Chapter 23: The Beast With Two Backs

As the entity righted itself Elaine got its first good look at it, at the hideous abomination the Red Rider's death had given birth to.

Unlike the enormous Red Rider this thing was only as tall as a man, though the menace it emanated wasn't inferior in any way to that of its progenitor.

Where the Red Rider had been entirely without skin, glistening red muscle over white bone, this thing had skin, though its skin was a nightmare of stretch marks and stitches. It had to be, given that it was clearly made up of two people.

It looked like a nightmare version of a man and a woman having sex, the man standing tall and the woman pressed up against him, her legs wrapped around his buttocks and her hands intertwined with his. Except this wasn't just two people locked in a loving embrace. Their bodies were fused together to the point where it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. Their arms, twined together and fingers interlocked, had fused into long limbs that ended in sharp claws flickering with Darklight. The woman's legs wrapped around the man's hips had melded into his flesh and had become armor, as had the flesh of her back. Her head had been split apart and stitched around his so that the result looked like a featureless human face framed in fleshy, bony, hairy armor. And to top it off the man looked as if a Viking blood eagle had been performed on him, the skin of his back peeled off, his back ribs cracked and his lungs pulled out the back, except these lungs had been replaced by glistening pink wings not entirely unlike those of a bat.

The fact that the thing also had digitigrade legs, bent backwards like those of a goat, barely registered with all the vileness the beast already exuded. What did register was the effect the creature's presence had on the red haze that had been saturating the area. Instead of spreading out and corrupting the area the mist drew closer with every passing moment and soon it had compressed around it like a red cloak, wreathing the beast in the hatred and madness that had permeated the entire battlefield. The eye in the sky soon winked out and then appeared behind the creature, much reduced in size but now fully awake and staring at the camp defenders.

“Evelyn?” Elaine asked and a moment later the redhead sent her scan result.

Of course, the moment Elaine finished reading she spotted the weapon the description had likely been talking about: The sword the Red Rider had wielded hadn't been evaporated like most of its body. Instead it had gone flying off and was sticking up where it was lodged in the asphalt. With every passing moment the sword sank a little deeper into the asphalt, hinting at how ludicrously sharp the blade had to be if the sword's own weight was enough to make it cut deeper and deeper into man-made stone. If that sword gained a coating of Darklight the way the creature could summon around its claws it would be nearly impossible to defend against. The only reason Cassie had managed to block its claws with his ice barriers had been because without the Darklight the claws didn't have the cutting powers to cleave through his magically conjured ice but this sword wouldn't have the same problem. Whatever could stop the Darklight would be sliced to ribbons by the sword and anything that could stop the sword would melt when exposed to Darklight. Well, there might be one thing, namely the Tormented Sword, which was beginning to cool down enough to at least consider touching while wearing the extremely tough body armor all the members of Project Divinity were wearing. That thing could block Darklight and it might be tough enough to block that sword as well. But that would have to be a last resort. She didn't want to risk her shiny new toy that had proven so wonderfully effective at carving apart Outsider barriers. After all, the circumstances of its creations weren't exactly easy to replicate.

Either way, Elaine clearly hadn't been the only one to realize what kind of weapon the description had been warning of because the moment the creature turned its eyeless gaze towards the sword an enormous ball of purple fire engulfed the weapon and Elaine looked back to see that it had come from the super robot piloted by the Russian chick. Elena, if Elaine remembered correctly. Fuck, that would get confusing.

With the path to its sword blocked at least temporarily the creature turned its sights towards the camp defenders and rushed towards them.

Elaine reached inside herself, intending to use her Higher form to stop the beast. If it reached their lines there would be a massacre. Yes, Elaine was nowhere near fully recharged but she couldn't risk...

Before Elaine could find the peace of mind to awaken her powers once again a bolt of lightning streaked across the battlefield and struck the Ouroboros Drive, clashing against it.

**

Good Lord but that thing was fast. Evelyn could move and strike with the speed of a bolt of lightning and she had caught the thing off guard but none of that mattered. Within fractions of a second the beast had managed to interpose one of its claws between its body and Evelyn's Vajra. There was a sickening crunch and even as unnatural and disgusting as the creature's limbs looked Evelyn could tell the claw was bending in ways it hadn't been intended to but the rest of the creature seemed to hold up fairly well for just having been electrocuted and slammed out of the way while going at nearly sonic speed.

It tilted its head, the motion somewhat bird-like, before it raised its other talon and came at Evelyn. As it turned out, being able to move as fast as a bolt of lightning wasn't quite the same as being able to act with lightning speed. Evelyn's reaction times had clearly grown much faster with this aura spell on and, frankly, it was all that saved her life as the creature came hacking at her again and again. It didn't matter how far and how fast she zipped away, the thing was back in her face in an instant. Only the fact that her Vajra could break the bones of its claws kept her alive, as it only took seconds for its claws to heal enough that it could take another swing at her. Even worse than the claws, however, was the eye over its shoulder. If she ever stood still in its line of sight it would send out searing bolts of energy that she had to scramble to keep away from.

She needed an edge to beat this thing. And she had one.

Evelyn summoned her Deva Arms, giving her two ghostly arms that for all of them being translucent were real enough to block strikes, swing weapons and, most importantly, cast spells. Being wreathed in electricity didn't just make her faster and stronger, it also attuned her to lightning magic in a way even her Thunderstorm Dominion couldn't do. Her spells became faster and stronger and with the Deva Arms she could cast three or four of them at a time.

