Re: The Fatal Conflict (GBS2G7) (Round 3: The Infinite Playground!)
10-20-2012, 09:13 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
They hadn't been the most impressive last words, but then, he probably hadn't expected them to be his last. Perhaps he hadn't ever had cause to consider the concept of "last" as it related him. Children were notoriously unprone to existentialism or serious cogitation on the nature of mortality, and that was doubly true of children that had been deemed "inadequate" and had their sanity devoured by ur-beings from beyond the reaches of space.
Nevertheless, impressive or not, they were the leader's last coherent utterances in the land of the living. Oh, he made quite a few more noises between the spike of garish metal Kargrek hurled striking him in the neck and his eventual death, but none of those muffled, gurgling screeches could be considered words. As such. He clawed at the projectile, at his neck, at the blood gushing out through his fingers, and he fell to the ground where he was promptly forgotten and trampled by those who had moments ago lead.
As the hunters behind him surged forward, mirrored by the other group swarming around Zom, they probably gave no more thought than the leader had to the possibility that they might lose or die. Nevertheless and in spite of their better equipment and higher average age compared to the group Kargrek and Bellona had encountered on the surface – most of them too old even to be called children anymore – they fared even more poorly than that last group had. The sole advantage the children had, given that Ymirhoogr's influence had removed fear and doubt and pain from the warriors as much as the sacrificed, had been numbers; even people as well-trained and supernaturally-talented as Bellona and Kargrek couldn't simultaneously hold off a dozen charging berserkers. Here in the tunnels though, they wasted no time in adopting defensive stances with their backs to each other; they were easily able to force the attackers to come in ones and twos, and no amount of adolescent wiriness or sharpened playground equipment could compare with steel and years.
In short, it was a slaughter. Zom wanted nothing more than to look away, to run away, but he was rooted to the spot by horror as much as by the spell that bound him. The worst part – if there could truly be said to be a worst part of watching waves of children cut down brutally and mercilessly – was the bloody glee that suffused the warriors as they killed. Bellona and Kargrek laughed and joked, their faces briefly twisting into demonic rictuses whenever a lucky hunter scored a blow before returning to sadistic jollity as the offender was bifurcated or impaled. Zom had long ago dismissed the fighters as simple and perhaps dangerous – although more likely to endanger themselves than him as long as he kept his distance – but this brutality and beastliness had never seemed part of their character. He briefly regretted warning them, but his mind wandered back to what he had seen the children do to each other and themselves, to rooms full of eldritch tentacles and eyes without faces. It was near-impossible to reconcile the emotional, visceral response of seeing the warriors cut their foes down so cruelly with the knowledge that it wasn't truly Kargrek and Bellona doing it. Were it not for the fact that death was probably a blessing for these poor child-shaped things, the spectacle would have been impossible to bear. As it was, it was merely sickening.
Sickening was exactly the word Zom would have used to describe it, too. He'd assumed nausea, like unconsciousness, was simply something that didn't happen to the undead; indeed, it was possible the retching sensation he was feeling was all in his head, but either way he wanted to vomit, to purge himself of everything and forget. He inwardly cursed his fate and the beings that had conspired to bring it about, saving special resentment for both Zaire and the boy that had bound his body and will. Actually... He glanced down at the erstwhile leader. He hadn't tried disobeying his standing orders since the boy had stopped writhing and coughing up blood. With trepidation, he willed his leg to slide back a step. And then again. And again. Soon, he was shuffling backwards as quickly as the terrain and his stiff joints would allow; it seemed that the blood magic had been undone once the blood it stemmed from had been spilled and stilled.
Still, there were too many children behind him for Zom to beat a real retreat; they continued to surge forward even as their ostensible friends and companions were cut down, and there was no way to push through the throng to escape. Instead, Zom ducked into the nearest alcove he could spot and turned his head away, not even wanting to watch the rush of bodies hurrying to their doom.
After some minutes, the sounds of battle stopped. Taking a deep breath and carefully avoiding looking at the floor, Zom peeked out into the corridor beyond. There were no more children standing; all that remained were one man and one woman, bloodied and leaning against each other. Zom was briefly surprised by the way Bellona rested her head on Kargrek's chest and the almost-deferential way the barbarian wiped a smear of unknowable ichor off her cheek with his meaty slab of a fist. Until now, everything he'd seen of the pair had involved her being begrudging or openly disdainful of him, and him being too focused on his quest to overcome the Redeemer to notice much of anyone else. All in all though, Zom didn't have a lot of time to ponder on the probably inconsequential scene: as soon as he moved into the tunnel, their heads snapped towards him.
"It's another one!"
Bellona narrowed her unnaturally-dark eyes and shook her head. "... No. He's too big, his eyes too clear."
