We sprinted out in the same formation a second time, encircling the monster with our blades ready. Catch it when it withdraws. Don’t stop until it’s dead. The monster turned its scythes in Lia’s direction as we charged, and we swapped our roles flawlessly on the fly; she caught its counterattack between her two blades while I slashed at its back legs, spinning out of the way of the kick we knew was coming. I was already advancing as it began its flip, and I hurled my sword over Lia’s shoulder to catch the beast dead center in its chitinous chest. The blade cracked through the hardened shell and buried itself to the hilt, the tip of the blade emerging in a splash of dark purple ichor on the other side.
Lia dashed ahead while the monster reeled, teetering back and forth on unsteady, twisted limbs. Her swords slashed in a whirlwind of onyx steel, severing both of the beast’s bladed forearms just above the joint where its natural armor was weakest. The momentum of her attacks launched her into a graceful flip over the creature’s body as it collapsed forward in a fountain of thick, purple blood. As she twirled through the air, her blades flashed and merged into a unified greatsword, which she plunged into the beast’s body with both hands as she landed behind it.
Stepping between the dismembered scythes that remained lodged in the ground before me, I took a firm grip on the handle of my bastard sword. We ripped our blades free with a synchronized flourish, sending a final, violent shake through the beast before it fell to the ground and lay motionless in the expanding pool of dark ichor. As soon as the beast was still, the oppressive force that had held our Detection at bay vanished, and we scanned the surrounding area with a burst of energy that nearly maxed our mental processing capabilities.
Though the scene around us was filled with death, two dim lights remained apart from our own within the upturned wagon. Lyn was curled up in a corner of the wreckage, weeping silently over Layne’s body in her lap. His chest was torn open in a single, deep cut that ran from his shoulder to his opposite hip. Across from her, Miles lay unmoving beneath a pile of broken wood and shattered glass, shielding his grandmother in his arms. A faint sparkle of dark blue energy in his core and the shallow rise and fall of his chest indicated he was alive, but Josephine’s body was devoid of light beneath him, a single break in her cervical vertebrae the only indication of trauma from the entire ordeal.
With the landscape around us finally revealed, it was easy to see where the beast had come from. A litany of pockmarks tracked back and forth from the road to a thicket of trees a few miles away, accompanied by multiple rows of long scrapes and wagon wheel tracks. All of the markings led to a large burrow hidden in the side of a hill beneath the shadow of the trees, which clearly served as the monster’s den. The shattered remains of over a dozen wagons lined the burrow, many of which were marked with the Three Barrels insignia. While the trade goods in the wagons remained relatively intact, the passengers did not; a scattering of human bones lined the floor of the space, all entirely cleaned of their flesh and emptied of their marrow.
Between the abhorrent fate of Elise’s men and the deaths of Layne and Josephine, the information our Detection relayed to us from the corpse of the monster at our feet took an extra moment to process. When our consciousness shifted to the beast’s remains, a horrible feeling of revulsion churned in our guts, and I found myself falling to my knees and vomiting as Lia’s visceral reaction bled over into my body as well. I fought back against the terror in our mental link as I stumbled to Lia’s side and held her braid away from her face as she continued to retch up bile.
Beneath the horrible mutations and thick layers of chitin, it was unmistakably clear that the monster had, at some point, been a human. The central body was actually much smaller than it had initially appeared, with massively thick layers of natural armor making up the majority of the bulk and protecting a leathery layer of skin underneath. A roughly humanoid torso sat at the center of the beast, housing a normal suite of organs in their usual places. The five serrated razors at the end of each scythe still held traces of knuckle bones, now barbed and ossified in place. Above everything, the skull was the most telling of the monster’s origins: apart from the distended jaw and slightly larger size, it was nearly unchanged from that of a normal person. The two strange indentations above its mouth were the vestigial remnants of the skull's eye sockets, long abandoned in favor of whatever form of perception the creature had used.
“Lia...look at me, Lia...please,” I panted, fighting back both of our panic responses at once. Her shoulders trembled beneath my hands as she swayed perilously back and forth.
“Lux,” she whispered, still staring at the ground. “Why is...how did…? Lux, I don’t understand…” I looped my hands under her arms and helped her up to a sitting position, then knelt in the dirt in front of her. Her eyes stared vacantly past my head to the bloodied, broken corpse behind us. “It’s...that thing, it’s—”
“Look at me, Lia,” I repeated, more firmly than before. Her head turned suddenly to meet my gaze as my voice snapped her out of her stupor. “Our fight isn’t over yet. Lyn still needs our help. Miles still needs our help. We can’t do that if we let our emotions take over.” As I spoke, I felt a fresh
