She’d already spent almost half the mana in her body to get to the lip of the damn pipe, and now she didn’t know what to do, panting from exertion as she deactivated [Telemantic Construct], the only thing that had allowed her atrophied arm to drag her body the distance.
An almost frantic sense of urgency pushed her forth, and she spent a quarter of the mana in her body on a self-applied [Haste] spell.
Her hearing was already little else but a steady whine that dug into her brain like a drill, so the Perception boost quickly made her realize just how loud things could become beyond her usual audial range. Yet, due to how Perception worked, she didn’t have to worry about a headache so much as the creeping suspicion that she'd be hearing that whine in her mind for months even without it existing.
Letting out a groan as she cracked her neck, she then dragged her collarbone over the end of the pipe with her rubbed-raw hand, and extended her arm down, excreting mana and struggling to feel how it conformed to the stone below her.
“Hey! Mutt! Beast! Dog! Fleabag! Void abomination!” She yelled once more, barely able to hear her own voice over the whining shriek drilling into her ears, but still hoping to hear something, anything to confirm that her companion was still alive, the memory of that panicked yowl bouncing around her skull like a pinball.
Nothing.
She could feel exactly where it was, from the strange, curled up position its limbs were in, to the distance that separated them, and she could feel how something foreign was tugging its limbs around without any input from her beastly companion. But she couldn’t feel if it was alive, whatever Skill the beast had that allowed them to share awareness of each other simply didn’t extend that far.
She pushed the mana out of her palm with more force, expecting results and feeling the blunted claws of panic start to brush against her throat with every passing moment.
A couple feet from her hand, everything worked perfectly, feeling like she had a dozen hands brushing against the rock beneath her, but then the feeling faded to nothing before it could meet anything substantial.
It was more akin to trying to extend her senses throughout a strand of smoke, like trying to grasp the hazy, crumbling memory of a dream, like a word that was on the very tip of her tongue but refused to come. She could feel it brush against her fingers, against her mind, but it could never press down hard enough to give her information.
With a growl of determination that hurt her throat, she poured the remaining quarter of her body’s mana and violently expelled it out of her hand, finally meeting some sort of cracked flooring, small hints of her mana managing to slip through the cracks to lick at the air before she lost sensation. So the beast had crashed through something twice, her ears hadn’t been deceiving her.
As the whine in her ears faded, she could hear the sound of faint scraping, the clicking of something hard impacting stone in a frantic tempo, and she grit her teeth as her imagination ran wild, gigantic spiders with eight spiked limbs and glowing eyes invading her thoughts. Or centipedes. Centipedes were even worse.
But the way the wolf was being restrained felt exactly like a cocoon.
And as she imagined her beastly companion being wrapped up in a cocoon and tugged around by such disgusting monsters, all hesitation and fear faded, even if only for a moment.
She gripped onto the rusty pipe with her shaking fingers, used telemancy to push her stomach off the metal, just a little bit, and heaved, pushing herself away from safety. Her shoulders cleared the lip, then her shoulder blades as her elbow started pushing outwards, her body tilting towards the right.
She paused for a moment to prepare herself, then remembered something of no real consequence, a distant memory of Katherine telling her that the only way to bathe in cold water as slaves usually did, was to dive right in without hesitation and deal with the aftermath until the body adjusted.
A bad analogy, but she’d held that conversation and belief dear to her heart for a long time. And it strangely fit in this scenario. Just dive right in.
She could only hope that the fading boost she got from the beast’s blood would spare her more broken bones.
She curled her waist to turn her body to the left, before lurching to the right, pushing with her arm and throwing her weight downwards, feeling her torn garments strain as they ground against rust, slowly dragging herself out of the pipe, her stomach digging into its edge.
Another push, and her balance shifted as her weight dragged her out of the pipe by itself. She swung her body to the left, splaying her fingers at a flat ninety degree angle at the edge of the pipe, and allowed her body to slide out, her legs painfully grinding against the top of the pipe as they slid out.
Then she did her best to lighten her weight with [Telemantic Construct], barely managing to hold onto the pipe with a strained, throaty grunt. She was oddly thankful of her malnourishment and lightweight armor at this moment, as her hand shook and painfully strained to keep her meager weight from collapsing.
She took a deep breath, mentally choreographing her fall to hurt as little as possible for a quick moment. Right side first, cover her head with her arm, and try to land on her hip and roll to the left.
