Jake's Story, ch 18

The next chapter will be up in an hour or two, I'm just editing.  It's longer than this one.

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Jake had to decide who to attack first, and the obvious choice was the Warhounds, the group that his sister said had actually killed his family.  He didn’t know for sure where they were located, but he figured that starting where their base had been in his first life was a good start--a private school to the north.

The land between the Andersons’ neighborhood and the private school were heavily wooded.  All of the gangs and groups that had formed in the first few months after Purple Rain had valued having remote bases.  After all, groups of hostile people were more dangerous than monsters...for now.  More powerful monsters would eventually appear and challenge that notion.

But Jake remembered the giants he’d seen on the way into Macon.  Things had changed.  The gangs and raiders might have already adapted.

His mind worked as he raced through the forest, chest full of fire.  It felt like ever since he’d come back to the past and been turned into a monster, he’d been walking on eggshells, trying to be a good person.  He had been dreading any conflict with humans.  The sense that he hadn’t really wanted to...get involved in this timeline had been a constant, nagging limitation he’d put on himself.  But all of that had changed.

Trees flashed past, and Jake only paused to kill and drain a ghoul he happened across.  His entire attitude had changed.  He had killed before in his new ghoul form, but now it felt more natural, like he’d finally accepted his situation and his new body.

Jake was not human anymore.  He was not a savior, he was just an adventurer who’d been fucked over again and again and screwed by a vengeful god.  It felt like he’d spent two lifetimes now watching people he cared about die right in front of him.  He’d tried to play by the rules, any rules, for far too long.

Now it was time to do what he wanted.  And right now, what Jake wanted to do was break things.  From now on, if anyone took anything from them, he would destroy them.  And he would get strong enough to never be pushed around again, now that he had such a clear path for rapid growth.

But right now his family’s blood needed an answer.

Jake’s pace through the forest was lightning fast.  He was done caring about caution or stealth.

He knew he was starting to get close to his destination when he passed a dark church.  Its doors had been boarded up tight.  He thought he could smell people inside.

There were not zombies in the parking lot, though.   Like the rest of Macon, this area was incredibly free of monsters.

While he ran, he discovered a new ability almost by accident.  As he cycled his cultivation base, he suddenly sensed people inside the church.  The feeling was like...seeing a mist where life existed, but he wasn’t seeing it with his eyes.  It was a very strange sensation, and Jake had a feeling it had something to do with his body’s influence on his chi, or maybe vice versa.  Either way, he could feel the location of all ten or so people inside now.

And now that he knew there were living mortals in the church, he approved.  The people inside, banding together, were smart.  They were doing exactly what he’d suggested people do in his internet posts what already felt like months ago.

Then he crossed a dark road.  On the other side was an apartment complex.  Much like the church, he could sense people inside  some of the rooms.  Some of the apartments had busted out windows, or kicked in doors.  A few doors had bullet holes in them.  Jake got the impression that after people had begun resisting, whoever was ransacking the place had left for safer pickings.

He was just going to pass the apartment complex when his supernatural senses picked up something that stopped him in his tracks.  Jake was already full of anger, spoiling for revenge.  So even though he was in a bit of a hurry, he decided to make a stop.

What he was feeling was on the second floor of a corner building in the complex.

At first, he thought about scaling the side of the apartment building, maybe go through a window, but then he remembered that he was a shadow ghoul now.  There were more direct methods of breaking and entering.

It was interesting that the longer he stayed a monster, the more clearly he could feel natural, mystic thresholds around homes.  His parents’ home and the Andersons’ home had been been open to him and he hadn’t been affected.  He could feel weak resistance now.  Apartments generally didn’t have strong thresholds. No thresholds were proof against zombies, but they could help against other things.   and even zombies could get through strong ones.  Usually, the more powerful the monster, the more they were generally affected by thresholds, at least supernaturally and magically.

A suppressed C-rank monster could still rip a normal person’s arm off.

Meanwhile, Jake was some sort of weird, cultivating hybrid.  The thresholds tickled his flesh as he walked down the exterior apartment hallway, but he didn’t feel like they’d offer any kind of meaningful resistance to him.  None at all.

Jake stood outside the door and could hear muffled screams.  Maybe cries for help.  He wasn’t sure how he could hear it, though.  His senses were keen, but what he was listening to felt more like a ripple in the ether.  There was also a steady drip, drip, drip, that made his hackles stand up.  After Purple Rain, lots of people had died and there had been chaos, so some survivors with latent predator tendencies had really given being a creepy psycho a go.  Preying on the weak seemed to have been especially popular.

