Chapter XXXV: Blood & Thunder

I drew my sword and gun. The sound, the scraping of nails on stone, echoed through the pillars and archways of the room until the source was completely impossible to triangulate, and there was nothing clearly visible. I pressed my back against a near wall.

“You’re not going to catch me unawares!” I roared. No response.

The sound grew louder, closer, but still remained undefinable. It was coming from somewhere, but where? Where? And why couldn’t I see it? My grip tightened around the hilt of my blade and the grip of my revolver. There was slight movement at the corner of my eye. Screaming in panic, I fired off a shot, only to realize that I’d just fired at nothing but a bit of gravel.

The scraping sound grew closer, closer, then suddenly stopped. No noise, no threat. Had I imagined it? Or had whatever it was left the area, having had no intention of doing me any harm at all. I let out a breath, lowering my guard.

The only warning I had was the sudden flood of nausea. It was a familiar sensation, the same one I felt any time there was a lightning storm since I’d arrived on Selene. In a blind panic, I leapt forward, skidding across the floor and landing at a crouch. Not a moment later, with a burst of thunderous noise, something huge and brimming with muscle crashed down from the ceiling, landing in the exact place where I’d been standing.

It was an animal, but it was like no animal I’d ever seen before. It had the hunched, horizontal posture of a bear or a big cat, but nearly six feet tall at the shoulder, its back covered in rusty-red fur. It crouched on six powerful, stout limbs, each one decorated with blunt claws, designed for climbing. The head was something like a cross between a wolf and a gorilla, with huge catlike eyes that almost glowed orange in the half-light. Most notable, however, was the row of bony spines projecting out of its back, around the shoulder joint; as it recovered from its deadly leap, visible arcs of yellow-blue electricity leapt from spine to spine. It looked at me, unhinged its immense jaw, and roared. The sound echoed across the chamber, loud enough to be felt as a physical impact on my chest. Then it charged. 

I can’t express how quickly that thing could move; with all six of its limbs pounding, you could feel the rush of air pushing toward you, like a freight train gone feral. Before I could even think of a response, it was right up in my face, rearing up to slam down with one enormous paw. I stumbled. My feet moved of their own accord. I escaped the slash, only barely. But I couldn’t escape what came next. 

The moment its claws hit the ground, there was a flash of light and an all-consuming crackling buzz as the creature’s spines exploded to life, sending an enormous pulse of electricity blasting through the air. One bolt lanced right into the center of my chest. I felt my heart stop, and realized with horror that I had no clue how well my body could handle electrical burns.

I was thrown back by an enormous muscle spasm, landing in a limp pile on the ground. The whole world spun on its axis. Regaining control of my muscles took several seconds longer than it had any right to, and my breathing became increasingly frantic as the beast stalked its way toward me, its eyes narrowed with feral malice. As soon as I had the strength and coordination to do so, I leapt back. My hand clenched around the hilt of my sword so tightly that it hurt as I scrambled to find a place where I could catch my breath. 

The beast didn’t give me any space to do that. Despite its size, the sheer muscle power in its legs allowed it to keep pace with me, even as I dodged and ducked around the pillars that filled the center of the room. In fact, it was almost certainly those pillars that prevented it from running me down and killing me right there and then. The whole world turned into a blur of desperation. We played cat and mouse from one end of the chamber to the other, the beast always a fraction of a second away from ripping me to pieces. Running wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I changed tactics. 

I changed direction suddenly, my small size giving me maneuverability that the beast had no way to account for. It overshot, carving gashes in the floor as it tried to stop in time, while I took my sword in both hands and rushed in, aiming to thrust through the relatively unprotected flesh of its stomach. But I’d failed to take into account the beast’s innate electricity. My sword would have driven right between its ribs, but the moment the tip of the blade came near to its skin, there was a flash of light, a burst of nausea, and a searing sense of agony playing across my arms. 

For a moment, I was utterly paralyzed, every muscle tensing to the point of pain. Then it suddenly passed, and the situation had changed: the beast had turned around, my sword was on the ground, there was a faint scent of burned flesh in the air. I grabbed my sword and ran for it. The beast pursued, as always, but something was slightly different about it; there weren’t as many arcs rolling across its back, and it wasn’t quite as energetic as it had been, though even conserving its energy it was more than fast enough to keep up with me. I’d depleted something by forcing it to fend me off. And in one moment of relative calm, where I’d managed to put a fallen pillar momentarily between myself and it, I had an idea.

