234: Husband and Wife, United as One

Both Beatrice and Number Sixty-six covered their faces from the sudden powerful gust of winds filled with dark energy that was also black as if to hammer home the point that whatever was happening was not good.

Did I just fall into a cliché of not finishing off my opponent when I had the chance? Beatrice hoped that her mistake would not end up even more embarrassing than it already was. But a single look from behind the cover of her arms at the source of the dark energy winds dashed all hopes of this just being some kind of strange double suicide pact.

Something strange was happening with the two figures within the energy vortex. Beatrice couldn’t tell if it was just the light and shadows dancing in the wins, but it looked like the two figures transformed and grew within the growing black aura.

“Oooh, what kind of an attack could participants Twenty-five and Twenty-six be preparing?” even the announcer acknowledged whatever was happening as worthy of attention.

The participants around the energy winds halted their fights, distracted by dark attention beacon. This proved a costly mistake for some as one beheading and one disembowelment put an end to two more careless participants.

“Tch! An amateurish mistake!” Thelicia clicked her tongue. “Keep your eyes on your enemy! That much should be common sense!”

Thelicia’s indifferent attitude toward people’s lives was blatantly obvious, however, what worried Beatrice at that moment was the strange figure that took shape in the dark vortex as the winds calmed down.

A single leg appeared first, black, covered in misaligned scales. Something took a step out of the spinning shadows, digging its giant, curved, yellowish claws of the four reptile-like fingers into the rocks.

Fuck, Beatrice cursed at the sign of things to come, yet she could not have guessed what followed. The creature took another step forward with its second leg, bringing its giant torso out of the obscuring winds. Then it took its third step with a third leg. Then a fourth. A four-legged, four-armed, two-headed, nine-feet tall monstrosity emerged from its transformation. If an orc, a dragon, and a centipede had a baby together, they would produce something prettier than this.

The creature had more claws than it would know what to do with. And many of the protruding spikes all over the creature’s limbs and back looked more like bones that outgrew the constraints of mortal flesh and black skin. Two black cloth armbands were wrapped around one of the creatures four arms. The red numbers spelled twenty-five and twenty-six, confirming that this creature was indeed some dark manifestation of the two participants.

One of the creature’s limbs missed a hand, however, it already grew several fluttering tentacles out of the healing wound. As for the hand that was disintegrating due to Number Sixty-six’s poison, instead of falling apart it calcified and grew larger than all the others, looking akin to an orc’s war hammer.

The two heads on the creature’s shoulders were the last reminder that this thing was once human. But even the heads looked barely human now. They swung at unnatural angles like puppets. Their jaws doubled in size and their teeth bore more resemblance to those of an anglerfish than human. Their tiny eyes were darker than black, and their hair now consisted of some kind of metallic braids. The fact that they still kept their glasses on their crooked noses made them even more unnerving.

WHAT. THE ACTUAL. FUCK!? Beatrice was not mentally prepared to witness something like this lumber toward her with ill intent.

One of the heads, Peter, judging by the shorter braids and an even uglier mug than his partner’s, shook rapidly and then straightened itself as if awakening from a daze. It then focused its attention on Beatrice and spoke in a deep, hoarse voice, “Now you pay!”.

The creature jumped forward and a second later was already swinging down its hammer on Beatrice’s head.

“Oh my, what is this?” the announcer’s voice was louder than usual to make sure she was louder than the crowds and the fighting in the arena without actually shouting. “It appears two of our participants have combined into one! What an unusual situation!”

Unusual!? Beatrice wanted to slap the playful, high and mighty bitch ‘Thelicia’, but she was too busy dodging the attacks of whatever the hell this new abomination was that kept smashing the rocks under whenever Beatrice’s feet were the second before, sending rocks flying in all directions.

“Peter!” One malformed head shouted at the other next to it through all the carnage their limbs made. “You promised we would kill that biting twat first!”

“Alright, alright, baby!” the other head conceded. The monster landed with all four feet on a slope in the rocks, digging in its claws as it pressed against the ground and jumped in the opposite direction, flying right at the snake lady at a speed that neither Peter nor Wendy had displayed before.