Book Three – Chapter Ten – Part Three – The Banquet of Death

Nero, Nimbus, Jade, and Sabre. Those were the names of the last four bases Servi needed to destroy. Perhaps it was laziness on the Mafia leader who did the legislative work assigning and creating the bases, but all four were located near each other. With such sharp aliases, it gave the illusion that they were going to be interesting.

They weren't.

Nero and Nimbus were either covered by warehouses or were inside the warehouses. It was one of the two, while Jade was located in a building that reminded Servi of Deset. Sabre was the most interesting of them all, but that didn’t say much since it looked like a homeless camp one would find under a bridge.

From up high on the tallest building she found, Servi kept an eye on all four targets. If she created enough Greater Fireballs, she could burn the four at once. If she went wild with Earth Wall and Metal Wall, she could flatten all four. That would probably cause a rumble that would be heard all around the world.

But she couldn’t.

The Warden office was located right by Jade. Servi couldn’t risk anything happening to any workers inside. Even if they worked a side job for the Mafia or reported to them, the hair on their heads had to be untouched until Momo could get promoted. After that? Destruction would rain from the heavens. That was probably 12 hours away, though.

After thinking on it for a few short seconds, Servi figured the best way to take care of everything would be to use a skill that quickly became her favorite.

The Shadow’s Embrace.

A nostalgic feeling covered her body as shadows embraced her. The thin line of existence and non-existence should have been something no one had access to, including her. Even if they had the help of a skill designed to do that very thing and said skill had the explicit drawback of lasting only ten seconds, the power it gave was too much.

Servi stood up from her crouched position and stared at the streets below. Trash filled her vision, enhanced by both the shadows covering her and the souls in her ring. However, she didn’t spot a single person out for a stroll. More than that, she hadn’t seen even a single homeless beggar, of which Arcton had plenty of, since coming back to the city after scorching Shepard.

With how much chaos she caused over the night, combined with the extraordinary events like producing a tornado in the middle of the city and destroying a solid chunk of town with Fulgur Spike, it was likely those who remained alive in Arcton wanted to protect their awful lives. However, if she thought about it that way, it wouldn't match up to the thirteen people she killed after the events at Turner. Their movements and actions suggested they wanted to die.

Could it be true that the people of the city didn’t share a single collective will? The Monotonia certainly acted like a corrosive poison to the mind. She didn’t think it was far-fetched for it to have the capabilities to drown out a person's self-survival instinct. If that was the case, then the terror she exuded had overpowered the Monotonia's poisoning of the mind.

It could all be true. Or it could all be false. It wasn’t like Servi had a full report on what the Monotonia was designed to do. She heard from Carrie and others that different colored pills gave different effects, but those were the publicly known effects. Such a pill had to have side effects that were kept from the general public. Or in this case, hidden from the Mafia Numbered.

With a leap, she jumped from her building without inflicting an extra scratch into its decrepit roof. She curled into a ball, accomplishing a front flip as she rapidly approached the incoming ground. She landed safely on her feet while simultaneously rolling to pick up some speed. Feather Fall wasn’t involved in her soft landing.

The Shadow’s Embrace took all the credit. Only something trapped between existence and non-existence could hurt Servi while under its effects. However, she had free reign over the world of the living. Anything existing couldn’t damage her, but she could interact with them. That included things like gravity. If she fell from the moon while encased in her shadows, then she’d smashed into the ground with the same force as a mother gently putting her child to sleep. The need of oxygen, food, and water didn’t apply to her because of True Immortality, but The Shadow's Embrace took care of that as well.

But The Shadow's Embrace had the option to interact with the living world. If she chose to, Servi could halt the safeguards preventing her from taking fall damage. And perhaps she would’ve done that if the situation was different.

Servi kicked off with enough force to shatter stone, yet she didn’t disturb even the tiniest grain of dirt as she ran towards Nero. The warehouse looked similar to one at Turner. With her arms held out, the two guards standing out front painfully perished. The large door was open, and Servi didn’t waste any time and started slaughtering the 36 people inside. The hard scales of a Koena or the giant body belonging to a Kobold put up as much fight as a Human when it came to The Shadow's Embrace. Servi found out when she stabbed her shadowy blade into a Kobold’s ear, they went to the afterlife much quicker. Since they were, on average, the largest humanoid sentient race, Servi’s shadows had a greater area to ravage. Bigger space meant more wounds, and more wounds meant more damage.

