Book 6: Chapter 38
Kay stopped in place as the necromancer began squabbling with herself. Unintelligible screeches mixed with garbled curses poured out of her mouth as different limbs and pieces of her limbs began attacking each other. Her left hand began scratching at her own eyes while her right arm tried to drag it off, but when the right arm suddenly began helping the left hand it turned and attacked the right hand and wrist. She twisted in place as she appeared to actively try and kill herself while also fighting to stay alive. It ranked fairly high on Kay's list of weirdest encounters and he wasn't sure what to do. It screamed "trap" at him, but he also wanted to kill the necromancer and end the threat anyways...
After watching one of her hip bones break through the skin and began stabbing at her stomach Kay decided to test the waters. He slashed out into the air with a sword strike and sent out a faux magical slash with blood. Three of the fingers on one of the necromancer's hands twisted around and fired purplish necromantic attacks to try and intercept the slash while other bits and pieces tried to obstruct the pieces that were defending. The "flying slash" burst into harmless droplets when the attacks hit it. One wrist suddenly snapped around and a beam of magic similar to the one the undead mech had fired lanced out, but the other arm punched the attacking hand and sent the attack off to the side.
Underneath the nonsensical noises coming from her mouth Kay could hear a faltering rant that she spurted out in bits and pieces, about how she would die taking something with her, how it would rue the day it had stolen her body, and how she was so much better than whatever it was she was addressing. As close as he'd gotten Kay could feel the corruption of whatever eldritch taint the necromancer had, and the feeling was lining up with the desperate call for death and the tirade the necromancer was shouting. There was eldritch corruption woven throughout the woman's body, but it wasn't complete. As she fought herself Kay could feel the foulness surge into a limb or a piece of the body that began to fight other parts or suddenly switched sides and when the tide turned or a part changed allegiances again the corruption felt like it had been pushed back. Throughout all of that, the feeling or taste of this brand of eldritch was noticeably different than that of vampyr.
Kay made his decision and started launching real attacks as he approached the necromancer. Patchwork shields appeared around the woman to block a hail of darts, but some failed or were redirected and the salvo hit true in many places. Kay sent tendrils of blood into her body, ripping and tearing as they went. Parts of her internals began to help the attack as the pieces of her that didn't have any eldritch taint in them started working with even higher ferocity. Piece by piece and bit by bit the necromancer's body was torn to shreds, the untainted pieces gladly sacrificing themselves to destroyed the eldritch touched ones.
Sidestepping a wildly fired orb of purple lightning that killed the grass where the bolts randomly struck, Kay stabbed through one of her legs. The blade expanded under his will and shattered the leg bone which severed the limb completely. Without missing a beat the splintered extremity rose up under it's own power and began bludgeoning the rest of the body. Taking that as a signal he sliced off the other three limbs which all joined their comrade in attacking the torso that slumped to the ground. The woman's skin began to twist and grow in unnatural ways as those sections began to fill with corruption but faster than they could mutate under the effects of otherworldly power they began to wither and die as necrosis grew throughout the body. A wave of death and decay consumed the torso from multiple spots that spread and joined each other until they were a single wave of the cessation of life. The blackening spread up to the neck as the necromancer began cackling and calling out about her victory.
"Finally! Finally I'll be free of-" Her milky eyes widened in shock and she cried out, "No! Don't let it get-"
One of her eyes exploded. A flickering string made of colors beyond the human spectrum that Kay could still see twisted in impossible ways as it threw itself at Kay's forehead. He surrounded it with blood and threw up barriers between himself and it, but it flew through them without stopping, as if it didn't really exist or it was on some other level of existence. Completely ignoring everything Kay did to try and capture or destroy it, it touched the skin of his forehead and vanished inside of him.
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The being was old and experienced. It wasn't one of the lesser of it's kind but neither could it call itself one of the greater. Nonetheless, it was well beyond it's first host and it's first world, and the fact that the host it had been stuck in for so long had stymied it so was aggravating beyond measure. The foolish lesser-dimensional being had dared resist it and had somehow remained even as the being had destroyed the inferior life. It had clung on and in doing so had changed itself to be just a fraction closer to the greatness of the being as the being reshaped the body to be closer to it's own perfection.