Chapter 35

  STARING INTO THE FACE OF HORROR

  The magical sky came back to life with an invisible groan, and the illusory dome reformed to reveal a full moon night—pale and sickly—scattered with stars that seemed to stare back. From different points in the village, the group watched in silence as the Totnes slowly descended from above, like an aberration torn from the firmament.

  Its body was tall and unnaturally elongated, stretched far beyond any coherent biological limit. It was made of neither flesh nor crystal, but of an impossible fusion of both: a translucent organic matter streaked with luminous veins that pulsed like exposed arteries. Each throb felt like a monstrous heartbeat, reminding everyone that the thing did not merely exist… it was alive, and it knew it.

  Where a face should have been, a central structure rose, dominated by a single massive vertical eye embedded high in its torso like a symbol of eternal judgment. That eye did not blink. It showed no rage, no pleasure. It only watched, with a coldness so absolute it made everyone feel as though their very soul was being dissected. Nothing was hidden beneath that gaze—thoughts, guilt, fear… everything was laid bare.

  From its torso and limbs sprouted multiple extensions, like twisted nerves or gnarled branches, and in each of them opened smaller eyes, wet and gleaming. They looked in every direction, rotating independently, granting it an impossible, almost divine perception. There was no blind spot for the Totnes. There was no refuge.

  Its arms stretched long and sharp, ending in organic blades, like living knives. They were not hands meant to create, but to cut, tear, and extinguish.

  The creature stopped in the center of the village, suspended several meters above the ground. The lower part of its body tapered until it faded into an ethereal form, as if it had never known what it meant to walk. It did not touch the earth. It defied it.

  The air grew thick. Heavy. Every breath hurt.

  Then the central eye contracted slightly, and from deep within the creature an impossible voice emerged:

  a torn sound, as if something dead were being forced to speak.

  — C…o…me… o…ut…

  Each syllable was dragged out of a throat that was never meant for words.

  It was not a plea.

  It was not a warning.

  It was a sentence.

  A fireball the size of a house tore through the air like a raging comet, launching straight toward the Totnes. The heat made the windows tremble, and a blazing trail marked its path.

  The Totnes slowly turned its central eye toward it. It did not rush.

  It only measured.

  When the blazing sphere was inches from impact, the creature moved with impossible, almost unnatural speed. Its body warped in a blink and the projectile flew past, smashing into a nearby house. The explosion reduced it to rubble in an instant, throwing up a cloud of dust, fire, and muffled screams.

  — Hey, ugly thing!

  Kiran’s voice cut through the chaos. One hand was pressed against the ground, fingers spread like claws. The Totnes turned its gaze toward him, curious, almost intrigued.

  The ground beneath the creature began to crack.

  A red glow rose from the depths of the earth, and the heat became unbearable. Stone melted, turning into bubbling magma… yet the Totnes kept floating, unmoving, as if gravity and fire had no power over it.

  Kiran slowly raised both arms.

  The molten stone obeyed.

  Columns of magma rose like blazing serpents and wrapped around the Totnes, completely engulfing it. In a matter of seconds, the fire solidified, forming a prison of black, burning rock that sealed the creature inside.

  — Suck on that, bitch, —Kiran sneered, a wild grin on his face.

  — Kiran… —Gabriel’s voice trembled— look.

  The stone prison began to crack.

  A deep hum vibrated from within, as if something were building up energy. The fissures glowed with a sickly light… and then it exploded.

  Chunks of stone were hurled in every direction. The impact raised a storm of dust and shrapnel. When the cloud cleared, the Totnes was still there, floating in the air.

  Unharmed.

  Untouched.

  Not a single mark on its impossible body.

  — It’s horrifying! —Tatiana shouted.

  With a sharp gesture, she ordered them to surround it. On her back, her shield glowed with golden runes pulsing like a heart of light, and her shotgun rested ready in her hands.

  At her sides, the two men raised their heavy swords. With every step they took toward the Totnes, the runes etched into the metal flared brighter, as if the weapons themselves recognized an enemy not of this world.

  The tall woman advanced with her spear, and along its blade, for brief instants, arcane symbols appeared and vanished like lightning trapped in steel.

