Drip-Fed Pt. 08

However, the wish to see him again had brought her here, which meant that Apotho had the ability to somehow enable this. Lying here could very well cost her the opportunity to see her love again.

There was nothing she wanted more in this world but to see him again. To hear his voice again. Feel him again. To silently sit with him under a moonlit sky again.

"Yes," she said despite all of this, "I want vengeance."

No matter how much she wanted to have Apexus back, making a pact with this murderous sinner for it would cost, with almost absolute certainty, more than she was willing to pay. More than she wanted Apexus to live knowing the cost for.

"Good," Apotho grinned, then suddenly contorted, his whole body thrashing as if he was suffering a stroke.

"Acly...sia..." the old man's voice was the same, but the tone desperate. "He lies... Vengeance is... cannot be your goal... Apexus... you can see him on the Day of the First Ascension."

"He is alive?!" Aclysia jumped to her feet in excitement, no longer paying attention to her nudeness.

"Y...You can... see him... again..." the same words echoed. It wasn't a confirmation to his life, at least not a certain one, he would have used other words if that were the case. At least, that was how Aclysia understood it.

"QUIET!" Apotho snapped control back from the split character. "Meddling fool, accusing me of lies," the warlock stated, leaving Aclysia confused on the ground. "Listen, all that will be there is his core, being paraded around, it doesn't matter. It's just a corpse on cushions." Aclysia felt as if her heart was being ripped out at that. It was too cruel to be true. Then again, what hadn't been recently? "Reysha will be trying to assassinate the Cardinal on the Day of the First Ascension, at the very start of the ceremony, this is the only truth. I know not where she is hiding until then, but if you want vengeance, and nothing but vengeance, you will help her that day."

"You... cannot..." Gizmo forced himself to the surface. "Reysha... will help this monster... The church, she'll be at the church... North... she will be... north... the building... His own goals are...."

Apotho turned inwards to fight his meddling other side, while Aclysia thought. Gizmo was desperately trying to give her the full-picture, it was obvious the Warlock was lying, be it directly or by omission. The only things that she could trust were the words of the friendly old man that shared the same body. That those were so hacked off made interpretation difficult.

She would have to analyse this for several days before coming to a proper conclusion.

Apotho visibly relaxed, having retaken full-control of him. "Now, listen to me and me alone and listen careful-"

"I will not," Aclysia stated outright and Apotho's expression darkened. Being interrupted alone was enough to slight the master of dark arts, her disobedience only furthered his anger. "I will not sacrifice a single life to you or your plans," she spread her wings and hovered off the ground. "I will stop Reysha and meet Apexus, you will not claim anything I care about." With that she took off, hearing only a single angry roar behind her.

An angry roar that soon turned into another ridiculing giggle. "Ah, Gizmo, good Gizmo," he spoke to himself with much amusement. "You may have access to my powers, but your reluctancy dulls your creativity."

After all this time, Apexus didn't imagine he would one day search for a crack INTO the mountain. The caverns below, heated by the magma chamber of a volcano that would likely never erupt, were the birthplace of the slime. Where he had just started existing one day and had gone from there. It had been over two years since. A year down there, slowly eating its way up, through insects, clams and tiny dragons, facing ants by the end. How insignificant that now all looked. Ants weren't even the size of a finger segment anymore.

Then the time out on the mountainside. Finding Aclysia. Whatever had she said back when he awakened her by sheer curiosity of what this mana draining was? He could remember that she had made sounds that, in retrospect, had to be speech. For the slime of him, he couldn't put those sounds back together, however.

She had broken to save him. He had found Gizmo to fix her. The months with Gizmo. Every day something to learn, however boring it was. Slowly caring more and more about the metal fairy until everything about her seemed just too adorable to ignore. Two years, the slime could only estimate his life to have been so long, since he hadn't even known what time was for so long of it. A sleepless existence without days made that concept hard to grasp at the start.

Regardless, here he was now, two days after his reuniting with his old mentor, searching for some kind of crack or cave big enough for him. Quadrupedal, Apexus stalked around the mighty tower of grey rock in search of something. Thanks to the thicker membrane around his limbs, the sharp corners of stones only cut into quickly regenerating tissue, if they penetrated at all.

