Everything happened too fast.
The darkness engulfing her, the rippling air on her black locks, the sensation of gravity in her stomach.
The shock and the fear.
Bubbling from a forbidden place inside her, a sealed part of her soul that she had swored off in the name of her mother's ideals and dreams, something was stirring awake.
Something hungry, like a beast whose hibernation was finally coming to an end.
The sight of Kornos, his faces a rictus of an evil grin illuminated by the unnatural blue lights in his eyes and the same pale blue that emanated softly from the many scars on his back, only served to fuel that dark beast inside her.
Hatred.
"Crowley!" She screamed, as they both fell, her hand hold tight in an inescapable grip by the controlled Kornos. "Let him go, you sick bastard!"
"And why would I do that after all the trouble I went through to plant this particular seed so long ago? Not my personal preference of shape, but you can't deny the power in these guns!" He made Kornos flex his free arm with a mocking wink directed at her. "Or are you perhaps worried that we are gonna crash? Oh my, where are my manners? I'm receiving you back home in such a frightful way, aren't I?"
Kornos extended his dragon wings and flapped clumsily a couple of times, his movements slow and forced, like the wings were refusing to be of help.
"My, oh my. The King Chimera is quite the formidable individual indeed! Or perhaps just lucky? Seems like not all of him agrees with my presence, mmm? You think a mere Tier 2 Aspect can deny me? Please, don't make me laugh..." Something in Kornos-Crowley's expression shifted, as if he was noticing something unexpected, before his eyes opened wildly.
"You?" He asked incredulously, all his previous good humor dried up all of a sudden. "How in the hells does he have your Aspect in him? That's impossible!" His free hand went to his face in pain as he started to huff and puff in effort, an unseen battle for the soul of the King Chimera happening inside him.
For a dragon does not share his treasures. Nor its domain.
Evelyn felt the grip on her relax a little as Crowley was too occupied with what seemed to be unexpected resistance in his moment of total victory.
"Sorry for this, Kornos. [Hylosynthesis]!" She channelled all the mana she had managed to recover on the Skill, focusing it on the metalwood staff that Kornos had just given her from the remains of the Firefly.
What happened next was a surprise to all involved in that fall at high velocity to the entrails of Neo Vorath.
Cable vines exploded from the staff's surface, but unlike the other times she had summoned them, the amber blades had taken a much different form. Instead of sharp pieces of metal slightly colored amber by her mana, now the leaf blades looked semitransparent and more orange than ever before, just like actual amber. Circuit patterns shaped with bright pure mana inside them illuminated the space they were falling through.
Sheer rock walls surrounded them, excavated to reach the depths of the earth. Why there had been such a thing under a children's park, she couldn't say, nor did she have the time to question.
A cascade of mana, far more than she could muster on her own at the moment, surged through circuit-like veins on the cable vines and the now truly amber blades as she felt something around her give her a little push, a tiny fraction of outside help.
[PURGE]
The voice of Neo Vorath came clear to Evelyn's mind, along with a fury such as she had never felt from the spirit of the great city ever before.
The cable vines multiplied into dozens, growing bigger than she had ever managed before, not even when her Core was out of control.
"It must have been her!" Growled Kornos-Crowley in thunderous fury, his every word a painful poison coming from the mouth of the proud man. "That saw this happening and gave it to him! Even in death, she still manages to be a thorn in my side! That... cursed... EVA!" The name was growled as if it were a curse on itself, a condemnation to a defeated enemy that was still getting in the way of total victory.
Evelyn felt her heart skip a beat with the mention of her mother, questions burning in her mind. Resolved not to miss her chance, she commanded her vines to attack.
Like an army of angry serpents, dozens of cable vines as thick as real snakes coiled around the mighty form of the King Chimera, cutting him with sharp amber blades as they sank as deep in his flesh as his hard dragon scales and thick muscles allowed.
But it was enough, because Evelyn wasn't trying to really hurt, much less kill Kornos. What she wanted them to do was the same thing that happened the last time her vines attacked him.
Feed.
Extending her senses with her Awareness to control dozens of cable vines proved immediately overwhelming, like suddenly having an equal number of arms and legs and all the information they sent at the same time. Her head should have exploded, and her brain liquified from the sheer mental effort; she was not ready to handle this amount of them directly connected to her body, but a presence, comforting and reassuring, supported her from inside herself.
Another mind, a more powerful one, used to hundreds of calculations for a second, gently took that load for her.
There were no words, just feeling, but it was enough for Evelyn to remember.
She wasn't alone.
A blue light added itself to the scene, but not one called for by Crowley. This runicron blue, was coming from Evelyn's borrowed eye. And it belonged to another.