But what was worse was how whispers in the dark had corrupted some, or given suggestions in dreams.  This was how some of the fissure witches that Jake had fought with the Grasshopper Mice had gotten started.  Some of the worst, most depraved scenes that Jake had ever witnessed hadn't been from monsters, but at the hands of humans doing horrible things to each other for power.

And he was pretty sure that someone on the other side of this door had joined the party early.

Jake stood still for a moment longer before acting.  He phased, and as the world became black and white he walked right through the door, into the apartment, and situated himself behind a couch before returning to the physical world.

Now that he was in the apartment he used his senses to get a better idea of its layout.  Soft, arcane muttering came from the hallway. It seemed that the chanter was facing away from the doorway.

A sweet, cloying scent of blood filled Jake's head a moment later.  He'd caught a whiff outside before entering, but inside the smell was stronger than he had anticipated. At first this confused him--his senses were really very good.  But then he caught sight of the caulk all around the edges of the door and the plastic covering it. There were also plastic bags taped over the vents.

Soft sounds of weak crying and screaming through a gag came from deeper in the dark apartment.  Jake could hear it now, but the sounds were quiet and getting fainter.

Glowing, angular writing and disturbing symbols covered the walls.  The light they gave was new to Jake, a sullen, dangerous violet.  But he'd seen similar scenes before and knew that every line had been painted in blood.

Blood of the innocent.  He could feel it.

Something in Jake reacted to the blood, but not in the way he might have feared. Instead of hunger, his monster body was making him feel even more anger than he would have already.

The reaction was curious, but Jake wasn't complaining.  This was something that needed doing--it helped that his new body seemed to be on the same page. He knew exactly what was happening here, despite the fact it shouldn’t be so soon after purple rain.  Someone was working to become a fissure witch.

And whoever this scumbag was, they’d gotten help.  All of the nearby apartments, to either side of this one, below and above were empty of life.  Jake was new to his life-sensing supernatural senses, but he could tell that much.

The care to protect this place, keep it hidden, was not normal.  And the existence of the innocents themselves was notable, too.  People working on their own could take a while to become official, transformed servants of dark powers. But whoever was chanting was doing it all at once.  Of course, Jake didn’t entirely know all of this for sure, but he thought he was probably right.

Now he had to figure out what to to next.  Mages conducting rituals were helpless, but dark contractors were not.  The entire point of a twisted ceremony like this was to make a connection with some ultimate evil.  And once the cultist found what they were looking for, it looked back.

He’d only seen the aftermath of something like this before, not the actual ceremony.  That had been bad enough.  If Jake was still human now, he’d likely be puking his guts out.  The air was full of dark magical energy, a miasma.  The sigils and esoteric formula on the wall must be containing all of the power inside the apartment, turning it into a capacitor.  In fact, he realized that if he had the time and inclination, he could probably even cultivate this energy.

That was not a fun thought.

Jake tried to sneak a peak around the couch and grimaced.  This Evil-Inc-onboarding-event was definitely in full swing.  He was still thinking about what to do, maybe phase into a deeper room in the house when he heard a raspy voice announce, “I know you are there.  Come out.”  While this voice spoke, the muttering and chanting in the background continued.

Well, there are at least two of them.  Despite Jake’s anger, his blood felt like ice.  He was here to exterminate, and he was willing to do whatever he had to in order to accomplish that goal.  He slowly stood up without making any aggressive moves.

What stood before him was a big, expensive-looking doll, the kind that older ladies who smelled like baby powder would like to spoil little girls with at the mall before Purple Rain.  Its eyes glowed the same color as the evil script on the wall.  While it wasn’t holding any weapons, Jake’s mage senses that he still somehow had could recognize that magic field around the thing.  It was protected, and the energy functioned like a loaded gun, too.  All of its magic mojo was currently pointed at Jake.

Behind the doll he could catch sight of a feverishly working and chanting old man wearing nothing but dirty, whitey-tighty underwear.  The man was using a paintbrush on the walls, dipping it into a paint rolling tray.  Jake could smell the fresh blood from where he was standing.

