar from. But…” she trailed off, narrowing her eyes. “you know that, how?”
“You know that the Eidolons set me a task?”
“Yeah…?” Lysyra’s head tilted, brows furrowing further.
“Well, they sent me back in time to do it.”
Lysyra’s jaw hung for a couple seconds before she shut it and nodded. “No, that makes sense.”
“It does?”
She shrugged. “It ties together your hate of the cults and your certainty of what will happen when they discover what you are with the fact that nobody does know. They already caught you once? Sure, it sounds insane. But I don’t think anything else can be expected when Eidolons are involved.”
Lysyra’s eyes fall to Nyxala’s chest. “That… doesn’t hurt?”
“No?” She checked the new mouth herself. Both robe and cloak would take a while to sacrifice her blood and repair themselves, but until then, her interlocked teeth were out in the open. She gnashed them. It was a lot of skin and flesh that was just… simply not there anymore. Even closed, the red gums only reached a bit further forward than her arms.
Then there was the sternum eye. She could hardly call it that anymore when she no longer had a sternum. The gem floated in the centre of that maw, completely detached from her body. Touching it, she found the eye was just as hard as ever, yet when she’d swallowed those cultists, it hadn’t gotten in the way at all. Curious.
“Ah.” Realising that Lysyra might not be seeing exactly what had happened to her, she deactivated the concealer. “It is… very different, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“Your concealer must have been working overtime to cover that up.” Lysyra leaned in. “To me, it looked like your chest exploded. I thought you’d lost all your organs, not whatever this is.”
“Oh, it did,” Nyxala said. “Pretty sure there are bits of my lungs and heart across the room. They regrew, but I’m not sure they’re exactly in the same place. Very unsettling, being hollowed out. I wouldn’t recommend.” She paused, noticing the girl’s intense scrutiny of her mutation. “…Or maybe I would, if there were a way to avoid Madness.”
Nyxala nor anyone else on Coral knew what caused Madness. Of course, they knew it was the divergence from the human form, but they didn’t know anything deeper than that. And clearly, it wasn’t universal. Nyxala wasn’t Mad. Even if she’d already accepted she was something other than human — a fact only reinforced by the flickering lights caused by pink — there had to be a way to stop Madness.
Though, if it were that easy, the cults wouldn’t all be bound to their human forms.
Her gaze flickered to the two Bodytwisters that were finally slowing down; their attacks either damaging each other enough to injure them both, or the hallucinogenic was finally wearing off. The pink glow bounding off the walls caught her eye. They really were like torches. She knew the pink bleeding through her eyes wasn’t really light — it was something incomprehensible — but she had to wonder how their alien illumination would affect the phantoms in Coral’s shadows. Would they stagger under the light as all humans seemed to, or would they become as aggravated as they were the last time?
Nyxala had already begun work on the next mutation. By how aggressively pink pushed through her gaze upon the arrival of her chest mouth, there was no denying the strength of connection between the two mutations. What would be the result of these combined prerequisites?
“Let’s deal with those Bodytwisters,” Nyxala said. “Once they’re dead, we can get back to the Fleshsmith Island. Fortunately, I now have a way to dispose of bodies quickly.”
By the energised sensation flowing through both her body and soul, she didn’t even need a ritual to steal name enrichment anymore. Such a perfect way to get rid of the souls that might give her away. Now she just needed to see if it worked on the already dead, too. That Omen Artisan wasn’t getting any warmer.
Nyxala did not acknowledge the eagerness with which she’d made that decision, nor the salivation that threatened to spill from both mouths.