Vol.5 Ch.18.1 – I F*cking Hate Bugs I

Chapter 18: I Fucking Hate Bugs

Yume let out a shriek of pure animal terror. On pure instinct I spun around to check whether she was getting overwhelmed by the goblins but no, she was staring at Carl in absolute horror. And her reaction gave me pause.

Selene was the one who was afraid of bugs but she seemed relatively fine, her face a pale mask of revulsion but otherwise composed. I had never even seen Yume squirm around insect monsters so I wasn't entirely sure why this was any different.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it was one of the vilest things I'd ever seen and the implications were far worse than the visuals had already been. But compared to all the disgusting Outsider shit we'd seen in the Temple of Zeus it really wasn't that horrible.

When Carl had said he'd sought out more power what he'd done had been to let himself get infested with crimson centipedes. Selene and I had encountered one of these held as a pet back in Shackled Hollow and back then I'd told her about them.

Crimson centipedes were a unique type of giant centipede that produced mana as a waste product. They were a popular pet among mages because they saturated any living space with ambient mana that the mage could then draw upon while taking care of any vermin that might find their way into the house. However, if one were to cut open their own flesh and let a crimson centipede crawl inside they would create something of a symbiosis. The centipede would devour just enough of the host's flesh to keep from starving and in exchange it would saturate their body with mana and replace the parts they ate with their own bodies. And in Carl's case the symbiosis was apparently so advanced that the centipede had devoured most of the flesh and bone inside his right arm and was now puppeteering the limb from inside.

It certainly went a long way towards explaining why he looked like shit now, his skin pale and sallow and his hair stringy. It also explained why his magic was this strong. He wasn't a powerful mage, he had simply taken a shortcut most people would be beyond reluctant to take.

However, the sheer fact that he had allowed crimson centipedes to parasitize his body likely meant that he was not corrupted by Outsider forces. Magic and miracles were antithetical to their stain on reality and the kind of mana saturation that crimson centipedes caused would likely weaken or maybe even outright destroy any growth of the Black Goat. That meant that despite everything he clearly wasn't as far gone as Wilhelm or the Holy Maiden. At the same time, the fact that he had an otherwise very rare dual affinity hinted that he might have gotten one of the mystic fruits from the first floor of the Crystal Crown's dungeon, which suggested that even if he wasn't corrupted by the Black Goat he was at least close enough to them to gain access to rare materials that Wilhelm might have taken during his own dive into the dungeon. Or maybe he had actually been born with a dual affinity and abhorred the Outsiders, though given the fact that the goblins he was bossing around were thoroughly corrupted I doubted that. Gods above, for all I knew he had led those goblins to the Black Goat's corruption himself.

But none of that really mattered. What did matter was that our opponent was a powerful shadow and force mage with superhuman mana reserves and a limited ability stitch himself back together thanks to his parasite.

“Alisha, focus on defense,” I said. “He can likely outlast you in a magical duel. Selene, focus on his right arm. The priority is killing that centipede. Once it's done he will be much weaker.” In fact, I was betting that once we killed his little parasite all the pain of having been partially hollowed out by a giant centipede would catch up with him and shut his body down completely. “If you can't hit the limb properly, pull out a mace and focus on his center mass. Blunt impacts are great for breaking carapaces.”

“Understood,” Selene said and we both rushed him.

Once again he summoned up a hail of force blades and once again I wanted to dodge out of the way but at the last moment I noticed that black tendrils had spread out from his shadow and created a pool in front of him.

“Back off!” I bellowed and Selene, bless her, came to an immediate stop and jumped back a breath before spears of shadow exploded from the dark pool. If we'd kept going or, gods forbid, rolled into them, we would have been skewered.

“Gods damn it, it's just like fighting Rognir,” I growled.

“Want to beat him the same way?” Selene called back.

Tempting, but no. “We need all miracles we can save up for later,” I said. “We need to do this the hard way.” Did we, though? Approaching him was clearly almost impossible. Between his shadow magic and his force magic there was no way to simply charge in without at least losing a limb. But at the same time, while he had seen Yume flash stepping behind Ares, he didn't know that I could do the same yet, so...

I summoned up my Qi and flash stepped behind Carl and sliced his head off in a single swing. His head spun off into the night sky and I felt an instant of smug satisfaction before a crimson centipede shot out of the stump and snapped its jaws at me, forcing me to scramble back to avoid it. And before I could close the distance to kill the centipede it snatched Carl's head out of the air and reattached it. Backwards.

“Now that was a little rude,” he said, his head staring right at me even though I was standing behind his back. And then he summoned up a massive blade of force that would have sliced me in two if I hadn't flash stepped away from him.

With a bit of breathing room he reached up, grabbed his head and then twisted it around so it was once again facing in the same direction as his body.

“Crimson centipedes are wonderful, you know?” he said, blue-gray magic dancing around his hands. “They don't just grant you incredible magical power, they also make you damn near immortal. I highly recommend it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “except for the part where you have to get hollowed out by a giant bug that farts mana.”

“We all do what we have to in order to get what we want, don't we?” he said, his tone cold as ice. His words were clearly directed at me but his eyes were fixed on Alisha.

“Do you honestly believe I would want you back, even if you win this?” she asked.

“I believe that once Ares and I are done with you, it won't much matter anymore what you want right now,” he said.

“Do you even have use for a woman anymore?” I asked. “I can't imagine having a giant centipede inside you is very good for your libido.”

“Oh, everything still works as it should,” he said, his eyes still never leaving Alisha. “And the centipedes need a warm place to lay their eggs.”