  The Totnes watched them all at once, hundreds of eyes wide open.

  And for the first time, it seemed interested.

  — Please… work… —Gabriel whispered.

  He extended his right hand, and from his palm burst a golden light tainted by a black mist, as if two opposing forces were being forced to coexist. The energy twisted through the air until it took solid form.

  A weapon was born.

  Its structure was long and perfectly symmetrical, forged not of metal but of will and corruption. Gold and black intertwined across its surface, like light trapped inside shadow. The blade had jagged, uneven edges, closer to fangs than a cutting edge, as if it had grown rather than been made. Its silhouette evoked wings or open jaws, suggesting it was not meant merely to cut… but to tear, devour, destroy. Along its edges ran ridges and organic spines, pulsing, almost alive.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  — This is new… —Gabriel murmured, his voice shaking.

  Fear pierced him, but he smothered it at once. There was no room for questions. Only to survive.

  The Totnes snapped its central eye toward the weapon.

  It recognized it.

  And it attacked.

  Its floating body hurled itself forward like a divine projectile, driven by impossible force. In a blink it crossed the distance, its mass warping with speed, all of its eyes locked onto Gabriel.

  Kiran reacted before Gabriel could even think.

  He threw himself between them, stretching out his arm with his index finger pointed at the monster. In front of him, the air tore open and a red arcane circle appeared, filled with symbols and perfect geometric figures, spinning over one another like infernal gears.

  From the center of the sigil, dozens of small spheres of blue fire burst forth.

  They did not burn.

  They consumed.

  They shot forward at brutal speed, slamming into the Totnes like a storm of arcane bullets. Each impact made its body shudder, forcing it to stagger in midair. The creature came to a sudden halt and raised its bladed arms, deflecting the spheres with unnatural movements—swatting them aside, slicing them, dissolving them into blue sparks that died before they could touch the ground.

  But for the first time…

  The Totnes was on the defensive.

  And Gabriel, with that impossible weapon blazing in his hand, understood that something in the balance of the fight had just changed.

  — Now! —Tatiana roared.

  The two burly men charged in unison. Their heavy swords, covered in blazing runes, carved arcs of light as they came down on the Totnes.

  But the creature met them with impossible precision.

  Every strike was dodged by millimeters.

  Every thrust deflected with the slightest movement of its bladed arms.

  There was no strain. No urgency. Only a surgical dance of death.

  Then the Totnes sensed something different.

  Kiran’s fire was weakening.

  Its rhythm was breaking.

  Fatigue was catching up to him.

  And there… everything changed.

  The blue fire spheres stopped coming.

  The swordsmen kept attacking, furious, but the Totnes no longer dodged.

  It raised both arms and caught both attacks at once.

  The swords crashed against its crystalline flesh, sending off sparks and an impossible metallic sound. The two men grunted, pushing with all their strength, trying to cut, to pierce, to open even a single wound.

  They couldn’t.

  The woman with the spear saw the opening and struck from behind, driving her weapon forward with a scream.

  The Totnes surged upward in a violent motion.

  The spear missed.

  And then…

  The two men went still.

  For a second, no one understood why.

  Then their bodies slid apart…

  and fell to the ground in two clean halves, cut straight through.

  — NO! —Tatiana screamed, her rage tearing through the air.

  The Totnes descended again.

  Gabriel tightened his grip on the monstrous scythe and charged straight at it, a strangled cry tearing from his throat. Tatiana rushed in as well, ripping one of the swords from the still-smoking corpses.

  The creature dodged Tatiana’s slash…

  but that movement opened a gap.

  Gabriel’s scythe plunged into its abdomen.

  A brutal impact.

  The Totnes was hurled into the ground, which shattered beneath its weight like a pane of glass.

  For the first time, it was no longer floating.

  It rose with an unnatural motion. From the lower part of its body, needle-like feet emerged and stabbed into the earth. Its arms warped and twisted like living flesh:

  One widened into a reddish shield, covered in eyes staring in every direction.

  The other elongated and hardened into a grotesque, living sword, pulsing with life.

  Tatiana dropped the stolen blade and grabbed her shotgun from the ground. She fired again and again.

