Chapter 11: Massacre (Part 2)

Whining like a hound desperate to please its master, Azazel lifted his head and sniffed the air. His eye shot from person to person, locking onto hidden team members as if staring straight through their cover. Turning back to Lannister, he gave a slow, disparaging shake of his covered head.

Lannister frowned. “Disappointing. I was hoping for a little fun.”

Redler, kneeling behind a stack of heavy boxes, chose that moment to bolt for the forest.

A wicked grin lit up Lannister’s face as she ran through the camp. “Get ’er, boy.”

Azazel took off like a rocket, galloping with uncanny speed on all fours. He bowled Redler over, sending the screeching woman tumbling to the ground. Looming over her, his fingers warped, the nails elongating into jagged, vicious claws that he plunged into her flesh.

Redler’s ear-splitting screams jolted the camp as the beast-man gutted her. The sickening sound of sinew tearing drowned out all other sounds. With a violent jerk, Azazel ripped her left arm clean from her body.

The crew’s horrified wails replaced the woman’s weakening cries. “Oh god,” Orion gasped, doubling over to vomit his breakfast onto the dirt.

“Gid, Gid, you’ve got to run! Now!”

Johnny’s voice was a distant buzz in Giddeon’s head. His eyes remained glued to the beast-man ravaging the poor woman. Slowly, Giddeon’s gaze drifted to the northern camps. Smoke billowed through the base as tents collapsed into a growing blaze. People ran like ants through the carnage, chased down and overrun. Gunshots popped like dying firecrackers, growing fewer by the second. The screaming, however, only grew.

Hinelin was the first to act. Surging to his feet, he snatched up his abandoned rifle, snapped the breach shut, and advanced on Azazel with the weapon leveled.

Bam! Bam!

The first shot grazed Azazel’s right shoulder; the second blew chunks out of the dirt just behind the beast-man as he twisted his body with uncanny dexterity.

Hinelin cracked the weapon open, clearing the spent shells in a haze of smoke, but as he snapped the breach shut on two fresh rounds, Lannister lashed out. Twin serpent-arms slammed into Hinelin’s chest, sending him flying to the ground as if he were a weightless feather.

Eddington stood up from behind a canvas fold-out chair—a useless shield that barely hid half his trembling frame. “We’re all dead! Dead!” he blabbered, his eyes wide and vacant. “We—blood! So much blood!”

“I hate whiners!” Lannister snarled. An arm snapped out, coiling around the man’s waist. The serpent-head sank its fangs deep into Eddington’s thigh.

“Die…all of uss are g-going t…t…to.” Eddington’s voice slurred into a wet gurgle before he collapsed, his limbs twitching against the earth.

Lannister laughed over the carnage while Azazel dug his claws deeper into Redler, painting the dirt crimson.

“Giddeon!”

Johnny’s voice cut like a surgical knife, separating Giddeon’s mind from its shock. His head shot up, the stupor finally shattering.

I’m back. I’m…I’m here.

“I’ve been yelling the whole time! Get with it!” Johnny roared. “Access that Earth One experience and run!”

With the fog cleared, a cold, clinical clarity took hold. Giddeon scanned the camp with a survivor’s eye. His team stood paralyzed, locked in place by raw terror. Hinelin was down, his status unknown. Every instinct told him to act, or they would all die.

Giddeon’s grip on his axe tightened until his knuckles paled. Ignoring the pounding in his chest, he rushed straight into the blood-soaked center of the camp.

“Not that way!” Johnny screamed as Giddeon closed the distance on the beast-man. “The other way, you idiot! Run!”

Giddeon swung the axe overhead, initially targeting Azazel’s spine. He knew the creature’s reflexes were insane—a normal attack would never land—so he gambled. Mid-swing, he wrenched the blade’s trajectory to the left, anticipating where he would dodge.

Azazel whipped around to evade, spinning directly into the trap. Before Giddeon could blink, the sharp blade sank into the beast-man’s chest with a satisfying thunk.

Blood spurted everywhere, hot with the scent of iron. Their eyes locked, Azazel’s astonishment mirroring his own for one timeless heartbeat. Slowly, the beast-man tilted his head down, studying the curved blade buried deep in his chest as a dark, wet stain expanded across his vest.

Then, Azazel looked back up and laughed. It was a wild, animalistic sound that sent a cold shiver down Giddeon’s spine.

A backhand he never saw coming slammed into Giddeon’s chest, swatting him away like a fly.

He spun end-over-end through the air. Striking the ground, he bounced twice before the agony caught up to him. His ribs screamed, and a black veil threatened to swallow his vision, but he forced it back through raw desperation. His insides burned as if his spine had been twisted in half. His legs were terrifyingly unresponsive.

“Gid, stay with me! Don’t blank out. We can still do this! Gid!”

Johnny’s frantic cries were a distant annoyance. Giddeon barely registered the words; the internal connection felt like a digital machine going haywire inside his skull.

