Collide Gamer

Metra followed the map Judas had given and Claire had confirmed to the lowermost of the caves.

It was filled with long strands of a material like spider-silk. It was black and white in colour, hanging from the ceiling in long drapes that swayed from the simplest movement. Unequal length and distances between each created a complicated labyrinth. Metra’s armoured hand brushed against one of the wispy strands. A claw of her gauntlet parted the fine threads of a silky drape. Then, she clutched it and tried to rip it off the ceiling.

The material proved resilient, stretching under the force, elongating rather than breaking. Rolling it around her palm, the First of Wrath gave it another pull. The strand eventually tore off the ceiling.

“H’ah guhr l’mgehye r’luhhnythog’s r’eagl!”

A pale hand burst out of the drapes, grabbing Metra’s head. The fingers felt too small to get a proper grip on the Astrotium plate helmet, yet she was ripped off her feet all the same. All of the world was white and black streaks. Then, her Astrotium helmet dented, slammed with horrendous force against the soot-painted wall of the cave.

Metra was dragged along the wall. Sparks of the supreme metal flew as it was ground away by the abrasion. The light of her green eyes flickered within the dark eye pits of her helmet, attempting to make sense of the situation. When that failed, Metra went back to the usual solution to her problems: delicious ultra-violence.

Claws rammed into the stone, Metra forced her dragging to come to a sudden stop. The hand released her with carefree laughter, retreating into the drapes. Rex Magnar sliced through them a moment later. The Fusional blade cut through the black-white silk with ease. The cut-off ends did not reveal even a hint of a person. The room echoed with the amusement of the creature.

Metra let the rage rise as a growl in her throat. The back-spike of her halberd flared, a torrent of plasma rising from the weapon. Guiding the propellent force, the First of Wrath spun around her own axis.

The energy torch set alight the silk it even distantly passed. Within moments, the underground chamber was alight, the wispy material devoured by the rapidly spreading flames. Metra kept her halberd at the ready, constantly scanning her surroundings. The front of her helmet parted into a set of metal teeth. Heat within her manifested as visible breath in the scorching hot air.

Individual flames reached the ceiling. The conflagration spread rapidly, the fire moving with such speed that mundane eyes would have barely been able to follow the development. Metra kept scanning for her laughing opponent. “Are you a Tzitzimimeh?!” the First of Wrath bellowed.

“Ahf' mnahn' kn'a.”

Metra recognized the ancient elemental tongue, already forgotten by most by the time she had been created. She recognized it, but she did not understand it. The mocking tone was all she could decipher.

No matter where the First of Wrath looked, there were just falling, burning pieces of silk. They did not pile on the ground, turning to clean ash, often before they had finished falling. “I know you can speak German, at a minimum, so spit it out!”

Metra whirled around again, eyes always seeking her opponent. She locked onto a massive eye. No, not an eye – an eclipse inside an eclipse. It was a portal replacing the burned clean ceiling, giving view to concentric rings of distant, bronze fire. The First of Wrath felt her consciousness drift into that vast, filled black.

She forced her eyes shut for one moment, for her rage to win over this eldritch draw. When she opened them up again, a hand hovered by the inner eclipse, caressing the ring of bronze like it was a halo hovering above the woman’s head.

Her pale arm was bandaged. A tattered, colourless robe covered her. Strands of silk were wrapped around her neck as well. She was a good looking woman with long, black hair and a wide smile on her dark, purple lips. Orange eyes in pools of black stared, filled with pity. The irises looked too small for a human.

[Nyala AI: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/fc5137ef26f4.png ]

“Mgah’eya chime uah!”

Ethereal strands of fresh silk fell out of nowhere. They were anchored in thin air, phasing into existence in a matte black gradient. From each of these new drapes hung a chime, swaying and ringing in the wind of the woman’s charge.

Metra barely brought her weapon up in time to block. The raw physical impact made her insides rattle. Rage fuelled her further, rage that this entity would stress out her Emperor, rage that a friend’s realm was threatened, rage at the pure gall of this creature to challenge the First of Wrath.

The canine maw of her helmet split even wider. While the woman pressed against Rex Magnar, Metra snapped forward. Her teeth sunk deep into the neck of her enemy. Bronze ichor oozed around her teeth, flying upwards into the concentric rings above, drawn in by another gravity.

The woman put a hand flat against Metra’s stomach. A lance of… something pierced the front of the Astrotium armour. Metra disentangled on her own terms, jumping back before a second attack like it could damage her even more. There was no reason she had to do all the heavy lifting anyhow.

“[Annihilation].”

The un-word carved itself into Metra’s wolf ears. A wave of anti-magic rippled through the room. The woman’s eyes widened in surprise, an instant before the attack struck. Blacker than the false night above, it ate the colour where it passed, then impacted the creature itself. Where it met the supposed Tzitzimimeh, the anti-magic stopped, leaving a glowing line from forehead to left thigh of the woman. The skin was gone, the barrier that kept the true nature of the monster concealed.

And she was a monster. In the gap of the skin crawled tendrils of solar rays, curling around one another as waves of aged bronze and unnatural violet. Spasming head to toe, the woman gripped the upper edge of her parted face, pulling at the white skin. It came off like an expensive mask, glued to the black bones beneath. Skeletal wings pierced the back of her outfit. Her ribcage opened up like a flesh-eating flower made of thorns.

‘We can scratch supposed from that Tzitzimimeh description,’ she sent a message to John, only to find her message ending at the edges of her own mind.

The Tzitzimimeh crouched down, filling her conceptual lungs with air for a horrid screech. It was a raspy sound and yet it was piercing enough to rattle the entire cage. Her head slowly rose as she screamed. She bent back down, a second scream ripping from her white teeth. The third scream was so long and shrieking, that it only ended when her spine was bent backwards.

