Chapter 502 (Patreon)

Something about this chapter fought me hard. Had to rewrite it.

Enjoy!


* * *


“Emptied Spirit.” Felix narrowed his eyes at the inverted woman. Not far from his side, Beef seemed to have fallen fully unconscious. “You don’t sound like Hallow, and you certainly don’t look like her.”

The beautiful older woman shifted her shoulders, her smile fading a bit more. “The voice you normally hear is filtered through Beef’s core space and my own power. I am capable of inhabiting multiple Bodies by my very nature, after all. The form before you is one that Michael found the most comforting when he created me.”

“Comforting?” Pit asked.

“I am a near-exact replica of his mother, Helen.”

Felix traded a glance with Pit. “Alright. That’s…well, I can’t fault him for missing his mom. But how?”

The emptiness shook around them as a burst of chill shadow once again suffused both platforms, above and below. When it cleared, more ice layered over Beef and Hallow in almost identical patterns of frost.

The woman that claimed to be Hallow grimaced, stretching her neck so that the ice cracked and snapped. “Though I wear this face, I am unaware of Michael’s beginnings. I only know snippets of the time before my creation. Michael was brought here, summoned the same as you, Lord Autarch, and dumped into the heart of the Scorched Expanse. There he fought beasts and monstrosities, changing his Race in order to survive, and yet coming closer to death with every passing moment.” Her eyes were bright and colorless—like empty glass orbs—yet her gaze bored into Felix’s. “I am a result of that trauma.”

Felix could understand that. The first few hours of his arrival had gone badly, too. “What are you, Hallow? I thought you were a Skill that Beef had learned, but what you’re saying is suggesting something else.”

That smile returned, still sad but now somewhat impish. “In an effort to extract the magic he required to survive, Michael did the impossible. He wrenched free his nascent Spirit by some virtue of his Unbound nature. Me. I am his Spirit, whole and completely separate from his Body and Mind.”

“Whoa,” Pit said, beak agape. “You’re not a Companion. You’re a Beef.”

“Hallow, please. Michael gave me that name shortly after I inhabited the corpse of the first Sandwolf he killed.”

“Not Helen?” Felix asked.

Hallow frowned, her expression turning dark for the first time since she’d started speaking. “I am not Helen. I only wear her face for Michael’s sake.”

“He makes you look like his mom?” Felix asked.

“Unconsciously. It was a form he chose when he began to visualize his core space and he first found this empty chamber.”

“Right. Empty because you weren’t here any longer.”

“Exactly.”

“This light…this is Beef protecting the rest of his core space from the ooze?” Felix asked, pointing to the barrier around both platforms.

“Incorrect. This is me protecting the rest of Michael’s core space. He is trapped, as I am, and barely holding on. I do not know why it is resonating so deeply with his Spirit, but I fear that even this solution will not hold for long.” Another burst of darkness, worse than the last. Thick ice crawled up Hallow’s chest. Her face twisted in pain, but her voice was steady. “Not long at all.”

Felix heard the increasing violence woven in the dissonant expulsion of ice and shadow. Whatever the ooze was doing, it was getting stronger. For the briefest of moments, Felix sent his awareness outward, back along his Link toward consciousness…and found his Link slam into a solid wall. Felix drew in a sharp, angry breath. “What the hell?”

The door out of Beef’s core space had closed.

“That is dire. The ooze is touching more of Beef’s power than I anticipated.” Despite the bitter cold, sweat beaded along Hallow’s pale forehead. It dripped off, turning to icy slush before vanishing into the dark. “My barriers are failing, and it is…it is claiming him.”

Felix whirled toward his friend, the teen Minotaur who just wanted to have a fun adventure. Ice had crawled up onto his jaw and around his face, locking his square, bovine head into a menacing snarl. Beef’s eyes were open, but inside there was only a deep, terrible darkness.

Hallow panted with wide eyes. There was no sad amusement, just a mounting panic. “Lord Autarch. Felix. If it takes him, I do not know what will happen. I am its point of entry into his core. You must destroy me.”

“Absolutely not.” Felix spun from Beef to glare at Hallow. “You think I’d just roll over and kill an ally—a friend—because some eldritch ooze wants to start calling the shots?”

“A friend?” Hallow asked, quietly.

“Yeah! We’re all friends!” Pit agreed with a bright chirrup. His wings spread, beating at the dark and crackling with sudden lightning. “And we fight for friends!”

“Damn straight.” Felix glared at the two platforms, Mind whirling. “Okay, what do we have? Barrier. Echo of the Regalia. Ooze. What’s the deal with the broken plinth there?”

