Ah'Ming narrowed his focus.
Something about the woman… felt wrong.
She was unnatural. He couldn't pinpoint if it was skin-tone, face, body, mo—
Wait.
Once you noticed it, you couldn't unsee it.
The woman's gait was wrong. Too careful, then too fast. Her balance kept correcting itself a half-second late, like she was compensating for extra weight that shifted when it shouldn't. It was almost as if something physical inside her was trying to escape. And there, there again! When she twisted to avoid a shadow, something pushed against the fabric of her coat.
A shape.
Blocky. Angular. Hard.
Her stomach bulged for an instant, edges too straight to be flesh.
Ah'Ming's breath slowed.
First of all, ew.
Second of all…
What she had was probably the key item to the mission. The key item that they needed to find. The something of the lost? Was it? He couldn't quite remember.
|Find the [][][][] of the lost!
The system chimed, rather cheerfully. Of course it only started helping now.
It also rather made sense when looked at in combination with the setting.
The item that the boss had?
A book.
Not metaphorical. Not symbolic (or maybe it was). A literal object, stuffed somewhere it absolutely did not belong.
"…Of course," he murmured. "Boss keeps the key inside the boss."
It made sense, that the boss would keep the key mission item in the safest place possible: in themself.
He moved.
Not fast. Not yet.
He stalked forward through the chaos, weaving between overturned tables and spellfire, timing his steps with the flicker of magic and the crash of bodies. Shadows lunged at others and ignored him, or recoiled when they got too close. A few players brushed past him, eyes glassy with devotion as they surged back toward Tamer's orbit.
The woman didn't notice him until it was too late.
Ah'Ming launched himself forward, claws snapping out mid-air, aimed straight for her stomach.
She screamed.
Not a human scream.
It was unholy, a wide scream that shred the listeners' ears. It sounded like it was from the depths of a bathroom in Taco Bell.
It ripped through the library like a blade, high and layered, carrying harmonics that made Ah'Ming's teeth ache. Everyone froze. Players. Magic. Even the shadows locked in place, their forms stiffening as if the sound had nailed them to the air.
Then the scream ended.
The shadows snapped toward Ah'Ming as one.
"All of them?" he muttered. "Wow. I feel popular."
He was kind of getting sick of getting ganged up on by little monsters. First the paper people, now shadows? What was next, goblins?
They rushed him.
Ah'Ming met them head-on.
His claws punched through the first shadow and didn't slow, ripping free and carving sideways into the next. He spun, momentum carrying him into a third, tearing it apart and hurling the remains into a cluster that dissolved on contact.
A pulse of warmth washed over him.
Buff.
He felt it settle into his muscles, sharpen his reflexes, lighten his limbs. He didn't look to confirm, but he knew exactly where it came from. Tamer, somewhere behind him, had flicked a switch. How kind of him, how amazing. Such a great guy—
AW COME ON.
Shut up, shut up brain. Evil mind magic again.
"Don't get attached," Ah'Ming muttered, then dove back in.
He vaulted off a collapsing shelf, slammed down into the floor hard enough to crack stone, and raked upward, shredding three shadows at once. Someone shouted an incantation and a lattice of glowing symbols flared briefly around him, reinforcing his strikes just long enough to matter.
It was still mostly him.
He tore. He smashed. He moved like the library was an extension of his body, using debris as cover, weapons, obstacles. A shadow tried to flank him from above and he ripped the railing down with it, sending both crashing into a heap of splintered wood.
The shadows broke.
They scattered, dissolving under relentless pressure, erased one by one until the space around him was clear, littered with fading darkness and wreckage. They all finally, disappeared.
Ah'Ming straightened, breathing hard.
His head whipped towards where the last monster was.
The woman was running.
She clutched her stomach as she fled, coat tearing as the shape inside her shifted violently, pressing outward, desperate. She didn't look back. She didn't need to.
Ah'Ming wiped shadow residue from his hands and looked up.
"…Yeah," he said, eyes tracking her escape route. "Nope. You're not leaving with that."
He stepped over the last dissolving shadow and broke into a run after her, the library groaning softly around them like it already knew how this chase was going to end.
