Chapter 21: Chapter 21: The Paladin

“Okay,” said Valerie, “what the actual fuck?”

“Long story.” Valen glanced behind him to look for the exit.

The moment he did, a cold chill exploded at the back of his skull. He turned back around just in time to see a bone-tipped tentacle shooting straight at his head.

Startled, Valen stumbled to one side. The sharp bone protruding from the tip of the sinuous tentacle sliced open his cheek before burying itself in the wall beside the heavy metal doors leading out to freedom.

Seeing an opportunity, Valerie gripped her fists tight. Her claws gouged into her own palm and the blood that spilled out solidified into another knife for her to wield in an inverse grip.

She stabbed it into the tentacle, causing it to let out a disgusting squelching sound. Gripping the blood knife tight, she ran towards Cyril, dragging the blade up his tentacle arm while screaming in righteous fury at the top of her lungs.

Flesh and sinew split open in one one long gash, bisecting the tentacle wherever the jagged crystalline blade touched. Blood sprayed out the tentacle in a crimson geyser. A trail of carnage on the walls and ceiling splattered behind Valerie as she rushed at Cyril down the hallway.

Valen joined in, running full speed ahead towards Cyril with the intent of beating his still mostly humanoid body to a pulp. He kept his lips pursed shut the whole time, unwilling to let a single drop of blood get inside his mouth.

Cyril’s left hand morphed into another tentacle and shot straight at him, but this time he was ready.

Valen hopped to the left to avoid its bony spear-like tip. When he saw the muscles go taught upon reaching the limit of its range, he stopped running and wrapped his right arm around the trunk of the tentacle. His left hand also gripped the tentacle’, his black claws digging deep into his tough bloody flesh in between the white bones protruding from it. In one sudden jerk, he yanked it backwards and took the person it was attached to with it.

Cyril stumbled forward just as Valerie finally reached him, falling straight towards her knife.

Several of the countless smaller tentacles on his back wrapped around Valerie’s wrist before she got the chance to ram the knife into his heart. Her right hand quivered in murderous rage under the tentacle’s grip. The tip of her crystalline blood knife hovered less than an inch away from Cyril’s exposed chest, only kept at bay by the tentacles squeezing her wrists.

Undeterred, Valerie slashed at Cyril with her left hand. Her black claws ripped open three deep slashes across his face and scratched the bones that lay under them. One claw managed to slice off an eye, sending the mutilated red orb flying from his head.

An inhuman cry of pain and rage roared forth from Cyril’s half-exposed maw. His one remaining eye, red and white and full of fury, stared daggers at Valerie before the tentacles on his back lashed out at her.

A dozen tentacles wrapped around her left arm. Then her torso. Then her legs.

“Shit!” Valerie struggled against the slimy tentacles restraining her limbs, never letting go of the blood knife in her hand. “I do not like where this is going!”

“Hang on!” Valen shouted.

He dropped the tentacle that used to be Cyril’s left arm and rushed towards Valerie. Not a second later, he felt the inexplicable chill wash over the back of his skull.

Instinct screamed for him to duck for reasons he didn’t quite know, but he followed it anyway, dipping his head nearly parallel to the floor while his feet continued to run.

Something brushed past the back of his lowered head at incredible speed. He glanced up and saw the sinuous tentacle he’d been holding retract back into Cyril before morphing into his arm. It must’ve tried to swipe at him from behind during its way back.

Valen shuddered when he realised that, had it not been for the mysterious chill at the back of his skull warning him, he would’ve been knocked out or worse.

Well, whatever it was, he just had to be grateful to have it now and wonder what the hell it actually was later. Right now he needed to save his sister from this eldritch bastard.

No point trying to pry the tentacles off her. He didn’t have much faith in his claws’ slashing power with how little use they’ve gotten over the years and there were too many of them anyways. Focusing on them alone would only give Cyril ample time to attack him.

He would have to cut the snake’s off so its body could die.

Valen leapt at Cyril as soon as he was in range. The claws of his left hand dug into the flesh under Cyril’s neck until he could wrap his fingers around the collar bone.

Cyril swung a left hook at him with his now humanoid arm. Valen blocked it with his right elbow, guided by muscle memory honed through years of martial arts.

