35. Hook and line
Jonas
Jonas watched the girl he was supposed to safeguard fall out of the sky like a puppet with its strings cut. He saw her descend. As near to lifeless as one could be. Body utterly still. The fire that burned within her soul gone cold. Mad taint receding like color from a corpse. And yet, he knew she lived.
It was the way of things here. The way of new victims to a game older than they could imagine. The way of the beyond. To make anything less than the truth of what it could be suffer. It was the same reason he was still alive. Still here, breathing the life of a chained animal, of a fisherman lost at sea. No friends save for the sky above.
A tortuous non-existence.
And the girl was going the same way.
… He could let her die. Spare her the untold suffering. The insanity of this twisted nightmare of a world. It would be a kindness really.
But Jonas wasn’t kind enough for that.
No, that sort of kindness had been beaten out of him. So, rather than putting the girl out of her misery early, he did his job.
Orange light flowing down his shoulder, from mark to hand and forming into a harpoon. One he threw with all the accuracy of a man to used to his line of work. Flaming projectile hurtling through the air at speed. Wind flowing around and into it, boosting how fast it was. Till it stopped being a thing of speed, time, and distance. It simply was.
Popping into existence beside the cannon wielding wasp’s head. Tip driving through skull. A skull that came apart in bloody spray. Corpse falling even faster than Celia’s.
And he could have stopped there. He could leave her to wake and find out how things would go. Or, he could get a bit more involved and intervene. Which wasn’t really his job. And it wouldn’t really help with anything pertaining to it. But on the other hand…
It had been so long since Jonas had allowed himself to let loose.
His Mark burned with anticipation.
|Curse of the Leviathan’s favor|
A fishing rod made of burnished gold formed in his hands. Shaped like his oldest friend, and carrying all the wicked intent of his heart. Line hung like a vicious promise of violence to come. A serrated hook that bled sideways at its end.
And when he cast it out, distance became irrelevant.
The air before him became the sea. A pond. A lake. The ocean. Ground beneath his boat. And the cry of a hundred oversized wasp hybrids his song.
It didn’t take long for the music to get playing. Notes starting off as his line jumped through space and arrived in the center of the aerial battlefield. No bait to lure in his prey. No, he simply cast it towards them. Leaning and bending as his hook found its mark, serrated teeth flying through a chest of hardened exoskeleton and steel feathers. Wrapping around a strand of nothing and swinging left.
Fifty wings stopped beating. Hook and line cutting through them all the same. Dancing a path from body to body. A snake ever in search for prey. Fang zipping through open air - before it was suddenly reeled back and it’s victims with it. Bodies vanishing into that void between here and there.
And suddenly he had taken its place. Rod in hand as he stood in the air, now the center of the swarms attention.
They descended as a singular entity. A horde of one mind. Claws and mandibles, teeth and hooks. More than enough to drown just about everything in this forest. To bury any foe under a tide of bodies, and chip them down to nought.
It was why they were even still alive. But the idea of them was incomplete. Completely unprepared for a singular question: What if numbers weren’t enough?
Jonas answered the hypothetical with a swing of rod. Whipping it through the air like a chain. Hook once again blinking through space, the distance between where it was and where he wanted it vanishing all at once. Tip drinking the wind around it, enhancing its speed even further. Till it was fast enough to exist in multiple. An afterimage that swept through the ranks of the horde and temporarily painted sky a brilliant shade of puke yellow.
He swung up. Clouds parting as the memory of a treasure from his past parted them.
And then down.
Hook digging into the dirt, deeper and deeper, faster and faster. Blinking forward a space, then two, then three, then all the space that mattered till it reached its target. Serrated teeth biting into the heart of the swarm and it’s mind. Burning it away in a flash of gold before he pulled it back. Reeled in something more precious than flesh. An essence of the swarm itself.
He pulled it off the hook, an orb of vibrant red, studied it, and weighed it against his collection.
And he found it… subpar. Throwing it out into that space between, into that great unseen sea, where it serve as feed for the hand on his leash.
The Abuser, Oppressor, Subjugator is pleased by your acts…
Favor increased!
Current Favor: 9,381 ~> 9,382
And that killed his mood.
"Yeah. I bet you are you crazy giant fish." He said with a sigh, anger betraying him for a moment.
But then it passed. And he was back to work, vanishing from the space of carnage he had left and over to his charge. Where he found her laid out of the ground. Life quickly fading from her. Metal that lined her body slowly receding back towards her mouth.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a half eaten silver fish, and pushed it into her mouth. Then he made her chew. A silver glow encasing her body as he did so. Wounds reversing in their tracks. Damage done being undone by the second. But only for a few, before the effect ran out. And rather than being two feet in deaths door, she only had half of one past the threshold. Which, in his defense should really be more than enough to make sure she survived.
Probably.
Either way, he was done. And vanished from the scene with a wink at the astonished looking half corpse in a cloak next to his charge.