LIGHTNOVELONLINE 237 Slurry (Age Warning: Gore)
Incensed didn't even begin to cover the Arboreal Maiden's mood at the moment. The actions of her 'subordinate' had set her off. Not even his screams were enough to tone down the rage, if anything they made it worse.
"What part of this was so hard to understand?" crunch "Why do you mongrels never learn?" crack "How many more of you will do I have to kill before you get it? Hundreds? Thousands? The rest?"
"I'm sor-" HREECH
The Arboreal Maiden finally ripped off the finger she had been focusing her efforts on, intentionally interrupting him to demonstrate she wasn't looking for a response. She could not trust the words of someone like him, a Velar, especially not when he demonstrated a propensity for breaking rules. Velar were vile and scummy creatures, she knew this better than anyone.
"I can understand wanting to observe him from a distance for a while. Even I like to get an idea of the people I work with before initiating a conversation, but fighting them is not an action I would ever condone as acceptable!"
"He sho-" CRUNCH
"I DON'T GIVE A SHIT!!! YOU were the one stalking him. YOU were the one being a creep! He had every right to resort to lethal force against a pursuing entity he couldn't ascertain the motive of. YOUR mistake was getting caught o God of Stealth." To accentuate the spite in her words, she twisted the Watcher's hand, snapping the bones and ripping apart the muscles. She continued to do so until the cocktail that exited the holes where his fingers were once attached represented something more like a smoothie.
While she performed this act with relative ease, it was by no means a simple process. In order to separate flesh from skin while keeping the latter intact, she needed to cut the membranes connecting the two with a blade of split, including the plethora of needles both micro and macroscopic. The slightest misapplication or lapse in concentration could result in some of the split escaping the blade and inducing a localized instance of split decay, ruining the smooth surface she was looking to create and compromising the strength of the dermis.
There wasn't any risk of that happening though. She had done this so often in the past that the motions came naturally, in fact she had recently been given the chance to practice the technique with Diana. That little surgery on her incorrectly regrown back muscles had been floating in the back of the Arboreal Maiden's mind for some time now, the worry that the complication might rise again being the factor that influenced her choice of punishment for the Watcher.
It was the opposite of skinning, 'meating' if she had to give it a name. The hand was her favorite location to perform the act given how easy the fingers of a Velar were to remove in comparison, but she had done it to the legs and chest in the past. It was an effective way to inflict inordinate amounts of pain upon a sturdy victim while leaving them in a defenseless state.
The key was to maintain the skin's integrity. The more in-tact the skin, the more pain he would feel as his body regrew. The needles would scrape and tear the interior of his skin, trapping air bubbles that would irritate the nerve endings long after she was done with him. The rest of the meat slurry, the flesh and bone she liquidated with an incessant stream of impacts and cuts, the sensation didn't last particularly long.
"Ugh, filthy." She glared at the puddle on the floor with contempt, fighting a particularly strong urge to spit on it. Doing so would be showing him more respect than he was worth. "I would have asked you to clean that up by eating it, but now I doubt you are competent enough to do so properly."
Despite having practically told him not to do so, he still wriggled over and tried to lap up the slop with his tongue.
dunck
She promptly kicked him in the temple, the force of the blow definitely knocking him out and probably shattering part of his skull. The reason she felt so comfortable going to such extremes with him (aside from the burning hatred of her own species) was that he was durable. Velar were a naturally quite durable race to begin with, so much so that killing them could prove a problematic task for a human. This one in particular was especially durable, he was a god.
Killing a Velar was hard, killing a god was extremely difficult. Naturally that meant killing a Velar god was nigh impossible. Given time, all of his injuries would be repaired. Severed limbs would regrow, ruptured and scrambled innards would make themselves right again. The only person who might even have a shot at killing this particular god was her.
. . .
Was that still true? Sure, it had been a while since she had familiarized herself with the gods outside of the Sanctum, but she wasn't considering any new upstarts. As a general rule, younger gods would struggle to take out older ones unless they became the god of multiple concepts, but this imbecile was particularly old. The Arboreal Maiden could never claim that he rivaled her in age, he was a few hundreds of generations younger.
That was still older than history, as far as many domains were concerned. Certainly he was older than the Sanctum's direct records had been capable of preserving.
Are you still lucid?
A vine had sprouted from the ground, wrapping around her ankle.
