Chapter 246: Finally Free
Days before the attack on Shatterbay, time had ceased to matter for John. He didn't know how long he'd been out or what had happened. He had no idea he'd almost died.
The pain had been agonizing.
It had started slowly. That was the worst part. Unknown to him at the time, Seo-jin's [Corruption] was breaking down his body, and because of what he'd inherited from the Matriarch, unfortunately for John, that meant a slow, horrifying metamorphosis.
His skin began to melt. The connective tissue beneath it bloated and swelled, pushing his flesh outward until it eventually hardened into a cocoon. The process took an entire day, and he felt every second of it.
Once his protective shell had formed, everything inside it—bones and all—began to turn to mush. Muscle, organs, and skeleton broke down together until a biological soup filled the space.
Yet even with his brain liquefied and his nerves dissolved, he still felt everything. Unable to scream, unable to move, unable to even understand what was happening, John nearly went insane.
It was the memories that saved him.
Memories that weren't his own.
Amid the blinding agony, images began forcing their way into his mind. They were loud, filled with sounds he didn't recognize and smells that defied his understanding, but clearest of all was the first.
John knew instantly that whatever he was looking up at, it was a god.
It was as if he were looking through the Vent Matriarch's eyes, feeling what she had felt and remembering the moments and sensations of her life.
The god should have made John recoil in fear and disgust. Instead, the sight filled him with an immense, overwhelming sense of devotion and love for the glowing nightmare. It was obviously some kind of bug god. Thousands of eyes covered a humanoid body riddled with cracking mouths and buzzing wings, the entire thing resembling a living hive. One massive hand reached down and rested gently on what felt like his own head. A few calm pats were all it took to make John forget the pain.
But just like everything else, joy never lasts.
The image changed, and with it, the hurt came back. Though now, through the shift of memories, he also felt anger. A deep, boiling rage, but beneath it was something worse: desperate fear.
He could see the Matriarch's view as she fought alongside her god, and their opponent was of the divine as well.
The enemy was an elephant-like creature with hundreds of trunks and a body the size of a planet. The Matriarch and her god rose to fight it, their powers combining in ways that left John speechless. Before, the tenderness of the bug god had lulled him into such complete acceptance that he'd nearly lost himself within the Matriarch's memories. Watching this, there was no chance of that. The scale of the battle made him feel indescribably small.
The battle ended, but John didn't see how. The memories moved on, thousands, if not millions of years flashed through his mind. Alien planets. Beings he couldn't begin to describe. Entire civilizations wiped out by her children, her never-ending swarm.
Finally, everything snapped, and the Matriarch was wounded. Her pain crashed into his own, sending John's consciousness into a whirlwind as he faded and fought to remain aware. Through the chaos, he caught glimpses.
Even though they didn't flow together, he remembered each one as if he'd lived it himself.
The god who sealed her. Thuldan. An ocean-sized mass of endless tentacles. The Matriarch had entered the Abyssal Realm by accident, only to be attacked the moment she arrived, her swarm helpless in a world of water.
She was defeated. Then sealed away, her bloodline suppressed until her descendants became what were known today as the Vent bugs. Confined to the Vent Cathedral for centuries, it was finally the sight of John himself arriving before her that began to pull him from the flood of foreign memories.
He heard his own voice bargaining with the Matriarch and felt her deception from the other side, every lie and hidden intention laid bare. The confusion and anger were overwhelming. Inside his cocoon, the swirling soup began to boil. Outside, the hardened flesh bulged in scattered places as something pushed against it from within.
He watched the Matriarch leave his body under Seo-jin's threat, watched himself wither and drain as she took over a broodling. By then, the rage was all that remained.
The cocoon cracked.
Blind to what was happening around him, Seo-jin had commanded Tiamat to regurgitate him, so when the cocoon ripped open and his seething mass broke free, he was instantly greeted by the salt air of Shatterbay. Against John's newborn body, the cold and salt felt unbearable.
Still completing his metamorphosis, his body was little more than flexible, half-formed chitin, pink and wet beneath the unfinished plates. Two dark neon-green orbs flickered to life within the collapsed helm as it slowly took shape. With the rage inside him demanding release, he leaned back and let out a high-pitched screech that vibrated the air around him.
It lasted only seconds, but almost immediately after it stopped, the ground around him came alive.