She sent out lightning strike after lightning strike and after a few moments she realized that if she had some copper rods to use as tethers she could turn an entire battlefield into a death trap with all that lightning magic. But even without them the creature was put on the defensive, dodging around the lightning instead of advancing on her. It wasn't that the lightning was lethal to the creature but it did shock its system. Every time the beast was hit by a lightning spell it faltered just long enough that Evelyn could smash her Vajra into its body. And she noticed quickly that the layer of organic armor created by the female parts of its anatomy didn't heal nearly as fast as its claws.

But even so Evelyn wasn't defeating this thing. She could tell. She'd been in enough scraps already to realize it. She was holding back this monster right now but it was taking nearly everything she had. And the thing was learning. Every time she managed to hit it with her lightning magic it became a little better at interposing its cloak between her spells and its body and the moment her magic touched that cloak of condensed red haze it winked out instantly. There wasn't even a hint that she was damaging the cloak itself, her spells simply stopped working, the Winds of Magic unraveling in an instant. A conjured blade like the ones Elaine could use would probably be immune to this, after all even when losing the magic animating them they would still have enough momentum and mass behind them to deal damage, but Evelyn didn't have access to anything like that. She was a berserker, striking fast and hard and not concerned about subtlety. Or defense.

The entity came at her again. Evelyn wasn't sure why this should matter to her. For once both of its arms were broken and the beast couldn't harm her so long as she stayed out of line of sight of the Oculus. Except, when the entity reached her it didn't focus the floating eye on her. Neither did it swing its broken talons at her. Instead the creature whirled through the air, narrowly avoiding Evelyn's Vajra, and then its red cloak snapped out, reaching a foot farther than it should have, and sliced clean through her left Deva Arm. It traveled further and struck her real left arm. This one it didn't manage to sever but it did manage to carve through the armor and the flesh, only finally stopping when it hit her bones.

Evelyn recoiled at lightning speed, cradling her arm. This was still a superficial injury to someone at her level but it did make a difference in the short term. Her Font of Soma would have her good as new in minutes but there were still two problems. The first was that while the armor the members of Project Divinity wore could regenerate, it did so far slower than the body of the wearer. The second, and much more severe, problem was that Evelyn couldn't afford to be weakened even for a few minutes. Not when fighting at this level.

Her eyes darted to the side, her mind calculating if she could outrun this thing, but before she could make a decision a pool of shadow spread out next to her. Now, normally a pool of shadow would be a sign of something very bad, especially if blades made of shadow and metal blossomed out of it as if reaching for prey, but she knew who these shadows belonged to and, sure enough...

**

“Tagging in,” Ophelia said, stepping out of the pool of shadows.

An aura of darkness accompanied her as she stepped out of the pool and a single tendril of that darkness reached out, wrapped around Evelyn's arm for a moment and then retreated, leaving not only unblemished skin but intact armor behind as it went, which spoke to the ludicrous amount of healing her Umbral Embrace could now project. She was glad to know it had progressed that far but she didn't really want to test out the skill's limits. She was fairly certain it was now strong enough that she could save someone from decapitation if she was present when it happened but it wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to test out, now was she?

What she did test out was her magic. Evelyn's lightning magic couldn't penetrate that cloak but last she checked her magic was a lot more powerful than Evelyn's. In fact, without sounding too arrogant, she was pretty sure her magic was stronger than most of what she'd seen during this operation. Granted, there was clearly still room for her to grow, as evidenced by that stunning display of magic Professor Stollos had shown everyone when he'd dueled Elaine, but she was clearly higher on the food chain than most.

And so she started attacking the beast, leaving Evelyn time enough to rush back and recuperate. The cute idiot probably hadn't even realized that she'd been running on fumes. Yes, the creature had started to adapt to her attacks but she had also been getting slower and slower and getting her arm nearly lobbed off hadn't helped matters. But Ophelia was relatively fresh again, the fight against the Stitched Angel long enough behind her to regain most of her strength. And so she came at the Ouroboros Drive, both her shadow magic and her knives flashing.

Well, 'knives' really was a misnomer. Their blades were several feet long and made of what looked like solidified blood. It glistened and seemed to bend like liquid held in shape by force of will but even so these blades could cut better than any razor. And after upgrading her shadow magic to blood magic her spells could do much the same. Instead of mere shadow lances those shadows were tipped with iron, stabbing much the same as a blade might.

But even so she could tell that this being in front of her was on another level entirely. She had never been this powerful, never been this confident, but that thing was still terrifying. It wasn't just the eerie eyeless face regarding her in much the same way as a bird of prey. It wasn't the shivery, spastic way its chest heaved with heavy breaths even though the thing had no nostrils she could see. It wasn't even the eye, the miniature version of the thing that had been hanging high in the sky mere minutes ago, the one that regarded her with what she felt looked like some kind of dispassionate hatred. No, what truly unsettled her was that damned cloak.

Ophelia had gotten pretty good at using her Sanctified Umbral Dominion, even with the short amount of time she'd been using it, and she could use it to feel out what kind of energy an opponent possessed. And she had never felt anything like the gnawing, insensate hunger of that condensed red haze. The stuff wanted to devour everything, make it part of itself, and even her Dominion felt as if a billion tiny mouths were tearing into it wherever her power touched this cloak.

That red haze had to go. The creature emitting it had to go. And when both were gone, the one who had created all of this had to go.