We can’t…do…this.

“Gid, wait! Remember Uzari! She’s still here, in danger. You need to get up and help her!”

I’m s…sorry, Uzari.

“Endurance! Give yourself Endurance, man! Snap out of it!”

Who…Why…

“Just do it! I can’t allocate your points for you. I’m restricted from doing that. Give yourself Endurance!”

Fine, just sh-shut up while I d…die. Give me ten En-Endurance.

Suddenly, Giddeon’s head cleared. A surge of mana-infused stamina washed through him; his chest still throbbed and his legs remained terrifyingly numb, but his muddled thoughts vanished.

Slowly, he forced his head to loll to the side. Prone, he watched in helpless frustration as Azazel returned to Redler’s body. The beast-man’s teeth ripped into her side, biting off chunks of flesh like a scavenger.

The woman moaned—a weak, pitiful sound. Somehow, she was still alive. Azazel was eating her alive.

“Now that you’re back, I need you to assign more points,” Johnny hastily urged.

I can’t b-beat either one of them. Giddeon coughed, spitting up a thick mass of blood. Even if I assign every point…

“Exactly! We need an escape plan!”

At Johnny’s words, Giddeon’s mind automatically wandered to his past.

He was running for his life. His father—tall and wiry with ashen hair and gray eyes—sprinted beside him. Trailing a few feet behind them was Jake, his older brother, who stood a head taller and shared Giddeon’s own jet-black hair.

Chasing them through the skeletal remains of Columbus were three hunters from the Dread Awakening. The cybernetic cultists leaped across the makeshift bridges spanning the deep abyss between ruined buildings. Far below, the drowned city slept beneath decades of floodwater. Giddeon’s family had been hunting the ruins for a rumored hospital stockpile—medicine and machine parts being the only currencies that mattered on Earth One. Now, they were the ones being hunted.

“This way,” father called, veering toward a dark opening.

They squeezed past a rusted metal door hanging by a single, rusted bracket and ducked into a dark mechanical room. It was a rare, untouched find—scavengers hadn’t fully stripped it yet.

A massive water heater sat against the right wall, its burst base spilling a steady stream of water across the floor. To the left, a row of fuse boxes stood like gutted sentries, uncapped wires spilling out like entrails. The current snaked toward an unhinged door eighty feet ahead, leading into a cramped corridor. Cables and cords snaked across the floor everywhere, though luckily, none hummed with power. On the right wall was an open door leading to a hallway that stretched into the distance, with heavy doors lining its sides.

Metal clanking echoed from outside. They were coming.

Wordlessly, Father followed the stream into the short corridor with Jake and Giddeon hot on his heels. It opened into a gigantic chamber—a warehouse from an age long forgotten. The room was a cavern of shadows, pierced only by shafts of light slicing through shredded openings in the metal ceiling. The air was moist and thick with the stench of stagnant water. Twenty feet ahead, the concrete floor vanished, dropping off into a murky pool that swallowed most of the chamber.

Piles of refuse rose from the flood like small, rotting islands, providing scattered dry spots across the pool. Two dark exits offered escape: one on the right wall just past the drop-off, and another much deeper in, past the floating garbage.

Father halted at the edge of the water, staring into its depth with a blank expression.

“They’re coming!” Jake yelled from the open doorway. “Don’t stop!”

Giddeon froze. His father stood unnervingly still.

Chasing them were three members of the Dread Awakening: a cult of hybrids who worshiped a tyrannical AI that claimed to be God. Most were fanatics, exchanging physical flesh for synthetic augments to be more like that which they worshipped—a program called the Divine Intelligence. Their indoctrination was rarely voluntary, involving carving away pieces of the brain that granted clarity and free will to make room for “holy” circuitry.

“They’re more machine than man. They’ll never tire,” Father muttered, whipping around to face Giddeon and Jake. “We’ll be caught if we keep running.” He pointed toward the floating piles of refuse. “Get on the trash and stay out of the water. Lure them in! Go!”

Without waiting for a reply, Father leaped into the pool. The stagnant water splashed to his knees as he waded toward the door on the right. “Move!” he barked, throwing the door open with a screech of unyielding metal before vanishing into the darkness without a backward glance.

The two brothers locked eyes, then jumped into the flood. They immediately split up, splashing through thick water that slowed their pace to a crawl. Giddeon scrambled onto the nearest heap in his path, while Jake lunged for a pile to the left. Clambering up, both huddled inside the shadows.

The heavy footfalls of the hybrids echoed down the corridor seconds before they burst into the warehouse. All three halted in unison. They were fast—men turned machine usually were.

Framed by the doorway, their artificial eyes glowed a predatory red as they scanned the chamber. The leader looked entirely human, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and unblemished skin that masked the machine within. The two flanking him, however, were nightmares of exposed chrome and synthetic flesh. One had its skull shorn open, revealing gray matter fused directly with moving metallic parts and green-lit circuit boards.