Zom glanced back down the corridor; there was no way his zombified legs could outrun either of them if they turned violent, so it was probably best to try to make himself as helpful as possible.
"And I warned you before they attacked, remember?"
They were silent for a few moments, but neither of them moved.
"I'm glad to see you're both–" Zom hesitated for a moment, looking as the cuts and scrapes on both of them and the handful of open wounds on Kargrek's chest and sides, before finishing "– okay."
"Why?"
He swallowed. "Haha, well, we're all in this together, right? Gotta... Gotta defeat Zaire, and so forth. All for one and all that."
They still weren't attacking, so Zom wasn't sure why he was more filled with dread now than when he'd been facing down obviously-murderous children. It was hard to read the pair's expression with their eyes so clouded, but both seemed passive and lost in thought.
In fact, though Zom couldn't have known it, Kargrek was internally struggling against the urge to cheerfully disembowel the man despite having no cogent reason to do so. Never in his life had he killed simply because he felt like it: the men and monsters that had died by his blade had always been enemy soldiers or perverters of nature or mindless killing machines; even the children had been twisted in his perceptions until they were nothing more than corrupting, evil demons. So this unarmed, shambling corpse of a thing before him gave him no reason to fight, and gave no purchase for Ymirhoggr's madness to push off of. But he wanted to kill him so badly.
"So, I was thinking, you know... We should probably go find something. To do. Back the way I came, there's a bunch of stuff. That the, uh, that these guys collected and made. Maybe it could tell us a bit more about this place? Or where to find Zaire? Or how to, uh, get out?"
It made sense in a feeble, forced way. And it certainly wasn't any kind of rationalization to murder. Kargrek pulled Bellona slightly closer to himself and grunted in a vague approximation of assent.
And then a phrase clicked in the barbarian's mind: "acceptable to kill if a round needs ending for some reason".
Of course, the pervasive insanity that had by now thoroughly ingrained itself in Kargrek's mind didn't make it past the first few words. Zom was acceptable to kill! He'd already decided as much!
With a roar, he pushed Bellona out of his way and lunged at the zombie, Strombald screaming through the air.
"Oh, bugger."
He turned and ran, but he knew it was hopeless. He'd been right: his undead gait simply couldn't outrun a living human, especially not one with a stride like Kargrek's.
For the umpteenth time since the contestants arrived and Ymirhoggr began feeding, the sound of metal cleaving through flesh, splintering bone, and coming out the other side rang out.
They hadn't been the most impressive last words, but then, he probably hadn't expected them to be his last. Perhaps he hadn't ever had cause to consider the concept of "last" as it related him. Children were notoriously unprone to existentialism or serious cogitation on the nature of mortality, and that was doubly true of children that had been deemed "inadequate" and had their sanity devoured by ur-beings from beyond the reaches of space.
Nevertheless, impressive or not, they were the leader's last coherent utterances in the land of the living. Oh, he made quite a few more noises between the spike of garish metal Kargrek hurled striking him in the neck and his eventual death, but none of those muffled, gurgling screeches could be considered words. As such. He clawed at the projectile, at his neck, at the blood gushing out through his fingers, and he fell to the ground where he was promptly forgotten and trampled by those who had moments ago lead.
As the hunters behind him surged forward, mirrored by the other group swarming around Zom, they probably gave no more thought than the leader had to the possibility that they might lose or die. Nevertheless and in spite of their better equipment and higher average age compared to the group Kargrek and Bellona had encountered on the surface – most of them too old even to be called children anymore – they fared even more poorly than that last group had. The sole advantage the children had, given that Ymirhoogr's influence had removed fear and doubt and pain from the warriors as much as the sacrificed, had been numbers; even people as well-trained and supernaturally-talented as Bellona and Kargrek couldn't simultaneously hold off a dozen charging berserkers. Here in the tunnels though, they wasted no time in adopting defensive stances with their backs to each other; they were easily able to force the attackers to come in ones and twos, and no amount of adolescent wiriness or sharpened playground equipment could compare with steel and years.
In short, it was a slaughter. Zom wanted nothing more than to look away, to run away, but he was rooted to the spot by horror as much as by the spell that bound him. The worst part – if there could truly be said to be a worst part of watching waves of children cut down brutally and mercilessly – was the bloody glee that suffused the warriors as they killed. Bellona and Kargrek laughed and joked, their faces briefly twisting into demonic rictuses whenever a lucky hunter scored a blow before returning to sadistic jollity as the offender was bifurcated or impaled. Zom had long ago dismissed the fighters as simple and perhaps dangerous – although more likely to endanger themselves than him as long as he kept his distance – but this brutality and beastliness had never seemed part of their character. He briefly regretted warning them, but his mind wandered back to what he had seen the children do to each other and themselves, to rooms full of eldritch tentacles and eyes without faces. It was near-impossible to reconcile the emotional, visceral response of seeing the warriors cut their foes down so cruelly with the knowledge that it wasn't truly Kargrek and Bellona doing it. Were it not for the fact that death was probably a blessing for these poor child-shaped things, the spectacle would have been impossible to bear. As it was, it was merely sickening.