She was so going to break something important, she could fucking feel it.
After mentally preparing a two-way repulsion field around her body for a few moments, she weakly swung her legs to fix her momentum, and once her right side was just a bit extended, she let go with a small yelp that didn’t escape her pursed lips, hurriedly curling her arm around her head.
She crashed through the first floor, much like she assumed the beast had, the impact surprisingly weak, only feeling like a really strong slap on the back. Which was terrible, as she’d been banking on the first impact softening the assumed second one.
She barely managed to send a pulse of mana out of her palm to feel the floor and process the information before she slammed almost half of her core’s mana into the construct at the last three feet.
Although the force of her own mana crashed into her back like a particularly unwieldy mattress, completely knocking her breath out of her lungs, she continued her fall with bleeding momentum, and with a reaction time that was equal parts luck and anticipation, managed to roll once her right shoulder hit the stone, the construct dissipating immediately after.
Her legs had been mercifully saved from even hitting the ground.
For several seconds, she simply laid on the floor, gasping and wheezing and choking and coughing like the useless pile of bones that she was, gathering mana into her fist just in case the spider came closer.
She felt her companion’s limbs slowly loosen from their rigid positions against its own body, as if the cocoon was being undone, and grew even more paranoid, straining her ears past the lingering whine to listen for the insect’s steps.
Gathering the dread in her stomach and chucking it to a distant corner of her mind, she tried to figure out where the spider was.
Was it gone, or was it repositioning to shove her in a cocoon as well? She was close to the beast, only eight or so feet away, she should be hearing something other than faint echoes of the explosion and the beast’s labored breathing.
She’d been hearing the odd tapping the entire time she’d been dragging herself to the pipe’s exit, she knew this damn thing made noise. If it wasn’t making any, it wasn’t moving.
So she would move instead.
Trying to force her legs to curl felt foreign, as if they’d forgotten that they weren’t just useless sacks of flesh hanging off her torso and her body wasn’t sure of how to force them into action.
She quickly formed two sturdy sleeves of mana with [Telemantic Construct], sticking them to her broken limbs, powerful enough to make sure nothing broke further than it already had, and with a heaving groan of both exertion and pain, staggered upright for what might have been the first time in gods knew how long, swaying side to side as she readied herself, ignoring the burning, pulsing pangs of agony that raced up and down her legs.
A halting, shuffling step forward, palm open and aiming just above the wolf, where she assumed the spider to still be, her heart slamming into her ribcage with near-audible thuds, feeling her blood pulse from the tips of her fingers to the sides of her skull as she pushed through a feral, instinctual fear.
But she held, patiently. She only had one singular, powerful shot, and if that didn’t work, they were both dead. She had to confirm where the spider was, even if she had to do so by getting tackled by some vile, eight legged nightmare.
Worst case scenario, the beast was already killed by the damned thing, and she would soon die alone anyway.
Her right leg was broken in two parts, and she felt the grinding of bone as her muscles pulled at the bone ever so slightly, her left slowly joining in her meandering shuffle.
Another step forward, her heavy, dust-choked breaths coming out with a rolling ‘r’ sound as if she was snarling, every drop of mana she could store in her core gathering in her hand and straining her circuits as her body quivered with adrenaline and fear.
The beast’s upper body was suddenly yanked forwards as the loud sound of something hard scraping against stone filled the room from just in front of her. With her nerves on a hair trigger, she didn’t hesitate at all to straighten her hand out, using [Sparkburst] by reflex, aiming a lot lower than she probably should with a barely restrained yell.
The heat felt as if her hand was dunked into boiling water, despite almost none of it being directed towards her, and her ears were consumed utterly by the sound of a million tiny explosions going off at the same time to combine into a single deafening crackle that didn’t at all sound like a pyromancy spell should.
And then she stood in place, panting, on quivering legs that only just managed to not crumble as her lungs burned.
Her body sagged with exhaustion, and she took a few stumbling steps towards her companion, letting her hand drop. If her blast hadn’t killed the thing, then they were both dead. Nothing more she could do. No weapons, no strength, no mana.
On her third step, her right knee crumbled, and she bit down on a cry between her teeth, refusing to let it escape as she stumbled, scarcely achieving to regain her balance by putting even more weight on her left.