Someone who was utterly pissed with her previous mentor.
Two voices came from Evelyn's mouth at the same time, a sentiment shared, an emotion too strong to be denied by the barriers of flesh or death.
Love.
"LET HIM GO!!" Demanded Evelyn.
"Let him go!" Admonished Alice.
Power shone blue in one eye, while it did a golden amber like the sun in the other. The two women sharing a body in harmony at that moment, a reflection cast in light against the dark takeover in front of them.
The cable vines tighten hard enough to stop any movement from Kornos-Crowley, thanks mostly to being too occupied with the internal battle for control of the body. With a single order, she commanded the vines to tear and rip, cutting everything in their path as they were pulled. Evelyn saw with just her runicron eye the spectral blue hand of a woman holding her runitronic crimson hand as it gripped the staff. with all the strength it was capable of.
She felt the apparition lend her own power as it faded away into mana dust.
A tear came down from Evelyn's amber eye as she screamed again, now with a single voice. But the warm presence inside her, calling the beast of hatred back to sleep, didn't go away.
The amber blades fed, hungry and voracious from the blood of Kornos, and as they left his body, the proof of their feeding was bare.
Where once had stood a mighty monster, there was now just a tall man, bleeding slightly from a thousand tiny cuts. His orange-red hair down to his shoulders was no longer the mane of a lion, nor had his body any sign of being anything more than a muscular human with a handsome face marked by a square jaw.
Almost the same face Evelyn had seen in the photo that Alice gave her. Kornos' physical mutations had all vanished.
Which also included his dragon wings. Now lacking the aid of the great wings as gliders to slow their fall, they picked up speed, accelerating by the second.
The extra power given by Neo Vorath had made Evelyn's unknown Aspect Skill, the one that Kornos had theorized was responsible for the effect that the blades of her cable vines had done to his Tier 2 dragon scales before, push its power beyond anything she could have done by herself. It had managed to eliminate even the physical mutations from Tier 4 Aspects Skills.
Which should have been impossible for a mere Tier 1 like Evelyn.
The now human-looking Kornos still had bright blue eyes. Crowley was still in there. But now, his human hand had a grip much easier for her to escape. With a hard smack from the metalwood staff, Evelyn finally escaped the grapple, separating from the possessed chimera as they fell.
Evelyn didn't go far, as she commanded the cable vines to grab Kornos and flip him to face away from her, his body still paralyzed with whatever internal battle was happening inside it. With the wings and hard scales gone, now the skin on his back, scars glowing in blue, was vulnerable.
"My city says you are not welcome here."
Evelyn called to a specific item in her Inventory, one that she remembered getting from the last time Neo Vorath helped her in a fight.
A blood-stained vibroknife, the same one that Adrien Nomeck, the classer who became the wraith of discord, used to kill himself with after giving up on his fight.
Now it would serve a much nobler purpose. Instead of taking a life, it would save one.
Evelyn sent mana to the vibroknife, activating its engraved Runeskill. She didn't know what it was called, so she couldn't activate it with her voice, but she didn't need to. [Pulse Link] was still active. She ordered the runitronics in the vibroknife to work as intended, to accept her mana and come to life, like an owner commands a pet to behave. There was a connection formed, a link pulsing with mana directly to the object as its runitronics drank it in.
And the weapon listened to its new master.
The Runeskill activated, and around the edge of the knife, the air hummed like an old forgotten melody from a musician long gone. But the imprint left from his mana on the object, one many times used to fight the tyranny of the Tetracrown's authority, to give voice to those who had seen it taken from them, still endured like a wish. The vibroknife was more than happy to perform against one that steals autonomy from others.
But just for good measure, she would make extra sure this chance was not lost.
"[Verdant Toolset]!" As she called on her third Skill, the amber colored mana absorbed by the vibroknife shone intensely as it transformed in her human hand, staff in the other, mid descend into the scarred back of Kornos.
The blade grew several inches, the metal turning a familiar golden orange color as its handle practically surrounded her hand like a hand guiding her into a shake. The hum from the vibrating air around the bigger edge turned melodious, its rhythm clear as the phantom sound of guitar strings resonated.
Evelyn knew the words she had to say as if they had been born in her heart. There was only one name possible for this living weapon she had made with the spirit of a rebel musician.
"[Edge Punk]!" She screamed as the music from a dead man's guitar, once touched with four phantom hands, turned to sharpness that cut through Kornos's back.