Yes. Thank you for keeping me in check.
I did no such thing. You kept yourself from losing control, just as I thought you would.
The Arboreal Maiden sighed, stepping back to take a seat on a leafy lump that had grown out of the ground behind her. She needed to calm down. Her heart wasn't racing, nor was she experiencing an adrenaline rush, but she feared what might happen if her emotions ran rampant.
When will you talk to them about this?
About what?
About who and what your people are. You are dumping the job of keeping them in line onto Donovan, are you not?
The Arboreal Maiden sighed, slouching into the foliage. She raised up her bloodied hand and stared at it for a while, twisting and turning it as she watched the different ways the blood traveled along it. This was by no means a calming act for her, nor was she relishing in the sight of another's blood.
I'll call them over tonight. I'm certain they are incredibly confused as to what happened.
After a short break, she stood back up. The Watcher may be unconscious, but there was still work to do.
- - - - -
Now that Donovan could walk around without the feeling of being watched, he noticed he was feeling very tired. Having been in a state of medium to high alert for weeks now, the mental stress was starting to crash down on him. He wouldn't collapse under this pressure until he could afford to, it wasn't the worst he had ever dealt with.
"Are you as angry as I am about this?"
"I don't know." Despite not having been a direct party to the assault, Diana expressed an incredible level of discontentment. If the Watcher was affiliated with the Arboreal Maiden as Nemo claimed, then Diana had only been given another reason to hate her. "I can't muster the energy for it right now."
Diana frowned at him. He gathered that some part of her was attempting to be outraged on his behalf, and he wasn't sure if he liked it. Her empathy wasn't something he was comfortable with yet, and moments like this were half the reason. There was every chance she was using this as an opportunity to sway him to her position on the matter of the Arboreal Maiden's actions, and equally as many chances that she wasn't. Granted, he was of the mind that Diana was coming from both of those angles in this scenario, which might have made it worse.
He loved Diana, she loved him. That she might be manipulating him as her grandfather had wasn't a nice thought to have sitting in the back of his head all the time, but the opposite was also true to an extent. If ever they wanted to make progress in a stable manner, unity of command was necessary. Diana pulling him into her way of thinking about the Arboreal Maiden wasn't a 'nice' thing to do, but it certainly spoke to her competence. He might have been more conflicted if she wasn't trying to manipulate him.
Of course, nothing would stop him from loving her. Nothing could stop him from loving her. They had been stuck too deep in the shit together for him to imagine a scenario without her by his side.
"Are you feeling alright? I mean, I know you got into an altercation with someone who could have killed you, but is there anything aside from that?" Diana leaned into him as they walked, grabbing his arm to pull it closer to her chest. "Donny?"
"I'm just tired."
"Tired? So you'll be waking up late tomorrow?"
"That's not what I - yes. I can sleep in with you tomorrow." Diana nuzzled his shoulder, making a pleased noise as she did so.
"I think I can afford to skip class tomorrow."
"Don't you say that every day?" Diana giggled. It was no secret to anybody that she found those 'classes' to be a bore. They weren't necessarily a waste of her time anymore given she was making 'friends', but she frequently expressed that it wasn't an efficient way to achieve her goals.
If he had a choice, he would force her to stop going. Recent events had made him worried about her safety. His urge to not let her separate from him had grown far more intense after being attacked; the Sanctum was no longer a place he could see as 'secure'. At the same time, he worried that keeping her isolated would be more detrimental in the long term. Diana felt to be infinitely more social than he was, what harm would sudden isolation do to her?
"I wonder how Mercedes has been."
"Do you miss your puppy?"
"You don't?!" Donovan played into Diana's teasing. "Next semester, she stays with us."
"Will she be allowed?"
"I have faith that we will be accommodated appropriately." He gestured towards the curtain of vines, the implication behind his words being they now had the capital to make such a demand. "Shall we?"
- - - - -
A rancid stench assaulted their noses as they approached the Inner Sanctum, one only Donovan had experienced before, though he probably didn't remember it. It was the smell of decay and decomposition, a concoction of digestion both internal and external. They didn't have questions about the source for very long.
"Good evening, though I imagine that is not the best way to phrase it at the moment." The Arboreal Maiden was seated quite neatly atop a mossy stump looking down at her tablet. In all likelihood she was reading something given her swiping motions, but the rest of the sight was quite ominous. Diana would have fallen to her knees and passed out had it not been for Donovan's aid.