'Last time I was here, I wasn't even heavy enough for this to be an issue,' Apexus thought, bending knees and elbows before jumping down a small cliff. Spread wings beat and before he could crash into the ground, he was up in the air. That area was also without yield.

Apexus didn't dare to stay in the air for too long, soon landing again close to the base of the mountain, where grey shifted into the emerald of the ever-stretching forest of Ctania. On the mountain and in the air, he was too easily visible. If he flew high enough, people might mistake him for a bird or something, but he wouldn't be able to see what he was looking there from that height either.

It was best to keep circling the base of the mountain, stay close to the trees and only occasionally venture further up. He would inspect the higher areas and tip of the mountain once he had made the full way around. Although he had to hurry about these things, only five more days until the Day of the First Ascension came, he had to be done before then. It would be best if he could have a day to recover from whatever injuries he might get before then. To batch the thoughts up, he had four more days.

He needed another two.

Many potential caves were found, but all of them were too shallow to be what Gizmo meant. On top of that, they were empty, so that was the dead giveaway. Apexus had grown the nose of a cat in addition to his other, permanent, Growths. A sense of smell wasn't helpful in this endeavour, but it was good to have the last 'usual' sense he was missing at hand.

Rather, a sense of smell shouldn't have been helpful in the endeavour.

That is, right up until Apexus caught a whiff of carrion. The foul smell was unmistakable, wafted from nearby. Apexus hadn't guessed to find a cave following that scent, but right there it was, half-hidden under a tree that stretched its roots over the shallow entrance. The second Apexus put his head into the gap, the smell intensified a thousand fold, hot air mixed with sulphur and the stench of dead bodies.

A human would have been repulsed, might have even emptied their stomachs onto the stone, at the intense smell, but Apexus had not just smelled worse things in his life, he had also eaten much worse. The only reason that odour was irritating to him was that he wasn't used to strong smells due to seldomly having a nose recently. Thankfully, he was built for quick adaptation to new things.

He needed to crawl in order to move into the cave. Only after a few metres did the ceiling start to rise and give way to dark tunnels. Apexus' cat-like eyes were good for this environment, however, and the tremor sense allowed him to gauge his rough surrounding just by the reverberations of his steps in the stone. It wasn't detailed enough to make out were the next corner would exactly be, but he could at least keep detailed track of the wall next to him without having to touch it at all times.

The air got hotter, more humid. Even with the stench, Apexus felt deeply nostalgic the deeper he got. Especially once his eyes picked up the soft glow of a pale, greyish green moss. The light source of his early life lived wherever it was humid or hot enough, it seemed. What started with one patch soon became two, then three, and ever more moss glowed away the darkness of the depths.

Apexus kept looking around as his steps carried him down a slope. Marvelling at the carpet that stretched along the walls. Like he remembered, the moss failed to grow up places that were too slated upside down. The ground was no problem, though, the moss happily covered all of the ground.

SNAP!

There was a loud sound under Apexus' right hand, something that had been hidden between the moss. His fingers stretched out. At first he tried to just grab whatever that had been with his entire hand, but that just succeeded in slowly ripping out the entire piece of moss. 'Sorry, little plant,' Apexus thought, not one to end life until he wanted to eat. To at least halfway fulfil that promise, he lowered the ripped out moss to his stomach. The thin membrane there parted and he spilled around the plant before pulling it inside to digest. It was often easier to eat like that, rather than do it like humans and try to chew things and swallow them afterwards.

He could have just looked down, but at that point this was a learning exercise, Apexus tried to pick up that snapping thing again, this time only using thumb and index finger. It worked and he raised that thing to his face. A fragment of bone, belonging to a creature that Apexus knew only too well, since that was the same kind of bone his skeleton currently was made from. Human bone, he dropped it with a level of disgust.

People had been killed here, he knew that already, but seeing it was another thing. The end of thinking life was bad, worse was that there were other people who would never see who they care about again. That was the aspect of killing that Apexus despised, those left behind. The shocked face of the guard flared in his memories again.

Then he heard something.

It was quiet, a sound that had just started. Apexus' blue fox ears turned to locate the source of the sound. It was loudest to his right. Like stomping into mud or swirling fluids around, the squelching echoes grew to a certain quiet and stayed there, only noticeable thanks to being the only thing down here to be heard.

