Chapter 197

◈ Chapter 197:

Rain turned his head groggily, searching for answers, sight wobbling as the ringing in his ears continued. At least for the moment he wasn't being killed. Quistis was… probably sparing him.

The sound of metal on stone came, and he slowly turned his throbbing head to see the suit of armour embedded in the wall.

The armour was creaking and shifting, wrenching free from the stone in jerky pained motions.

It slipped free and fell to the sands, staggering and near falling before finding its balance. One armoured arm hung limp. Empty. There was no limb inside to move it.

The knight was bowed, hunched over, and the helm broken open. Rain could see an eye through a gap in the steel. Aolis.

He took a step.

There was a groan from nearby, the other knight, the father, still part buried in sand.

"What have… you done…?"

Aolis wavered but kept going, his brow furrowing.

"It took my arm. I- I had to do something before it devoured my arm like the centaur! She doesn't matter… I… am OUR future!"

He staggered forward, clearly struggling not to black out. Eventually he came to a halting stop before Rain and slowly unsheathed a knife from his hip. The blade started to glow a clinical white, its ability to cut through flesh magnified, the edge becoming infinitely sharp.

With a cry he lunged, but before he could raise the knife to stab down into Rain's head the ground erupted, three arm thick snakes wrapping around and around his armoured legs, spiralling up and drawing them together, tying and binding him in place. All three snake heads biting down on the vambrace holding the knife, pinning it in place. With his other arm gone he had no way of attacking.

The wild knife lunge came up short and Aolis looked down in surprise at his bound legs.

He grunted, unsurprised. "You held back from the start of course. You could have killed any one of the levelers you fought with relative ease, but you didn't. You were hiding this kind of thing as an advantage."

Rain slowly rose to his feet, towering over the elf, swaying on his feet.

He raised his paw. He looked between Aolis and his claws. He hesitated.

He couldn't kill this elf, even though he had vowed to. He could feel the bit of him that was still human egging him on, urging him to kill, emotionally driven.

But doing so would just mean Quistis killing him. It would be pointless.

The eye just visible behind the broken helm blinked and then crinkled with mirth.

"You- you're afraid! You're afraid the snake bitch will kill you! You know you can't do it, you aren't like any other dumb monster, you understand the consequences, and you fear them! You hold back, you always have!"

Rain's hesitation became frustration and he took a step back, his paw trembling at his side, his head a mess of fog and a haze of pain.

Fucking elf. Everything was so…

Trapped.

He was trapped.

Like a wild animal in a cage, prowling behind the bars, watching the outside, but unable to truly interact, being driven mad with feral frustration.

The sudden visceral revulsion for his situation and this elf was so powerful that it made him feel nauseous.

…Fuck it.

He brushed his paw over his chest and snakes started to emerge, small, very very thin snakes, their bodies only as thick as a human thumb.

The snakes eased from his fur, long and tentacle-like wavering in front of his chest like tendrils or seaweed underwater.

Aolis's eye went wide, looking at the things warily.

"Wha-What are you planning to do with those?"

Rain gave him a blank look.

"Something I'm going to regret."

He opened his mouth wide and the snakes launched themselves, shooting toward his open mouth like it was the most important thing in the world that they be inside. In moments they were streaking past his fangs and diving down his throat, he gagged, retching, nearly vomiting, but forced them to go down, all eight of them flowing into his throat, down his trachea, and into his lungs, splitting apart and spreading. The pain was immense, and the feeling was utterly utterly horrible.

If he was being honest with himself, Plan C fucking sucked.

The snakes split into a mess of predation and spread throughout his lungs and then he accessed a Skill.

He used his Flame skill.

A lot.

[Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame] [Flame].

Countless little fires sprung up along the predation and set his lungs aflame.

Pain. Horrifying pain. Rain hated magic-made fire, even his own. And now the fire was within him, and it BURNED.

His chest was burning.

Just as the chimaera had drunk liquid flame into its lungs to purge the smoke, Rain had filled his lungs with fire, burning out Quistis's smoke, destroying it.

Black smoke poured from his mouth and he staggered, falling to all fours. Fire blackened blood spewed from his mouth onto the sand and he watched wide eyed as a single thin blood coated needle emerged inch by slow inch from his chest, a knitting needle steel spike. But then the needle slowed to a crawl and then finally came to a stop.

Quistis had tried to kill him, as his lungs burned out the smoke. But there was no more of her strange transformative smoke left, he had burned it all away.

He was free.

He slowly rose to his feet, pitch black smoke curling from his lips and a rumbling wrathful snarl in his throat.

Aolis blinked.

"What did you do, you idiot of a monster, have you gone mad?"

Rain's paw started to rise, reaching.

"Y-You can't kill me!"