Not missing a beat, Valen clenched his right hand into a fist that he proceeded to hammer against Cyril’s jaw. The jawbone had already been dislocated once, and if he was lucky it would still be weak enough to pop out again just as easily as before. At the very least he hoped it would inflict enough pain for him to loosen his grip on Valerie.

No such luck.

The jawbone remained secured tight, held in place by strands of hard muscles that were already beginning to regenerate over his exposed bones. The tentacles around Valerie’s limbs refused to budge no matter how many times Valen pummelled Cyril in the face.

“Okay, fuck this!” Valerie used all her strength to pull her right wrist close to her mouth with the tentacles still wrapped around her entire arm.

She opened her mouth, her jaw extending to its very limits. Four vicious fangs emerged from where her canines were and she chomped them all down the squirming tentacles around her wrist.

A chunk of tentacle flesh and bits of her own sleeve tore off inside her mouth. What remained of the maimed tentacles around her wrist either fell off or retreated. With her knife hand free, Valerie slashed at the rest of the tentacles trapping her limbs. The tentacles she bit off still writhed in between her fangs as if struggling to break free from her vice-like jaws.

“Don’t swallow his blood!” Valen warned, still punching Cyril in his now barely recognisable face with his bloodsoaked right fist. “It’s poison!”

Turns out he didn’t need to warn her.

Her face had scrunched up in disgust the moment she tasted the blood bleeding out of the tentacle.

Even without tasting it, Valen could almost smell the potent magic emanating from the blood that now painted the basement halls. He imagined trying to drink it would be akin to eating an extra hot demon pepper.

Valerie spat out the tentacles in her mouth, its torn and minced flesh splattered into the ground with a sickening squelch.

“The hell is this shit?” Valerie briefly exited the fight to wipe her lips and spit out any remnants of tentacle flesh still caught in the recesses of her mouth. “I feel like I just licked Leva’s arse.”

“You don’t want to know.” Valen stopped punching Cyril in the face for just a moment and swung his knee into his.

Cyril’s leg buckled under him at the unexpected low strike. Valen followed it up by pushing him down with the hand still gripped around his collar bone.

The combined force of Valen’s push and the weight of the thousand tentacles growing from his back forced Cyril to fall onto the ground. His back tentacles became crushed under his own body. They writhed in apparent pain under him. Their movements turned frantic when Valen added his own weight to the mix.

He tore his claws from Cyril’s collarbone to grip his right shoulder in place instead. His right knee pressed against his other shoulder to remove any chances of retaliation.

With that out of the way, it was back to the regularly scheduled programme of face punching.

Valen reeled back his arm, his shoulder raised up almost perfectly straight in the air. His clenched fist crashed down right into Cyril’s face again, this further time assisted by the force of gravity and the fact that his head couldn’t turn with the punch while the ground was behind it.

Each brutal blow drew energy from Valen’s entire upper body but was channelled through only two extended knuckles, those of his middle and index fingers. They concentrated all his power into a singular point that didn’t allow kinetic force to spread and deal less damage as a result. Every punch hit with the precision of a pistol that had the power of a shotgun, but unlike either of those, Valen wasn’t going to run out of bullets any time soon.

Over and over again he pummelled Cyril in the face, never giving him a chance to catch his breath. He was pretty sure Valerie was also stomping the poor bastard in the chin or crotch behind him, but he was too preoccupied with trying to cave his face in to really notice.

Then, out of nowhere, a familiar chill gripped the back of his skull again. So far it had warned him of danger, but he was in a dominant position right now. It’d be foolish to try and give it up now on a spur of the moment hunch.

Whether out of a tactical choice or mind clouding anger, Valen elected to ignore the chill at the back of his skull and brought his fist down on Cyril’s jaw again.

He didn’t realise his mistake until it was too late.

Valen felt his knuckles hit Cyrils’ clenched teeth but was surprised when he felt his punch keep going.

Cyril had opened his mouth, allowing part of Valen’s hand inside it. Rows of sharp, needle-like bones sprouted from his gums over his regular teeth.

Valen jerked his hand back from the monstrous maw when he realised what was happening but was a split second too slow. The two extended knuckles he’d been ramming against Cyril’s face for the past minute were still in his mouth when his jaws clamped shut.

Pain erupted in his fingers. First sharp, then crushing, then nothing. Cyril’s new bony teeth sliced through his flesh and pierced right through his bones as easily as if they were dried twigs. By the time his right hand returned from the mouth of the beast, it was missing the two fingers he’d been striking it with.

