Chapter 52
To Remember Part 3
Teo's eyebrow twitched.
Just a millimeter.
A minimal vibration.
Teo halted his attack dead.
A violent skid, boots scraping wood, muscles contracting instantly, the red aura shuddering around him.
His breath hitched for an instant.
The pink crystals vibrated with a high-pitched sound, almost shattering.
Then they exploded like fine glass.
The greatsword was slammed back into the floor.
The monster… contorted.
Like a fish writhing out of water, but with joints too human.
Its spine bent at an angle no human could mimic without breaking.
Its three limbs folded under its body, then it shot the movement sideways, like a giant insect fleeing the light.
Even so… Teo didn't take his eyes off it.
His head turned, his eyes tracking the blue-black wake of the deformed body moving almost on all fours near him.
It was too fast.
Too erratic.
Teo reinforced his aura without thinking.
The red grew denser around his calves, flowing down to his fingers.
Just in time.
Because then he saw it:
an attack that wasn't an attack.
The monster threw a body at him.
The body hanging from its back suddenly tensed, as if an internal spring had propelled it.
The monster used the body with its single arm like a human whip, grabbing it by the ankle and whipping it in an ascending arc, straight at Teo.
A move as horrifying as it was efficient.
The body's clothes flapped like a flag.
Its neck bent at a grotesque angle from the force of the motion.
Teo saw the shadow coming.
He had no room to dodge and didn't want to.
He extended both arms to the sides, reinforced with aura.
He caught it.
He grabbed the soldier by the waist, stopping the impact with a grunt.
—"Tsk!"—
The blow was brutal.
The weight slammed into him like a sack of meat over 70 kilos propelled by monstrous force.
Teo's heels scraped the floor.
And for an instant,
both he and the body were stuck in the air, the aura cushioning just enough to keep bones from breaking.
The monster released the body's leg in that same instant.
And the remaining force of the movement dragged them both.
Air hissed through Teo's clenched teeth.
—"Hhh!" —
They flew backward.
Teo's back hit the edge of an overturned bench.
CRAM!
The wood splintered.
Scattered chairs jumped from the shockwave.
The body fell on top of him, crushing him against the broken bench.
They both rolled among the legs of broken chairs, tangling in the splintered wood.
The aura around his fingers shattered into fragments of light.
Even so…
amid the blood, the wood debris, and the body on top…
Teo was getting up.
Eyes open.
Fixed on the monster changing direction again.
---
The monster returned to its starting point.
Literally.
As if its trajectory had described a perfect circle between jumps, spins, attacks, charges, and contortions, it returned to the same space where it had impaled the first boy.
Its body rose slightly, its three limbs tensing.
Its posture was no longer that of a surprised animal or a stalking predator.
Blood still dripped from the dark hollow where one of its arms had been.
Meanwhile…
The rest of the group split into two. A vanguard and a rearguard.
First the vanguard: five people lunged at the monster.
Their bodies ignited from within, veins standing out under skin as muscles took on an almost metallic sheen. And from them emerged… their reddish auras.
They lunged.
Each with their personal weapon or a generic one, among the five soldiers.
They separated into a trident-like formation, with every intention of overwhelming this thing with their numbers.
Except one… one who didn't use aura.
Who stopped dead a few meters in front of the monster, from whose body came certain orange sparks.
The monster looked at them before intercepting an attack on its right; the blade sank into its limb. It quickly lowered its arm and opened its maw with the full intention of biting off the head of its attacker, who tried to kick it away.
But the monster curved so the leg wouldn't reach.
Almost at the same time…
The rearguard lined up—as best they could—among overturned tables, broken chairs, and scattered crates.
One clapped palm to palm then pulled them apart vertically; from the joined palms a column of fire stretched out, then he rotated both hands and, as if drawing a bow, aimed a fire arrow at the monster, holding both ends with his fingers.
Another joined his hands like a thick arrow and aimed at the monster, firing a pressurized water blast from them.
And two others gripped their fingers with each thumb and tensed them. They aimed at the monster.
Eli also took a step forward, teeth clenched.
Her violet eyes lit with an internal glow, her fingers forming a precise gesture.
"You're not going to move—", she thought.
She tried to lock the head.
Tried to immobilize that deformed muscle before the monster moved.