Hallow seemed unable to speak for a few seconds. “Uhm…that–that is one of the few extant pieces of his Spirit. All the stone you see before you is such. A chunk was required—a piece of himself—when he formed my Homunculus. Primordial power or not, such a creation was beyond Michael’s abilities without a piece of who we are.”

“Primordial power…” Felix grinned. “Of course. I knew I recognized it.”

Fiendforge!

The multi-colored lights, the flashing hues of multiple Mana types and System power, all of them stopped swirling as Felix closed his Will and Intent upon them. His grip around Beef’s core space tightened until the emptiness around them shivered.

“What are you doing?” Hallow shouted, and this time there was no mistaking the fear in her voice. “If that barrier is broken, you’ll doom him entirely!”

“If I do nothing, either you or him will be killed or worse.” Felix reached his hand out, letting the stilled light mingle among his fingers. “Those are not options I can accept.”

He shoved his hand through the light and right into the darkness as it burst.

“Chthonic Tribute!”


* * *


Isla witnessed wave after wave of the dark-scaled Drakin and Broodvipers pouring through the root tunnel. Thick ooze followed them, clinging wetly to their slick hides and pouring over the ground like a tide of onrushing blood. The War Naga fought against it, tridents and heavy muscles claiming their due from the monstrosities, while the Lady Dayne danced among them in explosions of air and metal Mana.

Yet they were flagging. Stamina and Mana were depleting faster than any of them could recover, despite their various potions. The numbers of the Fathom spawn only increased. For every beast killed, another three took their place, and now something else tore at the root tunnels. Something very, very large.

They could not hold.

Their only saving grace were the thick blue roots that had lifted and swelled, a thorn-lined bulwark against the monstrous advance. Holes in the tunnel were patched and filled, stemming the flood of water and ooze even as large talons clawed at it from outside. It had worked, giving them a brief reprieve, but the Nymean spirit that fueled them was likewise rapidly waning in strength.

“This is not enough!” Paxus cried out. His shape flickered in and out of visibility, much as Isla’s own illusions might when she was pressed to the edge of her power. “You must all of you run!”

“Can you bottle them here?” Trained as a healer, Isla was all too familiar with making hard decisions. Even with the Chant, there was only so much one could do before the dire truth must be confronted. Sometimes the limb must be amputated to save a life. “If we run, retreat to your Companion Tree, can you keep them back?”

“Not for long. My influence over these tunnels has dwindled to almost nothing. All that I command now is my own limited potency.” The spirit’s dark blue eyes, completely without whites or pupils, stared down at Isla with a vast swell of soft sadness…one that swiftly transformed to hardened conviction. “Your Autarch gave us our lives back. I will repay that, no matter the cost.”

He inspires such loyalty in mere hours. Isla could not help but marvel at Felix’s abilities, separate from his Skills or Temper. To Paxus she only gave a nod and raised her voice. “Lady Dayne! Toa’ut! We must retreat! Is the ice broken?”

“It is!” Lavix shouted back. The Naga had been tasked to breaking the increasing layers of ice off the two Unbound and their Companions. “I can pull them out!”

“Take the Unbound and go!” Isla summoned up her power, humming just beneath the cadence of her words. A complicated technique, but one she had mastered after many long centuries. A defensive construct wove into place, shaped of green-gold, faint purple, and oily brown Mana; an illusion to aid their phantasmal defender. It was the least she could do. “Fall back!”

The Lady Dayne barely made it back to the fold when the battle changed.

“The ooze!” the spearmaiden cried out, still mid-air. She landed with a flex of her knees. “It’s moving!”

Isla whipped around, just in time to see that the ooze indeed was moving. Where before it had flowed like a restless sea, now it congealed, rising up less like a wave and more like a behemoth. The ooze formed a mass of twisted tendrils that resolved into the gaping maw of something far from natural, a shrieking abyss filled with a blistering cold.

“Brace yourselves!” she cried out, activating her defensive working. All of them blurred in place, sending the Fathom spawn stumbling around their forces, but the wave of gelid shadow hit them like a tsunami.

Isla hastily hurled her power into another shield, but it was not her strong suit. She felt the shield detonate, doing little to blunt the cacophony of screeching chaos that encompassed them all.


* * *


Beefhammer blinked.

Wha—where am I?

All around him was a white expanse, empty and sterile. Beef lifted his hands. They were just as dark and blunt as ever, the backs of his hands covered in a brown pelt shot through with red and tan. He was also totally naked. That was weird. Other than that, though, he felt…normal.

Until he looked up.

“Jesus!” Beef dropped to the ground, just out of range as a massive tendril of monstrous goo thundered inches above his head. “What the hell is that?”

“She does not like you, Michael.”

Beef twisted awkwardly, his huge Body unencumbered by his chitin armor but still not made for these sorts of movements. He ended up throwing himself to his feet, brow furrowed and head ducked low. A hard lump formed in his throat. “Mom?”