The chill at the back of Valen’s head returned, stronger than ever. This time he heeded its warning and leapt to his feet, as far away from Cyril as he could.

“Get back!” Valen shouted at Valerie, though it wasn’t necessary.

The mixture of surprise and dread on her face suggested that she could tell something was coming too, and she responded by jumping back alongside him.

The tentacles on Cyril’s back pushed against the ground. They stiffened into pillars of unyielding muscle and bone. Every single one of them propped his limp humanoid body up in the air. His open arms laid spread out on either side of him as if nailed to an unseen cross.

A long red wound split open in the middle of his naked chest like a giant mouth. From within the muscular frame of his torso burst forth even more tentacles, but these were different from the ones on his back.

They each ended in ferocious jaws filled with bony bloodstained teeth that snapped at the air like a grotesque bouquet of fleshy carnivorous plants. Saliva dripped from their ravenous fangs, eager to plunge themselves into any living flesh they could find.

“Again,” said Valerie, “What the fuck.”

“You know, at this point, even I don’t know,” said Valen.

His knuckles were already beginning to heal from his missing fingers thanks to his healing factor. The stumpy knuckles had stopped bleeding and he could feel his bones slowly growing back with strands of newly grown muscles coiling around them. It would take at least several hours before they fully grew back, so for the time being he’d just have to make due without them.

The tentacles on Cyril’s back eased his body into a vertical position, his feet hovering about a foot off the ground. His remaining red-white eye was half hidden through the bruises and swollen from all the punches Valen threw at it, yet it retained an eerie calmness to it. He spoke, and each word passed through his bony needle-like teeth like a poisonous hiss.

“You have been lucky so far, but I am no mere pawn forced to serve through drugs or selfish promises.” The chomping tentacle maws that had slithered from the gaping wound on his chest stopped squirming aimlessly in the air and pointed themselves at Valen and Valerie like a hundred hungry snakes readying themselves for a strike. “I am a paladin of the Unborn God. A holy warrior here to usher forth a new age-”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Valerie crafted another red crystalline weapon out of blood from her bleeding palm, this time a full-length sword with a single edged blade as long as her arm. “But you talk too much.”

She rushed at Cyril with sword in hand. Each powerful step stomped the ground to propel her forward with the speed of a fired bullet.

The tentacle growing from Cyril’s stomach lashed at her, their open maws stretched wide open to tear her to pieces. As soon as they were in range she slashed them to ribbons with her blood sword. The ones she couldn’t hit she ducked and weaved through like a skater on bloody ice.

Chunks and strips of flesh flew every which way with each swing of her blade. Hungry maws lay severed on the ground, opening and closing with nothing between its fangs like a fish out of water.

Meanwhile Valen was pushed into the defensive, forced to focus on just trying to dodge the tentacle maws snapping at him. The chill in the back of his skull flared up about a split second before any of them lunged at him, allowing him to narrowly avoid their hungry fangs without an inch to spare.

Whatever the chill was, it was saving his arse right now. While he was no slouch when it came to fighting, this wasn’t anything like the scraps and spars he was used to. During those he only had to worry about four limbs and maybe a headbutt to defend against up close.

Here he wasn’t so much fighting a person as he was trying to keep a den of eldritch snakes from consuming him. Tentacle maws lunged at him from unnatural angles that no normal fighter could reach with a humanoid body.

He couldn’t even block any of them. Doing so would only allow the tentacle to clamp down on and immobilise him while its brethren tore him apart. Without a weapon to dispatch them with like Valerie’s sword, every last bit of his energy had to be put purely into dodging. Even then, he barely managed to scrape by.

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There just wasn’t a reliable way to predict where the next strike would come from, and he had to fight against his own instincts to not slip into fighting habits that might’ve helped him in a normal brawl but would surely get him killed here.

But whether it was shooting up from under him or swinging down at him from above, the mysterious chill at the back of Valen’s skull bailed him out by warning him of it before it could connect.

On the other end of the spectrum, Valerie dedicated herself to all out offence. The jagged crystalline sword forged from the very life in her veins tore through any tentacle maw that dared approach her. Every bloody stump she cleaved drew her closer to the head of the snake who was quickly running out of fangs.

Upon reaching Cyril’s main body, she thrusted the tip of her sword straight at his head. The blood crystal blade moved like a sliver of red lightning, but not quite fast enough.

