Shock

Alice jumped off the thrashing millipede the moment she realized what Skitter wanted to do, shouting to the rest of the swarm to move away. They didn’t even seem to register her words, still focused on binding the segmented behemoth to the ground.

Her knees bent painfully when her feet hit the ground, the muscles of her calves and thighs sending waves of dull pain to her brain after the strain she had subjected them to in order to leap onto the monster in the first place. She ignored the pain and started running towards Ozren and Chillushrith, waving her arms in the air to get their attention.

“Get them away! They will die!” she shouted frantically, stumbling on the slick and uneven floor to turn and point at the oblivious Spear Spiders.

The two Thinkers seemed to finally understand but, before they could act, a loud and prolonged hiss came from the tall and gangly spider standing just a few meters away, the high pitched sound apparently able to reach the unheeding spiders, shaking them away from their trance and allowing them to start fleeing.

Most of the clusters had managed to retreat when the injured titan shook the ground with another deep, warbling bellow, followed by a crack of broken stone as its straining body finally ripped off the last of the large cables binding it.

Then it happened.

A tiny, white sparkle appeared from the previously dark wall of the cave, a tiny light that caused a small shimmering ripple to instantly propagate throughout the thousands of grubs resting on the rocky surface.

An instant later, the normally idle colony of small, fat larvae turned into a massive flare of light as each one of the plump little creatures released its deathly electrical charge at the same time.

Alice had felt the effect of one of them on her own body, a painful experience she was not keen on repeating. Now thousands of them had done it at the same time.

The massive electrical discharge moved through the air, turning it into massive arcs of blindingly bright plasma before it finally grounded itself with a thunderous, earth-shaking rumble to the closest conductive object it had available.

The young woman felt her ears pop and the hair on her head stand up, she smelt the burned ozone in the air as the deadly electricity coursed through the hastily woven thread of metal and silk, through Eisor’s severed legs and, finally, into the titanic millipede who, for less than a heartbeat, stood silent.

Then it screamed.

A twisted, multi-pitched shriek erupted from the body of the immense arthropod as it was wracked by the flood of electricity and everywhere around the expanse hundreds of overwhelmed screechlings dropped from the air, unable to sustain the sudden cacophony.

Steam and noxious fumes started hissing from the gaps in the monster’s armor as it cried its pain to everything that could listen, its body cooked from the inside out by the current, the superheated metal legs of Eisor sinking deeper into its melting flesh.

The light suddenly blinked out, with the charge depleted, darkness returned; the fate of the titan, however, was sealed.

The millipede thrashed weakly on the ground, twitching erratically as a scalding mess of innards and blood spewed out of the small, horrid mouth hidden between its huge and sharp mandibles.

A shrill, pitiful cry could still be heard from the creature every now and then. It still wasn’t dead.

The Biomancer of Symbiosis watched on, unable to move or even breathe as Chillushrith rushed forward, her legs slamming loudly on the ground, sinking in the limestone as she raised the two mallets her frontal limbs had turned into and swung them onto the head of the beast with a sonorous crack.

Once.

Twice.

On the third strike the cooked, weakened chitin shattered and a whimpering hiss escaped from the now barely twitching behemoth.

A fourth hit finally punched through with a squelching sound of pulped meat and organs. The whimpering suddenly stopped.

Only then did Alice manage to shake herself from her daze, using one hand to wipe away the tears from her eyes, barely able to see through the afterimage of the plasma still seared into her retina, instantly made worse by the blood she just now realized was flowing freely out of a deep, long cut into the palm of her hand.

It must be from tying the wire to the spikes she thought while sending a brief Hemostasis to stop the bleeding, waiting for the blood to coagulate before finally looking around, trying to catch her bearings.

The girl saw the surviving members of the swarm regrouping around Chillushrith and instantly moving to secure their position, pushing forward to slaughter the massive mound of frenzied wasps and millipedes still busy feeding on their bait of hallucinogenic sirenshrooms.

