THE KING OF NOTHING

  Chapter XI: The Laughing Flesh

  The plaza had become a canvas painted with the pigments of hell. Under the sickly night sky, stained a violent, pulsating crimson by the reflection of a thousand fires, the shadows danced a grotesque dance.

  And in the center of that macabre illumination, the Abomination breathed.

  It wasn't a single sound. It was a discordant chorus, a symphony of agony. The dozens of human heads fused into its torso moaned, sobbed, emitted whispers of air forced through petrified lungs, a constant, wet murmur rising from its mass like the steam from a swamp. Its limbs, those columns of intertwined corpses, creaked with every movement, a sound of dry branches and bone grating under immense pressure. The smell it exuded was of a freshly opened grave, of advanced gangrene, of a rot that went beyond death.

  It was a vision that stole sanity. Not a monster, but an affirmation. A living mockery of all order, all decency, the very idea that life had a purpose beyond suffering and fusion.

  —Scatter —ordered Yoel, his voice now devoid of all warrior's mirth. It was the dry, flat tone of a man who has seen the abyss and knows no rhetoric can cover it.

  The quartet moved, instinctively, forming a flawed semicircle around the thing.

  The Abomination attacked. It wasn't a calculated blow, nor a charge. It was an avalanche of conscious flesh. One of its giant arms, a heap of fused torsos and limbs ending in a cluster of bony claws, swept across the plaza in a low, devastating arc. It wasn't aiming at them; it was erasing the space they occupied. It shattered what remained of an ornamental stone fountain as if it were dry plaster, sending head-sized chunks flying like shrapnel.

  Yoel, with the reflexes of a poisoned cat, slid under the sweep, rolling over his shoulder and rising in one fluid motion.

  —Cut the limbs! We can't handle the center! —he roared, his voice a whip-crack in the charged air.

  Seizing that the monster's arm had passed, he lunged forward with a guttural cry and launched a brutal, downward slash at one of the creature's twisted legs. His curved sword, still warm from the previous battle, severed three human femurs protruding like beams from a ruinous structure. The leg gave way, making the Abomination stagger to that side… but only for a second.

  The flesh around the wound didn't bleed. It bubbled. From the cut surfaces, like worms emerging from earth, new arms sprouted, smaller, twisted, which frantically interwove, weaving the leg back together, soldering the broken bones with a black, fibrous substance. In ten seconds, the leg was rebuilt, perhaps thicker, more monstrous.

  —It regenerates… —Irina whispered, horror choking her voice. It wasn't a regeneration of life. It was a recomposition of death.

  The fight ceased being combat. It became a desperate race against the impossible. Every blow they managed to land was erased in an instant. Every effort, a useless expenditure of precious energy. The Abomination advanced, slow but implacable, its arms sweeping, its multiple heads moaning, a wall of living despair.

  Vael, while dodging a backhand that ripped the facade off a shop, looked up. His gaze, sharp despite the dust and blood, fixed on a nearby structure: the tower of a church bell tower, half-ruined from a previous impact, its jagged silhouette outlined against the red sky.

  —To the tower! —he shouted, pointing with his spear—. The entrance is narrow! It's a bottleneck trap! We can force it inside and buy time!

  There was no discussion. It was a desperate plan, but it was a plan. They ran towards the base of the tower, jumping over rubble, dodging the slow sweeps of the Abomination that destroyed everything in its path. The creature, seeing its prey trying to escape, changed course. It compressed its deformed mass, an unnatural feat that produced a sound of bones snapping and flesh stretching, and began to enter through the tower's broken door, filling the frame with its horror.

  Inside, a spiral stone staircase ascended into darkness. They climbed at full speed, the sound of their boots mixing with the rhythmic, nauseating clac-clac-clac of the Abomination's limbs dragging and striking the steps behind them. The tower trembled with every movement of the monster.

  They reached the upper floor, an open room that must have been the bell tower, now bell-less, with large, shattered arched windows looking out on the burning city. The cold, ash-laden wind blew in gusts.

  —I'll be the bait! —Vael announced, planting himself in the center of the room, facing the stairwell opening.

  —What? No! —Elara protested, but it was too late.

  The Abomination emerged from the stairwell. It didn't enter; it erupted. Its deformed mass burst through the stone arch of the entrance, raining down rubble. It filled the room with its presence, its multiple heads turning, its black eyes searching. It saw Vael, alone, defiant.