Cyril brought his humanoid left arm up to stop the blade and it impaled itself in his forearm instead.

Valerie grabbed the sword handle with her other hand and attempted to pull the blade out. She found it lodged tight, its jagged blade snagging in the tensed up muscles in his forearm.

The tentacle that had been attacking Valen ceased their assault and darted back to aid their master, their open maws headed straight for Valerie’s back.

“Valerie, behind you!” Valen shouted.

His sister glanced back in time to see the chomping maws and immediately let go of her sword, which promptly dissolved back into the blood it’d been forged from. She ducked and rolled away from Cyril, the tentacles’ fangs scraping past the hem of her red cape.

Now Valerie joined him on the defensive, hopping around like a maniac trying to avoid the chomping maws of dozens of sinuous red tentacles.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to have a break now!” Valerie shouted. “Or maybe stop attacking to give us another evil speech?”

A simple, hollow “No,” from Cyril was her only reply.

“I don’t suppose you have any more bloodcraft tricks up your sleeves,” said Valen right before bobbing away from a tentacle maw that would’ve taken off his head.

“Just one!” Valerie did three continuous backflips away from a series of tentacles that each crushed the ground in front of her. “Might have to grab a snack upstairs afterwards though!”

Valen was about to ask what the hell she meant by that when she suddenly darted forwards towards Cyril again without a weapon.

Even Cyril seemed surprised at the ballsy display by the way he stepped back from her. His one remaining red-white eye fixed on her black-reds, not realising the fanged grin just below it.

Valerie’s eyes widened until her eyelids were no longer visible. Her red irises glowed bright in the darkness and the pupils inside them narrowed into cat-like slits-the eyes of a magical predator.

In an instant, the tentacles stopped attacking and fell limp to the ground. Cyril’s main body tensed up like a marionette whose strings had been tugged by an invisible puppeteer.

“W-what?” Cyril managed to force out in a shaky breath. “D-did you do?”

The grin on Valerie’s face widened.

“You have one weird body, I’ll give you that,” she said, her hungry fangs glistening with saliva. “But it’s mine to control now. Every vein and muscle with blood inside now moves at my command.”

As she said that, streaks of blood bled from her eyes and rolled down her pale cheeks.

“Valerie!” Valen rushed to his twin’s side, worried for her but unsure of what to do.

“I’m sure you have a priceless look of awe on your face right now, Valen,” she said dryly. “But I have to keep my eyes on this guy if I want to keep controlling his body.”

“Your eyes,” he said, ‘they’re-”

“Bleeding, yes,” said Valerie in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s just some recoil from the spell. Nothing to worry about.”

But as she said that the blood pouring from her eyes increased in volume and velocity. The two streaks met in the middle and dripped down her chin like a leaky faucet.

“Uh, right.” Valen still didn’t know what to make of it, but his questions would just have to wait until after Cyril was dealt with. “I’ll just go and snap his neck then-”

“No need.” Valerie raised her hand in the air, causing Cyril’s body to immediately convulse. “I got this.”

Streams of blood rose from every orifice in Cyril’s body, from the gaping wound in his chest to the eyes, mouth, and nose on his upturned face. He had a look of agony on his twisted face, but Valerie’s control over his body didn’t even allow him to scream. The most he could do was let out a sickening gurgling noise from choking on the blood that now filled his throat on its way out of his body.

Valen averted his gaze. He’d been ready to kill Cyril to save himself and his sister but this was bordering on straight up torture. Still, he could not ask her to stop when he had no better solution to offer.

It took about two seconds for him to bear it no longer.

“Look,” he turned to Valerie. “Just make me a knife. I’ll cut off his head and end this-”

Valen freezed when he noticed the smile was gone from his twin’s face. A dumbfounded frown had replaced it, and eyes that had been intimidating before now looked to be wide in shock. The blood that bled from her eyes turned from a bleeding faucet and into a continuous stream that hit the ground in heavy splashes.

“Something’s wrong,” said Valerie, lacking the casual bravado she had before. “I can’t-”

“YOU DARE CONTROL MY VESSEL, CHILD?!”

The roar of the Unborn God’s voice projected into his head startled Valen to look at Cyril. Valerie somehow kept herself from blinking, but her eyeballs now shook inside their sockets as if they were about to pop out at any minute.

Cyril’s body stopped bleeding into the air. His head craned forward to look at the twins.

