Act 3, Chapter 117: The burning throats

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday), past 11:30 a.m.—approximately 4 hours and 51 minutes remain until the record time is lost

Elle Erikson

“Wait,” Patricia stopped us, pulling Piotr by the fabric of his jacket. It was more shreds than an actual jacket by now, but somehow it had survived everything that came before, including her current tug. “There are two soulmarks on this floor, and creatures connected to them. Lots of Authority of that nature too.”

“Details?” Kito prompted.

“Destruction...”

“Common shit,” Piotr commented.

“...and hunting,” she finished.

“Hunting could be interesting for us, brother.” Liana tapped her thigh with a finger, while Kito wrapped his arms around his chest in contemplation.

“How does it work for established Domains? If you use it temporarily, Lia, would Kito be able to manifest properties of the soulmark?” I asked while summoning my spy-ders and sending them ahead into the hall-like cavern that occupied this level of the Tower. It was even darker here than on the ground floor, with no light sources at all. I focused on the picture forming in my mind from what the spiders felt through vibrations rather than what they saw. At the same time, I rolled up the mask and forced the bear's nose painted on it to become the real thing.

“Individual basis,” Lia answered. “I used Concrete before. He had no access to it then.”

“There are mages who collect, buy, or even farm soulmarks. They know enough to extend their Domain's abilities well beyond normal means. Like that Domain of the Sailing guy who carried around dozens of soulmarks of Manifestation and Creation to make sails out of thin air. He had hundreds of them, so he didn't need to carry actual sails everywhere. His legacy Domain already had five soulmarks within it, so inserting another would've required advancing it far beyond what his group could manage. Instead, they focused on solving that by temporary means.”

“Peppin Walsh is the name, right?” Bastien tapped his chin. “Like in the Hobbit stories.”

“Yeah. Crazy guy,” Piotr mused.

“Can you guys focus on the present?” Patricia almost shouted, her embarrassment finally getting the better of her. “There are obviously monsters in there, ready to hunt us, and we can't see anything. How do we approach?”

“Just one more question, I promise.” I smiled to the woman. “Aren’t those manifestation and creation soulmarks very expensive? They sound like something that would be.”

“They are. This particular family found a splinter nearby their own Domain, where they for the lack of better word—farm those soulmarks. They let them grow and get them for themselves.” Kito said, stepping from one foot to the other. “Satisfied with an answer?” I nodded to confirm. “Good.

I winced. Shivered even—when one of the minions I released had been squashed with one clean and unexpected motion by something that was felt by others as a giant multi-fingered disembodied hand, with a mouth where the wrist ought to be. The echoes of the hit ran through the air and were caught up by the bodies of my little helpers to visualize the threat. Few more of those hands dropped from the ceiling and ran after my minions in complete darkness, dispatching my whole unit with a scary efficiency. I staggered back, and leaned against the steel wall. “I know what is in there. Enormous fingered mouths, that drop from the ceiling. Two of their appendages are like thumbs with wide flat surface, they use to smash things, while rest of the fingers have long nails they use to thrust into the soft tissue to cling to is.”

“Sounds delightful.” Patricia caught her stomach.

“I can take them.” Liora announced.

“You don’t know that.” Piotr, out of all people, addressed him. “But I can.” His words of wisdom were short-lived. I turned my head in disbelief. Patricia and Lia matching my motion, with the latter covering her face with both hands too. “Just a joke. Goddamn people. Relax.”

“We need to know where we're going before we even step into that chamber,” Liana proposed, spreading her arms apart and letting the bugs crawl out of the pockets in her skin. They left her with trails of Shadowlight, making her once more look like a star ejecting its coronal gases into the darkest of nights. Once those links broke, the little critters spread out, venturing both across the ground and through the air, deeper into the chamber.

Piotr planted his bat into the ground, and his protective shield shimmered with clouded crimson Shadowlight.

“Just to be fucking sure,” he mumbled.

At the same time, I let web-slingers pour out of the Domain and onto the field. Each received its own orders: connect to one another with silk, spread wide, and keep expanding. They started fulfilling those commands with beauty and efficiency. The first stood in the center, and every new one approached, attached its silk to the growing web, then skittered away to find another point to anchor before moving onward. At the same time, the greater organism they formed pushed farther and farther into the darkness.

I extended my hand toward them, watching jolts of prismatic Shadowlight dance between my fingers like static electricity before spilling from my palm and spreading across my minions. Every single one accepted it, each glowing briefly as it became coated in the glorious common purpose I bestowed upon them.

This time, it was movement and ever-expanding entrapment.

“Whoa,” Patricia exclaimed, covering her mouth as the web my spiders spun lit up, soaking in that Shadowlight. The entire chamber suddenly brightened, revealing its enormous size and the terrifying shapes waiting above to strike. The shadows they cast against the writhing, squirming ceiling gave the whole scene an ominous look. “Equally beautiful and scary.”

Another of those enormous hands dropped from the ceiling, trying to crush my critters, only to become caught in the web. I felt it struggle through the vibrations carried along the silk to my minions.