The massacre was bloodless. To the untrained eye, it looked as if the warehouse was home to a sleepover. Only, they weren’t sleeping.

Eying the staircase, Servi hopped over to the railing and dashed down to the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. For a moment, she became tangible and rammed the wooden door down.

It smashed into the support column located a few meters ahead of her, sending numerous wooden fragments up in the air. Multiple Greater Fireballs spurred to life beside her, scorching the wooden chips before they touched the floor and lit up the room. Her red eyes looked left and right at the large single room basement.

There wasn’t anyone inside. The wooden racks of sword and spears stood undisturbed next to the door she broke down. The living section, complete with beds and furniture, was messy as expected. A small candle lit in the distance faintly flickered, darkening the already dark room. Without a word, Servi canceled the Greater Fireballs and ran out. She leapt up the stairs with a single jump, landing with a roll, and rushed out of the warehouse.

Her mind raced back to the unnatural amount of souls she absorbed at the Nova base. A part of her wondered if the inhabitants of Nero went to hide out there. It sort of made sense because the supplies she saw at Nova must've originally belonged to Nero. The few stragglers she killed in the warehouse-section must’ve been those who were going to bring up the rear. Now that she thought about, the enemies she had just killed were hastily moving about. It made sense, to her, at least. After far as she was concerned, Nero was wiped out. Servi accomplished that part of her ultimate goal and moved on to the next one.

Her feet silently stomped against the ground as she raced towards Nimbus, the last of the warehouse-type bases. To get there, she jumped on top of an abandoned carriage. Using it as a springboard, she jumped to the roof and took a moment to get her bearings. Her chest stayed motionless as oxygen neither entered nor left her lungs. Like a statue, she stood perfectly still for some reason. Itarr didn’t know why. And at that point, she didn’t care.

Even if she did, she had no options available to her. She, a Goddess, losing to a Human. It sounded preposterous. People prayed to deities like herself for help with all sorts of things, yet here she was giving her power to a Human who teetered on the brink of insanity.

Itarr opened her mouth, wanting to say something that couldn’t be heard by anyone but her, but closed it when she realized it was useless.

Like a switch had been flipped, Servi sprung to life and kicked off of the building. Nimbus was her next destination, and it only required her to hop from three structures. She landed with such gentleness each time, something that didn’t befit her at all when taking her mental state into account. When she leapt from the last building and landed on the broken, paved road below her, Servi saw the rusty warehouse waiting for her. It was the sole thing on the street. Unlike the last two that had doors, the one in front of her only had three walls and no floor.

No, perhaps calling it a warehouse was too generous. It was more like a canopy that had almost all of the characteristics of a storage facility.

The lack of a floor meant nothing was bolting the warehouse-like canopy to the ground. The missing wall acted as the door, and that allowed Servi to plan out her attack. But even better than that, she didn’t spot any kind of staircase. There wasn't anything that could act as a secret passage leading to an underground base, either.

Nimbus's inhabitants were all up, moving around in a panic while shuffling large boxes filled with all kinds of supplies. Four or five large wagons were attached to the back of sturdy oxen by way of a piece of wire wrapped around their tails. It wasn’t comfortable at all, and the oxen made their displeasure known by stomping around, throwing tantrums. The Mafia retaliated by hitting the distressed animals with metal bars, inflicting pain to sour the beasts' growing rebellious spirits. Servi was too far to hear what they said, but her eyes picked up on their body language. It was like they were making jokes about harming the animals.

Instantly, she fell to the ground and clutched her head in pain. She gritted her teeth, breaking a few and biting down on her gums as the images of two young Singi children appeared in her mind.

Seka and Seko. Two siblings who had faced torture at the hands of Arnold. Servi saw them on the day she woke up, and she witnessed the beating they received. Inflicting anguish to innocent children and animals for the fun of it struck a violent cord within her body. Rage escaped from her mouth via a horrible shriek.