For half a heartbeat after the last shadow dissolved, the library forgot how to breathe. Mostly out of shock, or anger at Ah'Ming. Kind of fair, but also not really. Eh, he was used to it.
There was some shock, obviously, but still. Just learn to identify monsters better, the idiots.
People stared at Ah'Ming like he'd just flipped a sacred table. Hehe, 'cuz they were in between a bunch of tables? No? Tough crowd.
"She was a player," someone hissed, horror curdling into anger.
"What the hell was that? You can't just—"
A few were frozen outright, brains buffering. A few were already shouting. And a precious little handful had that slow, dawning look of realization in their eyes. The look of people finally lining up the dots and realizing the picture was not friendly. It was great to see some people finally start to use their brains.
Ah'Ming clocked them and snorted softly.
Wow. Growth. Still idiots, but growth.
Tamer, of course, looked entertained.
He stood amid the wreckage with shadows lingering obediently near his feet, arms loosely crossed, head tilted like he was watching a stage play that had finally gotten to the good act. Amused detachment draped over him like a well-loved coat.
Queens above, he really was an audience member.
Ah'Ming didn't spare him another glance.
The woman was fast, running away, but she was panicking now. Her movements had lost their careful wrongness and tipped into frantic wrongness, coat flapping, the shape inside her stomach bucking hard enough to tear seams.
"Hey," Ah'Ming called, conversational. "You dropped the subtlety."
She didn't slow.
He surged forward, running like a really cool person, and punched her in the head.
Unoriginal. Inelegant. A classic.
It worked though!
Until…. It didn't.
His fist went straight through her skull.
"…Huh."
There was no resistance. Well. There was some, but none that would come with a monster fight. She was way too squishy. There was the very unpleasant sensation of his arm passing through something that was red and soft (something that was sort of normal, since like hunting monsters) but then was actually slimy and for some reason pulsing, like a really fucked-up heart.
The woman didn't fall.
She laughed.
Like a psycho.
Listen, he wasn't judging. Everyone had their "society is a trainwreck" breakdown phase, but a library really wasn't the best place to do it.
Her body rippled outward from the point of contact, skin sloughing off in sheets of light like a bad disguise being peeled away. Her face stretched, jaw unhinging, eyes splitting into too many facets before collapsing inward. Limbs elongated, joints bending where joints were not meant to be, her silhouette swelling and collapsing as if it couldn't decide what shape it wanted to be. Ew.
The thing inside her finally forced its way out.
A rectangular mass punched through her torso, slick with shadow, edges too sharp, too deliberate. A book slammed into the air, hovering for a second, pages fluttering violently, glyphs burning themselves into existence across its surface.
It was trying to escape, with magic that was both compatible and incompatible with her own. Kind of like a mother trying to steal her kid's passport.
The rest of her followed though.
She burst apart at the seams and reassembled into something tall and wrong, stitched together from shadow and pale light, ribs exposed and rearranging themselves, mouth splitting open along her torso in a vertical grin.
Double Ew.
Shelves warped, again. Books rattled and tore free, orbiting the creature like debris caught in a gravity well. The lights dimmed again, not fully out this time, but sickly and flickering, as if the room itself was afraid.
Some paper flew around her like a messed up halo, and some merged with shadows that came up from the ground. More, but cooler and upgraded, shadow monsters. Like level two of a game.
A system chime rang out, cheerful and utterly inappropriate.
Stupid system.
|BATTLE ENCOUNTER INITIATED.
|Good luck!
Were… were the previous things not battle???
Ah well.
At least there wasn't boss fight music. Though, maybe that would have been very cool. Scratch that, if only there was battle music.
Ah'Ming flexed his hand, watching shadow residue slide off his knuckles.
"…Yeah," he said, baring his teeth. "Called it."
Behind him, people finally started screaming.
Ahead of him, the boss leaned down, book slamming back into its chest with a wet, final thud, and fixed all too many eyes on Ah'Ming alone.
The grin widened.
Oh.
Yeah.
Definitely a boss fight.
Finally, something moderately interesting!