Chapter 15: 015 – Victory?

My eyes open.

Everything hurts!

I want to go back!

Sigh…

There’s a really bitter taste in my mouth, it’s quite disgusting.

I’m still in the same room as I was before, and Antonia is looking over me. 

She's drenched in blood, especially her legs.

“Are you ok?” She asks worriedly.

“I… I’m alive, that’s what matters.” I try to stand up, but I can’t move either of my arms, trying to use them hurts a lot, actually!

“Let me help you.” She grabs me by the torso, and helps me stand up, and when I stand up completely it’s almost like a hug.

Ahh, I can feel her boobs, nice and soft.

She lets me go and goes to help Marceline

“Thanks.” I try to give her a thumbs up, but I can’t move my arms…

This is going to be a thing now, isn’t it?…

I don’t like feeling alive…

No no, focus Octavius!

I'm trying to follow my path until my bones are broken, all of my blood has been spilled, and all of my flesh has been consumed! 

And then, to go beyond that!

That’s what the guy who scammed me out of a meal said.

And honestly, by that metric I’m doing pretty well right now, my bones are broken!

That’s step 1 out of 4!

…Do I have to keep them broken?

That would be very bad.

I need my arms to do things, like buttoning up my shirt when it's unbuttoned!

Like it is right now.

Honestly that’s the biggest tragedy of this whole ordeal. 

The pain is one thing, I can deal with it, but having to deal with my unbuttoned shirt is truly horrible!

I also need them to do the dirty, don't I?

I still remember how Georgeta’s chest felt in my hands… 

Not being able to feel that again is on par with having to deal with an unbuttoned shirt.

Truly a fate worse than death.

It is decided, my next goal will be finding a way to heal these darn things.

Soldiers from the Walkman expanse wanting to destroy Epice?

Not my problem, I was already trying to leave this place anyway, I’ll just tell Valentina about it when I get to Basil.

Even if I wanted to get the most out of this situation I wouldn’t be able to do much, Master would just give this task to Sexta and my involvement would end there.

So that’s that.

I look around the room, the body of the jester has a big hole on its chest, while the body of the songstress fell to the floor, creating a line with her blood from where she first hit her head to her current position.

Let’s not think about that…

Antonia is giving some sort of red potion to the unconscious Marceline, after a moment the mercenary starts coughing and wakes up, and she immediately jumps up ready to fight. “Ah! What happened?!” 

“It’s fine, this place is empty now.” Antonia tries to calmly explain the situation.

“I… I see.” It seems she doesn’t have a lot to say, she’s probably ashamed from her poor performance. “No one died?”

Antonia shakes her head. “Everyone is alive, but Octavius is badly injured.”

“I’ve had worse injuries.” I shake my head.

I once got injured on a hunting trip and got a serious mushroom infection, now that was truly painful!

I still shudder when thinking about it. 

I also lost my wood and light affinities, so even if I lose my arms it still wouldn’t be as big of a loss as that time.

Marceline looks at my arms and sighs. “There’s no need to act though, since we are safe now we can lick our wounds.” She comes closer and starts inspecting my arms. “Did they have any other medical supplies?” Marceline asks Antonia.

“Yes! Let me go get them!”

 

* * *

 

It didn’t take too long to bandage both my arms, it seems Marceline has some experience doing this kind of first aid.

Both of my arms were bandaged up so they don’t flail around.

We also had to throw my shirt away, it was too filthy and it got in the way.

How ingenious, this way I don’t have to button it every time one of the darn buttons unbuttons itself!

Button.

“Thanks.” I nod towards Marceline, an injury like this could be easily dealt with in the clan, but that’s not really an option now.

I turn towards Antonia, who helped Marceline with my first aid. “Where did you find those potions?”

“Yes! I mean, their storage room was there,” she points at one of the rooms with a grimace. “I also found Marceline’s sword, your glasses, and other stuff, but some of it was very worrying.”

“Worrying?” What could it be? “I’ll go take a look.”

I enter the storage room.

It’s not big, and the only furniture inside is a small table and a chair. 

Marceline’s nightmarish sword and my glasses are indeed here.

There’s a small key on the table, this should be the key for Timotei’s chains!

There’s also 3 empty bags of holding, though they seem to be rank 1. 

These are pretty valuable, they should have about 1 cubic meter of space inside, and they are small enough to fit in one’s pocket.

However, you can’t put a bag of holding inside another bag of holding, or they’ll both break, that’s a general rule with any storage artifact actually. 

And whatever you want to store must fit in the opening of the bag, so you wouldn’t be able to store something like Marceline’s nightmarish sword inside these.

There’s also one red potion on the table. “How did you know these were healing potions?” I ask Antonia.

“I drank one!” Antonia acts like she’s drinking something out of her hand.

“How reckless… I approve of it!” What a simple method!

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“Neither of you do something like that, ever, it’s seriously dangerous.” Marceline looks very disappointed.

There’s also a dozen of black collars in here, these are <Collars of slavery>, all of them are rank 1, these things are nasty, these would naturally make anyone nervous.

