Blood Shaper

The thing swept Martha’s eyes back and forth across the battlefield, internally fuming that the defenders were holding their own against the undead it was throwing at them. It had gathered so many corpses from the departed that littered the land after multiple wars had brewed and then the vampyr had massacred so many of those who’d been left, and it had been sure that it’s unending horde would defeat anything it brought them to destroy.

Martha laughed at it’s displeasure and kept looking for an opportunity to strike. The was no such thing as an unending horde, which the thing would have known if it had actually tried to learn anything about necromancy. It had never truly learned her art, to it necromancy was just another tool. It was true that quantity had a quality all it’s own, but quality was quality and the thing had made such poor servants that most of them started falling apart as soon as they’d risen. It was a waste of bodies and a waste of their deaths, and it made Martha rage more than any other time the thing had defiled those who had passed. True necromancy was to use what the dead had left behind in service to the living, not this mockery and disgrace to their memories!

The thing sent the twisted abominations made from the corpses of the vampyr it had been studying forward as shock troops, but most of them fell apart before reaching the wall. They were either trampled beneath other marching undead, fell apart when their own movements tore the combined bodies apart, or were blown to bits by incoming fire. Only the worst monstrosities actually made it into the fray, but both were quickly engaged by the defender’s elites. The twisted centipede made form hundreds of vampyr bodies was attacked by a wielder of gray dust while a woman was punching the gold limbed creature repeatedly in the face. Neither would last long and Martha laughed at the thing’s attack falling apart.

Seething with rage, the thing gathered up Martha’s body and started lumbering forward. Martha forced the cells and strands of muscles she inhabited to stop vibrating with laughter so she could focus on her goal. It was difficult to stop, the madness pulling at her was so tempting to dive into so that she could forget the horror that was her existence, but she managed it. She kept repeating her oldest mantra to herself over and over while she waited for her moment.

This fight might kill her. Oh, how she prayed that this fight would be the one that killed her.

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The trees to the rear of the the undead army began to shake and bend. Kay braced himself, ready to jump into the fight. A hunched shape, taller than the abomination that had been made with Glowl’s body shuffled into sight. A thin cloak draped over the figure’s body, obscuring most of their features. A thin, disjointed arm held onto a towering white staff topped with a bulbous skull that was too large to be natural. Either that or it had belonged to a giant. A single clouded eye peered out form under the cloak’s hood and the empty hand of the being swung up to point in Meten’s direction.

From the other side of the battlefield a deep purplish-black beam of energy erupted from the hunched creatures hand and speared at Meten’s side. A ripple in the air intercepted the beam and the purplish energy splashed against a glowing orange rune made of ash that appeared from inside the ripple. Meten glanced to the side as the hidden rune protected him, then vaulted over the crawling vampyr centipede monstrosity, pushing it into the path of the attack as the rune buckled and failed. The bar of energy broke through and impacted the side of the undead abomination, sending it tumbling. It crawled back to it’s many feet a moment later, looking slightly dented on the side it had been hit but otherwise unharmed by the necromantic energy.

Kay had already leapt off the wall and was charging forward. He extruded thin platforms from the soles of his boots in midair less than a second before each step which let him run through the sky at full speed. He reached the oversized figure as the beam stopped. He threw himself down at highs speed as a halberd formed in his hands, the hardened blade of blood aimed directly at where the figure’s neck should be. The cloak covering the thing rustled and a third arm sprang from inside it to intercept the attack. Kay’s blade pierced the palm of the hand twice as tall as Kay was and sliced down through the arm, stopping at the elbow as it jarred against the bone there.

Hundreds of grasping arms bloomed from every inch of the bisected limb, trying to wrap Kay up. He turned his armor into a bladed whirlwind that gave him enough space to leap free. He jumped from the platforms he made until he was high enough in the air to evade the creature’s long arms and stared down at it, cataloging what he saw for the fight that would resume shortly. The necromancer, monster, or whatever it was was so much more grotesque up close. Like the two other abominations that Meten and Eleniah were fighting it was made of a multitude of corpses combined together into one disgusting whole, but instead of being fused together so that flesh and bone merged into each other this thing was weaved from pieces of dead bodies. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of arms and hands were braided together into a coil to make the three arms coming off the disfigured body. The same was true for it’s legs, but those were made of legs and feet. It’s torso was created from a graveyard’s worth of torso’s stitched together at the shoulders and hips with what looked like intestines, and the head and face were made of uncountable smaller faces, all stretched out in a way that made them look like they were screaming in agony.