  Each blast slammed into the Totnes’s shield, exploding into sparks and shrapnel as the creature advanced toward them with slow, deliberate steps.

  Every footfall cracked the earth.

  Kiran straightened, shaking. He was exhausted, but still breathing… and as long as he was breathing, he could fight.

  He looked at his arm: the veins glowed with a sickly blue light, pulsing as if they wanted to tear through his skin. Each heartbeat was agony.

  He cursed under his breath.

  He raised both hands.

  Between them, a massive sphere of blue fire began to form—unstable, ravenous. Sweat streamed down his face. The luminous veins spread across his neck, his chest, like roots of poisonous light.

  The Totnes was busy blocking Tatiana’s shots and Gabriel’s slashes.

  — Move! —Kiran roared.

  They both obeyed instantly.

  And the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

  The creature turned its central eye…

  and beheld the majesty of that sphere of blue fire.

  Kiran, arms outstretched, looked as if he were holding a fragment of a dying star between his hands. The energy pulsed, alive and unstable, devouring the air around it.

  With a roar of effort, he unleashed the attack.

  A beam of blue fire burst from the sphere and slammed into the Totnes’s shield. The impact was devastating. The reddish barrier warped, shoved backward like a wall on the verge of collapse. The eyes embedded in the shield writhed, some of them bursting in a spray of dark fluid.

  The Totnes drove its sword into the ground.

  The blow made the earth tremble.

  A roar burst from its body that did not belong to any world, a sound that seemed to tear reality itself apart, as if the air were being shredded. Windows shattered. The runes on the weapons flickered.

  But Kiran’s beam did not stop.

  It pushed it.

  It forced it back.

  Tatiana then felt something different.

  A whisper.

  A movement.

  A presence that had not been there before.

  She turned her head… and saw shapes beginning to rise from the red roots that covered the ground.

  They did not walk.

  They did not crawl.

  They slid.

  Their bodies were tall and slender, with an elegant and unnatural silhouette, like living statues carved to kill. They had no human faces: their heads were smooth and elongated, aerodynamic, with no visible eyes, no mouth, nothing that could be called an expression.

  Their torsos were covered in plates and grooves that resembled exposed muscle or organic armor fused to flesh. Nothing about them was superfluous—every line seemed designed for a single purpose… the hunt.

  Their arms stretched into natural blades, living edges that needed no weapons, because they themselves were the weapons.

  And where legs should have been, their bodies became long, segmented, muscular tails that coiled and propelled them forward with terrifying precision. Spines ran along those tails, reinforcing their appearance as predators born from a nightmare.

  A legion born of corruption.

  — What the hell is that?! —Gabriel shouted, his voice broken by horror.

  And for the first time since the Totnes had descended from the sky…

  The battle no longer felt like a fight to win.

  It felt like a desperate race not to be devoured.

  One of those creatures launched itself at Gabriel like a living arrow.

  He raised the scythe in time and deflected the slash of its blades, but he didn’t see the tail until it was too late. The appendage wrapped around his leg and the barbs sank into his flesh.

  The pain was immediate.

  Brutal.

  As if he were being flayed from the inside.

  — Aaagh!

  Tatiana reacted without thinking. She turned and fired point-blank.

  The creature’s head exploded into a black, viscous mass, and its body writhed on the ground, convulsing like a crushed insect.

  But it wasn’t the only one.

  In the distance, dozens more were emerging from the roots. They were not heading toward them.

  They were running toward the Great Tree.

  — They’re going for the witches! —Tatiana shouted, already sprinting after them.

  Kiran clenched his teeth.

  — Diya!

  He cut off the beam of fire and, with an impossible leap, launched himself onto the rooftops, moving at superhuman speed toward the tree, vaulting across roofs and chimneys like a blue shadow.

  The Totnes, visibly agitated, tore its sword from the ground and straightened to its full height. Its many eyes followed Gabriel as he ran after Tatiana, blood streaming from his wounded leg.

  Then, from a place that belonged to neither sky nor earth…

  a voice emerged.

  Distorted.

  Ancient.

  Cruel.

  — Obey… and go after her…

  The Totnes froze for a single second.

  And then it smiled…

  even though it had no mouth.

  Because it now knew exactly

  who it had to kill.