Servi kicked off the ground, turning off her shadowy form and storing her sword. She wanted to beat those insufferable fools with her own hands. The ground cracked with every step as her momentum continued to increase. The moment before she rammed into a Human carrying a bag of corn, he turned to look at her by sheer coincidence. The next moment, he exploded into a fine red mist. Her hair, face, and arms were coated in his crimson remains, but she had the advantage. No one realized she was heading their way.

Sure, they heard the odd noises and seen the strange things happening around the city for the past few days, but they never expected the source of that chaos would be standing in front of them right at that moment.

A few minutes before Servi made her entrance, the Numbered in charge had ordered everyone to kick it into high gear when his pointy ears picked up a series of odd noises. He figured the things he heard were coming from one of his companions, who was just having a spot of fun the night before leaving Arcton, but he felt something was off. That was why he shouted for his men to move even faster. His instincts were proven correct, and he had the right call, but there was nothing they could do to continue living.

Servi's sudden appearance meant she had the time to rip off the arms of a Kobold standing nearby. She threw them down so hard they exploded, and she leapt into the air. An arrow flew where her waist had been. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to rotate 180 degrees while ascending, kick off the rusty roof with her feet, which uprooted the whole canopy and sent it flying tens of meters in the air, and slammed her head into the Koena who fired the arrow.

He didn’t dodge out of the way in time as a hole the size of Servi’s body appeared in his chest, and cracks in the earth radiated from ground zero. His scales did a pathetic job in both slowing her down and defending him, and Servi died yet again. True Immortality restored her body, healing her crushed head as the metal canopy fell back down. Before it smashed into the ground, Servi held it up in the air with Telekinesis. The strain on her brain didn’t compare at all when she carpet-bombed the area of the city that contained Nova. Comparing the two, it was night and day. Servi only had to focus on the actions of a singular object. Though the pillars she dropped earlier that night paled in comparison to an entire canopy, weight wasn’t an issue. It only became relevant when the combined total weight of everything affected by Telekinesis was more than her limit. Until it did, she could maneuver a single object that weighed half a kilogram with the same ease as a 15,000-kilogram object.

An idea suddenly appeared in her chaos-filled mind. The structure she held up emitted a horrendous crunching noise as metal folded upon metal. The remaining Mafia members dropped what they were doing and helplessly stared at the impressive display of power happening above them.

It was unbelievable. The canopy folded over itself as it took on a shape similar to that of a rolled-up rug. The rafters supporting the roof twisted and turned around the log-like object like a snake climbing a tree. When it seemed like the display was finished, the compressed warehouse shrunk.

It shrunk and shrunk as a thousand anchor points of Telekinesis pushed the compressing warehouse in on itself. The girl responsible for it simply stared at her enemies. Their eyes, turned ever upward, took in something that only a God or Goddess could accomplish. A Kobold could bend metal. That wasn’t difficult at all, but not just anyone could twist something created to provide shelter over a large area.

Even speaking about something like what Servi was doing was enough to be declared as a crazy person. Yet, here was someone who could do it with the utmost ease. One by one, the combined sounds of weapons hitting the floor reached Servi’s ears. For a final show of force, Servi doubled the anchor points on the still-shrinking canopy until it tripled the size of her nadrium greatsword. When that happened, she cut off Telekinesis. The canopy landed with force befitting its original size and becoming stuck in the ground. Somehow, the weight didn’t change at all. Only the form was altered.

The ‘blade’ portion, red and rusty, gave off a diseased vibe. The handle was made out of wrapping the rafters together until it formed a somewhat rounded shape. The rusty rafters curling around the blade section were more for intimidation than practical use. Odd and intimidating, there was certainly nothing else like it in the world.

Suddenly, Servi broke the silence and summoned her ID.  She expertly clicked on Absorption and upgraded it thirteen times. Her Potential barely dropped at all, and Servi had enough left in the tank to fully max it out. For some reason known only to her, she refused to go that far.