Metra took the chance to attack. Her feet hammered on the cave floor. The maw at the front of her helmet had been knitted shut again, gone with the power granted by her blessing of rage. A price she was willing to pay for a difference in the plans they had told Judas about and the reality of the situation.

The chimes were ringing wildly now, each glowing like a star made of ghost-light. Gorgeous sounds and radiant light, both clashing so intensely with the hideous form of the Tzitzimimeh.

The eldritch entity suddenly struck a pose, then danced out of the way. Firm steps of deep grace. More instruments wove into the network. Drums and gongs hovered in the air, bobbing up and down to the whistling rhythm of the black skeleton’s jovial steps.

Lances of inky black dripped from the space above. Nia cut them off with her sword made of manifest nothing. Streams hardened into curled statues, resembling the detached horns of great, black goats.

Metra lost sight of the Tzitzimimeh for a brief moment. Combat instincts had her raise Rex Magnar, the Fusional head of the weapon blocking a kick of the now hooved foot of the entity. She laughed, copies of her laughed, a tidal wave of naked, pale women manifesting from the overhang of her robe.

Metra backed off behind an artificial arch created by two overlapping ‘horns’. Forcing the frenzied facsimiles of humanity through the gap made cutting them down so much easier. Swing for swing, thrust for thrust, the First of Wrath diminished their number. Sharp fingernails scratched over her armour, long since repaired by her natural regeneration.

Grasping the space in front of her, Metra ripped her hand back. The tide of copies was forced forward, incomplete bodies melting into each other. In a fluid motion she brought Rex Magnar up above her head then brought the halberd down with immense prejudice. Thunder clapped and the earth rumbled under the dual discharge of the enchantments. False bodies exploded into a cascade of white sludge and light.

Nia manifested in the opening. Her black blade pierced where the sternum of a human would have been. Nyala responded by pulling in her open ribcage into a deadly embrace. Metra was already there. A primitive downwards swing of her gauntlet cracked through the right row of thin bones. Blue and purple particles bled from the stumps, the mana-wounding attribute of her claws working just fine against whatever the nature of this being was. A path to dodge open, Nia simply retreated with two backsteps.

The Tzitzimimeh giggled, an echoing sound that was thin and forced. She breathed heavily, the tattered robe over her hunched back expanding and contracting notably with every cycle of air.

“Start talking,” Metra growled, pointing the tip of her halberd at the enigmatic entity. “What are you? Where do you come from? Who do you serve?”

“Ymg’agar nafl kadishtu,” Nyala responded with another giggle.

It was the final straw for Metra’s patience. “Let me guide you to the afterlife!” she declared and rushed forward.

The chimes had slowed. The drums had fallen and crumbled away into a red dust. The gongs hang lethargically in the air. One drifted into Metra’s path. She was determined to just storm right through it. It rang like it had hit something hollow when she was stopped by it.

The humiliation of that moment would have flared her powers to maximum, had she been fighting on her own.

A goat hoof slammed into Metra’s midriff, forcing her several steps back. The second she was still, her hand disappeared in the space before her, gripping the Tzitzimimeh by the throat. Metra’s arm disappeared back into the portal, yanking Nyala towards her.

One thrust skewered the midriff of the black-boned witch. Metra wasn’t sure what she was piercing, what invisible flesh still clung to those bones, but it bled bronze all the same. She carved the Tzitzimimeh open all the way to her neck. Lowering her halberd in a swift swing, Metra painted a sickle of blood on the ashen floor.

Nyala collapsed to her knees. Metra was ready to punch the neck off her shoulders immediately, but Nia intervened. “One more chance,” the pariah said to the unknown woman. “Talk to us?”

The empty eyes of the Tzitzimimeh beheld first the pariah, then the First of Wrath. There were no eyes in those sockets, nothing remaining of her face to emote with. All the same, Metra could feel the mocking pity oozing from the female thing. Nothing was said, not even in Ancient Elemental.

Nia executed the Tzitzimimeh herself. A swing of her sword across the neck caused the creature to convulse one more time. Her existence, bones, robe, chimes and all were drawn into a distorted singular point where the pariah had sliced her. Even the false sky above was absorbed, red particles of light sucked into a midnight blue point.

All that remained at the end were the horn-like spires around them.

“Got even the slightest clue what the fuck that was about?” Metra’s helmet parted, the segments that made it up folding up to integrate themselves into the collar of her armour. “Because I am more confused than an Assyrian looking at a human right’s declaration.”

As the blonde so often did, she chose to press a kiss on her fellow haremette’s lips first. Metra reciprocated, it was second nature to her by now. She had not become tired of having upwards of a hundred kisses a day. The harem life had taught her a whole lot about her own sexuality and liking kissing her fellow women was one of those things.

“The mana around it was disturbed,” Nia finally said. “It reminded me of… I don’t quite know.”

“As confused as the rest of us, fantastic.” The wolf-eared berserker scratched the back of her head. Flexing her mental connection, she reached out to John again. That the connection was re-established was the biggest pointer that they were done down there, disappointing as that was.

It wasn’t as if their enemies owed them explanations in the middle of combat. Neither was it like Metra needed a lot of motivation to see how far she could shove Rex Magnar down someone’s throat before they died. Even she, however, liked to have some basic idea of what was going on.

‘Nyala, or at least some Tzitzimimeh-like thing, is dead,’ the First of Wrath reported. ‘How are things up there?’

‘I think you’ll want to see this,’ John just responded in an upbeat tone. ‘Telling you would spoil the surprise.’