Chapter 195

◈ Chapter 195:

For a moment Rain wondered what she was talking about with this talk of 'golem' (himself?), but then the wind physically took hold of the blue scaled fish girl and snatched her away from his reach. He growled in frustration as she vanished into the shifting winds.

Winds which were rapidly changing direction.

He looked around, alarmed, as the turbulence started to organise, becoming a channelled fury, rivers with a current, rivers that all focused entirely on himself.

It felt like being at the center of a whirlpool and the thickness of the sand in the air multiplied, becoming near impossible to see as the storm howled toward him, pounding at him with wind and sand, drawing inward.

In under a minute the sand storm had compressed down where he stood, and then compressed further until…

The wind died away. Rain slowly lowered his arms and shook his head slightly, the sand pouring away from the eye holes of the camouflage and allowing him to see.

He blinked as he found himself looking at… a sand wolf.

There was a sand statue in front of him, a ten foot tall statue that looked exactly as he did, a blurred representation of a bipedal wolf, a sand sculpture.

It wasn't the only one, and as he turned he found three more, four in total, surrounding him on all sides. He was boxed in.

Some kind of trick?

With a frown he formed a fist and jabbed it at the nearest sand wolf's head.

Its limbs jerked up in a sudden explosive motion and caught his fist in both paws.

To Rain's shock he found his fist slowing and then being stopped by the sand wolf, which then fully took hold of his arm.

It wasn't the only one and he grunted as another tackled him, wrapping its arms around his waist. Another glomped onto his free arm, and then the last thrust its paws in between the others and wrapped them around his throat.

He blinked in surprise. These… sand things… were quite strong.

In fact he found to his increasing alarm that he had no way of escaping their combined strength which was enough to hang onto him without being thrown off, restricting his movement.

He lifted one foot and took a very slow and heavy step with a grunt, carrying all four of the him sized golems along with him, then another, but it was no use, the golems set their feet and simply hung on, being dragged along but still keeping him basically pinned in place.

"It worked!" came the fish girls cry. "Quickly! Fucking quickly! Use the bow!"

"I don't know where it is!" came a panicked shriek, "I fucking dropped it, and— and it's nowhere!"

Rain suddenly felt very glad that he had taken care of that bow.

"Fuck your bow, do it manually! The thing can't attack or move or anything! Kill it! Kill it now!!"

"Go GO!" bellowed the female twin.

A weight landed on his back and  he looked over his shoulder to see the fish girl. She had her gauntleted hand curled through his fur and the other free with a knife. She plunged it down and he felt the sharp sting of a blade against flesh, but the thing failed to penetrate and it twisted in her hand awkwardly causing her to nearly drop it. She didn't have the physical strength to pierce his body.

"G-get in here! I can't cut this fucking thing!" came her frantic voice.

Another weight, and Rain felt a knife plunge into his back, for real this time and he grunted in pain, straining at the golems holding him in place.

Then came the sound of scrambling and the elf launched himself up the back of one of the golems scrambling over top, an arrow held in his fist, the crystal tip glowing bright. With a cry he stabbed it down, aiming to stick the thing through Rain's ear, stabbing straight for the brain.

With monumental effort Rain jerked to the side, hauling the entire four golems along with him, uncountable tons, their feet grinding against the sand, trying to pin him yet unable to fully hold him back.

The glowing arrow missed, plunging down into his shoulder instead and scraping painfully against his clavicle.

He now had all three remaining levelers climbing over his body.

In close proximity.

Very close proximity.

What to do only seemed natural to him.

His maw yawned open, sand falling away in streams from his muzzle as his teeth became visible and he breathed in vast amounts of air, his chest expanding as his head drew back and back and back.

And then he roared.

A shockwave blew out from his maw, rippling and shimmering the air, a sound like distant thunder in extreme close proximity, deep bone shaking bass that generated violent growing vibration. His camouflage covering disintegrated, his black fur uncovered in an instant, and the golems surrounding him on every side near blew apart from that first impact. Their entire sand made bodies rippled from top to bottom, strands of sand flying away from their suddenly unstable forms, sand flowing almost like water across their bodies, barely holding together, their heads no longer wolf like but spherical blobs of shifting sand.

The levelers climbing over him cried out, their voices snatched away as blood poured from their ears, their eyes, their mouths.