His remaining eye had rolled into the back of his head again, showing only an orb of solid red. The lights in his head were on, but it wasn’t the rightful owner inside the home.

The limp tentacles around them twitched with signs of renewed life. Under the influence of the Unborn God, Cyril’s mutated body began to shatter the chains of Valerie’s spell link by link with every jerking muscle and spasming limb.

At this rate he’ll be back to kicking their arses again, and Valen highly doubted Valerie would be in any state to fight after losing so much blood. He had to act fast.

Valen sprinted forward. He had no weapon, armed only with hypersensitive hearing and his knowledge of anatomy. He’d just have to hope that the eldritch alterations made to Cyril’s body didn’t also shift his internal organs by too much.

Upon reaching Cyril he plunged his left hand into the open wound inside his chest, forcing his way past the hundreds of slimy tentacles struggling to regain control. His face scrunched up in revulsion at the sensation of tentacles, organs, and gods knows what else squirming around his ungloved hand.

It was on nights like this that he was glad to be ambidextrous because he doubted his right hand could’ve pulled this off with two fingers missing. He listened for the sound of a rhythmic beating inside Cyril’s chest and moved his hand towards it until he felt his fingers touch it.

He wrapped his hand around the organ, his claws piercing into its contracting muscles while his fingers squeezed it still.

A final violent convulsion wracked Cyril’s body before going still. His red-white eye rolled back to place and looked at him. The abject fear in it told Valen that the real Cyril was back in control, but it was too late for him to stop now.

“I’m sorry,” said Valen in his softest voice, hoping that it could provide the man some small level of comfort in his final moments.

Then, in one violent pull, ripped out his heart.

Valen felt the aorta tearing away. The vital organ which had pumped life throughout Cyril’s body was forced to feel cold air for the first and last time within the grasp of his black claws.

He threw the heart against the wall in disgust at what he had to do.

It smashed into a pulpy mess against the concrete before slowly sliding down. The beating muscles, once full of vigour, now quieted towards an inevitable stillness.

“Uuugh.” Valerie collapsed onto her knees with rivers of blood bleeding from her downcast eyes.

“Valerie!” Valen rushed to her side and put a hand on her back. “It’s over now. You’re going to be okay.”

A long, hungry hiss emanated from her. Red mist that smelled of blood escaped into the air from the gaps between her clenched fangs.

“So…thirsty…” she whispered.

Valen rolled back his bloodied sleeves. He was just about to bite into his wrist for her to drink when the worst possible thing happened.

The heavy metal door out of the basement creaked behind them. Valen spun his head around to see Keiko descending the stairs with a half bewildered, half terrified look on her face. Her coffee brown eyes surveyed the scene, from the blood covering the hallway, to the tired and battered twins, to the tentacle-covered body of Cyril on the ground.

“What the fuck?” she uttered under her breath through the shock.

Valerie’s crumpled body shot up in an instant. She turned to Keiko with drool dripping from her ravenous fangs.

“Blood!” she cried before leaping at the startled detective.

“No!” Valen grabbed Valerie by the cape with all his one and a half hands to hold her back. There was no way she’d be able to keep herself from draining Keiko completely with how much she was foaming at the mouth. “You’ll kill her!”

His sister let out a long hissing noise with what might’ve been words inside it.

Though he was sympathetic to her thirst, Valen couldn’t allow her to hurt someone innocent. He’d seen enough death for one night.

Valen grabbed the collar of her cape coat and the waistband of her trousers and swung her to the side, tossing her further down the hallway.

It wasn’t a martial arts move. He’d learned it first hand from some school bullies who thought throwing him into the school pool was funny. Never in a million years would he have thought he’d be doing it to his own sister as a grown arse adult.

The moment Valerie was launched from his grasp, Valen rolled up his right sleeve and sunk his fangs into his forearm. Dark blood trickled from the self-inflicted bite.

“Valerie, drink my-” Valen froze when he realised his mistake.

He’d tossed her a little too far away, and now she had a much closer source of blood to slake her thirst with than him or Keiko.

Cyril still laid bleeding out on the ground. Neither his open mouth nor the dead maws of his tentacles drew air anymore.

He was a goner no matter how you looked at it but there was still a fading light in his eyes and the magical blood in his body, the Unborn God’s blood, was still warm.

Warm enough, it would seem, to drink.

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