An invisible force—mental, psychic, sharp as a wire stretched between two trees— began closing around its "neck."
The violet light shone in her eyes.
The veins at her temple bulged.
Her jaw tightened.
It was working.
The monster felt the pressure.
A moment…
It got distracted for a moment.
Bam!!
Its head took the fire arrow, the pressurized water, and the four air bullets head-on.
All aimed at the head, but despite the attempt to immobilize it, it could still move.
Eli had underestimated the strength of its body, focusing more on her power's endurance than its restraining force.
Even so, the thing's jaw and one eye were destroyed.
Its jaw hung loose, revealing to the soldier who now freed himself with a kick, the inside of its maw and the severed area of the fifth limb. The soldier reacted with palpable disgust.
Pum!!
A kick snapped its hanging jaw shut.
The monster jumped backward while its head tilted back. The moment it felt and heard two weapons sink into its… back.
It spun, throwing the two who had stabbed it in the back toward the rest of the group.
As it finished the turn, the thing saw a young man with brown hair and orange sparks over his body, instead of the red aura it saw on the others… Eilor appeared out of nowhere.
The next thing was to see how, from a hand hidden by perspective, with a slight movement, the right hand appeared, holding a sword.
The blade, double-edged, had a dark bronze color with small copper teeth interwoven along the edges, not protruding from the original edge. Barely visible from its angle.
It glowed with the orange discharges as if charging, or more as if directing them to the tip, growing larger… it was getting closer.
And then…
everything went dark, followed by horrible discharges and their screeching noise, plus the sensation of being stomped.
At the same time in the darkness, a burst of light began to appear from nowhere and quickly started to expand, to open up.
The light took shape and the vision moved to the left.
Eilor was disoriented and quickly pushed with his legs, barely managing to dodge the monster's counter-attack.
An attack that tore Eilor's shirt and opened three reddish gashes on his stomach; his legs miraculously avoided the attack.
CRUNCH—!
The MONSTER CRUSHED WITH A STOMP the left arm of the young man—the one with the ankle stone—who was writhing on the floor, as it retreated.
Eilor landed on the floor and, along with the rest of the group, saw how the wounds they had inflicted on the monster began to close with a white vapor.
CRUNCH—!
The bone gave way instantly.
The boy's scream was trapped in his throat, stifled by the shock that stole his air.
While the golden light of the stone on his ankle had been flashing irregularly for a while now.
In flickers.
As if it were fighting something inside his body.
But the scaly patches climbing his back, neck, and arms said otherwise:
The change had already begun.
And the stone was only delaying it.
The creature inhaled with a wet, deep sound.
It rotated its single healthy arm.
And grabbed the young man.
It took him by the right arm—the only one not shattered—and lifted him like a gnawed log.
The boy didn't even have time to scream.
The force of the grip wrenched a gasp from him that was lost in the air. Even so, a red aura emerged and enveloped his whole body.
And then…
It used him as a whip.
As if he were an object.
As if the body's weight were nothing more than an extension of its limb.
The monster pivoted its hips.
The air curved around the movement.
FWUMP!
The young man's body traced an arc in the air, a human whip with legs dangling and back bending with a dull crack.
And then—
FWUH!
It threw him.
The body shot out like a human projectile, spinning sideways, clothes flapping from the force of the throw, arms hanging uncontrollably.
Three soldiers in its path reacted by pure reflex.
The three caught him:
one hugged the torso,
another grabbed the shoulders,
the third held the young man's trembling legs.
The impact made them slide back several dozen centimeters.
—"I've got him!"— one groaned.
But they didn't.
Because…
At the same time he landed in their arms, the body pulled backward with impossible force.
The monster with its empty gaze was pulling them.
The three soldiers' throats tightened simultaneously, their boots scraping the floor as they were dragged forward as if tied to a huge animal.
—"WHAT—?!"
—"LET GO!"
—"IT'S PULLING HIM!!"
The monster's hand, the scaly claw holding the young man by the wrist, pulled just once.
A brutal tug.
The three soldiers were dragged almost half a meter forward, their legs losing traction, the wood groaning under their boots.
—"LET GO!!"— one of them roared.
The first two did so instinctively:
they opened their hands, released the torso and shoulder.
The third was the last to let go.
And as he did… He felt something.
A short tear.
A soft snap.
