Chapter 24: The Academy Main Building Plaza (2)

Staying here wasn’t an option. And moving forward would almost certainly mean running into the Mist King—the equivalent of a zone boss in a game. No way they could win that fight with just the two of them.

And as if that weren’t enough, there were other troubling matters.

Booker glanced down at his hands. It wasn’t obvious, but something wasn’t right. His fingertips, knuckles, and wrists were tinged with red and purple, as though irritated or inflamed. Faint blotchy shadows hinted at something festering beneath the skin. Infection? Inflammation? It didn’t quite look like either, but it definitely wasn’t good.

Rena too. The skin around her temple and elbow showed minor signs of rot.

At first glance, they looked like nothing more than scrapes, but they were definitely there. He hadn’t gotten a close look at the others, but now that he thought about it, they might have similar marks.

Maybe he was just being paranoid, but those lesions looked eerily like the rotted-face people.

What the hell was going on?

No, no—not the time to be thinking about that. Booker shook his head hard, trying to fling the thought away and refocus on the current situation.

“Are we really just gonna have to sit here and hope the others come find us—wait, what?”

“Brother Booker! Look over there!”

They both spotted it at almost the same moment.

They were standing in the plaza before the Academy’s main gates.

Ahead lay the collapsed ruins of the gate itself.

Beyond that was a wide, straight road stretching all the way to the grand entrance of the Academy’s main building.

And now, that door—massive, ancient-looking, easily ten meters high and who knows how heavily rusted—

“…Is opening?”

Even from dozens of meters away, they could hear the low scrape of something massive dragging open. From their position, they could barely make out the dim interior beyond the doors, but something was moving inside.

Something was coming out.

Something that had just pushed open those enormous, heavy gates all on its own.

Thud.

The main doors groaned fully open.

Thud.

Something stepped out with a heavy footfall.

Thud.

A towering figure, nearly three meters tall.

Thud.

The sheer pressure it radiated far surpassed that of any ordinary monster.

Thud.

It was striding down the road that led from the Academy’s entrance to the plaza.

Closer. Closer still.

Booker and Rena could now see it clearly.

It was a humanoid figure, just under three meters tall. Its upper body was a grotesquely exaggerated inverted triangle. Its limbs were long and slender, but exuded coiled strength. Its skin gleamed with an oily black sheen, like supple rubber.

It had no head—or rather, where its head should have been, there was only a small fleshy growth.

Completely naked, yet its lower body bore no trace of gender.

Its right arm ended in an organ that looked like a swollen tumor. In its left hand, it held a gleaming short blade.

But the most striking feature—

From where its collarbone should be, all the way down to its abdomen, there was a zipper embedded directly into its skin—taut, sealed shut.

“Wh-Wh-What the hell is that…?”

Booker and Rena both instinctively took a step back.

This thing—whatever it was—was without question at least elite-tier, if not worse.

“Uncle Booker, it’s…”

“I see it, yeah, fuck. I see it… This… This thing’s really about to come at us? You’ve gotta be kidding me, shit! I was just—huh?”

Just as he stepped back, Booker’s heel bumped into something.

He spun around.

“What the actual f—!?”

A hulking lizardman was right behind him. Booker instinctively raised his straight sword and shielded his face, expecting an ambush.

But nothing happened.

The lizardman just walked past him. Like a sleepwalker.

And it wasn’t just him. All around the ruined town, fog fiends began to emerge: ordinary lizardmen, venom-spitting variants, even human centipede beasts. One by one, they ambled out into the open.

None of them showed aggression.

Their movements were sluggish, vacant—like puppets under hypnosis.

Booker and Rena stood frozen in disbelief as the swarm of low-level fog fiends slowly passed them by, drawn toward the towering monster that had just appeared.

The monster didn’t react at all. It just kept walking, silent and unstoppable, until the first of the fog fiends—a powerful lizardman—reached its path.

Crack!

Splurch!

The zipper that ran from the creature’s collarbone to its lower abdomen burst open from the inside.

A massive vertical maw was beneath it, ringed with countless needle-sharp teeth arranged in a spiraling vortex. Like a living meat grinder.

Shlk-shlk-shlk-shlk.

Dozens of tentacles slithered out like squirming squid arms. In an instant, they coiled around the lizardman and dragged it into the gaping mouth.

The moment it was pulled close, a sickening crunch filled the air—the sound of bone and flesh being crushed. The tentacles hauled the body inward, and the interior muscles of that monstrous maw clamped down, gnashing and pulsing in frenzied rhythm. The entire lizardman—equal in size to a full-grown adult—was ground to paste and devoured in seconds.

Rena’s legs buckled beneath her, and she collapsed, face ghostly pale. Booker fared only slightly better, barely staying on his feet.

But it wasn’t over yet.

After swallowing its prey, the monster’s abdomen bulged grotesquely. Then the swelling began to shift.

From its belly… to its chest…

Then to its shoulder…

Finally concentrating in the tumor on its right arm.

The entire limb ballooned outward, now as massive and misshapen as the devoured lizardman. With the sickening grind of bone and the slick squelch of fluid, the right arm twisted, stretched—

Crrrrack!

—until it had elongated to over three meters in length, like a warped weapon of flesh and sinew. The tumor at the end of its arm shifted, jagged bony protrusions thrusting out until it resembled a grotesquely oversized halberd.

It had digested its prey, transformed it into part of itself.

Into a weapon.

Gurgle…

That wide-open mouth, like a distorted, vertical eye, twitched with vile hunger. The slithering tentacles began to probe outward.

“Kra-Kra-Kra-Kra-Kra-Kraaaaaa!!!”

#####

Aldrich
 • Type: Humanoid (?) · Cyborg · Alchemical Creature
 • Rank: Elite
 • Background: The gatekeeper created by Ian. Appears as a headless humanoid with an exaggerated inverted-triangle upper body, long slender limbs, and rubbery black skin. A large, zippered mouth is located on its abdomen—when opened, it can extend tentacles to capture and devour nearby organisms. Consumed prey is assimilated into its body and weaponized through its right arm. The more it eats, the stronger it becomes, and it can use devoured organs to repair itself. Wields a custom rune dagger in its left hand, crafted by Ian, for supplemental attacks.
 • Weapons: Abdominal mouth, tentacles, limbs, rune dagger
 • Skills: Slam, Devour, Strangle, Slash
 • Special Traits: —