In an instant smoke whipped around the levelers bodies as blood poured from every orifice they possessed, all three of them screaming wordlessly as their insides started to rupture and burst. The smoke spiralled around their bodies and hurried them away from the roaring wolf, removing them from the danger before it could do any more damage.

The golems promptly exploded as the fish girl left, becoming a cloud of sand that shimmered around Rain, jerking and twitching, a minor sand storm, except instead of wind sustaining it, it was sheer vibration suspending the particles up in the air.

Strings of blood and spit strung between Rain's open jaws, stretching and breaking as the sound hit, flecking off into the air as the sound built and built and built, booming ever louder.

The ground was shaking, trembling, the sand visibly rippling outward. The vibrating sand no longer behaved like sand, the vibration changing it from a solid reliable thing to stand upon, into a semi liquid. His feet started to sink in the sand, slowly easing downwards as the ground could no longer support his great weight, passing up over his feet and then reaching his shins and then passing his knees.

He wasn't the only one and around him the entire arena started to slowly sink into the liquified sand, not that anyone noticed, as they were too busy running around yelling with their hands over their ears, trying to escape the terrifying sound and the quaking trembling ground.

Then, to Rain's surprise, a little smoke started to appear, a little bit of grey drifting from his open mouth, shifting and snapping back and forth, rippling in the roar, a little smoke, and then a lot, a streamer that struggled reluctantly from his jaws, jerking and twitching.

It was Quistis's smoke, pulled and syphoned from his lungs despite the smoke's best efforts to stay inside, a long stringy line of grey that emerged from his mouth, extending two foot, then three foot then—

His head was angled upward and the ceiling of the cavern happened to be partially in view. Even at that great distance he could see the ceiling and the glowing crystals attached to it shaking and trembling, vibrating under the waves of pressure and sound. Because it was in view, Rain was given a clear view as a glowing crystal the size of a building detached from the ceiling and came falling down in terrible slow motion. Small fragments of crystal falling around it as the great monolithic structure tumbled through the air. Part of it started to turn to smoke at the last millisecond, but it seemed Quistis hadn't looked up in time, no doubt distracted by the roar.

With an earth shattering BOOM, the crystal demolished three private boxes, smashing down through them and collapsing the arena wall before rolling across the sand inside, like a tumbling house.

He was reaching the very limit of how long he could sustain the roar, with quite a lot of smoke to go, but it ended with a strangeld choke as the sudden thought that Opal and Lyra had been beneath flashed across his mind. With a snap the smoke darted back into his mouth and into his lungs, joining back with the rest of it pooled stubbornly inside.

He'd failed to remove the deadly smoke.

A scream came from up on the stands, right by the crater the crystal had left , "H-he's dead! The monster killed him!"

Fuck.

As he climbed out of the sand trapping his legs and stood once more Rain's gaze shifted from the devastated crater that was the three private boxes (Thankfully none were Lyra's box), demolished by the falling building sized crystal, over to Quistis who was standing on the arena edge about to physically explode with anger.

She looked absolutely livid.

It didn't take long for the shrill complaints to start coming.

"The monster killed one of us!"

"You said this couldn't happen! I've paid so much money here! You promised!"

"The guarantee, where was the guarantee! What are you doing!!"

"The monster did it! The roar was an attack!"

"Fuck, I think my ears are bleeding…"

Rain could feel his heart beating in his chest, was that something stirring behind it? The smoke in his lungs about to transform and kill him?

Quistis's furious eyes slowly moved down to stare at him.

She was going to do it. She didn't care, she was simply that pissed.

He should kill her as she killed him.

But could he even do that now? Without Quistis there was no way for Lyra and Opal to easily leave this cavern, that is assuming all the exits were blocked as the one he had entered by were, and it wasn't like he would be alive to dig them out with brute force. So they would be trapped.

At least if Quistis lived they might get out okay, just as any other client of the Abattoir.

…Maybe he could chop off the end of her tail still, just out of spite.

He readied the centipede below her.

"WAIT! STOP! TIME OUT!"

Came a bellowed voice from behind.

Rain turned in surprise to find Lyra leaning out against the railing to her private box. She'd discarded her big floppy hat and had a finger raised pointed directly at Quistis. It seemed she had worked out what was about to happen, putting together what she knew and had seen, combined with the pure killing intent radiating from the lamia.