—"What…?"— he had time to think, too late.
His attention diverted for half a second.
He looked at his hand.
And saw…
The orange band.
And the black stone, still pulsing with frantic golden flashes, falling to the floor, spinning on itself before rolling among the splinters.
The soldier's eyes widened, frozen, unable to process what he had just done.
The golden glow intensified…
then began to fade, sputtering out irregularly.
While the wet sound of the monster advancing grew like a threat.
The young man's body, freed from human hands, flew backward from the final tug, returning straight toward the monster.
Just as it lunged at the three soldiers.
The monster batted the incoming body aside with a blow during its charge.
Then behind it… the sound was heard.
That sound.
That sound that burned in the memory of the soldier who had let go of the legs.
The same sound from the first day this nightmare began.
A sound of human flesh being torn from the inside out.
A wet, bubbling sound, like bones being crushed from the center of the chest.
Like organs being pushed outward.
Like skin stretching beyond its limit and then tearing.
SHLK—KRRRSHHK—GLK—!
A sound that could only mean one thing:
Transformation.
The transformation of a human into something else.
Into a Beast.
Into a monster.
The air itself seemed to freeze around that sound, as if the entire room remembered that nightmare noise.
The soldier felt his stomach drop.
His throat close.
His hands tremble, this time not from fear of the deformed fish, but from something worse.
Memory.
Flashes struck his mind:
The white room full of crates of food and soldiers telling jokes, catching up, or just doing the work of managing supplies.
And then, from one moment to the next, like a simple blink.
—The metallic, sweet smell of transformation…
—Teo's voice shouting: "GET AWAY!"
—And then the red explosions that saved his life in the supply room and ended the lives of all those half-transformed.
And his horrible internal thought: "at least they should have let them transform… it's worse to see them so deformed with human faces."
All of it, compressed into one second.
All of it, awakened by that sound.
The soldier's eyes snapped open, frozen, on the verge of vomiting.
And near them…
The fish monster took another step.
A step that made the wood creak under its deformed feet.
A step accompanied by the wet roar of the newly transformed body…
which was already rising behind it.
Snapping back to the present, the soldier turned just in time to see the rest of the group intercept the monster.
It was like a human stampede crashing into a living wall.
Two lunged straight for the legs.
One aimed for the torso, seeking some soft joint.
And two—Eilor and the one in the blue coat— went for the head, at a coordinated angle almost by instinct.
The impact was brutal.
The attacks fell like an irregular rain, each blow different in force, precision, technique, and material.
And the result…
was a chaos of mixed wounds.
---
The first half failed to penetrate.
Almost half the attacks barely managed to break the skin.
They were human weapons, from normal forges, made of iron, steel, or simpler composites.
Metals that, against mutated, scaly, wet, hardened flesh,
could only scrape, open superficial cuts, or leave shallow grooves.
The half of that half who didn't coat their weapons with aura…
only opened wounds the width of a finger.
Reddish.
Bleeding.
But superficial for something of that size.
The monster didn't even flinch.
---
The other half of that half.
Those who did reinforce their human weapons with aura achieved something more:
deep, though irregular, wounds opening like vibrant lines that exposed flesh.
But even then, they didn't penetrate bone.
The aura compensated for the metal's weakness…
but didn't transform it into something that could break the monster's deformed bone structure.
Their weapons sank halfway through the blade,
leaving a reddish vapor of dissipating aura with each impact.
---
The other half.
Those who carried weapons won from hunts, adventures, or as rewards.
Bearers of weapons made from parts of creatures and monsters.
Weapons that weren't artifacts only for lack of their own power…
but were still monstrously superior to a traditional weapon.
Even without aura,
their blades, serrated edges, curved edges, or adapted tools sank into the monster like overripe fruit.
They lodged between scales.
Tore tendons.
Opened thick channels where dark blood spilled out in gushes.
And those who DID use aura on those weapons…
achieved something no one expected:
they pierced bone.
Some edges pierced the skin and kept going, stumbling against bony plates but pushing them inward.
One such blow sank a blade to the hilt in the monster's thigh.
---
Eilor and the one in the blue coat.
These two were in the most dangerous zone:
the head.
Eilor attacked first, his special weapon descending like a hammer.
The one in the blue coat completed the angle, striking with an aura-imbued curved blade.