“You know, I would say that's the most disturbing thing I've ever heard but that would be a lie,” I said. “In fact, it's not even the most disturbing thing I've seen or heard today. So why don't we get on with it and send you back to whatever hole that centipede crawled out of?”

Before he could even open his mouth to give a scathing reply, Selene answered for him. While we had been talking she'd raised her sword and gathered her Qi before bringing it down in a Qi Projection. She wasn't very good at it and it took her much longer than me but she could do it. And she once again sliced his hand off.

This time, however, I didn't simply let the centipede grab the hand again. Instead I rushed him just as the centipede shot out of his arm, grabbed it right by the back of the neck and yanked. Hard.

The centipede had clearly anchored itself in Carl's flesh with several dozen of its legs because there was a godawful ripping sound as I yanked it free. Despite that the centipede slid out of the meat sleeve that had once been Carl's arm relatively easily. But once I had the entire beast out, all fifteen feet of it, I realized that its butt end was being held by another centipede. The sight shocked me so much I nearly dropped the awful creature and it used my momentarily loosened grip to bite me in the wrist.

I flailed wildly in pain as I let go of the centipede and by the time I had scrambled away I had to throw myself flat to avoid the force magic Carl had been preparing. Apparently he was getting better at casting even when distracted by centipede trauma. Great.

“Seriously?” I asked as I backed off. “How many of them did you put inside you?”

“As many as I had to,” he said. His voice was a little raspier now. Apparently getting those things yanked out and having them crawl back inside him wasn't the most pleasant experience. “You really think you're the only one whose life didn't work out the way they planned, right? The only one who had to rely on their own strength after the gods abandoned them?”

He stood up straight and the centipedes pulled all the way back inside him, looking grotesquely like a frog's tongue retracting. “Not all of us had the luxury of time to grow stronger. I woke up in a castle filled with goblins, you know? I almost died to fucking goblins. It was adapt or die for me. And I adapted. For the first time in my life the magic flowed freely. For the first time in my life my sword swings landed. I fought my way out of there and found myself in a hostile forest. Did you know there was a goblin nest near that Dark Lord's castle? They came after me again and again. I was beaten and battered and bloody when I came upon those centipedes.” He snarled at me and his aura flared to three times its previous size. “As I said, some of us didn't have the luxury of choice. And with the power of the centipedes I was able to not just fend off the goblins but to subjugate them. I held them in place with shadow magic and I learned their language. I learned how they think. They have the right of it in some ways, you know?”

“You know,” I said, “it's not like I don't get where you're coming from. If I had been in your situation I would probably have made a lot of those same choices. But I don't care.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.

“You took Alisha for granted,” I began. “That makes you a moron. You decided to befriend a nest of goblins. That makes you a nasty shit. You pulled that stunt with the Silvermoon clan. That makes you a spiteful bastard. And finally you took up with all of the pricks who pulled this off. I don't care that you're not corrupted by the Outsiders, you helped them do this shit to Artemis and the others. That makes you a vile shitstain. And now you've threatened to take Alisha's agency away in an even worse way. That makes you the lowest of scum. And so the only thing I regret about what happened in that throne room is that I didn't kill you then and there.”

And then I charged him again. I was furious. Not blindingly mad but filled with cold fury, one that made me more efficient, more focused. As I ran I felt Alisha's blessing settle into my skin. Her blessing as a Minor Saint wasn't quite as strong as her Enhancement miracle but it was something.

Once again he summoned forth a flurry of force blades but this time it was as if they moved through honey. I could clearly see their path and it was the easiest thing in the world to slip past them. I didn't even break stride. Alisha's barrier miracle snapped into existence a moment before I hit the wall of blades but it was unnecessary. They all missed.

Past the cloud of force blades was a puddle of shadow but as I saw the tips of the shadow spears emerge out of it I kicked off the ground in a high kick and leapt over the spell, clearing it by a foot. As I sailed through the air I summoned forth my Qi and threw a trio of dispelling stilettos, not as a single volley but as three separate Qi Bursts. The first one collided with a force wall. It disabled the spell but was still slowed by it. The second passed through the dissipating force wall and struck a hastily constructed shadow cocoon, shattering it and then clattering to the ground, spent. The third one hit him right between the eyes, disrupting whatever spell he had planned on using.

Right after that I landed, Helios Edge already in my right hand, and slit the fucker open from throat to hip. Before he could even react I took a step back, charged a Qi Burst, and sliced through his left arm.

The Qi Burst didn't merely heat up Helios Edge, it also sped the slash up by an order of magnitude. And so, this time, not only did I sever his arm, I did it fast enough that the centipede puppeteering it didn't have time to retreat and so this time, blue bug guts sprayed from the wound and immediately started sizzling as the swathe of fire heated up both cut surfaces. His arm swelled grotesquely and a moment later it exploded, producing a shower of blue gore. Apparently the centipede had exploded from the heat.

But that wasn't the concerning part. No, the concerning part was the slash I'd placed over his body. Because even though the hole in his chest was only visible for a moment, what I saw inside was...

Have you ever heard of a rat king? It's an extremely rare phenomenon where a group of rats have their tails tied together, a giant ball of fat, mucus, hair and tails at their center. Some monster manuals claim that these rats, once untangled and left to grow, grow into giant rats, a common type of monster. And you don't want to find out what happens when a rat king occurs in giant rats.

And what I saw inside Carl's chest for that one moment was what I could only describe as a centipede king, a single dense, pulsing ball of legs and chitin out of which at least half a dozen centipedes sprouted.