My mind split into two separate states. One closely observing every detail of this unfolding tragedy. The other somehow calcuting a thousand moves ahead for a game I wasn't aware that I was pying... Game, another game in all of this mess? What game was this?
The changing screams of the former Preacher cut through the night. A siren warning off the standard street rats and police alike.
Grais's skin pulsed, then it rippled with all the shades of all the colors you never knew existed, all the really unpleasant ones. Swelling masses grew then erupted in a haphazard manner, as if they couldn't be bothered to try to be intensely shocking or truly grotesque. Honestly, it cked the horror you might expect from an eldritch horror tearing it's way out of its former human host. There was no metaphysical weight to it, something was missing. This was just a strange being finally undressing after a log day of pying at being Grais.
It spoke in a voice that sounded like a thousand out of sync throats trying to imitate a discordant Theremin. The sylbles were mere random noises, at first, nothing but disharmonious gibberish. Then actual words began to emerge. They dripped with the juices of fouled dreams, and wormed into your ears seeking a pce to lodge themselves permanently into your mind.
"Where is the great SONG? The sickly sweet sounds of PLEASURE! The gurgle of DECAY! The braying of WRATH! The giggles of CORRUPTION! Where? Where did you go my lord? Do not leave me here all alone!"
A ripping noise preceded the final discarding of its man-flesh. Wails and screams flooded the air in a fevered pitch, and shortly after only a warped, twisted mass of writhing tentacles, snapping fang den mouths, and soul-less eyes remained. The flesh, if you could call it that, had settled into a color somewhere between madness inducing purple and ruptured intestinal pink.
My first impression: That's a fuck of a lot of tentacles! Second impression: Damn that's fugly! Third impression: KILL IT! KILL IT WITH ALL THE FIRE! even though I knew there would never be enough fire to scour clean this filth ridden mass of putrid existence. Its voluminous screeches continued, carrying a note of endless loss and hopeless dread.
I snapped into the moment, no longer a mere observer with a yer of separation from the events unfolding before us. My mind cleared and my resolve firmed. "Shoot it, now!" My bellow broken everyone out of the daze the transformation had inflicted on them. " Attack! Before it regains its senses!"
John was the first to get with the program and pump rounds into the beast, followed by the deafening report of Raynor's weapon. The cacophony of the troops' guns were barely a split second behind. Given the unknown nature of the creature before us, I had a brief concern that our bullets wouldn't have much effect on the disgusting beast. Thankfully my worries were wrong, each round that hit it and erupted with a small burst of bright blue fme. It seemed that the minute amounts of Psicrystal in the crysbronze alloy reacted violently with the baleful purple energies the creature radiated. The damage of each round was small but at least it was something.
Raynor started shouting orders to his men, and they busted their asses to follow his commands. They knew damn well that all of our live were on the line. I rapidly took stock of the situation. We were on mostly ft ground, nearby the Station and its covered pump area where behind the crazy unnatural thing. Sadly, we had spend all that time earlier clearing the area of trash to feed the disassemblers in the forges. There was nothing left anywhere to use for cover on this side of the building.
We had created and loaded tons of spare magazines earlier and even had more loose ammo. So while the beast seemed to be eating the round by the dozens, we had plenty to keep scoring small holes upon its twisted visage.
Its wailing grew louder, "It hurts, it hurts to be alone. Forsaken. WHY?! Why does it hurt to be abandoned?" It then burst into giggles followed by more senseless screaming. Its energies that burned bright at first seemed muted somehow now. It also seemed confused, if such a term applied. I expected something more from a creature of the beyond. While it barely showed signs of damage from the barrage pounding into it, the signs of our wrath were slowly adding up. Chucks had been thrown free to continue burning in blue fmes.
I used Divine Wrath, hoping that the golden energies of faith would burn the foul thing to a crisp. While the energy appeared to increased it's agony, and certainly did more damage, it was hardly the confgration that I was looking for. However that was the signal that the beast finally seemed to understand that it was being attacked.
"What are these souls, tainted by soft energy? Why are you not drawn to my belly? Come, come food and join the blurp and the glorp of my stomach. Join the agonizing delight of being dissolved into nothingness." The beast charged, it's movements an awkward series halting and sluggish lurches, all of its disgusting tentacles flopping about or being dragging by its bulk. Slow but inexorable. Worse, it appeared to be getting use to this new manner of locomotion. As it moved ever closer I realized how much volume its form had gained, the beast was now a massive house sized pile of wiggling flesh. Even now the very nature of its material composition seemed to be transforming.
The damage of our sustained attacks, had began to strike meaningful blows. Larger chucks were torn from the main mass to fall combusting upon the ground. I leveled another Divine Wrath at the offensive thing, as I pulled my Omaha, adding my own share of bullets to the fray. We had started spreading out as we backed away, trying to hit the abomination from as many different angles as we could, while making it harder for the fallen Preacher to pick a target.