She spotted Ricee rushing towards a heavily bleeding Eisor, unable to stand up on account of her missing or shattered legs, a small pool of bluish blood flowing from her many wounds.

She started heading that way too, checking her well for the amount of magic she had remaining, hoping it would be enough to at least seal the weeping wounds of the Thinker.

The young woman had taken a couple of steps when a weak, pained shriek reached her enhanced ears, still recovering from the wall of noise from the battle. She stopped, glancing around once more, scouring the dozens of almost-identical Spear Spiders for the one she could now recognize at a single glance. Skitter wasn’t there.

She turned to look at the wall of the grubs, dark once again, hidden by the steaming carcass of the monster, biting her lip as she sent another glance at the bleeding Eisor.

“Fuck.”

She ran towards it.

She sprinted around the smoldering body, using the adrenaline still flowing through her system to push past her limits, vaulting over the remains of a dead Spear Spider partially embedded into the stone and entering the grubs’ territory.

She immediately saw the curled up, blackened shape lying maybe a dozen meters away from the wire, his molten legs barely twitching, a weak hiss escaping his mouth when she dropped on the ground beside him.

“It’s okay, Skitter it’s gonna be alright,” she promised as she pushed her hand against the warped exoskeleton, crying out in pain as the scalding chitin burned the palm of her hand.

She grit her teeth and sent her entire reservoir of warmth towards her hand, using only a small trickle of it to numb the pain receptors while the rest soaked into the dying spider, ignoring his weakened resistances as she delved into his system.

Alice winced when she spotted the numerous, branching lines of dead, cooked flesh that ran along a large part of the carapace, sprouting from the melted stump where one of his metallic legs had been.

The electricity had partially grounded itself on the too-close spider, running along the metallic legs and then finally discharging on the wet ground. To Alice’s relief, the deadly current had mostly ignored the rest of the body, avoiding a large part of the internal system in favor of the more conductive metal shell. Without it, Skitter would have been as dead as the millipede lying just a few meters away.

The energy, however, had still done a number on the male Thinker. By heating up the metallic components of his body, it had caused deep burns wherever they were in contact with his unprotected flesh.

The first thing she did was numbing the portion of living pain receptors that were still active in the wounded areas, stopping the continuous flow of agonizing signals sent to the spider’s brain.

As soon as she felt him exhale a weak but relieved hiss, the young woman immediately checked his tubular heart, worried it might have been damaged by the shock. Thankfully, the organ seemed healthy, pumping blood with its regular, if frantic, beat.

After making sure he wouldn’t die of a heart attack, Alice sent a small ripple of her energy throughout the entire body, using it in combination with Biomagical Instincts to pinpoint the areas that needed her attention the most.

She winced when she received her feedback, ignoring the large portions of destroyed flesh to rush to the arachnid’s strange set of lungs, now a mess of burnt and broken tissue.

The gasses within them had apparently been heated by the electricity as it moved past the breathing holes on his abdomen, swelling up within each one of the thin layers of cells and tearing up the fragile membranes that usually harvested the oxygen from the air.

Skitter was soon going to die if she didn’t repair them.

Her first attempt to empower the few healthy portions of the organ failed immediately as the cells were simply unable to work surrounded by their dead or dying brethren that would not be removed in time, even if her own powers managed to work completely dead tissue, which they didn’t.

In a rush, she attempted to cut off the oxygen supply to the less important organs, only to be reminded that Skitter’s open circulatory system wouldn’t allow it. She simply didn’t have enough time.

Damn. Damn. Damn. What can I do? Why am I so useless? she swore as each one of her ideas failed miserably.

She knew what it meant to slowly suffocate in her own fluids, unable to harvest the precious oxygen her body needed.

Her eyes widened, as she rushed back to her system and once again forced the Lumen out of her stomach before sending a tiny tendril of the glowing particles through the scorched breathing holes of the spider.

She ignored Skitter’s frantic twitching as his airways were blocked, and immediately empowered the glimmers, forcing them to consume the shredded cells, leaving only the healthy, if weakened, ones.

It’s still not enough.

Alice remembered when she had finally completed her fusion with the Lumen, breathing in the glowing water, letting the particles themselves sustain her as she changed.

It’s the only way.

Her power running on empty, she delved into the light core that had belonged to the Rocktopus and started using it as a battery, pushing its blindingly radiant tendrils of mana into her own well and turning them into her warmth, only then sending them into the spider’s dying system, controlling it to favor the integration.

As soon as the Lumen attempted to fuse with the remaining cells, however, they were pushed away, unable to even connect with the healthy cells,

She frantically pushed with more strength, using a large amount of the core’s energy to try and force the communion, desperate to save the annoying creature she owed so much.

She failed again.

Only then did she feel it. The flaring energy coming from deep within Skitter’s brain, coursing at incredible speed to and from his remaining organs, using his nerves as pathways and filling his entire being with sudden sparks of energy.

A core.

She gasped when one of those tiny flickers came in contact with her magic, flowing through it and reaching her own body where it discharged with a painful zap.

She could feel his organs feed back the tiny, round core, charging it with barely contained lightning that was immediately sent to the rest of the body, somehow keeping it alive in a recursive cycle she had trouble understanding.

The girl couldn’t help but smile at the sight.

You really can’t allow me to help you, huh?.

Carefully, ignoring the painful sparks hitting her through her connection, Alice prodded the healthy cells of the lungs, activating the process of mitosis before she erected a complex lattice of proteins to guide their regrowth.

When the firsts of the microorganisms finally started splitting, the biomancer retreated back to her body, trusting that Skitter’s core would last for enough time for the lungs to partly repair themselves.

She had just managed to stand up on her feet when a loud, pained hiss came from behind the dead titan. Her heart sank again.

She knew what that meant.

After an instant of guilt and doubt, Alice forced herself to move nonetheless, ignoring the still torn muscles of her legs to sprint back to the other side of the carcass.

When she finally moved past the massive, segmented body of the monster, she couldn’t help but grimace at the sight.

Eisor laid unmoving where she had last seen her many minutes before, a puddle of congealed blue blood coating the ground beneath her corpse.

All around her stood the remaining members of the swarm, dozens of wounded spiders staring silently at their Overseer.

Ozren was still busily trying to seal the shattered carapace with a layer of sodden silk, ignoring everything else.

Ricee turned towards her the moment she appeared from behind the millipede, silently staring with her eight eyes.

Chillushrith stopped her mournful hiss, ambling from one side to the other before she suddenly moved towards the felled titan, her pedipalps twitching erratically as she raised the heavy mallets over her head and slammed them over and over again on top of its head, cracking it, shattering it and pulping it with the flesh and blood underneath as her grief and sorrow echoed throughout the caves.

Alice spent the rest of the day working on extracting the core of the millipede from its body.

While Chillushrith and Ozren mourned, she managed to ask a silent Ricee to carefully move Skitter away from the grubs and towards the nest, informing her that they would need to carefully carry him back to the Main Nest while his wounds healed and his core crystallized.

After ensuring the only Son of Maath was being taken care of, the biomancer slowly scaled the slick steps leading to her cave, ignoring the pain from her torn muscles as she walked through the tunnel and the antechamber, entering the cavern of the glowing pool and harvesting most of the Lumen contained within before leaving it without a single glance.

With the increased numbers of glimmers, the girl proceeded to use the energy still contained within the light core to control them as they consumed the millipede’s meat, slowly carving into its body until, after many hours of grueling digging, she finally caught sight of a smooth, grey surface embedded in a nest of connective tissue halfway through its corpse.

Pulling away the glowing particles, Alice carefully cut away at the flesh with her knife until, after a few more minutes of relentless carving, a huge and incredibly heavy core slid into her arms, straining her back just to keep it aloft.

It didn’t feel like a success.

*****

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