"I see what you are about to do!" she said, accusatory.

Quistis blinked.

"Ah?"

"Don't 'Ah' me. Not when you are trying to hide your incompetence. I mean, what kind of fucking idiot can't affix a crystal to the ceiling properly? It's literally just stone on stone! Gods, how sloppy are you with your … material… shaping… power… thing."

Quistis frowned, but did not immediately kill Rain.

"This mons-

"Noope! The monster did not kill those levelers, you did. It simply sat in the arena and roared a bit, but that sound could have been anything, what if a leveler had a really really loud Skill huh? Since you so incompetently attached the crystal to the ceiling literally anything could have knocked it down! Therefore this is not monster on leveller violence, it is leveler on leveler violence, and I'm sure that you are strong enough to hold your own against any of those who take issue with the leveler that you just killed."

Rain could see Quistis grinding her teeth together as she listened to Lyra speak, her fury urging her to kill Rain, kill him now, if only to sate her rage.

"And of course, either way, you killing this monster would be taking from the rest of us customers! Why should you get a share? You own this dump! If someone wants to bid on and then kill this monster and level lots and lots, what about them? Are you just going to throw away your client's wishes and, uh, lots and lots and lots of gold?"

Slowly, the desire to sell Rain once again for a small mountain of gold started to overcome her anger, eating away at her rage, calming it, soothing it with the promise of coin.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the monster lived a little bit longer.

Just one more auction.

Triskian stepped up beside her and began frantically whispering in her ear, but it was clearly too late, she'd already made her decision.

"Very well, I will admit that I have shown… incompetence… with my, ah, architectural design. We are hardly a construction guild after all. I apologise to those affected and I will see that they are compensated fairly as is becoming of a well respected institution such as ours. If that is still not enough then I will be happy to face the aggrieved in the arena where they may fight me. I will not show mercy and I will kill all who take this option."

There was a murmuring that went around the audience, the mood shifting from anger to word of it being an unfortunate accident. It was only one dead leveller after all, just leveller on leveller violence, and that happened often enough on the surface.

Quistis formed a hammer in her hand from smoke and struck the bell beside her.

"Bidding for the monster for the third time will begin now."

Rain glanced from Lyra who looked extremely relieved that Rain was alive, practically drooping over the railing as she sagged in relief, then over to the levelers he'd just fought. Quistis had only managed to drag them to the edge of the arena. They weren't doing very well. The elf was sluggishly crawling across the sand, completely delirious, droplets of blood drip-dripping from his ears, the blue scaled fish girl was weakly pawing at the air, and the female human twin was slumped against the wall groaning. One of the Abattoir gang splashed healing potion over the elf's head haphazardly.

They had tried valiantly, Rain had to admit. Their plan had been to delay and distract until the storm was powerful enough to physically copy him, have the sand golems hold him in place, and then have the elf pin cushion him with charged up arrows. He could appreciate a smart plan like that. Too bad for them that he was as difficult to predict as they were.

As he watched smoke took hold of the levelers and guided them stumbling to their feet, guiding them out through a tunnel that had appeared in the arena wall. It didn't look like they quite understood what was happening, although perhaps that would change as the healing potions worked through their bodies.

Nearby the tunnel the shattered private boxes started to heal, the broken stone seeping and liquefying into smoke which slinked back into the architecture's original shape. Similarly, the giant fallen crystal in the middle smoked and drifted away.

Soon Rain was left standing in the arena alone.

Standing and listening as once more his death was bid upon.

Admittedly there weren't a lot of bids.

After seeing what he had done, how dangerous he was, the levelers were hesitant to try for him, at least not alone, or even in small groups, much larger maybe, but then that would defeat the purpose of killing him.

The numbers slowly ticked up, small groups of allies in bidding forming, furtive conversation scattered across the boxes, voices lowered as if afraid that Rain could hear them.

Which he actually could, the combination of his sharp hearing and the levelers not being aware of how loud they were being due to their ears still ringing with the sound of his roar.

His ear twitched as he heard the clank of armour, and then steps. A gauntleted hand coming down on a stone railing.

He didn't have to turn to guess who it was.

The voice of Aolis the elf rang out.

"As seems to have become tradition, it is I who shall be finishing off the monster, where all others have failed."