A swarm of malformed monsters poured out of the abyss. Arms that could never have grown in nature hooked over its edge and dragged up grotesque bodies behind them.
They climbed the rock wall on hooked claws, their scraping filling the cave. Like an endless tide of twisted nightmares, they swarmed upward through stone in packs, driven by a murderous urge that could never be soothed. They had only one goal: to tear apart and destroy the world above.
If they were left alone, there was no telling when this horde would discover the settlement on the surface.
Zihark stood at the mouth of the cave and kicked a stone into the abyss below.
The moment it touched the purple surface of that surging energy, the stone softened like wax and melted away, releasing a puff of black smoke.
That smoke drew the attention of the Void beasts, and the black tide immediately surged toward Zihark.
He lowered his helmet, shutting out the foul stench that made the air itself feel untouchable. Threat closing in, instinct filled him with strength.
He had never rejected that urge. It was what gave him the power to strike back, and it was what had kept him alive this long.
Bone spikes grew out from the backs of his hands as he slowly retreated into the middle stretch of the tunnel.
The creatures crawled along the walls. Beneath him, to either side, even overhead—there were monsters everywhere.
They clogged the narrow passage and attacked from all directions at once.
One horned, armored creature sprang at him. Its razor-sharp claws raked across Zihark's thigh, and its mouthful of needle teeth gnawed furiously at his hardened armor, leaving a scatter of shallow white marks.
Zihark did not bother tearing it off with his hands. The easiest things to grab on its body were those bladed legs, but these hunger-driven monsters would sooner lose a limb than loosen their bite.
He turned and slammed his knee into the wall.
The Voidling's body shattered on impact, its heart crushed by its own broken shell, and the oversized head still hanging from his leg was knocked away.
Zihark stomped down, crushing a smaller but no less vicious Voidling as easily as a snail beneath his heel. Without even lifting his head, he thrust a bone spike forward and drove it neatly through the throat of another one lunging at him, piercing its heart.
Thanks to his awareness web, Zihark could sense every malicious movement the monsters made around him, even if he closed his eyes.
He could see the weak points hidden beneath their shells. He could hear the pulsing of their hearts with perfect clarity.
No two Void creatures were ever truly identical, and no matter how many gathered around him, he never confused one with another. It was like the way one person might easily tell apart faces from a familiar group, yet see strangers from elsewhere as all blending into one.
To some extent, Zihark felt a disturbing familiarity with the Void creatures before him, the kind of recognition that existed between beings of the same kind. From one nearly identical Voidling to the next, he could still tell them apart. Perhaps, deep down, he had already begun to see them as kin.
Two Voidlings clinging to the ceiling shrieked and dropped onto him like hunting spiders, aiming for his spine and neck.
Two bone spikes burst out from his armor and punched cleanly through their hearts. Their shattered remains were pinned to his shell, and the energy spilling from their hearts was devoured by the spikes, repairing the damage in his armor.
If an attack truly threatened him, Zihark would dodge it. But the rest, even when he saw them coming, he would simply take. Every wound they carved into him became another mark of honor, hanging across his armor bristling with spikes.
By the time Zihark finally stopped striking back, the narrow tunnel was choked with broken remains. Bladed legs stuck up from the floor, overturned. Reversed streams of strange fluid filled every hollow. Flesh and gore were smeared across the walls, the rock itself melting and smoking, and the air had become something no living thing should willingly enter.
One by one, Zihark retracted the bone spikes that had grown from his armor. More than a dozen hollow corpses rolled off his body and hit the ground.
Their hearts and bodily fluids had been greedily drained dry by the spikes. Their empty shells had turned brittle, and every movement Zihark made crushed through them with sharp cracking sounds.
After the bitter fight, not only was he uninjured, but his hardened armor had fully repaired itself by feeding on the energy it had absorbed.
All he had needed to do was stand there and answer their attacks. The creatures had thrown themselves at him without fear, only to be devoured in return and turned into nourishment, becoming part of his voidskin forever.
Now that he had shed the pile of dead weight clinging to him, he could finally give his full attention to the massive creature in front of him.
It was a huge Void beast. Zihark had torn it open again and again with claws and bone spikes. Its eyes were gouged out, its shell split open, its flesh ripped apart, and several limbs had been torn away.
He had inflicted enough horrific wounds to kill any normal living thing a hundred times over.
But he had never touched its heart.
And so, despite everything, it still fought on with brutal ferocity.
The monster was struggling to rise while feeding on the remains around it.
It dragged blood and flesh from the ground into itself, devoured the essence of the Void, sealed its wounds, and grew new limbs.
The spots that had once been weak points hardened after being damaged. From the injuries it could not fully restore, tentacles wreathed in black flame burst out and lashed against the stone with crackling force.
It no longer resembled whatever it had once been. Three clusters of pinprick eyes glowed with warm purple light. It had become a vast, hideous thing with a mangled body and a face like a nightmare. Centipede-like bladed legs stabbed into the heaps of corpses beneath it as it thundered toward Zihark like a living war machine.
Its enormous body nearly filled the tunnel.
There was nowhere for Zihark to dodge.
So he met it head-on.
Digging his clawed toes into the ground, he raised both arms and caught the triangular skull in a posture like a giant lifting a cauldron. The impact drove his knees downward and gouged trenches more than ten meters long through the rock beneath his feet.
The stitched-together beast opened its huge mouth, trying to swallow him whole, but Zihark braced both hands against its upper and lower jaws and forced them apart. He looked down its throat and saw a gullet lined with teeth, its flesh convulsing hard. The heart was nowhere in sight. Then a long, tube-like tongue shot straight at his face.
It stopped just short of impact, frozen in place by Zihark's will.
Several burning tentacles lashed toward him, and the black flames ate through his armor, turning it to smoke that drifted away.
Zihark blinked once.
Then something like hunger connected.
His senses fell into perfect resonance with the Void creature in front of him, and through layers of shell and flesh he saw exactly where its heart lay—dead center behind the seventh segment of its skull.
He released one hand, seized the tongue, and ripped it outward. The loosened jaws slammed shut, severing the tongue instead.
Then Zihark forced the creature's head down and flipped forward. Planting both feet against the ceiling, he hung upside down and pinned its skull to the ground with his claws. With a body built like a centipede's, the monster had no strength to lift its head against that leverage.
The tentacles wrapped in black flame came at him again. With visible effort, Zihark freed one hand, caught one of them, and began devouring it.
Melting and repair happened at once in his palm. It felt as though the voidskin had bitten into bone marrow itself, and a violent shudder of pain ran through him.
A tide rose in his eye, crashing against the edge of an abyss.
The flames went still.
At once, the voidskin absorbed them.
Then, at Zihark's command, black fire surged back out across the surface of his armor and engulfed his entire forearm.
He dropped his inverted stance, sprang forward across seven armored segments, and smashed both fists down. The black flames melted holes through the creature's shell. Then he snuffed the fire, drove a claw into the strange mass of flesh beneath, and tore out the faintly pulsing heart with perfect precision.
Zihark wanted to rub his eye, but when he looked at the slick black sheen on his claws, he stopped. As tears began to fall, he felt something inside himself vanish. Yet he could not remember what it was, and in the end all he could do was let it go.
Half an hour later, Zihark had finally managed to tear the giant head off the stitched-together monster.
He looked at the result of all that effort, then removed his helmet and let out a stream of white breath into the cold, dry air.
"This thing's big enough. Ugly enough too. So now I've got the horrifying object... but getting it up to the surface is going to be a problem."
[End of chapter]