I shoved my sword into its scabbard, then ripped off my jacket. The beast finally climbed over the pillar, and I burst free not a moment too soon, clutching the jacket in both hands like a bullfighter. While I was trying to catch my breath, I’d remembered seeing a pool of stagnant water in the far corner of the room. Sure enough, it was there, a shallow puddle about a foot deep, covering an area the size of a king-sized bed, and probably containing one or more species of algae entirely unknown to science. But I didn’t need the water for it’s drinkability; in fact, for what I had in mind, the more impurities the better. 

The hard part was getting to that puddle without getting all of my limbs forcefully torn from my body. I gave up on being evasive, instead going into a full sprint, legs pounding and lungs complaining as adrenaline pushed me to speeds that should not have been possible for a human frame. For a human; but not for whatever this thing was. Even exhausted and drained it devoted all of its energy to the chase, its paws hitting the ground hard enough to produce a resounding thud. Even my head start only bought about six feet of gap between me and it, a gap that would close in moments if I slowed down even slightly. There was no time to try my plan, but if I was right, there was one way to buy myself that time. If I was wrong, I would get mauled. 

I reached the puddle at a full sprint, not slowing down in the slightest until the moment my foot splashed into the edge. Then I put my foot down, beginning to slide. Slowing down from nearly twenty-five miles per hour on wet stone was basically impossible, and I went down onto my knees, soaking most of my body and substantially splashing the rest. There was nothing between me and the beast as I slowly pushed myself back to my feet. Nothing but the water, that is. 

It had started slowing down before I had, as could be seen from the deep gouges in the floor, and ended up crouched right at the water’s edge, baring its teeth and growling in fury. I laughed, openly, part out of the absurdity of it all and partially out of the sheer relief I felt at having been proven right. Just to rub it in, I opened up my jacket and crouched down, carefully holding a pool of water in the cloth as I stood up. With a quick movement, I whipped the coat towards the beast, dousing it with water. The reaction was immediate and violent. The beast howled in agony the moment the water struck it, as an enormous burst of electrical energy shot out of all six of its limbs, all grounding out at once through the conductive water. It remained standing, which was better than I would have done in that circumstance. 

Still, I had it at bay, and without its electricity it should have been as vulnerable as any other animal. I drew my revolver and fired into its shoulder, then again and again and again until the chamber clicked empty, leaving five bullet holes in its torso and head. But the beast didn’t fall. It whimpered in pain, sagging under its own weight, panting and heaving with exertion, but it didn’t fall. I stepped back to the wall, holstering my revolver. I’d heard stories of bears or wild boar surviving bullet wounds to kill the ones who’d shot them, but that usually only happened when the creature was already enraged and charging, and the creatures must have bled out afterwards. Perhaps it would just be a matter of waiting?

The first sign that this plan wouldn’t work out for me was the all-too-familiar clatter of bullets dropping to the floor. A sound I’d only heard before when I’d been shot, and the bullets forced out as the wounds healed. Sure enough, as I watched in horror, the injuries I’d given the beast stopped bleeding and slowly shrank away, turning first into pale dots of scar tissue, then vanishing entirely. I’d drained its electricity, but I was still no closer to actually wounding it.

For a few seconds, I could scarcely breathe from terror and panic. A creature, a beast, had the same powers of regeneration that I had? Except this thing could also match my speed, and so severely outclassed me in physical power that I wouldn’t last more than a couple of seconds in a melee, which meant that I had basically nothing I could leverage to win against this thing.

Then it got worse. The beast rolled its shoulders, shaking its neck like a big cat, then glared down at the water. Its eyes narrowed in what I could almost recognize as curiosity or understanding, before it gingerly extended its front left paw to touch the water. The fur dipped into the liquid, and there was no reaction. I realized what was going on before it was even done; drained of electricity, there was nothing preventing it from entering the water, which meant that I needed to find a way to escape right away. My vision locked in on a small hollow in the far wall, a place where a small stable pocket had formed in the rubble

Everything happened at once. The beast pounced, fangs bared and claws out, letting out a barking roar. At the same time, I dodged, throwing myself toward and to the side of where the beast had been, hoping to make it overshoot me. My plan worked; it crashed into the wall, and I ran for the hollow. At that point I was so exhausted that I’d reverted to pure instinct and reflex, with no space for strategizing or acrobatics as I ran as fast as I could in a direct path toward the one place that seemed to provide hope of legitimate safety. I made it most of the way there unimpeded, with the beast’s footfalls on the floor a mere background element. I was maybe eight, nine feet away when it caught up to me. One moment I was on my feet, and the next moment I had been knocked off of my feet by a force almost as powerful as a reikverratr’s fist, landing on my stomach in a sprawl. I started crawling, barely making it another step before it was over me.