Sickening was exactly the word Zom would have used to describe it, too. He'd assumed nausea, like unconsciousness, was simply something that didn't happen to the undead; indeed, it was possible the retching sensation he was feeling was all in his head, but either way he wanted to vomit, to purge himself of everything and forget. He inwardly cursed his fate and the beings that had conspired to bring it about, saving special resentment for both Zaire and the boy that had bound his body and will. Actually... He glanced down at the erstwhile leader. He hadn't tried disobeying his standing orders since the boy had stopped writhing and coughing up blood. With trepidation, he willed his leg to slide back a step. And then again. And again. Soon, he was shuffling backwards as quickly as the terrain and his stiff joints would allow; it seemed that the blood magic had been undone once the blood it stemmed from had been spilled and stilled.
Still, there were too many children behind him for Zom to beat a real retreat; they continued to surge forward even as their ostensible friends and companions were cut down, and there was no way to push through the throng to escape. Instead, Zom ducked into the nearest alcove he could spot and turned his head away, not even wanting to watch the rush of bodies hurrying to their doom.
After some minutes, the sounds of battle stopped. Taking a deep breath and carefully avoiding looking at the floor, Zom peeked out into the corridor beyond. There were no more children standing; all that remained were one man and one woman, bloodied and leaning against each other. Zom was briefly surprised by the way Bellona rested her head on Kargrek's chest and the almost-deferential way the barbarian wiped a smear of unknowable ichor off her cheek with his meaty slab of a fist. Until now, everything he'd seen of the pair had involved her being begrudging or openly disdainful of him, and him being too focused on his quest to overcome the Redeemer to notice much of anyone else. All in all though, Zom didn't have a lot of time to ponder on the probably inconsequential scene: as soon as he moved into the tunnel, their heads snapped towards him.
"It's another one!"
Bellona narrowed her unnaturally-dark eyes and shook her head. "... No. He's too big, his eyes too clear."
Zom glanced back down the corridor; there was no way his zombified legs could outrun either of them if they turned violent, so it was probably best to try to make himself as helpful as possible.
"And I warned you before they attacked, remember?"
They were silent for a few moments, but neither of them moved.
"I'm glad to see you're both–" Zom hesitated for a moment, looking as the cuts and scrapes on both of them and the handful of open wounds on Kargrek's chest and sides, before finishing "– okay."
"Why?"
He swallowed. "Haha, well, we're all in this together, right? Gotta... Gotta defeat Zaire, and so forth. All for one and all that."
They still weren't attacking, so Zom wasn't sure why he was more filled with dread now than when he'd been facing down obviously-murderous children. It was hard to read the pair's expression with their eyes so clouded, but both seemed passive and lost in thought.
In fact, though Zom couldn't have known it, Kargrek was internally struggling against the urge to cheerfully disembowel the man despite having no cogent reason to do so. Never in his life had he killed simply because he felt like it: the men and monsters that had died by his blade had always been enemy soldiers or perverters of nature or mindless killing machines; even the children had been twisted in his perceptions until they were nothing more than corrupting, evil demons. So this unarmed, shambling corpse of a thing before him gave him no reason to fight, and gave no purchase for Ymirhoggr's madness to push off of. But he wanted to kill him so badly.
"So, I was thinking, you know... We should probably go find something. To do. Back the way I came, there's a bunch of stuff. That the, uh, that these guys collected and made. Maybe it could tell us a bit more about this place? Or where to find Zaire? Or how to, uh, get out?"
It made sense in a feeble, forced way. And it certainly wasn't any kind of rationalization to murder. Kargrek pulled Bellona slightly closer to himself and grunted in a vague approximation of assent.
And then a phrase clicked in the barbarian's mind: "acceptable to kill if a round needs ending for some reason".
Of course, the pervasive insanity that had by now thoroughly ingrained itself in Kargrek's mind didn't make it past the first few words. Zom was acceptable to kill! He'd already decided as much!
With a roar, he pushed Bellona out of his way and lunged at the zombie, Strombald screaming through the air.
"Oh, bugger."
He turned and ran, but he knew it was hopeless. He'd been right: his undead gait simply couldn't outrun a living human, especially not one with a stride like Kargrek's.
For the umpteenth time since the contestants arrived and Ymirhoggr began feeding, the sound of metal cleaving through flesh, splintering bone, and coming out the other side rang out.