And together…
they forced the monster's head back a hand's breadth.
They didn't make it stagger.
They didn't make it fall.
But they forced it to correct its posture, adjust its weight, open its remaining limb again to absorb the damage.
That was enough to buy a second of life for everyone.
EVEN SO…
EVEN SO, everyone's attention shifted from the monster they were attacking.
Because that sound…
That damned sound…
Everyone heard it.
A wet sound.
Organic.
Irregular.
A sound none of them could forget because it meant only one thing:
Transformation.
A human body breaking from the inside.
Tissues reorganizing violently.
Bones bending in impossible directions.
Flesh inflating, sinking, stretching…
A sound branded into their memory with fear.
---
Everyone turned to the left.
First their eyes.
Then their heads.
The red aura on their bodies flickered irregularly, as if even the energy reacted to their confusion.
There…
between two overturned chairs,
under the broken shadow of a fallen table,
with bones still trembling from the accelerated transformation…
a human body
was getting up.
Slowly at first.
Trembling.
Clumsy.
A hand braced on the floor, fingers clenching as if they'd forgotten how to grip anything human.
A knee rising… but swelling.
The thigh bending inward.
The skin splitting in fine, thin lines that revealed black scales pushing from beneath.
The torso arched backward.
A crunch.
Another.
Several more.
The ribs widened violently, pushing the shirt outward until it tore.
The neck elongated a hand's breadth…
then compressed forward as if something were pulling it from inside.
A spasm shook the spine.
Then a stronger one.
Then one that jerked the body upright, as if yanked from above by an invisible rope.
---
And then… it stopped being human.
The changes accelerated.
The back hunched forward.
The shoulders stretched outward.
The legs strengthened, calves thickening to double their original volume.
The scales expanded like a dark tide climbing the skin.
One second.
Another.
Another.
And when the body finally straightened…
when it stood erect on its two legs…
the human was no longer there.
What stood was another fish-monster.
A new one.
One whose presence—whose pressure—felt similar… or even greater than the first.
The room tensed as if the air had lost room to move.
The group felt a collective shudder.
Eli let out an involuntary, muffled gasp.
Eilor tightened his grip on his weapon.
The one in the blue coat swallowed.
Two soldiers in the rearguard broke into a cold sweat.
And Teo…
Teo, still under the wreckage of the broken bench,
still breathing among wood fragments and a dead body on top…
lifted his gaze just in time to see the second monster take its first breath.
A deep breath.
Wet.
Vibrant.
The new fish-monster's head tilted forward, maw slightly open, empty black eyes fixed on the group.
Quickly, the first monster turned.
A sharp crack of its hip.
A spinal arc.
An animalistic lunge.
It launched itself directly at the other monster, still with all the soldiers on it, embedded in its flesh, hanging on top of or clinging to it.
The second monster—newly transformed, still with steam rising from the cracks of its mutation— responded in kind.
A leap.
A charge.
An inevitable collision.
Both monsters advanced toward the midpoint.
Two masses of muscle, scales, deformed bone, and murderous pressure.
The soldiers, by pure instinct, knew what was going to happen before it did.
And they jumped.
All of them.
They abandoned their weapons.
They threw themselves to the floor.
They fell rolling, some crashing into each other, others into chairs, others into overturned tables.
Except Eilor.
While the others fled the impact,
Eilor planted his boots on the head.
He leaned his body forward.
Clenched his jaw.
Gripped his sword with both hands.
The hilt was filthy with blood.
Eilor's hands trembled.
Even so:
they ignited.
Orange discharges burst between his fingers,
racing over his knuckles, climbing his palms.
Sparks that seemed to seek something more than just escaping into the air.
All of it went into the hilt.
The metal vibrated.
Then hummed.
Then emitted a sharp sound.
The electricity flowed into the thick blade…
bouncing tooth to tooth in a "zigzag," each tooth gradually changing color, heating up.
And the blade lit up.
First with a faint orange.
Then brighter.
Then more.
Until the discharges Eilor was pushing into the sword began to make smoke rise from the wound in the head.
The energy crackled.
Sparks jumped.
The metal vibrated like an overloaded engine.
He was burning it out with a single, concise discharge.
Because the true nature of that "weapon"…
was not to be a weapon.
It was a conductor.
A channel designed to drink electricity and channel it more easily.