Insects of every kind crawled from the ruined earth and broken buildings. From miles around, anything that crawled or skittered began flooding toward him.
It wasn't long before he began to rise. The bugs poured into him, squeezing beneath his forming plates and filling the hollow spaces within his armor. Poison and acid sprayed between them, boiling against the wet armor before hardening it into place.
Soon, John stood in his new form.
Taking a deep breath, his body settled, and with it, his word echoed in his mind. He somehow knew what it meant the moment he heard it. His true name.
Ah-Muzenkab.
The second the name formed, something else sank into him, deeper than any of the changes to his body or even his new name. Something stronger. The Broodlink. It was overwhelming, and before he could fully process it, it was already in control.
Without a word, he knelt before his new master.
He received his first command. To follow Snare and obey his orders, and without a moment to celebrate his new birth, he was already en route to his first mission.
At least he wouldn't have to wait. He was more than eager to test the full extent of his new body.
So as he finished eating the heart of one of the legendary Woon Sisters, John of the past would've never dreamed of killing one. The fact that he enjoyed the warm taste to such an extent would have surprised his old self even more.
But he'd killed her for more than a meal, and it wasn't just because he'd been following orders. John wanted to see if her death would finally force Yu-na to fight. He didn't like the idea of leaving her alive. In fact, he really wanted to kill her too.
He watched the tears stream down her face and felt a rush of ecstasy when she dropped to her knees screaming.
"JI-YOON!"
The silly human screamed the name as though it might somehow bring the dead back. To him, it was music.
Seeing that she still hadn't attacked, he bent down and grabbed her sister's corpse by the leg. Lifting it where Yu-na could see. He finally caught the fire in her eyes as he sank his bugs into her sister's crotch.
"LET HER GO!"
Her blonde hair whipped in the wind as black tendrils snaked around her. With her aura fully unleashed, Yu-na's eyes radiated black light as she spoke a single word.
"Rot."
The arm holding her sister immediately began disintegrating into black mist. The effect raced toward his shoulder, and John tore away part of his own chest along with the infected limb as he leapt back.
Before he could land, another pulse of aura burst from Yu-na's ring, turning the ground beneath him pitch black.
She'd timed it perfectly. Unable to stop his fall, he didn't panic. New instincts took over. In the blink of an eye, the insects inside him shifted, packing his ribs on his right side with coils of centipedes. They burst all at once, spraying liquid with enough force to knock him sideways and clear of the shadow's range.
A black mass of insects crawled from the surrounding ruins and poured into him, rebuilding what he'd lost. As he rose, an explosion of bloodlight in the distance flashed across his chitin, briefly silhouetting his restored body.
"You Woons think so highly of yourselves. Did you really think death wasn't possible?"
Whole again, John tilted his horned helm as he stared at Yu-na, dark wisps of neon green spilling from him and creeping low across the broken street.
"I've wanted to kill you all for so long. Living under your boots. Bowing. Fighting over your fucking scraps."
His words dragged out as his aura continued to spread. John walked toward her without hurry, and Yu-na's rage could no longer blind her to the difference in their strength.
"I ran into you in a dungeon once. You all laughed at me. Called me bald. Called me ugly."
Yu-na's eyes darted between her dead sister and the demon approaching. Her mind screamed at her to run, but her body refused to move. Her blood was still boiling.
"Fuck you!"
Throwing both arms up with her hands pressed tight, she pulled the black tendrils around herself until they completely swallowed her. They sucked tight against her body, coating Yu-na from head to toe in skin-tight shadow. She didn't wait for John to respond before sprinting forward with one hand outstretched.
Smiling, he stopped to welcome the foolish human—then an overwhelming sense of death flooded his entire being.
Whatever covered her, he couldn't let it touch him.
But she was already too close.
Yu-na's hand was inches from his chest as his mind raced for an answer, but luckily, he didn't have to find one. A shot cracked across the battlefield, and something moving too fast to follow slammed into the side of Yu-na's head. It failed to punch through, but the impact snapped her sideways and sent her flying top over end.
Turning toward the source, John's vision stretched across the distance. Atop a mostly intact high-rise, Gregor lay prone with a large rifle braced against his shoulder.
With Sin's healing, the human had made a full recovery.
"She's mine!"