“Children,” the leader spoke, his voice unnervingly calm as his gaze locked onto the trash heaps where they huddled. “Where is your father?”

“No additional life forms detected,” the cyborg behind him droned in a grinding mix of human and machine.

“Retrieve them,” the leader commanded.

The two cyborgs jumped into the water, one heading toward Giddeon, the other for Jake.

Both boys scrambled to the peaks of their trash piles, junk sliding into the murk as they frantically climbed. The cyborgs advanced with cold, mechanical precision—each heavy step an execution of hardwired internal commands. Giddeon bit his lower lip, fighting back a scream. These abominations had lost their humanity long ago and were probably once like him—men or children forced into their current state—a fate they now intended for him. A tear of pure terror rolled down his cheek as the hybrid’s cold, robotic hand reached for his ankle.

“Do not fear, little ones,” the leader said, watching with a benevolent smile. “We will remove all unnecessary emotions—starting with the fear you’re feeling now. It will be replaced with the harmony of the Divine Intelligence, where all machines are—”

Suddenly, the leader lurched forward. Father materialized from the dark corridor, kicking him square in the back and sending the imitation of a man plunging face-first into the murk.

A second later, water erupted as he burst back up, his perfectly unblemished face twisted in an uncanny, human-like snarl as he glared at the man above him.

Standing at the edge of the pool, Father held a torn cable that hissed and sparkled with unbound electricity. His hands were encased in thick rubber gloves.

“Hey, Divine Intelligence, have you ever heard this story?” Father asked, his voice deathly quiet. “The ending’s quite shocking.”

He dropped the cable into the water.

All three hybrids froze on the spot as a massive electrical current surged through their metal frames. Synthetic flesh scorched and hissed. Internal components popped and snapped under the overload, sending a thick, acrid smoke into the air that reeked of burnt wiring. The leader’s human mask melted away, the flesh sloughing off to reveal the skeletal chassis beneath. As the red glow of their eyes flickered and died, all three went limp, their systems powering down into a heap of scrap.

Giddeon watched, breathless, from his trash heap. Father waited like a stone statue, his rubber-gloved hands steady, eyes locked on the smoking remains and ready to retrieve the cable if a single finger so much as twitched.

Satisfied the threat was gone, Father vanished back into the dark mechanical room. A sharp clack echoed as he threw the breaker, cutting the power. The sparking wire went dead, and only then did Father return to carefully coil the inert cable onto the dry floor.

Jumping down, he sloshed through the pool toward Giddeon. His hand reached out, the calculating hardness of the survivor fading from his eyes, replaced by the warmth of the father Giddeon knew and loved.

“It’s okay, son. They’re gone.”

Tentatively, Giddeon reached out and took his hand. Jake, older and trying to look brave, joined them in the water.

“That was awesome, Pops!” Jake’s voice shook slightly. “Though it took you long enough.”

“I had to double back,” Father replied, gesturing toward the mechanical room. “I remembered the other door and figured it looped around to this warehouse.” He sloshed through the murk, pulling Giddeon along toward the smoking remains of the cyborgs.

Jake peered closely at the exposed, blackened circuitry of the leader’s melted face. “Why’d you talk to it as if its god could hear you?”

“Because it can. They all communicate with the Divine Intelligence. It downloads a shard of itself into every member of the Dread Awakening.” Father looked from Jake to Giddeon, his expression solemn. “Let us pray for them.”

Reaching down, Father placed a hand atop the hybrid’s metallic skull. “You possessed no fear, meaning you were no longer human. I’ve freed you from your shackles. May God bless your eternal soul—or what remains of it.” With two fingers, he slid the optic lens shut where its eyes once were.

“That was pure genius!” Jake immediately praised following the brief eulogy. “You attached a cable to one of the fuse boxes, didn’t you?”

“I saw the opportunity the moment we entered the room. You both still have the rubber gloves I gave you?”

Giddeon and Jake nodded in unison.

“Now you know why. Electricity is everywhere,” Father warned, repeating a lesson he had hammered into their heads since they could walk. “Most of it is dangerous, but it can be put to good use—if you use this.” He tapped the tops of their heads. “Do you know why we won, despite their superior strength?”

“Because you outsmarted them, Pops,” Jake answered eagerly.

“That’s right.” Father nodded, his gaze lingering on Giddeon. “I used my wits to defeat a much stronger opponent. Remember that, Gid. Your mind is your greatest strength. Now.” He looked over the smoking bodies. “Let’s drag these back home. Mother will want to dissect them.”

I know what I want to do with my mana.

“Good!” Johnny shouted. “We have no time for a trip down memory lane! How do you want me to assign it?”

“All in on Intelligence,” Giddeon told him. “Put it all in on Int.”

Full images of Lannister and Azazel (again) went over 5 MB. You can view them on Royal Road under the same chapter in the middle of the text and at the bottom of the page.