“No,” Hallow said and Beef watched a complicated twitch cross her face. “Just me.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Beef swallowed, but the lump didn’t vanish. He looked up, where the endless white expanse was stained by skittering, blue-purple shape. He had trouble focusing on it, like he was staring at buzzing static through a rain-soaked windshield. Ropey strands hung from it—that much Beef could make out—striking out in every direction like they were swatting at flies. If it was as huge as the appendage that swung for him, then the thing was absolutely monstrous. “What…that’s the Creature’s ooze?”

Hallow nodded, and recent events flooded back to Beef’s bruised Mind. He recalled feeling ill and unsteady and the long fight down the root tunnel. He remembered falling.

“Bastard sneak attacked me,” he muttered. “What do we do? How do I fight this thing? Am I in my core space?”

“You are. The Autarch stepped into it to save you.”

“Felix is here? He saw my core space?” Oh god, that’s embarrassing! Beef suddenly wished he hadn’t dodged that massive tendril. At least then he’d have been at peace. “What—what did he say? Anything?”

Hallow leveled a look at him, so similar to one his mom would use.

“Yes! Yes, that is what I’m worried about, right now!” Beef swallowed. His fur felt too hot, and his hands were sweaty. What did he see?

“Beef. Focus. Felix needs you, now.”

That stopped him. Beef lifted his eyebrows. “Felix…needs me?” Pride swelled in him and he puffed out his chest. “What does he need? Wait, where is he?”

Hallow pointed. Up.

Beef followed her finger, gazing up into the fuzzy mass of monster that seemed to be slowly expanding. Or getting closer. Except parts of it were whirling this way and that, slapping outward at the endless white like gooey frog tongues only to be batted away violently. Beef focused, straining his Perception, and could barely make out another shape beyond the blue-purple blob. It too was massive, like the shadow of the moon itself, lit with flashes of blue-white and red-gold. Too fast to truly see.

“Wha—what does he want me to do?” he asked, staring up at his friend that was battling the behemoth.

“He needs you to embrace the storm, Michael,” Hallow told him. Her voice was quiet, but the words almost boomed in Beef’s ears. “We both know what that means.”

Beef’s breath caught in his chest, tangling around the vast riot of power that still waited within his core space. “I have to?”

Hallow’s colorless eyes were soft as she looked at him. His mother’s eyes had been brown, and sometimes it was all Beef could use to assure him that Hallow wasn’t his mom. “You have been delaying the storm for weeks, Michael. Perhaps in another time you could have avoided it entirely. But you were given a choice. You chose to be selfless. To help, uncaring of the costs.

Now it is time to pay.”

Beef looked back up, where the white nothing had begun to fade. It was a shell, his Mind whispered to him, a protection, keeping him away from the monstrous battle that was occurring beyond his senses. Felix was there, Converged with Pit, scales darker than the black around him, whorls of cyan glowing upon his chest and arms in an echo of his haunting eyes. Wings made of scale, claw, and feathers spread outward, hurling lightning from them with every stroke. More than that, shapes seemed to manifest and vanish all around him, flickering and fading like ghosts. The ooze attacked and he savaged it, consumed it with teeth that shone like red-gold fire. He moved…he did not move like a Human. He was an engine of violence and power, brought to bear against the undulating monstrosity the size of a skyscraper.

And he wasn’t backing down an inch.

“I’m afraid, Hallow. What if I…what if I lose the room? It’s all I have left.”

“Felix is strong. Perhaps he can fight the ooze alone, and perhaps you can stay on the sidelines and remain unaffected.” Hallow shrugged but anger churned under her too-familiar features. “Change will always happen. But it is better to embrace it than to let it run you over, right?”

“Beef!”

The cry came from above, from somewhere impossibly distant. Felix had become a whirling vortex of lightning that was devouring pieces of the ooze. “Your core!”

A tendril slammed down, along with a second, but they were deflected by summoned shields of ice and stone. “It’s cool! Sick gaming rig!”

More came, spearing outward from every direction. It shrieked and charred as Felix breathed out red-gold flame. “Now—hah!” He caught another protuberance, and ripped it in half. “Let’s kick some ass—together!”

Beef took a big, shaky breath. He closed his eyes. Everything twisted as Beef took command of his core space. He returned to his core, to the replica of his old room back in Texas, and the storm outside had begun to rage harder than ever before. The trees whipped hard enough to uproot, and the foggy shapes of houses began to tear apart beneath the titanic winds. The storm, the Primordial’s Essence he’d held off for so long, it was coming.

“Hallow?”

“Yes, Michael?” She stood at his back, as always.

“My name is Beefhammer.”

With a savage boot, Beef kicked open the window.