It paused again. Perhaps the foul creature was lost in whatever passed for thought in its kind. "What is the meaning of a heart beat? Who counts the cost of a tearful eye?" It leapt and caught one of the troops as he was changing his magazine. Tentacles pulled his limbs in different directions and tore him into quarters. Shucked of his armor, the pieces of the man's body were absorbed into the tainted being. "Little soul, little voice. It joins me, IT joins US!" A face, too simir to the man just lost to us, morphed out of the gross pink flesh, the face began to sing.
"It killed Huskler! You'll pay you bastard!" Someone yelled. Another one of my men charged and shoved his rifle into one of the countless mouths, dumping his whole mag into the beast's internals before getting smashed into the ground by at least a dozen fleshy pseudopods.
"Keighvus! No!" This man too, was absorbed into the mass of tainted flesh. Another face formed between the tentacles to add to the dirge sung by the other face.
"MY souls, they join my song. Eversting and loving peace for the little pretties. Sing for the world my darlings!" There was a new quality to the creature ranting. It was gaining awareness and purpose from the men it absorbed.
It had no right! How dare it! I would make it pay!
I snarled and dropped another Divine Wrath on the fucked up amoeba. This time the light seared much deeper into the mass of the corrupted meat. This time a sting golden fme ignited in its pustunt innards. We were finally weakening it. "Hold strong! We are hurting it! Keep it up!" I yelled with fury burning in my heart.
"Roughnecks! Pour it on! Fight!" Raynor bellowed. His rifle blew basketball sized holes into the abomination.
"Fight!" 8 voices responded as one.
John had snatched up Huskler rifle, and a few mags. He reloaded the weapon and started popping eyeballs. One shot, one eye. He danced between tentacles as the foul thing turned it's full attention to him. It cheered in its frustration, it ughed in the glory of its pain.
I reloaded, and continuing to add what damage I could. Twitching oddly the foul thing started to sway, its momentum stalled. Everyone was still firing and reloading as fast as they could, determined to end this monstrosity. This horrid thing that has stolen our companions.
"Why do the little souls not submit? We not longer wish to be alone!"
"Rot in Hell!" I bsted it with another Divine Wrath. The gold fmes rushed in eager to consume its corrupted meat. This time the votile nature of the energies resulted in a small explosion. Foul shreds of the warped being that Grais had become pelted the whole area. We had done it. Hopefully the souls of our friends could now find peace in death.
Though, I still was left wondering why the fuck had this just happened?
We had won a costly victory against an unbelievable foe. Why was something still bothering me? Was it something that the Imperials had said earlier? Think, man, think. What was it?
Chaos corrupts...
That had to be a daemon, right? A servant of the "Ruinous Powers", of Chaos.
"Raynor! Status!" I yelled to him, half because my hearing was screwed up. The other half was to make sure he could hear from me all the way over where he was already checking to see if anyone had been poking their noses into our business. At least Night City had some good points, people here didn't usually run towards the sounds of massed gunfire. I cast a quick Regrowth on myself to bring my hearing back up to normal.
"Ryan, Huskler and Keighvus are KIA, bodies missing." He paused grimly, we all knew where they were. "The rest of the troops are good to go, no other casualties. The area is clear, no lookie-loos."
That had me thinking about, how the daemon had just torn Huskler apart. His armor did fuck all to stop the beast's power. Then when it absorbed him... Oh Shit!
I called, through the Psifield, ordering all nearby Probes to converge on us. We needed to hurry. "Raynor! Start the boys looking for all the scraps of the creature's flesh. Gather it all into a pile. Don't let it touch bare skin. Same for anything covered in its blood. This may not be over."
He got an idea of what that meant immediately, "Hell. Let's get to it boys!" He hurried up to start them on the clean up job.
"John, you alright?" I saw him just staring at the rgest chuck of rubbery flesh remaining.
"Yeah." He sounded odd. Maybe, offended was the right term.
"What's wrong?" I cast a Regrowth and Cleanse on him just to make sure he was okay.
"Too many bullets." Oh. He was pissed it took so many rounds to bring the damned thing down. Despite everything, I chuckled. He gave me a look, if it was anyone else I would have said it was a wounded one. Nah, John Wick ain't other people, it must mean something else.
"Don't worry. There was probably only the one creature. Even if there were more, I already have a few crazy ideas percoting in my head to help counter them." A higher purity of Psicrystal in the alloy of our ammo for a start. Infusing mana and/or faith into the rounds on top of that might also be a long overdue experiment...