The beast smacked me with a paw, effortlessly turning me over onto my back, then lunged down. Agony shot through me as the beast dug its enormous fangs into the flesh of my chest until I screamed, a raw and choked sound, as all of my muscles locked up from the sheer pain coursing through me as my ribs broke under the incredible power of its bite. The beast started worrying at the wound, ripping and tearing the surrounding flesh even as it healed. I was going to die if I didn’t do something. So I did something, and more by chance than by intention I did the one thing that could have given me a chance. My hand lashed out uncontrollably, and my fingers found its huge orange eyes. In a frenzy of pain and adrenaline, my hand formed a claw and gouged, trying to rip out the beast’s eyes in a blood-fueled rage. 

My fingers felt something soft. I don’t know if it that was its eyes or not, but whatever I did caused the beast to flinch back, weakening its almighty grip. At the same time, I pushed with everything I had, desperate to claw my way to safety a few feet away. My hands still reached for its head, scratching at eyes and ears, and after a moment of struggle I forced the beast to detach, recoiling in pain as it did. That bought me a second, two at most. I crab-walked away, always keeping my eyes on the beast, and tumbled over into the hollow.

It was a small enough space that I couldn’t stand up, so I instead rose into a crouch and backed as far from the entrance as I could, which wasn’t far. There was just enough space that I could have, maybe, lain down on my back without my feet sticking out. I refused to look down at myself, didn’t want to see what had happened down there. The pain faded, but failed to disappear the way it should have, and it still stung to breathe or move my arm too much; something was wrong.

The beast nearly threw itself against the fallen rubble at the mouth of the hollow. Even as wounded and exhausted as I was, that still made me jump, which made the pain from my wound suddenly flare up. My hand flew to my chest. My hand hit something hard several inches out from my skin; looking down I realized that the beast had left a fang embedded in my flesh, just above my right breast. The wound continued to ooze blood into my shirt, pouring around the tooth. I tried to grab the tooth and pull it out to no avail, my blood-slick hands slipping on the smooth enamel and sharp edges while my muscles clenched around the wound, holding the tooth in. I knew, not long after, what I was going to have to do.

I took my sword in both hands and turned it toward myself. My jaw tensed as I ran through what I was going to have to do, repeating the motions in my mind so that I wouldn’t lose track of everything in the middle of it. The beast was still trying to get in, pushing and surging against the entrance, the spittle dripping down its jaw mixing with blood from its missing tooth. If I was going to survive, I needed the tooth out of me.

The blade went in slowly, gliding with disturbing ease into the wound, separating the tooth from the surrounding flesh. The blood flow increased, dripping slowly down the blade. I gave the tooth a test pull, which went nowhere: the pressure was being transmitted through the sword blade, leaving me in the same situation I’d started with. I’d been worried that that would happen, and prepared for it. I gripped the hilt of the sword with both hands, tightening my grasp until my hands got sore, then finally realized that I had to do it sooner rather than later and twisted the blade ninety degrees to the side. 

It hurt. It hurt like hell. The expression “twisting the knife” is fully accurate, because I was already in so much pain but the new pain burned like the motherfucking sun and I screamed like an infant the entire time. The edge of the sword cut into my flesh, causing a spray of blood that speckled the whole of the hollow with spots of red. More trickled down the blade, turning the steel red. I had no control over my arms or hands, they were shaking so badly, and it was all the presence I could manage to not let go, because who knew what kind of awful damage would happen if I lost control of the sword multiple inches into me. Instead I tipped my torso forward, an almost convulsive motion. More blood poured, and the tooth slid out of the injury by gravity. The sound of the hard enamel clattering on the stone snapped me out of my haze just enough that I could pull the sword out of me.

The wound didn’t close. It shrank a little bit, and the flow of blood slowed down to a slow drip, but it didn’t close. I was starting to get lightheaded from blood loss. Fuck. My memories of taking first aid class years ago were faded and scattered by that point, but I did remember a little bit about what to do with deep injuries like that. The sword was completely covered in my blood, which hugged the surface like those videos of a wet washcloth in zero-gravity instead of dripping off like a normal fluid, but still had a sharp edge underneath, which I used to cut off the bottom of my shirt. I crumpled up all of the cloth, hoping that my regeneration would protect against infections, and stuffed as much of it into the wound as possible. The key part was maintaining pressure and blocking blood flow. I didn’t stop cramming fabric in there until I physically couldn’t fit any more, leaving a little tail spilling out. Then I very nearly passed out.

Not that I could actually afford to lose consciousness, with the beast knocking at my door. My eyes started to flutter closed when it lunged again. This time, though, there was a deep, almost subsonic, cracking noise, like a redwood tree breaking. My eyes shot open. By throwing its weight against the barrier repeatedly for minutes on end, the beast had finally gotten the stone pillar and chunks of ceiling to crack. A few more pushes like that and I would be done for. 