  —Elara, now! The keystone, the load-bearing point! —shouted Vael, not taking his eyes off the monster advancing towards him, its claws rising.

  Elara understood. It wasn't an attack on the monster. It was on the stage. She ran to the side, where the remains of the entrance arch were still attached to the main wall. With all her might, she drove the tip of her straight sword into the joint of the stone, into the "keystone" that distributed the weight.

  —By all the light I have left… FALL! —she screamed, and released not a concentrated bolt, but a dull, powerful explosion of pure energy inside the stone.

  The structure, already weakened by the monster's breach, gave way. It didn't collapse; it imploded. The stone around the arch shattered into a thousand pieces, and the entire upper section of the tower, deprived of its support, collapsed inward with a thunderous roar. An avalanche of ashlars, beams, and dust buried the Abomination, entombing it under tons of rubble. The tower groaned and leaned dangerously, but held, now shorter and wounded.

  The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the distant crackle of fires and their own panting breath. The dust, thick and white, filled the open room, covering them all.

  —Did we… kill it? —asked Elara, her voice a thread in the dusty gloom.

  ROOOOAR!

  It wasn't a roar from a throat. It was the sound of a hundred torn throats in unison, a howl of pure fury that erupted from the pile of rubble. The rubble exploded outward. It didn't move; it was projected as if a bomb had detonated at its center.

  And from the cloud of dust and stone, the Abomination emerged.

  It didn't crawl out. It leaped. A colossal leap, unnatural for its mass, that took it from the bottom of the hole where it had been buried to the edge of the upper floor, landing with an impact that shook the tower's remaining foundations.

  It landed right in front of Vael, who had retreated to the edge of the open balcony.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The monster, still smoking with bits of masonry embedded in its flesh, didn't hesitate. With a quick and devastatingly simple motion, it backhanded Vael with the back of its central claw, a mass of bone and tendon the size of a log.

  Vael saw it coming. He calculated the options in a fraction of a second. Dodging to the side would put him in the path of another arm. Ducking, too slow. The blow was inevitable.

  He curled up, crossing his arms over his chest in an instinctive block.

  The impact was like being hit by a moving wall.

  Vael was flung like a ragdoll. He flew across the width of the shattered balcony and slammed into the tower's inner stone wall with a dry, brutal sound, a crack that could have been the stone or his own bones. He fell to the floor in a heap, motionless for a second that felt like an eternity to Elara and Irina.

  Then, he moved. With a titanic effort, Vael tried to get up, propping himself on an elbow. But his lungs refused to expand. A sharp, stabbing pain stabbed his left side with every attempt to breathe. He tasted the metallic, coppery sweetness in his mouth, warm and thick. He pressed a hand to the cold floor, forcing his body to obey, to rise, as a thread of dark, gleaming blood dripped from his split lips and fell, drop by drop, onto the white dust.

  —I'm… okay —he lied, his voice choked, hoarse, a sound that convinced no one, not even himself—. Just… had the wind knocked out of me.

  The Abomination, having dispatched the obstacle, advanced. Its multiple heads now fixed on Elara and Irina, who were further back, near the broken windows.

  But Yoel interposed himself.

  The Captain, seeing Vael fall, the girls cornered, and the monster intact, something broke inside him. It wasn't fear. It was the final surrender to fury. His grey eyes, already bloodshot, seemed to go out, replaced by a flat, animal glint. A humorless smile, more a rictus of pain, spread across his bloodied face.

  —GET AWAY FROM THEM! —he roared, and his voice was no longer human. It was the growl of a wounded bear, a cornered wolf deciding its last action would be to tear out the hunter's throat.

  Yoel entered a berserker frenzy. He forgot tactics, defense, survival. He became a whirlwind of bronze and steel. His curved sword moved so fast it was almost invisible, a bloody silver disc that hacked the Abomination's flesh into pieces. He severed parasitic arms, sliced off protrusions, drove the blade into the fused faces. He bought seconds, meters of space, with his own life, with every blow he landed opening himself to a counterattack he didn't even try to avoid.

  But it was useless. The beast barely seemed to notice the cuts. The flesh bubbled and regenerated almost instantly. And the Abomination didn't tire. It didn't breathe. It just existed, and advanced.

  And then, time seemed to stop.

  For Irina, for Elara, even for Vael watching with blurry vision, the scene became slow, heavy, as if underwater. Every movement, every sound, was amplified and stretched into an endless agony.