A spasm.
A crunch of uncoordinated muscles.
The monster whose head was being electrocuted grew numb, swayed, became uncoordinated.
It writhed as if each spark altered a different nerve, its body reacting in spasms that didn't match.
The smell of charred flesh began to mix with the white vapor of its forced regeneration.
A roar… malformed, choked by electricity, came from its throat like a liquid growl.
Then it raised its single arm and threw a spasmodic, violent swipe.
The black claw cut through the air in a disordered arc, fast enough to cut a human in two.
Eilor saw the shadow of the blow…
He threw himself forward, pressing his chest against the monster's deformed crown, sinking his knees for more control.
Both arms clung to the sword's hilt as if his life depended on it.
The electricity didn't stop flowing.
On the contrary: it increased.
It poured from his hands like a desperate torrent, running down the blade, entering the open wound, and racing through the monster's skull in a frantic zigzag.
The swipe passed centimeters from his face.
So close the claw opened a cut on his right cheek a millimeter from his eye.
The monster's arm continued onward, uncoordinated, hitting a table and splitting it in half.
Eilor squeezed the hilt harder.
The monster's body shaking beneath him.
But he didn't let go.
He crushed it with his own weight, with his chest, his abdomen, his entire back flexed forward, driving his boot between scales to hold on better.
Each discharge burned more.
His right arm was starting to go numb.
The sword vibrated as if about to break.
But Eilor kept pushing electricity as if willing to burn out his own nerves before letting go.
The other monster—the newly transformed one— noticed something approaching from its left side.
A rapid displacement, a pressure, a change in the air.
It didn't stop.
It didn't think.
It simply launched an attack.
A claw.
A lateral sweep that could have split a human in two.
But what it cut…
wasn't flesh.
It was a white blur.
A silhouette that passed under the attack at such a tight angle it raised splinters.
Eilor also saw the change.
He saw the monster attack something to its left.
Eilor, quickly piecing together the spatial information he had, made a quick decision, gripping his sword tighter.
The electricity stopped flowing into the weapon and returned to his fingers like hot needles.
He stood up, bracing on his left leg—clumsy, muscles still vibrating from the electricity—and tightened his grip with both hands.
A sharp tug.
The sword came free from the flesh with a wet sound.
The white regeneration vapor splashed him, hot.
Offering no resistance, he let the momentum carry him backward.
Falling onto his back, hissing air through his teeth.
—"Hhh!"—
The world tilted.
He fell…
And in mid-fall, as he scraped against the monster's scaly body, the limbless side…
Eilor bent his torso and acted quickly while the sound of the monster's thunderous footsteps grew louder. He was nearing the floor.
A left elbow.
A short, dry blow, without wind-up, but precise.
An elbow that impacted the monster's side.
The impact didn't even shake the flesh; it was like hitting stone.
And the monster, still convulsing, kept running, now with a thread of vapor rising from its head.
The blow, though insignificant, achieved something: it bought space.
Eilor moved a few centimeters away from the monster.
Using the gained movement, Eilor spun in the air like a soaked rag.
His legs tucked in, his boots sought traction in the void, his back let out a crack from tensing too fast.
He landed.
First one knee.
The right knee hit the floor with a sharp tak.
Then, momentum betrayed him.
His left side was pulled to the floor, crashing against the wood—CRAM—and the air was knocked out of him.
His face immediately followed, hitting the floor.
A blow that left his cheek burning and his vision shaking.
Then came the involuntary spin.
His body rolled, once, twice, three times among splinters, pieces of furniture, sunken and raised floorboards.
Each turn kicked up more splinters.
Each turn made it harder to know which way was up.
And in less than a second…
something hit the wounded, spasming, smoking-headed monster.
An impact from a single leg, but reinforced with aura.
The kick was Teo's.
It went straight into the monster's abdomen, sinking the scaly flesh, bending it downward as if splitting it in half.
The monster folded over itself.
And then…
Teo finished the movement.
The full rotation of his hips exploded upward,
turning the kick into an ascending whip that not only lifted the monster:
it sent it straight into the ceiling.
A roar.
An explosion of splinters.
A brutal snap from the impact against the beams.
The monstrous body was embedded for an instant, trembling, limbs splayed like a stamped insect.
And below…
the floor vibrated with the force of the blow.