Apexus turned his view, walked, the amount of bones grew. The further he went in, the more of them mounted, the closer he got to that sound. Soon the moss covered bones made way for semi-complete skeletons. Jaws parted in death into an endless death scream, cowered into tiny balls or stretched out. They hadn't died a sudden death, that much was certain. The squelching sound was so close now, Apexus tried to sneak as best he could, but bones snapped under his weight again and again, like a pathway laid with dire twigs.

And at the end of that path sat the Skinwalker.

"Lay-Maker. Depth-Strider. Truth-Seeker."

Cheery, clacketing words echoed from the squelching sounds, a disgustingly mechanical contrast, now that Apexus could see the demon. To call it a creature would have been an affront to living creatures. It was a physical impossibility made flesh and that meant quite a bit said by a slime.

"Skin-Bringer. Dark-Stalker. Spell-Flinger."

It continued to rant on, always three batches of two connected words, spoken in a steady rhythm, all while Apexus still tried to understand what exactly he was looking at. It was like a carpet of human skin, stretched out in a grotesque way and stitched together with tiny legs, like a centipede's, still wiggling around at times.

"New-creature. Lightless-Reaper. Bone-Creeper."

It was wider than some houses, a show untypical of its kind, showing just how many people it got to consume over the years. Laying on the floor like a fleshy carpet, the surface of white, brown, black and all different kinds of skin moved eternally like an unsteady ocean.

"News-bringer. Freedom-Ringer. False-Speaker."

The rippling had the same source as the squelching sound. Apexus could see this when managing to glance under the surface, seeing yet more of the thin legs of varying sizes wiggle in the little ways an exoskeleton allowed. The legs were directly attached to some sort of semi-liquid membrane, to which the human skin was attached.

"Hello-Monster. Greetings-Creature. Salutations-Friend."

Apexus took a step backwards as the demon rose, the centre of it thin body pulled upwards by some invisible hand. A centre patch of skin as black as tar was now clearly visible, towering far above Apexus as the horrid monstrosity transformed from a carpet into a tower. The ground it had previously covered revealed withered moss, the shreds of torn, blood red robes, and a number of decaying bodies.

None of them had even a single bite taken out of them. Indeed, it seemed like they hadn't been harmed whatsoever. Save for their skin, which had carefully been removed by the longer legs of the creature. Like a worm knew to dig, a bird how to sing, so did the Skinwalker demon know how to perfectly rip off the human epidermis.

It rose to be as tall as the ceiling allowed it to, its body a grotesque warping of a humanoids under a robe, legs protruding outwards. Short and thin, curved like sickles, they stretched out the gaps between skin patches and the holes where mouths and eyes of its victims had formerly been.

It was the sheer amount of murder that Apexus saw stitched together that managed to make him sick to the acid. All while the cheery, clacketing voice continued, barely overpowering the squelching of the demon's singular internal organ continuing to cling onto the skin and birth more and more legs.

"Friend-Foe? New-Apprentice? Demon-Tamer?" the Skinwalker spoke from that central, pitch black patch, piece. Now that it was fully upright, it looked like an armless, cowl-covered torso. The head had all the right pieces of human exterior, lips, nose, ears, but they all had a smoothness to their surface that made it seem more like polished stone than proper skin. Furthermore, the sockets of its eyes were empty, and its mouth only filled with more centipede legs.

Apexus continued to back up, now in search of a way to defeat this thing. They both seemed to have bodies with similar baselines. Large, slow, heavy and flexible, but the Skinwalker had two clear advantages over the chimeric slime. The demon was the superior in all of them and his killing method, those sickle-like legs, had a tremendously longer reach than Apexus' acid.

'Own advantages,' the slime thought as he continued to analyse his way around the battlefield. The Skinwalker followed, more curious than hostile. It seemed the superiority in all aspects included being the slower of the two of them, at least as far as ground movements were concerned. There was also the obvious thing, the demon wasn't the dullest thing Apexus had ever encountered, but he clearly wasn't nearly on the level of intellect the evolving blob was.