If you make someone wear this the collar will recognize them as your slave, then it has some ways of making the slave follow the orders of the master, it can strangle the wearer whenever the master wills it, and if the slave disobeys any orders it will attack their mind, wearing their resistance down, and not only that, but some collars even give the wearer’s nightmares until they are fully obedient. 

Overall it’s quite a terrible fate to have, but it’s not hopeless, as long as one removes the collar it will leave no lasting effect on the body, however, escaping your master as a slave is very illegal, and since most slaves are branded in some way that means they’ll have to live as outlaws for the rest of their life, everywhere they go.

The Walkman expanse is extremely harsh on escaped slaves, and most of it’s former territories have similar attitudes towards them, Epice certainly isn’t unique in that regard.

Hell, I’ve even made a branding iron and branded a few maids myself.

Horrible stuff, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

It was one of my tasks as the young master…

I’m quite lucky, maybe I could’ve been born as the one being branded instead.

But instead I had no real worries beyond being bored, and all of my needs were taken care of.

I’m really spitting on lots of people’s faces by running away and doing as I please. 

Not only that, but there’s also the risk someone might put one of these on me one day.

Yeah.

Anyway.

There’s also some elemental crystals, mana crystals and even a few ether crystals. 

These form on the corpses of monsters, elemental crystals are pretty common, every other monster will leave one of these, while ether crystals are extremely rare, if you kill a hundred monsters you might find 1 or 2 if you’re lucky, mana crystals are somewhere in the middle.

Monsters also have patterns in their ether core, same as us humans, but we classify them with ranks, a rank 1 monster has a pattern of magic, a rank 2 monster has a pattern of change and so on, these crystals follow the same ranking.

All of these are only rank 1 though.

You can break them in your hand and absorb the energy inside, but only of the same rank as you and below, ether crystals are a valuable resource for cultivation, but a single one isn’t going to make a meaningful difference in one’s cultivation, so these guys probably saved them to win favor with a higher up.

I think.

It makes sense to me at least, I’ve had that happen to me before.

Some disciples would try to win my favor for some reason, I guess Sexta is too far above them.

I never remember their names though, it’s always a pain to deal with them, they always just want something.

Anyway.

They could also be saving the ether crystals for trading or whatever, they’re dead so it doesn’t matter.

There’s little else of value, some common stolen goods and…

Oh…

That’s bad.

Now I see why Antonia was worried.

There’s a skeleton in a corner of the room with an arm coming out of its skull and writhing inside its ribcage.

It has 2 mouths, one on its palm and the other in the elbow joint, both mouths have their long tongues sticking out, ominously slithering in the air and licking the ribs of the skeleton.

What the hell is that?

I mean, it’s really cool looking, 

But it’s clearly something evil and bad.

Other than that, I have no idea.

I want to give it a handshake though.

“So, do any of you know what that is?” Antonia asks in a worried tone.

I shake my head.

“I have absolutely no idea.” Marceline steps back slowly. “But don’t touch, it’s obviously something dangerous, very dangerous.” She grabs her sword, the key, and one of the bags of holding as she leaves, clearly unnerved by this thing.

I look at Antonia, and she looks at me.

“Whatever this is, it’s better to leave it.” She says with a hesitant expression.

“You’re right, let’s not spend too much time here, let’s take what we need and leave, the others are waiting for us.” I say, though I’m also hesitant to leave it here.

I kinda want to take it with me.

Just so that no one else stumbles into it, of course.

Antonia nods.

[Don’t leave.]

I feel every hair in my body freeze and Antonia jumps from the fright.

Something echoes inside my head.

A voice that’s… wrong, it doesn’t sound human at all, I can’t pinpoint how though, it sounds like the voice of a woman, and it’s perfectly understandable… but only like one, it’s fundamentally not a human sound.

[I am the earth monster, mother of chaos, Cipactli.]

“Y-you heard that, right?” I immediately ask Antonia.

She holds both her hands near her mouth as she nods.

[Mere pawns of fate, our meeting was not a coincidence.]

The door closes violently and the room turns almost pitch black, there’s only a faint blue light coming from the crystals in the room.

Both of the arm mouths open as wide as possible, and two similar arms come out of the mouths accompanied by a horrendous wet sound.

[Seek the primordial grave.]

And more arms come from those arms, and so on, and so on, and so on.

My body isn’t responding, it’s standing still like a statue no matter how much I try to move it.

[You will find my inheritance.]

The arms start roughly climbing my body, scratching me all over, and one of them grabs my face, and inserts its tongue into my mouth.

The taste of blood overwhelms me as it tries to dig its tongue deeper into my throat, until I can’t breathe.

[Do as you please with it.]

Other arms are licking the scratches, but these tongues are ice cold, I feel as if I had been thrown into a freezing lake.

I feel tendrils painfully digging into my flesh, especially my arms, I feel as if I had dozens of snakes violently slithering inside them.

[There is only one condition.]

I’m going to die!

However, the agony quickly turns into a perverse ecstasy against my own will, as this thing continues to do as it wants with my body.

[Avenge me.]

[Kill the flayed one and his court.]

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