One more stumbling step, feeling like hundred pound weights were attached to her ankles, and she slowly lowered herself to her knees with all the strength left in her atrophied thighs, then surged forward, her chest hitting stone as she stopped her head from smacking into the beast’s with her oversensitive, stinging hand.
She lowered her forehead to the beast’s slimy neck, regaining her breath. As the seconds continued to tick and no unseen horror came to bite her head off, she felt a cautious sense of hope flicker in her chest, an odd, unfamiliar sense of accomplishment welling in her heart.
She’d done it.
And the steady rise and fall of its chest against her shoulder assuaged her most prominent worry. It might be poisoned, or unconscious, or temporarily comatose, but it was alive.
A trembling hand moved up to pet along its back, moving through quickly thinning slime and odd, veiny protrusions that covered its shoulder blades, to eventually brush against hard, smooth material utterly out of place on its fur.
With a faint, exhausted sense of confusion, she gripped the sticky limb, following up along its tapering length, her fingers running over veins that seemed to come out of the protrusion, until her fingers felt the first joint, and she realized what she was touching, a surge of overwhelming revulsion filling her gut as her hand jerked away.
She fucking hated spiders.
And for that precise reason, she waited only a second to psych herself up before grabbing onto the disgusting, slippery appendage and yanking it off the beast, who didn’t react as she grunted with effort to shove the damn thing as far from them as possible.
The fact that there was a limp spider corpse right next to her prevented her from truly being at ease, but as she laid her head on the beast’s shoulder and neck, her hand idly sitting on its slimy coat and playing with its fur, she gradually felt her heartbeat slow down, enough for her to not feel like her body was one scare away from a heart attack.
Yet, through the dust, rust, and acrid stench of slime and dead spider filling the air, her nostrils caught a faint whiff of tangy copper, and she felt her breath hitch. With a dry gulp, she extended her neck towards the source, just a bit, just enough to feel the beast’s wet fur under her cheek, her nose nestling into glorious, blood-soaked fur with a deep inhale.
An intense craving slammed into her like a sledgehammer as her nostrils flared, as her heartbeat started picking up once more. The insides of her throat turned into sandpaper, like the driest, most barren earth, like a tube rubbed raw with sand.
Without even thinking, her hand ripped off the cloth on her face and she extended her tongue out to lap at the cooling blood, only to freeze in place from shock, tongue pressing at dirty fur as her mind raced.
What did I…
Her body had just acted without any thought or input on her part. It was startling, and the intense desire she felt for the blood was equally so.
Despite that however, as she felt her taste buds sing in pleasure, felt her nostrils flare to inhale the delectable scent of blood, and felt the tantalizing prospect of another Attribute boost dangle before her mind’s eye, taunting her with how weak and useless her body was right now, she couldn’t deny herself.
It was…
Dehumanizing. Addictive.
A balm on her scorched dry throat.
She licked at the beast’s fur like an animal, uncaring of the faint undercurrent of chemicals in the blood, mixed in from its dirty coat, her slime-coated hand clutching at its fur.
Each lap of cooling blood filled her limbs with a little more strength, made her soul swell just a little more, made her body feel just a shred tougher, so she continued, her hand gradually tilting the beast’s neck as she slowly trailed up the path of dripping blood, cursing her tongue’s short nature for being unable to lick off the crimson that coated her nose.
Time ebbed and hazed in her mind. In what felt like only a few moments, she’d basically licked its neck clean, blood and slime coating the inside of her mouth in equal measures, any liquid long since swallowed. Her jaw and tongue were sore.
She should be disgusted, by both herself and her behavior, but she just… couldn’t. She couldn’t feel that revulsion. She simply sniffed the air as she placed her head back on its shoulder, her nostrils luxuriating in the scent of gamey copper, feeling a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.
Her first real kill. Her first meal, taken rather than given, even if it was from her only ally, with no fight nor conflict to be had.
The only judge in this empty court was herself, and she had no cares left to give toward propriety, dignity, or social expectations hammered into her for two decades. In this humid, dusty grave, there was no outside world, no culture or civilization, no humanity to judge or temper her, nothing but survival and the comforting song of her companion’s breaths.
Whether her actions were driven by some sick addiction, some inherent, desperate desire to feel a little stronger, even if just for an hour or two, or the increasingly sharp knife of delirium gently scraping at her mind, she felt not a shred of shame or disgust.
And as she fell asleep, she felt the distant pull on her attention, of the System telling her she’d progressed, something that she temporarily ignored.
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