The paw enclosed his head, one panicking eye behind a broken helm seen between thumb and index.

New grey smoke was rising from the sands to stop him, but the shock of what had just happened had slowed the lamia's reaction.

"Aren't you listening?! She'll kill you! You'll die! You'll die! You fucking idio-"

Rain closed his paw in vicious crushing motion and blood exploded from between his digits. The helm crushed like shrieking tin, the elf head inside instantly pulped like a fruit, the liquid remains spraying out from the pressure, waterfalling down the cuirass in a wash of gore and splinters of bone.

Stillness fell over the arena as the audience froze. Absolute. Pin-drop. Silence. That is, apart from the wet plap-plap of brains and teeth drizzling down to the puddle of red below.

He could hear Quistis drawing in a long shuddering breath of dismay behind him, her eyes going round, fury flaring.

He knew it was coming and he had readied for it. A snake burst from the ground, a black sphere in its teeth. Ruin stone. Perfectly smooth. The snake lunged for his mouth just as smoke roared up from the sand, a column that shot straight toward his head.

This time he was more than ready. The stone sphere smoothly clicked into place blocking off his lungs, and tiny snakes crawled about his mouth and ears. He closed his mouth firmly, and the smoke went for his nostrils. But he wouldn't even allow it that, plugging them with predatory claws and teeth and then setting them aflame. His sense of smell was seared away in an instant.

The feeling of sensitive flesh burning was enough to make him choke and he opened his mouth on instinct. The grey smoke lunged at the chance, but all it found was more flame, and what little made it past found its way blocked by stone. Even his ears were defended from the invading smoke.

Overly cautious perhaps, and brutal on his body, but this smoke, this smoke was like a creature that sought out weakness in a living being's head and exploited it, insidious worms that crawled inside to kill. There was nothing else to be done if he were to be free.

"It's not working! D-Do something! DO SOMETHING!" came Quistis's rising voice.

"We should have killed it! We should have killed it!" shrieked Triskian.

"Then kill it now you fool! Go! GO!"

Rain glanced up to see the monumentally vast snake rising from where it curled around the arena, he could see Triskian sprinting up its body, racing toward its rising head.

As that happened smoke was attacking, smoke slammed around his legs, shifting and shaping into solid steel or iron. Seeing the intent Rain kicked out, his powerful limb scattering the smoke with ease, leaving chunks of malformed metal to go bouncing across the sand.

He stepped free quickly, keeping in motion as much as possible, and ripping away the clinging metal when it managed to get a grip on him.

He could hear the rising outrage from the audience, Quistis's increasingly frantic attempts to pin him. Ahead the father knight began to rise from where they sat half sunken in sand, its arm hanging limp at its side. There was barely restrained wrath in its body language, the metal shaking, rattling, as the elf inside raged. A gauntleted palm slapped down and he launched free from the sands, a howl echoing from the metal helmet, sprinting toward Rain, who struggled as clouds of smoke lunged for him.

Rain had escaped one problem, but really it was more like stepping from the frying pan and into the fire.

He swept away a cloud of smoke with the back of his paw and snatched the chance to grab a lungful of air. It hurt. Breathing hurt so fucking much. His lungs were a charred wreck, and despite taking in so much air he felt as though he'd only taken a scant shallow breath.

He'd barely given thought to what was to come after freedom, he had no plan, but with injuries like this, and surrounded by so many powerful levelers…

The sand shifted below the sprinting knight, a stretched rope of centipede just below the sand catching his foot. The elf stumbled but brute forced his balance, lunging forward more like a wild animal than anything, the empty arm flapping and clanking as he pelted across the sands toward a backpedalling Rain, frantically trying to stay on top of Quistis's cloying smoke.

"You almost killed me! ME!!" came a screamed yell from the knight, pure white hot outrage. He swung the sword up wildly over head, spit flecking from the grill of their helm, blood seeping from the edges of the armour, motions wild, uncoordinated.

Still nothing Rain could stop as he was.

But then Aolis was never going to reach him in time.

A shadow fell over him and Rain only had a moment to look up before a vast and terrible maw descended on him, a wild eyed and panicked Triskian riding atop the great snake's head.

Everything went dark.

Crushing force all over, enough force to pulverise metal or crush stone to dust, he could feel his bones creaking, joints on the verge of dislocation.

Pitch black. Couldn't see a thing.

Couldn't breathe, suffocating from both lack of air and charred lungs.

…It took him a moment to realise that the insane drake had made his oversized pet goddam eat him!

When he realised that was the case he was very upset.

He was the one who did the eating!

Which, of course, if either of them had known, they would never in their wildest dreams have thought what they had just done was a good idea.

He opened his jaws.

And began to bite.