Then another hand was caught. And another. With each one grounded, my smile grew wider.

“My bugs are dying en masse in the very center. More so than anywhere else,” Liana said.

“I can feel the expression of Hunting Authority coming from there. It's singular in origin, while Destruction is much more common and evenly spread,” Patricia said, wrinkling her nose as a particularly foul scent reached us.

“I can't really find an exit,” Liana concluded, turning her head from Pat to me. “What about you guys?”

“Nothing,” I replied, while Miss Paulding simply shook her head.

“We can't just stand here forever.” Piotr grew impatient. “Maybe it'll reveal itself once we go in?”

“Maybe.” Kito crossed his arms over his chest. “It's still unwise to fall into the same trap we just managed to crawl out of.”

“Kurwa,” Piotr mumbled in his native tongue.

“What do you guys think about setting my web on fire?”

“What?” Laurent asked. “What do you mean?”

“I say, do it,” Kito answered before I had a chance to explain.

“I agree. We're close to the exit in case it goes south. Fire would give us a chance to see while at the same time killing those pesky things in here.” Liana tapped her thigh with a finger, weighing our options.

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“I think that's a bad idea,” Patricia added. “What about the smoke? It'll keep rising, and up is where we ultimately want to go. We'll suffocate.”

“I'll deal with the smoke. As soon as the cavern lights up, I'll take the photos and edit it out.”

“You heard the man,” Liora said, hissing at the same time through his fox-like snout. His whiskers twitched, and he whirled in the air, unable to contain his excitement. “Let us hunt!”

“Vote?” Kito asked. “Who is against?” No one voiced any concerns anymore.

I reached for two explosive cards and about a dozen fire cards, fanning them between my fingers before letting them collapse back into a single stack. I shuffled them in my hands for a second, the cards riffling and mixing together in a blur, before snapping them into a quick bridge between my palms in a cascade of cardstock arcing and clattering back into a perfect deck.

With the trick complete, I sent them all flying toward the web stretched between my minions. Each one trailed Shadowlight like a comet's tail as it accepted its steel identity mid-flight, the paper-thin cards visually thickening and glinting into honed metal one by one. They whirred through the air like throwing stars, spinning end over end, before leaving my aura entirely and there, at the very edge of my reach, each one flashed one last time, a final pulse of light as it accepted its secondary identity and became something altogether more dangerous.

The explosions lit the cavern first, shaking both the fleshy mass below and the air that rushed toward us in a hot, glowing blast. Then the fire cards struck the web spanning much of the cavern, and as the silk caught fire, the flames spread with frightening efficiency.

At the same time, I released the Authority sustaining both the elaborate artistic installation and the individual spiders, letting them become nothing more than origami once again. They too caught fire and burned away within seconds.

“Look at you!” Piotr shouted as the flames overtook the monstrous hands trapped within the web. Their flesh burned quickly, Destruction by flame claiming them as though returning them to the Authority they already carried.

At the same time, Laurent worked at a frantic pace, taking photograph after photograph. His flash barely paused between shots while his fingers danced across the touchscreen, editing the smoke away just as he had promised.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't mesmerizing.

The blackness and greyness of the smoke lit up with Shadowlight, veins of pale fire threading through each billow before it guttered into puffs of glowing nothingness and winked out of existence as if the dark itself were breathing, inhaling embers and exhaling ghosts. Columns of smoke unraveled and vanished, only to be born again a heartbeat later, rising straight out of the raging flames below in an endless, hypnotic cycle, each fresh column catching the shadows of the burning creatures and throwing them huge and warped against the writhing pillars of fire and the distant walls, so that the whole chamber seemed to dance with silhouettes of things already dead.

Those too caught fire and soon the entire chamber glowed with hellish reds and oranges, the light pulsing like a slow, monstrous heartbeat, revealing that the way out lay within the central column—most likely an elevator shaft leading upward.

“I hate elevators,” I whispered more to myself than to any of them, while watching that light also reveal the Hunting Authority hidden in this place.

A centipede vast enough to dwarf the shaft it coiled around, its segmented body formed from the torsos of Nazi soldiers stitched one behind another, spines fused to ribs fused to spines in an endless column of flesh. Skin sloughed wetly between the joints where the stitching had torn loose, and old uniforms hung rotted and fused into the meat beneath. The grotesque creature extended itself from the column with a sound like tearing canvas, and where a head should have been, dozens of soldiers' arms fanned outward instead, fingers splayed and grasping, forming a bristling, many-handed maw. Those hands snatched the last of Liana's stragglers from the air, and the segmented body rippled—one torso at a time—as it passed each screaming bug backward down the line, mouth after mouth after mouth, until nothing was left.

"I can't see any more moving hand-monsters. Can you?" Piotr turned his head around.

"No."

"Nothing."

"All are dead." We all said one after the other, each one of us trying our best to spot the danger before it put its eyes onto us.

"There is our exit," Patricia pointed at the steel shaft exposed behind the half-burned mass of tongues at the center. "If we wait long enough, everything will—"A roar of compressed air tore down from the top of the long tunnel above, a single monstrous breath that slammed into the chamber like a detonation. It hit every flame at once, snuffing the inferno out in one instant, unified gasp, as if the entire tower had filled its lungs with the fire itself and swallowed it whole. The force of it picked us up before we even understood what was happening and hurled us against the wall behind us; we dropped to the ground in a heap as Piotr's shield guttered out from under him, and he too was swept off his feet like he weighed nothing at all. In the same breath, every scrap of light the inferno had given us was gone, and the darkness that replaced it felt total, pressing, alive. "—burn," Patricia finished her sentence, as she rolled onto her back and coughed.

"This tower exhaled. This is a fucking bullshit!" Milo shouted, hauling himself into a sitting position, bracing on his bat and rebuilding his shield in the same motion. "Places are not supposed to breathe!"

"Here goes an easy approach," Kito complained.

"It's still easier than dealing with those hand-creatures. And we know there is this mutant hunter in the middle, waiting for us to approach the tower. We can prepare. It's a win in my book."

*Would you be willing to try something for me?* Alexa's inner voice reached me.

Of course. Why wouldn't I? Her idea slipped into my mind the moment I gave my answer.

“Guys I have another idea. Want to hear it?” I asked the team. “If what I have in mind works, we might be able to get past this creature without a fight at all.”

“How would that work?” Liana countered with a question of her own while rolling her neck, bones cracking with each turn.

“It's a hunter, right? So it'll hunt us if it considers us prey. If it sees us as more dangerous hunters, it'll leave us alone. Especially if we prove to be stronger hunters by virtue of numbers.”

“Far-fetched, and it exposes us to the danger of walking into its nest unprepared.” Kito voiced his reservations.

“Then let me do it alone. I'm already wearing a suit that makes me look like part of my spider army. If anything goes wrong, it'll only be me who gets hurt. And if it works, you can join me.”

“We accepted you and decided you're worth keeping on the team. We will do everything in our power to keep you alive and unharmed,” Kito replied. “That said, I think you should do it.”

“What the fuck, man?” Milo asked. “You just said it was a bad idea. Is there some mind-control stuff at play here, Pat?” He turned toward our field medic. She shrugged and shook her head.

“Not any that I can notice.”

“I meant that all of us going there is a bad idea. If she goes alone, we can observe and either ambush the creature or help her if something goes badly. It's a better plan.”

“I agree with my brother.”

“Me too.” Laurent supported the Chuma siblings while checking his arm-mounted device. Then he focused on me. “I can teleport you back to us the instant something goes wrong. Just don't resist my claim of Authority, okay?”

"Deal." I said it while summoning paper wasps and spy-ders all around myself. Each small critter was connected to me inside my aura by invisible Shadowlight threads, and every single one responded instinctively the moment I started sprinting across the burned tongues covering the ground.

The wasps flew beside me on buzzing wings while the spiders bounded forward as fast as they could. Some attached silk lines to me whenever they managed to remain within my vicinity.

Liora flashed into his Shadowlight form, and soon he was running through the air at my side as well, teeth bared in an aggressive, animalistic smile. I felt like a real hunter on the prowl among my companions. My movements were sure and devoid of fear. My muscles remained relaxed as I took long, measured strides, completely assured of my own dominance. My act was pure, and so were the acts of everything around me.

So I reached out and altered our shared performance.

Applying my power over Identity to the group, I turned us into apex hunters on the prowl. Shadowlight burst around us, coating each creature in a thin veil of brilliance, while Lio and I remained fully covered—him in his usual radiance, me in a protective layer of armor. Not because I feared being harmed, but because I wanted to push back the darkness and see what I was hunting.

As we neared the shaft in the center, the creature finally revealed itself, illuminated by both my Shadowlight and my lóng's. Its maw froze in indecision, the dozens of grasping hands curling half-shut, as our Authorities collided.

Mine declared absolutely: we are the ultimate hunters. Its Authority answered in the same breath, the same certainty, the same claim laid over every inch of the tower it had ruled for however long it had festered here: I am. Two truths, identical in shape, could not stand in the same chamber. Something had to give, and for one suspended second, neither did.

Mine was anchored in numbers, in the swarm at my heels and the wasps humming conviction into my aura, in the resonant strength of my Domain pressing outward. Its was anchored in something older and uglier—territorial dominance soaked twisted flesh and steel underneath, and beneath that, the very nature of the Soulmark stitched into its flesh, the thing that had made it this and nothing else for who knew how long.

For a heartbeat, it held. I felt the pressure of its claim pushing back against mine in my own soul, unwilling to concede the ground it had never once needed to defend.

But I held an ace up my sleeve. My dragon companion believed in nothing more strongly than his own superiority, and that certainty poured straight into my Authority like fuel onto a fire already burning hot.

The creature's claim buckled first, then shattered outright. Before I even reached the base of the tower, the horrific thing recoiled, its many-armed maw twisting away from us as if it couldn't bear to look, and it retreated in a spiraling motion higher into the structure, hastily abandoning its former hunting grounds and leaving them for me and my swarm to claim.