His layered shout carried easily across the battlefield. Seeing Gregor raise his weapon, John turned back toward his prey—
"Bastard!"
At the edge of his compound vision, he caught a surge of blood spiraling toward him. He raised a wall of poisonous fog just in time, and the attack tore into it, scattering red droplets through the churning haze.
Rushing to her sister's side, Hye-jin crushed a small idol of a green stag in her fist, then scattered the dust inside it over Yu-na.
The black spell covering her was receding, revealing mangled, scarred skin beneath. Hye-jin recognized the spell the instant she felt Yu-na cast it. It was extremely powerful, but the damage left across her sister's body made its heavy cost obvious.
"Where's Ji—?"
Her words died when she spotted what remained of her sister. Hye-jin might have rushed to her side if she hadn't seen the massive hole punched through her chest.
Somewhere in the distance, another explosion shook the street, white light flashing between the ruined buildings before fading across Hye-jin's frozen expression.
"You need to focus, otherwise we're both gonna die. Hye-jin... come on! She's gone."
Gripping her sister's shoulder for support, Yu-na rubbed the throbbing side of her head as the dust healed her wounds. Within moments, the mangled skin smoothed over, but Hye-jin remained frozen beside her, staring at Ji-yoon's corpse.
"Hye-jin, we gotta—"
Appearing out of thin air, the demon stood behind Hye-jin with his arm already drawn back, the insects beneath his chitin armor writhing.
"Move—!"
Heart in her throat, Yu-na tried to warn her sister, but she knew the attack would be too fast. Her eyes squeezed shut as the impact came, followed by a wet crunch that made her stomach drop.
In that brief moment it took her to blink, instead of her sister, the demon had disappeared. Yu-na's vision was filled by the back of a man she recognized instantly.
"Ivan... Ji-yoon. Father needs—"
"He knows. Fall back. I will handle this."
With that said, the head of Woon security removed his black suit coat, carefully laid it across a slab of concrete, and began rolling up his white sleeves. A wrapping ornate tattoo of a red demon slowly appeared across his right forearm, followed by an identical design with a blue demon on his left, while behind him, a distant rumble rolled through Shatterbay as red and white light briefly washed across the broken skyline.
Pulling himself from the side of a building, John's body shifted and packed itself back inside his armor, insects crawling into place.
His scout bugs allowed him to watch the remaining Woon sisters collect Ji-yoon's corpse and retreat. He sent a group of cockroaches after them, then focused on the new arrival standing amid the dust.
"Ivan Cho. I didn't even sense him."
Stepping from the rubble, John felt the insects swarming inside him begin to churn in a frenzy.
"This is better."
He still wasn't sure where the limits of his new body lay. So far, most of what he'd discovered had come through instinct, so a fight that could push him to his limits was exactly what he needed.
Watching his opponent approach through the settling dust, dark blue and red aura rolling from the human's body, a strange thought caused John to pause.
"I'm not afraid."
He'd been too caught up in everything to notice. Even while fighting one of the feared Woon sisters, he hadn't been afraid for a single moment.
Stopping a short distance away, the human's expression finally shifted. Ivan Cho looked confused as the bug demon suddenly started laughing hysterically. It sounded horrible.
"This is a strange way to face death. So be it."
Still laughing, another explosion thundered somewhere beyond the buildings as John's aura spiked. Massive waves of neon-green poison poured from his body, spreading across the ruined street in a rolling haze and mixing with bloodlight bursting against white in the distance.
"If it's death, bring it! Finally! After all these years!"
John couldn't stop. Even as Ivan settled into position to attack, John couldn't stop laughing, the sound carrying through the poisoned air.
For the first time in his life, he wasn't afraid anymore.
So when Ivan moved, he was ready.
Cho practically disappeared from where he stood. A growth of dark grey chitin surged around John's arm just as the man reappeared at his side, forming a thick shield before a glowing blue fist slammed into it. The impact produced a massive shockwave, blasting dust and chunks of concrete outward as the street beneath them buckled.
Two trails ripped through the dust cloud as John and Ivan shot backward, both catching their footing and sliding across broken concrete before grinding to a stop.
Steam curled from Ivan's fist. John's shield smoked as well, though the thick armor had also been crushed inward.
Still undaunted, John knew one thing for sure from their first exchange. Ivan was stronger.
Much stronger.