Now that he could see the entire room, Jake understood how the walls of mystic script, basically a giant spell working, had been created.  There were several broken circles of chalk scattered around the room’s veneer floor, big ones.  Some might have been swept up already.  Jake was able to quickly recognize how the wannabe fissure witch was standing within an ominous, energized circle.  The man had put one side of the circle directly against the wall.  Now that Jake was watching it work, he understood how it all functioned.  The blood on the paint brush didn’t break the circle as the chanting cultist basically channeled evil energy inside into his glowing script.

Jake wished he’d known this information in his first life.  How fissure witches were actually created had still mostly been a mystery even when he’d died.  There were different ways for a human to become a fissure witch, and the leftovers of rooms like this one had been found before.  But if any adventurers had witnessed the process in Jake’s first life, they hadn’t lived to tell the story.  In fact, there had been extra bodies at some locations that hadn’t belonged to the sacrifices, probably some poor bastard that had wandered into the ceremony.  The existence of those bodies, sometimes obviously having died right before the fissure witch was born, was how Jake had assumed there would be a guardian present.  And the reason he knew the working itself could kill was because there had been evidence of that, too.

The animated doll was menacing just standing there.  Its eyes glowed brighter in surprise as it said, “You are not human.  I feel a human soul.”  It narrowed its glowing eyes before slowly nodding.  “Yes, that is a fine specimen, I do not recognize it.  You are obviously not human in form, but I sense a human soul.  A servant of one of my master’s siblings, I presume.”

Before Jake met Morrigan, he would have had no idea what the fuck this thing was talking about.  However, now he could only thank God for fortunate misunderstandings.  Jake had already accepted the fact he was standing in a dark apartment glowing with evil energy, talking to a creepy, powerful, animated doll, while some psycho painted on the wall with fresh blood and children suffered in another room.  He would have liked to just attack, but doing so without the element of surprise would be stupid.  It was possible he could try a Demonic Contradiction Wave attack, but he hadn’t practiced with it.  Such a volatile attack would not be a good option, either.  If it didn’t work, he’d be giving himself alway.  If it worked too well, he could end up blowing himself or the sacrifices up.  In fact, there was so much energy buzzing around the apartment, he might blow up the entire block.

Now was time to do some improvised acting.  He remembered how The Morrigan had understood his moans as a zombie, so he didn’t try to speak clearly, just growled, “You are on my master’s territory.  I was sent to find out what you were doing.”

The doll cocked its head.  “I find that hard to believe, as my master took over this territory without any opposition.”

Jake thought quickly, and basically just repeated back what he’d just heard.  “There was a change?”

“Yes.  My master originally had control of the land this world calls Mexico.  However, some of his brethren have allowed him to settle here and invest his power more quickly.  You should know this.  You are a child of the night and wear the body of a powerful creature of darkness.”  The doll’s eyes flashed and Jake felt a strange, probing feeling.  “Ah, your soul is practically dripping with demonic energy, but I cannot place it.  How curious.  There is something blocking my vision.  You are lucky, indeed.  If I were destroy you now, I would likely get no answers for my lord.  So instead, we can continue to talk.”  The doll’s face didn’t move, but Jake could tell it was smirking.  Its unmoving face between golden locks was quite a contract with the glowing eyes.  How it communicated expressions so well was a mystery.

Mexico? Thought Jake.  He remembered several things at once and the situation grew much more real, and more dangerous for him.  He’d been a stupid zombie at the time, but now he could remember what Morrigan had told him more clearly.  She’d actually given him a freebie.  What had she said, that the catastrophe in Mexico would not happen in the same place again?  That’s right.  She’d said it would happen near the place of his birth.  Georgia.

Holy shit, thought Jake.

The light, mystic touch of the animated doll had been enough for him to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this thing could destroy him in a straight fight.  But Jake had years of adventuring experience.  When a good, honest brawl was out of the question, it was time to be sneaky and ruthless.

What do all evil creatures have in common?  Selfishness, thought Jake.  Okay, that’s half the puzzle, but this doll obviously doesn’t believe me that I didn’t know what it was up to, and it’s not attacking.  Why would it think I’ve really come? Hmmm.  Then he got an idea.  Now he had a half-formed plan of how to act and how to take advantage of the situation.  “You are almost finished with this ceremony, I presume?”

The doll’s eyes flared again, and its voice dripped amusement as it said, “I have no reason to answer that question.  State your business and be honest about it or I will be forced to destroy you, or at least the vessel you are using.  I will do my best to attack you through your link if I do.”

And that told Jake everything he needed to know, the last piece of the puzzle.  He hoped.