Bab 173: Overwhelming Defeat
"Fire!" Lyle's confident voice boomed throughout the camp.
Immediately, a symphony of lights erupted from behind his shoulder. The sea of white sparks swirled in the air, flowing freely between the mess of soldiers and coating their arms and limbs in a blinding radiance.
Streaks of light, lasers, and bolts of electricity surged towards the laboratory entrance. Before they hit, the worm-like monster emerged from the darkness that engulfed the hallway.
Its face was corroded as flaps of skin peeled off its cheeks revealing rotting — sunken in flesh. Its large eyes were hollow, lacking both pupil and iris, leaving only empty white space where its eyes should have been.
Then suddenly, its disfigured face vanished from sight, drowned out by the torrent of light. The bolts of electricity struck first, latching onto its temples like fishing hooks and transferring thousands of watts of energy into the beast's brain.
Following that display of light, a pink bolt crashed into its body. The bolt dispersed across the creature's flesh, rippling through the slime that coated the creature.
After that, the light completely drowned away the creature's form. The soldiers too were absorbed into the light as their attacks collided with the beast. But then, the light faded and the loud clash between bulbous rubber and incinerating electrons died down.
When Jazz opened her eyes once more the gigantic slug was on top of one of the soldiers, its disgusting form molded into the shape of an arm that wrapped around the soldier's mouth.
Jazz watched in horror as the arm-like tentacle tore into the soldier's mouth, his lips stretched and distorted, eventually cracking and tearing apart from the pressure. And once his lips tore, his face followed; his cheeks split apart, the skin covering his chin split in two, the soldier's face bloomed open like a flower as his eyes rolled back into his head and blood poured out from his eye sockets.
His chest expanded and ballooned until his very own rib cage burst through his military uniform, protruding out of him like some sort of bear's claw.
Lyle dashed forward. His shield slammed into the creature's ever changing form.
Lyle dug his boots into the mud, he clenched his teeth and released a blood-curdling scream that broke in and out of pitch from the strain placed on his vocal chords, but nevertheless, he was pushing the abomination back.
In an act that resembled David versus Goliath, Lyle stood stall and slowly pushed back the black sludge that took up the entirety of the hallway. Lyle felt his tendons tear as he pushed back, his muscles tightened beyond common sense and began to collapse under their own pressure.
With the beast almost completely back in the lab's hallway, Lyle suddenly dropped onto one knee and coughed up a mouthful of blood. His vision gradually darkened and the sheen in his eyes disappeared only to be replaced with a deep and intimate pit of dread.
His soldiers swarmed behind him, slamming their bodies into his shield and helping prop him up. They were determined to keep their commander standing and his will unchanging.
But the likes of Chosen and Enlightened never stood a chance to begin with, nobody had taken the time to notice it yet, but their previous onslaught of attacks hadn't left even a single mark on the creature's body.
The soldiers continued to attack, streaks of energy pelted the beast's figure, but none of them did anything. Instead, the creature's form began to change.
Its bulbous body started vibrating incessantly; meanwhile, Lyle's shield began to sink into the beast's flesh. A handful of tentacles burst past the shield and wrapped around the soldier's limbs.
The tentacles continued to grow, traveling down their arms and up their legs until they were able to forcefully pry open an entrance into the soldier's bodies.
For some it was their mouths, others their ears or eye sockets, and for those unlucky souls it was their genitalia that was ripped open and ravaged by the creature's invasion. Very quickly, the soldiers in front of the laboratory burst apart like grapes.
Their organs splattered across the battlefield, bones shattered and wailing cries filled the air. Tears swelled within Jazz's eyes and she began to cry, the pungent smell of iron filled her nose and refused to let her look away from the slaughter taking place.
Only a few soldiers remained alive and even they didn't know how, Lyle was one of them. His body was slumped against his shield, what remained of it, and his breathing was soft; even his heartbeat weakened so much that it began to skip many of its beats.
The sludge's neck stretched forward, reaching above Lyle's shield. It opened its maw revealing a pitch black abyss surrounded by a sea of tiny teeth. The teeth covered the inside of the beast's mouth, wrapping around its throat in its entirety.
The devouring abyss encroached deeper and deeper, black slime dripped onto Lyle's shoulder and smoke began to sizzle off of Lyle's back. Even though his skin was burning away, Lyle's sense of pain was taken from him long ago when he first competed with the monster.
His head disappeared under the gluttonous abyss that began to consume him. Its lips slowly tightened around Lyle and crept down his body even further until they hit the floor and wrapped around his feet, swallowing him whole.
As the creature's neck retreated with Lyle in tow, a golden figure plummeted from the sky, crashing into the mudstone building and sinking into the beast's back.
Willow steadied herself on the sludge's body and summoned her golden hammer. The moment it materialized she bludgeoned what she assumed to be the creature's skull.
The sludge parted its maw in agony and Lyle slid out of its throat like drool, collapsing onto the ground with an audible plop.
"Damn —" a prepubescent voice suddenly washed over the battlefield, "that guy got f***** up."
"Blood —" Emile sighed beside the boy, they stood atop the wall separating the camp and the forest, overlooking the laboratory and the murder scene it contained, "was that necessary?"
Blood raised his arm and pointed at Lyle in the distance, "Are you looking at who I'm looking at? Dude is messed up."
"Yeah, so why don't you go and protect him?!" Emile said stubbornly.
Blood scoffed and flicked his wrist. Instantaneously, all the puddles of blood in their surroundings began to bubble and raise into the air.
The blood pooled together and hardened into a flat bed of crimson crystal. The bed flew over to Lyle and dipped underneath him, eventually lifting him into the air and flying him away from the laboratory.
Lyle arrived beside the two boys and Emile didn't hesitate to place his palm on the shoulder of the slime covered man. He began circulating his Gift and Lyle's body latched onto Emile's essence without any resistance, sucking down Emile's essence like he came with a straw.
His color deepened and his breathing became steady. Emile cast a glance at the rampaging worm before him, a slight smile crept up his face as he did so.
He couldn't help but start to see every new creature as a living, breathing XP pool for him to devour. It hadn't been long, but it seemed like it was time to hunt already.
Hadiah
-- Hadiah diterima Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone