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Tick.
John glanced over his shoulder as he stepped down the hallway, only lingering a moment to confirm that it was yet another false positive before hobbling on. Of course, that didn't mean that he was safe, and he was sure that if Kikui saw he wasn't checking religiously, she'd be on him in moments.
He had been so stupid! Why the fuck did he go along with her for so long? He should have ignored her and just kept searching for a way out.
She would not bind his will again. He would not allow it, no matter what. If it came down to it… he refused to let something like her turn him into a weapon.
A creak sent his instincts screaming into overdrive, and he leapt back just in time to dodge a pair of bone darts the size of human spines that ejected themselves from the walls, smashing into where he had been moments ago.
"Good dodge!" Kiku taunted over the horrible fleshy intercom.
John glared at the wall. She was trying to taunt him, to distract him from his goal of getting out of here, or at least finding a good place to hunker down and wait for Yuki and the rest of the squad to find him. Kiku hardly had infinite time, and his friend was fighting more than evenly with the Greater Nameless solo even before it had been starved and had a hole blown through it.
Still, if he didn't take the bait at least to some degree, she might decide that it wasn't moving and change tactics. Of course, she might know that he just wants to lead her along while secretly pivoting in the background.
John decided he hated fighting kitsune, and the next time one came knocking, he would find a way to move the whole fort to a new country.
"I thought you wanted me intact!" he shouted back at the disembodied voice, carefully checking around for any extra surprises while she "distracted" him. Who knew if she could record messages to play when she desired?
"I did say I should have been a healer," Kilu mused. "Even if your… What did you call your quasi-Aegis?" She paused only for a fraction of a second, just long enough to give the impression of waiting for an answer but not long enough for John to start cursing her out. "Ah, yes, even if your 'warding' is so weak as to collapse under so little stress, I aimed it for your legs, and as long as you remain alive, I can trivially stitch you back together. Unless, of course, you've seen the errors of your ways and will save me from resorting to such barbarism?"
He couldn't help but scoff.
Kiku sighed. "I thought not."
Think, John, think! She had to be controlling these speakers somehow. His first thought was that she was somehow inside the walls, following along with him, but that wouldn't explain how she got around his detector at the start when she didn't know how it worked. Triggering that trap and the one that gave him a limp required her to know where he was down to the step, though, so, however she was tracking him was damned accurate.
Pressure-sensitive floors, maybe? It's either that, or she can see through the eyes even though they're closed. Smell and acoustics were two other possibilities, but John wasn't sure they'd be consistently accurate enough. In any case, the "signal" she used to control this place had to be transmitted somehow, and he bet it wasn't wirelessly. In addition, he doubted that ankle-crushing trap was there when he first entered that cursed room, as she'd have no clue where he'd stop. Were she openly using Presence over the air, John was pretty sure his Kiku detector would start screaming, yet nothing preceded either attack.
Perhaps she was carrying the signal through the walls themselves? It felt plausible, and she could likely stretch a nerve like a power cable. Which meant…
John grinned and aimed his gauntlet at the ground, setting the cone to a narrow beam before firing. Scorching heat flew from the knuckle-mounted emitter, melting a hole through the, completely obliterating the organic matter and leaving ash in its wake as he cut a gouge through the flesh and bone and well into the surrounding substrate.
It was hard to tell, but he swore he could see a tiny gray blob beneath the floorboards, but it might have been ash.
"Well, I know you don't care for me, but that's no reason to take it out on my house. I put a lot of effort into this place," Kiku taunted through yet another hidden mouth, one which was pointedly on his side of the divide. Was she trying to trick him into believing that he was doing nothing, perhaps?
Of course, he wasn't going to take the bait.
John cut a section of the building apart, dicing the vein-like corridors into ashy mush, and Kiku had gone conspicuously quiet, her unsettling banter giving way to even more terrifying silence.
Still, no new holes had claimed his ankles, so that was a good sign.
Now, did she have no power here, or was she just pretending?
The silence stretched on in the darkness, and it felt like a noose was slowly tightening around his neck. His heart raced to fill the emptiness, and his mind quaked under the stress of staring into the darkness, looking for even a hint of pink.
Tick.
John spun around to the source, yet there was nothing out in the darkness of the cross junction.
Tick-tick—tickticktick—
His blood ran cold before he sprinted away from where he stood with all the urgency of a gazelle spotting a charging lion, leaving before she took him once more. He had no delusions about surviving unaltered a second time.
He ran, unfamiliar corridors blurring past him, ignoring the way his recently dislocated ankle screamed in agony through adrenaline alone. Ultimately, he nearly toppled over as he sucked in deep breaths, staggering against a wall.
It opened up a mouth to clamp down on his wrist, gravestone teeth biting down on his gauntlet with a mighty crack as his warding flared to life.
"Gah!" he shouted, reflexively firing into its faux throat with a wide cone and burning a hole straight through to the other side, severing the muscles and making the fangs clatter onto the floor as he pulled his arm free.
Why the hell did he do that? He was out of his safe zone and… Wait. Why did he do that? He was scared, sure, but he wasn't that terrified, and he could have just jogged a few steps to the side. He just knew he had to go! His instincts rarely led him astray.
John sniffed and suddenly realized that the air smelled a bit different than usual.
Eyes widening, he forcibly powered his warding on, cutting him off from the outside world. While he may not have the most effective defences against esoteric attacks, his warding was at least half effective against gas attacks, at the very least.
Kiku had manipulated this place into emitting something that made him irrational and jittery. He could still feel it burning its way through his mind even now, screaming at him to keep running, but he ignored it.
It was a small mercy she didn't start with some sort of depressant and knock him out from the get-go, but his understanding was that unconscious and dead were terrifyingly close together when it came to any sort of anesthetic gases. Perhaps she didn't want to risk it, or maybe she had a better chance of healing him if his heart exploded from whatever she puffed into the air.
Why didn't she start with it, anyhow? Perhaps she didn't have it ready; this whole situation stank of improvisation on her part. Even if she wanted to be cautious, she could have hit him with this from the start, but perhaps she didn't have it ready.
Did they actually catch her off guard for once? Maybe, just maybe, he had a chance.
Tick.
John spun again, reflexively firing a blast of heat down the corridor.
Again, there was nothing there.
He was on a timer for mere minutes now, and she probably knew it. Yuki took moments to figure out the weaknesses of his warding, and Kiku would certainly realize why he normally left it on the setting where it only flared to life when it detected an attack.
Would it last long enough for Yuki to get here? Did Kiku know it wouldn't, or was she trying to bluff him into doing something reckless by making him think that it wouldn't?
Damned mind games. Still, Kiku wanted him to act irrationally, which was useful information—
Tick.
Whirling around, he saw something retreat around a corner. It was tall, lanky, and pink. Yet, it wasn't the Kiku he knew. It was far too skeletal, with a body stretched far too long, making it so she had to crouch over even in these towering halls. Twisted, like the ugliness of her soul had burst forth to fill the holes left in her body. He had half-expected her to be a puddle still. Evidently, even that little hope was far too much for this world to grant.
John acted on instinct, his gauntlet shooting up as he aimed not at where he saw her, but at the wall. All his primary ranged foci had a very important property: the layered order and entropy aligned corridors they relied on didn't care about flimsy things like cover. There was a lot of guesswork involved. He didn't know if she still maintained the same speed, or even if she turned down some corridor in this bloody maze that he couldn't see.
He still tracked a section of wall, modelling her movements in his mind. Aiming, he levelled the beam across where she might be, setting the cone to be relatively narrow to maintain firepower while still increasing his odds to land a good hit.
Then, he let loose a stream of soundless heat, the wall in front of his scorching attack turning to ash in moments, the invisible wave continuing onwards through the Nameless material behind it, straight through to the far side.
The high-pitched wail that emitted from his hidden opponent was terrifying, filling him with an ancient dread. It was like a thousand opera singers screaming. It was the glasswork of centuries past being shattered with a hammer. It echoed against the inside of his head, the sheer metaphysical weight of it punching through his warding and burying his mind under a wave of almost sympathetic pain of his own, vision blurring as his ears edged on exploding. Blood dribbled down from his nostrils, and he tasted copper from where he came terrifyingly close to biting his tongue off.
Yet, it was still the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
She could bleed, he could hurt her, maybe even win! He didn't want to kill her, sure, but if she could take being reduced to a puddle, John wagered that she could take a bit of cooking.
"It isn't as fun when people fight back, huh?" John joked, a strained smile spreading across his face. "I will never be your slave! Run as far as you can, and maybe you'll get a chance to run once we deal with your pet!" His voice quaked, but he finished strongly, the warmth of fragile bravado spreading through his chest.
Silence was his only response.
Tick.
The ground cracked under his feet, his breath catching, then he was falling, a clawed hand closing on his skull as fingers wrapped around his gauntlet's fingers.
Whatever twisted appeal Kiku once might have possessed was gone. Her flesh was stretched, limbs and spine lengthened to grotesque lengths to give her far too much reach, but her skin seemed to have stayed the same size, tearing it in places and exposing the meat beneath.
At least, he thought it was meat. Some was red, sure, but the rest was dark, swirling matter that felt eerily familiar. The tissue almost seemed to shepherd it from place to place, moving aside and squishing it from behind to shuffle it. Was that Nameless material? It looked dense, as if she had taken a half-dozen Nameless and compacted them into unruly masses which she used to replace her missing flesh.
Her muzzle seemed trapped in a bony grin; the elongated mess of razor-sharp fangs had the skin pulled back off them, revealing not the gum underneath but dense bone. Above, there were no eyes, but a pair of blue lights hovering in empty sockets, locked onto John, staring into his very soul.
Terror seized him, but his will was still his own for now. He remained able to think for himself for a few fractions of a second longer.
Perhaps even just as importantly, Kiku didn't know that binding the fingers of his gauntlet didn't stop him from firing anymore.
Quickly swapping the focus, lightning surged from his knuckle with an almighty crack, unholy amounts of amperage discharging from the well-hidden knuckle-mounted emitter in a coherent beam. The flames in Kiku's empty sockets seemed to brighten, almost as if her eyes were widening, as it crashed into her Aegis. It did not annihilate it. Yet, somehow, just enough leaked through, and the monster's arm spasmed, throwing John up.
With a loud crash, he smashed into the roof, nearly blacking out from the sheer force as he rebounded off the fleshy mass, an embedded eyeball popping against his spine and showering him in clear fluids.
As he fell back down towards the waiting monster, her horrifying hands spread wide to receive him, John longed for his hover disc. If only he could fly. Hell, if only he could do anything! Even if he wasn't falling back into her arms, he was completely outmatched in mobility, and she just had to get a good grab on him to win, and he was pretty sure that he might at best get one good shot on Kiku. Even with his war gauntlet, he doubted it would be enough to put her down, even if she just stood there and took it.
Was this it? Were these the last free moments he'd ever have? Maybe he might have just long enough to overload his gauntlet, if the last one was able to hurt her…
Then, John had an idea.
Quickly swapping over to his telekinetic focus, he pointed at the wall and grabbed on for dear life. Under normal circumstances, he would barely feel the force of moving something telekinetically, entirely disregarding Newton's third law. However, once, he tried to lift a rock that was far too heavy and knocked himself off his feet.
For a split second, John hovered in the air, seizing in place, then he twisted his wrist, slingshotting himself down the hall using the incredibly amped capabilities of his war gauntlet and the wall itself as a pivot point. It was not a graceful flight, and he tumbled wildly, smashing into his surroundings as he tucked himself into a ball, holding onto himself for dear life as he tried not to lose consciousness from the sheer Gs involved. The only thing that saved him from turning into a soup was his now dangerously depleted warding, but even then, he could feel a deep, abiding soreness soaking into his bones.
But there was no time to gather himself, and as soon as he had made enough distance, he grabbed onto the walls again at a lower setting, letting him skid to a stop and scramble to his feet.
Tick.
His opponent was already far too close for comfort. She had taken no time bounding out of the hole, and her towering form was sprinting down the hallway on all four of her limbs, nine tails spread out behind her like a fan.
Back to lightning, then.
John aimed at the charging monstrosity and fired off a quick bolt, but to his horror, her flesh warped with the tearing of meat and cracking of bones*.* As he sent smite after smite at her, holes opened up in her flesh just long enough for the attacks to pass harmlessly through before snapping back to her previous state. Even when he aimed for her head, her flesh and bone alike just parted around the beam to no effect, slowing not a step. She shouldn't know when he was about to fire. How the devil was she dodging the lightning like this?
With no shortage of growing panic, John swapped to his cold focus, setting it in a massive cone wide enough to cover the entire hallway, and unleashed it once more, unnatural chill streaking forth.
Cold punched into the kitsune's chest like a missile, momentarily halting her as the entire corridor iced over on the spot, faint ice crystals dropping as even the air itself gave out, liquid oxygen and nitrogen splashing across the ground, air rushing to fill the space with a hiss.
Her limbs stilled as a layer of solid material formed over her, each step coming more slowly than the last as he kept the attack up. Pure white ice grew over her jagged, bony smile, and she moved not a step forward as the frost claimed her as one of its own.
John didn't let up, though, and he kept the beam on her, sheer cold dropping the area to temperatures that life could never survive, the fleshy walls and floors cracked and gave way as whatever moisture existed within turned into a million knives amongst now-brittle veins.
Then, the ice sculpture in the shape of Kiku moved and split just barely, and a mix of red and black gushed from the wounds like slit throats, somehow moving despite the conditions and sinking away into the floor, crawling through the dead meat like a swarm of liquid termites.
What the hell did it take to slow this lady down?
Tick-tick.
Readings, on both sides!
Instinctively, John swapped from cold to his telekinesis turned grapple, grabbing onto the floor and sending himself forward in a far more controlled throw as perhaps twenty feet of walls slammed shut around where he used to be like a colossal set of jaws with a resounding crunch, the very flesh and bone that comprised them tearing to shreds from the strain.
Wait. John had fought someone like this before, hadn't he? Kiku was burrowing through the ground much like the man from back in Broadstream. He had feinted John out and then attacked him when he wasn't looking. Perhaps it was a stretch, but if that fool had come up with such a strategy, given Kiku's intelligence…
As he fell, John swapped to his drill focus and ignited a piercing spiral of solid green, a terrifying spire that crushed steel as easily as it tore through soil. Then, he plunged it into the ground where he was about to land, churning through meat and bone alike.
Tick.
The yowl that issued forth was music to his ears, even as a monstrous hand streaked towards the side of his torso. What might have once been a grab that'd crush his torso into paste instead batted him to the side, sending him to the side hard enough that he felt several ribs crack in two. Yet, adrenaline kept him upright as he righted himself just in time to avoid being impaled by a bone spine propelled from the nogitsune's palm.
"You've gotten better at this," Kiku lightly commented as she pulled herself from the floor once more. She was missing one of her arms now, presumably where his drill caught her, although the torn pieces were slowly crawling out of the floor and over her form before reattaching themselves in place.
"I try," John shot back. She was close, within a few meters, just beyond reach. If he tried to shoot her, she would likely be able to reach him first. Same if he tried to aim down the hall to pull himself clear. How the hell was he going to deal with this? Except… No, that'd be risky. His warding was strong against temperatures, sure, but its charge was terrifyingly low.
"I want you to know I'll take care of you, despite everything," she soothed, her tilted head giving the impression of a smile despite her current lack of lips. "You'll be happy. You'll have a place to belong, where none shall hurt you again." The nogitsune took a step forward.
John's fingers twitched to swap the focus and fire as a hand shot toward him, wrapping around his neck and choking him of air.
Wait, no, what was he doing?! He couldn't hurt Kiku; she had done everything for him, and—
Yet, before his traitorous body could respond, his gauntlet responded to the input. Under ordinary circumstances, a low-powered omnidirectional field was a nice way to cool off in the summer or heat up in the winter. With the power of his war gauntlet pumped into it, though, with no safeguards?
The area around him sprang past hell straight into being molten, flesh and bone alike returning to ash as Kiku recoiled, her weakened Aegis not enough protection to withstand it. He eased up, but the damage was already done, and Kiku released her grip as both her flesh and bone boiled.
All at once, John's thoughts returned to being his, and he cut the power just in time, his own warding finally giving out. He was only exposed to the heat for a split second. It was nearly enough.
He felt his skin cook, the inferno cracking his skin with unearthly heat, the top few layers warping like a hot dog cooked for far too long as he snapped his eyes shut in an attempt to prevent them from cooking off and blinding him.
At least he was successful at that.
Stumbling, limping, he removed himself from the area, breaths coming hard and heavy as he removed himself from the remnants of the inferno.
He glanced over his shoulder, and there she lay.
The seared body of Kiku was draped over the pile of ashes in a crumpled heap, far too many limbs splayed out wide in burnt piles, most of what fur remained missing.
Oh no. John hadn't wanted to kill her; he just wanted to shove her off, so—What would happen to Yuki now? Dread settled deep in John's soul, and he shivered. Would she remember her death and turn against him? Would she pretend to be fine, even as a part of a monster drove a stake into her soul?
Yet, John was distracted from his terror by the sounds of something heavy barreling down the hallway behind her. Despite everything telling him to curl up, adrenaline kept John upright as he steeled his will for whatever came next.
Around the corner barrelled the Greater Nameless, an amalgam of darkness and silk. It looked rather different than how John remembered it, but somehow, John knew it still, despite all the changes. Despite all its new injuries. John swore he left it with a full complement of limbs and eyeballs, but now it looked as if vultures had picked it half to pieces while it still lived.
Yet, the monster, despite everything, froze in place, staring at the corpse with gobsmacked awe, standing in a pool of the nogitsune's own blood.
"I will tear you apart!" roared Yuki from behind as she bounded around the corner, following the beast. Terror seized his heart for a second as he imagined her, possessed by the soul of the woman he had just killed, but… she seemed normal, still the same kitsune he called a friend.
"Yuki?" John groaned out, leaning against a wall to steady himself.
"John?" Yuki echoed, tearing her gaze away from the now seemingly paralyzed monster, locking onto him before going wide. "John! What did she do to you?" she roared out, bounding past the beast and landing by his side, fluffy tails protectively coiling around him in a cocoon. Their touch hurt, every brush against his fresh burns sending a new wave of agony lancing through his form*,* but the sheer warmth and concern emanating from the kitsune was a balm to his soul.
"I'm fine, Yuki," he lied, stopping to let out a rattling cough. "I've been through worse. When we're back, I'll wrap myself in those gel bandages; they're really good for burns. We still have a job to finish." At that, John glanced toward the last monster they had to slay for the day. It looked almost pathetic, in a way. Sure, it was still a massive engine of destruction that could crush a building, but it hardly looked the part, between the missing limbs and what John swore was terror in its crimson eyes.
John wondered how there was a pool of blood on the ground when it should have vaporized in the heat.
"I'm sorry, my ally," mourned a mouth that formed on the pool, before the tide of crimson rushed up over the Nameless' limbs, the beast screaming as the ruby invader crawled in through every joint and cut.
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