  Yoel, at the peak of his fury, launched a two-handed downward slash, meant to split one of the monster's main protrusions. It was a perfect blow, loaded with all the weight of his desperation.

  The Abomination didn't dodge it. It didn't block it with an arm.

  It caught it.

  Not the sword. It caught Yoel's arm.

  One of its secondary claws, quick as thought, closed around the Captain's forearm, just above the guard of his sword. The grip was casual, almost careless, like a man grabbing a bothersome branch.

  With a motion that required no visible effort, the beast pulled.

  It wasn't a pull. It was a separation.

  The sound was wet, deep, a rrrrip of tendons, muscle, and skin tearing, followed by a final, dry crack of bone breaking at the shoulder joint.

  Yoel's right arm, from the shoulder down, still gripping the hilt of his curved sword with mortal strength, flew through the air. It drew a scarlet, gleaming arc in the tower's darkness, spinning slowly, spattering drops of blood that seemed to move in slow motion, before smashing against a distant wall with a dull thud.

  Yoel stood still. Standing. He looked at his right shoulder, where now there was only a grotesque stump, a crater of shredded flesh and splintered bone from which blood gushed in rhythmic, powerful spurts, like the beat of an exposed heart. His brain, flooded with adrenaline and shock, didn't process the loss. He just watched, with a vacant curiosity, the scarlet jet leaving his body.

  —YOEL! —Irina's cry was rending, a pure sound of horror that pierced the artificial slowness—. RUN! PLEASE, RUN!

  The Captain looked up slowly, his grey eyes meeting Irina's. He was pale, a waxen pallor that already announced the end. In his eyes there was no fear. There was… perplexity. As if he didn't understand what had gone wrong in his last, fiercest dance.

  From above, the Abomination's central arm, the largest, a column of grey muscle, twisted bone, and concentrated fury, rose. It rose slowly, like a giant forging hammer, until it blocked the red sky visible through the windows.

  And came down.

  Not with the speed of a blow, but with the deliberation of an executed sentence.

  SPLAT!

  There was no scream. There was no time.

  The giant fist, the size of a barrel, crushed Yoel against the tower's stone floor.

  The sound wasn't of bones breaking. It was the sound of an overripe fruit bursting under a rock. A wet, final sound that swallowed all hope.

  Captain Yoel, the bronze warrior, the man who laughed in death's face, became a stain. An unrecognizable pulp of flesh, pulverized bones, twisted armor metal, and blood. A red and dark stain that spread rapidly, soaking the flagstones.

  But the horror, the true, fathomless horror, did not end there.

  The Abomination didn't turn towards its other prey. It didn't seek Elara or Irina.

  It stayed there, hunched over the stain. It raised its fist, now dripping and covered in fragments of Yoel, and struck again.

  Thud!

  A dull impact, laden with terrible weight.

  And again.

  Thud!

  And again.

  Thud!

  The creature beat frenetically, obsessively, at the sanguineous mass that had been a man. It wasn't a coup de grace. It was obliteration. A sick necessity to destroy down to the last fragment of bone, the last spark of identity, to reduce Yoel to nothing more than another component of its own being, a paint stain on the canvas of its horror. With each blow, it spattered black blood (its own?) and red blood (Yoel's) in all directions, painting the walls, the dust, the very air.

  Irina was paralyzed. Her blue eyes, so often cold and calculating, were fixed, glassy, on the hypnotic, brutal motion of the arm rising and falling. The wet, repetitive sound of each impact drilled into her mind, erasing all thought, all survival instinct. She couldn't breathe. Her lungs refused to function. Her legs were made of molten lead, anchored to the floor. She saw the death of her captain, of a man who had been a beacon of brutal strength in her crumbling world, repeated over and over, turned into an obscene ritual of annihilation.

  Vael, still struggling to draw a breath that didn't stab his side, saw Irina motionless. He saw the vacant look in her eyes. And he knew, with a certainty cold as ice in the veins, that when the Abomination finished turning Yoel into pulp, it would turn its attention. And Irina, frozen, would be next. She would be reduced to another stain, another erased memory.

  —IRINA! —he shouted, and his voice was not that of the clumsy recruit, nor the lazy philosopher. It was an order that cut the air like a dagger's edge, charged with desperate urgency and an ancient authority that brooked no argument—. COME TO ME! NOW!

  Irina didn't react. She didn't blink. Only the Abomination's arm, rising and falling. Thud. Thud. Thud.