In the air behind the Arboreal Maiden, a corpse was suspended upside down. The ankles were secured with vines that extended down from a branch, and three weights were strung from it's neck and arms respectively. The body oozed whatever fluids remained, the cocktail dripping from the stones at the bottom into pit. Certain portions of the body were skinned, leaving a shiny layer of muscles and ligaments exposed to the elements. Other portions seemed to be the opposite, empty bags of skin where some form of innards should be. The gut and center portion of the chest had been removed as well, leaving the body remarkably incomplete.
The worst of it, at least for Diana, was what had been done to the face. The eyes had been gouged out, the portion of skull above them along with it. The jaw and cheek tissue had been removed, as well as the teeth of the person placed in suspension. The ears, usually something not often thought of when looking at the face, hadn't been completely removed. They were attached by the barest of cartilage, bending over themselves such that they were 'listening' to the sides of the head. Similar to other parts of the body, skin had been removed. However the scalping done here was to the bone. Even under the dark red liquid dripping from the top of the skull, an unmistakable pearly white could be imagined. Diana didn't even notice that the throat had been slashed where the weight was attached, leading the face to tilt directly towards them.
". . ." While Diana shivered and spasmed in quiet horror in his arms, Donovan glared maliciously into the bored Maiden's eyes.
"I will not apologize for this. It is something you needed to see." She didn't need to be a mind reader to understand his thoughts. "You both needed to see it if you are to accept the Velar into your ranks."
"This seems a little extreme for-"
"For what? Breaking the rules?" A wave of what could only be described as bloodlust washed over Donovan, a wave he did not yield to. "The punishment for the crime he committed is death, you know. I am only being so kind as to spare him because I believe he may prove useful to you."
The Arboreal Maiden rose to her feet and walked to the edge of pool. She paused for a few seconds, staring up at the body, before gracefully raising reaching a hand upwards. She was not able to reach it, even the weights were a good few feet out of her reach. It was then that Donovan had a thought. Were the pool not the result of a spat of body horror and the corpse not in frame, he felt certain it would have made a serene photo. A graceful maiden in a forest clearing, the backdrop reflected on the pond before her, reaching up to the sky.
The beautiful hellscape did not last long. Something happened. Even after seeing it, Donovan was not sure what that 'something' was, but the arm the Arboreal Maiden extended . . . didn't look like an arm anymore. Well, the fact it was an arm was unmistakable, it just didn't look like a human arm. An appendage that dwarfed Wall's entire body extended from her shoulder. The fabric that had once surrounded it was now shredded, independent fragments pinned by light brown spikes the same color as her hair, each the size of Donovan's fingers. The spikes ran the length of arm, alternating in direction as well as becoming smaller the closer they were to her 'hand', which looked more like an industrial claw than something capable of delicately manipulating the surroundings.
"I won't blame you for not trusting someone who attacked you on your first meeting." The claw had wrapped itself around the body. Donovan swore he could see a large spike protruding from the 'palm'. "It would make my life easier too. I haven't disciplined one of these aberrations in quite some time, I worry they have been getting a tad too restless recently."
Despite this display, Donovan was not afraid. The Arboreal Maiden's malice was not directed towards him.
"So, what will it be oh Emperor of the Velar? What is to be the fate of this Watcher?" She was perfectly still. She did not twitch, she did not sway, she wasn't even breathing. Donovan wondered if her heart was still as well.
"Why?" Donovan didn't like this. "Why are you leaving the decision to me?"
"Because he belongs to you now. All of them do. If you believe you can make a tool out of him, then I will not take that tool away from you. Otherwise, I can guarantee that he will be more trouble than he is worth."
". . . would I be able to change my mind at a later date?"
"Feel free, though I don't possess the capability to resurrect the dead."
"Then I would like to leave him alive." Donovan did not consider himself a saint, but he wasn't a fan of whatever this was. "I still don't know who he is or what he does. I won't pass judgement until then."
The Arboreal Maiden looked back at Donovan over her shoulder, maintaining eye contact for a few seconds before releasing the man, leaving him suspended once more. Just as before, Donovan couldn't even make out her arm changing. One instant it was monstrous, the next it was back to 'normal'.
"Take a seat, Donovan. We need to have a talk. A talk about me, about the Velar."