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Kay grimaced as he realized the cloak the massive, stitched together hag was wearing was a patchwork of flayed skin. The only part of the thing that didn’t look like it was made from a mass number of the deceased were the cloudy eyes as big around as the palms of the hag’s massive hands, and bile rose in Kay’s throat at what they might actually look like if he was closer to them. The twisted, heinous creation figuratively screamed with the amount of misery and suffering necessary to create it, but that might not have been the worst thing. Kay’s vampire instincts, the ones implanted in him by the System to incentivized him to hunt down the eldritch, were snarling and snapping at him to unmake a part of the hag, meaning that this enemy was not just an evil that had to be eradicated for past crimes, but potentially a threat to the world as well.

He juked to the side as crackling bolts of purple lightning erupted from the arms that made up the third arm growing from the center of the “chest”. He sidestepped and spun to avoid getting struck while returning the bombardment with sharpened spikes that dug in and tried to cut and dig into the undead flesh. The areas with hands had those hands grow sharp nails and dig at the shredded flesh, shedding what was compromised while sections grew and covered the wounds with weeping scars that oozed putrid pus.

Kay focused his attacks on the chest area where there was nothing to dig out his tendrils. Heavy spears and quick daggers spread out around him in a cloud that rained down on the necromancer. Dead flesh sloughed off the creature in waves and avalanches that dripped down among the stamping feet as it tried to maneuver around Kay. Three giants hands tried to grab him, smash him, or slap him to the ground. Kay danced to the side as each blow came at him and he replied with slashes and blasts of compressed blood. If he hadn’t had the experience of fighting the asura miniboss in the Seramist Isles’s capital city’s dungeon the large multi-limbed monster might have been more difficult to fight, but the asura had been much more deadly and Kay was even more skilled than when he’d fought that.

As the fight continued and Kay peeled away more and more dead mass from the necromancer’s body, he began to get a better reading from his instincts. He’d been right the first time, the feeling of taint from outside this world was coming from something inside the monstrous body, not from it as a whole. There was a core somewhere controlling the greater whole, and that’s what he needed to target. He began sending more pointed attacks, driving deeply into the monster in an attempt to burn away the outer shell. The necromancer resisted as best it could, shifting it’s core away into other parts of the bod while thickening other sections into deeper armor with dead hair and nails sealing together into a protective casing. The movement didn’t matter when Kay could track the feeling of the core though, and he chased it determinedly.

Right before Kay could impale the twisting core on the end of his halberd the back of the monstrous construct burst open and a smaller form flew outward from it. That didn’t end the fight Kay was in though as the undead construct that had been operating as some kind of flesh-mech lost all sense of self-preservation and started attacking Kay en mass. The construct began collapsing on top of him, both grabbing at him with individual pieces and trying to crush him with its entire weight. He tore his way through with a focused detachment, carving out an empty space around him until the dead flesh slumped against the ground and he was free.

Wasting no time Kay threw himself forward at the source of the corruptive feeling, which was retreating away form the battle at high speed. The mass of flesh behind him rippled and threw itself at him in a storm of tentacles and pseudopods of mixed together corpse bits but Kay blasted past all of that. The fleeing core had hit the ground and was running as fast as it can away from him as undead began tracking him instead of marching forward mindlessly and began trying to slow him down as well. It did nothing, and he quickly caught up, then passed, the necromancer. He slammed to the ground in front of them and lashed out with three different attacks, each coming from one of his primary weapons as he shifted what he was wielding between blows.

Bits of the necromancer shifted, as if there was something wrong with their body, as they dodged back and Kay got a good look at them. The necromancer’s true from was very similar to the giant construct they’d been piloting. They looked like an older woman with gray hair and unseeing white eyes. She was naked, but that didn’t matter as much as the rot and putrefaction parts of her body displayed. There were rotting muscles showing form beneath translucent or torn skin and bones were poking out in other places. There was an alien intelligence that Kay could sense behind those seemingly blind eyes, the eldritch corruption Kay had sensed was easily identifiable as somehow controlling the woman.

Kay braced himself, ready to fight again in earnest against what had to be a difficult opponent, when part of one of her arms twitched. The woman’s head turned to look down at her arm in anger, then the other one suddenly rose up and slammed into her own neck, drawing blood and causing her to stumble back. Kay watched in shock as the necromancer started literally fighting herself before his eyes.

“What are you waiting for?” A desperate, crackling voice asked. The necromancer’s mouth moved disjointedly as she choked out the words. “Kill me before it’s too late!” 𝖗𝐚ℕÒ𝔟Ęṩ