  —IRINA! —Vael shouted again, and this time there was something more in his voice, something broken, something that was almost a plea—. PLEASE! COME!

  The sound of her name, shouted in that voice he had never used, finally pierced the layer of shock enveloping her. Irina blinked. A tear, mixed with the dust and blood from her own wound, traced a path down her cheek. She turned her head, slowly, with a titanic effort, as if her vertebrae were made of rusted iron.

  Her eyes met Vael's. He was fifteen meters away, leaning against the wall, blood on his mouth and chest, but his arm was outstretched towards her, his hand open, firm, waiting.

  —I'm coming… —she whispered, and the word was only a movement of lips, without sound.

  But her legs reacted. Like an automaton, she turned. And she ran. Not with the grace of the warrior, but with the clumsiness of a sleepwalker, stumbling over debris, but running towards him.

  The Abomination delivered one last, particularly energetic blow to Yoel's remains, and stopped. The giant arm rose, dripping, and hung suspended in the air. The multiple heads on its torso turned slowly, like a flesh radar, towards the spot where Irina had been standing a second ago. They found it empty. Then, they turned to where she was now running.

  A collective groan, of disappointment and renewed hunger, issued from its mouths.

  Elara, seeing the monster reorienting, closed her eyes for an instant, searching within herself for the last vestige of courage. Then, she ran to Vael and Irina, placing herself in front of them, her sword raised though it trembled. She embraced Vael with one arm, trying to hold him up, while with the other she kept the sword ready. Irina reached her side, raising her own Toledo longsword with hands that trembled uncontrollably, preparing for a final, desperate confrontation that would be suicide.

  The Abomination began to drag itself towards them, slow, sure, its claws scraping the stone with a sound that was a promise of agony.

  Then, without warning, the air in front of the monster split.

  It wasn't the ground. There was no explosion. A vertical crack, like a wound in reality itself, tore open in the airspace between the trio and the advancing mass of flesh. From that crack, silent and cold, gushed a wall of black fire.

  They were not flames. It was darkness solidified into heat, an immobile, silent wall that absorbed the sound of the fires and the screams. It didn't crackle. It emitted no light. It was absence made barrier.

  The Abomination crashed into it.

  The impact didn't produce a sound of flesh hitting. It produced a collective shriek, a cry of surprise and acute pain from its hundred mouths. Where its flesh touched the black fire, it didn't burn instantly. It petrified. The grey skin turned to ash, the muscles contracted and hardened like black, porous rock. The frantic regeneration halted abruptly, frozen in the very instant of contact.

  The creature staggered back, moving its main limbs away from the barrier. But the damage was done. The touched parts—an entire claw, a section of its flank—were left as sculptures of charcoal, inert, dead with no possibility of regeneration. A stench of ozone and charred meat filled the air.

  The wall of black fire remained there, immobile, an infinite curtain separating the horror from its prey.

  The trio, stunned, followed the crack in the air upward, towards its origin.

  On the roof of the adjacent, lower building, outlined against the bloody glare of the burning city, was a figure.

  It was a woman.

  She wore a full suit of plate armor, of an ebony black so deep it seemed like a cut in the fabric of the night. She wore no helmet. Her hair was liquid silver, long and straight, falling like a cascade of mercury over her shoulders. Her face was of a cold, sharp beauty, sculpted in pale marble.

  Her eyes were an intense yellow, two coins of molten gold that shone with their own light. They showed no emotion, only absolute attention and a glacial contempt.

  In her right hand, gloved in black metal, she held a long, slender rapier, forged from a dark purple metal that pulsed with its own rhythm. The tip of the blade was extended towards where the crack in the air remained open. A fine thread of dark smoke connected the tip to the wall of fire, like a puppeteer holding the strings of a shadow marionette.

  The woman did not look at the trio. Her golden gaze was fixed solely on the Abomination, which was retreating, confused and wounded in a new way, moaning with its multiple mouths. She observed its confusion with the coldness of an entomologist observing a rare insect trapped in a jar.

  She did not move. She took no step to the edge. She made no gesture to leave. She remained there, on the roof, holding the barrier with apparent effortless ease, her presence as immobile and definitive as the wall of fire she had conjured. She was not a savior arriving and leaving. She was a new factor, a static and impenetrable variable that had altered the equation of their survival, giving no hint of what her next move would be, or if there would be one.