Taking a protruding sickle, Apexus ripped at it while he took another step backwards. The leg came off easily, the demon didn't even seem to notice the loss. A new one didn't immediately spring up, so it didn't seem like the Skinwalker had enormous regeneration. Regardless, it had several hundreds of these legs, so yanking them out one at a time didn't seem like a proper strategy.

'Would it follow to shallower areas?' Apexus wondered, always careful to follow his own steps backwards to avoid suddenly finding himself back to the wall. Where they currently were, the ceiling was quite tall, allowing the Skinwalker to use its size for a range advantage. Better to spread it out, that black tar in the middle was clearly the centre of the demon.

"Boring-Walker. Slow-Tracker. Yawn-Inducer."

Apexus decided that he would see what chattering back would cause. "You are odd."

"Odd? Yes. Odd? Yes. Odd? Yes." A different rhythm, but the same structure, a sudden red light flaring up in its empty eye socket. "Demon my kind. Impreh my type. Skinwalker my like."

"Your red eyes remind me of an old man in the woods," the slime stated carelessly, just wondering what reactions he would get out of the demon. It suddenly froze. Every last leg, every last facet of its being, stopped moving. Even the squelching became silence.

"Aaaaapooooothooooooooo," it's voice was suddenly deep and revering. "Sparkless-Master. Endless-Desirer. Deathless Greed, his work of Art."

Apexus felt like he was talking to an ant who had just picked up the scent of its queen. There was a slight sense of dread he felt himself at the idea that the Warlock had this sort of effect by just being mentioned to this sort of creature. Regardless, this was a potential upside the slime wasn't just going to leave untested. "Apotho would like for me to kill and eat you," he bluntly stated.

"As-desired. Skinwalker-dies. Hull-decays. Spark returns to roots far down, for the demon shall return to haunt," the abomination spoke that last sentence in an untypical smoothness. Less like something said and more like a song studied in advance and regurgitated without understanding the words. Then the entire thing just laid down.

Meanwhile, the slime could not believe that worked. He had hoped for it, for sure, but in the same way a lazy man in his bed just hopes a cup of hot tea will just appear on his nightstand. It was so good that Apexus at first didn't dare to approach at all, first tearing off some pieces of skin along the rim.

Wherever skin was ripped from the demon's body, a sticky liquid oozed out. Once in contact with air, it quickly evaporated, leaving only a clotted, black crust that stayed on top of the squishier main body of the demon, to which the legs were attached. No matter how often Apexus did that, the Skinwalker just remained motionless.

Once Apexus had shredded and torn enough skin to feel secure, that the Skinwalker wasn't trapping him in some way, no organism would have to taken that amount of damage when they were already at an advantage, he approached the centre. The demon remained still, Apexus rose up and began to expand his stomach around the heart of the creature. He would feel safer once that thing was for sure dead and he could eat all of him in peace.

The second the head started to be dissolved, however, there was a sudden shift in the Skinwalker's behaviour. The body that had laid still rippled in a panicked burning of energy. Apexus was thrown off when the demon rose tall again, ripping a hole into the slime's stomach, out the side, as the enveloped head was suddenly freed again.

The legs ripped at Apexus as he fell, creating thin, shallow cuts that healed quickly. Only that central loss of mass was a bit concerning, but even it closed to satisfactory degree once there was distance between them again.

"SPARK-EATER! LIFE-DEVOURER! ALIEN-MONSTER!"

It wasn't that the Skinwalker was suddenly disregarding his respect for Apotho. There was a different, much deeper sitting reason that the demon no longer dared to risk being devoured by this being. With all of his legs, the Skinwalker rushed towards the chimeric slime.

"SPARK-EATER! SPARK-EATER! SPARK-EATER!"

The demon had lost all semblance of intelligence now and was screaming that single title over and over again as it tried to catch up to Apexus. They had long stopped their slow prowling and now the nightmare of sewn skin and sickle-legs rushed after Apexus, who himself was moving at the best sprint he could muster.

While a human could have easily outpaced them, the force with which their heavy bodies moved would have crushed numerous bones in a regular person's body upon impact. Apexus could feel the entire cave shake when he took a sharp turn and the demon rammed into the wall behind him, before using his countless sickles on his top side to crawl along the wall just as he was crawling along the floor.