Chapter 114: Insupportable Pain
It was a sickening sight. The flesh regrew almost cancerous, too fast, too voracious. Bloody filaments stretched out like greedy roots, seeking to close the horrible maw opened in Dylan’s chest. Bones clicked as they fused back together with a sound like dry wicker, muscles wove themselves in a grotesque, accelerated dance.
The black blood no longer flowed – it crawled towards the wound, sucked in by this unnatural regeneration. New skin, a sickly, glistening pink, spread like living mold, covering the horror before their eyes. A sickly-sweet, metallic odor – that of fresh flesh and corrupted blood – mingled with the abomination’s stench.
The abomination staggered back a step, its ember eyes wide with an expression that could have been horror, or demented fascination. It emitted a low, choked gurgle, as if suffocating from what it saw. It wasn’t the healing it craved. It was the wound itself, that essence of pain and void it had tasted. And Dylan was stealing it away, sealing it up too fast.
"DYLAN!" Maggie’s hoarse voice split the air. She had gotten up, hunched forward, one hand pressed against her probably cracked ribs, the other brandishing her axe. Her face, bruised and mud-smeared, was twisted by pure rage. She wasn’t looking at the abomination. She was looking at Dylan, his torso sealing itself shut in a spectacle of horror. But in her eyes, there was no disgust. Only icy determination. She had seen. She understood. And she was going to take advantage.
The abomination, distracted by the monstrous miracle of Dylan, turned its head too late. Maggie was already in motion. Avoiding a frontal charge this time. She rushed in an oblique, brutal surge, using a standing stone as a springboard. She leaped, her entire mass propelled by primal fury, her axe raised high above her head with a muffled snarl.
The metal came down with the weight of a boulder falling from a cliff. It cleaved through the shadow-body and slammed into the pulsing, red, glistening heart the creature had exposed in its unhealthy excitement.
The impact was dull, deep, like an axe sinking into rotten wood. The heart of sinew and twisted essence exploded in a geyser of viscous black fluid and reddish sparks.
The abomination stiffened, arched in silent agony. Its ember eyes snuffed out like coals plunged into water, shifting from fiery red to dead ashen grey in a fraction of a second.
It collapsed in on itself, not like a solid body, but like a pile of wet ashes and dissolving shadows. One last putrid breath escaped the form that was already ceasing to be, then there was only a black puddle and a smoking crystal on the stony ground, and the silence, suddenly deafening.