I quickly resolved that I was either going to have to kill this thing now, or find out what would happen when I got ripped apart and partially devoured. Scrambling around in the tight quarters of the hollow felt like trying to pour the whites out of an eggshell while keeping the yolk inside, and I was the yolk. The position I ended up in was a sort of partial crouch. I held my sword with both hands, one hand on the blade, which was still wet and red from my blood clinging to the blade. There was another resounding crash as the beast continued to throw itself at the hollow, this one followed by an almost-subsonic rumble as all of the piled stone around me began to destabilize from the impact. No matter what happened, I’d probably end up dead anyway. Better to die while trying something than to be so afraid that I got crushed or devoured while sitting down.

My legs flexed like a spring, launching my entire weight. My whole body turned into a thrown javelin, a single arrow, with the forward-facing point of my cutlass aimed directly at the center of the beast’s chest. By sheer coincidence, the beast reared up at that moment, exposing its chest. I crashed into the beast’s underside with enough force to knock the air from out of my lungs and send a shock through my whole skeleton, while the cutlass bit into the flesh of the beast’s chest and sank deep into muscle and organ. My momentum combined with the pain of the sudden strike knocked it off-balance, sending the beast careening backwards. The only thing I could think about was doing as much damage to it as I could before the inevitable counterattack cost me my life, so I grabbed onto the fur of its belly and pushed, screaming incoherently as I drove the blade of the sword ever deeper. The beast jerked and spasmed as it landed on the uneven floor, easily overcoming my weakened grip and throwing me aside.

So I lay there on my stomach, weak from blood loss, and waited to die. More growls and whines emanated from the beast’s cavernous throat, but they weren’t coming closer, and no fatal lunging bite or crushing swipe of the claws ever came. A few moments passed in absolute quivering terror. Then, confused at my continued survival, I pushed myself off of the stones and looked around.

The beast was dying. It lay, pathetically, on its back, twitching and writhing as blood erupted from its throat and spilled onto the ground in rivulets. The only visible sign of injury was my sword. Or rather, my sword’s hilt, the only part of it still visible externally after I’d driven all twenty-eight inches of the blade right into the beast’s vital organs. I waited for the moment of hope to end. Inevitably the beast would heal, and the sword would be driven out as all of my work was undone. But the moment never ended; it was properly, completely, dead.

A few minutes later, Sarnai emerged from the Wayggranjlit hall. She looked almost dissociated from the world around her, a mix of deep serenity and utter confusion, an expression that broke when she saw me leaning against the corpse of a huge creature, covered in blood. 

“Emma! What happened?”

“What do you think?” I said wearily. “This thing showed up out of nowhere. Tried to kill me. Nearly succeeded. I killed it back.”

She circled around the corpse, examining it from every angle with a sense of growing awe. “A thunderfang,” she said. “And you said you killed it?”

I gestured with my sword. “It didn’t kill itself.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it later on. Killing a thunderfang is… usually it involves twenty Durkahns, often more, and even then some of them may die. Slaying one on your own is something that happens in stories, an act of heroes or clever village girls. How did you do it?”

“I…” I looked at the sword, still embedded in its chest. “I don’t know. I mean, the sword did it in, but when I tried to shoot it, it just healed, like I do. I don’t know why it couldn’t heal from this.”

“And why you didn’t heal from it, either,” she said, gesturing to my wound.

I’d forgotten about my injury already, and the sudden reminder re-opened the floodgates of pain. Sarnai rushed forward as I groaned in sudden agony. “Fucking hell, we need a doctor.”

“Yes! I’ll get Rook and Sir Margaret. I think one of them will know. Maybe.”

She turned, but before she could walk away I seized her by the wrist. “Before you go. How do you feel? Did anything happen down there?”

Sarnai paused, looking back at me with surprise that I’d asked. “Yes. But I don’t think… I think that what I saw down there is something that I should keep to myself. But I feel much better now.”

“Good,” I said. “Now go find the others.”

“Thank you for giving me the confidence to do what I had to do. It is appreciated,” Sarnai said, then ran off. Relieved that she was doing well and suddenly deeply exhausted, I rested my head against the dead thunderfang and shut my eyes.

SaffronDragon

My girlfriend could not stop herself from making a bunch of Monster Hunter references when she was first reading this chapter, so now I can't help but associate this fight with one of those games. I know I'm probably getting annoying with the calls to action, but my Patreon income, and thus my only income overall, has been stagnating for months, so if anyone could click the link below and consider sending their support, I'd appreciate it so, so, so much. If you only want to give a one-time tip, I also have a ko-fi now, so don't forget about that option. Otherwise, I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter XXXVI: Skirmish and Survival. We're almost at the end of this book, people, just a handful of chapters to go.