An image of the disgusting beast fshed once more into my head. It had been hidden well, deep in the flesh of it's human host, I guessed that the Company had missed it riding along. At least, I hoped they'd missed it and it wasn't an intentional action on their part. I doubted the others had been tainted, but I'd have to check them thoroughly before we left. Best to be sure, this was too much of a threat to ignore, or take half measures.
The first of the Probes had arrived, and I told them to scan for every bit of the supposed daemon's flesh and stack it in the pile that Raynor and his troops had already started on. At first I had a mild concern that maybe the daemon's remains could corrupt the Probes, but I remembered the violent interaction of crysbronze and the daemon's chaos energies. Not quite as good as faith energy but it gave me confidence that the Probes would be able to resist any taint.
That reminded me, I gathered everyone up and cast Blessing of Mankind on them. This was to increase the amount of faith energy left surrounding them. My own pool of faith was running low, but there should be more than enough to ignite the pile once we were sure we had gathered everything up. I also cast Cleanse once more to get rid of the filth spttered all over everyone, since I still had plenty of mana. After a couple of hours we were certain that all the foul meat was ready to be burned.
Divine Wrath was called down and its golden light set the filthy mass of giblets abze. We all watched it burn away into carbon ash, and I Cleansed that ash as well. We all took a few moment to thank the fallen for their sacrifice.
With that messy issue out of the way, we went back underground briefly to restock our ammo, and recheck all our equipment. I spent more time rounding up the Kriegsmen and the Magos before casting Nature's Blessing on them. My breath hitched as the mana hard a hard time tching on to them, especially the Magos, but after a rger pull on my reserves than normal the blessing finally took. They didn't flinch or seem bothered, quite the opposite, actually. They were vibrating with vitality. A good sign they they remained uncorrupted. Then just to double check I also granted them the Blessing of Mankind, that one went far more smoothly. The golden light wrapping around them like a comforting bnket. Excellent. One less concern. I let out a sign of relief as I expined what happened.
Their unexpected reaction was simple acceptance. They held no anger, no doubt, no questions, no horror or fear over this revetion. To them, it was okay that I had killed Grais because it was me doing it. If I said he was tainted by Chaos, then to them that was an absolute fact. That grim outlook was such an ingrained part of their lives that even the reality that they were that close to a tainted beast hadn't rattled them in the slightest. I sadly shook my head and let them get back to their jobs. Insanity.
Finally we'd been shed of our burden, and were loaded up for another few rounds of fighting. Raynor, John, the Boys and I finally got underway to Watson. We had lost half the night already and despite everything were eager to hunt some Maelstrom. The ability of our troops to keep going was nothing short of amazing. Was it because they were summons, or could it be chalked up to the harshness of Raynor's training? I was impressed yet saddened that I would be leading them once more into a fight. And so soon after that clusterfuck with the daemon. Maybe we should swing by Lizzie's to let them unwind. It's not like the Maelstrom was going to vanish overnight. Even if they did, there were other Gangs. There was always another Gang.
Part of my thinking was that I was still shaking on the inside. That had been terrifying, my heart and mind hadn't caught up yet. That such things existed anywhere in all of reality freaked me the fuck out, and pissed me right off. I was also fairly certain that hadn't been anywhere near one the the worst of those daemons. Who knows where another of those abominations was lurking.
It didn't help that we were back in this monument of corporate greed. That I was once again immersing myself and the people I was responsible for into the underbelly of the most depraved pce I could've imagined. Well, before today, anyway. Night City was nothing next to the most common Hive Cities of the Imperium, if the tales of the newcomers could be believed. How could humans survive such bullshit?
That thought had me spiraling in my head for most of our drive. I was driving shitty, to the point were I almost hit a few folks, before I recovered at all. It was so bad that the onboard AI took over managing the wheel. That stung a bit.
John seemed to understand my dilemma. "Stop thinking." A calm statement.
"It not easy to just turn it off." I scoffed.
"No. But can you do anything about it, now?" He tried to banish the insanity with cold reason.
"Not that I know of." I responded after a moment spent examining the question.
"Then push it to the back of your mind. Let your subconscious work on it. Here, I'll show you some techniques to manage your reactions." I focused on his lessons and honestly managed to have a more stable outlook on the present. The techniques he showed me took decades to master but even those first few steps were helpful. Damn, I should have asked him for some training long before now.
This new viewpoint let me take in more of the city and not be so centered on my own issues. I began to notice things I'd missed before. A gang of kids helping a dy to carry her things. A cop actually just having a friendly chat with a citizen while keeping an eye on the area. Some Gangers cleaning up a park, who would have thought it was possible. Even in this broken city, people were people. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I had mostly seen the bad and it had dug it's way deep into my heart, coloring how I perceived everything else.
And it was, John Wick, of all people who opened my eyes.