He was still a Tier 4, with a tremendous level of physical resistance to boot, even weakened with Neo Vorath's help. Evelyn was struggling to put more than an inch of the upgraded runitronic weapon through his scarred skin, but she knew she needed to go deeper. If the scarflock had runitronics put inside their scars for Crowley to be able to control them from a distance, then there had to be something similar inside Kornos.
She kept pushing as the punk rock music rose to a crescendo along with the sharpness of the vibrating knife, but it was still not enough. Evelyn just didn't have the muscles. She had no augments to her Strength whatsoever, and her runitronic arm wasn't doing the job. The difference between a Tier 1 and a Tier 4 was still too great. She couldn't pierce deep enough to reach whatever Crowley had put inside him.
Her Awareness flared, calling her attention. The scales were already returning to his skin, his musclemass increasing in volume and density. But that wasn't the only problem.
They were about to reach the bottom.
So Evelyn made a choice. She couldn't pierce with the knife by herself. So she would let the city go one more time. Evelyn released the handle of the knife, almost two inches inside the growing back, and let it remain there. Maneuvering in the air with the help of the cable vines she could manage to control, she got on top of Kornos and shifted his axis, putting his body horizontal and his face upwards. Evelyn straddled his torso and gently grabbed his face, frozen in an ictus.
"I'm sorry, I wasn't strong enough. Please, survive this." She pleaded, not just to Kornos, but to anything that could hear her. "Goddess, if you really exist, wherever you are, I beg you. Help him."
Evelyn stood on his torso, jumped with a kick to his chest, and sent him straight down. Using her cable vines and the momentum from the kick, she used the amber blades to pierce the rock, trying to latch onto them.
One by one, the amber blades failed to pierce the wall, shattering against the rock as the cable vines they were growing died and turned into mana dust. Scrapping and sending sparks in the air, the amber blades still managed to slow her descent enough for her to take her metalwood staff and use her very last drops of mana to activate her arm one last time.
"[Grow Metal]" Uttered like a prayer, the tiny bits of mana left in her Core were just enough for one more activation of the runeskill in the crimson runitronic arm that Alice had made for her.
She wasn't sure if the staff, once wood, now a strange living fusion of plant matter and metal, would react to the runeskill. Evelyn was betting it all at a last card. A leap of faith.
The last of her mana shone through her arm down to the staff. There was a half of a second of pause as she heard the impact of a body against the bottom, before the runeskill activated and the staff grew.
Evelyn gave it all that she had left, all of it, until there was no more. The staff elongated faster than she was falling, reaching solid ground with just enough time for Evelyn to brace for impact.
The tension of the sudden stop as she held for dear life to the staff, almost tore her limbs from her sockets, but she finally stopped her fall.
She was alive, but not yet safe. She slid down the staff until her feet touched the ground and absorbed the long staff into her Inventory.
Kornos told me I must not lose it. It's important. It's too unwieldy right now. I'll shrink it once I have mana again. She rationalized to herself, only half thinking. Her real attention was on the body.
There was a big lion man with dragon scales, wings, and a tail on the ground. His eyes were closed, his mouth agape. The blue lights were gone.
Evelyn ran to him, mind racing faster than her legs could. They had done it. They had saved him. The puppet strings had been cut, the runitronic inside his scars too damaged for Crowley to control him.
His body was big and heavy again, so she struggled for what seemed to be hours, but was in fact just a couple of minutes, to flip him on his side to see his back.
Once she finally managed to do it, she was greeted with the vision of the verdant vibroknife down to the hilt inside one of the scars. Darkened blood dripped from the weapon, staining a floor that she noticed was no longer rock as the rest of the shaft had been. It was cold metal, like one would find in a high-tech facility.
"Kornos, wake up. We are here. Everything is gonna be fine; he can't control you anymore. We'll take out the rest of whatever he put in you later." She sniffed on her sleeve, half crying and laughing as she shook his body. "Come on, sleepy head, there's a bad guy for us to fight. Then we will find a machine to take Alice from me, put her back in her body, or even better, a new body just like she wanted! Now that we know I can take your mutations away from your whole body, maybe if I train, I could make it permanent! You were still pretty tough, so you could still fight, but look like you wanted to. You can both be happy..."
There was a little ping that rang in her ears and a visual indication in the corner of her eye. A notification from the Overseer.
Evelyn stared at it, refusing to acknowledge it, but it kept insisting on being opened. Her breath was agitated, her hands shaking, and her mouth dry.
She slapped Kornos in the face, screaming for him to wake up, but he wouldn't. Something inside him was... broken.
The notification sound rang again, the little icon refusing to disappear from her vision.
Dread in her heart, fear in her mind, and a prayer on her lips, Evelyn took the leap of faith.
She opened it.