Every soul used to give her only 2% of their strength. Now, she could use 15%. Servi's power had utterly increased. The Servi of the past didn’t even come close to the new Servi. It was like comparing a harmless cat to the king of the jungle.

Servi felt the new strength surge through her body as she walked up, grasped the sword’s crude handle, and lifted it like it was a holy object. Each millisecond she spent holding the near equivalent of a metal warehouse broke all of Servi's bones, but pain didn't mean anything to her.

With every step, her feet sunk a few centimeters into the ground, breaking them tens of times every single second. Her body cried out in pain when her right arm lifted her ‘weapon’ above her head. It slammed down on the head of the Kobold standing in front of Servi and almost literally sent him to hell. His ‘remains,’ if it could be called that, consisted of a pile of blood. The few red scales he had left were camouflaged by the crimson.

Even with one of their members dead, the remaining Mafia associates continued to stare with eyes that couldn't grasp the current situation. Like shooting blind ducks in a barrel, Servi faced no opposition of any kind. She simply walked from each fear-frozen member, raised her ‘weapon,’ allowed it to drop on her foe, and moved on to the next. She repeated those simple motions over and over until the moon illuminated 26 piles of blood.

Well, Servi thought they were frozen in place, and they were, but it wasn't by fear. Itarr assisted in keeping the enemies restrained, but Servi never found out about it.

We have to hurry this up... This senseless violence shouldn't last this long... It's only wasting time... We have to save Momo...

Her eyes turned to the area where the oxen and wagons used to be. They picked up the fearful aura Servi emitted when she started the attack. When forced to choose between enduring more punishment at the hands of their ‘masters’ or potential death via a girl with a grudge, their instinct told them that running away would be the best shot and surviving even a moment longer. Even the stress on their tails from dragging such heavy wagons didn’t hamper their yearning for survival.

She was left with boxes upon boxes of supplies meant for a wartime expedition. Her hand let go of her shoddily constructed weapon. Quite a few of the boxes trembled from the force dispersing through the ground, but none broke. A minor struggle rose from within Servi. Should she take the supplies for later? Her body required no warmth or nutrients, so food and drink were simple pastimes and nothing else.

But in the end, she absorbed every box from where she stood. Even if they were more than four meters away, Servi didn’t need to use Telekinesis to bring them to her. When she upgraded Absorption, her range increased from 4 meters to 17 meters. Her efficiency skyrocketed as well. What used to take thirty seconds now took only one, and absorbing entire buildings, as a whole, was no longer out of the realm of possibilities.

However, those perks were sidelined when compared to the strength increase. Servi could hit far harder than before, and jumping hundreds of meters came was as hard as breathing. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Servi ascended past her limits and became a warrior on par with heroes of legend.

As she turned to leave, a stray red eye turned to her makeshift weapon. Even as strong as she was, the strength she had wasn’t yet up to par with what she needed to properly use it. In terms of combat and destructive power, any nadrium greatsword had it beat. But a part of Servi wanted a weapon to call her own. And what better weapon for a Mad Dog than something she molded using her own strength. Appearance-wise, it was raw, messy, and ugly: untamed and wild with years of abuse behind it.

Perhaps Servi unknowingly made a connection with it and her unknown past? Her body might have remembered whatever she went through. Like a loving memory, Servi stared at the crudely-formed weapon and walked away. The blood dripping down its makeshift-wrapped blade soaked the thirsty ground, but the noise was odd enough to force Servi to double back. She trod forward, looking at what the crimson covered.

It turned out to be a pack of cigars. Servi wiped away the blood after picking it up. A short groan escaped her lips, but she didn’t know why. The red and green box said it contained ‘watermelon-infused tobacco wrapped cigars.’ Popping it open, she took one out and held it to her nose.

A deep sniff later, both a wave of nostalgia and uneasiness washed over her battle-stained soul. The sweetness of the watermelon, filtered with the raw tobacco, yearned to touch Servi’s lips. A short battle endured between her wanting to smoke and her desire for destruction, and that ended with her cocking her head to the night sky and screaming bloody murder in a horrible voice. Afterwards, she grunted, returning the cigar to its slot and slid the slim case down into her left pocket.